First, there is rare melodiousness about them all. The quality of the melodies is hard to analyze. There is little savor of the folk-song, as there is in many of Haydn’s melodies. They are not so clearly cut, not, in a way, of such solid stuff. Neither, on the other hand, have they a peculiar germinating vigor which we associate with Beethoven. They seem to spin themselves as the music moves along. The movements seem to flow rather than grow. Mozart was none the less a great contrapuntist, one of the greatest among composers. But his music seems strangely to _pass through_ counterpoint, not to be built up of it. It has therefore a quality of litheness or supple flexibility which distinguishes it from that of other composers and gives it a preëminent grace. In this regard it is akin only to the music of Couperin and Chopin. In the second place, the harmonic coloring is subtle and suggestive. His music seems to play about harmonies rather than with them. The simplest chords and modulations have a sort of shimmer. An instance in orchestral music comes to mind--the second themes in both the first and last movements of the inspired symphony in G minor, particularly the treatment of the second theme in the restatement section of the last movement. The effect is due largely to the chromatic half-steps through which his melodies glide, noticeably into cadences, and to the same chromatic hovering about tonic, dominant and subdominant chords. Oftener than not the fine thread of his melody only grazes the notes proper to its harmony, touching just above or below them in swift, light dissonances. Frequently the harmonic foundation is of the simplest kind. Modulations to remote keys or vague drifting of the whole harmonic fabric, such as one finds, for instance, in the first pages of the Fantasia in C minor, are rare. Usually the harmonic foundation is astonishingly simple. It is the wholly charming unwillingness of the melodies to be flatly chained to it that gives the whole such an elusive color. There is a wealth of passing notes, of anticipations and suspensions, of every device which may aid melody to belie its unavoidable relations to harmony. These take from most of his pianoforte music all trace of commonplaceness. Most of it has a graceful distinction which we may call style. Take even the opening theme of the great sonata in A minor. The nature of the theme is bold and declamatory; yet the very first note avoids an unequivocal allegiance to the harmony by a D-sharp. Or observe in the last movement of the sonata in C minor (K. 457) how the short phrases of the melody not only anticipate the harmony in beginning, but delay acknowledging it again and again.