"By the end of their time [Haydn's and Mozart's] instrumental art had branched out into a very large number of distinct and complete forms, such as symphonies, concertos, quartets, trios, and sonatas for violin and clavier. The style appropriate to each had been more or less ascertained, and the schemes of design had been perfectly organized for all self-dependent instrumental music. Both Haydn and Mozart had immensely improved in the power of finding characteristic subjects, and in deciding the type of subject which is best fitted for instrumental music. The difference in that respect between their early and later works is very marked. They improved the range of the symphonic cycle of movements by adding the minuet and trio to the old group of three movements, thereby introducing definite and undisguised dance movements to follow and contrast with the central cantabile slow movement. Between them they had completely transformed the treatment of the orchestra. They not only enlarged it and gave it greater capacity of tone and variety, but they also laid the solid foundations of those methods of art which have become the most characteristic and powerful features in the system of modern music. Even in detail the character of music is altered; all phraseology is made articulate and definite; and the minutiæ which lend themselves to refined and artistic performance are carefully considered, without in any way diminishing the breadth and freedom of the general effect. There is hardly any branch or department of art which does not seem to have been brought to high technical perfection by them; and if _the world could be satisfied with the ideal of perfectly organized simplicity without any great force of expression_, instrumental art might well have stopped at the point to which they brought it." Dr. Parry has, in the passage which I have italicized, touched the marrow of the matter. Haydn's and Mozart's symphonies, however they may have impressed their contemporaries, appeal to us through their perfect transparency, their balance of form, their fluency of instrumental language, and their simple beauty of style. The working out parts of their symphonies, for instance, are devoted wholly to the exposition of the musical fruitfulness of their subjects. There is nowhere any evidence of an attempt to employ the apparatus of the symphony for a systematic communication of emotion. These works do, indeed, at times arouse our feelings, but there is no conviction that their composers designed them to speak a message of the inner life to us. They are the perfect embodiments of pure musical beauty, and it was not till Beethoven took up the form which they had perfected that it became the definite embodiment of feeling, the systematic means of expression.