to what a composer sees in it and gets out of it.
Who would know this of old Clementi--
[Illustration: some bars of music]
--if Mozart had not woven the _Zauberfloete_ overture out of it? And who
save Beethoven saw the possibilities of this?--
[Illustration: some bars of music]
But Haydn had to find such themes and see their possibilities before
Mozart or Beethoven, and it was only after Mozart's death he was
completely successful. He still largely depended upon fanfares and
key-relationships in leading from passage to passage, and getting
variety while keeping unity. There is still, compared with Beethoven, a
huge amount of formalistic padding; but so far as he dared and could, he
was loading his rifts with ore. Such a subject as this--
[Illustration: some bars of music]
--is far removed from his earlier folk-song themes, but it is further
still from the old fugal type of subject. It is suited to symphonic
development, and to no other kind.
The theme quoted in my first chapter is one of a singing kind, and, as
if Haydn had planned the whole symphony with a prophetic glance at these
remarks, the subject of the last movement is either a peasant-dance or a
good imitation:
[Illustration: some bars of music]
This movement is rich in invention, even for Haydn at his best; it is
full of jollity far removed from vulgarity; the atmosphere is
continuously fresh, almost fragrant, and there are endless touches of
poetic seriousness. The Adagio is as profound as anything he wrote.
Perhaps, on the whole--and it may be wrong to indicate a choice at
all--the slow movement of the symphony in C is fullest of sustained
loveliness. That phrase beginning
[Illustration: some bars of music]
is, in its sheer beauty, reminiscent of Mozart, though the way the
balance of feeling is recovered at the end is pure Haydn; there is the
deepest human feeling, but perfect sanity is never lost. Towards the end
the development is carried on in quite the Beethoven way, quite a long
passage growing out of the simple phrase:
[Illustration: some bars of music]
Nearly all Haydn's art, and a good deal of the art of Beethoven, may be
found in the B flat symphony. The theme is announced in a minor form,
adagio:
[Illustration: some bars of music]
--taken up at once in the major, allegro, and wrought into most
beautiful and expressive strains, each one growing out of the last (if I
may once again use Wordsworth's magnificent word)
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