“One more unfortunate
      Weary of breath,
    Rashly importunate,
      Gone to her death.”

[Sidenote:  Use of a dactylic figure.]

We hear it lightly tripping in the first movement: 

[Music illustration] and [Music illustration];

gentle, sedate, tender, measured, through its combination with a spondee in the second: 

[Music illustration];

cheerily, merrily, jocosely happy in the Scherzo: 

[Music illustration];

hymn-like in the Trio: 

[Music illustration]

and wildly bacchanalian when subjected to trochaic abbreviation in the Finale: 

[Music illustration]

[Sidenote:  Intervallic characteristics.]

Intervallic characteristics may place the badge of relationship upon melodies as distinctly as rhythmic.  There is no more perfect illustration of this than that afforded by Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  Speaking of the subject of its finale, Sir George Grove says: 

“And note—­while listening to the simple tune itself, before the variations begin—­how very simple it is; the plain diatonic scale, not a single chromatic interval, and out of fifty-six notes only three not consecutive."[A]

[Sidenote:  The melodies in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.]

Earlier in the same work, while combating a statement by Lenz that the resemblance between the second subject of the first movement and the choral melody is a “thematic reference of the most striking importance, vindicating the unity of the entire work, and placing the whole in a perfectly new light,” Sir George says: 

“It is, however, very remarkable that so many of the melodies in the Symphony should consist of consecutive notes, and that in no less than four of them the notes should run up a portion of the scale and down again—­apparently pointing to a consistent condition of Beethoven’s mind throughout this work.”

[Sidenote:  Melodic likenesses.]

Like Goethe, Beethoven secreted many a mystery in his masterpiece, but he did not juggle idly with tones, or select the themes of his symphonies at hap-hazard; he would be open to the charge, however, if the resemblances which I have pointed out in the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, and those disclosed by the following melodies from his Ninth, should turn out through some incomprehensible revelation to be mere coincidences: 

From the first movement: 

[Music illustration]

From the second: 

[Music illustration]

The choral melody: 

[Music illustration]

[Sidenote:  Design and Form.]

From a recognition of the beginnings of design, to which identification of the composer’s thematic material and its simpler relationships will lead, to so much knowledge of Form as will enable the reader to understand the later chapters in this book, is but a step.