Symphonic themes present certain difficulties to the listener whose understanding of melody is limited to a square-cut strophic tune. He is accustomed to a certain musical punctuation--a comma (so to speak) after the first and third lines of the music, a semicolon after the second, and a period at the end. And when he gets an extra period thrown in (as he does after the third line of the tune “America”) he is all the happier. When he hears the opening theme of the “Eroica” Symphony break in two in the middle and fall apart, he gets discouraged, for his musical imagination has not been sufficiently developed to see that that very breaking apart presages the tragic turmoil of the whole movement. When Brahms gives out, in the opening measures of his Third Symphony, two themes at once, he does not fathom the element of strife which is involved, and so cannot follow its progress to the final triumph of one of them. But the symphony contains everything, and there is a place in it for lyric melody, provided the flight be long and sweeping. The “slow movement” of a symphony contains such themes, but they are not content to be merely fine melodies. They, too, must contain some potentiality which is afterwards realized. The best and most familiar example will be found in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where the first rhythmic unit (contained in the first three notes) of the beautiful romantic theme detaches itself and pursues an almost scandalous existence full of delicate pranks and grimaces, and comic quips and turns, now gentle, now ironic, now pretending to be sentimental, until it finally rejoins the theme again. This piece is a romance touched with comedy--a romance great enough to suffer all the by-play without the least dilution of its quality.