SONG LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
Lyric poetry and song--The song before Schubert--Franz Schubert; Carl
Löwe--Robert Schumann; Robert Franz; Mendelssohn and Chopin; Franz
Liszt as song writer.
Song in the modern sense (the German word _Lied_ expresses it) is
peculiarly a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. In the preceding
centuries it can hardly be said to have claimed the attention of
composers. Vocal solos of many sorts there had, of course, been;
but they were of one or another formal type and are sharply to be
contrasted with the song of Schubert, Schumann, and Franz. If a prophet
and theorist of the year 1800, foreknowing what was to be the spirit of
the romantic age, had sketched out an ideal art form for the perfect
expression of that spirit he would surely have hit upon the song. The
fact that song was not composed in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries proves how predominantly formal and how little expressive in
purpose the music of that time was.
It is strange how little of the lyrical quality (in the poet’s sense
of the term) there was in the music of the eighteenth century. The
lyric is that form of poetry which expresses individual emotion. It
is thus sharply to be contrasted in spirit with all other forms--the
epic, which tells a long and heroic story; the narrative, which tells
a shorter and more special story; the dramatic, which pictures the
characters as acting; the satiric, the didactic, and the other forms of
more or less objective intent. No less is the lyric to be contrasted
with the other types in point of form. For, whereas the epic, the
dramatic, and the rest can add detail upon detail at great length,
and lives by its quantity of good things, the lyric stands or falls
at the first blow. Either it transmits to the reader the emotion it
seeks to express, or it does not, and if it does not then the longer it
continues the greater bore it becomes. For all the forms of objective
poetry can get their effect by reproducing objective details in
abundance. But to transmit an emotion one must somehow get at the heart
of it--by means of a suggestive word or phrase or of a picture that
instantly evokes an emotional experience. The accuracy of the lyrical
expression depends upon selecting just the right details and omitting
all the rest. Thus the lyric must necessarily be short, while most of
the other poetic forms can be indefinitely extended.
And, besides, an emotion usually lasts in its purity only for a moment.
You divine it the instant it is with you, or you have lost it. It
cannot be prolonged by conscious effort; it cannot be recalled by
thinking about it. The expression of it will therefore last but for a
moment. It must be caught on the wing. And the power so to catch an
emotion is a very special power. Few poets have had it in the highest
degree. Those who have had it, such as Burns, Goethe, or Heine, can,
in a dozen lines or so, take their place beside the greatest poets
of all time. The special beauty of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’
or ‘_Der du von dem Himmel bist_’ or ‘_Du bist wie eine Blume_’ is
as far removed from that of the longer poem--say, ‘Il Penseroso’ or
Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Man’--as a tiny painting by Vermeer is from a
canvas by Veronese. Emotional expression, of course, exists in many
types of poetry, but it cannot be sustained and hence is only a sort of
recurrent by-product. The lyric is distinguished by the fact that in it
individual emotional expression is the single and unique aim.
This lyric spirit is obviously seldom to be found in the ‘art’ music
of the eighteenth century. It is not too much to say that music in
that age was regarded as dignified in proportion to its length.
The clavichord pieces of Rameau or Couperin were hardly more than
after-dinner amusements; and the fugues and preludes of Bach, for all
the depth of the emotion in them and despite their flexible form, were
primarily technical exercises. The best creative genius of the latter
half of the century was expended upon the larger forms--the symphony,
the oratorio, the opera, the mass.
All the qualities which are peculiar to the lyric in poetry we find
in the song--the _Lied_--of the nineteenth century. A definition or
description of the one could be applied almost verbatim to the other.
The lyric song must be brief, emotional, direct. Like the lyric poem,
it cannot waste a single measure; it must create its mood instantly.
It is personal; it seeks not to picture the emotion in general, but
the particular emotion experienced by a certain individual. It is
unique; no two experiences are quite alike, and no two songs accurately
expressive of individual experiences can be alike. It is sensuous;
emotions are felt, not understood, and the song must set the hearer’s
soul in vibration. It is intimate; one does not tell one’s personal
emotions to a crowd, and the true song gives each hearer the sense
that he is the sole confidant of the singer. Musical architecture, in
the older sense, has very little to do with this problem. Individual
expression goes its own way, and the music must accommodate itself to
the form of the text. Abundance of riches is only in a limited way a
virtue in a good song. The great virtue is to select just the right
phrase to express the particular mood. Fine sensibilities are needed
to appreciate a good song, for the song is a personal confession, and
one can understand a friend’s confession only if one has sensitive
heart-strings.
Thus the song was peculiarly fitted to express a large part of the
spirit of the romantic period. This period, which appreciated the
individual more than any other age since the time of Pericles (with
the possible exception of the Italian Renaissance), which sought to
make the form subsidiary to the sense, which sought to get at the inner
reality of men’s feelings, which longed for sensation and experience
above all other things--this period expressed itself in a burst of
spontaneous song as truly as the drama expressed Elizabethan England,
or the opera expressed eighteenth century Italy.
I
Lyrical song begins with Schubert. Before him there was no standard of
that form which he brought almost instantaneously to perfection. It
is hard for us to realize how little respect the eighteenth century
composer had for the short song. His attitude was not greatly unlike
the attitude of modern poets toward the limerick. Gluck set his hand to
a few indifferent tunes in the song-form, and Haydn and Mozart tossed
off a handful, most of which are mediocre. These men simply did not
consider the song worthy of the best efforts of a creative artist.
If we take a somewhat broader definition of the word song we find that
it has been a part of music from the beginning. Folk-song, beginning
in the prehistoric age of music, has kept pretty much to itself until
recent times, and has had a development parallel with art music. From
time to time it has served as a reservoir for this art music, opening
its treasures richly when the conscious music makers had run dry. Thus
it was in the time of the troubadours and trouvères (themselves only
go-betweens) who took the songs of the people and gave them currency
in fashionable secular and church music. So it was again in the time
of Luther, who used the familiar melodies of his time to build up his
congregational chorales (a great part of the basis of German music from
that day to this). So it was again in the time of Schubert, who enjoyed
nothing better than walking to country merry-makings to hear the
country people sing their songs of a holiday. And so it has been again
in our own day, when national schools--Russian, Spanish, Scandinavian
and the rest--are flourishing on the treasures of their folk-songs. And
when we say that song began with Schubert we must not forget that long
before him, though almost unrecognized, there existed songs among the
people as perfect and as expressive as any that composers have ever
been able to invent. But these songs are constructed in the traditional
verse-form and are, therefore, very different from most of the art
songs of the nineteenth century, which are detailed and highly flexible.
Of the songs composed before the time of Schubert, mostly by otherwise
undistinguished men, the greater part were in the simple form and
style of the folk-song. A second element in pre-Schubertian song was
the chorale. The _Geistliche Lieder_ (Spiritual Songs) of J. S. Bach
were nothing but chorales for solo voice. And the spirit and harmonic
character of the chorale, little cultivated in romantic song, are to be
found in a good part of the song literature of the eighteenth century.
A third element in eighteenth century song was the _da capo_ aria of
the opera or oratorio. Many detached lyrics were written in this form,
or even to resemble the more highly developed sonata form--as, for
instance, Haydn’s charming ‘My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair,’ which is
otherwise as expressive and appropriate a lyric as one could ask for.
The effect of such an artificial structure on the most intimate and
delicate of art forms was in most cases deadly, and songs of this type
were little more than oratorio arias out of place.
It will be seen that each of these sorts of song has some structural
form to distinguish it. The folk-song, which must be easy for
untechnical persons to memorize, naturally is cast in the ‘strophic’
form--that is, one in which the melody is a group of balanced phrases
(generally four, eight, or sixteen), used without change for all the
stanzas of the song. The chorale or hymn tune is much the same, being
derived from the folk-song and differing chiefly in its more solid
harmonic accompaniment. And the _da capo_ aria is distinguished and
defined by its formal peculiarity.
Now it is evident that for free and detailed musical expression the
melody must be allowed to take its form from the words and that
none of these three traditional forms can be allowed to control the
musical structure. And the _Lied_ of the nineteenth century is chiefly
distinguished, at least as regards externals, by this freedom of form.
Such a song, following no traditional structure, but answering to
the peculiarities of the text throughout, is the _durchkomponiertes
Lied_, or song that is ‘composed all the way through,’ which Schubert
established once and for all as an art-type.
But in its heart of hearts the ‘art’ song at its best remains an own
cousin to the folk-song. This art, the mother of art and the fountain
of youth to all arts that are senescent, takes what is typical, what
is common to all men, casts it into a form which is intelligible to
all men, and passes through a thousand pairs of lips and a thousand
improvements until it is past the power of men further to perfect it.
Its range of subject is as wide as life itself, only it chooses not
what is individual and peculiar, but what is universal and typical.
It has a matchless power for choosing the expressive detail and the
dramatic moment. An emotion which shakes nations it can concentrate
into a few burning lines. It is never conscious that it is great art;
it takes no thought for the means; it is only interested in expressing
its message as powerfully and as simply as possible. In doing this it
hits upon the phrases that are at the foundation of our musical system,
at the cadences which block in musical architecture upon the structure
from which all conscious forms are derived.
This popular art, as we have said, has revivified music again and
again. It was the soul of the Lutheran chorale, which, the Papists
sneeringly said, was the chief asset of the Reformation, since it
furnished the sensuous form under which religion took its place in the
hearts of the people. It is the foundation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s
music from beginning to end. And it is therefore the foundation of
the work of Bach’s most famous son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, from
whom the ‘art song’ takes its rise. In the fifties he published the
several editions of his ‘Melodies’ to the spiritual songs of Christian
Fürchtegott Gellert; these may be taken as the beginning of modern
song. In his preface Bach shows the keenness of his understanding,
stating in theory the problem which Schubert solved in practice. He
says that he has endeavored to invent, in each case, the melody which
will express the spirit of the whole poem, and not, as had been the
custom, merely that which accords with the first stanza. In other
words, he recognizes the incongruity of expecting one tune to express
the varying moods of several dissimilar stanzas. His solution was to
strike a general average among the stanzas and suit his tune to it.
Schubert solved the problem by composing his music continuously to suit
each stanza, line, and phrase--in other words, by establishing the
_durchkomponiertes Lied_, the modern art song.
Philipp Emanuel Bach thus saw that the _Lied_ should do what the
folk-song and the formal aria could not do. It is a nice question,
whether the conscious _durchkomponiertes Lied_ is more truly
expressive than the strophic folk-song. Mr. Henderson, in his book
‘Songs and Song Writers’[88] illustrates the problem by comparing
Silcher’s well-known version of Heine’s _Die Lorelei_ with Liszt’s.
Silcher’s eight-line tune has become a true folk-song. It keeps an
unvarying form and tune through three double stanzas, using, to express
the lively action of the end, the same music that expresses the natural
beauty of the beginning. Liszt, on the other hand, with masterful
imaginative precision, follows each detail of the picture and action
in his music. Mr. Henderson concludes that he would not give Liszt’s
setting for a dozen of Silcher’s. Some of us, however, would willingly
give the whole body of Liszt’s music for a dozen folk tunes like
Silcher’s. It is, of course, a matter of individual preference. But
we should give an understanding heart to the method of the folk-song,
which offers to the poem a formal frame of great beauty, binding the
whole together in one mood, while it allows the subsidiary details to
play freely, and perhaps the more effectually, by contrast with the
dominant tone. Whatever may be one’s final decision in the matter, a
study and comparison of the two settings will make evident the typical
qualities of the folk-song and ‘art’ song as nothing else could.
Emanuel Bach also showed his feeling for the lyrical quality of the
_Lied_ by apologizing, between the lines, for his poems, saying that,
although the didactic is not the sort of poetry best suited to musical
treatment, Gellert’s fine verses justified the procedure in his case.
There is in the melodies, as we have said, something of the feeling of
the folk-song and of the Lutheran chorale. And there is also in them an
indefinable quality which in a curious way looks forward to the free
melodic expression of Schubert.
Throughout the eighteenth century the chief representative of pure
German song was the singspiel, or light and imaginative dramatic
entertainment with songs and choruses interspersed with spoken
dialogue. The singspiel was not a highly honored form of art; it held a
place somewhat analogous to the vaudeville among us--that is, loved by
the people, but regarded as below the dignity of a first-class musician
(Italian opera being _à la mode_). Nevertheless, we find some excellent
light music among these singspiele. Reichardt’s _Erwin und Elmira_, to
Goethe’s text, contains numbers which in simple charm and finish of
workmanship do not fall far below Mozart. These singspiele maintained
the German spirit in song in the face of the Italian tradition until
Weber came and made the tinder blaze in the face of all Europe.
Reichardt felt the spirit of the time. He was one of those valuable
men who make things move while they are living and are forgotten after
they are dead. As kapellmeister under Frederick the Great he introduced
reforms which made him unpopular among the conservative spirits. His
open sympathy with the principles of the French revolution led to his
dismissal from his official post. From such a man we should expect
exactly what we find--an admiration for folk-songs and an insistence
that art songs should be founded on them. He was widely popular and had
a considerable influence on his time. He was thus a power in keeping
German song true to the best German traditions until the time when
Schubert raised it to the first rank. Reichardt was also the first
to make a specialty of Goethe’s songs, having set some hundred and
twenty-five of them.
Zelter,[89] likewise, was best known in his time for his settings of
Goethe’s lyrics, and the poet preferred them to those of Schubert.
This fact need not excite such indignation as is sometimes raised in
reference to it, for Goethe was little of a musician. Zelter kept
true to the popular tradition and some of his songs are still sung by
the German students. Zumsteeg[90] was another important composer of
the time, the first important composer of ballads, and a favorite with
Schubert, who based his early style on him.
Historically the songs of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are of less
importance than those of the composers just named. Haydn’s are
predominantly instrumental in character. Mozart was much more of a poet
for the voice, and has to his credit at least one song, ‘The Violet,’
a true _durchkomponiertes Lied_, which can take its place beside the
best in German song literature. Beethoven’s songs are often no more
than musical routine. His early ‘Adelaide,’ a sentimental scena in
the Italian style, is his best known, but his setting to Gellert’s
‘The Heavens Declare the Glory of the Eternal’ is by far the finest.
Except that it is a little stiff in its grandeur it would be one of the
noblest of German songs. Yet Beethoven’s place in the history of song
rests chiefly upon the fact that he was one of the first to compose
a true song cycle having poetical and musical unity. In some ways he
anticipated Schumann’s practises.
II
With Schubert the _Lied_ appears, so to speak, ready made. After his
early years there is no more development toward the _Lied_; there is
only development _of_ the _Lied_. In his eighteenth year Schubert
composed a song which is practically flawless (‘The Erlking’) and
continued thereafter producing at a mighty pace, sometimes nodding,
like Homer, and ever and again dashing off something which is
matchless. In all he composed some six hundred and fifty songs. Many
of them are mediocre, as is inevitable with one who composes in such
great quantity. Many others, like the beautiful _Todesmusik_, are
uneven, passages of highest beauty alternating with vapid stretches
such as any singing teacher might have composed. He wrote as many as
six or seven songs between breakfast and dinner, beginning the new one
the instant he had finished the old. He sometimes sold them at twenty
cents apiece (when he could sell them at all). It is easy to say that
he should have composed less and revised more, but it does not appear
that it cost him any more labor to compose a great song than a mediocre
one. On the whole, it seems that Schubert measured his powers justly
in depending on the first inspiration. At the same time, it has been
established that he was not willfully careless with his songs--not,
at any rate, with the ones he believed in. A number were revised and
copied three and four times. But generally his first inspiration,
whether it was good or bad, was allowed to stand.
Now this facility is not to be confounded with superficiality.
Schubert, taking an inspiration from the poems he read, went straight
for the heart of the emotion. No amount of painstaking could have
made _Am Meer_ more profound in sentiment. His course was simply that
of Nature, producing in great quantity in the expectation that the
inferior will die off and the best will perpetuate themselves. The
range of his emotional expression is very great. It is safe to say that
there is no type of sentiment or mood in any song of the last hundred
years which cannot find its prototype in Schubert. His songs include
ballads with a touch of the archaic, like ‘The Erlking’; lyrics with
the most delicate wisp of symbolism, like _Das Heidenröslein_ (‘Heather
Rose’); with the purest lyricism, like the famous ‘Serenade’ or the
‘Praise of Tears’; lyrics of the deepest tragedy, like ‘The Inn,’ or
pathos, like ‘Death and the Maiden’; of the most intense emotional
energy, like _Aufenthalt_; of the merriest light-heartedness, like
‘Hark, Hark, the Lark’ or the _Wanderlied_; and of the most exalted
grandeur, like _Die Allmacht_.
It would be out of place here to estimate these songs in any detail.
For they have a personal quality which makes the estimating of them for
another person a ridiculous thing. Like all truly personal things, they
have, to the individual who values them, a value quite incommensurable.
Each of the best songs is unique, and is not to be compared with any
other. They are irreplaceable and their value seems infinite. Hence the
praise of one who loves these songs would sound foolishly extravagant
to another. We can here only review and point out the general qualities
and characteristics of Schubert’s output.
With one of his earliest songs--‘Gretchen at the Spinning
Wheel’--composed when he was seventeen, Schubert establishes the
principle of detailed delineation in the accompaniment, developed so
richly in the succeeding decades. The whole of the melody is bound
together by the whirring of the wheel in the accompaniment. But when
Gretchen comes to her exclamation, ‘And ah, his kiss!’ she stops
spinning for a moment and the harmonies in the piano become intense
and colorful. This principle of delineative detail, even more than
the _durchkomponierte_ form, constitutes the difference between the
‘art’ song and its prototype, the folk-song. The details become more
and more frequent in Schubert’s songs as his artistic development
continues. They are rarely realistic, as in Liszt, but they always
catch the mood or the emotional nuance with eloquent suggestiveness. A
free song, like _Die Allmacht_, follows the varying moods of the text
line for line. But Schubert did not follow his text word for word as
later song-writers did. He felt what the folk-singer feels, the formal
musical unity of his song as apart from the unity in the meaning of the
words. He was never willing to admit a delineative detail that involved
a harsh break in the flow of beautiful melody. It was his choice of
melody, much more than his choice of delineative detail, that gave
eloquence to his songs.
This melody is of great beauty and fluency from the beginning. The
lovely songs of the spectral tempter in ‘The Erlking’ could not
be more beautiful. Yet this gift of lovely melody becomes richer,
deeper, and even more spontaneous as Schubert grew older--richer and
more spontaneous than has been known in any other composer before or
since. It is nearly always based on the regular and measured melody of
folk-song, and rarely becomes anything approaching the free ‘endless
melody’ of Wagner. But beyond such a generalization as this it can
scarcely be covered with a single descriptive phrase. It was adequate
to every sort of emotional expression, and was so gently flexible in
form that it could fit any sort of poem without losing its graceful
contour.
‘The Erlking,’ perhaps Schubert’s best known song (it is certainly one
of his greatest), is a perfect example of the ballad, or condensed
dramatic-narrative poem, a type which had been cultivated by Zumsteeg,
but had never reached real artistic standing. It demands sharp
characterization of the speaking characters, and especially some means
of setting the mood of the poem as a whole, in order to keep the story
within its frame and give it its artistic unity. The former Schubert
supplies with his melodies; the latter with the accompaniment of
triplets, with the recurring figure representing the galloping of the
horse. Without interrupting the musical flow of his song he introduces
the delineative detail where it is needed, as in the double dissonance
at the repeated shriek of the child--a musical procedure that was
revolutionary at the time it was written. And, if there were nothing
else in the song to prove genius, it would be proved by the last line
in which, for the first time, the triplets cease and the announcement
that the child was dead is made in an abrupt recitative, carrying us
back to a realization of the true nature of the ballad as a tale that
is told, a legend from the olden times. It must always be a pity that
Schubert did not write more ballads. He is commonly known as a lyric
genius, but he could be equally a descriptive genius. Yet only ‘The
Young Nun,’ among the better known of his songs, is at all narrative in
quality.
Schubert’s form, as we have said, ranges all the way from the simple
strophe, or verse form, up to the verge of the declamatory. He was
extremely fond of the strophe, and usually used it with perfect
justice, as in the famous ‘Who is Sylvia,’ ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark,’ and
‘Ave Maria.’ Very often he uses the strophe form modified and developed
for the last stanza, as in _Du bist die Ruh_, or the ‘Serenade.’
Again, as in _Die Allmacht_ and _Aufenthalt_, the melody, while being
perfectly measured and regular, follows the text with utmost freedom.
And, finally, there is _Der Doppelgänger_, which is scarcely more than
expressive declamation over a delineative accompaniment. ‘The music of
the future!’ exclaims Mr. Henderson. ‘Wagner’s theories a quarter of a
century before he evolved them.’
A number of Schubert’s are grouped together in ‘cycles,’ a procedure
practised by Beethoven in his _An die Ferne Geliebte_, and brought to
perfection by Schumann. Schubert’s twenty-four songs, ‘The Fair Maid of
the Mill,’ to words by Müller, tell the story of a love affair and its
consequent tragedy, enacted near the mill, by the side of the brook,
which ripples all through the series. The songs tell a consecutive
story somewhat in the fashion of Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’ but the group has
little of the inner unity of Schumann’s cycles. The ‘Winter Journey’
series, also to Müller’s text, is more closely bound together by its
mood of old-aged despair. The last fourteen songs which the composer
wrote were published after his death as ‘Swan Songs,’ and the name has
justly remained, for they seem one and all to be written under the
oppressive fear of death. They include the six songs composed to the
words of Heine, whose early book of poems the composer had just picked
up. What a pity, if Schubert could not have lived longer, that Heine
did not live earlier! Each of, these Heine songs is a masterpiece.
Schubert’s literary sense may not have been highly critical, but it
managed to include the greatest poets and the best poems that were to
be had. His settings include seventy-two to words by Goethe, fifty-four
of Schiller, forty-four of Müller, forty-eight of his friend Mayrhofer,
nineteen of Schlegel, nineteen of Klopstock, nineteen of Körner, ten of
Walter Scott, seven of Ossian, three of Shakespeare, and the immortal
six of Heine. And, though he was not inspired in any very direct
proportion to the literary worth of his poems, he responded truly to
the lyrical element wherever he found it.
Writing at about the same time with Schubert were the opera composers
Ludwig Spohr, Heinrich Marschner, and Weber. The song output of these
men has not proved historically important, but they have to their
credit the fact that they were true to the German faith. Marschner’s
songs are not altogether dead to-day, and Weber’s are in a few
instances excellent. They come nearer than those of any other composer
to the true style and spirit of the folk-song, and reveal from another
angle the presiding genius of Weber’s operas.
The place for the ballad which Schubert left almost vacant in his
work was filled by Johann Carl Gottfried (Carl) Löwe, born only a
few months before him.[91] The numerous compositions of his long life
have been forgotten, except for his ballads. And these have lived,
in spite of their feeble melodic invention, by their sheer dramatic
energy. Löwe’s ballads depend wholly on their words--that is their
virtue; as music apart they have scarcely any existence. But Löwe’s
dramatic sense was abundant and vigorous. A study of his setting of
‘The Erlking’ as compared with that of Schubert will instantly make
evident the differences between the two men. The motif of the storm
is more complex and wild; the speeches of the Erlking are strange and
mystical, as far as possible removed from the suave melody of Schubert.
The voice part is at every turn made impressive rather than beautiful.
Superficially Schubert’s method looks the more superficial and
inartistic, but it conquers by the matchless expressive power of its
melody. Löwe’s ballads compel our respect, in spite of their lack of
melodic invention. They are carefully selected and include some of the
best poetry of the time. They are worked out with great care, and are
conscientiously true to the meaning of the words as songs rarely were
in his day. They are designed to make an impressive effect in a large
concert hall. They have a considerable range, from the mock-primitive
heroics of Ossian to the boisterous humor of Goethe’s ‘Sorcerer’s
Apprentice.’ And in their cultivation of the declamatory style and
of the delineative accompaniment they were important in the musical
development of the age.
III
Schumann was not, like Schubert, a singer from his earliest years. He
was at first a dilettante of the piano, and as he grew up dreamed
of becoming a virtuoso. He was enchanted by the piano, told it his
thoughts, and was fascinated by its undiscovered possibilities. His
genius came to its first maturity in his piano works, and all his
thoughts were at first for this instrument.
He did not write his first song until 1840; that is, until almost
the end of his thirtieth year. When he did take to song-writing he
wrote furiously. There was a reason for it. For after several years
of passionate love-making to his Clara, and of almost more passionate
stubbornness on the part of her father, the young people took the
law into their own hands (quite literally, since they had to invoke
the courts) and were married in 1840. The first happiness of married
life and the anticipations leading up to it seem to have generated
in Schumann that demand for a more personal and intimate expression
than his beloved piano could offer. Though he had never been a rapid
writer he now wrote many songs at a stretch, as many as three or four
in a day. He seemed unable to exhaust what he had to say. By the
time the year was over he had composed more than a hundred songs. He
declared himself satisfied with what he had done. He might come back to
song-writing, he said; but he wasn’t sure.
He did come back to it, but not until his creative powers were on the
wane. In the last six or seven years of his life he wrote more than a
hundred new songs, but hardly one of them rises above mediocrity. All
the songs that have made him famous, and all that are worthy of his
genius, date from the year of his marriage.
Just what, in a technical way, Schumann was trying to do in his first
songs we do not know. It is probable that the ammunition for his
unusual harmonic progressions and his freer declamatory style came
from his own piano pieces. Fundamentally we know he admired Schubert
almost without reserve, having already spent the best part of a year
in Vienna, unearthed a number of Schubert scores, and spread Schubert’s
reputation to the best of his ability. Yet there is hardly one of
Schumann’s songs that could for a moment be mistaken for Schubert’s,
so different was the musical genesis of the two composers in their
song-writing. Schumann is a part of the Schubert tradition; but he is
just so much further developed (whether for the better or for the worse
may be left to the theorists).
With Schumann the tendency of detailed musical description is carried
into a greater number of songs and into a greater variety of details.
The declamatory element increases, both in the number of songs which
it dominates and in the extent to which it influences the more melodic
songs. The part of the piano is tremendously increased, so much so that
the _Waldesgespräch_ has been called a symphonic poem with recitative
accompaniment by the voice. The harmony, while lacking in Schubert’s
entrancingly simple enharmonic changes, is more unusual, showing in
particular a tendency to avoid the perfect cadence, which would have
hurt Franz Schubert’s ear for a time. Schumann’s songs are commonly
called ‘psychological,’ and this much-abused word may be allowed to
stand in the sense that Schumann offered a separate statement of the
separate strands of an emotional state, while Schubert more usually
expressed the emotional state pure and simple. No songs could be more
subjective than some of Schubert’s later ones, but many, including
Schumann’s, have been more complex in emotional content. But perhaps
the first thing one feels on approaching the Schumann songs is that
they are consciously wrought, that they are the work of a thinker. This
is no doubt partly because Schumann, with all his gifts, did not have
at his disposal Schubert’s wonderfully rich melody and was obliged
to weigh and consider. But it is also quite to be expected from the
nature of the man. While Schumann’s songs are by no means so rich as
Schubert’s in point of melody, there are a few of his tunes, especially
the famous _Widmung_, which can stand beside any in point of pure
musical beauty. Still, it must be admitted that Schumann’s truly great
songs, even from the output of 1840, are decidedly limited in number.
To understand better what is meant by the word ‘psychological’ in
connection with Schumann’s songs, let us turn to his most famous
group, the ‘Woman’s Life and Love.’ The first of the group, ‘Since
My Eyes Beheld Him,’ tells of the young girl who has awakened to
her first half-consciousness of love. It is hero worship, but it is
disconcerting, making her strangely conscious of herself, anxious to be
alone and dream, surrounded by a half sensuous, half sentimental mist.
The music is hesitating and broken, with many chromatic progressions
and suspensions in the piano part which rob it of any firm harmonic
outline. In the whole of the voice part there is not a single perfect
cadence. The melody is utterly lovely, but it sounds indefinite, as
though it were always just beginning; only here and there it rises into
a definite phrase of moody longing. In the second song, the famous _Er,
der Herrlichste von Allen_ the girl has come to full consciousness of
her emotion. Her loved one is simply her hero, the noblest of men. The
music is straightforward and decisive; the main theme begins with the
notes of the tonic chord (the ‘bugle notes’). There is no lack of full
cadence and pure half cadences. In the third song the girl has received
the man’s avowal of love, and is overcome with amazement, almost
terror, that her hero should look with favor upon _her_. The voice part
is scarcely more than a broken recitative, and the accompaniment is
largely of short sharp chords. Only for one ecstatic instant the melody
becomes lyrically lovely, in the richest German strain: it is on the
words ‘I am forever thine.’ In the sixth song the mother is gazing at
her newborn baby and weeping. The voice part is free declamation, with
a few rich chords in the accompaniment to mark the underlying depth of
emotion. In the eighth and last song the husband has died. The form
of the song is much the same as that of the sixth, only the chords
are now heavy and tragic. As the lamenting voice dies away the piano
part glides into the opening song, played softly; the wife dreams of
the first awakening of her love. The effect is to cast the eight songs
into a long backward vista, magically making us feel that we have lived
through the years of the woman’s life and love.
This, easily the most famous of song cycles, is the type of all of
them. Beethoven wrote a true cycle, but his songs are by no means equal
to Schumann’s. Schubert wrote cycles, but none with the close bond and
inner unity of this one. Nor are Schumann’s other cycles--‘Myrtles,’
the _Liederkreis_, song series from Eichendorff and another under the
same name from other poets, the ‘Poet’s Love’ from Heine, the Kerner
cycle, and the ‘Springtime of Love’ cycle--so closely bound as this.
The song cycle, on this plane, is a triumph of the accurate delineative
power of music.
Almost as much as of this type of ‘psychology’ Schumann is master of
the delicate picture of mood, as in _Die Lotosblume_, _Der Nussbaum_,
and the thrice lovely _Mondnacht_. His musical high spirits often
serve him in good stead, as in Kerner’s ‘Wanderer’s Song.’ In ‘To the
Sunshine’ he imitates the folk-song style with remarkable success.
In the short ballad he has at least two works of supreme beauty,
the _Waldesgespräch_, already referred to, and the well known ‘Two
Grenadiers.’ There is a certain grim humor (one of the few lyrical
qualities which Schubert never successfully attempted) in his setting
of Heine’s masterly ‘The Old and Bitter Songs.’ And, finally, one
song that stands by itself in song literature--the famous _Ich grolle
nicht_, admired everywhere, yet not beyond its deserts. Here is tragedy
deep and exalted as in a Greek drama--though it is disconcerting to
note how much more seriously Schumann took the subject than did his
poet, Heine.
IV
In 1843, when Schumann had made his first success as a song writer,
he received from an unknown young man a batch of songs in manuscript.
With his customary promptitude and sureness, he announced the young man
in his journal, the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_. This man was Robert
Franz, who, many insist, is the greatest song writer in the world,
barring only Schubert.[92] Franz, it seems, had had an unhappy love
affair, and had taken to song-writing to ease his feelings, having
burned up all his previous compositions as worthless. Schumann did for
Franz what he did for Brahms and to some extent for Chopin--put him on
the musical map--and that on the strength of an examination of only
a few early compositions. Through his influence Franz’s Opus I was
published, and thereafter, steadily for many years, came songs from
Franz’s pen. He wrote little other original music, save a few pieces
for church use. His reputation refused to grow rapidly, for there was
little in his work or personality on which to build _réclame_, but
it has grown steadily. The student of his songs will discover a high
proportion of first-rate songs among them--higher, probably, than in
any other song composer.
Franz is one of those composers of whose work little can be told in
print. It is all in the music. Unlike Schubert and Schumann, he limited
himself in his choice of subjects, taking mostly poems of delicate
sentiments, and avoiding all that was realistic. Unlike Schubert, he
worked over his songs with greatest care, sometimes keeping them for
years before he had fashioned them to perfection. His voice parts are,
on the whole, more independent than Schumann’s. They combine perfect
declamatory freedom and accurate observance of the text with a delicate
finish of melodic grace. The accompaniments are in many styles. Broken
chords he uses with distinction, so that the individual notes seem
not only harmonic but melodic in their function. In him, more than in
previous song writers, polyphony (deriving from his familiarity with
Bach) plays a prominent part. He is a master in the use of delicate
dissonance, and in some ways the poetry of his accompaniments looks
forward to the ‘atmospheric’ effects of what we loosely term the
‘impressionistic school.’ He does not strike the heights or depths of
emotion, but his music at times is as moving as any in song literature.
Above all, he stands for the perfect and intimate union of text and
music, in a more subtle way than was accomplished either by Schubert or
Schumann.
Mendelssohn wrote many songs during his days of fame, which had a
popularity far outshining that of the songs we have been speaking
of. They sold in great abundance, especially in England, and fetched
extraordinary prices from publishers. But by this time they have sunk
pretty nearly into oblivion. They are polished, as all his work is,
and have the quality of instantly pleasing a hearer who doesn’t care
to listen too hard. Needless to say, their musicianship is above
reproach. But their melody, while graceful, is undistinguished, and
their emotional message is superficial.
Chopin, however, composed a little book of Polish songs which deserves
to be immortal. They purported to be arrangements of Polish melodies
together with original songs in the same spirit. As a matter of fact,
they are probably almost altogether Chopin’s work. In them we find the
highest refinement of melodic contour, and an exotic poetry in the
accompaniments such as none but Chopin, at the time, could write. ‘The
Maiden’s Wish’ is perhaps the only one familiar to the general public,
and that chiefly through Liszt’s piano arrangement of it. But among the
others there are some of the first rank, particularly the ‘Baccanale,’
‘My Delights,’ and ‘Poland’s Dirge.’
In the intervals of his busy life Liszt managed to pen some sixty
or more _Lieder_, of which a large proportion are of high quality.
They suffer less than the other classes of his compositions from the
intrusion of banality and gallery play. In them Liszt is never the
poet of delicate emotion, but certain things he did better than either
Schubert or Schumann. The high heroism, often mock, which we feel in
his orchestral writing is here, too. He had command of large design; he
could paint the splendid emotion. His ballads are, on the whole, among
the best we have. In his setting of Uhland’s ‘The Ancestral Tomb,’ he
caught the mysterious aura of ancient balladry as few others have. When
there is a picture to be described Liszt always has a musical phrase
that suits the image. And in a few instances, as in his settings of
_Der du von dem Himmel bist_ and _Du bist wie eine Blume_, he achieved
the lyric at its least common denominator--the utmost simplicity of
sentiment expressed by the utmost simplicity of musical phrase. It was
a feat he rarely repeated. For in these songs he painted not only the
picture, but also the emotion. In Mignon’s song, ‘Know’st thou the
Land?’ he has put into a single phrase the very breath of homesickness.
His setting of ‘The Loreley’ has already been mentioned. It could
hardly be finer in its style. The preliminary musing of the poet, the
quivering of a dimly remembered song, the flow of the Rhine, the song
of the Loreley, the sinking of the ship, are all described. Still finer
is ‘The King of Thule,’ which, with all its elaboration of detail,
keeps to the sense of archaic simplicity that is in Goethe’s poem. In
his settings of Victor Hugo, Liszt was as appropriate as with Goethe,
and we find in them all the transparency of technique and the delicacy
of sentiment that distinguishes French verse. In all these songs Liszt
uses the utmost freedom of declamation in the voice part, with fine
regard for the integrity of the text.
H. K. M.
FOOTNOTES:
[88] W. J. Henderson: ‘Songs and Song Writers,’ pp. 182 ff.
[89] Carl Friedrich Zelter, b. Petzow-Werder on the Havel, 1758; d.
Berlin, 1832.
[90] Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, b. Sachsenflur (Odenwald), 1760; d.
Stuttgart, 1802.
[91] In 1796 at Löbejün, near Köthen. He was educated in Halle,
patronized by King Jerome of Westphalia, Napoleon’s brother, and later
became municipal musical director at Stettin. He died in Kiel, 1869.
[92] Originally his name was Knauth, but his father changed it by royal
consent to Franz. He was born in Halle in 1815 and died there in 1892.
He became organist, choral conductor, and university musical director
in his native city. An assiduous student of Bach and of Handel, his
townsman, he combined a contrapuntal style with Schumannesque sentiment
in his songs, of which there appeared 350, besides some choral works.
His critical editions of Bach and Handel works are of great value.
Almost total deafness cut short Franz’s professional activity.