It must not be supposed that this wonderful scheme of design reached its maturity in any short period of time, or through the labors of a few musicians. Infinitely slow and gradual was its growth; and though the immediate followers of J. S. Bach, and especially his own son, Philip Emmanuel Bach, brought it to a condition in which its general outline was pretty well established, it was still, at the time when Haydn appeared on the scene, incapable of that free manipulation which high musical beauty requires. It was Haydn who removed the last traces of stiffness and primitive angularity from the sonata-form; it was Haydn who brought it to complete definiteness as an artistic device and stamped it with lasting individuality; and it was Haydn who at least hinted and foreshadowed those subtleties and accommodations in its treatment which, as extended by Mozart and Beethoven, perfected its capabilities and brought it to its mature estate as the most vital, elastic and beautiful of modern musical forms. FOOTNOTES: [25] The musical foot does not always correspond exactly with the “measure”; for the measure begins with the accent, while the foot often ends or culminates with the accent. The measure is marked off by the bar lines, but the foot sometimes spans the bar line. [26] It must be remembered that all primitive music was vocal. [27] The reason of the “answer at the fifth” is this: the tonic and dominant being the two tonal centres of the key, about which all its sounds are grouped, it is natural that they should be treated as complementary to each other and made the bases of contrast effects. After the subject is announced in the tonic, then, it is answered in the dominant, or a fifth above (or a fourth below, which amounts to the same thing). See Figure VIII. [28] A still more primitive type of structure, occasionally but not uniformly used in symphonies and sonatas, is the variation form. This consists of a theme, generally in simple binary or ternary form, subjected to many successive modifications or “variations,” generally of a superficial kind. Though low in the scale of musical organisms, it is surprisingly effective in the hands of real masters of musical development such as Beethoven and Brahms. [29] This is the case with the Trio, or second Minuet, as well as with the Minuet proper. [30] At first the second subject was in a contrasted key; now both subjects are in the tonic. CHAPTER V HAYDN CHAPTER V HAYDN