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:
The second is more resilient and individual:
The third, or conclusion-passage, is of a most strongly marked character: