CHAPTER VI

THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT: ITS CHARACTERISTICS AND ITS GROWTH

Modern music and modern history; characteristics of the music of

the romantic period--Schubert and the German romantic movement

in literature--Weber and the German reawakening--The Paris of

1830: French romanticism--Franz Liszt--Hector Berlioz--Chopin;

Mendelssohn--Leipzig and Robert Schumann--Romanticism and classicism.

I

Modern history--the history of modern art and modern thought, as well

as that of modern politics--dates from July 14, 1789, the capture of

the Bastille at the hands of the Parisian mob. Carlyle says there

is only one other real date in all history, and that is one without

a date, lost in the mists of legends--the Trojan war. There is no

political event, no war or rumor of war among the European nations of

to-day which, when traced to its source, does not somehow flow from

that howling rabble which sweated and cursed all day long before the

prison--symbol of absolute artistocratic power--overpowered the handful

of guards which defended it and made known to the king, through his

minister, its message: ‘Sire, this is not an insurrection; it is a

revolution!’

For a century and a quarter the mob of July 14th has stood like a wall

between the Middle Ages and modern times. No less than modern politics,

modern thought and all its artistic expression date from 1789. For,

against the authority of hereditary rules and rulers, the mob of

the Bastille proclaimed another authority, namely that of facts. The

notion that forms should square with facts and not facts with forms

then became the basis of men’s thinking. This truth had existed as a

theory in the minds of individual thinkers for many decades--even for

many centuries. But the Parisian mob first revealed the truth of it

by enacting it as a fact. From that fact the truth spread among men’s

minds, forcing them, according to their lights, to bring all forms

and authorities to the test of facts. Babies, who were to be the next

generation’s great men, were brought up in this kind of thought and

were subtly inoculated with it so that their later thinking was based

upon it, whether they would or no. And so men have come to ask of a

monarch, not whether he is a legitimate son of his house, but whether

he derives his authority from the will of the nation. They have come

to ask of a philosophy, not whether it is consistent, but whether it

is true. And they have come to ask of an art-form, not whether it is

perfect, but whether it is fitting to its subject-matter.

When we come to compare the music of the nineteenth century with that

of the century preceding we find a contrast as striking as that between

the state of Europe as Napoleon left it with that as he found it. The

Europe of the eighteenth century was for the most part a conglomeration

of petty states, without national feeling, without standing armies in

the modern sense--states which their princes ruled as private property

for the supplying of their personal wants, with power of life and death

over their subjects; states whose soldiers ran away after the second

volley and whose warfare was little more than a formal and rather

stupid chess game; states whose statesmanship was the merest personal

intrigue of favorites. Among these states a few half-trained mobs of

revolutionary armies spread terror, and the young Napoleon amazed them

by demonstrating that soldiers who had their hearts in a great cause

could outfight those who had not.

So, in contrast to the crystal clear symphonies of the eighteenth

century and the vocal roulades and delicate clavichord suites, we

find in the nineteenth huge orchestral works, grandiose operas, the

shattering of established forms, an astonishing increase in the size

of the orchestra and the complexity of its parts, the association of

music with high poetic ideas, and the utter rejection of most of the

prevailing harmonic rules. And with this extension of scope there came

a profound deepening in content, as much more profound and human as

the Parisian mob’s notion of society was more profound and human than

that of Louis XVI. The revolution and the Napoleonic age, which had

been periods of dazzling personal glory, in which individual ability

and will power became effective as never before, had stimulated the

egotistic impulses of the nineteenth century. People came to feel that

a thing could perhaps be good merely because they wanted it. Hence

the personal and emotional notes sound in the music of the nineteenth

century as they never sounded before. The sentimental musings of

Chopin, the intense emotional expression of Schumann’s songs, the wild

and willful iconoclasm of Berlioz’s symphonies were personal in the

highest degree. And, as the complement to this individual expression,

there dawned a certain folk or mob-expression, for the post-Napoleonic

age was also an age of national awakening. The feeling of men that

they are part of a group of human beings rather than of a remote

empire is the feeling which we have in primitive literature, in the

epics and fairy stories, the ballads and folk epics. This folk-feeling

came to brilliant expression in Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsodies, and

the deep heroic note sounds quite as grandly in his symphonic poems.

Music took on a power, by the aid of subtle suggestion, of evoking

physical images; and, in deeper sincerity, it achieved something like

accurate depiction of the emotions. A thousand shades of expression,

never dreamed of before, were brought into the art. Men’s ears became

more delicate, in that they distinguished nuance of tone and phrase,

and particularly the individual qualities of various instruments, as

never before; it was the great age of the pianoforte, in which the

instrument was dowered with a musical literature of its own, comparable

in range and beauty with that of the orchestra. The instruments of

the orchestra, too, were cultivated with attention to their peculiar

powers, and the potentialities of orchestral expression were multiplied

many times over.

It was the great age of subdivision into schools and of the development

of national expression. The differences between German, French, and

Italian music in the eighteenth century are little more than matters of

taste and emphasis--variations from one stock. But the national schools

which developed during the romantic period differ utterly in their

musical material and treatment.

It was the golden age of virtuosity. The technical facility of such

men as Kalkbrenner and Czerny came to dazzling fruition in Liszt and

Paganini, whose concert tours were triumphal journeys and whose names

were on people’s lips like those of great national conquerors. This

virtuosity took hold of people’s imaginations; Liszt and Paganini

became, even during their lifetimes, glittering miracular legends.

Their exploits were, during the third and fourth decades of the

century, the substitute for those of Napoleon in the first fifteen

years. Their exploits expanded with the growing interrelation of modern

life. The great growth of newspaper circulation in the Napoleonic age,

and the spread of railroads through the continent in the thirties,

increased many times the glory and extent of the virtuoso’s great deeds.

But the travelling virtuoso was a symbol of a far more important

fact. For in this age musicians began to break away entirely from the

personal patron; they appealed, for their justification and support,

from the prince to the people. The name of a great musician was, thanks

to the means of communication, spread broadcast among men, and there

was something like an adequate living to be made by a composer-pianist

from his concerts and the sale of his compositions. From the time of

the revolution on it was the French state, with its Conservatory and

its theatres, not the French court, which was the chief patron of the

arts. And from Napoleonic times on it was the people at large, or at

least the more cultured part of them, whose approval the artist sought.

In all essentials, from the fall of Napoleon onward, it was a modern

world in which the musician found himself.

But it is evident that we cannot get along far in this examination

of romantic music without reviewing the outward social history

of the time. It is a time of colors we can never discover from a

mere observation of outward facts and dates, for it is a time of

complexities of superficial intrigue likely to obscure its meaning. We

must, therefore, see the period, not as most historians give it to us,

but as a movement of great masses of people and of the growing ideas

which directed their actions. Royal courts and popular assemblies were

not the real facts, but only the clearing houses for the real facts.

The balances, on one or the other side of the ledger, which they showed

bear only the roughest kind of relation to the truth.

It is well to skeleton this period with five dates. The first is the

one already met, 1789. The next is the assumption of the consulate by

Napoleon in 1799, which was practically the beginning of the empire.

The next is the fall of Napoleon, which we may place in 1814, after

the battle of Leipzig, or in 1815, after Waterloo, as we prefer. The

next is 1830, when, after conservative reaction throughout Europe, the

mobs in most of the great capitals raised insurrections, and in some

cases overthrew governments and obtained some measure of constitutional

law. And the last is 1848, when these popular outbreaks recurred in

still more serious form, and with a proletarian consciousness that made

this revolution the precursor of the twentieth century as certainly as

1789 was the precursor of the nineteenth.

We cannot here give the details of the mighty and prolonged

struggle--we shall only recall to the reader the astounding sequence

of cataclysms and exploits that shook Europe; roused its consciousness

strata by strata; remodelled its face, its thought, its ideals, its

laws, and its arts. Paris was the nervous centre of this upheaval, the

stage upon which the most conspicuous acts were paraded; but every blow

struck in that arena reëchoed, multiplied, throughout Europe, just as

every wave of the turmoil originating in any part of Europe recorded

itself upon the seismograph of Paris. From the tyranny and unthinking

submission of before 1789 we pass to a period of constitutional

tolerance of the monarchical form; thence to the aggressive propaganda

for republican principles and the terror; thence to the personal

exploits of a popular hero, arousing wonder and admiration while

imposing a new sort of tyranny. Stimulated imaginations now give

birth to new enthusiasms, stir up the feelings of national unity and

pride; to consciousness of nationality succeeds consciousness of

class--reactions and restorations bring new revolutions, successful

mobs impose terms on submissive monarchs, at Paris in 1833 as at

Berlin in 1848; then finally follows the communist manifesto. France,

Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, even England, were convulsed with

this glorious upheaval; and not kings and soldiers alone, but men

of peaceful moods--workingmen, men of professions, poets, artists,

musicians--were borne into this whirlpool of politics. Musicians of

the eighteenth century had no thoughts but of their art; those of

the nineteenth were national enthusiasts, celebrants of contemporary

heroes, political philosophers, propagandists, and agitators. What

wonder? Since the days of Julius Cæsar had there been any concrete

events to take hold of men’s imaginations as these did? They set all

men ‘thinking big.’ If the difference between a Haydn symphony of

1790 and Beethoven’s Ninth of 1826 is the difference between a toy

shop and the open world, is not the cause to be found mainly in these

battles of the nations? Not only Beethoven--Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and

Wagner, the political exile, were affected by the successive events

of 1789 to 1848. As proof of how closely musical history coincides

with the revolution wrought by these momentous years, let us recall

that Beethoven, the real source of romantic music, lived at the time

of Napoleon and by the _Eroica_ symphony actually touches Napoleon;

and that by the year 1848, which is the last of those dates which we

have chosen as the historic outline of the romantic movement in music,

Schubert and Weber were long dead, Mendelssohn was dead, Chopin was

almost on his deathbed, Schumann was drifting toward the end, Berlioz

was weary of life, and Liszt was working quietly at Weimar, which had

been for years one of the most liberal spots in Germany. And, as if

Wagner’s dreams of a mighty national music attended the realization of

the dream of all Germany, the foundation stone of the national theatre

at Bayreuth was laid hardly a year after the unity of the German empire

was declared at Versailles in 1871.

How shall we characterize the music of this period? In musical terms

it is almost impossible to characterize it as a whole, for the steady

stream of tradition had broken up violently into a multitude of

forms and styles, and these must be characterized one by one as they

come under our consideration. As a whole, it must be characterized

in broader terms. For the assertion of the Parisian mob was at the

bottom of it all. Previously men’s imaginations had been bounded by

the traditional types; they took it for granted that they must contain

themselves within the limitations to which they had been born. But

since a dirty rabble had overturned the power of the Bourbons, and an

obscure Corsican had married into the house of Hapsburg, men realized

that nothing is impossible; limitations are made only to be broken

down. The intellectual giant of the age had brought this realization to

supreme literary expression in ‘Faust,’ the epic of the man who would

include within himself all truth and all experience. And, whereas the

ideal of the previous age had been to work within limits and so become

perfect, the ideal of this latter age was to work without limits and so

become great. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century this

sense of freedom to achieve the impossible was the presiding genius of

music.

And with it, as a corollary to it, came one thing more, a thing

which is the second great message of Goethe’s ‘Faust’--the idea that

truth must be personally experienced, that while it is abstract it

is non-existent. Faust could not know love except by being young and

falling in love. He could not achieve his redemption by understanding

the beauty of service; he must redeem himself by actually serving his

fellowmen. And so in the nineteenth century men came to feel that

beautiful music cannot be merely contemplated and admired, but must be

lived with and felt. Accordingly composers of this period emphasized

continually the sensuous in their music, developing orchestral colors,

dazzling masses of tone, intense harmonies and biting dissonances,

delicate half-lights of modulation, and the deep magic of human song.

The change in attitude from music as a thing to be admired to music

as a thing to be felt is perhaps the chief musical fact of the early

nineteenth century.

II

Let us now consider the great romantic composers as men living amid the

stress and turmoil of revolution. All but Schubert were more or less

closely in touch with it. All but him and Mendelssohn were distinctly

revolutionists, skilled as composers and hardly less skilled to defend

in impassioned prose the music they had written. As champions of the

‘new’ in music they are best studied against the background of young

Europe in arms and exultant.

But in the case of Franz Schubert we can almost dispense with the

background. His determining influences, so far as they affected his

peculiar contributions to music, were almost wholly literary. He was an

ideal example of what we call the ‘pure musician.’ There is nothing to

indicate that he was interested in anything but his art. He lived in or

near Vienna during all the Napoleonic invasions, but was concerned only

with escaping military service. Schubert was the last of the musical

specialists. From the time when his schoolmaster father first directed

his musical inclinations he had only one interest in the world, outside

of the ordinary amusements of his Bohemian life. If Bach was dominated

by his Protestant piety and Handel by the lure of outward success,

Schubert worked for no other reason than his love of the beautiful

sounds which he created (and of which he heard few enough in his short

lifetime).

Yet even here we are forced back for a moment to the political

background. For it is to be noticed that the great German composers

of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century found their

activities centred in and near Vienna: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and

Schubert are all preëminently Austrian. In the second quarter of the

nineteenth century--that is, after the death of Schubert--there is

not a single great composer living in Vienna for more than a short

period of time. The political situation of Vienna, the stronghold of

darkness at this time, must have had a blighting effect on vigorous and

open-minded men. At a time when the most stimulating intellectual life

was surging through Germany generally, Vienna was suffering the most

rigid censorship and not a ray of light from the intellectual world

was permitted to enter the city. Weber felt this in 1814 in Austrian

Prague. He wrote: ‘The few composers and scholars who live here groan

for the most part under a yoke which has reduced them to slavery and

taken away the spirit which distinguishes the true free-born artist.’

Weber, a true free-born artist, left Prague at the earliest opportunity

and went to Dresden, where the national movement, though frowned

upon, was open and aggressive. Schubert, on the contrary, because of

poverty and indolence, never left Vienna and the territory immediately

surrounding. In the preceding generation, when music was still flowing

in the calm traditions, composers could work best in such a shut-in

environment. (It is possibly well to remember, however, that Austria

had a fit of liberalism in the two decades preceding Napoleon’s

régime.) But with the nineteenth century things changed; when the

beacon of national life was lighting the best spirits of the time, the

composers left Vienna and scattered over Germany or settled in Paris

and London. Schubert alone remained, his imagination indifferent to the

world beyond. In all things but one he was a remnant of the eighteenth

century, living on within the walls of the eighteenth century Vienna.

But this one thing, which made him a romanticist, a link between the

past and the present, a promise for the future, was connected, like all

the other important things of the time, with the revolution and the

Napoleonic convulsions. It was, in short, the German national movement

expressed in the only form in which it could penetrate to Vienna;

namely, the romantic movement in literature. Not in the least that

Schubert recognized it as such; his simple soul doubtless saw nothing

in it but an opportunity for beautiful melodies. But its inspiration

was the German nationalist movement.

The fuel was furnished in the eighteenth century in the renaissance of

German folk-lore and folk poetry. The researches of Scott among the

Scotch Highlands, Bishop Percy’s ‘Reliques’ of English and Scottish

folk poetry, the vogue which Goethe’s _Werther_ gave to Ossian and

his supposed Welsh poetry, and, most of all, the ballads of Bürger,

including the immortal ‘Lenore,’ contributed, toward the end of the

century, to an intense interest in old Germanic popular literature.

Uhland, one of the most typical of the romantic poets, fed, in his

youthful years, on ‘old books and chronicles with wonderful pictures,

descriptions of travel in lands where the inhabitants had but one

eye, placed in the centre of the forehead, and where there were men

with horses’ feet and cranes’ necks, also a great work with gruesome

engravings of the Spanish wars in the Netherlands.’[74] When he looked

out on the streets he saw Austrian or French soldiers moving through

the town and realized that there was an outside world of romantic

passions and great issues--a thing Schubert never realized. Even

then he was filled with patriotic fervor and his beloved Germanic

folk-literature became an expression of it. In 1806-08 appeared Arnim

and Brentano’s _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_, a collection of German folk

poetry of all sorts--mostly taken down by word of mouth from the

people--which did for Germany what Percy’s ‘Reliques’ had done for

England. Under this stimulus the German romantic movement became, in

Heine’s words, ‘a reawakening of the poetry of the Middle Ages, as it

had manifested itself in its songs, paintings, and architecture,’[75]

placed at the service of the national awakening.

But patriotic fervor was the ‘underground meaning’ of the romantic

movement. This hardly penetrated to Schubert. He saw in it only his

beautiful songs and the inspiration of immortal longings awakened

by ‘old books and chronicles with wonderful pictures.’ He had at

his disposal a wonderful lyrical literature. First of all Goethe,

originator of so much that is rich in modern German life; Rückert and

Chamisso, and Müller, singers of the personal sentiments; Körner, the

soldier poet, and Uhland, spokesman for the people and apologist for

the radical wing of the liberal political movement; Wieland and Herder;

and, in the last months of his life, Heine, ultra-lyricist, satirist,

and cosmopolite.

From this field Schubert’s instinct selected the purely lyrical,

without regard to its tendency, with little critical discrimination

of any sort. Thanks to his fertility, he included in his list of

songs all the best lyric poets of his time. And to these poets he

owed what was new and historically significant in the spirit of his

musical output. This new element, reduced to its simplest terms, was

the emotional lyrical quality at its purest. His musical training was

almost exclusively classical, so far as it was anything at all. He knew

and adored first Mozart and later Beethoven. But these composers would

not have given him his wonderful gift of expressive song. And since it

is never sufficient to lay any specific quality purely to inborn genius

(innate genius is, on the whole, undifferentiated and not specific),

we must lay it, in Schubert’s case, to the romantic poets. From the

earliest years of his creative (as opposed to his merely imitative)

life, he set their songs to music; he found nothing else so congenial;

inevitably the spontaneous song called forth by these lyrics dominated

his musical thinking. The romantic poets had taught him to create from

the heart rather than from the intelligence.

Franz Schubert was born at Lichtenthal, a suburb of Vienna, in

1797, one of a family of nineteen children, of whom ten survived

childhood. Instructed in violin playing by his father--nearly all

German school-masters played the violin--he evinced an astounding

musical talent at a very early age, was taken as boy soprano into the

Vienna court chapel, and instructed in the musical choir school--the

_Convict_--receiving lessons from Rucziszka and Salieri. At sixteen,

when his voice changed, he left the _Convict_ and during three years

assisted his father as elementary school teacher in Lichtenthal. But

in the meantime he composed no less than eight operas, four masses,

and other church works and a number of songs. Not till 1817 was he

enabled, through the generosity of his friend Schober, to devote

himself entirely to music; never in his short life was he in a position

to support himself adequately by means of his art: as musical tutor

in the house of Esterhàzy in Hungary (1818-1824) he was provided for

only during the summer months; Salieri’s post as vice-kapellmeister

in Vienna as well as the conductorship of the Kärntnerthor Theatre he

failed to secure. Hence, he was dependent upon the meagre return from

his compositions and the assistance of a few generous friends--singers,

like Schönstein and Vogl, who made his songs popular. Narrow as his

sphere of action was the circle of those who appreciated him. Public

recognition he secured only in his last year, with a single concert

of his own compositions. He died in 1828, at the age of thirty-one.

During that short span his productivity was almost incredible; operas,

mostly forgotten (their texts alone would make them impossible) and

some lost choral works of extraordinary merit; symphonies, some of

which rank among the masterpieces of all times; fourteen string

quartets and many other chamber works; piano sonatas of deep poetic

content, and shorter piano pieces (_Moments musicals_, impromptus,

etc.) poured from his magic pen, but especially songs, to the number of

650, a great many of which are immortal. Schubert was able to publish

only a portion of this prodigious product during his lifetime. Much

of it has since his death been resurrected from an obscure bundle of

assorted music found among his effects, and at his death valued at 10

florins ($2.12)! A perfect stream of posthumous symphonies, operas,

quartets, songs, every sort of music appeared year after year till the

world began to doubt their authenticity. Schumann, upon his visit to

Vienna in 1838, still discovered priceless treasures, including the

great C major symphony.

As a man Schubert never got far away from the peasant stock from which

he came. He was casual and careless in his life; a Bohemian rather

from shiftlessness than from high spirits; content to work hard and

faithfully, and demanding nothing more than a seidel of beer and a

bosom companion for his diversion. He was never intellectual, and what

we might call his culture came only from desultory reading. He was as

sensitive as a child and as trusting and warm-hearted. His musical

education had never been consistently pursued; his fertility was so

great that he preferred dashing off a new piece to correcting an old

one. Hence his work tends to be prolix, and, in the more academic

sense, thin. Toward the end of his life, however, he felt his technical

shortcomings, and at the time of his death had made arrangements for

lessons in counterpoint from Sechter. It is fair to say that we

possess only Schubert’s early works. Though they are some 1,800 in

number, they are only a fragment of what he would have produced had he

reached three-score and ten. By the age at which he died Wagner had not

written ‘Tannhäuser’ nor Beethoven his Third Symphony.

In point of natural genius no composer, excepting possibly Mozart,

excelled him. His rich and pure vein of melody is unmatched in all the

history of music. We have already pointed out the strong influence of

the great Viennese classics upon Schubert. In forming an estimate of

his style we must recur to a comparison with them. We think immediately

of Mozart when we consider the utter spontaneity, the inevitableness of

Schubert’s melodies, his inexhaustible well of inspiration, the pure

loveliness, the limpid clarity of his phrases. Yet in actual subject

matter he is more closely connected to Beethoven--it is no detraction

to say that in his earlier period he freely borrowed from him, for, in

Mr. Hadow’s words, Schubert always ‘wears his rue with a difference.’

Again, in his procedure, in his harmonic progression and the rhythmic

structure of his phrases, he harks back to Haydn; the abruptness of

his modulations, the clear-cut directness of his articulation, the

folk-flavor of some of his themes are closely akin to that master’s

work. But out of all this material he developed an idiom as individual

as any of his predecessors’.

The essential quality which distinguishes that idiom is lyricism.

Schubert is the lyricist _par excellence_. More than any of the

Viennese masters was he imbued with the poetic quality of ideas. His

musical phrases are poetic where Mozart’s are purely musical. They have

the force of words, they seem even translations of words, they are the

equivalents of one certain poetic sentiment and no other; they fit

one particular mood only. In the famous words of Lizst, Schubert was

_le musicien le plus poète qui fût jamais_ (the most poetic musician

that ever lived). We may go further. Granting that Mozart, too, was a

poetic musician, Schubert was a musical poet. What literary poet does

he resemble? Hadow compares him to Keats; a German would select Heine.

For Heine had all of that simplicity, that unalterable directness

which we can never persuade ourselves was the result of intellectual

calculation or of technical skill; he is so artless an artist that we

feel his phrases came to him ready-made, a perfect gift from heaven,

which suffered no criticism, no alteration or improvement.

Schubert died but one year after Beethoven, a circumstance which alone

gives us reason to dispute his place among the romantic composers. He

himself would hardly have placed himself among them, for he did not

relish even the romantic vagaries of Beethoven at the expense of pure

beauty, though he worshipped that master in love and awe. ‘It must be

delightful and refreshing for the artist,’ he wrote of his teacher

Salieri upon the latter’s jubilee, ‘to hear in the compositions of his

pupils simple nature with its expression, free from all oddity, such as

is now dominant with most musicians and for which we have to thank one

of our greatest German artists almost exclusively....’ Yet, as Langhans

says, ‘not to deny his inclination to elegance and pure beauty, he was

able to approach the master who was unattainable in these departments

(orchestral and chamber music) more closely than any one of his

contemporaries and successors.’[76] Yes, and in some respects he was

able to go beyond. ‘With less general power of design than his great

predecessors he surpasses them all in the variety of his color. His

harmony is extraordinarily rich and original, his modulations are

audacious, his contrasts often striking and effective and he has a

peculiar power of driving his point home by sudden alterations in

volume of sound.’[77] In the matter of form he could allow himself

more freedom--he could freight his sonatas with a poetic message that

stretched it beyond conventional bounds, for his audience was better

prepared to comprehend it. And while his polyphony is never like that

of Beethoven, or even Mozart, his sensuous harmonic style, crystal

clear and gorgeously varied, with its novel and enchanting use of the

enharmonic change and its subtle interchange of the major and minor

modes, supplies a richness and variety of another sort and in itself

constitutes an advance, the starting point of harmonic development

among succeeding composers. By these tokens and ‘by a peculiar quality

of imagination in his warmth, his vividness and impatience of formal

restraint, he points forward to the generation that should rebel

against all formality.’ But, above all, by his lyric quality. He is

lyric where Beethoven is epic; and lyricism is the very essence of

romanticism. Whatever his stature as a symphonist, as a composer in

general, his position as song writer is unique and of more importance

than any other. Here he creates a new form, not by a change of

principle, by a theoretically definable process, but ‘a free artistic

creative activity, such as only a true genius, a rich personality not

forced by a scholastic education into definitely limited tracks, could

accomplish.’

The particular merit of this accomplishment of Schubert will have more

detailed discussion in the following chapter. But, aside from that, he

touched no form that he did not enrich. By his sense of beauty, unaided

by scholarship or the inspiration of great deeds in the outer world,

he made himself one of the great pioneers of modern music. Together

with Weber, he set the spirit for modern piano music and invented some

of its most typical forms. His _Moments Musicals_, impromptus, and

pieces in dance forms gave the impulse to an entire literature--the

_Phantasiestücke_ of Schumann, the songs without words of Mendelssohn

are typical examples. His quartets and his two great symphonies (the

C major and the unfinished B minor) have a beauty hardly surpassed in

instrumental music, and are inferior to the greatest works of their

kind only in grasp of form. His influence on posterity is immeasurable.

Not only in the crisp rhythms and harmonic sonorities of Schumann, in

the sensuous melodies and gracious turns of Mendelssohn, but in their

progeny, from Brahms to Grieg, there flows the musical essence of

Schubert. Who can listen to the slow movement of the mighty Brahms C

minor symphony without realizing the depth of that well of inspiration,

the universality of the idiom created by the last of the Vienna masters?

Schubert’s music was indeed the swan-song of the Viennese period of the

history of music, and it is remarkable that a voice from that city,

more than any other in Europe bound to the old régime, should have sung

of the future of music. But so Schubert sang from a city of the past.

Meanwhile new voices were raised from other lands, strong with the

promise of the time.

III

The great significance of Weber in musical history is that he may

fairly be called the first German national composer. Preceding

composers of the race had been German in the sense that they were of

German blood and their works were paid for by Germans, and also in

that their music usually had certain characteristics of the German

nature. But they were not consciously national in the aggressive

sense. Weber’s works are the first musical expression of a German

patriotism, cultivating what is most deeply and typically German,

singing German unity of feeling and presenting something like a solid

front against foreign feelings and art. But we are too apt to wave away

such a statement as a mere phrase. At a distance we are too liable to

suppose that a great art can come into being in response to a mere

sentimental idea. But German patriotism was a passion which was fought

for by the best brains and spirits of the time. It was in the heat of

conflict that Weber’s music acquired its deep meaning and its spiritual

intensity.

To understand the state of affairs we must again go back to the

French Revolution. Germany was at the end of the eighteenth century

more rigidly mediæval than any other European country, save possibly

Russia and parts of Italy. The German patriot Stein thus described

the condition of Mecklenburg in a letter written in 1802: ‘I found

the aspect of the country as cheerless as its misty northern sky;

great estates, much of them in pastures or fallow; an extremely thin

population; the entire laboring class under the yoke of serfage;

stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farm houses; in

short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the whole country;

an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my spirits. The

home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his peasants

instead of improving their condition, gives me the idea of the den of

some wild beast, who devastates everything about him and surrounds

himself with the silence of the grave.’ If Stein was perhaps inclined

to be pessimistic in his effort to arouse German spirits, it is because

he has in his mind’s eye the possibility of better things, and the

actual superiority of conditions in France and England. Most observers

of the time viewed conditions with indifference. Goethe showed little

or no patriotism; ‘Germany is not a nation,’ he said curtly.

After the peace of Lunéville and the Diet of Ratisbon the greater part

of Germany fell under Napoleon’s influence. The German people showed

no concern at thus passing under the control of the French. The German

states were nothing but the petty German courts. Fyffe[78] humorously

describes the process of political reorganization which the territory

underwent in 1801: ‘Scarcely was the Treaty of Lunéville signed when

the whole company of intriguers who had touted at Rastadt posted off

to the French capital with their maps and their money-bags, the keener

for the work when it became known that by common consent the free

cities of the empire were now to be thrown into the spoil. Talleyrand

and his confidant, Mathieu, had no occasion to ask for bribes, or to

maneuver for the position of arbiters in Germany. They were overwhelmed

with importunities. Solemn diplomatists of the old school toiled up

four flights of stairs to the lodging of the needy secretary, or

danced attendance at the parties of the witty minister. They hugged

Talleyrand’s poodle; they played blind-man’s buff and belabored each

other with handkerchiefs to please his little niece. The shrewder of

them fortified their attentions with solid bargains, and made it their

principal care not to be outbidden at the auction. Thus the game was

kept up as long as there was a bishopric or a city in the market.’

Such were the issues which controlled the national destiny of Germany

in 1801. Napoleon unintentionally gave the impetus to the German

resurgence by forcing some vestige of rational organization upon

the land. The internal condition of the priest-ruled districts was

generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance kept

life down to an inert monotony. The free cities, as a rule, were sunk

in debt; the management of their affairs had become the perquisite

of a few lawyers and privileged families. The new régime centralized

administration, strengthened the financial system, and relieved the

peasants of the most intolerable of their burdens, and thus gave them a

stake in the national welfare.

Five years later Napoleon helped matters further by a rule of insolence

and national oppression that was intolerable to any educated persons

except the ever servile Prussian court. The battle of Jena and the

capture of Berlin had thrown all Prussia into French hands, and the

court into French alliances. Stein protested and attempted to arouse

the people. He met with indifference. Then came more indignities.

Forty thousand French soldiers permanently quartered on Prussian soil

taught the common people the bitterness of foreign domination. When

the Spanish resistance of 1808 showed the weakness of Napoleon a band

of statesmen and patriots, including the poet Arndt, the philosopher

Fichte and the theologian Schleiermacher, renewed their campaign for

national feeling, the only thing that could put into German armies

the spirit needful for Napoleon’s overthrow. In all this the House of

Hohenzollern and the ministers of the court of Potsdam played a most

inglorious rôle. The patriots were frowned upon or openly prosecuted.

Schill, a patriotic army officer, who attempted to attack the French

on his own account, was denounced from Berlin. Even when Napoleon was

returning defeated from Moscow, the jealousies of the court stood

out to the last against the spontaneous national uprising. Finally

Frederick William, the Prussian king, made a virtue of necessity and

entered the field in the name of German unity.

But the nationalist movement had become a constitutionalist, even a

republican, movement. The German soldiers, returning home victorious

after the battle of Leipzig, received the expected promise of a

constitution from Frederick William. After two years of delay the

promise had been practically withdrawn. Only the examples of Weimar,

Bavaria, and Baden, together with the propaganda of the liberals, kept

the issue alive and growing, until it came to partial culmination in

1848.

It was into this Napoleonic situation that Weber was thrown in his

most impressionable years. On a little vacation trip from Prague

he went to Berlin and saw the return of Frederick William and the

victorious Prussians from Paris after the battle of Leipzig. The

national frenzy took hold of him and, at his next moment of leisure, he

composed settings to some of Körner’s war songs, including the famous

_Du Schwert an meiner Linken_, which made him better known and loved

throughout Germany than all his previous works. To this day these

songs are sung by the German singing societies, and nothing in all

the literature of music is more truly German. To celebrate Waterloo

he composed a cantata, _Kampf und Sieg_, which in the next two years

was performed in a number of the capitals and secured to Weber his

nationalist reputation. It was well that he was thus brilliantly and

openly known at the time; he needed this reputation five years later

when his work took on a changed significance.

Carl Maria Freiherr von Weber was born at Eutin, Oldenburg, in 1786, of

Austrian parentage, into what we should call the ‘decayed gentility.’

His father was from time to time ‘retired army officer,’ director of a

theatre band, and itinerant theatre manager. His mother, who died when

he was seven, was an opera singer. The boy, under his stepbrother’s

proddings, became something of a musician, and, when left to his own

resources, a prodigy. His travellings were incessant, his studies a

patchwork.[79] Nevertheless he had success on his infantile concert

tours, and showed marked talent in his early compositions. At the age

of thirteen he wrote an opera, _Das Waldmädchen_, which was performed

in many theatres of Germany, and even in Russia. From the age of

sixteen to eighteen he was kapellmeister at the theatre in Breslau.

After some two years of uncertainty and rather fast life he became

private secretary to the Duke Ludwig of Württemberg. His life became

faster. He became involved in debts. Worse, he became involved in

intrigue. The king was suspicious. Weber was arrested and thrown into

prison. He was cleared of the charges against him, but was banished

from the kingdom. Realizing that the way of the transgressor is hard,

Weber now devoted himself to serious living and the making of music.

Then followed three undirected years, filled with literature and

reading, as well as music. In 1812, during a stay in Berlin, he amused

himself by teaching a war-song of his to the Brandenburg Brigade

stationed in the barracks. No doubt his life in the court of Stuttgart

had shown him the insincerity of aristocratic pretensions and had

turned his thoughts already to the finer things about him--that popular

liberal feeling which just now took the form of military enthusiasm. In

the following year he accepted the post of kapellmeister of the German

theatre at Prague, with the difficult problem of reorganizing the

opera, but with full authority to do it at his best. From this time on

his life became steady and illumined with serious purpose. He brought

to the theatre a rigor of discipline which it had not known before, and

produced a brilliant series of German operas.

Early in 1817 he accepted a position as kapellmeister of the German

(as opposed to the Italian) opera of Dresden. It was a challenge to

his best powers, for the German opera of Dresden was practically

non-existent. For a century Italian opera had held undisputed sway,

with French a respected second. The light German _singspiele_, the

chief representative of German opera, were performed by second-rate

artists. All the prestige and influence of the city was for the Italian

and French. For the court of Dresden, like that of Berlin half a

century before, was thoroughly Frenchified. The king of Saxony owed his

kingdom to Napoleon and aristocratic Germans still regarded what was

German as mean and common.

But there was a more significant reason for Weber’s peculiar position,

a reason that gave the color to his future importance. What was

patriotic was, as we have seen, in the eyes of the court liberal and

dangerous. To foster German opera was accordingly to run the risk of

fostering anti-monarchical sentiments. If, just at this time, the

court of Dresden chose to inaugurate a separate German opera, it was

as a less harmful concession to the demands of the populace, and more

particularly as a sort of anti-Austrian move which crystallized just at

this time in opposition to Metternich’s reactionism. But, though the

court wished a German opera, it felt no particular sympathy for it. In

the preliminary negotiations it tried to insist, until met with Weber’s

firm attitude, that its German kapellmeister should occupy a lower rank

than Morlacchi, the Italian director. And, as Weber’s fame as a German

nationalist composer grew, the court of Dresden was one of the last

to recognize it. In the face of such lukewarmness Weber established

the prestige of the German opera, and wrote _Der Freischütz_, around

which all German nationalist sentiment centred. But to understand why

_Freischütz_ occupied this peculiar position we must once more turn

back to history.

‘On the 18th of October, 1817,’ says the ever-entertaining Fyffe,

‘the students of Jena, with deputations from all the Protestant

universities of Germany, held a festival at Eisenach, to celebrate

the double anniversary of the Reformation and of the battle of

Leipzig. Five hundred young patriots, among them scholars who had been

decorated for bravery at Waterloo, bound their brows with oak-leaves

and assembled within the venerable hall of Luther’s Wartburg castle,

sang, prayed, preached, and were preached to, dined, drank to German

liberty, the jewel of life, to Dr. Martin Luther, the man of God,

and to the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar; then descended to Eisenach,

fraternized with the _Landsturm_ in the market-place, and attended

divine service in the parish church without mishap. In the evening

they edified the townspeople with gymnastics, which were now the

recognized symbol of German vigor, and lighted a great bonfire on the

hill opposite the castle. Throughout the official part of the ceremony

a reverential spirit prevailed; a few rash words were, however, uttered

against promise-breaking kings, and some of the hardier spirits took

advantage of the bonfire to consign to the flames, in imitation of

Luther’s dealing with the Pope’s Bull, a quantity of what they deemed

un-German and illiberal writings. Among these was Schmalz’s pamphlet

(which attacked the _Tugendbund_ and other liberal German political

institutions of the Napoleonic period). They also burnt a soldier’s

straitjacket, a pigtail, and a corporal’s cane--emblems of the military

brutalism of past times which was now being revived in Westphalia.’

The affair stirred up great alarm among the courts of Europe, an alarm

out of all proportion to its true significance. The result--more

espionage and suppression of free speech. ‘With a million of men

under arms,’ adds Fyffe, ‘the sovereigns who had overthrown Napoleon

trembled because thirty or forty journalists and professors pitched

their rhetoric rather too high, and because wise heads did not grow

upon schoolboys’ shoulders.’ The liberal passion, in short, was there,

burning for a medium of expression. It was not allowed to appear on

the surface. The result was that it must look for expression in some

indirect way--in parables; in short, in works of art. In such times art

takes on a most astonishing parallel of double meanings. The phenomenon

happened in striking form some forty years later in Russia, when the

growing and rigidly suppressed demand for the liberation of the serfs

found expression in Turgenieff’s ‘Memoirs of a Sportsman,’ which is

called ‘the Russian “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”’ The book was a mere series of

literary sketches, telling various incidents among the country people

during a season’s hunting. It showed not a note of passion, contained

not a shadow of a political reference. There was no ground on which the

censor could prohibit it, nor did the censor probably realize its other

meaning. But it proved the storm centre of the liberal agitation. And

so it has been with Russian literature for the last half century; those

whose hearts understood could read deep between the lines.

And this was the position of _Der Freischütz_. The most reactionary

government could hardly prohibit the performance of a fanciful tale of

a shooting contest in which the devil was called upon to assist with

magic. But it represented what was German in opposition to what was

French or Italian. Its story came from the old and deep-rooted German

legends; its characters were German in all their ways; the institutions

it showed were old Germanic; its characters were the peasants and the

people of the lower class, who were, in the propaganda of the time,

the heart of the German nation. And, lastly, its melodies were of the

very essence of German folk-song, the institution, above all else save

only the German language, which made German hearts beat in tune. The

opera was first performed in Berlin, at the opening of the new court

theatre, on the sixth anniversary of the battle of Waterloo--that is in

1821. The success was enormous and within a year nearly every stage in

Germany had mounted the work. It was even heard in New York within a

few months. At every performance the enthusiasm was beyond all bounds,

and, after nine months of this sort of thing, Weber wrote in his diary

in Vienna: ‘Greater enthusiasm there cannot be; and I tremble to think

of the future, for it is scarcely possible to rise higher than this.’

As for the court of Dresden, it realized slowly and grudgingly that it

had in its pay one of the great composers of the world.

After _Freischütz_ it was indeed ‘scarcely possible to rise higher,’

but Weber attempted a more ambitious task in a purely musical way

in his next opera, _Euryanthe_, which was a glorification of the

romanticism of the age--that of Jean Paul and E. T. A. Hoffmann, who

represented to the Germans of the time vigor of the imagination and

the freedom of the individual. Both _Euryanthe_ and _Oberon_, which

followed it, are very fine, but they could not repeat the success

of _Der Freischütz_, chiefly because Weber could not find another

_Freischütz_ libretto. The composer died in England on June 4, 1826,

after conducting the first performances of _Oberon_ at Covent Garden.

Personally we see Weber as a man of the world, yet always with a bit of

aristocratic reserve. He had been one of a wandering theatrical troupe,

had played behind the scenes of a theatre, had known financial ups and

downs, had lived on something like familiar terms with gentlemen and

ladies of the court, had been a _roué_ with the young bloods of degree,

had intrigued and been the victim of intrigue, had been a concert

pianist with the outward success and the social stigma of a virtuoso

musician, had been a successful executive in responsible positions,

had played the litterateur and written a fashionable novel, had been a

devoted husband and father, and had felt the meaning of a great social

movement. Certainly Weber was the first of that distinguished line of

musicians who cultivated literature with marked talent and effect; his

letters reveal the practised observer and the literary craftsman, and

his criticisms of music, of which he wrote many at a certain period,

have the insight of Schumann, with something more than his verve.

Finally, he was the first great composer who was also a distinguished

director; his work at Prague and Dresden was hardly less a creative

feat than _Der Freischütz_.

Musically Weber has many a distinction. He is the acknowledged founder

of German opera (though Mozart with _Zauberflöte_ may be regarded

as his forerunner), and the man who made German music aggressively

national. Wagner, as we know him, would hardly have been possible

without Weber. Weber is the father of the romanticists in his emphasis

upon the imagination, in his ability to give pictorial and definite

emotional values to his music. It is only a slight exaggeration of

the truth to call him the father of modern instrumentation; his use

of orchestral timbres for sensuous or dramatic effects, so common

nowadays, was unprecedented in his time. With Schubert he is the

father of modern pianoforte music; himself a virtuoso, he understood

the technical capacities of the piano, and developed them, both in the

classical forms and in the shorter forms which were carried to such

perfection by Schumann, with the romantic glow of a new message. He

is commonly regarded as deficient in the larger forms, but in those

departments (and they were many) where he was at his best there are

few musicians who have worked more finely than he.

[Illustration: Carl Maria von Weber]

IV

The scene now shifts to Paris, a city unbelievably frenzied and

complex, the Paris that gives the tone to a good half of the music of

the romantic period.

‘As I finished my cantata (_Sardanapalus_),’ writes Berlioz in his

‘Memoirs,’ ‘the Revolution broke out and the Institute was a curious

sight. Grapeshot rattled on the barred doors, cannon balls shook the

façade, women screamed, and, in the momentary pauses, the interrupted

swallows took up their sweet, shrill cry. I hurried over the last pages

of my cantata and on the 29th was free to maraud about the streets,

pistol in hand, with the “blessed riff-raff,” as Barbier said. I shall

never forget the look of Paris during those few days. The frantic

bravery of the gutter-snipe, the enthusiasm of the men, the calm, sad

resignation of the Swiss and Royal Guards, the odd pride of the mob in

being “masters of Paris and looting nothing.”’

This was Paris in Berlioz’s and Liszt’s early years there. In Paris

at or about this time were living Victor Hugo, Stendhal, de Vigny,

Balzac, Chateaubriand, de Musset, Lamartine, Dumas the elder, Heine,

Sainte-Beuve, and George Sand among the poets, dramatists, and

novelists; Guizot and Thiers among the historians; Auguste Compte,

Joseph le Maistre, Lamennais, Proudhon, and Saint-Simon among the

political philosophers. It is hard to recall any other city at any

other time in history (save only the Athens of the Peloponnesian War)

which had such a vigorous intellectual and artistic life. Thanks to the

centralization effected by Napoleon, thanks to the tradition of free

speech among the French, the centre of Europe had shifted from Vienna

to Paris.

A few months before the political revolution of July, 1830, occurred

the outbreak of one of the historic artistic revolutions of the

capital. Victor Hugo’s ‘Hernani,’ on which the young romantic school

centred its hopes, was first performed on February 25, before an

audience that took it as a matter of life and death. The performance

was permitted, so tradition says, in the expectation that the play

would discredit the romantic school once and for all. The principal

actress, Mlle. Mars, was outraged by Hugo’s imagery, and refused

point blank to call Firmin her ‘lion, superb and generous.’ A goodly

_claque_, drawn from the ateliers and salons, brought the play to

an overwhelming triumph, and for fifteen years the dominance of the

romantic school was indisputable.

This romantic school was somewhat parallel to that of Germany, and,

in a general way, took the same inspiration. The literary influences,

outside of the inevitable Rousseau and Chateaubriand of France

itself, were chiefly Grimm’s recensions of old tales, Schiller’s

plays, Schlegel’s philosophical and historical works; Goethe’s

_Faust_, as well as our old friend _Werther_; Herder’s ‘Thoughts on

the Philosophy of History’; Shakespeare and Dante as a matter of

course; Byron and Sir Walter Scott; and any number of collections of

mediæval tales and poems, foreign as well as French. This much the

French and German romanticists had in common. But the movement had

scarcely any political tinge, though political influences developed

out of it. By a curious inversion the literary radicals were the

legitimists and political conservatives, and the classicists the

political revolutionists--perhaps a remnant of the Revolution, when the

republicans were turning to the art and literature of Greece for ideals

of ‘purity.’

For the French intellectuals had perhaps had enough of political

life, whereas the Germans were starved for it. At any rate, the French

romanticists were almost wholly concerned with artistic canons. To

them romanticism meant freedom of the imagination, the demolishing of

classical forms and traditional rules, the mixing of the genres ‘as

they are mixed in life’; the rendering of the language more sensuous

and flexible, and, above all, the expression of the subjective and

individual point of view. They had a great cult for the historic, and

their plays are filled with local color (real or supposed) of the

time in which their action is laid. They supposed themselves to be

returning to real life, using everyday details and painting men as they

are. In particular they made their work more intimately emotional;

they substituted the image for the metaphor, and the pictorial word

for the abstract word. This last fact is of greatest importance in

its influence on romantic music. The painting of the time, though

by no means so radical in technique as that of music, showed the

influences of the great social overturning. Subjects were taken from

contemporary or recent times--the doings of the French in the Far

East, the campaigns of Napoleon, or from the natural scenery round

about Paris, renouncing the ‘adjusted landscape’ of the classicists

with a ruined temple in the foreground. Scenes from the Revolution

came into painting, and the drama of the private soldier or private

citizen gained human importance. Géricault emphasized sensuous color as

against the severe classicist David. The leader, and perhaps the most

typical member, of the romantic school was Delacroix, a defender of the

art of the Middle Ages as against the exaggerated cult of the Greeks.

He took his subjects ‘from Dante, Shakespeare, Byron (heroes of the

literary romanticism); from the history of the Crusades, of the French

Revolution, and of the Greek revolt against the Turks. He painted with

a feverish energy of life and expression, a deep and poetic sense of

color. His bold, ample technique thrust aside the smooth timidities of

the imitators and prepared the way for modern impressionism.’[80]

But there was still another result of the suppression of political

tendencies in French romantic literature. In looking to the outer world

for inspiration (as every artist must) the writers of the time, turning

from contemporary politics, inevitably saw before their eyes Napoleon

the Great, now no longer Corsican adventurer and personal despot, but

national hero and creator of magnificent epics. The young people of

this time did not remember the miseries of the Napoleonic wars; they

remembered only their largeness and glory. Fifteen years after the

abdication of Napoleon the inspiration of Napoleon came to literary

expression. It was a passion for bigness. Victor Hugo’s professed

purpose was to bring the whole of life within the compass of a work

of art. Every emotion was raised to its nth power. Hernani passes

from one cataclysmic experience to another; the whole of life seems

to depend on the blowing of a hunting horn. The painting of the time,

under Géricault, Delacroix, and Delaroche, was grandiose and pompous.

The stage of the theatre was filled with magnificent pictures. A nation

comes to insurrection in _William Tell_; Catholicism and Protestantism

grapple to the death in _Les Huguenots_. But not only extensively but

intensively this cult of bigness was developed. Victor Hugo sums up

the whole of life in a phrase. The musicians had caught the trick;

Meyerbeer was of Victor Hugo’s stature in some things. He gets the epic

clang in a single couplet, as in the ‘Blessing of the Poignards’ or in

the G flat section of the fourth act duet from _Les Huguenots_. And

this heroic quality came to its finest expression in Liszt, some of

whose themes, like that of Tasso

[Illustration: Music score]

or that of _Les Préludes_

[Illustration: Music score]

seem to say, _Arma virumque cano_.

V

If ever a man was made to respond to this Paris of 1830 it was Franz

Liszt. Heroic virtuosity was a solid half of its Credo. Victor Hugo,

as a virtuoso of language, must be placed beside the greatest writers

of all time--Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and whom else? No less can

be said for Liszt in regard to the piano. He was born in 1811 in

Raiding, Hungary. He is commonly supposed to be partly Hungarian in

blood, although German biographers deny this, asserting that the name

originally had the common German form of List. Almost before he could

walk he was at the piano. At the age of nine he appeared in public. And

at the age of twelve he was a pianist of international reputation. How

such virtuosity came to be, no one can explain. Most things in music

can be traced in some degree to their causes. But in such a case as

this the miracle can be explained neither by his instruction nor by

his parentage nor by any external conditions. It is one of the things

that must be set down as a pure gift of Heaven. Prominent noblemen

guaranteed his further education and, after a few months of study in

Vienna, under Czerny and Salieri, he and his father went to Paris,

which was to be the centre of his life for some twenty years. He was

the sensation of polite Paris within a few months after his arrival

and he presently had pupils of noble blood at outrageous prices. Two

years after his arrival--that is, when he was fourteen--a one-act

operetta of his, _Don Sanche_, was performed at the Académie Royale.

Two years later his father died and he was thrown on his own resources

as teacher and concert pianist. Then, in 1830, he fell sick following

an unhappy love affair, and his life was despaired of until, in the

words of his mother, ‘he was cured by the sound of the cannon.’

How did the Paris of 1830, and particularly the temper of Parisian

life, affect Liszt? ‘Monsieur Mignet,’ he said, ‘teach me all of French

literature.’ Here is a new thing in music--a musician who dares take

all knowledge to be his province. He writes, about this time: ‘For two

weeks my mind and my fingers have been working like two of the damned:

Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand,

Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are about me. I study them,

meditate them, devour them furiously.’ He conceived a huge admiration

for Hugo’s _Marion de Lorme_ and Schiller’s _Wilhelm Tell_. Be sure,

too, that he was busy reading the artistic theories of the romanticists

and translating them into musical terms. The revolution of 1830 had

immediate concrete results in his music; he sketched a Revolutionary

Symphony, part of which later became incorporated into his symphonic

poem, _Heroïde Funèbre_. He made a brilliant arrangement of the

_Marseillaise_ and wrote the first number of his ‘Years of Pilgrimage’

on the insurrection of the workmen at Lyon.

The early manifestations of modern socialistic theory were then in the

making--in the cult of Saint-Simon--and Liszt was drawn to them. For

many years it was supposed that he was actually a member of the order,

though he later denied this. The Saint-Simonians had a concrete scheme

of communistic society, and a sort of religious metaphysic. This

latter, if not the former, impressed Liszt deeply, especially because

of the place given to art as expressing the ideal toward which the

people--the whole people--would strive. But a still stronger influence

over Liszt was that of the revolutionary abbé, Lamennais. Lamennais

was a devout Catholic, but, like many of the priesthood during the

first revolution, he was also an ardent democrat. He took it as

self-evident that religion was for all men, that God is no respecter of

persons. He was pained by the rôle of the Catholic Church in the French

Revolution--its continual siding with the ministers of despotism, its

readiness to give its blessing and its huge moral influence to any

reactionary government which would offer it material enrichment. He

felt it was necessary--no less in the interest of the Church than in

that of the people--that the Catholic Church should be the defender of

democracy against reactionary princes. He was doing precisely what such

men as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are trying to do in England

to-day. His influence in Paris was great and he became the rallying

point for the liberal party in the Church. Perhaps if his counsel had

prevailed the Church would not have become in the people’s minds the

enemy of all their liberties and would have retained its temporal

possessions in the war for Italian unity forty years later. Liszt had

always been a Catholic, and in his earlier youth had been prevented

from taking holy orders only by his father’s express command. Now he

found Lamennais’ philosophy meat to his soul, and Lamennais saw in

him the great artist who was to exemplify to the world his philosophy

of art. In 1834 Liszt published in the _Gazette Musicale de Paris_ an

essay embodying his social philosophy of art.

Several points in this manifesto are of importance in indicating what

four years of revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt the artist. Though

primarily a virtuoso, Liszt had been raised above the mere vain

delight of exciting admiration in the crowd. He had made up his mind

to become a creative artist with all his powers. He had asserted the

artist’s right to do his own thinking, to be a man in any way he saw

fit. He had accepted as gospel the romanticist creed that rules must be

broken whenever artistic expression demands it and had imbibed to the

full the literary and romantic imagery of the school. He had linked up

his virtuoso’s sense of the crowd with the only thing that could redeem

it and make it an art--the human being’s sense of democracy. And he had

outlined with great accuracy (so far as his form of speech allowed) the

nature of the music which he was later to compose. We can nowhere find

a better description of the music of Liszt at its best than Liszt’s own

description of the future ‘humanitarian’ music--which partakes ‘in the

largest possible proportions of the characteristics of both the theatre

and the church--dramatic and holy, splendid and simple, solemn and

serious, fiery, stormy, and calm.’ In this democracy Liszt the virtuoso

and Liszt the Catholic find at last their synthesis.

How many purely musical influences operated upon Liszt in these years

it is hard to say. We know that he felt the message of Meyerbeer and

Rossini (such as it was) and raised it to its noblest form in his

symphonic poems--the message of magnificence and high romance. But

it is fair to say, also, that he appreciated at its true value every

sort of music that came within his range of vision--Schubert’s songs,

Chopin’s exquisite pianistic traceries, Beethoven’s symphonies, and

the fashionable Italian operas of the day. He arranged an astonishing

number and variety of works for the piano, catching with wizard-like

certainty the essential beauties of each. But probably the most

profound musical influence was that of Berlioz, who seemed the very

incarnation of the spirit of 1830. Berlioz’s partial freeing of the

symphonic form, his radical harmony, and, most of all, his use of the

_idée fixe_ or representative melody (which Liszt later developed in

his symphonic poems) powerfully impressed Liszt and came to full fruit

ten years later.

One more influence must be recorded for Liszt’s early Parisian years.

It was that of Paganini, who made his first appearance at the capital

in 1831. Here was the virtuoso pure and simple. He excited Liszt’s

highest admiration and stimulated him to do for the piano what Paganini

had done for the violin. In 1826 Liszt had published his first études,

showing all that was most characteristic in his piano technique at

that time. After Paganini had stormed Paris he arranged some of the

violinist’s études for the piano, and the advance in piano technique

shown between these and the earlier studies is marked.

But Liszt had by this time thought too much and too deeply ever to

believe that the technical was the whole or even the most important

part of an artist. He appreciates the value of Paganini and the place

of technical virtuosity in art, but he writes: ‘The form should not

sound, but the spirit speak! Then only does the virtuoso become the

high priest of art, in whose mouth dead letters assume life and

meaning, and whose lips reveal the secrets of art to the sons of

men....’ Finally, note that, amid all this dogma and cocksureness,

Liszt understood with true humility that he was not expressing ultimate

truth, that he spoke for art in a transition stage, and was the

artistic expression of a transitional culture. ‘You accuse me,’ he said

to the poet Heine, ‘of being immature and unstable in my ideas, and

as a proof you ennumerate the many causes which, according to you, I

have embraced with ardor. But this accusation which you bring against

me alone, shouldn’t it, in justice, be brought against the whole

generation? Are we not unstable in our peculiar situation between a

past which we reject and a future which we do not yet understand?’ Thus

revolutionary Paris had made of Liszt a conscious instrument in the

transition of music.

For some ten years Liszt remained the concert pianist. His concert

tours took him all over Europe, ‘like a wandering gypsy.’ He even

dreamed of coming to America. In 1840 he went to Hungary and visited

his birthplace. He rode in a coach, thus fulfilling, in the minds of

the villagers, the prophecy of an old gypsy in his youth, that he

should return ‘in a glass carriage.’ In his book, ‘The Gypsies and

Their Music,’ he gives a highly colored and delightful account of how

he was received by the gypsies, how he spent a night in their camp, how

he was accompanied on his way by them and serenaded until he was out

of sight. The trip made a lasting impression on his mind. He had heard

once more the gypsy tunes which had so thrilled him in his earliest

childhood, and the Hungarian Rhapsodies were the result.

In 1833, in Paris, he was introduced to the Countess d’Agoult, and

between the two there sprang up a violent attachment. They lived

together for some ten years, concerning which Liszt’s biographer,

Chantavoine, says bluntly, ‘the first was the happiest.’ They had three

children, one of them the wife of the French statesman, Émile Ollivier,

and another the wife of von Bülow and later of Richard Wagner.

Eventually they separated.

In 1842 Liszt was invited by the grand duke of Weimar to conduct a

series of concerts each year in the city of Goethe and Schiller.

Soon afterward he became director of the court theatre. He gave to

Weimar ten years of brilliant eminence, performing, among other works,

Wagner’s _Tannhäuser_, _Lohengrin_, and ‘Flying Dutchman’; Berlioz’s

_Benvenuto Cellini_; Schumann’s _Genoveva_ and his scenes from

_Manfred_; Schubert’s _Alfonso und Estrella_; and Cornelius’ ‘The

Barber of Bagdad.’ The last work, an attempt to apply Wagnerian

principles to comic opera, was received with extreme coldness, and

Liszt in disgust gave up his position, leaving Weimar in 1861. But

during these years he had composed many of the most important of his

works.

[Illustration: Liszt at the Piano]

_After a painting by Josef Danhauser_

From this time until his death at Bayreuth in 1886 he divided his

life between Buda-Pesth, Weimar, and Rome. In the ‘Eternal City’ the

religious nature of the man came to full expression and he studied the

lore of the Church like a loyal Catholic, being granted the honorary

title of Abbé. The revolutionist of 1834 had become the religious

mystic. Rome and the magnificent traditions of the Church filled his

imagination.

Liszt’s compositions may be roughly divided into three periods:

first, the piano period, extending from 1826 to 1842; second, the

orchestral period, from 1842 to 1860 (mostly during his residence at

Weimar); and, third, his choral period, from which date his religious

works. The nature of these compositions and their contribution to

the development of music will be discussed in succeeding chapters.

Here we need only recall a few of their chief characteristics. Of his

twelve hundred compositions, some seven hundred are original and the

others mostly piano transcriptions of orchestral and operatic works

of all sorts. Certainly he wrote too much, and not a little of his

work must be set down as trash, or near it. But some of it is of the

highest musical quality and was of the greatest importance in musical

development. The most typical of modern musical forms--the symphonic

poem--is due solely to him. He formulated the theory of it and gave

it brilliant exemplification. His mastery of piano technique is,

of course, unequalled. He made the piano, on the one hand, a small

orchestra, and, on the other, an individual voice. While he by no means

developed all the possibilities of the instrument (Chopin and Schumann

contributed more that was of musical value), he extended its range--its

avoirdupois, one might almost say--as no other musician has done. His

piano transcriptions, though somewhat distrusted nowadays, greatly

increased the popularity of the instrument, and, in some cases, were

the chief means of spreading the reputations of certain composers. His

use of the orchestra was hardly less masterful than that of Berlioz and

Wagner; in particular he gave full importance to the individuality of

instruments and emphasized the sensuous qualities of their tone. More,

perhaps, than any other composer, he effected the union of pure music

with the poetical or pictorial idea. His use of chromatic harmony was

at times as daring as that of Berlioz and antedated that of Wagner, who

borrowed richly from him. Only his religious music, among his great

works, must be accounted comparatively a failure. He had great hopes,

when he went to Rome, of becoming the Palestrina of the modern Church.

But the Church would have none of his theatrical religious music, while

the public has been little more hospitable.

Intimate biographies of Liszt have succeeded in staining the brilliant

colors of the Liszt myth, but, on the whole, no composer who gained a

prodigious reputation during his lifetime has lived up to it better, so

to speak, after his death. As an unrivalled concert pianist, the one

conqueror who never suffered a defeat, he might have become vain and

jealous. There is hardly a trace of vanity or jealousy in his nature.

His appreciation of other composers was always generous and remarkably

just. No amount of difference in school or aim could ever obscure,

in his eyes, the real worth of a man. Wagner, Berlioz, and a host of

others owed much of their reputation to him. His life at Weimar was one

continued crusade on behalf of little known geniuses. His financial

generosity was very great; though the income from his concerts was

huge he never, after 1847, gave a recital for his own benefit. In our

more matter-of-fact age much of his musical and verbal rhetoric sounds

empty, but through it all the intellectuality and sincerity of the man

are unmistakable. On the whole, it is hardly possible to name another

composer who possessed at once such a broad culture, such a consistent

idealism, and such a high integrity.

VI

In Hector Berlioz (b. 1803 at Côte St. André, Isère) we have one of

those few men who is not to be explained by any amount of examination

of sources. Only to a small extent was he _specifically_ determined by

his environment. He is unique in his time and in musical history. He,

again, is to be explained only as a gift of Heaven (or of the devil,

as his contemporaries thought). In a general way, however, he is very

brilliantly to be explained by the Paris of 1830. The external tumult,

the breaking of rules, the assertion of individuality, all worked upon

his sensitive spirit and dominated his creative genius. He was at

bottom a childlike, affectionate man, ‘demanding at every moment in

his life to love and be loved,’ as Romain Rolland says. In Renaissance

Florence, we may imagine, he might have been a Fra Angelico, or at

least no more bumptious than a Filippo Lippi. It was because he was so

delicately sensitive that he became, in the Paris of 1830, a violent

revolutionist.

His father was a provincial physician and, like so many other fathers

in artistic history, seemed to the end of his days ashamed of the fact

that he had a genius for a son. The boy imbibed his first music among

the amateurs of his town. He went to Paris to study medicine--because

his father would provide him funds for nothing else. He loyally

studied his science for a while, but nothing could keep him out of

music. Without his father’s consent or even knowledge he entered the

Conservatory, where he remained at swords’ points with the director,

Cherubini, who cuts a ridiculous figure in his ‘Memoirs.’ By hook and

crook, and by the generosity of creditors, he managed to live on and

get his musical education. His father became partially reconciled when

he realized there was nothing else to do. But how Berlioz took to heart

the lawlessness of the romantic school! Nothing that was, was right.

All that is most typically Gallic--clearness, economy, control--is

absent in his youthful work. ‘Ah, me!’ says he in his ‘Memoirs,’ ‘what

was the good God thinking of when He dropped me down in this pleasant

land of France?’

The events of his career are not very significant. He had a wild time

of shocking people. He organized concerts of his own works, chiefly

by borrowing money. After two failures he won the _Prix de Rome_,

and hardly reached Italy when he started to leave it on a picaresque

errand of sentimental revenge. He fell in love with an English actress,

Henriette Smithson, married her when she was _passée_ and in debt,

and eventually treated her rather shamefully. He gave concerts of his

works in France, Germany, England, Russia. He was made curator of the

Conservatory library. He was made an officer of the Legion of Honor.

He wrote musical articles for the papers. He took life very much to

heart. And, from time to time, he wrote musical works, very few of

them anything less than masterpieces. That is all. The details of his

life make entertaining reading. Very little is significant beyond an

understanding of his personal character. He was called the genius

without talent. Romain Rolland comes closer when he says, ‘Berlioz

is the most extreme combination of power of genius with weakness of

character.’ His power of discovering orchestral timbres is only

equalled by his power of making enemies. There is no villainy recorded

of his life; there are any number of mean things, and any number of

wild, irrational things. His artistic sincerity is unquestioned, but it

is mingled with any amount of the bad boy’s delight in shocking others.

Like Schumann, but in his own manner, he made himself a crusader

against the Philistines.

Of the unhappiness of his life it is quite sufficient to say that it

was his own fault. His creed was the subjective, sentimental creed of

the romanticists: ‘Sensible people,’ he exclaims, ‘cannot understand

this intensity of being, this actual joy in existing, in dragging

from life the uttermost it has to give in height and depth.’ He was

haunted, too, by the romanticists’ passion for bigness. His ideal

orchestra, he tells us in his work on Instrumentation, consists of 467

instruments--160 violins, 30 harps, eight pairs of kettle drums, 12

bassoons, 16 horns, and other instruments in similar abundance.

His great importance in the history of music is, of course, his

development of the orchestra. No one else has ever observed orchestral

possibilities so keenly and used them so surely. His musical ideas,

as played on the piano, may sound banal, but when they are heard in

the orchestra they become pure magic. He never was a pianist; his

virtuosity as a performer was lavished on the flute and guitar. For

this reason, perhaps, his orchestral writing is the least pianistic,

the most inherently contrapuntal of any of the period.

He was a pioneer in freeing instrumental music from the dominance of

traditional forms. Forms may be always necessary, but their _raison

d’être_, as Berlioz insisted, should be expressive and not traditional.

Berlioz was the first great exponent of program music; Liszt owes an

immense amount to him. He was also the first to use in a thorough-going

way the _leit-motif_, or the _idée fixe_, as he called it. Not that

he developed the theory of the dramatic use of the _leit-motif_ as

Wagner did, but he made extensive use of the melody expressive of a

particular idea or personage. His output was limited, both in range and

in quantity, but there are few composers who have had a higher average

of excellence throughout their work--always on the understanding that

you like his subject-matter. The hearer who does not may intellectually

admit his technical mastery of the orchestra, but he will feel that the

composer is sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

VII

Frédéric Chopin was far less influenced by external events than most

composers of the time. We have the legend that the C minor _Étude_ was

written to express his emotions upon hearing of the capture of Warsaw

by the Russians in 1831. We hear a good deal (perhaps too much) about

the national strain in his music. The national dance rhythms enter

into his work, and, to some extent, the national musical idiom, though

refined out of any real national expressiveness. Beyond this his music

would apparently have been the same, whatever the state of the world at

large.

Nor are the events of his life of any particular significance. He

was born near Warsaw, in Poland, in 1810, the son of a teacher

who later became professor of French in the Lyceum of Warsaw. His

father had sufficient funds for his education, and the lad received

excellent instruction in music--in composition chiefly--at the

Warsaw Conservatory. At nine he appeared as a concert pianist, and

frequently thereafter. He was a sensitive child, but hardly remarkable

in any way. There are child love affairs to be recorded by careful

biographers, with fancied influences on his art. In composition he was

not precocious, his Opus 1 appearing at the age of eighteen. A visit

to Vienna in 1829 decided him in his career of professional pianist,

and in 1830 he left Warsaw on a grand concert tour. In 1831 he reached

Paris, where he lived most of his life thereafter. His Opus 2 was

‘announced’ to the world by the discerning Schumann, in the famous

phrase, ‘Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!’ In 1837, through Liszt’s

machinations, he met Madame Dudevant, known to fame by her pen name,

George Sand. She was the one great love affair of his life. Their visit

to Majorca, which has found a nesting place in literature in George

Sand’s _Un Hiver à Majorque_, was a rather dismal failure. The result

was an illness, which his mistress nursed him through, and this began

the continued ill health that lasted until his death. After Majorca

came more composition and lessons in Paris, with summer visits to

George Sand at her country home, and occasional trips to England. Then,

in 1849, severe sickness and death.

All that was really important in Chopin’s life happened within himself.

No other great composer of the time is so utterly self-contained.

Though he lived in an age of frenzied ‘schools’ and propaganda, he

calmly worked as pleased him best, choosing what suited his personality

and letting the rest go. His music is, perhaps, more consistently

personal than that of any other composer of the century. It is

remarkable, too, that the chief contemporary musical influences on his

work came from second and third-rate men. He was intimate with Liszt,

he was friendly with the Schumanns. But from them he borrowed next to

nothing. Yet he worshipped Bach and Mozart. Nothing of the romantic

Parisian frenzy of the thirties enters into his music; the only

influence which the creed of the romanticists had upon him seems to

have been the freeing of his mind from traditional obstacles, but it is

doubtful whether his mind was not already quite free when he reached

Paris. All that he did was peculiarly his; his choice and rejection

were accurate in the extreme.

In his piano playing he represented quite another school from that of

Liszt. He was gentle where Liszt was frenzied; he was graceful where

Liszt was pompous. Or, rather, his playing was of no school, but was

simply his own. His imitators exaggerated his characteristics, carrying

his _rubato_ to a silly extreme. But no competent witness has testified

that Chopin ever erred in taste. The criticism was constantly heard,

during his lifetime, that he played too softly, that his tone was

insufficient to fill a large hall. It was his style; he did not change

because of his critics. He was not, perhaps, a virtuoso of the first

rank, but all agree that the things which he did he did supremely well.

The supreme grace of his compositions found its best exponent in him.

Ornaments, such as the cadenzas of the favorite E flat Nocturne, he

played with a liquid quality that no one could imitate. His rubato

carried with it a magical sense of personal freedom, but was never too

marked--was not a rubato at all, some say, since the left hand kept the

rhythm quite even.

As a workman Chopin was conscientious in the extreme. He never allowed

a work to go to the engraver until he had put the last possible touch

of perfection to it. His posthumous compositions he desired never to

have published. His judgment of them was correct; they are in almost

every case inferior to the work which he gave to the public. Just where

his individuality came from, no one can say; it seems to have been born

in him. From Field[81] he borrowed the Nocturne form, or rather name.

From Hummel[82] and Cramer[83] he borrowed certain details of pianistic

style. From the Italians he caught a certain luxurious grace that is

not to be found in French or German music. But none of this explains

the genius by which he turned his borrowings into great music.

Emotionally Chopin ranks perhaps as the greatest of composers. In

subjective expression and the evocation of mood, apart from specific

suggestion by words or ‘program,’ he is supreme. He is by no means

merely the dreamy poet which we sometimes carelessly suppose. Nothing

can surpass the force and vigor of his Polonaises, or the liveliness

of his Mazurkas. In harmony his invention was as inexhaustible as in

melody, and later music has borrowed many a progression from him.

Indeed, in this respect he was one of the most original of composers.

It has been said that in harmony there has been nothing new since

Bach save only Chopin, Wagner, and Debussy. But, however radical his

progressions may be, they are never awkward. They have that smoothness

and that seeming inevitableness which the artist honors with the

epithet, ‘perfection.’ Chopin’s genius was wholly for the piano; in

the little writing he did for orchestra or other instruments (mostly

in connection with piano solo) there is nothing to indicate that music

would have been the richer had he departed from his chosen field. In

a succeeding chapter more will be said about his music. As to the man

himself, it is all in his music. Any biographical detail which we can

collect must pale before the Preludes, the Études, and the Polonaises.

* * * * *

An ‘average music-lover,’ about 1845, being questioned as to whom

he thought the greatest living composer, would almost undoubtedly

have replied, ‘Mendelssohn.’ For Mendelssohn had just the combination

of qualities which at the time could most charm people, giving

them enough of the new to interest and enough of the old to avoid

disconcerting shocks. Our average music-lover would have gone on

to say that Mendelssohn had absorbed all that was good in romantic

music--the freshness, the pictorial suggestiveness, the freedom from

dry traditionalism--and had synthesized it with the power and clearness

of the old forms. Mendelssohn was the one of the romantic composers

who was instantly understood. His reputation has diminished steadily

in the last half century. One does not say this vindictively, for his

polished works are as delightful to-day as ever. But historically he

cannot rank for a moment with such men as Liszt, Schumann, or Chopin.

When we review the field we discover that he added no single new

element to musical expression. His forms were the classical ones, only

made flexible enough to hold their romantic content. His harmony,

though fresh, was always strictly justified by classical tradition.

His instrumentation, charming in the extreme, was only a restrained

and tasteful use of resources already known and used. In a history of

musical development Mendelssohn deserves no more than passing mention.

Of all the great musicians of history none ever received in his youth

such a broad and sound academic education. In every way he was one of

fortune’s darlings. His life, like that of few other distinguished

men of history (Macaulay alone comes readily to mind), was little

short of ideal. He was born in 1809 in Hamburg, son of a rich Jewish

banker. Early in his life the family formally embraced Christianity,

which removed from the musician the disabilities he would otherwise

have suffered in public life. His family life during his youthful

years in Berlin was that which has always been traditionally

Jewish--affectionate, simple, vigorous, and inspiring--and his

education the best that money could secure. His father cultivated

his talents with greatest care, but he was never allowed to become

a spoiled child or to develop without continual kindly criticism.

He became a pianist of almost the first rank, and was precocious in

composition, steadily developing technical finish and individuality. At

the age of 17, under the inspiration of the reading of Shakespeare with

his sister Fanny, he wrote the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ overture, as

finished and delightful a work as there is in all musical literature.

At twenty he was given money to travel and look about the world for his

future occupation. As a conductor (chiefly of his own works) and, to

a lesser extent, as a pianist he steadily became more famous, until,

in 1835, he was invited to become conductor of the concerts of the

Gewandhaus Orchestra at Leipzig. In this position he rapidly became the

most noted and perhaps the most immediately influential musician in

Europe. From 1840 to 1843 he was connected with Berlin, where Frederick

William IV had commissioned him to organize a musical academy, but in

1843 he did better by organizing the famous Conservatory at Leipzig, of

which he was made director, with Schumann and Moscheles on the teaching

staff. In 1847, after his tenth visit to England, he heard of the death

of his beloved sister Fanny, and shortly afterward died. All Europe

felt his death as a peculiarly personal loss.

What we feel in the man, beyond all else, is poise--one of the best

of human qualities but not the most productive in art. He knew and

loved the classical musicians--Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven--indeed,

the ‘resurrection’ of Bach dates from his performance of the Matthew

Passion in Berlin in 1828. He also felt, in a delicate way, the

romantic spirit of the age, and gave the most charming poetical

pictures in his overtures. All that he did he did with a polish that

recalls Mozart. His self-criticism was not profound, but was always

balanced. In his personal character he seems almost disconcertingly

perfect; we find ourselves wishing that he had committed a few real

sins so as to become more human. His appreciation of other musicians

was generous but limited; he never fully understood the value of

Schumann, and his early meeting with Berlioz, though impeccably polite,

was quite mystifying. His ability as an organizer and director was

marked. His work in Leipzig made that city, next to Paris, the musical

centre of Europe. Though his culture was broad he was scarcely affected

by external literary or political currents, except to refine certain

aspects of them for use in his music.

VIII

There were more reasons than the accidental conjunction of the

Schumanns and Mendelssohn for the brilliant position of Leipzig in

German musical life. For centuries the city had been, thanks to its

university, one of the intellectual centres of Germany. Being also

a mercantile centre, it became the logical location for numerous

publishing firms. The prestige and high standard of the _Thomasschule_,

of which Bach had for many years been ‘Cantor,’ had stimulated

its musical life, and even when Mendelssohn arrived in 1835 the

Gewandhaus Orchestra was one of the most excellent in Europe. The

intellectual life of the city was of the sort that has done most honor

to Germany--vigorous, scholarly, and critical, but self-supporting

and self-contained. Around Mendelssohn and his influence there grew

up the ‘Leipzig school,’ with Ferdinand Hiller,[84] W. Sterndale

Bennett,[85] Carl Reinecke,[86] and Niels W. Gade[87] as its chief

figures. Mendelssohn’s emphasis on classicism and moderation was

probably responsible for the tendency of this school to degenerate into

academic dryness, but this was not present to dim its brilliancy during

Mendelssohn’s life.

In the ‘Leipzig circle’ Schumann was always something of an outsider.

Though he was much more of Leipzig than Mendelssohn, he was too much

of a revolutionary to be immediately influential. Nor did he have

Mendelssohn’s advantages in laying hold on the public. For the first

twenty years of his life his connection with music was only that of the

enthusiastic dilettante. Though his father, a bookseller of Zwickau

in Saxony, favored the development of his musical gifts, his mother

feared an artistic career and kept him headed toward the profession

of lawyer until his inclinations became too strong. In the meantime

he had graduated from the Gymnasium of Zwickau, where he was born in

1810, and entered the University of Leipzig as a student of law. His

sensitiveness to all artistic influences in his youth was extremely

marked, especially to the efflorescent poet and pseudo-philosopher,

Jean Paul Richter (Jean Paul), on whom Schumann later based his

literary style. In his youth he would organize amateur orchestras

among his playfellows or entertain them with musical descriptions of

their personalities on the piano. When, at about seventeen, he arrived

in Leipzig to study in the University, he plunged into music, in

particular studying the piano under Frederick Wieck, whose daughter,

the brilliant pianist, Clara Wieck, later became his wife. An accident

to his hand, due to over-zeal in practice, shattered his hopes of

becoming a concert pianist, and he took to composition. He now devoted

his efforts to repairing the gaps in his theoretical education, though

not until a number of years later was he completely at home in the

various styles of writing. His romantic courtship of Clara Wieck

culminated, in 1840, in their marriage, against her father’s wishes.

Their life together was devoted and happy. The year of their marriage

is that of Schumann’s most fertile and creative work. His life from

this time on was the strenuous one of composer and conductor, with

not a few concert tours in which he conducted and his wife played his

compositions. But more immediately fruitful was his literary work as

editor of the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_, founded in 1834 to champion

the romantic tendencies of the younger composers. Toward 1845 there

were signs of a failing in physical and mental powers and at times an

enforced cessation of activity. In 1853 he suffered extreme mental

depression, and his mind virtually gave way. An attempted suicide in

1854 was followed by his confinement in a sanatorium, and his death

followed in 1856.

Schumann is the most distinguished in the list of literary musicians.

His early reactions to romantic tendencies in literature were intense,

and when the time came for him to use his pen in defense of the music

of the future he had an effective literary style at his command. It

was the style of the time. Mere academic or technical criticism he

despised, not because he despised scholarship, but because he felt it

had no place in written criticism. He set himself to interpret the

spirit of music. True to romantic ideals, he was subjective before all.

He sent his soul out on adventures among the masterpieces--or, rather,

his souls; for he possessed several. One he called ‘Florestan,’ fiery,

imaginative, buoyant; another was ‘Eusebius,’ dreamy and contemplative.

It was these two names which chiefly appeared beneath his articles.

Then there was a third, which he used seldom, ‘Meister Raro,’ cool

judgment and impersonal reserve. He set himself to ‘make war on the

Philistines,’ namely, all persons who were stodgy, academic, and dry.

He had a fanciful society of crusaders among his friends which he

dubbed the _Davidsbund_. With this equipment of buoyant fancy he was

the best exemplar of the romantic idealism of his time and race.

The _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_, organized in connection with

enthusiastic friends, bravely battled for imagination and direct

expression in music during the ten years of Schumann’s immediate

editorship and during his contributing editorship thereafter.

Schumann’s ‘announcement’ of Chopin in 1831, and of Brahms in 1853,

have become famous. In most things his judgment was extraordinarily

sound. Though he was frankly an apologist for one tendency, he

appreciated many others, not excluding the reserved Mendelssohn, who

was in many things his direct opposite. Sometimes, particularly in his

prejudice against opera music, he disagreed with the tendencies of

the time. After hearing ‘Tannhäuser’ in Dresden he could say nothing

warmer than that on the whole he thought Wagner might some day be of

importance to German opera. But, though Schumann was thus limited, he

had the historical sense, and had scholarship behind his articles, if

not in them. During a several months’ stay in Vienna he set himself to

discovering forgotten manuscripts of Schubert, and the great C major

symphony, first performed under Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus concerts

in 1839, owes its recovery to him.

Schumann worked generously in all forms except church music. At

first he was chiefly a composer for the piano, and his genre pieces,

‘pianistic’ in a quite new way, opened the field for much subsequent

music from other pens. In them his romantic fervor best shows itself.

They are buoyantly pictorial and suggestive, though avoiding extremes,

and they abound in literary mottoes. In 1840 begins his chief activity

as a song composer, and here he takes a place second only to Schubert

in lovableness and second to none in intimate subjective expression.

Between 1841 and 1850 come four lovely symphonies, uneven in quality

and without distinction in instrumentation, but glowing with vigorous

life. In the last ten years of his life come the larger choral works,

the ‘Faust’ scenes, several cantatas, the ---- and the opera ‘Genoveva.’

Throughout the latter part of his life are scattered the chamber works

which are permanent additions to musical literature. These works,

and their contributions to musical development, will be described in

succeeding chapters.

* * * * *

These are the preëminent romantic composers. What they have in common

is not so evident as seems at first glance. The very creed that

binds them together makes them highly individual and dispartite. At

bottom, the only possible specific definition of romantic music is a

description of romantic music itself. ‘Romantic’ is at best a loose

term; and it happens always to be a relative term.

But a brief formal statement of the old distinction between

‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’ may be helpful in following the

description of romantic music in the following chapters. For the terms

have taken on some sort of precise meaning in their course down the

centuries. Perhaps the chief distinction lies in the æsthetic theory

concerning limits. The Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral are the

standard examples. The Greek loved to work intensively on a specific

problem, within definite and known limits, controlling every detail

with his intelligence and achieving the utmost perfection possible to

careful workmanship. The Greek temple is small in size, can be taken

in at a glance; every line is clear and definitely terminated; details

are limited in number and each has its reason for existing; the work

is a unit and each part is a part of an organic whole. The mediæval

workman, on the other hand, was impressed by the richness of a world

which he by no means understood; he loved to see all sorts of things in

the heavens above and the earth beneath and to express them in his art.

Ruskin makes himself the apologist for the Gothic cathedral when he

says: ‘Every beautiful detail added is so much richness gained for the

whole.’ The mediæval cathedral, then, is an amazing aggregation of rich

detail. Unity is a minor matter. The cathedral is never to be taken in

at a glance. Its lines drive upward and vanish into space; it is filled

with dark corners and mysterious designs. It is an attempt to pierce

beyond limits and achieve something more universal.

Here is the distinction, and it is more a matter of individual

temperament than of historical action and reaction. The poise and

control that come from working within pre-defined limits are the chief

glory of the classical; the imagination and energy that come from

trying to pass beyond limits are the chief charm of the romantic. Let

us never expect to settle the controversy, for both elements exist

in all artists, even in Berlioz. But let us try to understand how the

artist feels toward each of these inspirations, and to see what, in

each age, is the specific impulse toward one or the other.

H. K. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] ‘Uhland’s Life,’ by his widow.

[75] Heine: _Die romantische Schule._

[76] Wilhelm Langhans: ‘The History of Music,’ Eng. transl. by J. H.

Cornell, 1886.

[77] _Ibid._

[78] Fyffe: ‘History of Modern Europe’, Vol. I.

[79] He was a pupil first of his stepbrother, Fridolin, of Heuschkel

in Hildburghausen, of Michael Haydn in Salzburg (1797), of Kalcher in

theory, and Valesi in singing.

[80] Reinach’s ‘Apollo.’

[81] John Field, b. Dublin, 1782; d. Moscow, 1837; pianist and

composer; was a pupil of Clementi, whom he followed to Paris and later

to St. Petersburg, where he became noted as a teacher. Afterwards he

gave concerts successfully in London, as well as in Belgium, France,

and Italy. His 20 ‘Nocturnes’ for pianoforte are the basis of his

fame. Being the first to use the name, he may be considered to have

established the type. His other compositions include concertos,

sonatas, etc., and some chamber music.

[82] Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837). Sec Vol. XI.

[83] Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858). See Vol. XI.

[84] Born, Frankfort, 1811; died, Cologne, 1885; was a man of many

parts, brilliant pianist and conductor, composer of fine sensibility

and mastery of form, and a talented critic and author; cosmopolite and

friend of many distinguished musicians, from Cherubini to Berlioz,

and especially of Mendelssohn. He left operas, symphonies, oratorios,

chamber music, etc., and theoretical works. His smaller works--piano

pieces and songs--are still popular.

[85] Born, Sheffield, England, 1816; died, London, 1875. See Vol. XI.

[86] Born in Altona, near Hamburg, 1824; a highly educated musician,

distinguished as pianist, conductor, composer, pedagogue, and critic.

As conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and as professor of piano and

composition at the Leipzig Conservatory he exerted a long and powerful

influence. As composer he followed the school of Mendelssohn and

Schumann, was very prolific and distinguished by brilliant musicianship

and ingenious if not highly original imagination. Besides operas,

_singspiele_ cantatas, symphonies, etc., he published excellent chamber

music and many piano works.

[87] See Vol. III. Chap. I.