spirit soared above them. "My compositions," he wrote in his diary,
"are the product of my mind, and spring from my sorrow; those only that
were born of grief give the greatest delight to the outside world;"
and in another place, more profoundly: "Certainly that happy joyous
time is gone when every object seemed encircled with a halo of youthful
glory; ... and yet I am now much more than formerly in the way of
finding peace and happiness in myself." But the best evidence we have
that Schubert learned the lesson of sorrow, and not only transmuted
bitter experience into immortal beauty but under the stress of that
experience first found his true self, lies in the wonderful series of
compositions which he wrote between 1820 and 1828. Here we find at last
the essential Schubert. In the single movement in C-minor for string
quartet, dated 1820, he discloses a new world of dramatic expression,
earnest feeling, daring modulation, intricate harmony, and chromatic
melody. And from this time on masterpiece followed masterpiece: the
"Unfinished Symphony" in 1822; the A-minor Quartet and the Octet in
1824; the G-major and D-minor Quartets in 1826; the first two piano
trios a year later; and to cap the climax, the C-major Quintet and the
immortal C-major Symphony in 1828.
In spite of the emotional depth of these last works, the dominant
note remains in them, as in everything that emanated from Schubert,
romantic. Everywhere in them the interest of the romanticist in
color for its own sake, in the primary sensuous charm of the tone
combinations, is strikingly manifest. One of the hallmarks of
Schubert's symphonies is his impressionistic treatment of orchestral
tints, both pure and in mixture. None knows better than he how to make
the oboe sultry or menacing, the clarinet mellow and liquid, the horn
hollow, vague, mystical, the 'cellos passionate, and the violins clear,
aspiring, and ethereal. The score of his C-major Symphony is a marvel
of ingenuity and felicity in the weaving of various colors and modes of
playing, as staccato and legato, pizzicato, etc. Look, for instance,
at page 162 of Eulenberg's miniature score, and see how the wood-wind
instruments chatter in staccato against the long rise and fall of the
strings playing in octaves, legato; or at page 139, noting how, after a
powerful climax and a moment of complete silence, the 'cello, against
plucked chords by the other strings, sings a languorous melody, which
is presently taken up by the oboe; or at pages 30-35, where, under the
shimmering veil of the strings, the trombones gradually work out their
sinister call, rising ever higher and higher, and finally precipitating
all into the sounding turmoil of the climax on page 36. In such
passages as these every tone sounds, and all unite harmoniously to
produce the intended effect. In few scores will one find at once such
richness and such clear transparency of coloring.
Nor is Schubert dependent for variety of color, as unimaginative
composers are, on the richly diversified palette of the full orchestra.
His chamber music shows how much he can accomplish with limited means.
In his two trios, op. 99 and 100, by making the most of the percussion
quality of the piano as well as of both the pizzicato and the sustained
tones of the strings, he evolves a surprising variety from the three
instruments. Even with the string quartet, the most monochromatic of
chamber combinations, he achieves great differentiation and contrast,
largely by rhythmically individualizing each voice. The opening of
the A-minor Quartet is a good example: viola and 'cello give a drone
bass in a peculiar and striking rhythm (a dotted half-note followed
by a group of four sixteenths); the second violin holds the tone-mass
together by means of a graceful legato running figure in eighth-notes;
the first violin sings a melody that follows its own free and
untrammelled rhythm. One is reminded by such a passage of Dvořák, who
is of close artistic kin to Schubert. Both men, in their writing for
strings, secure fascinating texture by opposing many diverse rhythms
simultaneously. The device has been assailed as being a mask to cover
a poverty of real polyphony (inner melodiousness); but though it may
to a certain extent be that, there can be no doubt of its sensuous
effectiveness.
Another similarity between Schubert and Dvořák, also indicative of
their romantic interest in special momentary features, is their
coloristic use of harmony, and especially of modulation. Sudden
transitions to remote keys are no commoner perhaps in Schubert than
in Beethoven, but in Schubert they are prompted by considerations
of color rather than of design. Like Dvořák, he loves unexpected
recrystallizations of tone. He shakes the kaleidoscope of his fancy,
and all the bits of glass fall into a new pattern (tonality). Such a
fascinating change as that immediately after the _forte_ chord of D, in
the second entr'acte of "Rosamunde," is an illustration. Even better
ones, because showing so clearly the lack of any element of formal
design in these changes, are those casual alternations of major and
minor mode which are so frequent as to constitute a mannerism. At the
close of the first movement of the G-major Quartet is an extreme case.
Four measures consist entirely of abrupt alternations of the major and
minor tonic chords, with no melodic binding together. This is obviously
purely a color effect, and its motive is of course unequivocally
romantic.
Romantic also is the persistent lyricism of all Schubert's music, the
symphonies and quartets as well as the songs and piano pieces. In the
larger almost as much as in the smaller works, the fundamental trait of
the peculiar type of expression used is its subjectivity, its strong
personal flavor. If the songs of the classicists seem often like
condensed symphonies, the symphonies of this romanticist are in many
respects magnified songs. In several of his instrumental movements
Schubert actually transcribes his themes from songs already written, as
for example in the variations of the D-minor Quartet, founded on "Death
and the Maiden," and those of the "Forellen Quintet," founded on "Die
Forelle." When he uses entirely new material, he is apt to conceive it
in the lyrical style, and even to cast it in the lyrical form, with an
exact balance of phrases of equal length. The second subject in the
"Unfinished Symphony," for instance, is like a stanza or strophe; the
imagination easily adds words to it; it is an instrumental song. Most
of Schubert's more emotional themes share this quality of utterances,
and seem rather communications of personal feeling than objects of
abstract beauty. Even in the later works, like the D-minor and G-major
Quartets and the C-major Quintet, in which the romance is tinged
with tragedy, it is still, one feels, romantic tragedy, the tragedy
of sentiment and sensibility, and not universal cosmic tragedy like
Beethoven's or Bach's.
Yet there is in these later works, also, an intensity and
breathlessness of utterance, a white heat of passion burning away all
dross and surplusage, and giving the style an incisiveness strongly
contrasted with Schubert's usual genial prolixity, which seem to
emanate from some sterner, wilder element in his nature. There is a
nervous tenseness here which is distinctively modern; the D-minor
Quartet particularly has the modern closeness of texture and rapidity
of pulse. Its first theme, unlike most of Schubert's, is a short and
trenchant motive of five notes, compelling attention from the very
outset. The entire first movement is treated with great depth of
feeling and sustained power, and the coda is of a wonderful dignity
and reticence. The final presto, too, reminds us of Schumann in its
emotional richness, and of Tschaïkowsky in the passion of its broken
rhythms and headlong harmonic progressions. On the other hand, the
harmonic idiom of the first movement of the quartet in G-major (see
Figure IV.), with its lapses of triads down through intervals of a
whole step, is that of César Franck. Schubert is here the prototype
of the most advanced modern symphonists, as in his piano pieces he
anticipates the methods of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, and in his
songs gives the cue to Franz, Rubinstein, Grieg, and Brahms.
[Illustration: score]
Figure IV.
The chief faults of Schubert's instrumental works--and they are grave
ones--result in part from his way of composing, and in part from the
untraversable opposition between the lyrical expression native to him
and the modes of construction suitable to extended movements. Schubert
was an easy-going, careless, and indolent writer. He wrote music as
most people write letters; often he would scribble off half a dozen
songs in a single day; he thought nothing of making an overture in
three hours, or a whole operetta in a week; to a friend who asked
him how he composed, he replied, "As soon as I finish one thing I
begin another." What all this means, practically, is that he did not
"compose" at all in the strict sense of placing together tones with
care and forethought, but merely improvised on paper. And as a result,
while he certainly attained a delightful spontaneity of effect, he also
fell into the pitfalls of monotony and diffuseness. He is constantly
becoming hypnotized by a rhythm, keeping it up relentlessly, page on
page, without relief. When he has once hit upon a phrase that appeals
to him, such, for example, as the second subject in the G-major
Quartet, he is apt to adhere to it pretty closely through a whole
section of the piece. Such insistence, in contrast to the variety of
phraseology of composers like Mozart, is comparable in effect to the
singsong couplets of Pope or Dryden, as contrasted with the pliant
versification of Shelley. This weaker aspect of Schubert, connected
with his lack of intellectual vigor and possibly with a certain
flabbiness of moral fibre, has been exhaustively discussed by Mr. H. H.
Statham, an English critic, who reaches the conclusion that "in music,
as in literature, easy writing is hard reading," and that in Schubert's
larger pieces "lovely melodies follow each other, but nothing comes of
them." Whether or not we agree with so extreme a view, we cannot deny
Schubert's weakness in musical construction.
We usually find in his music five pages of repetition to one of real
development. Mr. Statham is right in contrasting the "vain repetitions"
in the andante of the C-major Symphony with the logical evolution of
matter in the allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. And even
where, as in the fine coda of the finale of the C-major Symphony,
Schubert has a truly broad design to work out, he fills in his detail
in the easiest, least exacting way by repeating identical phrases at
a higher and higher pitch. The effect of the long, gradual climax is
intensely dramatic, but when upon familiarity we realize that the ideas
generate, so to speak, by fission, or exact reduplication, rather than
by organic evolution, we are left æsthetically unsatisfied. The truth
seems to be that Schubert, being essentially a lyrical writer, makes
beautiful symphonies and quartets in spite of, rather than by means
of, the natural conditions of these epic musical forms. His symphonies
are expanded songs, delightful, as songs are delightful, for their
directness of feeling, their beauty of detail, their warmth of color
and sensuous charm.
His last work, however, the great C-major Symphony, has enough of
the heroic about it to make us cautious in saying what he might or
might not have done had he not died at thirty-one, when he was just
entering the period of artistic maturity. There is a grandeur of scale
and intention, a deliberation and solidity, a sustained power, large
touch, and freedom of execution about this symphony that place it
above all his other works. The long climaxes bespeak a reserve power
not associated with Schubert the song-writer; the themes wear their
possibilities less upon the surface, and unfold them more cumulatively;
the harmony is firmer, plainer, and stronger; the scoring is done as it
were with a larger brush, the colors laid on in wider spaces and freer
patterns; and in the last movement the romantic note is for once well
drowned in a deeper cry of tragic heroism. It is not a mere coincidence
that the theme at the beginning of the development section so strongly
suggests Beethoven's "Hymn of Joy"; the spirit here is Beethoven's,
and the spaciousness of the scheme of construction, if not the detail
with which it is filled in, are worthy of the greatest symphonist.
Here surely the graciousness of childhood and the romantic dalliance
of youth are laid aside, and Schubert speaks with the deep, deliberate
voice of manhood. Death never came to an artist more untimely. Had he
lived, we cannot tell what new and even profounder expressions of the
ripe earnestness that lies beyond romance he might not have planned and
achieved.
III
ROBERT SCHUMANN
[Illustration: ROBERT SCHUMANN From a painting by E. Bendemann]
III
ROBERT SCHUMANN
In the year 1830, in the old German university town of Heidelberg,
Robert Schumann, then a youth of twenty, a reluctant student of law,
and a devoted lover of music, was making the most momentous decision
of his life. For us, to whom his music is a _fait accompli_, it is
easy enough to see the way his genius pointed; for him it was a time
of self-searching, of beckoning hopes and haunting fears, of long
hesitation before the final courageous adventure into an unknown land.
"My whole life," he writes his mother, "has been a twenty years'
struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so,
Music and Law. Now I am standing at the crossroads, and am scared at
the question 'Which way to choose.'" "Let me draw a parallel," he
continues. "_Art_ says: 'If you are industrious, you may reach the
goal in three years.' _Jurisprudence_ says: 'In three years you may
perhaps be an "Accessist," earning sixteen _groschen_ a year.' _Art_
continues: 'I am as free as air; the whole world is open to me.'
_Jurisprudence_ shrugs her shoulders, and says: 'I am nothing but red
tape, from the clerk to the judge, and always go about spick-and-span,
and hat in hand.' _Art_ goes on to say: 'Beauty and I dwell together,
and my whole world and all my creations are in the heart of man. I am
infinite and untrammelled, and my works are immortal.' _Jurisprudence_
says, with a frown: 'I can offer you nothing but bumpkins and lawsuits,
or at the utmost a murder, but that is an unusual excitement. I cannot
edit new Pandects.' My beloved mother, I can but faintly indicate the
thoughts which are surging through my brain. I wish you were with me
now, and could look into my heart. You would say: 'Start on your new
career with courage, industry, and confidence, and you cannot fail.'"[3]
Certainly there was little enough in the legal profession to attract
a youth such as these early letters reveal, ardent, imaginative,
romantically intolerant of the humdrum and the prosaic. From the first
we see him, in this clear mirror of his own words, marked for a life
of artistic expression and free creation. He has all the artist's
susceptibility to impressions, both sensuous and intellectual, as we
gather from his rhapsodies over the landscapes, peasant maidens, and
wines of the Rhine Valley, and from his interest in the individualities
of his travelling companions. He is a creature of moods, plunged in a
day from heights of joy into abysses of melancholy. He is impetuous,
generous, and volatile in his boyish friendships and love affairs; an
affectionate but inconsiderate son, an ardent but desultory worker,
a voluminous but irregular correspondent, irresponsible in money
matters, impatient of social usages, inconstant in almost everything
but his devotion to beauty. The idol of his boyish hero worship is
Jean Paul Richter, that curiously German compound of sentimentality,
mysticism, and wayward humor; he wishes that all mankind might read
Richter and become "better and more unhappy;" and he often favors his
mother with Jean-Paulish apothegms, reflections, and fantasies, in
which platitude and sincerity are mixed as only enthusiastic boyhood
can mix them. Byron, Heine, and the other romantic poets of the day
he reads, too, with avidity, and imitates them in erotic ballads and
plays about picturesque robbers. And all along, music is the language
of his deepest moods, and he spends hours communing with his piano in
rhapsodic improvisation, and devotes his leisure to composing musical
character-sketches of his friends.
By such a youth the choice between law and music could hardly be
decided but in one way. He persuaded his mother and his guardian to
allow him six months in Leipsic, under the teaching of Friedrich Wieck,
to show what he could make of himself as a pianist. His letters during
this period of the first steady labor he had known, when the reaction
necessarily following the feverish weeks of decision plunged him into a
dull and relaxed state, show the sterling side of his meteoric nature.
They complete the picture of one of the most lovable of youths. "I
just keep jogging on," he writes in May, 1831. "It is the fault of all
vivid young minds that they aspire to too much at once; it only makes
their work more complicated, and their spirit more restless.... If only
I could do one thing well, instead of many things badly, as I have
always done! Still, the principal thing for me to keep in mind is to
lead a pure, steady, sober life. If I stick to that, my guardian angel
will not desert me; he now sometimes almost possesses me for a little."
A few months later he continues, more tranquilly: "If one has at last
come to a conclusion, and is quiet and satisfied in one's own mind, the
ideas of honor, glory, and immortality, of which one dreams, without
doing anything toward their accomplishment, all resolve themselves into
gentle rules, only to be learned from time, life, and experience. To
bring to light anything great and calmly beautiful, one ought only to
rob Time of one grain of sand at a time; the complete whole does not
appear all at once, still less does it drop from the sky. It is only
natural that there should be moments when we think we are going back,
while in reality we are only hesitating in going on. If we let such
moments pass, and then set to work again quickly and bravely, we shall
get on all right."
The philosophic calm thus gained by habits of regular work was soon to
be sorely taxed; for in that very year all Schumann's hopes of ever
becoming a piano virtuoso were shattered by an accident to his right
hand. With characteristic impatience he had devised a mechanism for
hastening the independence of the refractory fourth finger by holding
it up with a string while the others practised. Of course the result
of this violence was a permanent lameness. Under this affliction,
however, was hidden an incidental benefit; for piano playing became
now no longer one of the many things that he did badly, as he had
complained, and he had at last all his attention to concentrate upon
composition. He had written his opus 1, "Variations on the name of
Abegg," in 1830; he now followed this up with an endless stream of
charming piano pieces, the like of which had never before been seen. In
1830-31 came the "Papillons," opus 2, and the "Allegro," opus 8; in
1832 the "Studies after Paganini" (in which the technical interest of
the virtuoso is still paramount), the "Intermezzi," and the fascinating
"Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck"; 1833 added to the list two more
primarily technical works, the "Concert Études on Caprices of Paganini"
and the splendid "Toccata," opus 7; and in the next six years, up to
1839, came a long series of unique and lovely things, among which
stand forth in especial prominence those romantic whimsicalities,
the "Davidsbündlertänze," the "Carnaval," and "Kriesleriana," the
somewhat less successful, because more ambitious, Sonatas, opuses 11,
14, and 22, and the more mature "Symphonic Études," "Kinderscenen,"
"Phantasie," and "Novelettes."
These piano works, conceived with most daring originality and executed
with inimitable verve, deserve to take rank with Schubert's songs,
Mendelssohn's overtures, and Chopin's nocturnes and preludes, among
the very few supreme and perfect attainments of the romantic spirit
in music. Their exuberant vitality, their prodigal wealth of melodic
invention, their rhythmic vigor and harmonic luxuriance, their
absolutely novel pianistic effects, their curious undercurrent of
fanciful imagery and extra-musical allusion, the peculiarly personal,
even perverse, idiom in which they are couched, all conspire to make
them unique even among their author's works, and in some respects more
happily representative of him than the later productions in which he
was more influenced by conventional or borrowed ideals. In them we have
the wild-flavored first fruits of his genius, fresh with all the aroma
and bloom of unsophisticated youth.
A curious feature of most of these early pieces, due to the literary
cultivation and to the fanciful bias of their composer's mind, is
their constant reference to all sorts of extra-musical interests.
Schumann, at this time almost as much a man of letters as of tones,
took pleasure in equipping his pieces with an ingenious and amusing
series of allusions to places and people, real and fictitious, a kind
of running commentary of footnotes on the music, comprehensible only to
the initiated. This is managed partly by means of spelling out words
in the letters which stand for musical tones,[4] partly by directions
printed above the music, like stage directions in a play, and partly
by mottoes, both musical and literary, and quotations of original and
other melodies. The "Variations," opus 1, are founded on a theme which
spells A-B-E-G-G--a pseudonym given by Schumann to a lady whose beauty
he had admired.
[Illustration: score]
Figure V.
Most of the pieces in the "Carnaval" are founded on four tones spelling
A-S-C-H, in honor of a friend who lived in the town of that name, the
rhythms being so ingeniously varied that each theme sounds new in spite
of its set tonal basis.
[Illustration: score]
"PIERROT."
[Illustration: score]
"ARLEQUIN." "VALSE NOBLE."
[Illustration: score]
"FLORESTAN." "COQUETTE."
[Illustration: score]
"PAPILLONS."
Figure VI.
In later life Schumann wrote six organ fugues on the name B-A-C-H;
in the album of Gade, the Danish composer, he wrote a theme spelling
"G-A-D-E, A-D-E" ("Gade, farewell"); and the "Northern Song," in his
"Piano Pieces for the Young," is founded on the same letters, in honor
of the same musician.
Mottoes and quotations meet us at every turn. Printed above one of the
melodies in the "Intermezzi" are the words "Meine Ruh' ist hin"--"My
peace is gone." The "Davidsbündlertänze" bear at their head a stanza
of verses, and commence with a musical motto by Clara Wieck. In the
final march of the "Carnaval," a melody of the seventeenth century,
"The Grandfather's Dance," is used to symbolize the futile resistance
of pedantic conservatism to the progress of art. The "Phantasie," opus
17, was to have been called "Obolos," the purpose of its composition
being to contribute to a fund for a monument of Beethoven, and the
separate movements were to have received the highly fanciful titles,
"Ruins," "Triumphal Arch," and "The Starry Crown"; but Schumann finally
contented himself with a motto from Schlegel:--
"_Durch alle Töne Tönet
Im bunten Erdentraum
Ein leiser Ton gezogen
Für den der heimlich lauschet._"[5]
In the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien" (Carnival Prank at Vienna) he
manages the musical quotation with felicitous humor. It seems that the
playing of the "Marseillaise" was at that time forbidden by the German
authorities, on account of the strongly revolutionary tendencies of
public feeling. This police taboo did not prevent Schumann from letting
a single strain of the splendid tune flash out from his mosaic of
melodies, to the unbounded delight of his audience and the discomfiture
of the helpless officials.