The Honourable Mrs. Bowater...was on a visit to the Elector Palatine at Bonn...when the French invaded the Low Countries, and was compelled hastily to leave.... The Abbé Dobler, chaplain to the Elector, accompanied her to Hamburgh, with the full intention of returning; but while there he was declared an emigrant. She...offered the Abbé a domicile in England: they arrived at Leicester about the year 1793.... [In Bonn] a rough black-headed lad, son of the inn-keeper...[had] exhibited so striking a talent for music as to attract the notice of my friend. This boy turned out to be that extraordinary genius, and sublime composer, Beethoven.... At this juncture, he had just published the violin trio in Eb [flat], when the Abbé, fortunately, in the hurry of his departure, put this work into his trunk.... On arriving at Leicester he [the Abbé] sought my acquaintance, and with the assistance of Mr. Valentine, the professor, this trio of Beethoven was first played in the year 1794, many years previous to its being known in London. How great was my surprise on hearing this composition, accustomed as I had been to the smooth-swimming harmonies of Corelli, the articulated style of Handel, and the trite phraseology of the moderns! for at that time we had only one symphony of Haydn, and not a note of Mozart. What a new set of sensations, I repeat, did this composition produce in me! It opened a fresh view of the musical art, in which sounds were made to excite the imagination entirely in a different way. The music I had hitherto heard was disposed in a certain order, agreeably to fixed rules—a species of language in which, on hearing the first word, you could tell what would be the last; and in many cases the succession of notes seemed to be the mere result of the mechanical motion of the fingers. By Beethoven’s music the most natural and pleasing reminiscences were awakened in me, which the strains of the old school never could have produced. The effects of simple melody, connected with pleasing words, must have existed from all time, and its consequent pleasure must have been felt by every people; but in the compositions of Beethoven, we have an art, sui generis, in which sounds by themselves operate upon the imagination, without the aid of words, raising it to the highest regions of thought. << less