Prof. Paine's Historical Concert.

The largest audience that has yet attended this course was present last evening in Sever 11 to hear Prof. Paine's lecture and illustrations on Beethoven. The lecturer began with a short sketch of the stormy and unhappy life of the greatest of all musical geniuses,- his unhappy boyhood, and still more miserable manhood, embittered by the heartless conduct of his nearest relations, and by that premature deafness which shut him out from all the world of musical sound. Several interesting anecdotes were given of his eccentric habits. In his works he carried the art of music to its highest perfection, excelling in every branch. In orchestral music, especially, he holds absolute pre-eminence. The idea, however, that Beethoven had worked out the view of purely instrumental music, tacitly acknowledging, in fitting words to his 9th Symphony, that a higher form uniting words and music was henceforth to be supreme, an idea advanced by several late writers, Wagner among others, Prof. Paine regarded entirely unforunded. The 5th symphony is as great as the 9th, and the purely instrumental forms since Beethoven are as worthy of admiration as the operas and symphonic poems of Wagner, Berlioz and Lizst. Beethoven's style was illustrated by the great trioop. 97, played by Messrs. Lichtenberg, Jonas and Perabo, and by the Kreutzer Sonata by Lichtenberg and Perabo. The names of these artists mean simply that the perform nice was of the very highest merit.