Because, however, Beethoven wrote thirty-two pianoforte sonatas and because he was for many years the all-dominating figure in the musical world, every great composer who came after him and composed for the pianoforte experimented with the sonata form, and always, be it noted, with less success and less importance to the real progress of music toward freedom of expression than when he followed his own inner impulse and wrote the mood pieces, the "music of intention," the subjective expressions of indicated thoughts and feelings, that were more consonant with the tendencies of the romantic period which followed Beethoven and for which he may be said to have paved the way. For just as Bach brought the contrapuntal form to such perfection that those who came after him could not even begin where he left off, let alone surpass him, so Beethoven brought the sonata form to such perfection that no further advance in it was possible. No wonder therefore that the pianoforte sonatas of the romanticists are comparatively few in number and the least satisfactory of their works. These composers seem to have written sonatas simply to show that they could write them and under a mistaken idea that length is a measure of greatness and that shorter pieces are minor achievements, whereas as much genius can be displayed in a nocturne as in a sonata.
Lawrence Gilman, one of our younger American critics, in his "Phases of Modern Music," a collection of essays, brief but containing a wealth of suggestion and breathing throughout the spirit of modernity, sums up the matter in speaking of Edward MacDowell's "Keltic Sonata": "I cannot help wishing that he might contrive some expedient for doing away, so far as he himself is concerned, with the sonata form which he occasionally uses, rather inconsistently, as a vehicle for the expression of that vision and emotion that are in him; for, generally speaking, and in spite of the triumphant success of the 'Keltic,' Mr. MacDowell is less fortunate in his sonatas than in those freer and more elastically wrought tone poems in which he voices a mood or an experience with epigrammatic concision and directness. The 'Keltic' succeeds in spite of its form, ... though even here, and notwithstanding the freedom of manipulation, one feels that he would have worked to still finer ends in a more flexible and fluent form. He is never so compelling, so persuasively eloquent, as in those impressionistically conceived pieces in which he moulds his inspiration upon the events of an interior emotional program, rather than upon a musical formula necessarily arbitrary and anomalous." This applies to pianoforte music in general since Beethoven. Such I believe to be the consensus of opinion among the younger generation of critics, to whom, after all, the future belongs, as well as the opinion of those older critics who refuse to allow themselves to be pitchforked by their years into the ranks of the old fogies and who still hold themselves ever receptive to every new manifestation in music that is based on a union of mind and heart.