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Accordingly the professional musicians under examination appear as monstrosities in the direction of musical arithmetic; and it is not difficult to understand how such musicians, endowed with the very reverse of a Beethovenian temperament, should succeed and flourish with a nervous system of the commonest kind.
It is not easy to estimate the positive weight and value of modern, Beethovenian, music but we may perhaps hope to get at some negative proof of its worth, by an examination of the pseudo-Beethovenian-classicism now in the ascendant.
We stand to-day before the Beethovenian Symphony as before the landmark of an entirely new period in the history of universal art, for through it there came into the world a phenomenon not even remotely approached by anything the art of any age or any people has to show us.
Now, how does the true Beethovenian Allegro appear with regard to this? To take the boldest and most inspired example of Beethoven's unheard-of innovation in this direction, the first movement of his Sinfonia eroica: how does this movement appear if played in the strict tempo of one of the Allegros of Mozart's overtures? But do our conductors ever dream of taking it otherwise?
This is specially in evidence in Beethoven's later work, particularly in the mass we are now considering. Wagner frequently compares it to a symphony. In Zukunftsmusik, he says: "In his Great Mass Beethoven has employed the choir and orchestra almost exactly as in the symphony;" and elsewhere he cites it as being a "strictly symphonic work of the truest Beethovenian spirit."
As to the coyer subtleties of the score, their discovery provides fresh interest for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenian inexhaustibility and toughness of wear. The themes associated with the individual characters get stamped on the memory easily by the simple association of the sound of the theme with the appearance of the person indicated.
In the course of the argument so far, two species of Allegro have been mentioned; an emotional and sentimental character has been assigned to the latter, the true Beethovenian Allegro, whereas the older Mozartian Allegro was distinguished as showing a naive character. I have adopted the expressions "sentimental" and "naive" from Schiller's well-known essay upon "sentimental and naive poetry."
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