The task of sifting through one's earlier writings in order to compile a collection such as the one you have in your hand ought to be a process of self-discovery, revealing a coherent set of attitudes and aims expressed or felt over many years. I confess I can find here little of that sense of direction and purpose that ought to guide a writer's life, and I have little explanation for the miscellaneous nature of the present book's contents. But I make no apology for it, and must leave it to the reader to judge whether the sum is any more than the parts. Beethoven's name invades the title and the first essay, and although the nineteenth century produced a dazzling collection of individualist musicians, his presence and his shadow were undoubtedly felt by almost everyone mentioned in these pages. I have stretched Beethoven's century to begin, as he did, in the eighteenth, and to end approximately a century after his death in the twentieth. The focus on nineteenth-century music and on French music in particular is simply a reflection of my main sphere of activity as a musician and scholar (not necessarily the music I most admire), although I have never wished to be confined to a narrow zone and have ventured at my peril into territory with which many others are far more familiar than I.