What I said last week about Mozart and classicism is exemplified perfectly in two of Columbia's November record releases. One of them is the overture to Don Giovanni. This is that famous overture which Mozart wrote the night before the first performance of the opera, while his wife fed him coffee to keep him awake. Listen to the overture, played superbly by Beecham and the London Philharmonic, and I think you will agree that there is something here more than the mere notes; the notes, lovely as they are, serve as a container, a melodic bowl, into which well the emotions of the composer.

I think you will not find this in a symphony like the Schubert Second, recorded this month by Howard Barlow and the Columbia Broadcasting Symphony. I think you will find that for all its charm the symphony is but a pale copy of eighteenth-century models. Perfectly constructed in every way, harmonically and melodically and rhythmically irreproachable, still it is patently thin. It lacks the emotional guts that made a Mozart E-flat or Haydn 99th great. In short, it succeeds only as a technical imitation. Compare another early Schubert symphony, the Fourth or "Tragic," with its eighteenth-century counterpart, the Mozart G-minor. At first glance the two are strikingly alike. Their plan of construction is almost identical. Both are based on a type of melancholy flowing theme. But if you listen very long to the Schubert Fourth, what seemed its real charm has mysteriously gone up in smoke, leaving only the ashes of a facile, perfunctory exercise in the mechanics of composing. But if you listen again to the Mozart G-minor, you continue, (at least, I do) to be haunted by its deep-driven intensity and the sheer melodic beauty which contains it. Perhaps another way of looking at it would be to say that if the music is really beautiful (and here again we are dealing with the slipperiest terminology)--if, I say, there is real beauty in the notes, you may be sure they are the product of genuine emotion. If there is not, you may be equally sure of the emotional sterility behind them. (But if you are really interested in all this, you will forget the above hogwash, and set about devising a new vocabulary for aesthetics, in which "beauty" and "emotion" and such words do not occur, but in which one can get off this plane of half-baked philosophical daydreaming and come to grips with something precise, scientific. The trouble with aesthetics is that it tries to say the unsayable, and mixes it all up with the sayable. A new and precise vocabulary would separate the two, and really say the sayable, leaving the unsayable to be imagined by gods and idiots.)

Among modern imitations of classicism, Prokofieff's Classical Symphony has received wide praise. To me it seems a weak-kneed, rather precious imitation of Haydn in modern harmonics. Probably it is somewhat satiric; still it is a good example of the failure of modern composers to recreate in twentieth-century dress the music of the eighteenth century. The spark which lit up the formal pattern of a classical symphony cannot be recaptured merely by reproducing the exteriors. Something else, whatever it is that makes any music great, must also be there.