Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/384

 the folk-song, have the fluency and amplitude of the finest examples of Italian art. In this he, much more than Haydn, showed himself the inheritor of the best results of the long period during which the art of song had been studiously advanced by generations of opera-writers.

As a harmonist, Mozart marks a decided advance. He was absolutely expert in all the procedures commonly used, but much more ready than his contemporaries to extend them to new applications. Many passages might be cited to show his prophetic grasp of principles not generally recognized till the early 19th century. It is probably true that much that we usually credit to later workers was really present in germ and essence in him. This is one reason for the persistent charm of many of his maturer works and for the indebtedness to him that many later masters have acknowledged.

Again, while Mozart's style was prevailingly homophonic and harmonic, he was also an accomplished contrapuntist, uniting with the solidity and soundness of the older traditions a striking brilliance and beauty of total impression all his own. Here, as always in matters of form and disposition, his instinct was unerring. On this side he stands as the type of the whole classical ideal of composition.

He had the singular advantage of uniting in his style what had been learned in both the vocal and the instrumental fields, and of fusing together tendencies that had been developing separately. He was himself a skillful singer, violinist, organist and pianist. He was almost equally fascinated by the attractions of the concert-stage, with its opportunities for both vocalist and player, of the operatic arena, with its still greater field for intense and complicated effect, and of the church service, with its appeal to higher feeling by less sensational methods. His eminence is due to his consummate power to appreciate and utilize all these at once. And, though his dominant national spirit was clearly German, his experience in all parts of Europe had been so wide that he was in contact with all the diverse tendencies at work in the South and the West. In a peculiar degree, therefore, his style is typical of the whole musical situation as it stood in his day, and of the very best in it.

Mozart's operas exhibit his genius more fully than his other works. Their general style varies much, according to the suc