most boys nowadays are learning arithmetic. At thirteen he broke
the ice with a four-hand piano fantasia, and from that moment swam
contentedly through a sea of manuscripts. His teeming fecundity and
his carelessness for the children of his brain once they were hatched
showed themselves from the first. When he mislaid thirty minuets
written at the Convict, he would not trouble to recopy them; what he
enjoyed was the activity, not its product; and it was dull to bottle
old water while the spring was flowing so cool and fresh. The figure
of a spring does scant justice to Schubert's inexhaustible fancy; it
was more like one of those magic knapsacks in the fairy stories--the
more he took out of it, the more remained behind. By 1815 his fertility
had become almost uncanny, especially when we remember that he had for
music only the leisure hours of a young schoolmaster of eighteen. In
March he wrote the Mass in G; between March 25 and April 1 a string
quartet in G-minor; in May a symphony (his third) in D-major; in June
an entire operetta; during six days in July another operetta, of which
the libretto fills forty-two closely printed pages; on October 15
seven songs; on the 19th four more; and in the interstices of time,
another symphony, four other operettas, two piano sonatas, and one
hundred and thirty-five songs, headed by "The Erl-King." One rubs one's
eyes. Compared with Schubert's pen, Aladdin's lamp seems a poor affair.
The natural result, in worldly matters, of this imaginative
preoccupation was abject poverty. Never did Apollo turn his back on
Admetus with a more sublime indifference than in the avatar of this
otherwise modest musician. It is true that he gave some scattering
music lessons, and that for a time he acted as music-master in that
same Esterhazy family which so long patronized Haydn; but of any
lasting patronage, any remunerative appointment, or any systematic
teaching, we hear nothing. Even his compositions brought him but a
farcical revenue. He published nothing until 1821, when the first batch
of songs, including "The Erl-King," was printed by subscription. Later,
the publishers being still unwilling to take risks on a virtually
unknown composer, twenty more songs were similarly issued. Only when
popular favor had become manifest could he use the regular channels
of publication; and then he had to content himself with the merest
pittances. Diabelli, who in forty years is said to have gained over
ten thousand dollars on "The Wanderer," paid Schubert for the plates
and copyright of that and nineteen other songs only three hundred
and fifty dollars. Haslinger, in the composer's last year, when his
reputation was made and his work practically done, paid him one dollar
and a quarter for half a dozen of his finest songs. That he was himself
largely to blame for this pecuniary misfortune, through his aversion
to drudgery and his carelessness in the conduct of business affairs,
hardly reconciles us to the fact of his constant and often extreme
poverty, but for which he might have lived longer and wrought to even
better purpose.
But if he was poor, he had at least the temperament and tastes suitable
to poverty. Not even Mozart, whose character and destiny had much in
common with Schubert's, was more light-hearted and easy-going. "Perfect
freedom of action," says his biographer, "was the element in which
he by preference moved, and for which he was content to make every
sacrifice." To drink his mug of beer and eat his sausage, to flirt
with pretty servant-maids and peasant girls, to discourse youthful
philosophy and play practical jokes with convivial poets, painters,
and students, above all to fill reams of music paper with the melodies
that were always flooding his brain--this was his conception of
sufficing happiness. It is curious to read of his daily routine--how,
rising early, he would proceed, often before dressing, to improvise
until breakfast; how, after a morning spent in composition, he would
dine at the _Gasthaus_ for a _Zwanziger_ (ten cents); how he would
divide the rest of the day between walking in the suburbs, calling on
the ladies of his acquaintance, and discussing beer and friendship
in Bogner's coffee-house, or the "Zur Ungarischen Krone," or the
"Zum rothen Kreuz,"--sometimes, in these latter haunts, jotting down
immortal melodies on the backs of wine cards in the midst of the tavern
pandemonium. When he was in high spirits he would challenge a friend to
a mock duel with walking-sticks, or sing the "Erl-King," in parody,
through the teeth of a comb. And then there were the Schubertiaden,
or Schubert evenings, held by his friends of both sexes in some one
of the Vienna suburbs, at which the diversions consisted of dancing,
_lieder_-singing, and theatricals, all to the accompaniment of the
flowing bowl. "When the juice of the grape flowed in his veins," says
one of his biographers, "he became a laughing tyrant, and would destroy
everything he could, without making a noise,--glasses, plates, and
cups,--and sit simpering and screwing up his eyes into the smallest
possible compass." Altogether we get the picture of a Bohemian,
irresponsible, bachelor life, innocent enough, but not troubled with
embarrassing refinements. Schubert was not at his ease in highly
cultivated circles. In his first letter from Zelész, the seat of the
Esterhazys, he describes the servants in detail before giving a word to
their princely employers. Physically Schubert was a short, stout man,
with round shoulders, thick, blunt fingers, low forehead, projecting
lips, stumpy nose, and short curly hair. Very near-sighted, he wore
spectacles from boyhood. His friends' somewhat boorish wit compared
him to a negro, a cabman, and even a tallow-candle, and afflicted
him with the nickname of "Schwammerl," or "The Sponge"--whether in
reference to his fondness for beer or to his superfluous flesh does not
transpire.
The noteworthy fact toward which all these bits of otherwise
insignificant personal detail point, the thesis in support of which
they are here cited, is that Schubert was an unusually pure case of the
sentimental temperament. All the external evidence--his contentedly
ambling, unbuttoned existence, his combination of sweetness and a sort
of involuntary nobility of aim, with an utter lack of intellectual
distinction, his gullibility in business matters and practical affairs,
his devotion to day-dream and revery, even his indolence and resulting
sponginess of physique--points in the one direction. And these matters
of ordinary observation are reinforced by the internal evidence of his
music, as for example the preference for short pieces, each vividly
expressive of a single mood; the pervasive tone of tender sadness,
frequently irradiated by charming fancy, but seldom swept aside by
tumultuous passion and energy; the fondness for minor keys, delicious
modulations, and persistent hypnotizing rhythms; the incapacity for
complex structure and sustained imagination. Here, obviously, is no
hero of abstract thought, like Bach, or of intellectual and emotional
passion, like Beethoven, but a gracious sentimentalist, a man of
feeling, a sort of Burns or Heine of music.
The natural medium of musical expression for such a temperament is the
brief lyric, the song for single voice with piano accompaniment; and it
was inevitable that Schubert, constituted as he was, should become "the
father of the song." Before his time, this had been a form not favored
by the great composers; Mozart's and Beethoven's songs, as Mr. Hadow
has remarked, were merely the chips thrown off in a great workshop;
for them the norm of expression was the symphony. But Schubert, as a
new sort of man among composers, treated the song with a new kind of
earnestness, and with an unprecedented spontaneity. Each of his best
songs is an unsophisticated utterance of simple sentiment, a wondrously
vivid presentment of a single isolated feeling, a "moment's monument,"
as Rossetti said the sonnet should be. And this was precisely what
the artistic situation required. As in a short story of the kind that
Kipling, Stevenson, and others have made familiar to us we do not
demand that evolution of character, that complex nodation of plot, that
subtle action and reaction of motive, which every great novel must
have, but simply vividness, brilliant depiction of a single person,
idea, or situation, so in a song we desire no symphonic grandeur of
scope and wealth of ordered detail, but rather perfect utterance of a
single highly specialized emotion.
Schubert's best songs fulfil this requirement in an almost inimitable
degree. Simple in style and design, wonderfully direct and sincere,
conceived as idealizations of the beautiful old German _Volkslieder_,
and carried out with all the artistic perfection and appropriateness
of detail that good craftsmanship could give, they are among the few
things in music that are absolutely achieved. Especially remarkable
is the art-concealing art by which Schubert, through some perfectly
simple and unobtrusive feature of rhythm, melody, or harmony, knows
how to suggest exactly the spirit and atmosphere of his text. In
the well-known "Serenade," for example, the deftly managed mixture
of minor and major harmonies (a favorite device, by the way, with
Schubert) strikes just the right emotional note of loverly solicitude
and tenderness. In "Am Meer" four chords at the beginning, and again
at the end, bring the sombre, majestic ocean visibly before us, while
the sudden dissonances introduced with the line "Fielen die Thränen
nieder" bring home to us with a terrible poignancy the human tragedy
which the poet has so vividly outlined against this stern natural
background. And then turn to "Hark! Hark! the Lark," perhaps the most
purely lovely, in a musical sense, of all the songs, and note the
adorable elasticity of the rhythm, the lambent grace of the tune, the
idyllic change of key at the words, "And winking Mary-buds begin to
ope their golden eyes," and the poising flight of the melody at the
final, "Arise--arise--arise":--truly Elizabethan this music, in its
graciousness and childlike joy. In short, Schubert strikes at once,
and in each case, in such songs as "Hark, hark! the Lark," "Who is
Sylvia?" "Am Meer," "Du bist die Ruh," "Die Forelle," "Heidenröslein,"
and perhaps a dozen others, the exact tone and style needed to
transfigure the particular feeling with all the magic of music, and
throughout the song maintains the mood perfectly, with no mixture or
clouding. And this, too, with the greatest actual diversity of mood in
the different songs, to which his art flexibly responds. This group of
his fifteen or twenty best songs is not only the crown of his own work,
but one of the brightest jewels in the crown of romanticism.
In critical justice it is necessary to add, however, that in another
group of his songs, even more popular than this supreme one, Schubert's
romanticism inspired him less happily. Whenever, giving free rein
to his passion for detailed expression, he directed his effort less
towards reproducing an emotional mood than towards illustrating actual
incidents, whenever, that is, he allowed dramatic rather than musical
considerations to sway him, he produced a type of song which, in spite
of its popularity, is intrinsically inferior, and hence likely to lose
favor as musical taste develops. The most famous examples of this type
are "The Erl-King" and "The Wanderer"; others scarcely less known are
"Der Atlas," "Die Doppelgänger," "Die Junge Nonne," "Die Allmacht,"
"Kolma's Klage," and "Hagar's Klage." To hear the music of some of the
songs of this class, unhappily large, after reading the commentaries
of their admirers, is almost as cruel a disillusion as to eat the food
at a cheap restaurant after a perusal of the pretentious and highly
decorated bill of fare. Of "Die Allmacht," for example, Mr. A. B. Bach,
in his book on "The Art Ballad," writes as follows:--
"This composition I would call a great tone-picture; it is a hymn of
praise, stately and full of splendor. We seem to hear some prophet,
who, with a voice of thunder, speaks to the people of the power
and glory of the Almighty. The greatness of God in nature is first
proclaimed. The tone-painting is full of grandeur and majesty. Not
with the delicate, charming pencil of Fra Angelico, but with the
strong, energetic, and powerful brush of Michael Angelo, does Schubert
paint the raging of the storm, the forest's boisterous violence, the
thunder and the lightning. The painting is softer, milder, sweeter,
only when he comes to the beautiful and calming words that the power
of God is high above all, and greater when man feels it in his inmost
heart.... Then follows a great crescendo, ending with the powerful and
mighty exclamation, 'Great is Jehovah, the Lord!' which produces an
overpowering effect. In this composition, as scarcely in any other,
Schubert, usually so charming, is very dramatic, and shows command of
the loftiest expression."
Turning, with expectation keyed high, from this rhapsody to the music
of "Die Allmacht," what do we find? An annoyingly loud thumping of
the piano, in its muddy lower register, for four pages on end, with
no rhythmic relief; a vocal part more like a second-rate operatic
recitative than one of those divine tunes of which Schubert had the
secret; and to fill the cup of boredom, three rumbles of conventional
musical "thunder," as threadbare and outworn as the antiquated
theatrical properties described by Steele in the "Tatler." It is
hard to understand how any true lover of music can turn from "Hark,
hark! the Lark," or "Who is Sylvia?" or "Du bist die Ruh," to such
songs as these, with their physically exciting tremolos, crashing
diminished-seventh chords, chromatic climaxes, mysterious staccato
octaves, pianissimo, in the bass, and other such claptrap effects,
better suited to accompany the drowning of the heroine of melodrama
than to edify the sense of musical beauty. They reveal pitilessly the
seamy side of romanticism, and make us wish that Schubert's fecund
imagination had been controlled by a more fastidious taste.
If the sentimentalist's tendency to value emotion for itself, as the
voluptuary wallows in sensation, and the realist's fondness for crudely
detailed effect, sometimes led Schubert into an artificial and fevered
style, his very simplicity at other times played him false. Simplicity
in art, as the case of Wordsworth has notoriously proved, covers a wide
range, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Schubert is often sublimely
simple, as in "Du bist die Ruh," "Heidenröslein," "Der Leiermann"; but
sometimes he is merely flat and obvious. Indeed, writing, as he did,
over six hundred songs in a score of years, not the most inspired of
men could always have avoided platitude. Thus we must set aside many
melodramatic and many trite compositions before we can get an unimpeded
view of his real masterpieces. But after that has been done, we have
left about twenty or thirty songs of such incomparable loveliness as to
give him a secure place among the great masters of the musical lyric.
The careful discrimination between quantity and quality in Schubert's
work, so obviously important in judging his songs, becomes perhaps
even more indispensable when we come to his instrumental works. The
facts that here present themselves to the intending student on his
first approach to the subject are entirely misleading. Schubert wrote,
he learns, ten symphonies and twenty string quartets, besides much
other chamber and orchestral music. Remembering that Beethoven wrote
nine symphonies and sixteen string quartets, he is likely to assume
that the essential Schubert is to be found permeating the one set of
works just as the essential Beethoven permeates the other, and that
if he can take, so to speak, a critical average of them all, he will
come at the true musical personality of their author. Nothing could
be more erroneous. For it must be borne in mind that while the works
of Beethoven were written during the entire period of his artistic
maturity, from his twenty-fifth to his fifty-sixth year, and with the
most laborious care, those of Schubert are largely youthful exercises,
and were in many cases thrown off as one would write a letter. Schubert
wrote voluminously and carelessly, and died at thirty-one, just as he
was entering the prime of life. His works are thus, if one may say
so, like his person, embedded in superfluous flesh. The bulk of them
are, so far as representing him goes, pure surplusage, to be stripped
off and thrown aside before we can see the outline and stature of his
genius. The compositions produced before 1820 are interesting to-day
only as documents bearing on the peculiar way in which his individual
style was gradually developed.
What they chiefly reveal is the ingenuousness, one might almost say the
unconsciousness, with which he habitually composed. He seems to have
made no effort to draw forth, by taking thought, his shy and retiring
individuality; his method was rather to copy, often almost literally,
the music he knew and liked, especially that of Haydn and Mozart. The
quartet in G-minor, written in 1815, for example, contains a perfectly
Mozartish minuet, while its finale is pure Haydn, except for occasional
gleams of Schubert in the happy exuberances of detail and in the quick,
informal modulations. Of the symphony in B-flat, written in 1816, the
first and fourth movements are Haydn, the second and third Mozart. The
closeness of the imitation is at times fairly disconcerting, as in the
last eight measures of the minuet, which sound like a rejected sketch
for the minuet of the "Jupiter Symphony":--
[Illustration: score]
[Illustration: score]
Figure I.
An even more amusing case is that of a passage in the E-major Quartet
(opus 125, no. 2), written in the following year (1817), so startlingly
like a portion of Mozart's G-minor Symphony that we can hardly resist
the theory of unconscious plagiarism. The passages in question merit a
careful comparison. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, Schubert
was paying an eloquent tribute, indeed, to the genius of Haydn and
Mozart in his works of 1815-1817.
[Illustration: score]
SCHUBERT.
[Illustration: score]
And later
[Illustration: score]
MOZART.
Figure II.
Before 1818 there is little internal evidence that Schubert had felt at
all the influence of the greatest musician of the period, Beethoven,
with whom, if we may judge from his diary, he was not yet in complete
sympathy. Under date of June, 1816, he compares disparagingly "that
_bizarrerie_ for which we have chiefly to thank one of the greatest
German artists" with the "naturalness" and "purity" of the Italian,
Salieri. In the C-major symphony of 1818, however, he has evidently
fallen completely under the sway of the master. The first movement of
this work shows a great advance over earlier symphonies; the orchestral
resources are increased, and used with more skill; the themes are
more concise and vigorous, more truly symphonic, though still showing
a tendency to rhythmic monotony; the construction is ampler and more
carefully planned, there being a slow introduction and a Beethovenish
coda. The transition by which the repetition of the first section of
the movement is approached shows afresh the curious literalness with
which Schubert copied his models.
[Illustration: score]
Figure III.
The long poising, pianissimo, on a single harmony, and the final almost
imperceptible lapse into the original key, are Beethoven to the letter.
The other movements show the same influence. Especially noteworthy are
the substitution of a scherzo for the old-fashioned minuet, and, in the
finale, the many sudden shifts of tonality by a semitone, and sudden
alternations of extreme loud and soft. Here, as much as in the earlier
things, it is true, Schubert remains the obedient and passive student;
he is still, in the phrase of Stevenson, "playing the sedulous ape";
but his model is much more complex, his touch is surer, his technical
facility greater, and he needs only to grow a little older, a little
more mature and self-conscious, in order to stamp all these gradually
acquired materials with his own individuality.
Now maturity comes to most men, the romanticists like the others,
as a result of the suffering, misunderstanding, and disappointment
that years have a way of bringing. The youth interprets all the world
by his own freshness of enthusiasm, keen sensation, untrammelled
imagination. Everything seems possible to him, and life is one long,
romantic adventure. But when he actually comes in contact with that
world which looked so fair from a distance, through the rosy glasses of
temperament, he discovers that it is stubborn to his purposes, that it
is full of alien wills with which he struggles in vain, and that this
struggle reveals insurmountable weaknesses and limitations in himself.
Then either bitterness, or a new understanding of himself, resignation
to the inevitable, and interpretation of life in more universal terms,
is bound to displace the old romantic egotism. Experience regroups
itself in soberer colors, and if he be generous enough to escape
cynicism he emerges from the ordeal chastened and humanized.
This transition from self-absorbed youth to magnanimous manhood came to
Schubert between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years, hastened by
the adverse conditions of his life. We have seen how poverty held him
in its sullen grasp; ill-health was added in 1824; and all through his
last decade the sense of the indifference of the public to his higher
artistic aims must have been dispiriting in the extreme. His songs were
favorably enough received, but little interest was taken in his chamber
and orchestral music except by a small circle of friends. That he could
nevertheless go on, year after year, producing so splendid a series
of compositions, in a spirit of such uncompromising devotion to art,
almost entirely unsupported by public recognition, buoyed up by inward
conviction alone, proves that underneath the careless Bohemianism of
his everyday existence there was developing in him the stuff of real
heroism. Like Columbus, he
"found a world, and had no chart
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies.
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art."
The story of the last year of his short life is most pathetic. In
March, 1828, he made an attempt to mend his fortunes by giving a
concert of his own works, by which he earned one hundred and fifty
dollars, to him a large sum. But no temporary help like this could
count for much, so long as his compositions, the main business of his
life, were so shamefully underrated by the publishers. For six of the
best of the "Winterreise" songs he received a little over one dollar;
for the E-flat Trio (opus 100), about four dollars and a half; for
the great A-major Pianoforte Quintet (opus 114), a little over six
dollars. His health being now seriously impaired, he wished to spend
the summer in the country with friends, but was compelled by poverty to
remain in the heat and confusion of Vienna. A momentary encouragement
offered in a projected performance of his greatest work, the C-major
Symphony, but it was given up as too difficult, and he never heard it.
It was first performed eleven years after his death, by Mendelssohn,
in Leipsic. In the fall he rapidly failed, and had just arranged to
take lessons in counterpoint, with a view to yet greater works, when,
after a comparatively short illness, he died, on November 19, 1828. He
left no will, but from the official inventory of his effects we learn
that he left behind him twenty-six dollars' worth of clothing and house
furniture, and "a quantity of old music" (including the manuscript of
the C-major Symphony), valued at five dollars.