The new auditor is the delicate dilettante who listens no longer so much to the inner parts, the ancient severity of which vanishes and is replaced by chord music. Now we listen to the melody, to the over-part, and we unfold its whole charm, revealing a hundred secrets of melodic pleasure, and disentangling them at ease. And in all this capricious enlivening of music there remains the same delightful contradiction as in the paintings and buildings of the time--the contradiction between inner freedom and the aim at a fixed form. The external form is to replace what was offered by the inner; and yet, from these new free figures, the intention is primarily to gain this form. The aim is not at collections of suites, but at the type of the free movement, of the piece, of the sonata. It is the same spectacle as when we see Hogarth and Greuze expressing a definite moral lesson in their pictures, or architectural principles conveyed in the play of childhood. In music, however, that exclusive predominance of form, which the French Revolution caused to prevail in the representative art, has never been quite attained. It is important to notice that this was only possible since music had emancipated itself from French influence. It was only in Germany that a Beethoven could arise. The distinction between “professional” and “amateur” is one to which our attention is always more and more drawn. “Tablatures” and apparatus for the scholar vanish gradually, and titles meant to attract the amateur become more frequent. Bach’s inscription--“for the delight of amateurs”--over suites and concertos, appears on more than one title-page. We read “Cecilia playing on the clavier and satisfying the hearing,” or “Manipulus musices, a Handful of Pastime at the Clavier,” or again, “the Busy Muse Clio,” or even “Clavier-practice for the delight of mind and ear, in six easy _galanterie parties_ adapted to modern taste, composed chiefly for young ladies.” A certain Tischer has put it very shortly on some suites--“The Contented Ear and the Quickened Soul.” As the most complete refiner of this taste, relying on the public at large, appears Philip Emanuel Bach, who inscribes his sonatas “easy” or “for ladies,” and thus openly confessed, much as he was censured therefor by the pedants, that he had systematically introduced the light _genre_ as a music for the future. [Illustration: F. W. Marpurg, Theoretician and Clavier Teacher. 1718-1795.]