Yet all this study and analysis, which may often have seemed to the reader uselessly detailed and dully scientific, has been made with an ulterior aim in view, and unless that aim has been in some degree attained, our work has been futile indeed. The great object of musical analysis must always be to concentrate the attention of the music-lover, to focus his mind as well as his ears on the melodies, and their developments, which he hears, and so eventually to increase his pleasure in music, and to help him to substitute for that "drowsy reverie, relieved by nervous thrills," an active, joyful, vigorous co-operation with composers, through which alone he can truly appreciate their art.
That, and that alone, is the object of the analytic study of music. For what shall it profit a man if he can tell a second theme from a transition-passage, or a minuet from a set of variations, if he has not meanwhile, through this exercise, got into vital contact with the music itself? But that he can do, no matter how great his natural sensibility to sound, only by learning how to listen.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] Grove's "Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies," page 35.
[49] For convenience of reference number the measures and partial measures consecutively. There will be 69 in the scherzo proper, and 31 in the trio.
[50] The student should also study the interesting scherzo of the Eighteenth Sonata, which is not in minuet form but in regular sonata-form. It is carried out with immense spirit.
[51] The Fourth Symphony has again, like the First, a minuet, though a most active one.
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