Page:Rolland - Beethoven, tr. Hull, 1927.pdf/44

 of the Symphony in C minor, 1805 to 1808, the grand epic of glory. This is really the first music breathing the revolutionary feeling. The soul of the times lives again in it with the intensity and purity which great events have for those mighty and solitary souls who live apart and whose impressions are not contaminated by contact with the reality. Beethoven's spirit reveals itself, marked with stirring events, coloured by the reflections of these great wars. Evidences of this, (perhaps unconscious to him) crop up everywhere in the works of this period, in the Coriolanus Overture (1807), where tempests roar over the scene; in the Fourth Quartet, Opus 18, the first movement of which shows a close relation to this Overture; in the Sonata Appassionata, Op. 57 (1804), of which Bismarck said, "If I heard that