ABSTRACT
Johann van Beethoven came to Vienna as an accomplished pianist. His extempore playing had already excited the wondering admiration of all who heard it, and it was this talent that first opened to him the salons of Vienna, and made him, in spite of his eccentricities and caprices, the spoiled child of the exclusive Viennese aristocracy. Beethoven's life in Vienna offers little subject for comment. Beethoven lived in his music, as he himself often said, and the stirring episodes through which he lived left little impress upon him. Beethoven's musical career has been divided by historians into three periods, but this sub-division can only be accepted in a very general sense. His three styles overlap each other in a rather disconcerting way, and it is impossible to draw a hard and fast line between them. Beethoven's method of working was entirely different from that of Mozart. The Mass is throughout, like all Beethoven's music, curiously personal in tone.
