Schumann adds to the lyrical ardor of Schubert insatiable yo_The Romantic Composers

Produced by Andrés V. Galia, Jude Elander and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This

file was produced from images generously made available

by The Internet Archive)

THE ROMANTIC

COMPOSERS

[Illustration]

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS

ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN AND CO.,

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

OF CANADA, LIMITED

TORONTO

[Illustration: ROBERT SCHUMANN

From a water color made in Vienna in his youth]

_The_ ROMANTIC COMPOSERS

DANIEL GREGORY MASON

AUTHOR OF "FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS,"

"BEETHOVEN AND HIS FORERUNNERS," ETC.

"Consciously or unconsciously a new school is being founded

on the basis of the Beethoven-Schubert romanticism, a school

which we may venture to expect will mark a special epoch in

the history of art."

SCHUMANN

NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

1940

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

BY DANIEL G. MASON.

form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a

reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a

review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1906.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

This book completes the series of studies of composers and of their

music, from Palestrina to the present day, which was begun with

"From Grieg to Brahms" (1902), and continued in "Beethoven and his

Forerunners" (1904). It will be noted that these three volumes should

be read in an order different from that of their publication. First

should come "Beethoven and his Forerunners," in which are made a

general survey of the periods of musical history and the principles of

musical style, and special studies of Palestrina, Bach, Haydn, Mozart,

and Beethoven; then "The Romantic Composers," in which the story is

taken up at the death of Beethoven and carried through the period of

romanticism, with essays on Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin,

Berlioz, and Liszt; and finally "From Grieg to Brahms," comprising

studies of the chief modern musicians, including Grieg, Dvořák,

Saint-Saëns, Franck, Tschaïkowsky, and Brahms, and two more general

papers on "The Appreciation of Music" and "The Meaning of Music."

Thus read, the three books should serve as a commentary on the more

important individual composers, æsthetic principles, and historical

schools in modern instrumental music.

From the first I have had in mind the intention of illuminating the

musical peculiarities of each composer by constant reference to his

personal character and temperament. For this reason, while I have dealt

as briefly as possible with colorless biographical facts, I have made

free use of characteristic anecdotes, of contemporary descriptions of

appearance, manners, etc., and of letters and table-talk where they are

available. Music is indeed a unique artistic medium, and no man can

express anything in it except through a technical mastery which has

little to do with his character. Yet, given the medium, what he does

express is bound to be permeated with his peculiar personality; and as

the general reader can get a much clearer idea of a human being like

himself than he can of so subtle a technique as that of music, it has

seemed better to lay stress on that side, even though it is not the

only or perhaps even the most important one. With the object of keeping

awake, nevertheless, the reader's sense of those technical methods and

traditions which so largely determine the nature of all music, I have

included in each book some pages dealing with impersonal principles and

historical schools.

Believing that one has no right to intrude, in such studies as

these, one's own prejudices, but should transcend as far as possible

one's temperamental limitations, I had hoped to be able to maintain

throughout the attitude of the chronicler, and to exclude all special

pleading. In the essays on Berlioz and Liszt I have perhaps not

achieved this detachment of attitude. Realism is a tendency which seems

to me quite mistaken and mischievous in music, and I have attacked it

with some warmth. But in view of the great favor that realism enjoys in

contemporary composition, the shoals of writers that rally every day

to its defence, and the potency of its appeal to the average listener,

whose dramatic sense and pictorial imagination are always livelier

than his purely musical perception, I do not greatly fear that I shall

dangerously disturb any reader's critical equilibrium.

These studies are intended simply as guides to the music they

discuss. If they lead the reader to the concert-hall, to the piano,

to the library of scores; if they help him to hear themes and their

development where before he heard only masses of agreeable sound;

if they incite him to repeat and analyze his musical experiences,

to listen with his mind as well as his ears, to study a symphony as

alertly as he would study a painting or an essay,--then only will they

have justified their existence.

WASHINGTON, CONNECTICUT,

October 17, 1906.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC 1

II. FRANZ SCHUBERT 61

III. ROBERT SCHUMANN 103

IV. FELIX MENDELSSOHN 163

V. FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN 195

VI. HECTOR BERLIOZ 253

VII. FRANZ LISZT 307

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING

PAGE

SCHUMANN AS A YOUNG MAN Title

SCHUBERT 63

SCHUMANN 105

MENDELSSOHN 165

CHOPIN 197

BERLIOZ 255

LISZT 309

I INTRODUCTION ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC

Historians of music are accustomed to speak of the first half or

three-quarters of the nineteenth century as the Romantic Period in

music, and of those composers who immediately follow Beethoven,

including Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and

some others, as the Romantic Composers. The word "romantic," as thus

used, forms no doubt a convenient label; but if we attempt to explain

its meaning, we find ourselves involved in several difficulties. Were

there then no romanticists before Schubert? Have no composers written

romantically since 1870? Such questions, arising at once, lead us

inevitably to the more general inquiry, What _is_ romanticism?

In the broadest sense in which the word "romanticism" can be used, the

sense in which it is taken, for example, by Pater in the Postscript

of his "Appreciations," it seems to mean simply interest in novel

and strange elements of artistic effect. "It is the addition of

strangeness to beauty," says Pater, "that constitutes the romantic

character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in

every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this

desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper." Romanticism

is thus the innovating spirit, as opposed to the conserving spirit of

classicism; romanticists appear in every age and school; and Stendhal

is right in saying that "all good art was romantic in its day." It is

interesting, in passing, to note the relation of this definition to the

widely prevalent notion that romanticism is extravagant and lawless.

To the mind wedded to tradition all novelty is extravagant; and since

an artistic form is grasped only after considerable practice, all new

forms necessarily appear formless at first. Hence, if we begin by

saying that romantic art is novel and strange art, it requires only a

little inertia or intolerance in our point of view to make us add that

it is grotesque and irrational art, or in fact not art at all. Critics

have often been known to arrive at this conclusion.

Suggestive as Pater's definition is, however, it is obviously too

vague and sweeping to carry us far in our quest. It does not explain

why Monteverde, with his revolutionary dominant seventh chords, or

the Florentine composers of the early seventeenth century, with their

unheard-of free recitative, were not quite as genuine romanticists as

Schubert with his whimsical modulation and Schumann with his harsh

dissonances. We have still to ask why, instead of appending our

label of "romantic" to the innovators of centuries earlier than the

nineteenth, we confine it to that comparatively small group of men who

immediately followed Beethoven.

The answer is to be found in the distinctness of the break that

occurred in musical development at this time, the striking difference

in type between the compositions of Beethoven and those of his

successors. From Philipp Emanuel Bach up to Beethoven, the romanticism

of each individual composer merely carried him a step forward on a

well-established path; it prompted him to refine here, to pare away

there, to expand this feature, to suppress that, in a scheme of art

constantly maturing, but retaining always its essential character. With

Beethoven, however, this particular scheme of art, of which the type is

the sonata, with its high measure of formal beauty and its generalized

expression, reached a degree of perfection beyond which it could not

for the moment go. The romantic impulse toward novelty of Beethoven's

successors had to satisfy itself, therefore, in some other way than by

heightening abstract æsthetic beauty or general expressiveness; until

new technical resources could be developed the limit was reached in

those directions. Beethoven had himself, meanwhile, opened the door

on an inviting vista of possibilities in a new field--that of highly

specialized, idiosyncratic, subjective expression. He had shown how

music, with Mozart so serene, detached, and impersonal, could become

a language of personal feeling, of individual passion, even of whim,

fantasy, and humor. It was inevitable that those who came after him

should seek their novelty, should satisfy their curiosity, along this

new path of subjectivism and specialized expression. And as this music

of the person, as we may call it, which now began to be written, was

different not only in degree but in kind from the objective art which

prepared the way for it, it is natural that in looking back upon so

striking a new departure we should give it a special name, such as

romanticism.

As for the other line of demarcation, which separates the romantic

period from what we call the modern, that is purely arbitrary. "Modern"

is a convenient name for us to give to those tendencies from which

we have not yet got far enough away to view them in large masses and

to describe them disinterestedly. As the blur of too close a vision

extends back for us to 1870 or thereabout, we find it wise to let our

romantic period, about which we can theorize and form hypotheses, end

there for the present. But it already seems clear enough that the

prevalent tendency even in contemporary music is still the personal and

subjective one that distinguished the early romantic period. Probably

our grandchildren will extend that period from Beethoven's later works

to those of some composer yet unborn. And thus we have, in studying the

romantic composers, the added interest that we are in a very real sense

studying ourselves.

If, with a view to getting a more precise notion of the new tendencies,

we ask ourselves now what are the salient differences between a

classical and a romantic or modern piece of music, we shall be likely

to notice at once certain traits of the latter, striking enough, which

are nevertheless incidental rather than essential to romanticism, and

must be discounted before we can come at its inmost nature. These

changes have come chiefly as a result of the general evolution of

musical resources, and though necessarily modifying the romantic

methods, are not primary causes or effects of them. Thus, for example,

the nineteenth century has seen an extraordinary development in the

mechanism of all musical instruments, and in the skilful use of them

by musicians. This is impressed upon us by the most cursory glance at

any modern orchestral score. Haydn's and Mozart's orchestra consisted

of a nucleus of strings, with a few pairs of wood and brass wind

instruments added casually for solos or to reinforce certain voices

in the harmonic tissue. The scheme was fundamentally monochromatic,

however much it might be set off by bits of color here and there. By

the time of Wagner the orchestra was essentially a group of several

orchestras of divers colors: the addition of a third flute, of English

horn to the oboe family, of bass clarinet, and of contrafagotto made

each group of the wood-wind instruments capable of fairly complete

harmony; the horns were increased in number from two to six or eight,

the bass trumpet made possible complete chords for the trumpets, and

there were four trombones and a choir of tubas. Thus, instead of having

a uniform foundation, with variety merely in the trimming, the modern

orchestra has complete, independent choirs of most various instruments,

capable of all sorts of combination, opposition, and contrast.

The manner of writing for the orchestra changed as much as its

constitution. Beethoven usually writes three- or four-part harmony

for the strings, and doubles the wood and brass as seems effective.

Tschaïkowsky and Wagner are apt to put an entire family of instruments

on one melodic voice, another on another, a third on a third--as in

the second movement of the "Symphonie Pathétique," at the point where

flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons sing the melody, while first and

second violins and violas pick an obligato to it. In a word, much more

attention is paid in the modern orchestra to richness and variety of

tone-color and to an impressionistically effective disposition of the

various timbres than in the classical scores.

The same tendency is observable in chamber and pianoforte music. Not

only are modern composers fond of curious groupings of wind and string

instruments, as in the trumpet septet of Saint-Saëns, the clarinet

quintet and horn trio of Brahms, and other such works, but when they

use only the four stringed instruments they combine contrasting rhythms

and modes of phrasing, as well as pizzicato, the sordino, the high

sense of color-values. Schubert is the first conspicuous example of

this sort of quartet writing; Dvořák is his worthy follower. As for the

piano, there is almost as much difference between the piano writing

of Beethoven, so often thick, harsh, and lumpish, and the ramifying

figuration of Schumann or the wide, clear arpeggiated accompaniments

and flowering scale-figures of Chopin as there is between the coloring

of Rembrandt and that of Monet.

All this gain in sensuous richness and technical elaboration is,

however, to be considered largely as a concomitant rather than a direct

result (though to some extent is was that) of the romantic movement.

It was primarily merely a phase of that unparalleled material and

mechanical progress so characteristic of the nineteenth century. The

modern orchestra and the modern pianoforte are simply special examples

of the ingenuity of that century in mechanical devices; the genius

which turned the clavichord into the piano was the same as that which

substituted the propeller for sails, and the electric telegraph for

the lumbering mail-coach. But if this modern mechanical genius has

indeed brought to the musician priceless gifts, it is still important

to remember that perfected mechanisms do not account for romantic

music, which might conceivably have existed without them. Instruments

alone cannot make music, any more than a steam derrick can build a

bridge. If we wish to seize the true spirit of the modern musical art,

we must, after all, leave orchestra, and piano, and sensuous value

behind, and ascertain to what use composers have turned all these

resources, and to what manner of expression, embodied in what kind of

forms, they have been spurred by the romantic spirit.

III

Difficult to make, and dangerous when made, as are sweeping

generalizations about so many-sided a matter as the expressive

character of whole schools or eras of art, there seem to be generic

differences between classical and romantic expression which we can

hardly avoid remarking, and of which it is worth while to attempt

a tentative definition, especially if we premise that it is to be

suggestive rather than absolute. The constant generality of classical

expression, and the objectivity of attitude which it indicates in

the worker, cannot but strike the modern student, especially if he

contrasts them with the exactly opposite features of contemporary

art. The classical masters aim, not at particularity and minuteness

of expression, but at the congruous setting forth of certain broad

types of feeling. They are jealous of proportion, vigilant to maintain

the balance of the whole work, rigorous in the exclusion of any

single feature that might through undue prominence distort or mar its

outlines. Their attitude toward their work is detached, impersonal,

disinterested--a purely craftsmanlike attitude, at the furthest pole

from the passionate subjectivity of our modern "tone-poets." J. S.

Bach, for example, the sovereign spirit of this school, is always

concerned primarily with the plastic problem of weaving his wonderful

tonal patterns; we feel that what these patterns turn out to express,

even though it be of great, and indeed often of supreme, poignancy, is

in his mind quite a secondary matter. The preludes and fugues of the

"Well-tempered Clavichord" are monuments of abstract beauty, rather

than messages, pleas, or illustrations. And even when their emotional

burden is so weighty as in the B-flat minor prelude or the B-minor

fugue of the first book, it still remains general and, as it were,

communal. Bach is not relieving his private mind; he is acting as a

public spokesman, as a trustee of the emotion of a race or nation. This

gives his utterance a scope, a dignity, a nobility, that cannot be

accounted for by his merely personal character.

Haydn and Mozart illustrate the same attitude in a different department

of music. Their symphonies and quartets are almost as impersonal as

his preludes and fugues. The substance of all Haydn's best work is the

folk-music of the Croatians, a branch of the Slavic race; its gaiety,

elasticity, and ingenuousness are Slavic rather than merely Haydnish.

It is true that he idealizes the music of his people, as a gifted

individual will always idealize any popular art he touches; but he

remains true to his source, and accurately representative of it, just

as the finest tree contains only those elements which it can draw from

the soil in which it grows. Mozart, more personal than Haydn, shares

with him the aloofness, the reticence, of classicism. What could be

more Greek, more celestially remote, than the G-minor Symphony, or the

quintet in the same key? What could be less a detailed biography of a

hero, more an ideal sublimation of his essential character, than the

"Jupiter Symphony"? And even in such a deeply emotional conception as

the introduction to the C-major quartet, can we label any specific

emotion? Can we point to the measures and say, "Here is grief; here is

disappointment; here is unrequited love"?

In Beethoven we become conscious of a gradually changing ideal of

expression. There are still themes, movements, entire works, in which

the dominant impulse is the architectonic zeal of classicism; and there

is the evidence of the sketchbooks that this passionate individualist

could subject himself to endless discipline in the quest of pure

plastic beauty. But there are other things, such as the third, fifth,

and ninth symphonies, the "Egmont" and "Coriolanus" overtures, the slow

movement of the G-major concerto (that profoundly pathetic dialogue

between destiny and the human heart), and the later quartets, in which

a novel particularity and subjectivity of utterance make themselves

felt. In such works the self-forgetful artist, having his vicarious

life only in the serene beauty of his creations, disappears, and

Ludwig van Beethoven, bursting with a thousand emotions that must out,

steps into his place and commands our attention, nobly egotistic,

magnificently individual. And then there is the "Pastoral Symphony,"

in which he turns landscape painter, and with minutest details of

bird-notes and shepherds' songs and peasants' dances delineates the

external objects, as well as celebrates the inner spirit, of the

countryside. These things mark the birth of romanticism.

For romanticism is, in essence, just this modern subjectivity and

individualism, just this shifting of the emphasis from abstract beauty,

with its undifferentiated expressiveness, to personal communication,

minute interest in the uttermost detail, impassioned insistence on each

emotion for itself rather than as a subordinate member in an articulate

organism, and, in extreme cases, to concrete objects, persons, and

scenes in the extra-musical world. Musicians since Beethoven have

inclined to exploit more and more that aspect of their art which is

analogous to language, even when this means neglect of the other

aspect, the nearest analogue of which is to be found in sculpture,

architecture, and decorative painting. The modern watchword has come

to be initiative rather than obedience, originality rather than skill,

individuality rather than truth to universal human nature. It is,

after all, one impulse, the impulse toward specialization, that runs

through all the various manifestations of the romantic spirit, and may

be traced alike in the lyricism of Schubert, the fanciful whimsicality

of Schumann, the picturesqueness of Mendelssohn, the introspection of

Chopin, and the realism of Berlioz and Liszt.

In Schubert, the first of the out-and-out romanticists, and the

eldest of them all in point of time (his birth date falls in the

eighteenth century), we find a curious grafting of a new spirit on

an old stem. Brought up on the quartets and symphonies of Haydn and

Mozart, making his first studies in boyishly literal imitation of them,

he acquired the letter of the classical idiom as none of the others

save Mendelssohn ever did. His works in sonata form, written up to

1816, might well have emanated from Esterhaz or Salzburg; the C-major

Symphony, so far as general plan is concerned, would have done no

discredit to Beethoven. Yet the spirit of Schubert is always lyrical.

It was fated from his birth that he should write songs, for his was

a typically sentimental temperament; and when he planned a symphony,

he instinctively conceived it as a series of songs for instruments,

somewhat more developed than those intended for a voice, but hardly

different in kind. As a naturalist can reconstruct in fancy an extinct

animal from a fossil jaw-bone, a musical historian might piece out

a fair conception of what romanticism is, in the dearth of other

evidence, from a study of "Erlkönig," or "Ständchen," or "Am Meer";

and the ideas he might thus form would be extended rather than altered

by acquaintance with the "Unfinished Symphony" or the D-minor Quartet.

The lyrical Schubert contrasts always with the heroic and impersonal

Bach or Beethoven, much as Tennyson contrasts with Shakespeare, or

Theocritus with Sophocles.

Schumann adds to the lyrical ardor of Schubert insatiable youthful

enthusiasm, whimsicality, a richly poetic fancy, and a touch of

mysticism. His songs are even more personal than Schubert's, and his

piano pieces, especially the early ones, bristle with eccentricities.

The particularity, minute detail, and personal connotation of the

"Abegg Variations," the "Davidsbündertänze," the "Papillons," the

"Carnaval," the "Kreisleriana," are almost grotesque. He confides

to us, through this music, his friendships, his flirtations, his

courtship, his critical sympathies, his artistic creed, his literary

devotions. Never was music so circumstantial, so autobiographic. In

later years, when he had passed out of the enchanted circle of youthful

egotism, and was striving for a more universal speech, his point of

view became not essentially less personal but only less wayward.

Till the last his art is vividly self-conscious--that is his charm

and his limitation. No one has so touchingly voiced the aspirations

of the imprisoned soul, no one has put meditation and introspection

into tones, as he has done in the adagio of the C-major Symphony, the

"Funeral March" of the Quintet, the F-sharp major Romance for piano.

If Schumann sounds, as no other can, the whole gamut of feeling

of a sensitive modern soul, Mendelssohn, quite dissimilar in

temperament,--correct, reserved, dispassionate,--is nevertheless also

romantic by virtue of his picturesqueness, his keen sense for the

pageantry of life, his delicate skill as an illustrator of nature

and of imaginative literature. His "Songs without Words" reveal a

strain of mild lyricism, but he is never intimate or reckless, he

never wholly reveals himself. His discreet objectivity is far removed

from the frankly subjective enthusiasms of Schubert and Schumann. He

was, in fact, by tradition, training, and native taste, a classicist;

the exhibition of deep feeling was distasteful to his fastidious

reticence; and he is thus emotionally less characteristic of his

period than any of his contemporaries. But for all that he shows

unmistakably in the felicity of his tone-painting the modern interest

in picturesque detail, in the concrete circumstance, the significant

particular. Illustration rather than abstract beauty--that is one of

the special interests of the new school. No one has cultivated it more

happily than the composer of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, the

"Hebrides Overture," and the "Scotch" and "Italian" Symphonies.

Chopin presents an even more singular instance than Schumann affords

of what introspection can make of a composer, of how resolute

self-communion can individualize his work until its intense personal

savor keeps little to remind us of other music. All Chopin's tastes

were so aristocratic that the exclusiveness of his style seems a matter

of course, and was probably to his mind a supreme merit. And if it

debarred him from some musical experiences, if it made his music sound

better in a drawing-room than in a concert hall, it certainly gave it

a marvellous delicacy, finesse, originality, and fragile beauty. It

is, so to speak, valetudinarian music, and preserves its pure white

complexion only by never venturing into the full sunlight. Here, then,

is another differentiation in musical style, a fresh departure from the

classic norm, due to the exacting taste of the mental aristocrat, the

carefully self-bounded dreamer and sybarite.

Markedly specialized as the expression is, however, in Schubert,

Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, and strikingly contrasted as it is

with the serene generality of the classical music, the two schools

after all differ rather in the degree of emphasis they lay on the

various elements of effect than in kind. Both, we feel, are using the

same means, though to such different ends. But with Berlioz and Liszt

we pass into a new world, in which not only emphasis and intention,

but the actual materials and the fundamental principles of art, have

undergone a change. These men have pushed the romantic concreteness

even beyond the range of sentiments and emotions, to invade that of

facts and events. They are no longer satisfied with the minutiæ of

feelings; they must depict for us the external appearance of the

people who feel, give us not only heroes, but these heroes' coats,

with the exact number of buttons and the proper cut, according to the

fashion of the particular decade. If Schumann and his fellows are the

sentimental novelists of music, the Thackerays and the George Eliots,

here are the naturalists, the scientific analysts, the "realists" with

microscope and scalpel in hand, the Zolas and the Gorkys.

This insistence on the letter is quite instinctive with Berlioz. In the

first place, he was a Frenchman; and the French have a genius for the

concrete, and in music have shown their bias by approaching it always

from the dramatic, histrionic point of view. Opera is the norm of music

to the Frenchman. For him, music originates in the opera-house, quite

as inevitably as for the German it originates in the concert room.

Berlioz's "symphonies," therefore, as a matter of course, took the form

of operas, with the characters and action suppressed or relegated to

the imagination.

In the second place, the active impulses in Berlioz's personal

temperament predominated over the contemplative to a degree unusual

even in his countrymen; he conceived a work of art in terms not of

emotion but of action; and his musical thinking was a sort of narration

in tones. He accordingly wrote, with ingenuous spontaneity, in a style

that was, from the German standpoint, revolutionary, unprecedented,

iconoclastic--a style the essence of which was its matter-of-fact

realism. His "Symphonie Fantastique," which Mr. Hadow calls his most

uncompromising piece of program music, sets forth the adventures of a

hero (whose identity with the composer is obvious) in five movements

or acts, and with the most sedulous particularity. We first see him

struggling with love, tormented by jealousy, consoled by religion;

then in a ball-room, pausing in the midst of the dance to muse on

his beloved; then in the country, listening to idyllic shepherds and

hearing the summer thunder. He dreams that he has murdered the beloved,

that he is to be beheaded at the guillotine; he is surrounded by

witches, his mistress has herself become a witch, the _Dies Iræ_ clangs

its knell of death across the wild chaos of the dance....

Now in all this the striking point is the concreteness of the imagery,

the plenitude of detail, the narrative and descriptive literalness of

the treatment--and above all the subordination of the music to a merely

symbolic function. Berlioz here brings into prominence for the first

time the device, so frequent in later operatic and program music, of

treating his themes or motives as symbols of his characters, associated

with these by a purely arbitrary but nevertheless effective bond. When

we hear the melody we are expected to think of the character, and all

the changes rung on it are prompted not by the desire for musical

development, but by psychological considerations connected with the

dramatic action. Thus, for example, in this symphony the motive known

as "_l'idée fixe_" represents the beloved; its fragmentary appearances

in the second, third, and fourth movements tell us that the thought

of her is passing through our hero's mind; and in the last movement,

when she endues the horrid form of a witch, we hear a distorted,

grotesque version of it sardonically whistled by the piccolo. Highly

characteristic of Berlioz is this use of melodies, so dearly valued in

classic music for themselves alone, as mere counters for telling off

the incidents in the plot, or cues for the entrances of the _dramatis

personæ_.

Liszt, a man of keener musical perception than Berlioz, placed himself

also, in obedience to his strong dramatic sense, on the same artistic

platform. In such a work as the "Faust Symphony" we discern a more

musical nature producing practically the same kind of music. There

is the same narrative and descriptive intention; the three movements

take their names from the chief characters in the action, Faust,

Gretchen, and Mephistopheles; and though the second is more general in

expression than Berlioz ever is, the other two are good examples of his

method. There is also the same machinery of leading motives and their

manipulation according to the requirements of symbolism, even to the

parodying of the Faust themes in the "Mephistopheles" section. In the

symphonic poem, "Les Préludes," however (and in the "Dante Symphony"

and other compositions), Liszt shows his German blood in a treatment

more imaginative, the actuating subjects being often not persons and

events, but emotional and mental states. But the fact that many of

the transformations of the themes are from the musical standpoint

travesties, justified only by their psychological intention, shows that

the attitude even here is still that of the dramatist, not that of the

abstract musician. The art, in a word, is still representative, not

presentative and self-sufficing. Again, the representative function

of music for Liszt is shown by his tendency to approach composition

indirectly, and through extraneous interests of his many-sided mind,

instead of with the classic single-mindedness: his pieces are suggested

by natural scenery, historical characters, philosophic abstractions,

poems, novels, and even statues and pictures.

In all these ways and degrees we see exemplified the inclination of

the nineteenth-century composers to seek a more and more definite,

particular, and concrete type of expression. Subjective shades and

nuances take the place of the ground-colors of classicism; music comes

to have so personal a flavor that it is as impossible to confound a

piece of Chopin with one of Schumann as it is difficult, by internal

evidence alone, to say whether Mozart or Haydn is the author of an

unfamiliar symphony; ultimately, insistence upon special emotions

opens the way to absorption in what is even more special--individual

characters, events, and situations,--and on the heels of the lyrical

treads the realistic. The artistic stream thus reverses the habit

of natural streams: as it gets farther and farther from its source

it subdivides and subdivides itself again, until it is no longer a

single large body, but a multitude of isolated brooks and rivulets.

Our contemporary music, unlike the classical, is not the expression of

a single social consciousness, but rather a heterogeneous aggregate

of the utterances of many individuals. What is most captivating about

it is the sensitive fidelity with which it reflects its composers'

idiosyncrasies.

All things human, however, have their price, and romanticism is no

exception to the rule. The composers of the romantic period, in

becoming more particular, grew in the same proportion less universal;

in bowing to the inexorable evolutionary force that makes each modern

man a specialist, they inevitably sacrificed something of the breadth,

the catholicity, the magnanimity, of the old time. It is doubtless a

sense of some such loss as this, dogging like a shadow all our gains,

that takes us back periodically to a new appreciation of the classics.

There is often a feeling of relief, of freer breathing and ampler

leisure, as when we leave the confusion of the city for the large

peace of the country, in turning from the modern complexities to the

old simplicities, and forgetting that there is any music but Bach's.

The reasons for this contrast between the two schools must of course

lie deeply hidden in the psychology of æsthetics, but a clew to them

at least may be found near at hand, in the conditions of life, the

everyday environments, of the two groups of artists.

It has often been remarked that the composers of the nineteenth century

have been men of more cultivation, of greater intellectual elasticity

and resulting breadth of interest, than their predecessors. Palestrina,

Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, even Beethoven, concentrating their whole

minds on music, were far less curious as to other human pursuits than

their later brethren. The six composers we are studying are impressive

instances of this modern many-sidedness of mind. At least three of

them, Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, were skilled journalists and men

of letters; Schumann with the finely judicial, fancifully conceived

sketches of his _New Journal of Music_, Berlioz with his brilliant,

fantastically humorous feuilletons, and Liszt with his propaganda, in

book and pamphlet, of Wagner, Chopin, and other contemporaries. (Fancy

Bach interrupting his steady stream of cantatas to write an exposition

of the genius of Handel!) Schumann was, moreover, something of a poet,

and Mendelssohn was one of the most voluminous and picturesque of

letter-writers. Chopin was as versed in social as in musical graces

and Liszt was--what was he not?--a courtier, a Lovelace, a man of the

world, and an abbé. Schubert alone, of them all the eldest and the

nearest to classical traditions, was a composer pure and simple.

The versatility of these men was no accident or freak of coincidence;

it was the effective trait that made their work so profusely allusive,

so vividly minute, in short, so romantic. And what is more to our

purpose just here, it was the underlying cause of a defect which

is quite as symptomatic of romanticism as its merits. So various a

mental activity must needs lack something in depth; if attention is

spread wide it must be spread thin; thought given to avocations must

be borrowed from the vocation. We should expect to find, accordingly,

division of energy resulting, here as elsewhere, in a lack of

concentration, a failure of power; and herein we are not disappointed.

With the possible exception of Mendelssohn, no one of our six composers

can compare, simply as a handicraftsman, with Bach or Mozart. Schubert

was so little a contrapuntist that he had just engaged lessons when

death interrupted his brief career. Schumann and Chopin gave in their

youth innumerable hours that should have counted for systematic to

routine the fanciful improvisation so seductive to poetic temperaments.

Berlioz kicked down all the fences in his coltish days, and ever after

looked askance at the artistic harness. Liszt, for all his diabolical

cleverness, remained the slave of mannerisms, and became a dupe of his

own rhetorical style.

Now there is doubtless in all this waywardness something that strikes

in us a chord such as vibrates in sympathy with the small boy who,

regardless of barbed wire, invades the orchard and carries off the

delectable green apples. It is a fine thing to be young, it is glorious

to be free. But sober second thought relentlessly follows: we know that

apples must be sent to market in due course, and that that exciting

green fruit is, after all, indigestible and unripe; and we know equally

that musicians must undergo their apprenticeship, and that all art

executed without adequate technical mastery is crude. The crudity of

the art of our musical orchard-robbers becomes at once evident when

we compare a single melody, or an entire movement, of Schubert or his

successors with one by Mozart or Beethoven.

The single melody is the molecule of music, the smallest element in

it that cannot be subdivided without loss of character. Every great

melody has an indefinable distinction, a sort of personal flavor or

individuality, which we may discern but cannot analyze. It has also,

however, an organic quality, depending upon both the unity and the

variety of its phraseology, that we can to a certain extent study and

define. Assuming, to start with, the subtle distinction without which

it would sink into the commonplace, we can compare and contrast it with

other melodies in respect of its organic quality, its simultaneous

presentation of unity and variety--in a word, its plastic beauty. Such

a melody as the second theme of the first movement of Mozart's G-minor

Quintet, for example, gains a wonderful charm from the complexity,

and at the same time the final simplicity, of its phrase structure.

The several musical figures, or motives, of which it is composed

follow each other without the least impression of crass mechanical

dovetailing; yet one feels, as they proceed, such a sense of logical

progression, of orderly sequence, that the final cadence seems like

an audible "Q. E. D." Contrasted with such dexterous phrase-weaving

as this, many of Schubert's and Schumann's tunes, with their literal

repetitions of short phrases, their set thesis and antithesis, seem

pitifully bald and trite. It is hardly fair to take extreme cases, but

they best bring out the point. Schubert's "Drang in die Ferne," ten

consecutive measures of which repeat literally the same rhythm, and the

theme in Schumann's "Abegg Variations," in which a single phrase recurs

sixteen times, will make it almost painfully evident. This tendency

to rhythmic monotony, to an unvaried singsong reiteration of phrase,

besets constantly these two composers, too often takes Chopin in its

grasp, and in Mendelssohn is aggravated by an inclination to stay

in one key, page after page, until our heads droop with drowsiness.

Berlioz, on the other hand, errs in the opposite direction. Variety,

with him, degenerates into a chaotic miscellaneousness, and what should

be an agreeably diversified landscape becomes a pathless jungle. In

both cases there is a failure of the constructive faculty, due to a

lack of mental coördination and concentration. The price paid for

interesting detail is monotony or instability in the organism.

Similar weaknesses reveal themselves when we pass from considering

the elemental melodies to survey the ways in which they are built

up into larger sections and whole movements--when we pass, that is,

from form to structure.[1] None of the romantic composers attained

a breadth, diversity, and solidity of construction in any wise

comparable to Beethoven's. Schubert was intellectually too indolent,

if not indifferent, to attempt intricate syntheses of his materials,

but relied instead on their primitive charm to justify endless

repetitions. Schumann, less tolerant of platitude, and gifted with

more intense, if hardly more disciplined, imagination, resorted to

constant kaleidoscopic change, resulting in those "mosaic forms" which

are related to true cyclic forms much as a panorama is related to a

picture. Mendelssohn was naturally a better master of construction,

but the knots he ties are somewhat loose and inclined to ravel out.

Chopin, a born miniaturist, obviously fails to make his sonatas and

concertos anything but chance bundles of lyrical pieces. As for Berlioz

and Liszt, they frankly faced their dilemma, and had the shrewdness to

disclaim the desire to do that for which they wanted the faculty. They

fell back on the "poetic forms," and let their works pile up without

internal coherence, held together only by the thread of the story they

were illustrating.

For this failure to work out the highest degree of plastic beauty

possible to them, the romanticists frequently have to pay in a serious

loss of power. Keenly interesting as are the details of their work,

the whole impression is apt to lack fusion, clearness, integrity.

Not without terrible risks may the musician neglect form, since form

is itself, for him, perhaps more than for any of his brother artists

in other mediums, a fundamental means of expression. Of this matter

popular thought is inclined to take a superficial view; it is fond of

confusing vital form with dry formalism, of speaking contemptuously

of formal analysis as the pedantic dissection of lovely melodies,

the plucking and counting of the petals of the flowers of art, and

of reiterating _ad nauseam_ its irritating half-truth, "Music is the

language of the emotions." Popular thought would do well to pause and

consider; to ask itself whether language too has not its form, without

which it is unintelligible; to inquire how much of the expressive power

of a lovely melody would remain were its pitch and time relations (that

is, its form) materially altered, how long we could be inspired by the

most exciting rhythms, were they ceaselessly reiterated without relief,

and how eloquent we should find even the most moving symphony, were it

written all in one key, or in several keys that had no relation to one

another. Such consideration soon suggests the truth, which impresses

us the more the more deeply we study music, that there is a general

expressiveness underlying all particular expressions, a fundamental

beauty by which all special beauties are nourished as flowers are

nourished by the soil, a symmetry and orderly organization that can

no more be dispensed with in music without crippling its eloquence

than a normal regularity of the features can be dispensed with in the

human face without distorting it into absurdity or debasing it into

ugliness. Without its pervasive presence, all special features, however

amusing or superficially appealing, fail to inspire or charm. They

become as wild flowers plucked to languish indoors, as seaweeds taken

from their natural setting of liquid coolness. Or again, the particular

expressions of music may be compared to the strings of an instrument,

of which the sounding board is plastic beauty; without its sympathetic

reinforcement the strings, strike them as we may, give forth a scarcely

audible murmur; with it, there is clear and powerful sonority. So

the most ingenious music is dull and dead if it lack the vitality of

organic form, but if it be beautiful it will make its way directly to

the heart.

It is surely not necessary to add that this discussion of the primal

importance of form is not intended to impeach all romantic music as

deficient in the appeal that beauty alone can make. This were indeed

a _reductio ad absurdum_. Much of the music of Schubert, Schumann,

Mendelssohn, and Chopin is of the rarest beauty, and, by the same

token, of the most moving eloquence. The intention of our analysis is

rather to secure that aid to the appreciation of just such beauties

which discrimination alone can give, and by means of comparison to

sharpen the focus of our mental image of what romanticism achieves

and of what it fails to achieve. At its best, we shall rejoice to

find, it shares the serene loveliness, the impersonal grandeur, of

classicism. At its less than best, it offers us a vivid intellectual

interest, a keen pleasure in following its wide ramifications and its

faithful illustrations of many phases of life. At its worst only does

its exaggerated passion for detail mislead it into petty and prosaic

literalism.

A slightly different angle of approach to this whole problem of musical

expression is afforded by psychological analysis. Here, again, as

we might expect, modern theory, the learned as well as the popular,

is somewhat biassed by the prominence in modern practice of certain

special features of effect. The psychologists dwell with a pardonable

partiality of vision on the means of special expression; to complete

their theories the reader has often to add for himself a consideration

of the psychology of form. An article by M. Edmond Goblot, entitled "La

Musique Descriptive,"[2] is interesting, like others of its kind, both

for what it explains and for what it ignores.