CHAPTER VIII

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Art-song and the romantic spirit--Precursors of

Schubert--Schubert’s contribution to song; Schubert’s

poets--Classification of Schubert’s songs--Faults and

virtues--The songs in detail; the cycles--Schubert’s

contemporaries.

If the art-song begins with Franz Schubert there are two reasons for

it. The first is the comparatively accidental one that Schubert was

the greatest of lyric geniuses--the song writer _par excellence_. The

second is that just as he arrived upon the scene the romantic element

in music began to gain the upper hand.

For modern song is nine-tenths a romantic product. There might be

such a thing as a classic art-song, but its existence is hardly more

than hypothetical. Almost by definition the art-song is opposed to

what we call the ‘classic’ spirit in music. For the art-song, let us

recall, is, above all, a personal, detailed expression. It is intimate,

subjective, predominantly emotional. The classic spirit (in music as

well as in the other arts) avoids the emotion that is too personal and

too subjective as something immodest--much as a young girl would avoid

telling the details of her love affairs to strangers. The classic is

always inclined to stress the formal elements. But the very definition

of the _durchkomponiertes Lied_ (which is almost synonymous with the

term ‘art-song’) is that it does not adhere to a common form, being

free to formulate itself according to the requirements of the text.

It must be more than a coincidence, then, that Schubert, the master

song-writer, came at a time when music was bursting forth into

romantic expression. Romantic song could not have been born much

earlier. For music, as an instrument of emotional expression, did not

come to maturity much earlier. Emotion we do find expressed in Haydn

and Mozart certainly, but it is subordinate, restrained, and not very

precise. It rarely seems to be the prime object of the music. The prime

object seems rather to be the giving of pleasure through the beauty of

musical patterns. The music must not be obviously inappropriate to the

words of an aria, but it is not thought of as expressing their sense in

itself. The movements of a Mozart symphony may have for us some mild

emotional connotation; but in the composer’s mind, in all probability,

it was not the emotion which germinated the music, but the music which

germinated the emotion. The music of the long period before Schubert

was predominantly formal. It became increasingly complex and refined.

It greatly enlarged musical technique and the means of expression. From

the emotional point of view the eighteenth century was _storing up_ the

technical materials which the nineteenth was destined to _use up_.

It was Beethoven who developed the expressive power of music to its

grandest proportions. Never has emotion been shown more powerful,

beauty more dignified, than in his symphonies. The art of music, as

it passed from his hands into those of younger men, was a grand and

universal instrument, equal to any emotional demand men might want to

make upon it. But, if Beethoven had developed all these capacities in

music, he had by no means used them all. Emotion in his music is that

of the epic poet, broad and grand, rather than that of the lyricist,

personal and subtle. He had developed his instrument to marvellous

perfection. He had played upon it only a few of its tunes. The greatest

of the classicists, he was the man who taught the romanticists their

trade. He indicated how music could be used primarily for emotional

expression. But the doing of it he necessarily left largely to those

who came after.

Among the first and the greatest of these was Schubert. He was born to

sing. He loved a beautiful melody beyond anything else. In some ways

he was like a woman, responding with infinite tenderness and delicacy

to the impressions that came to him from without, divining shades of

feeling which a man can rarely catch.

And, just when this man came, burning to write personal and emotional

songs, Beethoven had forged the finished instrument for the purpose. By

this time all the conceptions of rhythm and design had been agreed upon

among musicians. The scales and the modes had been adopted, the sense

of the tonic deeply inculcated in every hearer, the independence of

all the keys had been established and their relation agreed upon. All

the ordinary positions of chords had been tested, and all the normal

progressions agreed upon. Composers had experimented with many forms

and had worked out the capacities of each. In short, men had come to

an almost complete agreement concerning the conventions of musical

technique. If this had not been so, it would not yet have been time

for romantic song. For, just as a poem can have no precise meaning

until all matters of words and syntax have been agreed upon, so music

cannot become accurately expressive while people are vague in their

minds about the identity of this or that chord. In the same way freedom

of form could have no meaning for people until the laws of form were

wholly understood. The subtleties of emotion could not be expressed

until people generally had begun to feel in music the emotions to be

subdivided.

The things that Schubert did with music in 1815 were hardly dreamt of

twenty years before. There were occasional foreshadowings, nothing

else. Mozart, always technically flawless, did not approach his full

creative maturity until toward his death, when he gave evidence of

becoming one of the greatest of innovators. And it is Mozart, whose

music Schubert knew well and admired beyond measure, who chiefly

foreshadowed romantic song before Beethoven’s great period. In the

famous ‘Statue’ scenes of _Don Giovanni_ Mozart seems suddenly to have

peeped into a whole new world of music--the world of primary emotional

expression. The same sense of half-discovered expressive possibilities

we catch in some of his later symphonies. And in his last opera, ‘The

Magic Flute,’ there are songs preserving the emotional richness of

the best German folk-songs. Such arias as _In diesen heil’gen Hallen_

or _Isis und Osiris_ are the last word in song before Schubert broke

through the bonds of form and established the _durchkomponiertes Lied_.

I

But song proper before Schubert is largely in the hands of men who by

no means hold a primary place in musical history. Of course, it can

nowhere be said to have a beginning. But we can sense the feeling for

romantic song as far back as the _Geistliche Lieder_ of Philipp Emanuel

Bach, published in the middle of the eighteenth century. The preface to

these songs is a remarkable document. Bach says that he has tried to

set fitting melodies to the words; that where the various stanzas of a

song were so different in spirit that a single melody could not express

both with equal faithfulness he has tried to strike an average between

all the stanzas and to compose the tune which will be most appropriate

to all; that he considers it unjust to the poem to compose a tune

which is suitable only to the first stanza, as is the usual practice;

and, finally, that he realizes that Gellert’s poems, being didactic,

are not of the sort best suited for musical settings, yet the high

earnestness of the poet’s work justifies musical treatment.

These remarks foreshadow the romantic spirit in more than one respect.

First, Bach recognizes the importance and integrity of the text: the

music exists in order to enhance the poem, not the poem in order to

sing the music. Next, Bach feels the power and the obligation to

express the spirit of the words in detail. Further, he clearly feels

the contradiction inherent in the strophic form--making one tune do

service for various dissimilar stanzas. Finally, he feels that song is

at its best when it is emotional. In all this he is entirely at one

with the romantic song writers, from Schubert on. In his criticism of

the strophic form he has put his finger on the central problem of the

art-song. It is true, his solution of the difficulty was different from

that of the romanticists, as was inevitable with a composer who came

half a century before the problem was ripe. But he shows in his preface

that he regards his solution as no more than tentative.

The songs themselves are not remarkable. They are much like the

_Geistliche Lieder_ of the composer’s great father, except that

a subtle and almost indefinable change has come over them in the

direction of the ‘intimate.’ They are short melodies, much like a

German chorale, except that they have a gentler, smoother movement.

The strophes are sometimes in one of the recognized melodic forms and

sometimes comparatively free. When closely compared they reveal not a

little individuality (which is undoubtedly what the composer was aiming

at), but, taken as a whole, they seem too much like short cantata arias

to suggest expressive song.

The real spirit of song was preserved in the German _singspiele_. These

were lively dramatic entertainments, interspersed with songs, like the

English ballad operas, except that the music was usually composed

especially for the piece. The _singspiele_ were not taken seriously by

the educated classes, hence the lightest kind of joyousness reigned in

them, and the music was that which would appeal most quickly to the

hearts of the people. The tunes were, in fact, generally as much like

true folk-songs as their composers could make them. _Singspiele_ were

written and performed by the hundreds during the eighteenth century.

Many of the more popular songs were remembered and sung by the people

as half-naturalized folk-songs, and the successful composers were

usually fertile producers of songs independent of the _singspiele_.

This was the true song-tradition of Germany before Schubert’s time.

It grew out of the art of the people and spoke familiarly to all. It

was a dignified and firmly established art institution, though it was

given hardly more recognition by the great musicians of the time than

the symphony composers of to-day give to operetta. The _singspiel_

folk-song type, moreover, was the type which was called into service

for the setting of the works of the standard poets of the time.

Zelter’s settings of Goethe’s poems were scarcely to be distinguished,

in point of form, from the songs that were sung in the cheap theatres.

Among the best of the _singspiel_ composers was Johann Adam Hiller

(1728-1804), also distinguished as the first director of the famous

Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig and as perhaps the first writer of true

_durchkomponierte Lieder_. His songs kept the popular flavor, but

strove for vigorous expression of the text and, in doing this, broke

out of the simple strophe or stanza form. The spirited character of

Hiller’s _singspiele_ is suggested by the names of some of them--‘The

Devil is Loose,’ ‘The Hunt,’ and ‘The Village Barber.’ Johann André

(d. 1799), fertile composer of _singspiele_, has a place alongside

of Hiller as a pioneer in that he was probably the first to adapt

the _durchkomponiert_ style to the ballad, setting Bürger’s famous

‘Lenore’ soon after it appeared in 1775. The true ballad style,

however, was more freely cultivated by Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg (d.

1802), commonly known as the inventor of the ballad form. He composed

settings for several poems to which Schubert and Löwe later set their

hands, notably Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ _Des Pfarrer’s Tochter_,

and _Ritter Toggenburg_. Johann Schulz, who was another prolific

_singspiel_ writer, is chiefly famous for his beautiful ‘Songs in the

Folk-Manner,’ which appeared between 1782 and 1790, when Herder’s

pioneer collection of _Volkslieder_ (words only) had just commenced to

create an interest in the subject of popular song.

But the most famous _singspiel_ composer of the time, and one of the

most interesting personalities among the lesser musicians, was Johann

Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814). Unlike most musicians of the age,

Reichardt was a man of wide interests and excellent education. At the

age of twenty-three he became royal choirmaster under Frederick the

Great at Berlin. But he was a radical by temperament and seems to have

caused the head that wore the crown to lie uneasy. His visits to Paris

gave him such a sympathy with the approaching French revolution that he

later lost his position in Berlin on account of his radical politics.

For a time he was choirmaster at Cassel to Jerôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s

brother, who was anxious to pose as a patron of art. Reichardt caught

the ‘folk-manner’ in his _singspiele_, but he was not a naïve musician

in the technical sense of the word. His choruses and concerted pieces

sometimes show a grace and artistry which suggests Mozart, and his

songs are always organically and artistically conceived. He set in

the simple strophe style some sixty of Goethe’s songs and Goethe’s

delightful _singspiel_, _Erwin und Elmire_ (as did also André). We must

give Reichardt praise for working in musicianly style, with a fresh

vein of melody and a graceful sense in the organizing of it. But we

should make a mistake if we gave him a very high place in the history

of the development of song, for Schubert’s earliest efforts tower far

above his and they surely owe but little to them.

[Illustration: Precursors of Schubert.

Top: Johann Zumsteeg and Johann Adam Hiller

Bottom: Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Carl Friedrich Zelter]

Schubert’s admiration for Zumsteeg and for his use of the ballad form

(to which we doubtless owe ‘The Erl King’) was extended to another song

writer of the time, Karl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832). This composer,

who did a notable service as director at the Berlin _Singakademie_,

was a personal friend of Goethe and had an extensive correspondence

with him, which has been preserved and published. He set a great number

of Goethe’s songs in the simple and unpretentious style of Reichardt.

This much pleased the poet, who was professedly not much of a musician.

In fact, it seems likely that Zelter frankly directed the great man’s

musical tastes. Zelter’s songs, some of which are still sung by German

singing societies, are spirited and musicianly. In their manly and

straightforward way they compel one’s liking. If they do not figure as

an element in musical history it is because their simple form offered

little that was of service to the genius of Schubert.

II

This genius was, along with that of Mozart, the most spontaneous

the world of music had ever seen. It seemed to work by a sort of

divination. Whereas Beethoven’s musical ideas developed slowly and

under great mental pressure from themes of little value, Schubert’s

songs often came into his mind almost in an instant complete from

beginning to end. From the age of thirteen (and probably earlier)

he was continually writing songs. Often he would compose as many as

three or four in a single morning, especially when he was unusually

pressed for money. Most of the time he did but little revising. If

the musical idea as it came was not of fine quality, then it could go

to the scrap-basket or to anybody who cared for it; there were plenty

more good tunes where that came from. Schubert’s supply of beautiful

melodies was inexhaustible. He never had to nurse and pet a tune in

order to get the maximum of musical service out of it. More than any

other song-writer Schubert ‘sings himself.’ And his songs, for the most

part, ‘wrote themselves.’ The poet would pick up a book on a friend’s

table and, discovering therein some lovely poems, would be seized by

musical settings for them. Sometimes he wrote as though in a trance.

The music seemed to come from some anterior source, and, passing

through his brain on its way to the paper, to make him intoxicated.

When he died at the age of thirty he left behind him some eleven

hundred musical works, of which more than six hundred were songs of all

descriptions. This was the product of scarcely more than fifteen years

of activity. It is obvious there could not have been much revision. But

this is hardly evidence that Schubert was incapable of self-criticism.

He had his favorites among his songs and doubtless realized that many

were as worthless as later generations have found them. And he did, in

certain cases, spend considerable effort in revision; there exist, for

instance, several different versions of ‘The Erl King’ in Schubert’s

handwriting. But his lack of revision was a result of his overpowering

fertility rather than of carelessness. If he kept on writing new songs

he might strike a masterpiece any time. Why waste his time polishing

second-rate pieces?

Briefly stated, what Schubert did for song was to establish it as one

of the great departments of music. We know what it was before his

time--an unpretentious amusement, considered appropriate chiefly for

the vaudeville theatres and the banquet tables of roistering students.

Among the educated classes song was loved, but hardly respected. The

great composers wrote songs only as bagatelles for their amusement or

for a special occasion. It was hardly realized that the song form,

so slight and so modest, could receive the burden of great ideas and

radical innovation.

Schubert, by force of genius, proved that the song could be as great

intensively as an opera or oratorio could be extensively; that to write

a perfect song was as difficult and worthy a task for a great artist

as to write an oratorio. To prove this he showered all the riches of

his artistic equipment on the song. First of all, he gave to it great

melodies. The melodies of the best art-songs before his time could

not be compared with the great melodies which musicians had put into

symphonies and operas. Musicians had felt that songs were not worthy of

their best melodies, but only of their second and third best. Schubert

gave to song his very best.

Next, Schubert chose (among his many texts) some of the greatest

short poems in German literature. Musicians previously had generally

considered the words a very unimportant part of vocal music. True, the

music of the eighteenth century (especially in Germany) is full of

exceptions to this rule, but the exceptions occur as if by accident

and prove that composers either didn’t care or didn’t know which texts

were better and which were worse. It is true, also, that Reichardt

Zelter, and others set the poems of Goethe to music, but their settings

were unpretentious and hardly aspired to be in themselves adequate to

express Goethe’s thoughts. With Schubert, for the first time, we find

the greatest poetry married to the greatest music. It must be admitted,

also, that Schubert’s taste was not highly critical in the matter of

poetry. Among his six hundred songs are a great many with insipid or

pompous words. But some of these texts were written by Schubert’s

personal friends (such as his room-mate Mayrhofer) and were set as

a personal compliment. Further, Schubert, who worked daily, did not

always find the best of poems at hand, and was obliged to take what he

could get, though he probably knew which were better and which were

worse. And, finally, he was generally best inspired by the best poems,

which should be a proof of his sensitiveness to poetic excellence. At

any rate, one finds the texts of Schubert’s songs almost an anthology

of the best German lyrical poems written in the century before his

death. And with some of the verses is music that seems to have been

made by one and the same master artist to fit for all time. On the

whole, though Schubert was not a man educated in _belles lettres_, he

showed a vivid appreciation of poetic excellence which has been a mark

of great song writers ever since.

Next, Schubert showed a marvellous sense of poetry in music. The music

before him had been, as we have said, predominantly formal. With

Beethoven it had reached its most perfect formal development and with

the symphony and sonatas of Beethoven’s later years broke through

formal bonds in its search after more intense expression. The violent

conflict between form and expression is the glory (and to some minds

the defect) of Beethoven’s later work. But Schubert in his songs seems

to feel nothing of this struggle. It is as though he had been born on

the other side; as though Beethoven had done the fighting for him.

Or it is as though a mountain stream had struggled through rocks and

over a precipice to reach the quiet level of the plains below. With

Schubert we feel only joyous spontaneous expression of the words. The

expressive resources of music which his forerunners had prepared are

laid at his feet, and from them he chooses with wonderful acuteness

the details and devices he needs. This sense of poetry could hardly be

found in the songs of Reichardt and Zelter. Sung with the words their

music would doubtless seem appropriate. But played without the words to

point the meaning they would seem pleasing but colorless. On the other

hand, if you play the songs of Schubert on the piano you will get, to

a surprising degree, the feelings conveyed by the words. It is not too

much to say that before Schubert song music was appropriate only; with

Schubert song became _expressive_.

Finally, Schubert gave to the art-song that freedom of form which has

been a characteristic of it ever since. Not that he was the first to

write the _durchkomponierte_ song or any of the other freer forms, but

he was the first with the genius necessary to establish such forms

(or formlessness) for all time. Schubert’s predecessors had not been

pedants. Within their limited capacities some of them had been genuine

poets of sentiment. But form had nevertheless retained its hold on

the spirit of their song writing. The regular recurrence of measured

lines, or the building up of the song according to a scheme of regular

repetitions or alterations, had been to them a matter of second nature

(except when a Hiller or a Zumsteeg tentatively broke through for

experiment’s sake). Such a song as Schubert’s _Aufenthalt_ or the early

‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,’ in which there is no discoverable

scheme yet a most cogent unity, would have been hardly conceivable to

these early pioneers.

Schubert, then, with a marvellous fund of melody, a sense of poetic

values in words and music, and a free instinct for expressive form,

did for the song what Haydn had done for the symphony--put it on the

musical map. He was able to do this not alone because he was a great

musician, but because there were great poets in Germany whose lyrics he

could set. Let us see who and of what character these poets were.

The poets whom Schubert set to music (over 100 in all) represent

several stages of a tremendous upheaval in German life and

literature--roughly, the period of the French Revolution and the

Napoleonic wars. For convenience we may divide them into three

classes--the ‘Storm and Stress’ poets, the Romantic poets, and the

‘young-German’ poets. The _Sturm und Drang_, or ‘Storm and Stress,’

tendency was the German equivalent of the pre-revolutionary upheaval

among the educated classes of France. Its ideal was that of the highest

perfection for the individual--personal rights rather than social

duties. The so-called Romantic movement (in the narrower meaning of

the term) was at its height during Napoleon’s period of power. It

was double. On the one hand, it was _Sturm und Drang_, individualism

carried to its extreme, with a high premium set on the imagination and

a morbid interest in what we should to-day call ‘psychology.’ On the

other hand, it was the growth of the social and national spirit which

aroused a sense of nationalism in Germany under Napoleon’s tyranny

and enabled the Germans gloriously to shake off the French yoke. The

third period, in which Schubert did most of his actual work, was that

of disillusionment, when the liberal dreams of the German enthusiasts

had been met by the stupid reactionism of the German princes and

the Congress of Vienna. The German uprising against Napoleon had

been synonymous in the minds of most with a movement toward liberal

institutions and political freedom. Under the royal houses of Germany

the people were forced back, at the point of the sword, to a state

little better than mediævalism. The poets of the ‘young-German’

movement saw that the dreams of the previous generation had been made a

fiasco and turned to cynicism, with just a shadow of a bitter dream of

vengeance stored up for the future.

The great poets of the _Sturm und Drang_ movement were, of course,

Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, one of the most universal minds the

world has ever known, was able to enter into a situation or a human

emotion so intensely that he was an ideal lyric poet. His command

over the music of the German language was complete. All Germany was

dazzled by the wealth of color and nuance which he found in life and

reflected in his poetry. Schiller was in every way his inferior. His

inflated rhetoric always stole the lyric quality from his poems, which

never pictured truth, either outer or inner. But by the sheer energy

of his spirit Schiller was a man of the time. It is worth noting that

though Schubert set nearly fifty of his texts, not a single masterpiece

resulted. For there is in Schiller, properly considered, little or

nothing to inspire a genuinely lyric poet. And, as is often the case

in lyric poetry, the minor men do some of the best work. Some of

Schubert’s best texts are supplied by Claudius, Schubart, Stollberg,

and Hölty, minor members of the fraternity which stirred up all Germany

to the expectation of a profound revolution. These men were crying

out against the vices of the aristocracy, or praising the simple

life of the peasants, as Herder had taught them. Their songs were a

glorification of the individual, proclaiming the intensity and beauty

of his spontaneous feelings--ideal lyric material.

The era of the Napoleonic wars brought a new generation of poets

to Germany. It was the period when the vision of great deeds was

stirring every one to demonstrate his own power. This side of the

movement, represented in Schubert’s songs by the brothers Schlegel,

was decidedly morbid. But there was another side. For Napoleonic

oppression had aroused a new sense of dignity and national solidarity

in German hearts, and there arose a group of poets to sing of it. Most

typical is Körner, author of the famous sword song, who volunteered

for the army, saying to his father: ‘Germany is rising; my art sighs

for her fatherland’--and died in battle. This adoption by art of a

new fatherland was signalized by a new return of poetry to all that

was popular and traditional in German life and history. It is to this

inspiration that we owe poems by Uhland and Müller, which Schubert set

to music.

The third era was that of disillusionment, when Platen could write

‘... man kann hienieden

Nichts Schlech’res als ein Deutscher sein.’

The lyric poetry of the time became either a cynical grasping of

selfish interests, as often in Heine, or a renunciation of the outer

word, a peace which is to be found in contemplation and humble love, as

in Rückert.

In translation, also, Schubert was familiar with the work of certain

foreign poets, notably Shakespeare and Walter Scott. To the inspiration

of the former we owe at least two masterpieces, ‘Who Is Sylvia?’ and

‘Hark, Hark, the Lark!’ From the latter we have the wonderful ‘Ave

Maria.’ We should not forget, also, the songs of Ossian, now almost

forgotten. These were forgeries (in all probability) by a Scotch

schoolmaster, purporting to be translations from the Gaelic of the

songs of the minstrel Ossian, who had been no more than a tradition for

centuries. The literary world took them in earnest, and such men as

Goethe became enthusiastic over their wild and rugged imagery. But to

us they seem rhetorical and far removed from the simplicity of genuine

folk-poetry. And Schubert seems to have felt this, for, though he set

eight of the long Ossian songs, not one of his settings is memorable.

Again the absence of the true lyric spark had left him cold.

[Illustration: Poets of the Romantic Period.

Top: Goethe and Hugo

Bottom: Schiller and Heine]

III

Among Schubert’s songs we find an extraordinarily wide range of form

and subject-matter--so wide that all song writers since his time have

not been able much to enlarge it. We have said that he was the first to

apply musical genius to the _durchkomponiertes Lied_. But he was not a

specialist in this form. He seems to have had no especial preferences,

but to have been guided by the nature of his poem. A number of his

songs are in the strophe form--simply contrasting phrases of the music

forming the tune, which is repeated without change for each stanza of

the words, as in the simple folk-tune type. Of this class are some

of Schubert’s best songs, such as ‘The Heather Rose,’ ‘The Fisher,’

‘Praise of Tears,’ ‘Wandering,’ ‘The Brook’s Lullaby,’ ‘Hark, Hark, the

Lark!’[20] and many others.

Next we find what we might call the ‘developed strophe’ form, in which

the simple stanza organization is preserved in spirit, but some change

enters into the make-up of the whole song in accordance with the

demands of the text. Examples of this are the famous _Du bist die Ruh_,

in which the final strophe is much altered to express the intenser

feelings of the poet; or the _Gute Nacht_, from the _Winterreise_

series, in which the melody of one stanza is sung in the major to

convey the contrasting effect of calmness; or the ‘Serenade,’ in which

the repeated strophe is followed by a free coda necessary to give

completeness to the idea. In the class of the ‘developed strophe’ form

we might group such pieces as ‘Her Portrait,’ which repeats the main

strophe after a contrasting middle section. Or there are such songs

as ‘By the Sea,’[1] which are almost in the strict strophe form, but

varied here and there in some minor detail, proving that however much

Schubert felt the beauty of form he did not feel its dogma.

Finally, there is the quite free or _durchkomponierte_ form. The

examples of this are innumerable in Schubert’s works: we recall

easily the famous _Aufenthalt_ (‘Abode’) and _Doppelgänger_ (‘The

Double’),[21] _Der Wanderer_, and _Das Wirtshaus_. In these songs

there is every variation from a deceptive strophic form to the utmost

dissimilarity, and yet there remains always a _sense_ of unity which is

the work of a master.

Besides the pure lyrics Schubert wrote ballads and scenas. The former

are simply stories told in verse. Unlike the lyric, the ballad is

highly objective, seeing the characters as things apart and as

acting for themselves; yet like the lyric it is highly sympathetic

with emotions, and sometimes identifies itself alternately with one

character and another as completely as though it were a lyric. This is

because of the dramatic quality implicit in every story,--a quality

which is particularly attractive to the primitive imagination. The

ballad, in short, is a miniature drama, in which the characters speak

in their own words with each other, and in which rapid and vigorous

action is abundant. Examples of this form in Schubert’s songs are

Schiller’s ‘The Diver,’ and of course ‘The Erl King.’

We should also distinguish a third class of songs--the _scena_. This

is a combination of the lyric and the ballad; it is essentially an

emotional utterance, but it usually pictures the characters and the

scene, and often involves some sort of dramatic action. The Ossian

Songs partake of the nature of the _scena_, but the best example

is Schiller’s _Erwartung_, in which the singer is waiting for his

sweetheart to come to him, and is beguiled by various noises of the

night into thinking it is she.

The scenas and the ballads involve not a little of the declamatory

style, which is quite unlyrical. Declamation in song is familiar to

us in the recitatives of the older operas, but declamation in the

true sense is more melodious than dry recitative. It is, in fact,

genuine melody, with all elements of melodic beauty, except that it is

independent of strict measure and rhythm, receiving all its accents

from the words which it follows with greatest nicety. The possibilities

of this style of music have only begun to be developed in the last

two or three decades. In Schubert declamation is usually on the right

track, but is pretty likely to be uninteresting. We must make an

exception, however, of such masterly bits of declamation as the last

line of ‘The Erl King,’ in which the half-spoken announcement, ‘Lo,

in his arms the child was dead,’ closes the ballad abruptly and seems

to frame it off from the workaday world; or the last line of ‘The

Wanderer,’ in which Schubert’s poetic sense reinforced the emphatic

word with an emphatic melodic note: _Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist

das Glück_. But on the whole we must admit that the whole body of

Schubert’s declamatory and dramatic songs is hardly worth the trouble

of study, except for the purpose of enlarging one’s knowledge of the

composer. If it were not for the wonderful ‘Erl King,’ greatest of

ballads, people would doubtless be saying that Schubert was a lyric

song-writer only, and had no feeling for the ballad form.

IV

Of Schubert’s six hundred songs, as we have said, many are of little

or no musical value. Sometimes the melody seems too facile; it

expresses nothing; it is like every other ordinary tune. And sometimes,

especially in the longer ballads and scenas, there is a lack of any

musical character; commonplace chords and scraps of indifferent melody

succeed each other to fatigue. The length is sometimes enormous. ‘The

Diver’ occupies nearly forty printed pages, and many others between

fifteen and twenty.

It is more regrettable that some of the songs should be sad mixtures

of greatness and triviality. ‘Death-Music’ is such a song. The opening

bars have a deep solemnity, which is almost equal to the dignity of

the theme, but seems just a little too thin or facile. Then on the

words _Hebe aus dem ird’schen Ringen_ comes a passage which is one of

Schubert’s great moments, and this is repeated in finer development on

the words: _Alles grosses werd’ ich sehen_, until one can almost feel

one’s self carried into the mysteries of death. But then follow three

pages of melody which are irritating, for they have much beauty and

expressiveness, but seem aimless and disorganized. In ‘Viola,’ which

is a matter of twenty-one pages, there are one or two of the most

gracious melodies Schubert ever wrote, but the song as a whole, what

with length and formlessness, is hopeless. _Fülle der Liebe_, again,

is both beautiful and expressive, altogether a distinguished piece of

work, except that its movement soon becomes so monotonous that it is

unendurable.

So Schubert is often betraying the rapidity with which he worked. But

he has left us at least one hundred songs which are immortal. First

of all, they are worth knowing for their wonderful stock of melodies,

as pure and rich as any composer in the world has ever given us. The

enchantment can hardly wear off with such melodies as those of ‘Praise

of Tears,’ ‘The Trout,’ _Du bist die Ruh_, ‘The Linden Tree,’ ‘The

Inn,’ ‘To Sylvia,’ ‘Litany,’ and ‘The Serenade.’

It is by no means the melody of the drawing-room. The dainty, snobbish

grace of the French _bergerette_ is foreign to Schubert. He seems

anxious to sing with everybody. It is recorded that one of his favorite

pastimes was walking out with a friend on a Sunday afternoon to one of

the villages in the neighborhood of Vienna, and watching the peasants

dance and hearing them sing their songs. This popular sense persists in

all Schubert’s music, however delicate may be his delineation of mood.

He had nothing of the aristocrat in him. The son of a schoolmaster,

accustomed to poverty, and accustomed to teach in an almost menial

capacity in the house of Count Esterhazy, he acquired none of the

tastes of the aristocrat and was content to take his pleasures as

other people did. Besides, the whole tradition of German music has

been remarkably close to the people. Even Mozart, the most polished of

composers, wrote in ‘The Magic Flute’ music that would have delighted

any peasant. So we are not surprised to find in Schubert’s lyrics a

strain of folk-song, especially in the cadences and progressions which

the Germans love so well. Take, for instance, the continually recurring

cadence of the song _Sei mir gegrüsst_, or that of ‘Praise of Tears.’

It sets the spirit for the whole of the song. And it is taken from the

very bone and sinew of German music. Or take the short middle section

of ‘The Wanderer,’--in which the Wanderer cries out, ‘Where art thou,

Where art thou, My beloved land!’--or the first of the Erl King’s

songs in the ballad ‘The Erl King’; or the whole strophic tune of ‘The

Fisher.’ Hum these over two or three times. Then take at random two or

three German folk-songs--_Ach du lieber Augustin_ and _Immer langsam

voran_, or what not, and hum these. And then two or three French

_bergerettes_. The relationship of Schubert will then be quite clear.

These matters of musical analogy are subtle and slippery. They cannot

be established by analysis. But they can always be proved or disproved

by the sympathetic ear.

But Schubert was writing art-songs, not folk-songs. Accordingly

he was obliged to give more precise meanings to his melodies than

folk-songs choose to give. He must not sing only of love or sorrow,

but of a certain mood of love or sorrow. This is what we mean by the

refinement of melody. Not that the unrefined melody is less worthy or

less beautiful, only that it is less precise. In refining his tunes

Schubert’s delicate artistic sense stood him in glorious stead. The

_Ave Maria_ is first of all a beautiful German melody. But it is

also a delicate, sensitive melody, which might have been sung by the

essentially aristocratic Ellen. Or notice the delicacy of mood implied

in Heine’s poem _Ihr Bild_. It is essentially a civilized mood, one

which comes over a person inside of a house with the lights turned

low, a mood which a folk-song would never be called upon to express.

Schubert catches it in a few simple notes. He does not strain his

melody in order to make it express an unusual mood. He selects his

notes--that is, refines the melody--until its expression has become

specific and accurate instead of broad and general.

This matter of melodic refinement (which must be divined by a sort

of sixth sense) leads us to one of the essential characteristics of

Schubert’s songs (and of art-songs in general)--namely, detailed

expression. Here we can be more specific. Compared to later

song-writers, Schubert makes very little effort to emphasize details

in his texts. He is never willing in his lyrical pieces to distort or

disturb the flow of the melody or the design of the whole, in order to

illustrate a detail. But a slight study of his songs will show that he

is never overlooking these details. And when it seems to him proper to

give them precise expression, the device is always at his finger-tips.

Take one of the loveliest of all his songs, _Das Wirthshaus_--‘The

Inn’--from the cycle _Winterreise_. The whole song should be played

through first to get the mood of weariness, of spiritual hunger and

thirst, that pervades it. Then on the words _die müden Wandrer_--‘tired

wanderers,’ comes this progression:

[Illustration: Music score]

die müden Wandrer laden ins kühle Wirtshaus ein

Notice the wonderful D flat of the accompaniment. And notice too with

what magic the simple chords of the next measure seem to fit the word

_kühle Wirtshaus_,--the ‘cool tavern.’ A little later, on the words:

_bin matt zum Niedersinken_--‘tired to exhaustion’--is the following

passage:

[Illustration: Music score]

bin matt zum Niedersinken und tötlich schwer verletzt

Notice the G flat of the accompaniment, how it creeps into the harmonic

framework and gives poignancy to the expression. And then four measures

further on, on the words: _doch weisest du mich ab?_--‘and do you turn

me away?’--there is this very simple musical passage:

[Illustration: Music score]

Doch weisest du mich ab

Only one altered chord, that containing the B natural, but what pathos

lies in it!

An even finer instance of musical delineation is the song _Der

Doppelgänger_, the last but one that Schubert ever wrote. Mr.

Henderson, in his ‘Songs and Song Writers,’ justly says that this

wonderful song anticipates Wagner’s theories and methods. Here we have

the continuous melody, the leit-motif (the first four measures of

the accompaniment), the declamatory voice part, and the ‘orchestral

comment’ which we associate with the Wagnerian music-dramas. We cannot

fail to notice in this song the ghostly effect of the thick chords kept

in the bass section of the pianoforte’s range, nor the uncanny effect

of the short, almost gasping, phrases for the voice, nor the fierce

picturing of terror on the words _meine eigne Gestalt_. What couldn’t

Schubert have been in the history of music, asks Mr. Henderson, if he

had lived!

Schubert’s command over modulation is facile and abundant. Sometimes

there is no rest in the matter of modulation. Yet the changes of key

and mode never seem strange. Tonalities melt into one another, and

voices lead as naturally as they do in the simple key-schemes of Haydn.

The best of examples is the wonderful song, _Die Allmacht_. Nominally

in the key of C major, it remains actually in this key for only about

a fifth of its length. The astonishing simplicity and inevitableness

of Schubert’s modulations are well exemplified by the change from F

major to G flat major on the words _Gross ist Jehovah der Herr_ (at

their next to last appearance). Wagner used precisely this modulation

about ten years later for the climax to the great prayer in the opera

_Rienzi_. But we find it no uncommon thing to discover that strokes of

genius in other composers have been anticipated in Schubert.

But the richness and smoothness of Schubert’s modulations, which are

everywhere to be discovered in his songs, are not the most important

qualities from the artistic standpoint. The important thing is the

marvellous deftness with which the composer uses his modulation for

expressive purposes. Let us return to _Das Wirtshaus_, a thorough

knowledge of which is a liberal education in Schubert’s art.

Modulation here is like flowing water. But notice especially the last

(repeated) line of the poem: _Nun weiter denn, nun weiter, mein treuer

Wanderstab_--‘then on again, my faithful wanderer’s staff.’ The

first half of the line is in C minor. Then on the words _mein treuer

Wanderstab_ it goes again into its original F major. The effect is

past all analysis. We feel the tragic vista of life ahead of the man,

the eternal trudging along white dusty roads. The human pathos of the

modulation is intense.

It is interesting to notice, in passing, that Schubert gets his most

tragic and pathetic effects out of the major mode rather than out of

the minor. Besides the example just quoted one recalls the entrance

of the major in _Ihr Bild_,--an effort of most delicate pathos; and

the ending of ‘Death and the Maiden,’ in which the coming of the minor

brings with it the feeling of deep human tragedy as contrasted with the

somewhat spooky tragedy of the preceding minor. Schubert’s effects,

though usually very simple, rarely come from a reliance on conventional

means.

Another of Schubert’s expressive devices is famous. It is the

dissonance of D flat against D against C (or a corresponding

combination), recurring in ‘The Erl King’ when the boy shrieks in

terror at the sight of the evil ghost. It was strenuously objected to

by certain ones who heard it in Schubert’s time, and it is recorded

that one of the objectors withdrew his criticism because the compound

dissonance resolved so smoothly. The justification, if justification

is needed, is something other than this. It is that the device is

tremendously expressive.

In ‘The Erl King’ we cannot fail to notice how the triplet motive in

the accompaniment binds the song closely together. In nearly every case

Schubert finds some means of accomplishing this end, when the free form

of the song might threaten to distract one’s attention. In a number of

the _Müllerlieder_, in which the brook figures constantly, the rippling

water is suggested (not imitated) in the accompaniment. The devices by

which the suggestion is accomplished seem naïve to us to-day, but it is

perhaps more artistic than an attempt at imitation would be.

Suggestive devices are innumerable. Note the movement of the breeze in

‘Suleika’s Second Song’; the opening chords, suggestive of deepening

night over the sea, in _Am Meer_; the delicate will-o’-the-wisp figure

in _Irrlicht_; the bass figure that suggests huge weight in _Atlas_;

the leaping triplet figure in ‘The Trout’; the tragic snatches of

melody in the bass of _Aufenthalt_, and so on without limit. It must be

remembered that such details as these were much more of a novelty in

Schubert’s time than now. A century ago the use of music for detailed

expression was comparatively strange.

We should bear in mind, also, how slightly this attention to detail

in Schubert affects the external unity of the song. Schubert’s method

(except in the long declamatory pieces) was essentially lyrical. He

wanted to write a piece of music which, while truly expressive of

the words, would be a beautiful piece of music even without them. He

kept the organization and proportion of his music, as such, always

in view. The whole course of song after him illustrates the conflict

(which was the origin of the art-song in the first place) between this

formal design and accuracy of expression. A simple strophic song can,

as we know, be quite perfect in design. But only rarely can it also

be quite accurate in the expression of the words. The musical realist

will seek to make the music detailed and expressive at all costs. The

many to whom beauty comes first, on the other hand, will admit the

realistic detail only when it accords with the beauty of the pattern.

It is instructive to note how Schubert solves the problem. While he

was never a formalist in the stricter sense of the word, his sense of

pattern beauty was such as would be pained at a realistic detail that

was detrimental to form. Judged by modern standards he was conservative

in his procedure. But considering his conservatism he managed to get a

wonderful amount of detailed expression into his songs. No song-writer

has ever had a more delicate and accurate feeling for these details of

human realism.

V

Schubert’s genius will never be known to people who imagine they know

it from the half dozen hackneyed songs that are most famous--the

‘Serenade,’ ‘Hark, Hark the Lark!’ ‘Who Is Sylvia?’ and one or two

others. There is a little group of Schubert songs which are rarely

heard and almost forgotten, which are of great beauty, such as the

_Wiegenlied_, _An die Sonne_, _Gretchen’s Gebet_, and _Clärchen’s

Lied_. And there are scores of others, which are known in a vague way,

but not well known to many a singer. No singer should attempt to sing

one of Schubert’s songs in public without being familiar with most of

these other lyrics.

Schubert reveals the folk genius in being able to achieve the highest

beauty within the smallest compass. Such a snatch of melody as the

first line of the ‘Litany’ is a work of pure genius. They say that

the test of a picture is its ability to be ‘lived with.’ The same is

true of a melody. The first line of the ‘Litany,’ as well as the whole

of it, can be sung each day and never lose its charm. It has all the

suave grace of a tune out of Italian opera. It might become cloying

and sentimental. But it does not. It remains dignified and sincere. It

reveals ever new beauties and adorable traits of character which could

not be suspected at first glance. This kind of genius is beyond the

analytical powers of the musical theorist to explain. The greatness

of large forms--for instance, a symphony by Beethoven--can in part be

explained, just as a very correct symphony can be written by a man

without talent. But to write greatly within half a dozen bars--this is

a miracle. Only the folk-composer and the highest conscious genius can

achieve it.

We see the same genius in the final measures of ‘Death and the Maiden.’

The Maiden sees Death approaching, and begs him to pass by. He replies

that he has not come to cause her pain. He is a friend and will

give her peace and joy. And the music, a succession of the simplest

chords, glides gradually into a major that seems to wring the tears

by main force from the eyes. Every now and then Schubert introduces

unexpectedly such a musical phrase, which seems to concentrate into

half a dozen notes all the sincerity of the German genius. We find it

in the ‘Second Harper’s Song’ of the Mignon series, on the words: _Ihr

lässt den Armen schuldig werden_:

[Illustration: Music score]

Ihr lässt Armen schulig werden

or in the ‘Praise of Tears’:

[Illustration: Music score]

aler lenza und Jugendlust

or in _Der Lindenbaum_:

[Illustration: Music score]

so manches liebe Wort

Of the songs that ‘sing themselves,’ Schubert has written many. We must

mention ‘The Fisher,’ which is unusual in song literature as being a

true ballad in strophe form; the ‘Heather Rose,’ which retains the

quality of Goethe’s words in that it must be intimately known to be

appreciated; _Wohin_, from the _Müllerlieder_, in which the tune seems

to flow as inevitably as the brook which is the motive of it; ‘The

Trout,’ the melody of which Schubert used as the theme of the last

movement of his famous string quartet; and the ‘Lullaby,’ mentioned

above. The flowing quality of these songs is due to the fact that

they are closely in accord with the felt traditions of German music,

containing a maximum of the usual and a minimum of the unusual, while

remaining unique and creative as a whole. In other words, they have

an abundance of the expected and nothing of the commonplace. And this

is why it is of such extreme value for every musician to be familiar

with a quantity of songs. Simple songs which are great in their human

appeal have concentrated within themselves all that people throughout

the centuries have agreed upon as beautiful. They contain in the

simplest form the elements of all great complex music. The singer who

can appreciate and love the simple song is not likely to go astray in

singing the works of Strauss and Reger.

But Schubert’s particular historic claim to greatness is his

introduction of precise musical expression into the Song. This takes

all forms--a variety as broad as his wonderful genius. In ‘Sea Calm’

it is a succession of quiet and slow chords, which preserve the

evenness of the calm sea without its monotony. In ‘The Wanderer,’

it is a succession of slightly different emotions, each lyrically

expressed, culminating in the impressive recitative. First the Wanderer

announces that he has come from the mountains, ever searching for

something. Then the lovely melody which Schubert later used in one

of his quartets--the motive of unsatisfied wandering. Then, with a

change of sentiment, comes the cause of the unrest--‘Where art thou,

My Native Land?’--a mere snatch of rich song. Then a quick movement as

the Wanderer sees in his mind’s eye the fresh greenness of his native

hills. Then the moody wanderer’s motive once more. And finally the two

lines of recitative--with all the beauty of poetry and all the force of

prose--‘There, where thou art not, there is happiness.’

‘The Young Nun,’ though it has perhaps been overrated, shows a

powerful dramatic expression of the singer’s feeling as interpreted by

surrounding nature (a favorite device of the Romantic poets). The song

rises into religious exaltation, with the thunderstorm outside, as the

nun returns resignedly to the praise of her religious contemplation.

_Die Allmacht_ is a song in the most exalted style of Beethoven, but

executed with a technique which is utterly of the romantic school. God

is praised by all his works, by the storm no less than by the devout

heart in prayer. Each is expressed by Schubert in a musical passage

of great beauty. Yet each section is but an inextricable part of the

symphonic movement--for religious adoration is not a collection of

separate feelings, but a great emotional synthesis. The music for

Goethe’s wonderful ‘Wanderer’s Evensong’ is no less remarkable for

the musical blending of shades of emotion. But it is something more,

something which is in the highest degree typical of the art-song. For

it follows the words, not only in expression but in accent, so that

not a syllable is falsified. No recitative could be more just to the

spoken value of the words. In fact, this song can be read as a pure

recitative, in which the words, spoken sincerely and unaffectedly,

correspond exactly with the music. And yet, looked at from the other

side, it is a perfect melody. This blending of the declamatory and

lyrical elements in a perfect synthesis is true to the spirit of the

art-song. For no art-song is good that does any sort of violence to the

text, as it would be spoken. And yet no art-song is a song if it has

not a musical beauty of its own. And it is one of the highest tests of

the trained singer to give full value to both these elements, without

letting either crowd out the other. ‘Gretchen’s Prayer’ is another

fine example of this, less simple but no less perfect. Here, as the

supplication rises into emotional entreaty, the music becomes more

independently lyrical, floating in air as though to bear the petition

to a higher sphere.

Schubert is the great exemplar of a form which has been cultivated

by almost every composer since his time--the song-cycle. He was not

the originator of the form, for Beethoven (in addition to others) had

written a true song-cycle in _An die Ferne Geliebte_. But Schubert was

the first to show the full possibilities of the song-cycle.

He has left us three such works--the _Müllerlieder_, of twenty songs;

the _Winterreise_, of twenty-four; and the _Schwanengesang_, of

fourteen. The last was not planned by the composer as a cycle, but was

issued as such by his publisher just after his death, when (as has so

often been the case) the Germans had waked up partially to the genius

they had lost. And for once the commercial publisher was justified. For

the songs were actually Schubert’s swansong, being written in the last

few weeks of his life (the final one of the series was the very last of

his compositions). Moreover, they are of a pessimistic character which

is rarely betrayed in Schubert’s earlier works.

The _Müllerlieder_, or ‘Miller’s Songs,’ were composed by Schubert in

his first enthusiasm over Wilhelm Müller’s poems. It is related that

he went to call upon a friend one evening, found the friend out but

discovered the book lying upon his table, became immersed in it while

waiting, and finally walked away with it in his pocket. The next day he

apologized for the borrowing, pleading that the poems had inspired some

beautiful melodies, and he felt he had to write the music for them all.

The friend forgave him, as have all who have since learned to know the

songs he wrote to those words.

The Miller Songs tell a connected story, after the manner of Tennyson’s

‘Maud,’ by making each one of the poems the lyrical expression of the

hero in his successive moods. The hero of Müller’s cycle is a typical

figure of the German romanticism. He is a wanderer on the face of the

earth, a sensitive, introspective man, a friend of sorrow and in love

with unhappiness. To us he seems a rather ridiculous figure. But he

was taken seriously enough by the Germans of the time, who had good

cause to be pessimistic over the disorganized state of their country

and their national life. This miller hero is suffering from unrequited

love, which was a favorite theme of the romanticists. But, above all,

in the spirit of the time, he is a lover of nature. He sees in nature a

reflection of his own moods and sorrows. Nature seems to us to be one

of the staples of lyric poems--worn to the bone. But, as a matter of

fact, nature is a rather recent invention of civilized man’s. The Alps

were ‘discovered’ by the poets no earlier than the eighteenth century.

Certain early poems, notably the Iliad, show a feeling for natural

beauty. But the study of nature as a cult, the conscious effort to find

moods and meanings in her, is hardly more than a century and a half

old. Folk poetry contains very little of it, and then usually only in

sentimental connotations. In Schubert’s time nature was still a recent

discovery and a thrilling one. So Schubert’s contemporaries, apart from

their pessimism, were able to immerse themselves in such poetry as

that of the _Müllerlieder_ and the _Winterreise_ without feeling the

strained preciosity which we inevitably feel in it in our realistic

age. As they stood and in their time the _Müllerlieder_ were admirably

suited to romantic musical treatment by Schubert.

In the first song, ‘Wandering,’ the hero is happy enough in his

simple melodic tramping about the countryside. Knowing Schubert’s own

predilections in that direction, we feel that he must have put some of

his own enthusiasm into the song. In the second song of the series,

‘Whither?’ he meets a rippling brook, and is filled with romantic

wonderings and presentiments concerning its destination. Can we doubt

that it leads him to his future beloved? He follows it and comes upon

a lovely mill, whose wheel is propelled by the brook, simple, of

beneficent and sympathetic nature. The wanderer applies to the miller

for work and is taken on. Thereupon, in a beautiful song, he pays his

thanks--to the brook. In the fifth song, _Feierabend_, he has become

as one of the miller’s family. He loves, like a true apprentice out of

Wagner’s _Meistersinger_, to hear the master, at the close of a day’s

work, say ‘Well done!’ But most of all he is happy because he has met

the miller’s daughter.

In the sixth song, ‘Curiosity,’ he is in perplexity, and turns, as

every romantic youth of the time did, to nature for help. ‘Does she

love me?’ he is persistently asking, and he addresses his question

to the brook. In the next song, ‘Impatience,’ his attraction for the

girl has become a full-fledged passion. ‘_Dein ist mein Herz!_’ he

cries ecstatically. In ‘Morning Greeting’ he addresses some pretty

stanzas and compliments to the miller’s daughter. The tenth song is an

excellent example, in simple form, of the delicate mood which, as we

have said, it is the special province of the art-song to express. The

young miller and the girl are sitting together--beside the brook, of

course. She gets up and goes into the house, and the tears come to his

eyes. In the next song the miller’s daughter has accepted and returned

his love, and in the following one he is at joyful peace with nature,

and is praising the green ribbon which his loved one wears.

But then enters the tragic complication. For we hear a hunter’s horn,

and the handsome young hunter descends upon the peaceful mill. The

miller previsages the meaning of this. In the fifteenth song he is

struggling between pride and jealousy. Then he is once more praising

the dear color--green, which his sweetheart loves because it is like

the fresh green of nature. And in the next song he is cursing the

hateful color (the same green) because its wearer is no longer true to

him. In the eighteenth song the miller’s daughter has given her love

to the huntsman, and the young miller has lost hope. The dead flowers

(for fall has come) express the state of his heart. These flowers must

lie upon his grave. But--when the loved one passes by the grave let

the flowers burst once more into fresh bloom. In the nineteenth song

the miller holds a conversation with his beloved brook, which suggests

to him the sweet suicide which was ultra-fashionable in all romantic

literature of the time. And in the beautiful last song of the cycle the

brook sings to sleep the dead man by its side.

The poems are all truly lyrical, and invite musical setting. They rise

to no marked poetic heights, but are thoroughly poetic and emotional

in feeling. Though Schubert did not achieve a uniform standard of

excellence throughout the series, the general average is high. The

first song, ‘Wandering,’ has a memorable melody of a simple sort, and

the second, which we have mentioned above, is one of his masterpieces.

‘Impatience,’ though formal and strophic in structure, has an

unrestrained sweep of feeling which is rare in Schubert and looks

forward to the later romanticists of music. The ‘Morning Greeting’ is

a simple Italianate melody of great beauty, one which is likely to

lead astray the singer who tries to give it overmuch ‘expression.’

‘The Hunter’ is spirited, but has no great musical value. ‘Jealousy

and Pride,’ though not very attractive musically, is interesting as

an example of Schubert’s discriminating use of the simplest kind of

accompaniment for precise emotional expression. _Die liebe Farbe_,

however, is one of the masterpieces. It is almost French in its

thread-like delicacy, but this will prove a pitfall for the singer who

has not attained full control of the niceties of vocal expression.

The formal daintiness of the song is like the allegretto of some toy

symphony. And at the same time it is neatly expressive of the playful

mood of the words. The contrast of the companion song, _Die böse

Farbe_, of course offers a problem to the interpretive singer.

But perhaps the most masterful song of the cycle is the eighteenth,

‘Dead Flowers.’ This, in moderate two-four time, is strikingly like

the allegretto movement of Schubert’s C major symphony, one of the

loveliest of all his orchestral pieces. The entrancing modulation from

an undecided minor to a spirited major on the words ‘_Der Mai ist

gekommen, der Winter ist aus_,’ is a touch which any lover of Schubert

would recognize as his unmistakably at the first hearing. But don’t

miss the finer art of this lovely passage, for the joyousness of the

major is deceptive; the miller is black at heart over his failure

in love, and is only beguiling himself in a passing moment. Notice,

therefore, the plaintiveness of the accompaniment on this passage.

‘The Miller and the Brook’ is an interesting example of the half

lyrical, half declamatory style which Schubert sometimes adopts, as we

have seen. But the last piece of the cycle is pure song. It is hard to

analyze the plaintive character of this melody, and hard especially to

understand how the augmented fourth, traditionally considered a harsh

interval, becomes at Schubert’s hands an instrument of deep emotional

expression.

It has often been pointed out that the motive of the brook gives a

subtle unity to this song cycle, and that the motive is preserved in

Schubert’s music. From the rippling triplets of the accompaniment

of ‘Whither,’ the first song in which the brook enters, to the

cradling motion of the accompaniment to the last, the brook is almost

continuously in the piano part. But, though Schubert’s feeling here

is extremely delicate, his technical means are of the simplest. If

it is realism, it is realism of the most primitive sort. We should

not be misled by the praise of the ‘brook music’ in this cycle. True

descriptive music, whether for good or for bad, did not enter song

until after Schubert. And we should further remember that, although

Schubert was indeed the first great composer of the song-cycle, he

never gave the form the unity and inner meaning which was imparted to

it by Schumann, and which is typical of it to our minds.

The _Müllerlieder_ reveal admirably the tender interpretation of

sentiment of which Schubert was such a master. But they are by no

means songs of a greatness equal to that of his next cycle, the

_Winterreise_. The ‘winter journey’ taken by the hero (Müller again is

the poet) is a pilgrimage in search of forgetfulness after an unhappy

love affair. Even more than the _Müllerlieder_, it is an essay in the

interpretation of nature in terms of human sentiments. The songs,

indeed, are little more than a series of parallels drawn between the

scene of the winter landscape and the feelings of the hero. They are a

personalizing of the weather, a dramatization of the thermometer.

In the first song the hero tells of his lost sweetheart, and sings to

the memory of her a touching ‘Good-night’ lullaby. The second hears the

wind playing about the roof of the house, and suggests that even so

circumstances play with man’s heart. In the third he finds the cold air

freezing his tears--thus his very sorrow has become fixed and rigid.

The fourth is a vision of the world paralyzed in the cold of winter:

his heart is frozen and her picture is blotted out of it. In the fifth

he remembers the linden tree under which they spent their happiest

hours.

So the songs go, one after another. The ninth is the ‘Will-o’-the-wisp’

song; he will not be misled by these false lights, for his heart has

been misled by such beacons before. In the next, ‘Rest,’ the hero

tells how he is so occupied by the pain of his travelling and the pain

of his sorrow that only when he lays his body down to rest at night

does he realize how tired he is. From this point on the great songs

of the cycle are numerous. The thirteenth, ‘The Post,’ pictures the

galloping of the approaching mail coach, with the blowing of its horn.

Is there a letter for him? No, for he is alone in the wide world. The

post departs--in a minor key. In the fourteenth song, _Der greise

Kopf_, he notices that the frost has made his hair white, and he thinks

of himself as an old man, and wishes he could be many years removed

from his sorrow. In the long and somewhat descriptive song, _Im Dorfe_,

he enters a village and the dogs bark at the lonely wanderer; even so

the world is strange and hostile to him. In _Täuschung_ (‘Illusion’)

he sees a light in the distance, and hopes it comes from a hospitable

farmhouse. But, alas! the light was an illusion, like the rest of the

things we hope for in life.

Then come five final songs--every one a masterpiece of the first order.

The _Wegweiser_ tells of the sign-post the hero sees on the road. But

there is another sign-post which is also directing him on his longer

road and it points relentlessly the way to Death. Yet, in the next

song, _Das Wirtshaus_, when he approaches a graveyard, he finds no

welcome awaiting: the rooms of this tavern are all occupied. Death

itself will not soothe his loneliness. In the next song, ‘Courage,’

he makes a final despairing effort to free himself from his misery by

pure force of will-power. If the snow flies in his face, he will dash

it aside. He will laugh loud and merrily. If life is an illusion, he

will _make_ it worth while. If there are no gods on earth, we ourselves

shall be gods. But this mood cannot last. He sees two false suns in the

heavens, in addition to the one that has always been there. But they

vanish, like the two suns of earlier years--the eyes of his beloved.

Only one more sun need vanish and blessed night will come for him.

We are spared the suicide which we might expect in the final song of

the cycle. The wanderer comes upon an old man playing the grind-organ.

He grinds out what music he can, but his little money-box remains

ever empty. The wanderer feels the brotherhood between himself and

the old man. ‘Play my songs on your grind-organ,’ he asks. People

have suggested that this bit of verse must have come very close to

Schubert’s heart; for he, too, had made what music he could, he too was

alone in the world, and he too found his little money-box always empty.

Of the songs of this cycle at least a third rank with Schubert’s

best. ‘The Lindentree,’ with its simple strophic melody, is almost

a folk-song among the German people. _Die Post_ is justly admired

because of the way it blends a mild realism with high melodic and

interpretative beauty. _Der greise Kopf_ is especially interesting as

pointing forward to the more complex and delineative style of several

of Schubert’s later songs, with its melodic peculiarity of outline and

the extreme importance given the accompaniment. In superficial texture

it much resembles _Die Stadt_ (‘The Town’) from his last song group.

‘The Signpost’ however, is more truly representative of Schubert’s

genius. The movement of the song is symphonic, much like that of the

‘Dead Flowers’ in the _Müllerlieder_. Its steady pulse of rhythm

avoids monotony by the most delicate of harmonic movement in the inner

parts. As the tragedy deepens toward the end of the song the steady

beat of the melody continues for whole measures on a single tone. And

in half notes a bass and an alto voice move chromatically toward each

other through the best part of an octave. The device would be a trick

in the hands of a lesser genius; with Schubert it becomes poetic

interpretation. This wonderful song is abundantly worth careful study;

in particular, the harmonic freedom, combined with liquid smoothness

of voice progression, reveals the romantic strain in the composer’s

equipment and something of his peculiar contribution to the development

of music’s expressive resources.

Of ‘The Inn’ we have already spoken. The deep and tragic sweetness of

it grows on one, impressive as it is at first hearing. This particular

mood of tragic sweetness is a pitfall for composers. With any but

the genius it is sure to become maudlin. With Schubert it became

heartrending.

Such a song as ‘Courage’ cannot be overpraised. The compressed energy

of its movement is not that of animal life, but of moral effort. Human

will-power is felt throughout it. The change from minor to major

(Schubert to the bone) in the last lines makes the hearer’s blood surge

to dizziness. It is one of the most difficult songs to sing. For its

energy may so easily be taken for animal spirits. It is just the song

to ‘run away’ with the singer. And when once the singer has lost mental

control of it, it becomes pitiless toward him. The tonic arpeggio of

the last line requires ultimate exactness of vocal control. And from

beginning to end the least inaccuracy of intonation or accent will be

evident to the audience like a black streak on a white shirt-front.

_Nebensonnen_ (‘Satellites’) is of utmost simplicity. It is so

unassuming that for a moment it seems all but trivial. Yet this is the

tender modesty of great lyric expression. The song is a test of the

singer’s taste. The least over-sentimentalization of it will make the

judicious grieve. A thousand times better to make it too simple and too

prosaic than too emotional.

The last song, ‘The Organ Grinder,’ is written over a monotonous ‘drone

bass,’ imitative of a primitive grind-organ. The melody is apparently

as crude as the instrument that is supposed to have played it. But

somewhere in it one hears--one knows not how--the deep strain of pathos

which is one of Schubert’s miracles.

The third cycle, ‘Swan Songs,’ is matter for amazement to every student

of Schubert. For its composer, in the space of fifteen years since he

first began writing in earnest, seems to have become a totally new

man with a totally new musical technique. It is traditionally hard

for a musician to change his technique once it is firmly ingrown. The

greatest musicians only--Beethoven, Wagner, and a few others--have

been able to do it. That Schubert could do it--in addition to the fact

that he was thus willing further to endanger his chances of material

success--proves the marvellous richness of his natural endowment. When

one considers that these songs were written by a man who had just

passed his thirtieth year one is ‘teased out of thought’ with the

curiosity as to what he would have become in music had he lived. Some

have answered--‘the greatest composer of all time.’ The speculation is

fascinating, and it makes us love our Schubert the better.

The fourteen ‘Swan Songs’ are written to seven texts by Rellstab,

one by J. G. Seydl, and six by Heine. The last fact makes us pause.

Rarely has there been so rich a lyric poet as Heine, probably never

one who could so inspire song writers. His first book of lyrics had

been published only shortly before Schubert’s death, and the composer

had set six of them before his final illness. Of these six, five are

enduring masterpieces. If only Schubert’s genius could have been mated

to Heine’s through the succeeding ten years!

The seven Rellstab songs include the universally known ‘Serenade,’

the beauty of which is too obvious and too familiar to need further

comment. Another and greater song of the list is _Aufenthalt_. The

speaker’s ‘abode’ is among the rugged cliffs, and he reflects that his

sorrow is as unshakable as the eternal rocks. The furious sweep of the

song’s movement is breathless. Beneath and above the triplets of the

accompaniment is always a passionate and despairing melody. When the

voice rests for a moment the piano, in marvellous imitation, takes up

the strain. The climax, on the words ‘_starrender Fels_,’ is terrific.

The final half-declaimed phrase is almost Greek in its severe nobility.

Of the Heine songs the best known is _Am Meer_ (‘By the Sea’). The

introductory chords scored in the bass express the impenetrable

mystery of the sea. The very simple melody is the essence of moody

retrospection. Such a work as this is as supreme among songs as the

second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in orchestral music.

_Die Stadt_ and _Der Atlas_ show the great importance which Schubert

accorded to the accompaniment and the freedom with which he had come to

handle it. In _Ihr Bild_ (‘Her Picture’) we have another of Schubert’s

very simple melodies--and how impressive in its simplicity! Perhaps

Heine was never more perfectly set to music than in this instance.

The wonderful _Doppelgänger_, unique among Schubert’s works, has

already been mentioned. Mr. Henderson is right in his judgment of this

piece. It is Wagnerism before Wagner’s time. It is the technique of the

latter half of the nineteenth century previsaged by the genius of a

poor and shy school-teacher living in a cheap Vienna lodging. It is a

vision and a prophecy.

Of the ballads we need say little. Strangely enough not one of them is

of the finest quality, or truly representative of Schubert, except that

one which was the first of his songs to be published, and one of the

half dozen to be most widely known--the ‘Erl King.’ It is strange, and

disappointing, when we consider the perfection of this early attempt,

that Schubert left the ballad, one of the most attractive of song

forms, to his contemporary, Löwe, a man who had not a tenth part of

his talent. ‘The King of Thule’ is one of the best of the remainder,

but it is immensely surpassed by Liszt’s setting. The ‘Fisher Boy’

is charming, but being in the strophic form, is no contribution to

the development of the form. ‘The Young Nun,’ fine as it is, is too

rhetorical to satisfy a true lover of Schubert. In his more declamatory

style Schubert often fails even to be interesting. ‘The Singer,’ to

words by Goethe, is workmanly declamation such as any man of talent

might have written. The Ossian songs, of which ‘Kolma’s Complaint’ is

the best, reflect the somewhat strained verbosity of the words, and

fail to convince with their beauty. The same is true of Schubert’s

setting to Klopstock’s scena, ‘Hermann and Thusnelda.’ Pomp and

circumstance drown out the music. For the true Schubert we must leave

the larger forms and return to the shorter lyrics, which reveal the

composer’s highest glory--the greatest beauty in the simplest terms.

VI

The writing of songs during Schubert’s time, and immediately before,

was carried on on an amazing scale. It is not unusual to find

composers of the time writing thousands of them. These songs have

practically vanished from modern song-programs. But many of them were

extremely popular at the time, and remain staples in the repertories

of singing societies. Not a few of them have become folk-songs second

to none in popularity. The simple form of most of these little lyrics

almost precludes their having any importance in the history of song

development, but it would be a pity if they were lost altogether to

the student of singing.

The age in which they were written was, as we have seen, the great age

of German national feeling. The intense sincerity and manliness of a

Körner or an Arndt filled the whole nation with generous sentiments,

contrasting with the delicate refinement of the French culture on the

one hand, and the morbid introspection of the German romanticists on

the other. Patriotic and military songs abounded. It was also the age

of the formation of the male singing-societies which have since become

such a typical feature of German life, and composers wrote freely for

the four-part male chorus, or for the male solo voice. It was also the

age of the awakening interest in folk-literature, and German history

or legend furnished many a tale for men to sing around the festive

board, or for nurses to sing to the children at night. Finally, it was

the age of republican sentiment in Germany, the age when an idealistic

and naïve nation was still expecting the reigning house to give

constitutional government once the people had freed themselves from

French rule. It was a Germany very different from the Germany we have

seen since the Franco-Prussian war--a Germany that was less practical,

less commercial, less ambitious, but infinitely more simple and lyric.

Hence the output of fine songs was enormous. Never was the German

genius more spontaneous; never was it more truly German. The songs of

the time, which repose by the thousands in old _Kommersbücher_, and

have sifted by scores into modern song collections, are the very breath

of fresh air and generous spirits.

At the period of Schubert’s early activity Weber was the great

national composer of the Germans. We have seen elsewhere[22] how

German national sentiment centred around his music when the German

kings turned traitor and sought to force the people back into an

age of eighteenth-century reactionism. His opera, _Der Freischütz_,

was a sort of Marseillaise in time of exile for the lovers of German

liberty and union. But earlier than this Weber had made himself the

chief national musical figure in Germany. His settings of Körner’s

fiery _Leyer und Schwert_ songs had raised him from a hardworking

kapellmeister into a household name. The newly formed singing societies

took up the songs, and at least one, the ‘Sword Song,’ has lived to

this day. But in addition to these purely national and military songs,

Weber wrote a great number of others, all in simple form and in the

direct folk-spirit which he mastered as no other composer mastered it

before or since. Many of them are sung still. But the great majority

have by this time become quite outdated. We need only refer to one--the

charming lullaby _Schlaf, Herzenssöhnchen, mein Liebling bist du_.

Three composers preëminently continued Weber’s work as composer

of German opera--Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849), Albert Lortzing

(1801-1851), and Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861). Of these, Kreutzer was

peculiarly close to the German popular genius. His settings of Uhland’s

_Wanderlieder_ are very fine, _In die Ferne_ being particularly worthy

of study. Kreutzer, too, was one of the most successful composers of

male choruses; his elaborate chorale, _Das ist der Tag des Herrn_, will

probably be remembered as long as German music exists. Lortzing and

Marschner freely introduced simple strophic songs into their operas,

and by these are chiefly known. Their style was as simple as Weber’s

and the historical development of song at their hands (slight in any

case) is in a different direction from that which Schubert took. Their

melodies are not inappropriate, but we look in vain in them for any

of the close emotional interpretation which we find so abundantly in

Schubert.

But the finest songs of this semi-popular style (_volkstümliche

Lieder_) were written by men who have no other claim to greatness. We

may mention F. H. Himmel (1765-1814), Methfessel (1785-1869), Nägeli

(1773-1836), Lindpainter (1791-1861), and Silcher (1789-1860). These

are the true writers of modern German folk-songs. The energy of their

music is of an elementary sort which the more highly trained composer

rarely equals. They live to-day in every gathering of German students,

in every Männerchor, in every nursery. Ten people are familiar with

their songs to one who knows who the composers were. But the gifts

these composers have left to their people are co-extensive with German

culture.

Methfessel is direct and virile, the singer of battles and of the manly

virtues of the great ancestors. How compelling is the vigor of ‘_Stimmt

an, mit hellem Klang_’! And what a boiling of the blood is in his

fiery setting of Arndt’s ‘The God Who Made the Iron Grow!’ Nägeli is

softer and more sentimental. We remember him chiefly by _Freut euch des

Lebens_ and the charming ‘Good-Night.’ Lindpainter was less talented,

and his songs, which partook of a romantic nature, have almost

disappeared. But Himmel is among the greatest. His setting of Körner’s

‘Prayer on the Eve of Battle’ (vastly superior to Schubert’s) is one

of the deepest expressions of religious faith in all song literature.

His ‘Ballad of the Three Tailors,’ from _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_, is a

delightful example of the typical Studentenlied. And one should not

overlook his four songs from _Alexis und Ida_, in which he shows a

delicacy of sentiment approaching that of Schubert though he wrote them

some years before the composition of the ‘Erl King.’

Finally, there is Silcher, who is to Germany exactly what Stephen

Foster is to America. His songs are innumerable, and the number of

great folk-songs among them is astonishing. The very heart of German

music pulses in Silcher. The famous ‘Loreley’ melody is his, and also

_Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz_ and the wonderful _Lebewohl_. He is

one of the three or four composers in the world who could with any

considerable frequency equal the beauty and directness of folk-songs.

He is a text for this chapter. Only the student who knows and loves

Silcher can truly know and love Schubert.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

[21] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

[22] Vol. II, p. 230 ff.