Falk’s Reviews > The Age of Mozart and Beethoven > Status Update

"For Beethoven, melody was no longer an unambiguous notion, but a spectrum of infinite shades.. (...) Beethoven's melody always has an instrumental root, even in passages of the most fluid cantabile style; his contemporaries became aware of this when (like Giuseppe Carpani) they recognized in him not singing but a 'desire interrupted by singing'..." (229)

"At the beginning of 1790 a document entitled Suppression de toutes les académies appeared in circulation in Paris (it was even introduced into German universities and rejected there by indignant critics) which proposed, after the suppression of the clergy decreed by the National Assembly, the abolition of the academies, which were 'the clergy of sciences, literature and the arts'." (178)

"Thus Mozart, who never consciously thought of reforming anything and whose character was the furthest imaginable from the statement of principles, had systematically developed all the musical genres of his time. His attitude was not far from that of the comedian in the prologue, 'Vorspiel auf dem Theater', of Faust: 'Suppose I talked about posterity, who'd give us any fun today?'..." (165)