Daniel Gregory Mason

CHAPTER VI
MOZART

Although Mozart, born twenty-four years later than Haydn, and therefore belonging to another generation, was under heavy obligations to his forerunner for technical resources and models of style, his disadvantage in years was so much more than cancelled by the superior brightness of his genius that he in his turn was able to exert a potent influence upon the older man. The two great predecessors of Beethoven, accordingly, can be understood only when they are considered as subject to mutual influences, as supplementing each other through a delicate play of action and reaction. Haydn led the way into the terra incognita, did the rough work of clearing the ground, but it was Mozart who turned the wilderness into a garden. The chief dates of the two careers indicate concisely their interaction. Haydn was born in 1732, Mozart in 1756; yet Haydn, although he began writing symphonies as early as 1759, when Mozart was but four years old, wrote none that can compare with the younger man’s until 1791, or after Mozart had written his three great symphonies of 1788. As with the symphony, so it was with the string quartet. Haydn opened up the way, but Mozart, outrunning him, became eventually the leader. It was a sort of hare and tortoise race in which, to the confusion of morality, the hare won.

Both circumstances and endowment fitted Mozart, in this case, for the rÔle of hare. The son of a professional musician, who wisely directed his early studies, and opened to him in his impressionable years all the advantages of companionship with musicians and with people of general cultivation, he came by good fortune into immediate possession of all the favoring conditions that Haydn had to struggle up to through years of poverty, neglect, and hard labor. It would be hard to imagine more dissimilar lots in life. The contrast between the two men thus externally induced was accentuated by their opposite characters. Haydn, as we have seen, was an intensely human person, full of sympathy for the ordinary and yet always appealing emotions of common humanity, and looking at music largely as a means for their expression. Mozart, on the contrary, was an artist pure and simple. His genius was almost completely independent of his character, and it was by virtue of the former that he was great. His sensitiveness to the minutest distinctions and gradations in sound, his unerring instinct for perfection in form, in the smallest as in the largest instances, his wonderful power to shape a multitude of details into a breathing organism, his Greek serenity of temper and indifference to ranges of feeling that might perturb his art—all these things gave him an incalculable advantage over the plodding Haydn as a master of the purely artistic side of musical composition. They enabled him to assimilate instantaneously all that the older man had to teach him of design, and to become his teacher before he had done with learning from him. Haydn showed Mozart how to do things; and in return Mozart showed Haydn how to do them better.

Both men were clearly aware of their obligations to each other. In the midst of the petty jealousies and the malicious efforts to stir up ill-feeling which characterized musical Vienna in their day, they remained warm friends and mutual admirers. Mozart dedicated his six finest string quartets to Haydn, with the comment: “It was due from me, for it was from Haydn that I learned how quartets should be written.” “It was affecting,” says a contemporary observer, “to hear him speak of the two Haydns or any other of the great masters; one would have imagined him to be one of their enthusiastic pupils rather than the all-powerful Mozart.” Haydn’s respect for Mozart was equally profound, and even more creditable, in that he was older and less appreciated by the Viennese public than the man he lost no opportunity to praise. He often asserted that he never heard one of Mozart’s compositions without learning something from it; and once when “Don Giovanni” was being discussed he made a period to the argument by saying: “I cannot decide the questions in dispute, but this I know, that Mozart is the greatest composer in the world.” Mozart was thus much more than a mere successor of Haydn in the usual course of musical evolution; he gave fully as much as he received. His short though full life, moreover, came to an end eighteen years before Haydn’s more leisurely one; so that in a purely human as well as an artistic sense, we can look upon him, in relation to Haydn, as a sort of brilliant younger brother.

Johann Chrysostum Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart, generally known to the world as Wolfgang Amadeus[33] Mozart, was born at Salzburg, a small town southwest of Vienna, in Austria-Hungary, on January 27, 1756. His father was Leopold Mozart, a professional musician of excellent abilities, court-composer to the Archbishop of Salzburg, and author of a School for the Violin which in its day was known throughout Europe. He was a devoted father, and although there has been some difference of opinion as to his character, it is certain that he spared no pains in the education of his son, which he considered the chief business of his life. He has been charged with penuriousness, with narrowness and bigotry, and with having forced his son to be a prodigy for the sake of gain; but there is no evidence that he ever acted unconscientiously, and the very thoroughness and almost mechanical regularity of the training he gave Wolfgang were invaluable in laying the foundations of his remarkable technique.

Under his father’s careful tutelage the young Wolfgang, together with his sister Maria Anna, who was almost equally precocious, advanced rapidly in music. When he was but three he picked out simple chords at the piano; at four he played minuets and other short pieces; and at five he composed them. His early compositions were carefully copied out in a sketch-book, at first by his father and later by himself, and dated; so that we have documentary evidence that they were actually written by him at an almost incredibly early age. The first, dictated when he was five years old, is a Minuet and Trio.

[Listen]

In this childlike but well-organized piece is shown already a perfect mastery of the simple three-part song-form which is, as we have seen, the structural embryo of the sonata. Both minuet and trio consist of (a) an eight-measure sentence, cadencing in the dominant, or contrasted tonal centre, (b) a four-measure clause of contrast, and (c) a four-measure clause echoing the last half of the first sentence, and closing in the home-key. Thus both halves of the piece, and the entire piece, as a whole, illustrate the fundamental principles of musical design in a very consummate way. All this, however, Mozart might have done simply by careful observation and imitation of methods familiar to all contemporary composers. What is therefore even more remarkable in such early work is the variety of detail that he manages to introduce. In view of the fact, which we shall later find very significant, that his skill as an artist lay largely in his command over variety of effect (while Haydn’s consisted more in the salient unity of his composition), it is exceedingly interesting to note that, at five years old, Mozart uses so complex a device as shifted rhythm[34] in the manipulation of his motif. In the fifth measure of the minuet, namely, he writes his motif on the second and third beats, thus producing a very charming effect of cross-accentuation. It is also noticeable that in so short a piece as this we find triplets (measures 7 and 15) and groups of sixteenth notes (in the trio), obviously introduced for the sake of rhythmic diversity.

Even greater ingenuity, of a similar sort, is shown in a piece which he composed in March, 1762. The theme runs like this:

[Listen]

How many composers, whether aged six or sixty, would have spontaneously thought of so charming an arrangement of the phrases, which we may symbolize with the letters A B B A C C? Most minds would have traveled the old time-honored rut, writing A B A B in something like this fashion:

[Listen]

But Mozart knew how to compose. Nor does his ingenuity fail him when in the last section of the piece he wishes, while repeating the essence of his idea, to reach the tonic instead of the dominant key. Simply dropping out the second A-phrase, he writes:

[Listen]

and the trick is done. It was by a steadily broader application of principles such as are here illustrated that he gradually became so marvelously skilful in composition.

Concerning the extraordinary physical delicacy of the young Mozart’s ear there are many stories, some of which are probably true. He is said to have fainted on hearing a trumpet. According to Schachtner, an intimate friend of the Mozarts, he was able to perceive an interval of pitch so small as the eighth of a tone. The story is that Wolfgang was allowed to play one day on Schachtner’s violin, which he called, on account of its full, rich tone, “Butter-fiddle.” “Herr Schachtner,” he announced a few days later, “your violin is half a quarter of a tone lower than mine; that is, if it is tuned as it was when I played it last.” The violin was brought out, and proved, Schachtner says, to be pitched as the boy had stated. As Schachtner, trained in literature by Jesuits, had the literary man’s instinct for effective statement, it is necessary to discount such tales a little; but the extraordinary delicacy of Mozart’s ear is sufficiently proved. For that matter, it needs no proof; so keen a sense of design would have been impossible to him had he lacked the requisite physical basis of accurate perception and discrimination of tones.

The first twenty-five years of Mozart’s life were spent largely in professional tours, as a piano virtuoso, with intermittent periods at home in Salzburg devoted to study and composition. Appearing as a boy-prodigy when he was only six years old, before he was twenty-five he had made five extended and uniformly successful tours. He appeared in most of the larger German and Italian cities, as well as in Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, and London, everywhere giving new proofs of the quickness, elasticity, and certainty of his musical powers. In Paris, when eight years old, he “accompanied a lady in an Italian air without seeing the music, supplying the harmony for the passage which was to follow from that which he had just heard. This could not be done without some mistakes, but when the song was ended he begged the lady to sing it again, played the accompaniment and the melody itself with perfect correctness, and repeated it ten times, altering the character of the accompaniment for each.”[35] “On a melody being dictated to him, he supplied the bass and the parts without using the clavier at all.”[36] In Rome, when fourteen years old, after hearing Allegri’s Miserere sung in the Papal chapel by a nine-part chorus, he went home and copied out from memory the entire work. A few mistakes were corrected after a second hearing. Such feats as this bespeak a mastery of the technique of pure music even more remarkable, and far more important, than his so much talked of skill as a performer on the piano, organ, and violin. Had music not become to him in early youth a natural language, a second mother-tongue, he could never have learned, in his manhood, to manipulate it with such extraordinary freedom, ingenuity, and power.

In the intervals of his travels, Mozart had to spend his time in Salzburg, a town almost intolerably uncongenial. It was a dull, provincial place, the butt of innumerable sarcasms. There was a saying: “He who comes to Salzburg becomes in the first year stupid, in the second idiotic, and in the third a true Salzburger;” and Mozart, in whom taste and experience wrought together to make provincialism odious, was never tired of telling of a Salzburgian who complained that he could not judge Paris satisfactorily, “as the houses were too high and shut off the horizon.” “I detest Salzburg and everything that is born in it,” he wrote; “the tone and the manners of the people are utterly insupportable.” Such a place would have been distasteful enough to the gay and highly social temperament of Mozart even had he had no responsibilities there; but it was his position of music-director to the Archbishop of Salzburg, with the dependence it involved, that finally exhausted his patience. Hieronymus, who became Archbishop in 1772, was a man famed for his churlishness and arrogant, bullying ways. He made his poor music-director’s life a burden; he treated him as a hireling, made him eat with the servants, and called him contemptuous names, such as “Fex,” “Lump,” “Lausbube.” Mozart, driven to desperation, finally applied for his discharge. Receiving no attention, he went in person to press the matter, and was then actually thrown from the Archbishop’s ante-room by a petty official. This insult marked the end of his galling relation with his patron. From 1781 until his death he lived in Vienna, picking up a scanty livelihood by teaching and giving concerts.

His situation, after this open rupture with the system of patronage which was the only solid dependence of the eighteenth-century composer, was most precarious. The Viennese public was notoriously fickle towards even the most popular pianists and teachers, while the number of educated people who could be depended upon to buy serious compositions was small, and publishers were consequently unable to pay composers so well as they could in Beethoven’s day. To make matters worse, Mozart was careless in money affairs, luxurious in his tastes, and so weakly amiable that he would at any time give a friend his last kreutzer. We cannot, then, be surprised that when Leopold Mozart, who was naturally cautious, conservative, and worldly, heard that his son had taken lodgings with a certain Madame Weber, in Vienna, and fallen in love with her daughter Constanze, he summarily commanded him to break off the affair. Mozart respectfully but firmly refused to deprive Constanze, whose position in the house of her shiftless and half-drunken mother had aroused his pity, of the benefit of his friendship; and as his father had foreseen, this friendship rapidly deepened into love.

Leopold Mozart for a long time stubbornly withheld his consent to the marriage; but at last, overborne by his son’s persistence and by the intercession of friends, he gave the pair a reluctant blessing. They were married August 4, 1782. The sequel proved that both father and son were justified in their opinions. The Mozart mÉnage was truly most erratic. Husband and wife were equally improvident and unmethodical. They were always poor, frequently in actual want. On the other hand, as Wolfgang had hoped, Constanze’s virtues as a comrade compensated for her deficiencies as a housekeeper, and their congeniality of temperament made them contented in the midst of disorder, poverty, and care. There is a story that a friend, calling on them one cold winter morning, found them waltzing together, and was told that, as they had no fuel, they were keeping warm in that way. The incident is typical of their existence—irresponsible, haphazard, and yet on the whole happy.

The remaining events of Mozart’s short life, from his marriage in 1782 to his death in 1791, were all artistic events—works composed—standing out luminous against a dark background of poverty, struggle, and pain. His three great operas were written during this time. “The Marriage of Figaro” was first produced at Vienna in 1786; “Don Giovanni” at Prague, in 1787; and “The Magic Flute” at Vienna, in the year of Mozart’s death. In the realm of absolute music Mozart was equally productive all through this period. The six great string quartets dedicated to Haydn date from 1782, 1783, and 1784. The three quartets written for Frederick William II of Prussia were composed in the spring of 1790. The four greatest string quintets were written in 1787, 1790, and 1791. Finally, the three finest and maturest symphonies, works which will endure as long as music does, were all written within two months in the summer of 1788. His last work was the famous Requiem, begun in July, 1791. His strong constitution was now beginning to give way under the long strain of poverty and unceasing mental labor, and he gradually became haunted by the idea that he was writing this Requiem for himself. He grew morbid and gloomy, but continued to work with feverish energy. The last evening of his life he looked at his unfinished score with tears in his eyes, saying, “Did I not say I was writing the Requiem for myself?” And later, when he became delirious, he was still busy with the Requiem, imagining it played, and blowing out his cheeks to imitate the trumpets. He died quietly on the evening of December 5, 1791, having accomplished an enduring work in thirty-five laborious, brilliant, and painful years.

This story of Mozart’s last ten years is undoubtedly one of the strangest pages of musical biography. The contrast between his external and his internal life is so violent, so startling, that we rub our eyes involuntarily, wondering if the facts as we know them can be true. And indeed we can believe in them only when we assume that his mind was independent of its environment to a degree uncommon even with genius. Mozart seems to have been a dual person, to have lived two lives at once; outwardly hounded by creditors, worn with the most prostrating and debasing anxiety, forgetting his cares only in a dissipation that was as squalid as they, he was all the time pursuing his artistic ideals with the highest success, and with the serenity of complete mastership. In his nature it was not even a step from the ridiculous to the sublime—the two extremes coexisted and interlaced.

The case of Mozart is in fact an eloquent human proof of the truth of Schopenhauer’s theory that pure music is a world by itself, parallel with the actual world of ordinary experience but independent of it. The plastic artist works in materials familiar to his ordinary experience; he puts in his pictures or statues the men, women, animals, trees, and other physical objects that he sees about him daily. Not so the musician. He deals with ideas that have no existence outside of his art; and he therefore constantly keeps up in his mind two independent trains of thought, coexistent but unrelated. That Mozart, whose purely musical genius was perhaps the brightest and most complete that ever existed, habitually lived this double mental life, there are many evidences. His sister-in-law described him as follows: “He was always good-humored, but thoughtful even in his best moods, looking one straight in the face, and always speaking with reflection, whether the talk was grave or gay; and yet he seemed always to be carrying on a deeper train of thought. Even when he was washing his hands in the morning, he never stood still, but walked up and down the room humming, and buried in thought. At table he would often twist up a corner of the table-cloth, and rub his upper lip with it, without appearing in the least to know what he was doing, and he sometimes made extraordinary grimaces with his mouth. His hands and feet were in continual motion, and he was always strumming on something—his hat, his watch-fob, the table, the chairs, as if they were the clavier.” Other contemporaries have recorded that he carried on this musical thought while having his hair dressed, while bowling or playing billiards, while talking or joking, and even, wonderful to say, while listening to other music that did not especially interest him. “The greater industry of his later years,” said his wife, “was merely apparent, because he wrote down more. He was always working in his head, his mind was in constant motion, and one may say that he never ceased composing.” Lange, his brother-in-law, observed that “when he was engaged on his most important works he took more than his usual share in any light or jesting talk that was going on.” When his wife was confined of her first child he was working on the second of the quartets dedicated to Haydn; he brought his table to her room, and frequently rose to cheer or comfort her in her pain, without apparently interrupting his train of thought. On the evening before the day set for the first performance of “Don Giovanni,” the overture was still unwritten, though Mozart doubtless had it perfectly clear in his mind. He sat up most of the night copying it out, his wife meantime plying him with punch and with stories to keep him awake; and by seven in the morning it was complete. When he sends his sister a prelude and fugue he apologizes for the prelude being copied after the fugue instead of before it. “The reason was,” he adds, “that I had already composed the fugue, and wrote it down while I was thinking out the prelude.”

It is necessary to bear constantly in mind this independence, activity, and self-sufficiency of Mozart’s musical thought-processes, if we would at all understand the paradox of his personality. Mozart the man, and Mozart the musician, were two beings. The man, when all is said, and in spite of many endearing traits, was disappointingly commonplace. Although he was a good linguist, and fond, as a boy, of mathematics, he was intellectually undistinguished. His letters are rather conventional, he kept no journal, he read little, and though he said a sharp or clever thing now and then his conversation was not remarkable. Emotionally he was also not unusual. Amiable, generous, and honorable, he was rather lacking in will-power, rather immature and unformed.

His mental attitude and his conduct in the world were curiously childlike. He was even unable to care for his own person; his wife attended to his clothes and cut up his meat at table. In money matters he was not a child, but a baby. Only six months after his marriage he began a long course of borrowing, in small sums, from friends and relatives, and he became later a familiar figure to the Viennese pawnbrokers and usurers. To make matters worse, he was so kind-hearted that he could not endure the sight of suffering when he had money to relieve it. The result was that he gave away freely what he had borrowed with difficulty, and sunk daily deeper in the morass of hopeless debt. His dealings with Albert Stadler, an excellent clarinetist and a wholly unreliable man, will serve as a specimen of his guilelessness. Being asked by Stadler for a loan of fifty ducats, he gave him instead two valuable watches to place in pawn, on the understanding that he should redeem them in due time. Of course Stadler did nothing about it; whereupon Mozart gave him the fifty ducats, together with interest, so that he might redeem the watches. Stadler kept the money. And what is more remarkable, Mozart seems to have cordially forgiven him, and later to have made him further loans.

Mozart’s high spirits were unquenchable. A tireless jester, a graceful dancer, a good hand at billiards, clever as an impromptu poet of doggerel verses and as a deviser of practical jokes, he found in society the relaxation he needed from the severe mental concentration of composing; and there is no doubt that he gave himself up to conviviality and to frivolous amours more than would to-day be considered becoming. His fondness for wine and punch were generally known, and he himself confessed to his wife that he was not always faithful to her. But it must be remembered that in pleasure-loving Vienna, in the eighteenth century, manners were lax, and that Mozart, although by his very sensitiveness peculiarly subject to temptation, was never grossly or habitually vicious. His failings were those of a high-spirited, vivacious, ardent temperament, combined with an amiable, but not a profound character. There was no depravity in him, but there was at the same time little moral or mental elevation. His humor, which bubbled forth unceasingly, was of the flavor of the comic papers and of tavern horse-play. He used to make his friend Leutgeb, a horn-player, submit to mock penances as the price of concertos for his instrument. Once the penalty was to collect all the orchestral parts from the floor, where Mozart threw them as they were copied; another time it was to sit behind the stove until the piece was written. The score of one of these concertos bears the inscription: “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart takes pity on Leutgeb, ass, ox, and simpleton, at Vienna, March 27, 1783.” Another is written in black, red, blue, and green ink. Mozart was fond of writing, to original doggerel words, for performance by gatherings of his friends, comic canons, in which the curious duality of his nature is strikingly illustrated. The words were colloquial, full of slang, and often coarse; the music, written in one of the most severe of contrapuntal forms, was always gracious and consummately wrought as only Mozart knew how to make it. His musical humor reaches its acme in the “Musikalische Spass,” or, as he himself called it, the “Peasants’ Symphony,” for string quartet and two horns. This is nothing less than a parody of the kind of work that Mozart was constantly producing in all seriousness—a Divertimento in regular form, but supposed to be written by a tyro and played by amateurs. The horns come in pompously with wrong notes; the first violin, ascending a long scale, goes half a tone too high; at the end, in the midst of a fanfare in F-major by the horns, the string instruments strike in each in a different key. “The attempt after thematic elaboration,” says Jahn, “is very ludicrous; it is as though the composer had heard of such a thing, and strove to imitate it in a few phrases, greatly to his own satisfaction. The art is most remarkable whereby the pretended ignorance never becomes wearisome, and the audience is kept in suspense throughout.”

Thus at every turn are we impressed with that wondrous inspiration and skill as an artist which were so curiously combined in Mozart with lack of distinction as a man. Even Haydn, for all his normality and usualness of emotion, had a certain human quaintness and sweetness for which we miss any analogue in Mozart. Yet when we shift the point of view, and study the artists rather than the men, it is Mozart who stands out as the more interesting figure. As we saw in the last chapter, Haydn’s power as an artist depended chiefly on the trenchancy and practical grasp of his mind, by which he was enabled to crystallize into forms of salient unity the motifs, phrases, and sections of his music. System is the key-note of his work; he was an organizer, both by natural faculty, and in obedience to the needs of his time. And he had the defects of his merits, in a certain monotony, angularity, and cut-and-dried precision. Mozart, on the contrary, even in his earliest pieces, already cited, showed a more flexible artistic technique; and beginning where Haydn left off, he was able to carry the same sort of organization into a higher stage, combining with the unity of the whole a much greater diversity in the parts. Variety is as notable in Mozart’s work as unity in Haydn’s. His art is more subtle, and not a whit less solid.

In the first place as regards the themes themselves, Mozart’s are longer and more complex than Haydn’s. It is hard to imagine Haydn disposing his phrases with the ingenuity and mental grasp shown by the melody in Figure XV., written when Mozart was only six years old. The characteristic of this melody is that the phrases are not immediately repeated, thereby balancing in the most obvious way, but alternated with apparent whimsicality, which, however, eventually issues in order. This is even more conspicuously shown by the following theme from Mozart’s great G-minor Quintet:

[Listen]

Here a broad and perfectly poised melody is evolved from two simple motifs by a deftly managed accretion. The effect reminds one of Beethoven; Haydn could scarcely have conceived it.

In harmony Mozart is more venturesome than his predecessor. His harmonic structure, while no less clear than Haydn’s, is less bald, less obvious. In the fifth of the quartets dedicated to Haydn, for example, in A-major, there is an early and pronounced modulation to C-major; after which the second theme comes in regularly in the dominant key. The effect of this insistence on a comparatively distant key is to blur slightly the contour of the form, and to prevent any possible sense of triteness. In the Finale of the third quartet, Mozart, after ending his first part strongly in C-major, jumps suddenly, quite without warning, to an emphatic chord of D-flat major,—a device by which we are irresistibly reminded of the complete shifts of tonality at the beginning of the coda of the first movement of the “Eroica” Symphony. Perhaps the most brilliant stroke of genius in harmonic conception that Mozart ever made, however, is the famous passage introducing the C-major Quartet. It runs as follows:

[Listen]

It was to passages of this kind (though even Mozart could not write many equalling it in supernal beauty and mystery of effect) that he owed his reputation for heterodoxy and radicalism among the pedants of the time. A musical connoisseur of Vienna is said to have torn up the instrumental parts of these quartets in his anger at finding that “the discords played by the musicians were really in the parts”; the parts were also returned from Italy as being “full of printer’s errors”; and even so good a musician as FÉtis undertook to “correct” this very Introduction. Thus to scandalize the conservative is ever the effect of the daring, novel, and unprecedented conceptions of genius.

Mozart’s rhythms, again, are much more various than Haydn’s. The characteristic figures of his themes are apt to be strongly contrasted, whereas Haydn’s generally bear a family resemblance to one another. Take, for example, the themes of the first movement of Mozart’s String Quintet in G-minor. The first is a simple series of eighth-notes:

[Listen]

The second is more resilient and individual:

[Listen]

The third, or conclusion-passage, is of a most strongly marked character:

[Listen]

Not only do these figures contrast well as they appear successively, but Mozart knows how to combine them in a very intricate web. When the third one enters in the 'cello, the second violin and viola toss back and forth the first, the second viola plays a slow sustaining part in quarter and half-notes, and the first violin has a racing counterpoint in sixteenth-notes. All this means life, variety, interest. And as for the question of diversity in phrase-structure, it is only necessary to compare the Minuet of Mozart’s G-minor Symphony, with its odd three-measure phrases and its wide climactic stretches of melody, with the square-cut Minuet of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, to gain a vivid idea of the younger composer’s superiority in rhythmic life.

In the general construction of his works, moreover, Mozart is more skillful than Haydn. Haydn’s transitions from theme to theme are frequently conventional to a degree—passages of scales or arpeggios unrelated to the thematic material, and therefore mechanical in effect. Mozart, whose melodic fecundity was limitless, is much more apt to write new, subsidiary melodies for his transitions; and though such passages lacked the fine economy of Beethoven’s carefully wrought transitions, founded on the themes themselves, yet they were far more vital than Haydn’s empty formulas. When it came to the working out of the themes, in the “development section” of the sonata, Mozart again had Haydn at a disadvantage, owing to his greater contrapuntal technique, the result of early study, and to the superior native logic of his mind. Haydn’s development sections are apt to sound perfunctory; worked out more by rule of thumb than by spontaneous fancy, they hold together imperfectly, and seem fragmentary and artificial. Mozart’s are more fluent, more sequacious, and more inevitable. Mozart is thus in all respects a more subtle artist than Haydn.

In expression, the prevailing quality of Mozart’s work is a clear serenity, an indescribable joyfulness and starry beauty, the natural result of his artistic perfection. In spite of a deep and mordant passion that he undoubtedly voices at times, as in the G-minor Quintet and in portions of the quartets and the G-minor Symphony, in spite of the breadth and heroism of such movements as the Andante of the E-flat Quartet and the Finale of the Jupiter Symphony, and in spite of the mystic vagueness and aspiration of that marvellous Introduction to the C-major Quartet, which stamps him as an idealist, at least in posse, his general tone is pagan, unsophisticated, naÏve. He not only lacks the self-consciousness, the tragic intensity, and the fierce, virile logic of Beethoven; he lacks the genial, peasant humanity of Haydn. There is an aloofness, a detachment, a rarefied purity, about his music, that makes it difficult to describe in terms of human feeling. It has the irresponsible perfection, the untarnished lustre, not to be dimmed by human tears, of the best Greek art.

Every attempt that has been made to describe in words the differences between the music of Mozart and that of his great successor, Beethoven, has necessarily failed. The matter is too subtle for literary description. Yet Henry FrÉdÉric Amiel, with his usual marvelous perceptiveness, wrote in his journal, after hearing quartets by the two masters, a passage that must be quoted here. It at least suggests their characteristics with an unerring insight:

“Mozart—,” writes Amiel, “grace, liberty, certainty, freedom, and precision of style,—an exquisite and aristocratic beauty,—serenity of soul,—the health and talent of the master, both on a level with his genius; Beethoven, more pathetic, more passionate, more torn with feeling, more intricate, more profound, less perfect, more the slave of his genius, more carried away by his fancy or his passion, more moving and more sublime than Mozart. Mozart refreshes you, like the ‘Dialogues’ of Plato; he respects you, reveals to you your strength, gives you freedom and balance. Beethoven seizes upon you; he is more tragic and oratorical, while Mozart is more disinterested and poetical. Mozart is more Greek, and Beethoven more Christian. One is serene, the other serious. The first is stronger than destiny, because he takes life less profoundly; the second is less strong, because he has dared to measure himself against deeper sorrows. His talent is not always equal to his genius, and pathos is his dominant feature, as perfection is that of Mozart. In Mozart the balance of the whole is perfect, and art triumphs. In Beethoven feeling governs everything, and emotion troubles his art in proportion as it deepens it.”

While the contrast here so well brought out is perhaps slightly over-stated, it is certain that between Mozart and Beethoven comes the gap between the serene childhood and the serious and thoroughly awakened maturity of secular music. Even in the earliest works of Beethoven, obviously modelled as they are in the forms and idioms made common property by his forerunners, there is a virility, a profundity, an intensity of spiritual ardor, for which we look in vain in Haydn and Mozart. In him the idealism which with them was instinctive arrives at self-consciousness. He is founded securely upon them, but he carries music to higher issues than it was in their happier and simpler natures to imagine. In leaving Mozart, therefore, we leave the preparatory stage of the art of pure music, to pass into the stage in which it realized its promises and accomplished its mission.