Even had Mozart known in advance that this would be the last movement of his last symphony, he could not have surpassed the “Jupiter” finale. A pithy summary of his achievement has proved elusive, however. The simple description of the movement as a synthesis of sonata form and fugue, or, as Einstein put it, of “galant” and “learned” styles, fails to suggest an innovation beyond that of the Quartet in G major, K. 387, or the C-major Symphony by Michael Haydn completed not quite six months before the “Jupiter.” In this chapter, I offer an interpretation of the “Jupiter” finale that revises the terms of discussing the learned style. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the persistence of such stylistic dichotomies and trichotomies as “galant-learned,” “elevated-plain,” “high-middle-low,” or “church-theater-chamber” styles attests to the legacy of rhetoric and its applicability to music of this period. Connecting learned style with rhetoric are several separate but related complexes of ideas: the idea of an older, antiquated style dependent upon strict rules; the idea of a musical topos or topic, already explored in Chapter 5; the idea of elevated style, as outlined in Chapter 2; and the idea of difficulty inherent in learnedness, and thus the propriety of taxing the understanding of the audience. Ultimately, the rhetoric of the learned style will invoke the sublime, to elucidate what I believe to be the real significance of this movement.

Analogies between rhetorical elements and matters of style and taste were pervasive in the eighteenth century.