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Assuredly, the novel and infinitely various combinations of a symphonic movement must be set in motion in an adequate and appropriate manner if the whole is not to appear as a monstrosity. The man was right in his way; he chose to recognise nothing but the Mozartian Allegro; and in the strict tempo peculiar to that Allegro, he taught his pupils at the Conservatorium to play the Eroica!
The entry of the masters is a scene that only Wagner could have executed. A stream of Mozartian melody ripples on as the men shake hands and go through the conventional business of the gathering of people on the stage: what in the operas of the day a dozen instances might be mentioned is wearisome stodge is here turned into a thing of surpassing beauty. These shifting shadows of the old world become for the moment alive; yet we see them as though across the centuries through the magical web of music. The steady swaying motion of the accompaniment and, of course, the whole charm lies in the accompaniment has a curious resemblance to the duet of the Don and Zerlina in the first act of Don Giovanni, though Mozart's score is simplicity itself compared with this. This use of a kind of rocking figure led many younger musicians astray; and I make a comparison between their use of it and Wagner's with no intention of being odious to any one, but to show exactly where Wagner's superiority lay. Take a composer of very fine genius, Anton Dvor
He has been especially fortunate in hitting the golden mean between forbidding abstruseness and trivial popularity, and consequently enjoys the esteem of those learned in music as well as of those merely happy in it. His erudition has persuaded him to a large simplicity; his nature turns him to a musical optimism that gives many of his works a Mozartian cheer. Graciousness is his key.
Mozart, the greatest of all masters of this art, never dreamt of employing them; and, extensively as they are used in The Ring, they do not enable Wagner to dispense with the Mozartian method. Apart from the themes, Siegfried and Mimmy are still as sharply distinguished from one another by the character of their music as Don Giovanni from Leporello, Wotan from Gutrune as Sarastro from Papagena.
Edmund Ollier, the son of Charles Ollier, the publisher of Lamb's Works, 1818, in his reminiscences of Lamb, prefixed to one edition of Elia, tells this story: "Once at a musical party at Leigh Hunt's, being oppressed with what to him was nothing but a prolonged noise ... he said 'If one only had a pot of porter, one might get through this. It was procured for him and he weathered the Mozartian storm."
But I never forgot that without knowledge even wisdom is more dangerous than mere opportunist ignorance, and that somebody must take the Garden of Eden in hand and weed it properly. Accordingly, in 1901, I took the legend of Don Juan in its Mozartian form and made it a dramatic parable of Creative Evolution.
The little Erich Korngold in reality a plump, good-looking boy presents few problems for the critic. Whether or not the youth is helped by his teacher, as some say, there can be no doubt as to his precocious talent. His facility in composition is Mozartian. Nothing laboured, all as spontaneous as Schoenberg is calculating.
With her bow she gave the time, and the opening prelude began. She adjusted her handkerchief to her shoulder, and with a light touch played snatches of the orchestral part, as if to give a hint as to its proper rendering. Now comes the solo. The accompaniment is hushed, that not a note of the golden Mozartian melody be lost.
The string sextet, if compared to the later music, is sunny and Mozartian in its melodic and harmonic simplicity. They tell me that Schoenberg once wrote freely in the normal manner, but finding that he could not attract attention he deliberately set himself to make abnormal music.
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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