In the melody, the motif ex­pres­ses through its changes and dis­guises the course of de­vel­op­ment of the hu­man char­ac­ter in a mani­fold mu­si­cal form.
In clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion, the melody logi­cally rep­re­sents the rea­son­able in­ner proc­ess of de­vel­op­ment of the in­di­vid­ual, and it is the lively de­scrip­tion of the de­vel­op­ment of his char­ac­ter.

Dur­ing the ex­pan­sion of the motif, i.e. dur­ing the struc­tur­ing of the melody, an in­terlacing of motif trans­for­ma­tions takes place to the ex­tent that the parts, the in­di­vid­ual motif-faces, the in­di­vid­ual quali­ties of the char­ac­ter, be­come less prominent, and the in­te­grated whole­ness of the com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of the hu­man char­ac­ter, in the form of the melody, be­comes more prominent in the mu­si­cal event.

Con­trary to con­ven­tional notion, it is not the pur­pose of the melody to de­scribe some­thing par­ticu­larly pleas­ant.

The melody de­scribes the truth of the for­ma­tion of char­ac­ter.

There­fore, it is not at all “sweet” as we know it in ex­ag­ger­ated form from the en­ter­tain­ment mu­sic.

In clas­si­cal mu­sic, it was never the pur­pose of the melody to flatly lull some­one, or to inebriate him, but it was meant to lead the lis­tener, by way of its in­ner un­fold­ment, di­rectly to the cog­ni­tion of more com­pre­hen­sive hu­man val­ues – thereby to greater per­sonal in­ner pu­rity, to greater per­sonal in­ner beauty, to greater per­sonal in­ner power.

Just as a man, at dif­fer­ent times, al­lows one of his mani­fold char­ac­ter­is­tics to domi­nate (his fel­lowmen would say he is al­ways chang­ing, show­ing a dif­fer­ent face), like­wise the motif pre­sents it­self in its vari­ous trans­for­ma­tions and thus ap­pears as the melody in the mu­si­cal proc­ess.
Owing to the im­pulse of the crea­tive power within the melody, the in­ner-hu­man quali­ties rush out­wards into the world of the sound-space, and bring about the chang­ing mu­si­cal pic­ture of the act­ing traits of char­ac­ter of in­di­vid­uals, of hu­man be­ings, of the world.