h a simple distribution of the string parts.

The characterization of musical keys is very strange. In different ages
an entirely different capacity of expression, often an exactly opposite
color, has been attributed to each separate key. In the eighteenth
century G-major was still a brilliant, ingratiating, voluptuous
key--indeed, in the seventeenth century, Athanasius Kircher goes so far
as to call it _tonum voluptuosum_. We, on the contrary, consider G-major
particularly modest, naive, harmless, faintly-colored, simple, even
trivial. Aristotle ascribes to the Dorian key, which corresponds
approximately to our D-minor, the expression of dignity and constancy;
five hundred years later Athaenaeus also calls this key manly,
magnificent, majestic. D-minor, therefore, had for the ear of the
ancient world about the same character that C-major has for us. That is
indeed a jump _a dorio ad phrygium_.

What, however, was for the ancients not proverbially, but literally, a
jump _a dorio ad phrygium_--namely, the contrast between D-minor and
E-minor--is for us no longer such a very astonishing antithesis. In the
seventeenth century Prinz finds the same Dorian key--which for Aristotle
bore the stamp of dignity and constancy--as D-minor, not only "grave"
but also "lively and joyous, reverent and temperate." This key conveys
to Kircher's ear the impression of strength and energy. For Matheson it
possesses "a pious, quiet, large, agreeable and contented quality,"
which encourages devotion and peace of mind, and, for that matter, may
also be employed to express pleasure. On the other hand, since Ch. P.
Schubert's theoretical procedure and since the use Gluck and Mozart have
made of D-minor in dramatic practice, the modern esthetic critic finds
the stamp of womanly melancholy, dark brooding, deep anxiety, in the
selfsame key which for a former age was the _tonus primus_, the one
particularly expressive of manly dignity and strength. And, to cap the
climax, the ear of the musical Romanticist of our day has become quite
accustomed also to hear in D-minor devilish rage and revengeful fury, as
well as all sorts of demoniacal terror and dreadful, midnight, musical
vampirism, as, for example, we find the Queen of Night giving vent in
D-minor to the "hellish revenge" which boils in her heart, and in the
_Freischuetz_ hell triumphs in D-minor. In the seventeenth century,
Sethus Calvisius, speaking of C-major, the Ionian key, says it was
form