Curiously oblivious of tonal monotony, he cast this passage entirely
for the strings, despite the fact that they had been prominent
throughout the whole of the preceding scherzo. It was Mendelssohn
who suggested the use of the wood-wind instruments here, certainly a
marked improvement. Isolated errors or miscalculations like these,
however, are much less serious than the pervasive heaviness and
muddiness of scoring that constantly mar the sound-mass. A mistaken
desire for richness of color led him to double his instruments until
all transparency was lost. It is as if a painter should use all his
pigments all the time: the potency of each would be cancelled by the
others, and the eye, through a surfeit of impressions, would become
dulled and jaded. Only by the silence of some instruments can others
come into relief. "Schumann's symphonies," says Mr. Weingartner,[10]
"are composed for the pianoforte, and arranged--unhappily, not well
at that--for the orchestra. Whenever I compare, as a conductor, the
labor of the rehearsals and the performance with the final effect,
there comes over me a feeling similar to that I have towards a person
in whom I expected to find mutual friendship and was disappointed.
No sign of life gleams in this apathetic orchestra, which, if given
even a simple Mendelssohnian piece to play, seems quite transformed."
There are, it is true, as Mr. Weingartner would doubtless admit, many
single passages of great tonal beauty and originality scattered here
and there in these overladen scores. Such are the sombre trombone
harmonies at the end of the slow movement of the B-flat Symphony, the
celestial violin melody in the adagio of the C-major Symphony (to which
Mr. Weingartner gives the highest praise), and the violin solo in the
Romance of the Symphony in D-minor. Above all, there is the wonderful
horn-call in the "Genoveva Overture"--one of the loveliest moments in
all music.
[Illustration: score]
Figure IX.
But these are the high lights in a picture which for the rest is too
often gray and blurred. In the chamber music, too, we feel the same
shortcomings. The three quartets sound patchy or dry, like piano pieces
played without pedal;[11] only in the quintet and the quartet with
piano does Schumann's favorite instrument introduce elasticity and
sparkle.
Another problem, even more fundamental than that of instrumentation,
which Schumann, in approaching the larger forms, had to solve as best
he could, was that of melodic variety and breadth. Here again he was at
a disadvantage. All his experience had been with short lyrical melodies
or germs of melodies such as are appropriate to piano pieces in the
romantic vein and to songs; but larger works require a wider sweep in
the initial themes, a more complex differentiation of themes, and a
power of mental synthesis that can combine the most diverse elements
in a coherent organism. Mr. Hadow[12] names the two types of melody,
which are suitable respectively to the large and to the small forms,
the "Continuous" and the "Discrete." "In the former," he explains, "a
series of entirely different elements is fused into a single whole:
no two of them are similar, yet all are so fitted together that each
supplies what the others need. In the latter a set of parallel clauses
are balanced antithetically: the same rhythmic figure is preserved in
all, and the differences depend entirely upon qualities of tone and
curve. The former is the typical method of Beethoven, the latter that
of Schumann." And he cites as examples Beethoven's violoncello sonata
in A, and the opening movement of Schumann's piano quintet. Now, the
construction of extended works out of melodies of the discrete or
lyrical type presents certain inevitable difficulties that the romantic
composers, who instinctively think only in such melodies, are always
having to meet in one way or another. We have already seen[13] how
Schubert, on the whole, failed to solve the problem, and contented
himself with monotonous repetitions of his ideas, or with variations
of their mere ornamentation or timbre. We shall later see how Chopin
declined, and how Berlioz and Liszt evaded, the same embarrassment.
It will be enlightening to examine how far Schumann succeeded and
how far he failed in readjusting his musical imagination to the new
requirements.
In many cases he fails as Schubert failed. Beginning a symphonic
movement with a song-like melody, grouped in parallel phrases,
generally of four measures' length, he is able to proceed only by
more or less "vain repetitions." The result is a monotony, a flatness
and lack of contrast and relief, something like that of a wall-paper
with its endless re-presentations of a single pattern. This defect is
especially felt in the development sections of his first movements and
finales, in which he has, by the compulsion of circumstances, to forego
the charm of melodic novelty. In the allegro of the first quartet, the
development is founded on two or three patterns, many times reiterated
in various keys. The first movement of the piano quartet, in spite
of its harmonic originality, is open to the same criticism, as are
also, in fact, most of the development sections in all four of the
symphonies. A welcome contrast is found in the corresponding parts of
the first movement in the quintet, where an ingenious "diminution" of
the theme gives opportunity for much genuine variation, and of the
finale of the concerto, with its inexhaustible fertility of rhythms
and melodic figures. It must be added, also, that even when Schumann
is most helplessly shackled to his initial themes, these are of such
intrinsic beauty that the effect is infinitely to be preferred to that
of more skilful mediocrity.
Next to the primordial charm of his melodies, his most efficient aid in
the solution of the problem is his instinct for counterpoint, with all
its matchless power to vitalize the musical tissue. This instinct was
educated by a long and earnest study of Bach. As early as 1829 he made
thorough acquaintance with the "Well-tempered Clavichord." In 1832 he
writes: "I have taken the fugues one by one, and dissected them down to
their minutest parts. The advantage of this is great, and seems to have
a strengthening effect on one's whole system; for Bach was a thorough
man. There is nothing sickly or stunted about him, and his works seem
written for eternity." One of the most striking passages in the letters
is that which acknowledges the supreme importance of such study to the
romantic composers. "Haydn and Mozart," he says, "had only a partial
and imperfect knowledge of Bach, and we can have no idea how Bach,
had they known him in all his greatness, would have affected their
creative powers. Mendelssohn, Bennett, Chopin, Hiller, in fact all the
so-called romantic school, approach Bach far more nearly in their music
than Mozart ever did: indeed all of them know Bach most thoroughly.
I myself confess my sins daily to that mighty one, and endeavor to
purify and strengthen myself through him." Besides this general
purification and strengthening of his musical thought, Schumann found
in Bach an invaluable antidote for his wayward, youthful subjectivism;
for Bach is of all composers the most deeply and abstractly musical,
the most thoroughly founded on natural tonal laws, the least infected
with extraneous ideals and meretricious methods. His art is wholly
objective, quite universal; he makes no concession to vulgarity or to
insensibility, and his taste is as exacting as his skill is impeccable.
Technically, too, he gave Schumann, too long habituated to the narrow
scope and rigid rhythmical balance of the lyrical forms, just the
emancipation, the mental liberation and broadening, which he needed.
The way of escape from the prosodic monotony of the song lies through
polyphony, through the conceiving of music as a group or bundle of
melodies each of which has its own vitality and its own provocation
to fancy. Once the composer learns to follow each strand in this
web, for its own sake, and to attain coherence by the persistence
of characteristic motives of all types, rather than by a slavish
alternation of phrase and equal counter-phrase, the creation widens in
his view, and he writes with a hitherto undreamed-of elasticity.
The wholesome influence of the polyphonic or contrapuntal habit of
mind makes itself felt very early in Schumann's works, even in the
piano pieces of the first period. Oscar Bie detects its earliest
manifestations in opuses 13 and 14, but it is certainly noticeable
in the "Impromptus," opus 5. The very scheme of this work, which is a
set of variations on a fixed bass quite as much as on the "Romance" of
Clara Wieck, suggests the Bach standpoint. The dexterous weaving of
motives in sections four and eight show the same spirit. Above all, the
fugato in the finale, with its bold contour and its steadily cumulative
sonority and thematic interest, and with its striking stretto (see the
figure), not only gives evidence of minute study, but is a far from
unskilful imitation of a great model.
[Illustration: score]
[Illustration: score]
Theme and Stretto from the Finale of the Impromptus, opus 5.
Figure X.
The habitual use of the sequence, the canon, and even the fugato,
though always in an impressionistic, romantic vein, also presses itself
constantly upon our attention. Such contrapuntal habits soon became
instinctive and unconscious with Schumann. "In my latest compositions,"
he remarks in 1838, "I often hear many things that I cannot explain.
It is most extraordinary how I write almost everything in canon, and
then only detect the imitation afterwards, and often find inversions,
rhythms in contrary emotion, etc." But the explanation is given by a
sentence in the same letter: "Bach is my daily bread; he comforts me
and gives me new ideas."
So beneficent in the small pieces, the inspiration of the Bach
polyphony became invaluable in the larger works. To it are traceable
the supreme passages in the symphonies, such as the profoundly
thoughtful introduction of the C-major, with the rugged dissonances
resulting from the superposing of the call of horns and trumpets upon
the inexorable progression of the strings, the insistently climactic
introduction of the D-minor, and the entire movement in the E-flat
major known as the "Cathedral Scene," which is surely not the least
of the monuments of Gothic art, though its massive pediments and
soaring arches are carved of immaterial tones. In his three essays
in the string quartet, the most exacting of all mediums, Schumann's
contrapuntal skill is less secure. Failing often to conceive the
inner voices independently, he falls into a jerkiness resulting from
the constant stoppages of the little phrases; instead of letting the
melodies germinate and soar, he constricts them within a predetermined
harmonic mould; and the wall-paper patterns inevitably creep in. But in
the quartet with piano and still more in the quintet, the contrapuntal
stimulus is again efficiently felt. From the soaring imitations of the
first page to the two exciting fugatos in the coda of the finale, one
on the theme of that movement, and the other, by a happy inspiration,
on the theme of the opening allegro, structurally rounding out the
entire work, the music bubbles and throbs with melody.
One other great work there is, belonging to this period, which for
fecundity of invention, luxuriant richness of coloring, and stoutness
of structure deserves to rank with the quintet, if not above it.
This is the piano concerto in A-minor, begun in 1841 and completed
in 1845,--that is to say, written in the brief prime of Schumann's
troubled life, when his powers had been marshalled and coordinated by
discipline, and before they had become blighted by disease. It is thus
quite up to his early standard in the matter of freshness of melody,
rhythmic animation, and exotic gorgeousness of harmony, and at the same
time far more firmly knit, more justly proportioned, and more flexibly
conceived than the piano sonatas or the string quartets. The sincerity,
tenderness, grace, and impetuous enthusiasm of the youthful romanticist
are not in the least abated. What could be more contagious than the
exuberant first movement, in which one hardly knows which to admire
the more, the felicity of such details as the clarinet cantabile, the
Andante expressivo for solo piano, and the nobly polyphonic cadenza, or
the broadly climactic plan of the whole? What could appeal more simply
and directly to the heart than the delicate and yet ecstatic Andante
grazioso, with its winding intermeshed melodies, clustering about the
violoncello phrases as a grapevine festoons itself upon a tree? Yet
perfectly wedded with all this feminine suavity and grace is a more
masculine quality, a fine poise, restraint, reservation of force, which
counteracts all tendency to feverishness, and gives the work a sort of
impersonal dignity and beauty at the opposite pole from the perverse
individualism of the "Davidsbündlertänze" and the "Carnaval." One feels
that the composer, no longer the victim of his moods, is shaping his
work with the serene detachment of the artist. Particularly manifest
is this new mastery in the rhythmical treatment of the finale. The
rhythms here are as salient, as seizing, as ever, but they are far more
various. The contrast between the strongly "three-beat" quality of the
initial motif, (_a_) in Figure XI, and the cross accent of twos in the
second theme (_b_), is a stroke of positive genius.
[Illustration: score]
(_a_)
[Illustration: score]
(_b_)
[Illustration: score]
(_c_)
Figure XI.
One should note also the subtlety with which the regular three-beat
meter is gradually resumed after the interregnum (_c_ in the figure).
Indeed, to do justice to the plastic beauty of this movement would
require nothing less than a measure-by-measure analysis of its
charmingly varied phraseology. To play it after the "Abegg Variations"
is like passing from a schoolboy's singsong delivery of "The Boy Stood
on the Burning Deck" to the reading of an ode of Shelley or a sonnet of
Keats.
In our desire to comprehend how much Schumann gained by his study of
Bach and other great masters of composition (such as his contemporary,
Mendelssohn, for instance, whose perfection of form he vainly tried
to emulate, possibly to the disadvantage of his own originality), we
must not fail to note certain indications that his enthusiasm sometimes
overleaped itself. A strong will like his easily falls, by the overuse
or abuse of special artistic devices, into mannerisms; and he, with
his fondness for sequences, inversions, canons, and other contrapuntal
traits, did not escape this danger. So long as he used these tools with
a certain romantic freedom and geniality, inspired by their spirit
rather than enslaved by their letter, as he uses for example the canon
in the andante of the piano quartet, the device of diminution in the
development section of the first movement of the quintet, and the
fugato in the finale of the same, they enriched and guided his fancy.
But when he writes canonically throughout a whole movement, as in the
scherzo of the D-minor Trio or the third movement of the F-major Trio,
when he puts upon his genius the manacles of strict counterpoint, as
in the Studies in Canon Form for Pedal Piano, opus 56, and in the Four
Fugues, opus 72, above all when he indulges, as in the organ fugues on
B-A-C-H, in those inversions and retrogressions of themes dear to the
schoolmen, then learning becomes baneful, and music degenerates into a
pedantic exercise.
A far more insidious and fatal blight than such occasional pedantry was
now, however, beginning to overspread his music. The story of the long,
gradual eclipse and final extinction some years before death, by the
ravages of physical and mental disease, of a genius which had dawned
so brightly and reached its meridian in such ample and yet tempered
splendor, is one of the most pathetic chapters in the history of art.
The exact nature of the disease was somewhat obscure, but the basis of
it seems to have been a tendency, inherited from the mother, toward
abnormal activity of the brain, and a resulting congestion, distention
of the blood-vessels, and final ossification of cerebral tissue,
carrying with it mental paralysis and degeneration. The trouble was no
doubt aggravated by overwork and by the constant excitement of musical
composition. A peculiar feature was its reaction on Schumann's spirits.
Generally this sort of cerebral atrophy is attended by unreasoning high
spirits, a baseless self-satisfaction uncanny to observe but merciful
to the sufferer. But Schumann's native moral force and mental power
were so great that he struggled with his fate as a lesser man would
not have done; and the result of the unequal fight was a terrible
melancholy, sinking sometimes into a blank lethargy of depression,
and rising at other times into acute despair. It was in one of these
frenzied moments that, in February, 1854, he attempted to drown himself
in the Rhine. Rescued from suicide, he had for safety's sake to be put
in an asylum, where after two years of merely vegetative existence, he
died on July 29, 1856.
This deep-seated physical disability is responsible for the curious
impotence of those compositions which he so restlessly produced all
through the afflicted years. Such things as the violin sonata, opus
121, the "Introduction and Allegro Appassionata," opus 92, the Concert
Allegro, opus 134, and the overtures "Julius Caesar," "Braut von
Messina," and "Hermann und Dorothea," negligible from the artistic
standpoint, are as human documents deeply pathetic. In them we see the
crippled master in fruitless travail. The intention is always noble,
the old fire flashes out now and then, the ideal of expression is the
same as ever, but the path from will to act is clogged, the musical
fancy is paralyzed; and all that results is page after dreary page of
rigidly unchanging rhythms, stagnant harmonies, manufactured melodies,
and climaxes that reach no goal. Particularly saddening is it to note
the hysterical character of the emotional passages. In the overture to
"Manfred," one of his immortal masterpieces, he showed once for all his
marvellous power for impassioned expression. Alas! that in the fever
of sickness he was goaded to parody his own immortal work in futile
replicas that imitate its qualities only to trivialize them.
It is a relief to turn from the sorry spectacle of these galvanic
twitchings of the once so virile intellect to the one happy episode
that lightens this period of gloom. This was the coming of Brahms in
1853. In order to understand fully what the apparition of a youth of
so pure and high a genius meant to Schumann, we must remember the
depth and unselfishness of his love for art, the lifelong labors he
had undertaken in order to purify public taste, the grim and often
single-handed battle he had waged against Philistinism and mediocrity.
Composition, the service of the gods of music at their inmost shrine,
had been only one aspect of his life; the other side had been his
literary and editorial labors, in which, like a true priest, he had
gone forth to spread the faith among heretics and idolaters. The _New
Journal of Music_, which he founded in 1834, had for its object, in
his own words, "the elevation of German taste and intellect by German
art, whether by pointing to the great models of old time, or by
encouraging younger talents." "The musical situation," he wrote some
years afterwards, "was not then very encouraging. On the stage Rossini
reigned, at the pianoforte nothing was heard but Herz and Hünten; and
yet but a few years had passed since Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert
had lived amongst us. One day the thought awakened in a wild heart,
'Let us not look on idly; let us also lend our aid to progress, let
us bring again the poetry of art to honor among men.'" The proposal
thus made, in a spirit of altruistic devotion to art unhappily too
rare among creative musicians, was faithfully carried out in a series
of appreciative, generally discriminating, and always entertaining
articles on such men as Mendelssohn, Gade, Bennett, Franz, Henselt,
Heller, Berlioz, Liszt, Thalberg, and Moscheles, alternating with
others of a more historical or general character, always wise, fair,
suggestive, and pleasantly pointed with humor, wit, and the play of
that irresponsible fancy which revelled in Jean Paul and created the
_Davidsbund_.
One of the most touching features of the _New Journal_, to a reader of
to-day, is the almost too generous kindliness of its judgments, the
eager enthusiasm with which it proclaims the advent of geniuses who
have already fallen into oblivion. Its editor proceeded so heartily
on the principle that it is wiser to encourage the good than to
discourage the bad that he often "discovered" nonentities only to
have them left helpless on his hands. The experience must have been
disappointing to the most sanguine. Seldom as he condemns, too, he must
frequently have had the petty egotists swarming and buzzing about him,
black flies and gnats in human form, such as will beset the stanchest
crusader. To one engaged in so humane and disinterested a task, and
pursuing it through such annoyances, the advent of a true genius like
Brahms must have been the most joyful of events. Schumann at once
recognized and welcomed it. When Brahms, then a tow-headed, high-voiced
boy of twenty, arrived from Hamburg with a parcel of manuscripts, he
gave him, in the famous article, "New Paths," the most royal greeting a
neophyte has ever received from a brother musician. "He has come, the
chosen youth, over whose cradle the Graces and the Heroes seem to have
kept watch. May the Highest Genius help him onward! Meanwhile another
genius--that of modesty--seems to dwell within him. His Comrades greet
him at his first step in the world, where wounds may perhaps await
him, but also the bay and the laurel." "It is a fitting reward,"
says Mr. Hadow, "that the voice which had so often been raised in
commendation of lesser men should devote its last public utterance to
the honor of Johannes Brahms."
Indeed, despite the struggles of his youth, the hardships and
disappointments of his manhood, and the cruel affliction that maimed
and killed him before his time, Schumann's destiny, look at it with but
sufficient largeness, was a happy one. It is not given to men to attain
their ideals; and in this respect, as in so many others, he was most
human. His life, in its mere actualities, is, like all lives, a thing
of incomplete beginnings, disappointed hopes, defeated or unrealized
aspirations. But to look at the individual is to see but a partial, and
therefore a distorted and misleading, picture. Only in his relations
to others, in his service to the common good, in the seeds of social
benefit which he plants and the ways of social progress which he
discovers, is his true life to be found. If he has wrought faithfully,
purely, single-mindedly, his work will suggest and imply more than it
attains; and it will partake by virtue of this suggestion in all future
attainment of the same kind. All Schumann's work tends in the direction
of what is highest and most beautiful in music. Much he achieved,
but much more he realized only as an ideal realizes that to which it
points, and in some sense gives it solid reality in the world. Whenever
and wherever men pursue what is pure, high, fresh, noble, and fair in
music, there the spirit of Schumann will be at work.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] "Early Letters of Robert Schumann," trans. by M. Herbert, London,
1888, pp. 113, 118.
[4] In German the terminology of letters standing for tones is richer
than in English. B is our B-flat, while H stands for our B-natural; Es
is E-flat; As, A-flat, etc.
[5] See page 128 for Schumann's comment on this motto.
[6] The remarkable story of this courtship is told at length in "Clara
Schumann, Ein Künstlerleben," by Berthold Litzmann, Zweiter Band,
Leipsic, 1906. It has also been vividly sketched in English by Mr.
Richard Aldrich, in an article in _Music_, vol. 18.
[7] Eve of a wedding day.
[8] H, it will be remembered, stands in German for the note B-natural,
which makes the musical interval of a fifth with E.
[9] "Clara Schumann, Ein Künstlerleben," by Berthold Litzmann,
1903-1906.