The Romantic Composers

by Daniel Gregory Mason

IV

All things human, however, have their price, and romanticism is no exception to the rule. The composers of the romantic period, in becoming more particular, grew in the same proportion less universal; in bowing to the inexorable evolutionary force that makes each modern man a specialist, they inevitably sacrificed something of the breadth, the catholicity, the magnanimity, of the old time. It is doubtless a sense of some such loss as this, dogging like a shadow all our gains, that takes us back periodically to a new appreciation of the classics. There is often a feeling of relief, of freer breathing and ampler leisure, as when we leave the confusion of the city for the large peace of the country, in turning from the modern complexities to the old simplicities, and forgetting that there is any music but Bach's. The reasons for this contrast between the two schools must of course lie deeply hidden in the psychology of æsthetics, but a clew to them at least may be found near at hand, in the conditions of life, the everyday environments, of the two groups of artists.

It has often been remarked that the composers of the nineteenth century have been men of more cultivation, of greater intellectual elasticity and resulting breadth of interest, than their predecessors. Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, even Beethoven, concentrating their whole minds on music, were far less curious as to other human pursuits than their later brethren. The six composers we are studying are impressive instances of this modern many-sidedness of mind. At least three of them, Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, were skilled journalists and men of letters; Schumann with the finely judicial, fancifully conceived sketches of his New Journal of Music, Berlioz with his brilliant, fantastically humorous feuilletons, and Liszt with his propaganda, in book and pamphlet, of Wagner, Chopin, and other contemporaries. (Fancy Bach interrupting his steady stream of cantatas to write an exposition of the genius of Handel!) Schumann was, moreover, something of a poet, and Mendelssohn was one of the most voluminous and picturesque of letter-writers. Chopin was as versed in social as in musical graces and Liszt was—what was he not?—a courtier, a Lovelace, a man of the world, and an abbé. Schubert alone, of them all the eldest and the nearest to classical traditions, was a composer pure and simple.

The versatility of these men was no accident or freak of coincidence; it was the effective trait that made their work so profusely allusive, so vividly minute, in short, so romantic. And what is more to our purpose just here, it was the underlying cause of a defect which is quite as symptomatic of romanticism as its merits. So various a mental activity must needs lack something in depth; if attention is spread wide it must be spread thin; thought given to avocations must be borrowed from the vocation. We should expect to find, accordingly, division of energy resulting, here as elsewhere, in a lack of concentration, a failure of power; and herein we are not disappointed. With the possible exception of Mendelssohn, no one of our six composers can compare, simply as a handicraftsman, with Bach or Mozart. Schubert was so little a contrapuntist that he had just engaged lessons when death interrupted his brief career. Schumann and Chopin gave in their youth innumerable hours that should have counted for systematic to routine the fanciful improvisation so seductive to poetic temperaments. Berlioz kicked down all the fences in his coltish days, and ever after looked askance at the artistic harness. Liszt, for all his diabolical cleverness, remained the slave of mannerisms, and became a dupe of his own rhetorical style.

Now there is doubtless in all this waywardness something that strikes in us a chord such as vibrates in sympathy with the small boy who, regardless of barbed wire, invades the orchard and carries off the delectable green apples. It is a fine thing to be young, it is glorious to be free. But sober second thought relentlessly follows: we know that apples must be sent to market in due course, and that that exciting green fruit is, after all, indigestible and unripe; and we know equally that musicians must undergo their apprenticeship, and that all art executed without adequate technical mastery is crude. The crudity of the art of our musical orchard-robbers becomes at once evident when we compare a single melody, or an entire movement, of Schubert or his successors with one by Mozart or Beethoven.

The single melody is the molecule of music, the smallest element in it that cannot be subdivided without loss of character. Every great melody has an indefinable distinction, a sort of personal flavor or individuality, which we may discern but cannot analyze. It has also, however, an organic quality, depending upon both the unity and the variety of its phraseology, that we can to a certain extent study and define. Assuming, to start with, the subtle distinction without which it would sink into the commonplace, we can compare and contrast it with other melodies in respect of its organic quality, its simultaneous presentation of unity and variety—in a word, its plastic beauty. Such a melody as the second theme of the first movement of Mozart's G-minor Quintet, for example, gains a wonderful charm from the complexity, and at the same time the final simplicity, of its phrase structure. The several musical figures, or motives, of which it is composed follow each other without the least impression of crass mechanical dovetailing; yet one feels, as they proceed, such a sense of logical progression, of orderly sequence, that the final cadence seems like an audible "Q. E. D." Contrasted with such dexterous phrase-weaving as this, many of Schubert's and Schumann's tunes, with their literal repetitions of short phrases, their set thesis and antithesis, seem pitifully bald and trite. It is hardly fair to take extreme cases, but they best bring out the point. Schubert's "Drang in die Ferne," ten consecutive measures of which repeat literally the same rhythm, and the theme in Schumann's "Abegg Variations," in which a single phrase recurs sixteen times, will make it almost painfully evident. This tendency to rhythmic monotony, to an unvaried singsong reiteration of phrase, besets constantly these two composers, too often takes Chopin in its grasp, and in Mendelssohn is aggravated by an inclination to stay in one key, page after page, until our heads droop with drowsiness. Berlioz, on the other hand, errs in the opposite direction. Variety, with him, degenerates into a chaotic miscellaneousness, and what should be an agreeably diversified landscape becomes a pathless jungle. In both cases there is a failure of the constructive faculty, due to a lack of mental coördination and concentration. The price paid for interesting detail is monotony or instability in the organism.

Similar weaknesses reveal themselves when we pass from considering the elemental melodies to survey the ways in which they are built up into larger sections and whole movements—when we pass, that is, from form to structure.[1] None of the romantic composers attained a breadth, diversity, and solidity of construction in any wise comparable to Beethoven's. Schubert was intellectually too indolent, if not indifferent, to attempt intricate syntheses of his materials, but relied instead on their primitive charm to justify endless repetitions. Schumann, less tolerant of platitude, and gifted with more intense, if hardly more disciplined, imagination, resorted to constant kaleidoscopic change, resulting in those "mosaic forms" which are related to true cyclic forms much as a panorama is related to a picture. Mendelssohn was naturally a better master of construction, but the knots he ties are somewhat loose and inclined to ravel out. Chopin, a born miniaturist, obviously fails to make his sonatas and concertos anything but chance bundles of lyrical pieces. As for Berlioz and Liszt, they frankly faced their dilemma, and had the shrewdness to disclaim the desire to do that for which they wanted the faculty. They fell back on the "poetic forms," and let their works pile up without internal coherence, held together only by the thread of the story they were illustrating.

For this failure to work out the highest degree of plastic beauty possible to them, the romanticists frequently have to pay in a serious loss of power. Keenly interesting as are the details of their work, the whole impression is apt to lack fusion, clearness, integrity. Not without terrible risks may the musician neglect form, since form is itself, for him, perhaps more than for any of his brother artists in other mediums, a fundamental means of expression. Of this matter popular thought is inclined to take a superficial view; it is fond of confusing vital form with dry formalism, of speaking contemptuously of formal analysis as the pedantic dissection of lovely melodies, the plucking and counting of the petals of the flowers of art, and of reiterating ad nauseam its irritating half-truth, "Music is the language of the emotions." Popular thought would do well to pause and consider; to ask itself whether language too has not its form, without which it is unintelligible; to inquire how much of the expressive power of a lovely melody would remain were its pitch and time relations (that is, its form) materially altered, how long we could be inspired by the most exciting rhythms, were they ceaselessly reiterated without relief, and how eloquent we should find even the most moving symphony, were it written all in one key, or in several keys that had no relation to one another. Such consideration soon suggests the truth, which impresses us the more the more deeply we study music, that there is a general expressiveness underlying all particular expressions, a fundamental beauty by which all special beauties are nourished as flowers are nourished by the soil, a symmetry and orderly organization that can no more be dispensed with in music without crippling its eloquence than a normal regularity of the features can be dispensed with in the human face without distorting it into absurdity or debasing it into ugliness. Without its pervasive presence, all special features, however amusing or superficially appealing, fail to inspire or charm. They become as wild flowers plucked to languish indoors, as seaweeds taken from their natural setting of liquid coolness. Or again, the particular expressions of music may be compared to the strings of an instrument, of which the sounding board is plastic beauty; without its sympathetic reinforcement the strings, strike them as we may, give forth a scarcely audible murmur; with it, there is clear and powerful sonority. So the most ingenious music is dull and dead if it lack the vitality of organic form, but if it be beautiful it will make its way directly to the heart.

It is surely not necessary to add that this discussion of the primal importance of form is not intended to impeach all romantic music as deficient in the appeal that beauty alone can make. This were indeed a reductio ad absurdum. Much of the music of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin is of the rarest beauty, and, by the same token, of the most moving eloquence. The intention of our analysis is rather to secure that aid to the appreciation of just such beauties which discrimination alone can give, and by means of comparison to sharpen the focus of our mental image of what romanticism achieves and of what it fails to achieve. At its best, we shall rejoice to find, it shares the serene loveliness, the impersonal grandeur, of classicism. At its less than best, it offers us a vivid intellectual interest, a keen pleasure in following its wide ramifications and its faithful illustrations of many phases of life. At its worst only does its exaggerated passion for detail mislead it into petty and prosaic literalism.