SCHUBERT

Excepting during his lifetime and for a period of some thirty years

after his death, Schubert cannot be said to have been neglected; and

last year there was quite an epidemic of concerts to celebrate the

hundredth anniversary of his birth. Centenary celebrations are often a

little disconcerting. They remind one that a composer has been dead

either a much shorter or a much longer time than one supposed; and one

gets down Riemann's "Musical Dictionary" and realises with a sigh that

the human memory is treacherous. Who, for instance, that is familiar

with Schubert's music can easily believe that it is a hundred years

since the composer was born and seventy since he died? It is as

startling to find him, as one might say, one of the ancients as it is

to remember that Spohr lived until comparatively recent times; for

whereas Spohr's music is already older than Beethoven's, older than

Mozart's, in many respects quite as old as Haydn's, much of Schubert's

is as modern as Wagner's, and more modern than a great deal that was

written yesterday. This modernity will, I fancy, be readily admitted

by everyone; and it is the only one quality of Schubert's music which

any two competent people will agree to admit. Liszt had the highest

admiration for everything he wrote; Wagner admired the songs, but

wondered at Liszt's acceptance of the chamber and orchestral music.

Sir George Grove outdoes Liszt in his Schubert worship; and an

astonishing genius lately rushed in, as his kind always does, where

Sir George would fear to tread, boldly, blatantly asserting that

Schubert is "the greatest musical genius that the Western world has

yet produced." On the other hand, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw out-Wagners

Wagner in denunciation, and declares the C symphony childish, inept,

mere Rossini badly done. Now, I can understand Sir George Grove's

enthusiasm; for Sir George to a large extent discovered Schubert; and

disinterested art-lovers always become unduly excited about any art

they have discovered: for example, see how excited Wagner became about

his own music, how rapt Mr. Dolmetsch is in much of the old music. But

I can understand Wagner's attitude no better than I can the attitude

of Mr. Shaw. I should like to have met Wagner and have said to him,

"My dear Richard, this disparaging tone is not good enough: where did

you get the introduction to 'The Valkyrie'?--didn't that long tremolo

D and the figure in the bass both come out of 'The Erl-king'? has your

Spear theme nothing in common with the last line but one of 'The

Wanderer'? or--if it is only the instrumental music you object to--did

you learn nothing for the third act of 'The Valkyrie' from the

working-out of the Unfinished Symphony? did you know that Schubert had

used your Mime theme in a quartet before you? do you know that I could

mention a hundred things you borrowed from Schubert? Go to, Richard:

be fair." Having extinguished Richard thus, and made his utter

discomfiture doubly certain by handing him a list of the hundred

instances, I should turn to Mr. Shaw and say, "My good G.B.S., you

understand a good deal about politics and political economy,

Socialism, and Fabians, painting and actors [and so on, with untrue

and ill-natured remarks _ad lib_.], but evidently you understand very

little about Schubert. That 'Rossini crescendo' is as tragic a piece

of music as ever was written." Yet, after dismissing the twain in this

friendly manner, I should have an uneasy feeling that there was some

good reason for their lack of enthusiasm for Schubert. The very fact

of there being such wide disagreement about the value of music that is

now so familiar to us all, points to some weakness in it which some of

us feel less than others; and I, poor unhappy mortal, who in my

unexcited moments neither place Schubert among the highest gods, like

Liszt and Sir George Grove, nor damn him cordially, like Wagner and

Mr. Shaw, cannot help perceiving that along with much that is

magnificently strong, distinguished, and beautiful in his music, there

is much that is pitiably weak, and worse than commonplace. The music

is like the man--the oddest combination of greatness and smallness

that the world has seen. Like Wagner and Beethoven, Schubert was

strong enough to refuse to earn an honest living; yet he yielded

miserably to publishers when discussing the number of halfpence he

should receive for a dozen songs. He had energy enough to go on

writing operas, but apparently not intelligence to see that his

librettos were worth setting, or to ensure that anything should come

of them when they were set. He thought, rightly or wrongly, that he

needed more counterpoint, yet continued to compose symphonies and

masses without it, vaguely intending to the very end to take lessons

from a sound teacher. He had spirit enough to fall in love (so far as

stories may be relied on), but not to make the lady promise to marry

him, nor yet resolutely to cure himself of his affliction. He had

courage to face the truth, as he saw it, and he found life bitter, and

not worth enduring; yet he could not renounce it, like Beethoven, nor

end it as others have done. As in actual life, so in his music; having

once started anything, he seemed quite unable to make up his mind to

fetch it to a conclusion. He was like a man who lets himself roll down

a hill because it is easier to keep on rolling than to stop. He

repeats his melodies interminably, and then draws a double bar and

sets down the two fatal dots which mean that all has to be played

again. If the repeat had not been a favourite resort of lazy composers

before his time he would have invented it, not because he was lazy,

but because he wanted to go on and could not afford infinite

music-paper. Hence his music at its worst is the merest drivel ever

set down by a great composer; hence at anything but its best it lacks

concentrated passion and dramatic intensity; more than any other

composer's it has one prevailing note, a note of deepest melancholy;

and therefore, when a few pieces are known, most of the rest seem

barren of what is wanted by those who seek chiefly in music the

expression of all the human passions.

Of his lengthiness, his discursiveness, Schubert might possibly have

been cured, but not of his melancholy: it is the very essence of his

music, as it was of his being. "The Wanderer" is his typical song: he

was himself the wanderer, straying disconsolately, helplessly,

hopelessly through a strange, chilly, unreal world, singing the

saddest and sometimes the sweetest songs that ever entered the ears of

men. That his home and his happiness lay close at hand counts for

nothing; for he did not and could not know that he was the voice of

the eighteenth century, worn out and keenly sensible of the futility

of the purely intellectual life. Even had he arrived at a

consciousness of the truth that the cure for his despair lay in

throwing over the antiquated forms, modes, and ideas of the eighteenth

century and living a nineteenth century life, free and conscienceless

in nature's way, he would have been little better off; for the

tendencies of many generations remained strong in him; and besides,

had he the physical energy for a free, buoyant, joyous existence, was

he not physiologically unfit for happiness? He lived with an

ever-present consciousness of his impotence to satisfy his deepest

needs. He was even destitute of that sense of the immeasurable good to

come which of old time found expression in the fiction of a personal

immortality, and in the nineteenth century in the complacent

acceptance of full and vigorous life, with death as a noble and

fitting close. Life and death alike were tragic, because hopeless, to

Schubert. His career, if career it can be called, is infinitely

touching. His helplessness moves one to pity, odd though it seems that

one in some ways so strong should also in so many ways be so weak; and

his death was as touching as his life. Of all the composers he met

death with least heroism. Mozart, it is true, shrieked hysterically;

but death to his diseased mind was merely an indescribable horror; and

the fact of his hysteria proves his revolt against fate. Beethoven,

during a surgical operation shortly before the end, saw the stream of

water and blood flowing from him, and found courage to say, "Better

from the belly than the pen;" and as he lay dying and a thunderstorm

broke above the house, he threatened it with his clenched fist.

Schubert learnt that he was to die, and turned his face to the wall

and did not speak again. It is hard to say whether his music was

sadder when he sang of death than when he sang of life. Even in his

rare moments of good spirits one catches stray echoes of his

prevailing note, and realises how completely his despair dominated

him. He could not sing of love or fighting or of the splendours of

nature without betraying his deep conviction of the futility of all

created things. It is characteristic that his major melodies should

often be as sad and wailing as his minor, and that his scherzos and

other movements, in which he has deliberately set out to be

light-hearted, should often be ponderous and without the nervous

energy he manifests when he gives his familiar feelings free play.

Despite its incessant plaintive accent, his music is saved by the

endless flow of melody, often lovely, generally characteristic, though

sometimes common, in which Schubert continually expressed anew his one

mood; and he was placed among the great ones by the miraculous

facility he possessed of extemporising frequent passages of

extraordinary power and bigness. At least half of his songs are

poor--for a composer capable of rising to such heights; but of the

remainder at least half are nearly equal to any songs in the world for

sweetness, strength, and accurate expressiveness, while a few approach

so close to Handel's and Mozart's that affection for the composer

presses one hard to put them on the same level. But, compared with

those high standards, Schubert, even at his best, is unmistakably felt

to be second-rate, while his average--always comparing it with the

highest--cannot truly be said to be more than fourth-rate. That he

stands far above Mendelssohn and Schumann, and perhaps a little above

Weber, almost goes without saying; for those composers have no more of

the great style, the style of Handel and Mozart, and Bach and

Beethoven at their finest, than Schubert, and they lack the lovely

irresistibly moving melody and the bigness. But it must be recognised

that Schubert never rose to a style of sustained grandeur and dignity;

he was always colloquial, paying in this the penalty for the extreme

facility with which he composed ("I compose every morning, and when I

have finished one thing I commence something fresh"). Compose is

scarcely the word to use: he never composed in the ordinary sense of

the word; he extemporised on paper. Even when he re-wrote a song, it

meant little more than that, dissatisfied with his treatment of a

theme, he tried again. He never built as, for instance, Bach and

Beethoven built, carefully working out this detail, lengthening this

portion, shearing away that, evolving part from part so that in the

end the whole composition became a complete organism. There is none of

the logic in his work that we find in the works of the tip-top men,

none of the perfect finish; but, on the contrary, a very considerable

degree of looseness, if not of actual incoherence, and many marks of

the tool and a good deal of the scaffolding. But, in spite of it all,

the greatness of many of his movements seems to me indisputable. In a

notice of "The Valkyrie," Mr. Hichens once very happily spoke of the

"earth-bigness" of some of the music, and this is the bigness I find

in Schubert at his best and strongest. When he depicts the workings of

nature--the wind roaring through the woods, the storm above the

convent roof, the flash of the lightning, the thunderbolt--he does not

accomplish it with the wonderful point and accuracy of Weber, nor with

the ethereal delicacy of Purcell, but with a breadth, a sympathy with

the passion of nature, that no other composer save Wagner has ever

attained to. He views natural phenomena through a human temperament,

and so infuses human emotion into natural phenomena, as Wagner does in

"The Valkyrie" and "Siegfried." The rapidly repeated note, now rising

to a roar and now falling to a subdued murmur, in "The Erl-king" was

an entirely new thing in music; and in "The Wanderer" piano fantasia,

the working-out of the Unfinished symphony, and even in some of the

chamber music, he invented things as fresh and as astounding. And when

he is simply expressing himself, as at the beginning of the

Unfinished, and in the first and last movements of the big C symphony,

he often does it on the same large scale. The second subject of the C

symphony finale, with its four thumps, seems to me to become in its

development, and especially in the coda, all but as stupendous an

expression of terror as the music in the last scene of "Don Giovanni,"

where Leporello describes the statue knocking at the door. In short,

when I remember Schubert's grandest passages, and the unspeakable

tenderness of so many of his melodies, it is hard to resist the

temptation to cancel all the criticism I have written and to follow

Sir George Grove in placing Schubert close to Beethoven.