We have endeavored to point out in our brief sketch of Mozart’s life the chief influences to which he was exposed. The extent to which he assimilated and developed the various elements thus absorbed must determine his place in musical history. ‘The history of every art,’ says Mr. W. H. Hadow, ‘shows a continuous interaction between form and content. The artist finds himself confronted with a double problem: what is the fittest to say, and what is the fittest manner of saying it.... As a rule, one generation is mainly occupied with questions of design, another takes up the scheme and brings new emotional force to bear upon it, and thus the old outlines stretch and waver, the old rules become inadequate, and the form itself, grown more flexible through a fuller vitality, once more asserts its claim and attains a fuller organization.’ The generation preceding Mozart and Haydn had settled for the time being the question of form. Haydn said, as it were, the last word in determining the design, applying it in the most diverse ways and pointing the road to further development. Mozart found it ‘sufficient to his needs and set himself to fill it with a most varied content of melodic invention.’ The analogy drawn by Mr. Hadow between the Greek drama and the classic forms of music is particularly apt: in both the ‘plot’ is constructed in advance and remains ever the same; the artist is left free to apply his genius to the poetic interpretation of situations, the delineation of character, the beauty of rhythm and verse. It was in these things that Mozart excelled. He brought nothing essentially new, but, by virtue of his consummate genius, he endowed the symphonic forms as he found them with a hitherto unequalled depth and force of expression, an individuality so indefinable that we can describe it only as ‘Mozartian.’ In no sense was Mozart a reformer. In opera, unlike Gluck, he did not find his limitations irksome, but knew how to achieve within these limitations an ideal of dramatic truth without detracting from the quality of his musical essence. His style is as independent of psychology as it is of formal interpretation, it is ‘sufficient unto itself,’ ineffable in its beauty, irresistible in its charm. This utter independence and self-sufficiency of style enabled him to use with equal success the vocal and instrumental idioms. And in his work we actually see an assimilation of the two styles and an interchange of their individual elements.