loping an idea enters. The melody flows
or soars like the song of a bird, because it is the free expression,
not of musical fantasy, as such (the unconscious play of tonal fancy),
but the flow of _melody_, _song_, the soaring of spirit in some one
particular direction, floating upon buoyant pinions, and in directions
well conceived and sure. The symmetry of the people's song follows as
a natural part of the progress. The spontaneous element of the music
of the northern harpers now found its way into the musical productions
of the highest geniuses. Henceforth the fugue subsides from its
pre-eminence, and remains possible only as a highly specialized
department of the general art of musical composition, useful and
necessary at times, but nevermore the expression of the unfettered
fancy of the musical mind.

The discovery of the secret of musical contrast, in the types of
development, the _thematic_ and the _lyric_, led to the creation of a
new form, in which they mutually contrast with and help each other.
That form was the Sonata, which having been begun earlier, was
developed further by the sons of Bach, but which received its
characteristic touches from the hands of Haydn and Mozart. This was
the crowning glory of the eighteenth century--the sonata. A form had
been created, into which the greatest of masters was even then
beginning to breathe his mighty soul, producing thereby a succession
of master works, which stand without parallel in the realm of music.

CHAPTER XXIII.

JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH.

All things considered, the most remarkable figure of this period was
that of the great John Sebastian Bach, who was born at Eisenach, in
Prussia, in 1685, and died at Leipsic in 1750. It is scarcely too much
to say that this great man has exercised more influence upon the
development of music than any other composer who has ever lived. In
his own day he led a quiet, uneventful life, at first as student, then
as court musician at Weimar, where he played the violin; later as
organist at Arnstadt, a small village near Weimar, and still later as
director of music in the St. Thomas church and school at Leipsic. In
the sixty-five years of his life, Bach produced an enormous number of
compositions, of which about half were in fugue form, a form which was
at its prime at the beginning of this century and which Bach carried
to the farthest point in the direction of freedom and spontaneity
which it ever reached.

[Illustra