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It is essential that the style of execution shall agree with the matter set forth that the tempo shall be imbued with life as delicate as the life of the thematic tissue. We may consider it established that in classical music written in the later style MODIFICATION of Tempo is a sine qua non. No doubt very great difficulties will have to be overcome.
"At an Old Trysting Place," "From an Indian Lodge," "A Deserted Farm," and "Told at Sunset," imply a consecutive dramatic purpose which is emphasised by their connection through a hint of thematic community. The element of drama, though, is not insisted upon indeed, a large portion of the searching charm of these pieces lies in their tactful reticence.
The various love scenes may be filled with special characters without great harm, save that the mind is diverted from a higher poetic view to a mere concrete play of events. The very quality of the pure musical treatment thus loses nobility and significance. Moreover the only thematic elements in the design are the various "motives" of the hero.
And they endeavour to imitate music with its haunting suggestiveness, its thematic vagueness, its rhythmic swiftness and splendour of tonalities. In vain. No picture can spell many moods simultaneously, nor paint soul-states successively within one frame. These painters have mistaken their vocation.
And now look at my clear thematic intention with the sustained E flat after the three stormy notes, and understand what I meant to say with other such sustained notes in the sequel."
He was a most prolific composer, leaving over two hundred works in all. His violin concertos stand foremost among his works, and are distinguished as much by noble and elevated ideas as by masterly thematic treatment, yet there is a certain monotony of treatment in all, and his style and manner are entirely his own. As an executant Spohr stands among the greatest of all time.
The thematic system gives symphonic interest, reasonableness, and unity to the music, enabling the composer to exhaust every aspect and quality of his melodic material, and, in Beethoven's manner, to work miracles of beauty, expression and significance with the briefest phrases.
The more complex characters, instead of having a simple musical label attached to them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations identified with special representative themes as they come into play in the drama; and the chief merit of the thematic structure of The Ring is the mastery with which the dramatic play of the ideas is reflected in the contrapuntal play of the themes.
King Charles liked his Church music as good as you like, but lively at all costs, and the royal mind speedily wearying of all things in turn, he wished the numbers that made up an anthem to be short. So Purcell wasted his time and magnificent thematic material on mere strings of scrappy, jerky sections.
Such likenesses were more common in Mozart's day than they were a century ago; they were more common in Handel's day than in Mozart's; they are almost as common in our day as they were in Handel's, but now we explain them as being the products of "unconscious cerebration," whereas in the eighteenth century they were frank borrowings in which there was no moral obliquity; for originality then lay as much in treatment as in thematic invention, if not more.
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