possibility of this before you-one musician, a successor, may nave exhibited greater genius; he now and then perhaps has surpassed Mozart; his means were greater, for he began life when Mozart ended it. One other, a predecessor, may have excelled Mozart in learning; he had time to do so, for he lived to the age of sixty-five. But surely no composer has combined genius and learning in such perfect proportions, none has been able to dignify the lightest and the tritest forms by such profound scholarship, or, at the moment when he was drawing most largely on the resources of musical science, to appear so natural, so spontaneous, and so thoroughly at ease.

THE FOURTH PERIOD

(Continued).

EXTINCTION OF ALL TRACES OF OLD TONALITY IN THE

WORKS OF MOZART-BEETHOVEN-HIS THREE MAN

NERS" -HIS ORATORIO, FIRST MASS AND OPERA

THE FOURTH PERIOD

(Continued).

My division of musical history into periods has been dictated, not by the accidental and external forms of the music written during the centuries, half-centuries, decades or even single years of which I have had to speak, but by the internal structure of this music, and the principles on which it is certain its composers worked. The musicians of the Second Period (it has been my principal object in this course to bring this out) took a wholly different view of the nature of the scale from those of the Fourth; and the inevitable results of this were melody, harmony, and a mode of developing musical thoughts essentially unlike.

Traces of this old "tonality" or theory of the scale, may be found in the works of almost every composer, of whatever nation, down to about the middle of the last century; in those of the first generation of the Neapolitan School, and of their contemporaries in other parts of Italy, in Germany, France, and England. It is possible even that some of these-echoes of echoes of voices themselves long silent-might be visible to a keen eye, or audible to a delicate ear, in the earlier works of Haydn. In those of his manhood and later life there are none whatever. Many of Haydn's musical expressions (I say it with all possible reverence) have become old-fashioned; but I do not know one which could with propriety be called ancient. Haydn therefore is justly regarded as the founder, or father,

of modern music. Original and elegant as were the compositions of his predecessor, C. P. Emmanuel Bach, to whom both he and Mozart avowedly owed so much, the influence of his great father and teacher, J. Sebastian Bach, is continually discernible in them; and though the modern sonata, quartet, and symphony are there clearly enough foreshadowed, that form, which is now the inalienable characteristic, nay even the condition of existence, of such pieces, was never fully developed in them.

The works of Mozart are essentially modern, in plan as in detail; those of the last ten years of his life may be regarded as types of the Fourth Period. In them he is never even oldfashioned. He uses now and then an "old and antique" figure, but always consciously and always finely. Barring these occasional tributes of respect to the memory of the sixteenth century, he is, in melody, harmony, treatment, and instrumentation, modern in thought, note, and deed.

Mozart died before he had attained his thirty-sixth yearprematurely, if life be measured by time only; but surely not so, if it be measured by labour. Nevertheless it is difficult to resist speculating on the future which might have been but was never to be his; and impossible not to feel regret that at least a few more years had not been accorded to one so able and so eager to turn them to account. But the additional steps which we picture him to ourselves as making in these possible years would probably have proved beyond the strength of one who had already travelled so far. The efforts of no single man, whether crowded into the shortest or spread over the longest life, could have been equal to the exploration or exhaustion of the enormous world of thought which Mozart's genius had opened up. The work however has not been unattempted, nor unachieved-though by another hand. A few days after Mozart's death Beethoven entered his twentyfirst year.