226 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



renewed admiration of the author's marvellous genius, Ludwig 

 felt that he must protest against the following passage: 'Among 

 our great composers, Mozart and Beethoven are only at the 

 beginning of the period in which equal temperament pre- 

 dominated. Mozart still had opportunities of making extensive 

 studies in the composition of songs. He is a master of the sweetest 

 melody, wherever he desires it, but in this he is almost the last. 

 Beethoven's bold genius took possession of the domain which 

 the development of instrumental music brought him; in his 

 hands it was the pliant and appropriate tool which he was able 

 to manipulate as none else had ever done. But he always 

 treated the human voice as a handmaid, and consequently it 

 never lavished the highest magic of its melody upon him/ 



Ludwig took umbrage at this view, and on March 30, 1865, 

 Helmholtz replies : ' In your last letter from Leipzig you attack 

 my remarks on Beethoven. Perhaps I had better not have 

 expressed myself merely critically about him, if I did not wish 

 to be misunderstood, for I too find him the mightiest and most 

 moving of all composers, and I myself play hardly anything but 

 Beethoven, when I do play. Had I been speaking about the 

 vehicle of musical emotion, I should certainly have placed him 

 above all others. I was, however, talking exclusively of melody, 

 and the fine artistic beauty of the flow of harmony, and there 

 I do hold Mozart to be the first, even if he does not affect us so 

 powerfully. Speaking generally, as one grows older, and bears 

 more scars within one's breast, one ceases to feel that emotion is 

 really the greatest thing in art.' 



The objections urged by Helmholtz's gifted friend Fechner, in 

 a letter of June 6, 1869, were more serious and of greater import : 



1 You explain the melodic no less than the harmonic relations 

 of tones by the presence of over-tones, and if I grasp your 

 meaning rightly, though I am not quite sure about this, in the 

 absence of over-tones the difference between the pitch of two 

 notes would be like the difference between their intensity, so 

 that we should lose all the characteristic and gradual degrees of 

 relationship and disparity between the tones which are known 

 to us as melodic. An octave appears so like the fundamental, 

 because the latter contains all the partial tones of the octave in 

 its over-tones ; the fifth is less similar, because the coincidence 

 in this respect is less perfect, and so on. This idea is so simple, 



