DICTIONARY OF MUSIC - El Atril

82 FORM FORM
intense enough to justify it, or else it mil be
mere vanity ; the cleverness of the fingers disguising
the emptiness of tl:e soul, —a tit accompaniment
to ' the clatter of dishes at a princely
table,' as Wagner saj's, but not Music. Such
is the vital germ from which spring the real
peculiarities and individualities of Beethoven's
instrumental compositions. It must now be
a Form of spirit as well as a Form in the framework
; it is to become internal as well as external.
The day for stringing certain tunes together
after a certain plan is past, and Form by itself
ceases to be a final and absolute good. A musical
movement in Beethoven becomes a continuous
and complete poem ; or, as Mr. Dannreuther i
says, ' an organism ' which is gradually unfolded
before us, marred by none of the ugly gaps of
dead stuffing which were part of the 'form ' of his
predecessors. Moreover Form itself must drop
into the background and become a hidden presence
rather than an obvious and pressing feature.
As a basis Beethoven accepted the forms of Mozart,
and continued to employ them as the outline of
his scheme. ' He retained,' as the same writer
has admirably said, ' the triune symmetry of
exposition, illustration, and repetition,' which as
far as we know at present is the most perfect
system arrived at, either theoretically or empirically
; but he treated the details with the independence
and force of his essentially individual
nature. He absorbed the principle in such a
fashion that it became natural for him to speak
after that manner ; and greatly as the form varies
it is essentially the same in principle, whether
in the Trio in E7, opus 1, No. 1, or the Quartet
in F, opus 13.5.
In estimating the great difference between
Mozart and Beethoven in their manner of treating
forms it must not be forgotten that Mozart,
as has been before observed, wrote at a time
when the idea of harmonic form was comparatively
new to the world of music, and to conform
to it was in itself a good, and to say the merest
trifles according to its system a source of satisfac-
tion to the hearer. It has been happily suggested
that ilozart lived in an era and in the very atmosphere
of court etiquette, and that this shows
itself in the formality of his works ; but it is
proliable that this is but half the cause of the
effect. For it must not be forgotten that the
very basis of the system was clear definition of
tonality ; that is to say, the key must be strongly
marked at the beginning and end of a movement,
and each section in a different key must l;)e clearly
pointed out by the use of cadences to define the
whereabouts. It is in the very nature of things
that when the system was new the hearers of the
music should be but little apt at seizing quickly
what the key was at any given moment of the
highest importance ; and equally in the nature
of things tliat this faculty should have been
capable of development, and that the auditors
' In MacviiUan's Magazine for July 1876.
of Beethoven's later days should have been better
able to tell their whereabouts with much less
indication than were the auditors of Mozart.
Hence there were two causes acting on the
development of form. On the one hand, as the
system grew familiar, it was inevitable that
people should lose much of the satisfaction
which was derived from the form itself as
such ; and on the other hand their capacity for
realising their whereabouts at any time being
developed by practice, gave more scope to the
composer to unify his composition by omitting
those hard lines of definition which had been
previously necessary to assist the undeveloped
musical faculty of the auditors. Thus Mozart
prepared the way for Beethoven in those very
things which at first sight seem most opposed
to his jiractice. "Without such education the
musical poems of Beethoven must have fallen
upon deaf ears.
Beethoven then very soon abandoned the formal
definition of the sections by cadences, and by
degrees seems rather to have aimed at obscuring
the obviousness of the system than at pointing it
out. The division of the movements becomes
more subtle, and the sections pass into one another
without stopping ostentatiously to indicate
the whereabouts ; and, last but not least, he
soon breaks away from the old recognised
system, which ordained the Dominant or relative
major as the only admissible key for the complementary
section of the first part. Thus as
early as his second and third Sonatas the second
sections begin in the Dominant minor key, and
in the slow movement of the Sonata in Eb (op. 7)
the Dominant is discarded in favour of the key
of the third below the tonic— Afc> relative to the
principal key C. In the first movement of the
Sonata in G (op. 31, No. 1) he begins his second
subject in the key of the major third, and that
and the same key
(relatively) is adopted in the "Waldstein Sonata
and the Leonora Overture. The effect of such
fresh and unexpected transitions must have been
immense on minds accustomed only to the formal
regularity of Slozart. Moreover, Beethoven early
began the practice of taking one pirincipal key as
major i.e. B, relative to G ;
central and surrounding it with a jiosse of other
keys both related and remote. Every one is
familiar with the opening passages of the "Waldstein
and Appassionata Sonatas, in both of which
a new key is introduced in less than half-a-dozen
bars, and then passes back to the principal key ;
and this practice is not done in the vague way so
often met with in Jlozart and Haydn, where tlieir
excessive use of rapid tran.sitions in the third sec-
tion of the movement has the effect of men beating
about in the dark. True it is that there are
instances of this in Beethoven's early works while
he wrote under the same order of influences as
they did ;
but in his maturer works these subsidiary
modulations are conceived with large
breadth of purpose founded on certain peculiari-