acquire variety to a degree impossible for any form developed earlier;
and which, when these opportunities were fresh, afforded composers a
field for the display of fancy which was practically free. This, one
may still realize by comparing the different fugues in Bach's "Well
Tempered Clavier" with each other, and with those of any other
collection. It is impossible to detect anywhere the point where the
inspiration of the composer felt itself bound by the restrictions of
this form. It was for Bach and Haendel practically a free form. And the
few other contemporaneous geniuses of a high order either experienced
the same freedom in it, or found ways of evading its strictness by the
production of various styles of fancy pieces, which, while conforming
to the fugue form in their main features, were nevertheless free
enough to be received by the musical public of that day with
substantially the same satisfaction as a fantasia would have been
received a century later. Roughly speaking, Bach and Haendel exhausted
the fugue. While Bach displayed his mental activity in almost every
province of music, and like some one since, of whom it has been much
less truthfully said, "touched nothing which he did not adorn," he was
all his life a writer of fugues. His preludes are not fugues, and
their number almost equals that of the fugues; but the operative
principles were not essentially different--merely the applications of
thematic development were different. Yet strange as it may seem,
within thirty years from his death it became impossible to write
fugues, and at the same time be free. Why was this?

A new element came into music, incompatible with fugue, requiring a
different form of expression, and incapable of combination with fugue.
That element was the people's song, with its symmetrical cadences and
its universal intelligibility. Let the reader take any one of the
Mozart sonatas, and play the first melody he finds--he will
immediately see that here is something for which no place could have
been found in a fugue, nor yet in its complement, the prelude of
Bach's days. The same is true of many similar passages in the sonatas
of Haydn. Music had now found the missing half of its dual nature. For
we must know that in the same manner as the thematic or fugal element
in music represents the play of musical fantasy, turning over musical
ideas intellectually or seriously; so there is a spontaneous melody,
into which no thought of deve