II
Let us now consider the great romantic composers as men living amid the stress and turmoil of revolution. All but Schubert were more or less closely in touch with it. All but him and Mendelssohn were distinctly revolutionists, skilled as composers and hardly less skilled to defend in impassioned prose the music they had written. As champions of the ‘new’ in music they are best studied against the background of young Europe in arms and exultant.
But in the case of Franz Schubert we can almost dispense with the background. His determining influences, so far as they affected his peculiar contributions to music, were almost wholly literary. He was an ideal example of what we call the ‘pure musician.’ There is nothing to indicate that he was interested in anything but his art. He lived in or near Vienna during all the Napoleonic invasions, but was concerned only with escaping military service. Schubert was the last of the musical specialists. From the time when his schoolmaster father first directed his musical inclinations he had only one interest in the world, outside of the ordinary amusements of his Bohemian life. If Bach was dominated by his Protestant piety and Handel by the lure of outward success, Schubert worked for no other reason than his love of the beautiful sounds which he created (and of which he heard few enough in his short lifetime).
Yet even here we are forced back for a moment to the political background. For it is to be noticed that the great German composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century found their activities centred in and near Vienna: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert are all preëminently Austrian. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century—that is, after the death of Schubert—there is not a single great composer living in Vienna for more than a short period of time. The political situation of Vienna, the stronghold of darkness at this time, must have had a blighting effect on vigorous and open-minded men. At a time when the most stimulating intellectual life was surging through Germany generally, Vienna was suffering the most rigid censorship and not a ray of light from the intellectual world was permitted to enter the city. Weber felt this in 1814 in Austrian Prague. He wrote: ‘The few composers and scholars who live here groan for the most part under a yoke which has reduced them to slavery and taken away the spirit which distinguishes the true free-born artist.’ Weber, a true free-born artist, left Prague at the earliest opportunity and went to Dresden, where the national movement, though frowned upon, was open and aggressive. Schubert, on the contrary, because of poverty and indolence, never left Vienna and the territory immediately surrounding. In the preceding generation, when music was still flowing in the calm traditions, composers could work best in such a shut-in environment. (It is possibly well to remember, however, that Austria had a fit of liberalism in the two decades preceding Napoleon’s régime.) But with the nineteenth century things changed; when the beacon of national life was lighting the best spirits of the time, the composers left Vienna and scattered over Germany or settled in Paris and London. Schubert alone remained, his imagination indifferent to the world beyond. In all things but one he was a remnant of the eighteenth century, living on within the walls of the eighteenth century Vienna. But this one thing, which made him a romanticist, a link between the past and the present, a promise for the future, was connected, like all the other important things of the time, with the revolution and the Napoleonic convulsions. It was, in short, the German national movement expressed in the only form in which it could penetrate to Vienna; namely, the romantic movement in literature. Not in the least that Schubert recognized it as such; his simple soul doubtless saw nothing in it but an opportunity for beautiful melodies. But its inspiration was the German nationalist movement.
The fuel was furnished in the eighteenth century in the renaissance of German folk-lore and folk poetry. The researches of Scott among the Scotch Highlands, Bishop Percy’s ‘Reliques’ of English and Scottish folk poetry, the vogue which Goethe’s Werther gave to Ossian and his supposed Welsh poetry, and, most of all, the ballads of Bürger, including the immortal ‘Lenore,’ contributed, toward the end of the century, to an intense interest in old Germanic popular literature. Uhland, one of the most typical of the romantic poets, fed, in his youthful years, on ‘old books and chronicles with wonderful pictures, descriptions of travel in lands where the inhabitants had but one eye, placed in the centre of the forehead, and where there were men with horses’ feet and cranes’ necks, also a great work with gruesome engravings of the Spanish wars in the Netherlands.’[74] When he looked out on the streets he saw Austrian or French soldiers moving through the town and realized that there was an outside world of romantic passions and great issues—a thing Schubert never realized. Even then he was filled with patriotic fervor and his beloved Germanic folk-literature became an expression of it. In 1806-08 appeared Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of German folk poetry of all sorts—mostly taken down by word of mouth from the people—which did for Germany what Percy’s ‘Reliques’ had done for England. Under this stimulus the German romantic movement became, in Heine’s words, ‘a reawakening of the poetry of the Middle Ages, as it had manifested itself in its songs, paintings, and architecture,’[75] placed at the service of the national awakening.
But patriotic fervor was the ‘underground meaning’ of the romantic movement. This hardly penetrated to Schubert. He saw in it only his beautiful songs and the inspiration of immortal longings awakened by ‘old books and chronicles with wonderful pictures.’ He had at his disposal a wonderful lyrical literature. First of all Goethe, originator of so much that is rich in modern German life; Rückert and Chamisso, and Müller, singers of the personal sentiments; Körner, the soldier poet, and Uhland, spokesman for the people and apologist for the radical wing of the liberal political movement; Wieland and Herder; and, in the last months of his life, Heine, ultra-lyricist, satirist, and cosmopolite.
From this field Schubert’s instinct selected the purely lyrical, without regard to its tendency, with little critical discrimination of any sort. Thanks to his fertility, he included in his list of songs all the best lyric poets of his time. And to these poets he owed what was new and historically significant in the spirit of his musical output. This new element, reduced to its simplest terms, was the emotional lyrical quality at its purest. His musical training was almost exclusively classical, so far as it was anything at all. He knew and adored first Mozart and later Beethoven. But these composers would not have given him his wonderful gift of expressive song. And since it is never sufficient to lay any specific quality purely to inborn genius (innate genius is, on the whole, undifferentiated and not specific), we must lay it, in Schubert’s case, to the romantic poets. From the earliest years of his creative (as opposed to his merely imitative) life, he set their songs to music; he found nothing else so congenial; inevitably the spontaneous song called forth by these lyrics dominated his musical thinking. The romantic poets had taught him to create from the heart rather than from the intelligence.
Franz Schubert was born at Lichtenthal, a suburb of Vienna, in 1797, one of a family of nineteen children, of whom ten survived childhood. Instructed in violin playing by his father—nearly all German school-masters played the violin—he evinced an astounding musical talent at a very early age, was taken as boy soprano into the Vienna court chapel, and instructed in the musical choir school—the Convict—receiving lessons from Rucziszka and Salieri. At sixteen, when his voice changed, he left the Convict and during three years assisted his father as elementary school teacher in Lichtenthal. But in the meantime he composed no less than eight operas, four masses, and other church works and a number of songs. Not till 1817 was he enabled, through the generosity of his friend Schober, to devote himself entirely to music; never in his short life was he in a position to support himself adequately by means of his art: as musical tutor in the house of Esterhàzy in Hungary (1818-1824) he was provided for only during the summer months; Salieri’s post as vice-kapellmeister in Vienna as well as the conductorship of the Kärntnerthor Theatre he failed to secure. Hence, he was dependent upon the meagre return from his compositions and the assistance of a few generous friends—singers, like Schönstein and Vogl, who made his songs popular. Narrow as his sphere of action was the circle of those who appreciated him. Public recognition he secured only in his last year, with a single concert of his own compositions. He died in 1828, at the age of thirty-one. During that short span his productivity was almost incredible; operas, mostly forgotten (their texts alone would make them impossible) and some lost choral works of extraordinary merit; symphonies, some of which rank among the masterpieces of all times; fourteen string quartets and many other chamber works; piano sonatas of deep poetic content, and shorter piano pieces (Moments musicals, impromptus, etc.) poured from his magic pen, but especially songs, to the number of 650, a great many of which are immortal. Schubert was able to publish only a portion of this prodigious product during his lifetime. Much of it has since his death been resurrected from an obscure bundle of assorted music found among his effects, and at his death valued at 10 florins ($2.12)! A perfect stream of posthumous symphonies, operas, quartets, songs, every sort of music appeared year after year till the world began to doubt their authenticity. Schumann, upon his visit to Vienna in 1838, still discovered priceless treasures, including the great C major symphony.
As a man Schubert never got far away from the peasant stock from which he came. He was casual and careless in his life; a Bohemian rather from shiftlessness than from high spirits; content to work hard and faithfully, and demanding nothing more than a seidel of beer and a bosom companion for his diversion. He was never intellectual, and what we might call his culture came only from desultory reading. He was as sensitive as a child and as trusting and warm-hearted. His musical education had never been consistently pursued; his fertility was so great that he preferred dashing off a new piece to correcting an old one. Hence his work tends to be prolix, and, in the more academic sense, thin. Toward the end of his life, however, he felt his technical shortcomings, and at the time of his death had made arrangements for lessons in counterpoint from Sechter. It is fair to say that we possess only Schubert’s early works. Though they are some 1,800 in number, they are only a fragment of what he would have produced had he reached three-score and ten. By the age at which he died Wagner had not written ‘Tannhäuser’ nor Beethoven his Third Symphony.
In point of natural genius no composer, excepting possibly Mozart, excelled him. His rich and pure vein of melody is unmatched in all the history of music. We have already pointed out the strong influence of the great Viennese classics upon Schubert. In forming an estimate of his style we must recur to a comparison with them. We think immediately of Mozart when we consider the utter spontaneity, the inevitableness of Schubert’s melodies, his inexhaustible well of inspiration, the pure loveliness, the limpid clarity of his phrases. Yet in actual subject matter he is more closely connected to Beethoven—it is no detraction to say that in his earlier period he freely borrowed from him, for, in Mr. Hadow’s words, Schubert always ‘wears his rue with a difference.’ Again, in his procedure, in his harmonic progression and the rhythmic structure of his phrases, he harks back to Haydn; the abruptness of his modulations, the clear-cut directness of his articulation, the folk-flavor of some of his themes are closely akin to that master’s work. But out of all this material he developed an idiom as individual as any of his predecessors’.
The essential quality which distinguishes that idiom is lyricism. Schubert is the lyricist par excellence. More than any of the Viennese masters was he imbued with the poetic quality of ideas. His musical phrases are poetic where Mozart’s are purely musical. They have the force of words, they seem even translations of words, they are the equivalents of one certain poetic sentiment and no other; they fit one particular mood only. In the famous words of Lizst, Schubert was le musicien le plus poète qui fût jamais (the most poetic musician that ever lived). We may go further. Granting that Mozart, too, was a poetic musician, Schubert was a musical poet. What literary poet does he resemble? Hadow compares him to Keats; a German would select Heine. For Heine had all of that simplicity, that unalterable directness which we can never persuade ourselves was the result of intellectual calculation or of technical skill; he is so artless an artist that we feel his phrases came to him ready-made, a perfect gift from heaven, which suffered no criticism, no alteration or improvement.
Schubert died but one year after Beethoven, a circumstance which alone gives us reason to dispute his place among the romantic composers. He himself would hardly have placed himself among them, for he did not relish even the romantic vagaries of Beethoven at the expense of pure beauty, though he worshipped that master in love and awe. ‘It must be delightful and refreshing for the artist,’ he wrote of his teacher Salieri upon the latter’s jubilee, ‘to hear in the compositions of his pupils simple nature with its expression, free from all oddity, such as is now dominant with most musicians and for which we have to thank one of our greatest German artists almost exclusively....’ Yet, as Langhans says, ‘not to deny his inclination to elegance and pure beauty, he was able to approach the master who was unattainable in these departments (orchestral and chamber music) more closely than any one of his contemporaries and successors.’[76] Yes, and in some respects he was able to go beyond. ‘With less general power of design than his great predecessors he surpasses them all in the variety of his color. His harmony is extraordinarily rich and original, his modulations are audacious, his contrasts often striking and effective and he has a peculiar power of driving his point home by sudden alterations in volume of sound.’[77] In the matter of form he could allow himself more freedom—he could freight his sonatas with a poetic message that stretched it beyond conventional bounds, for his audience was better prepared to comprehend it. And while his polyphony is never like that of Beethoven, or even Mozart, his sensuous harmonic style, crystal clear and gorgeously varied, with its novel and enchanting use of the enharmonic change and its subtle interchange of the major and minor modes, supplies a richness and variety of another sort and in itself constitutes an advance, the starting point of harmonic development among succeeding composers. By these tokens and ‘by a peculiar quality of imagination in his warmth, his vividness and impatience of formal restraint, he points forward to the generation that should rebel against all formality.’ But, above all, by his lyric quality. He is lyric where Beethoven is epic; and lyricism is the very essence of romanticism. Whatever his stature as a symphonist, as a composer in general, his position as song writer is unique and of more importance than any other. Here he creates a new form, not by a change of principle, by a theoretically definable process, but ‘a free artistic creative activity, such as only a true genius, a rich personality not forced by a scholastic education into definitely limited tracks, could accomplish.’
The particular merit of this accomplishment of Schubert will have more detailed discussion in the following chapter. But, aside from that, he touched no form that he did not enrich. By his sense of beauty, unaided by scholarship or the inspiration of great deeds in the outer world, he made himself one of the great pioneers of modern music. Together with Weber, he set the spirit for modern piano music and invented some of its most typical forms. His Moments Musicals, impromptus, and pieces in dance forms gave the impulse to an entire literature—the Phantasiestücke of Schumann, the songs without words of Mendelssohn are typical examples. His quartets and his two great symphonies (the C major and the unfinished B minor) have a beauty hardly surpassed in instrumental music, and are inferior to the greatest works of their kind only in grasp of form. His influence on posterity is immeasurable. Not only in the crisp rhythms and harmonic sonorities of Schumann, in the sensuous melodies and gracious turns of Mendelssohn, but in their progeny, from Brahms to Grieg, there flows the musical essence of Schubert. Who can listen to the slow movement of the mighty Brahms C minor symphony without realizing the depth of that well of inspiration, the universality of the idiom created by the last of the Vienna masters?
Schubert’s music was indeed the swan-song of the Viennese period of the history of music, and it is remarkable that a voice from that city, more than any other in Europe bound to the old régime, should have sung of the future of music. But so Schubert sang from a city of the past. Meanwhile new voices were raised from other lands, strong with the promise of the time.