I. FORM AND CONTENT.
Our study of the Path?ique Sonata has shown how closely Beethoven followed the models of Haydn and Mozart, at the same time infusing into them a new spirit. The first movement of that sonata does not differ materially in form from the first movement of Mozart's G-minor Symphony, discussed in Chapter IX, yet Beethoven takes us into a new world, far removed from that world of pure impersonal beauty in which Mozart dwelt. Beethoven is the man struggling, fighting, working out his own individuality, learning through bitter experience; Mozart is the artist not so much turning his own experience into music, as creating outside himself imperishable works of an almost superhuman beauty. In many of Beethoven's works there is this same regularity of form coupled with freedom of expression. The brusqueness of his style led his contemporaries to think him an iconoclast; and it was not till many years after works like the Fifth Symphony were produced that the public began to understand how orthodox they are.
This free individual expression, now a characteristic of art generally and evident enough in all phases of human life—this assertion of the personal point of view—began with Beethoven and has been increasing ever since his day, until we now have music in which certain phrases or themes no longer please us as beautiful sounds, but exist for some ulterior and individual purpose.
(a)
![[PNG]](#5102994518728001825_pag177_score1.png.id-7233349558401844676.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
(b)
![[PNG]](#5102994518728001825_pag177_score2.png.id-3979295536133781825.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
FIGURE L.
This change was perhaps only a part of that more general transformation of society by which the composer, who had previously been subject to the favor of princely patrons, became an independent individual, living in direct contact with the public at large. Music, thus freed and given an independent existence, became an expressive art and took deeper root in human experience. It lost, in this process, something of that calm, ethereal beauty it had possessed, but it gained greatly in expressiveness. In Beethoven's hands it became plastic; he enlarged the range of harmonic combinations far beyond that of Mozart, and created themes that were of wider application to human feeling. In illustration of this there will be found in Figure L, (a) a quotation from the slow movement of Beethoven's piano sonata, op. 2, no. 2, and in (b) a quotation from the slow movement of his sonata, op. 10, no. 3. These should be compared with the theme from Mozart's piano sonata in Figure XLI. The difference between the themes of Beethoven and that of Mozart is in their content rather than in their form.
The purpose of Mozart's theme is beauty; the purpose of Beethoven's themes is expressiveness, the conveyance of deep emotion. They are lacking in one essential quality of melodic beauty, namely, outline, or curve.[39] These two quotations are not representative of Beethoven's lyric genius, for he has left us many fine melodies, but they reveal a general tendency of his to seek in music an outlet for his deepest thoughts and feelings, and to sacrifice, if necessary, that beauty of outline that characterizes Mozart's finest tunes.