Even if this melody be not instrumentally accompanied, it will imply a
certain harmony, or at all events arouse curiosity as to what the
harmony is to be. And the sequel may shed a new light upon the harmony,
and thus by degrees the whole character of the melody may be
transformed. The power of the modern round for humorous and subtle, or
even profound, expression was first fully revealed by Mozart, whose
astounding unaccompanied canons would be better known if he had not
unfortunately set many of them to extemporized texts unfit for
publication. The round or the _catch_ (which is simply a specially
jocose round) is a favourite English art-form, and the English specimens
of it are probably more numerous and uniformly successful than those of
any other nation. Still they cannot honestly be said to realize the full
possibilities of the form. It is so easy to write a good piece of free
and fairly contrapuntal harmony in three or more parts, and so arrange
it that it remains correct when the parts are brought in one by one,
that very few composers seem to have realized that any further artistic
device was possible within such limits. Even Cherubini gives hardly more
than a valuable hint that the round may be more than a _jeu d'esprit_;
and, unless he be an adequate exception, the unaccompanied rounds of
Mozart and Brahms stand alone as works that raise the round to the
dignity of a serious art-form. With the addition of an orchestral
accompaniment the round obviously becomes a larger thing; and when we
consider such specimens as that in the finale of Mozart's _Cosi fan
tutte_, the quartet in the last act of Cherubim's _Faniska_, the
wonderfully subtle quartet "Mir ist so wunderbar" in Beethoven's
_Fidelio_, and the very beautiful numbers in Schubert's masses where
Schubert finds expression for his genuine contrapuntal feeling without
incurring the risks resulting from his lack of training in fugue-form,
we find that the length of the initial melody, the growing variety of
the orchestral accompaniment and the finality and climax of the free
coda, combine to give the whole a character closely analogous to that of
a set of contrapuntal variations, such as the slow movement of Haydn's
"Emperor" string quartet, or the opening of the finale of Beethoven's
9th Symphony. Berlioz is fond of beginning his largest movements like a
kind of round; _e.g._ his _Dies Irae_, and _Scene aux Champs_.

A moment's reflection will show that thr