The
symphony is an enlargement of the sonata. All our intellectual progress
is an unfolding, like a flower from the bud. We have first an
impression, then an opinion, then demonstration.
Many years were to elapse before the next and last symphony was to
appear; years in which the ripening process was to go on, and which were
to culminate in the Mass in D, the Choral Symphony and the last
quartets,--works that are in a class by themselves in the same sense
that the works from the Third Symphony on, up to, and including the
Eighth, are in a class apart from the others. His compositions prior to
the Third Symphony are in the style of Mozart and Haydn. They are the
naive utterances of the young musician who does not yet realize that he
has a mission to perform; whose ambition was to be ranked with his great
predecessors. Of the works of the second period, it can be said that
their most prominent characteristic is gayety (_Heiterkeit_). They are
not all in this mood, and but rarely is the mood maintained throughout a
single work, but it exists to the extent that it dominates it, just as
the key-note to his later works is to be found in his mysticism.
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