others--oftenest one, sometimes more--were added; all the subjects were
passed about from part to part until the end of the composition, with
the interspersion of passages called "episodes" for the sake of
"variety." Here there was unity, continuity, with a vengeance. It was of
the very essence of the fugue that the motion should never be arrested;
if it seemed to halt for a moment, then, as in the older music, the
stopping-place was the jumping-off place for a fresh start. All the
severer men wrote in this form, most of them displaying marvellous
mathematical--and some of them, alas! mechanical--ingenuity; a few of
them, Bach towering high above the rest, attained a full and truthful
expression of deep feeling. Bach, for the organ alone, raised sublime
architectural structures, unapproachable, to use Schumann's word, in
their magnificence. But the underlying feeling was always the same
throughout; it might wax or wane in intensity: its character did not
change. The themes, once announced, were rigid and unalterable; the
music had always to be more or less like "a tune tied to a post."
Dramatic changes of mood had no place. So later, a voice had to be found
for shifting, complex, theatrically conflicting moods--states of mind
characteristic of the modern and not of the bewigged world. When Haydn
was still young the problem composers were more or less at random trying
to solve was the creation of a new form of music and a new kind of music
to fill the form. Neither the old form nor the old style would serve;
the naïve dance-forms were too short. The content had to be as
poignantly expressive, as direct in its appeal, as a folk-song; the
different passages uttering the different moods had somehow to be welded
together into a coherent whole--in one way or another dramatic climaxes
and changes had to be arranged in an unbroken, logical, apparently
inevitable sequence. I do not say the composers knew what they were
after; on the contrary, as in the beginnings of anything new in any art,
they simply were vaguely groping after something, they did not by any