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Updated: May 7, 2025
The thematic material of the "Leonore" overtures Nos. 2 and 3 being practically the same, careless listeners may easily confound one with the other. Nevertheless, the differences between the two works are many and great, and a deep insight into the workings of Beethoven's mind would be vouchsafed students if they were brought into juxtaposition in the concert-room.
The land of dawn, fresh and pure, the limpid river: these, the essence of Lohengrin and the pervading atmosphere, proceed from the narrative. But much has to be got through before this point is reached. First, we have the gorgeous prelude the most brilliant Wagner wrote, and the last he was to write that has no thematic connection with any portion of the opera.
From Fifty-seventh Street to Peter's rooms was a matter of four miles. Peter had not half finished his thematic treatment of Leonore when he reached his quarters. He sat down before his fire, however, and went on, not with hope of exhausting all possible variations, but merely for his own pleasure. Finally, however, he rose and put photographs, rose, and card away.
This transcendental work more nearly approaches Beethoven in its unity, its formal rectitude and its brave economy of thematic material. While few men have dared to unlock their hearts thus, Chopin is not so intimate here as in the mazurkas. But the pulse beats ardently in the tissues of this composition. As art for art, it is less perfect; the gain is on the human side.
This was an imposing array, but it was only a beginning, and her productive career continued until her death in 1883. Not all of her works have been published, but all show good thematic material and an unusual sense of musical form.
He could not apply the thematic system to his striking phrases, and so had to cobble them into metric patterns in the old style; and as he was no "absolute musician" either, he hardly got his metric patterns beyond mere quadrille tunes, which were either wholly undistinguished, or else made remarkable by certain brusqueries which, in the true rococo manner, owed their singularity to their senselessness.
His thematic substance at its best in, say, the greater part of the sonatas, the "Sea Pieces," the "Woodland Sketches," the "Four Songs" of op. 56 has saliency, character, and often great beauty; and even when it is not at its best as in much of his writing up to his opus 45 it has a spirit and colour that lift it securely above mediocrity.
One more illustration of the way in which the thematic system is worked. There are two themes connected with Loki. One is a rapid, sinuous, twisting, shifty semiquaver figure suggested by the unsubstantial, elusive logic-spinning of the clever one's braincraft. The other is the fire theme. In the first act of Siegfried, Mimmy makes his unavailing attempt to explain fear to Siegfried.
The thematic material is originally turned, oftentimes broad and churchly and magnificent; the movement of the Franckian themes being a distinct invention. The harmony is full and varied and brilliant. But it is pre-eminently the seraphic sweetness of Franck's style that distinguishes his music and sets it over against this other that is so hard of edge and thin of substance.
Through the representative nicety of his themes, through his inordinate capacity for thematic variation and transformation, his playful and witty and colorful instrumentation, Strauss was able to impart to his music a concreteness and descriptiveness and realism hitherto unknown to symphonic art, to characterize briefly, sparingly, justly, a personage, a situation, an event.
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