Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Amadeus is the Latin form of the Greek name Theophilus. The German form, Gottlieb, was also sometimes used.