One great difference exists, however, between music and literature, and that is in the number of its subjects or characters. “War and Peace,” to take an extreme example, contains scores of characters, while a whole symphony would usually contain not more than twelve or fourteen themes. The prime reason for this is that themes have no established law of association, and so do not represent something else with which we are already familiar as do names of persons in books. We remember the names of such characters as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, or even Dr. Portsoaken, for, although they lived a long time ago, we have enough word association to contain their names and we can understand them and can follow the devious courses of their adventures and the philosophy of life they represent. (The absence of this association makes it difficult for us to remember the characters in Russian novels.) When we hear a musical theme, however, we have to remember it as such.
I have frequently stated the somewhat obvious fact that music obeys general æsthetic laws, and the foregoing is intended to show how these laws are modified by the peculiar properties of sound. A symphony in this sense, then, is a coherent arrangement of themes. This brings me to the important question of the detachment or the unification of the several movements of a symphony. Is a symphony one thing or four? Should we listen to it as a unit, or as separate contrasting pieces strung together for convenience? The conventional answer to these questions--the answer given by the textbooks--is that a few symphonies transfer themes from one movement to another, but that, speaking generally, a symphony is a collection of four separate pieces contrasted in speed and in sentiment, etc. Now I wish to combat this theory as vigorously as possible, and I should like to rely solely on general æsthetic laws, and say that no great work of art could, by any possibility, be based on such a heterogeneous plan as that. Or I might base my opinion on psychology and say that, since there are four different movements, different in general and in particular characteristics,--one containing themes which evolve as they proceed, producing the effect of struggle toward a goal, another suited to states of sentiment, another for concise and vivid action, and so forth,--and since the mind of a great man is a microcosm of the world and contains everything, it follows, as a matter of course, that he tries to fuse his symphony into one by filling its several parts with the various elements of himself, a process that has been going on ever since there has been any music at all. The composer is not four men, nor is his mind separated into compartments. One symphony will differ from another because it will represent a different stage in his development, but any one symphony--unless arbitrarily disjointed--will express the various phases of its composer’s nature at the time, and will have a corresponding internal organism. This is sufficient evidence of the soundness of this view in the great symphonies themselves. I cannot specify at length here, but any reader having access to Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, and Brahms’s symphonies or that of César Franck may investigate for himself. Let me merely point out a few instances which I choose from celebrated and familiar symphonies. In the last movement of the C major of Mozart (commonly called the “Jupiter”) there is a rapid figure in the basses at measures nine and ten which is derived from the beginning of the first movement. The theme of the last movement is drawn from--is another version of--the passage in measures three and four of the first movement. In Beethoven’s “Eroica” the first theme of the last movement is drawn directly from the first theme of the first movement. The theme of the C major section of the “Marche Funèbre” is the theme of the first section in apotheosis, and each owes a debt to the first theme of the first movement. Illustrations of this principle could be multiplied almost indefinitely, and it is not too much to say that there is in all great music this inward coherence. In other words, form in music is not merely a sort of framework, or, if you please, a law or precedent, but the expression of an inward force.