VIII
There were more reasons than the accidental conjunction of the Schumanns and Mendelssohn for the brilliant position of Leipzig in German musical life. For centuries the city had been, thanks to its university, one of the intellectual centres of Germany. Being also a mercantile centre, it became the logical location for numerous publishing firms. The prestige and high standard of the Thomasschule, of which Bach had for many years been ‘Cantor,’ had stimulated its musical life, and even when Mendelssohn arrived in 1835 the Gewandhaus Orchestra was one of the most excellent in Europe. The intellectual life of the city was of the sort that has done most honor to Germany—vigorous, scholarly, and critical, but self-supporting and self-contained. Around Mendelssohn and his influence there grew up the ‘Leipzig school,’ with Ferdinand Hiller,[84] W. Sterndale Bennett,[85] Carl Reinecke,[86] and Niels W. Gade[87] as its chief figures. Mendelssohn’s emphasis on classicism and moderation was probably responsible for the tendency of this school to degenerate into academic dryness, but this was not present to dim its brilliancy during Mendelssohn’s life.
In the ‘Leipzig circle’ Schumann was always something of an outsider. Though he was much more of Leipzig than Mendelssohn, he was too much of a revolutionary to be immediately influential. Nor did he have Mendelssohn’s advantages in laying hold on the public. For the first twenty years of his life his connection with music was only that of the enthusiastic dilettante. Though his father, a bookseller of Zwickau in Saxony, favored the development of his musical gifts, his mother feared an artistic career and kept him headed toward the profession of lawyer until his inclinations became too strong. In the meantime he had graduated from the Gymnasium of Zwickau, where he was born in 1810, and entered the University of Leipzig as a student of law. His sensitiveness to all artistic influences in his youth was extremely marked, especially to the efflorescent poet and pseudo-philosopher, Jean Paul Richter (Jean Paul), on whom Schumann later based his literary style. In his youth he would organize amateur orchestras among his playfellows or entertain them with musical descriptions of their personalities on the piano. When, at about seventeen, he arrived in Leipzig to study in the University, he plunged into music, in particular studying the piano under Frederick Wieck, whose daughter, the brilliant pianist, Clara Wieck, later became his wife. An accident to his hand, due to over-zeal in practice, shattered his hopes of becoming a concert pianist, and he took to composition. He now devoted his efforts to repairing the gaps in his theoretical education, though not until a number of years later was he completely at home in the various styles of writing. His romantic courtship of Clara Wieck culminated, in 1840, in their marriage, against her father’s wishes. Their life together was devoted and happy. The year of their marriage is that of Schumann’s most fertile and creative work. His life from this time on was the strenuous one of composer and conductor, with not a few concert tours in which he conducted and his wife played his compositions. But more immediately fruitful was his literary work as editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, founded in 1834 to champion the romantic tendencies of the younger composers. Toward 1845 there were signs of a failing in physical and mental powers and at times an enforced cessation of activity. In 1853 he suffered extreme mental depression, and his mind virtually gave way. An attempted suicide in 1854 was followed by his confinement in a sanatorium, and his death followed in 1856.
Schumann is the most distinguished in the list of literary musicians. His early reactions to romantic tendencies in literature were intense, and when the time came for him to use his pen in defense of the music of the future he had an effective literary style at his command. It was the style of the time. Mere academic or technical criticism he despised, not because he despised scholarship, but because he felt it had no place in written criticism. He set himself to interpret the spirit of music. True to romantic ideals, he was subjective before all. He sent his soul out on adventures among the masterpieces—or, rather, his souls; for he possessed several. One he called ‘Florestan,’ fiery, imaginative, buoyant; another was ‘Eusebius,’ dreamy and contemplative. It was these two names which chiefly appeared beneath his articles. Then there was a third, which he used seldom, ‘Meister Raro,’ cool judgment and impersonal reserve. He set himself to ‘make war on the Philistines,’ namely, all persons who were stodgy, academic, and dry. He had a fanciful society of crusaders among his friends which he dubbed the Davidsbund. With this equipment of buoyant fancy he was the best exemplar of the romantic idealism of his time and race.
The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, organized in connection with enthusiastic friends, bravely battled for imagination and direct expression in music during the ten years of Schumann’s immediate editorship and during his contributing editorship thereafter. Schumann’s ‘announcement’ of Chopin in 1831, and of Brahms in 1853, have become famous. In most things his judgment was extraordinarily sound. Though he was frankly an apologist for one tendency, he appreciated many others, not excluding the reserved Mendelssohn, who was in many things his direct opposite. Sometimes, particularly in his prejudice against opera music, he disagreed with the tendencies of the time. After hearing ‘Tannhäuser’ in Dresden he could say nothing warmer than that on the whole he thought Wagner might some day be of importance to German opera. But, though Schumann was thus limited, he had the historical sense, and had scholarship behind his articles, if not in them. During a several months’ stay in Vienna he set himself to discovering forgotten manuscripts of Schubert, and the great C major symphony, first performed under Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus concerts in 1839, owes its recovery to him.
Schumann worked generously in all forms except church music. At first he was chiefly a composer for the piano, and his genre pieces, ‘pianistic’ in a quite new way, opened the field for much subsequent music from other pens. In them his romantic fervor best shows itself. They are buoyantly pictorial and suggestive, though avoiding extremes, and they abound in literary mottoes. In 1840 begins his chief activity as a song composer, and here he takes a place second only to Schubert in lovableness and second to none in intimate subjective expression. Between 1841 and 1850 come four lovely symphonies, uneven in quality and without distinction in instrumentation, but glowing with vigorous life. In the last ten years of his life come the larger choral works, the ‘Faust’ scenes, several cantatas, the—— and the opera ‘Genoveva.’ Throughout the latter part of his life are scattered the chamber works which are permanent additions to musical literature. These works, and their contributions to musical development, will be described in succeeding chapters.
These are the preëminent romantic composers. What they have in common is not so evident as seems at first glance. The very creed that binds them together makes them highly individual and dispartite. At bottom, the only possible specific definition of romantic music is a description of romantic music itself. ‘Romantic’ is at best a loose term; and it happens always to be a relative term.
But a brief formal statement of the old distinction between ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’ may be helpful in following the description of romantic music in the following chapters. For the terms have taken on some sort of precise meaning in their course down the centuries. Perhaps the chief distinction lies in the æsthetic theory concerning limits. The Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral are the standard examples. The Greek loved to work intensively on a specific problem, within definite and known limits, controlling every detail with his intelligence and achieving the utmost perfection possible to careful workmanship. The Greek temple is small in size, can be taken in at a glance; every line is clear and definitely terminated; details are limited in number and each has its reason for existing; the work is a unit and each part is a part of an organic whole. The mediæval workman, on the other hand, was impressed by the richness of a world which he by no means understood; he loved to see all sorts of things in the heavens above and the earth beneath and to express them in his art. Ruskin makes himself the apologist for the Gothic cathedral when he says: ‘Every beautiful detail added is so much richness gained for the whole.’ The mediæval cathedral, then, is an amazing aggregation of rich detail. Unity is a minor matter. The cathedral is never to be taken in at a glance. Its lines drive upward and vanish into space; it is filled with dark corners and mysterious designs. It is an attempt to pierce beyond limits and achieve something more universal.
Here is the distinction, and it is more a matter of individual temperament than of historical action and reaction. The poise and control that come from working within pre-defined limits are the chief glory of the classical; the imagination and energy that come from trying to pass beyond limits are the chief charm of the romantic. Let us never expect to settle the controversy, for both elements exist in all artists, even in Berlioz. But let us try to understand how the artist feels toward each of these inspirations, and to see what, in each age, is the specific impulse toward one or the other.
H. K. M.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] ‘Uhland’s Life,’ by his widow.
[75] Heine: Die romantische Schule.
[76] Wilhelm Langhans: ‘The History of Music,’ Eng. transl. by J. H. Cornell, 1886.
[77] Ibid.
[78] Fyffe: ‘History of Modern Europe’, Vol. I.
[79] He was a pupil first of his stepbrother, Fridolin, of Heuschkel in Hildburghausen, of Michael Haydn in Salzburg (1797), of Kalcher in theory, and Valesi in singing.
[80] Reinach’s ‘Apollo.’
[81] John Field, b. Dublin, 1782; d. Moscow, 1837; pianist and composer; was a pupil of Clementi, whom he followed to Paris and later to St. Petersburg, where he became noted as a teacher. Afterwards he gave concerts successfully in London, as well as in Belgium, France, and Italy. His 20 ‘Nocturnes’ for pianoforte are the basis of his fame. Being the first to use the name, he may be considered to have established the type. His other compositions include concertos, sonatas, etc., and some chamber music.
[82] Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837). Sec Vol. XI.
[83] Johann Baptist Cramer (1771-1858). See Vol. XI.
[84] Born, Frankfort, 1811; died, Cologne, 1885; was a man of many parts, brilliant pianist and conductor, composer of fine sensibility and mastery of form, and a talented critic and author; cosmopolite and friend of many distinguished musicians, from Cherubini to Berlioz, and especially of Mendelssohn. He left operas, symphonies, oratorios, chamber music, etc., and theoretical works. His smaller works—piano pieces and songs—are still popular.
[85] Born, Sheffield, England, 1816; died, London, 1875. See Vol. XI.
[86] Born in Altona, near Hamburg, 1824; a highly educated musician, distinguished as pianist, conductor, composer, pedagogue, and critic. As conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and as professor of piano and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory he exerted a long and powerful influence. As composer he followed the school of Mendelssohn and Schumann, was very prolific and distinguished by brilliant musicianship and ingenious if not highly original imagination. Besides operas, singspiele cantatas, symphonies, etc., he published excellent chamber music and many piano works.
[87] See Vol. III. Chap. I.
CHAPTER VII
SONG LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD
Lyric poetry and song—The song before Schubert—Franz Schubert; Carl Löwe—Robert Schumann; Robert Franz; Mendelssohn and Chopin; Franz Liszt as song writer.
Song in the modern sense (the German word Lied expresses it) is peculiarly a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. In the preceding centuries it can hardly be said to have claimed the attention of composers. Vocal solos of many sorts there had, of course, been; but they were of one or another formal type and are sharply to be contrasted with the song of Schubert, Schumann, and Franz. If a prophet and theorist of the year 1800, foreknowing what was to be the spirit of the romantic age, had sketched out an ideal art form for the perfect expression of that spirit he would surely have hit upon the song. The fact that song was not composed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proves how predominantly formal and how little expressive in purpose the music of that time was.
It is strange how little of the lyrical quality (in the poet’s sense of the term) there was in the music of the eighteenth century. The lyric is that form of poetry which expresses individual emotion. It is thus sharply to be contrasted in spirit with all other forms—the epic, which tells a long and heroic story; the narrative, which tells a shorter and more special story; the dramatic, which pictures the characters as acting; the satiric, the didactic, and the other forms of more or less objective intent. No less is the lyric to be contrasted with the other types in point of form. For, whereas the epic, the dramatic, and the rest can add detail upon detail at great length, and lives by its quantity of good things, the lyric stands or falls at the first blow. Either it transmits to the reader the emotion it seeks to express, or it does not, and if it does not then the longer it continues the greater bore it becomes. For all the forms of objective poetry can get their effect by reproducing objective details in abundance. But to transmit an emotion one must somehow get at the heart of it—by means of a suggestive word or phrase or of a picture that instantly evokes an emotional experience. The accuracy of the lyrical expression depends upon selecting just the right details and omitting all the rest. Thus the lyric must necessarily be short, while most of the other poetic forms can be indefinitely extended.
And, besides, an emotion usually lasts in its purity only for a moment. You divine it the instant it is with you, or you have lost it. It cannot be prolonged by conscious effort; it cannot be recalled by thinking about it. The expression of it will therefore last but for a moment. It must be caught on the wing. And the power so to catch an emotion is a very special power. Few poets have had it in the highest degree. Those who have had it, such as Burns, Goethe, or Heine, can, in a dozen lines or so, take their place beside the greatest poets of all time. The special beauty of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ or ‘Der du von dem Himmel bist’ or ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ is as far removed from that of the longer poem—say, ‘Il Penseroso’ or Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Man’—as a tiny painting by Vermeer is from a canvas by Veronese. Emotional expression, of course, exists in many types of poetry, but it cannot be sustained and hence is only a sort of recurrent by-product. The lyric is distinguished by the fact that in it individual emotional expression is the single and unique aim.
This lyric spirit is obviously seldom to be found in the ‘art’ music of the eighteenth century. It is not too much to say that music in that age was regarded as dignified in proportion to its length. The clavichord pieces of Rameau or Couperin were hardly more than after-dinner amusements; and the fugues and preludes of Bach, for all the depth of the emotion in them and despite their flexible form, were primarily technical exercises. The best creative genius of the latter half of the century was expended upon the larger forms—the symphony, the oratorio, the opera, the mass.
All the qualities which are peculiar to the lyric in poetry we find in the song—the Lied—of the nineteenth century. A definition or description of the one could be applied almost verbatim to the other. The lyric song must be brief, emotional, direct. Like the lyric poem, it cannot waste a single measure; it must create its mood instantly. It is personal; it seeks not to picture the emotion in general, but the particular emotion experienced by a certain individual. It is unique; no two experiences are quite alike, and no two songs accurately expressive of individual experiences can be alike. It is sensuous; emotions are felt, not understood, and the song must set the hearer’s soul in vibration. It is intimate; one does not tell one’s personal emotions to a crowd, and the true song gives each hearer the sense that he is the sole confidant of the singer. Musical architecture, in the older sense, has very little to do with this problem. Individual expression goes its own way, and the music must accommodate itself to the form of the text. Abundance of riches is only in a limited way a virtue in a good song. The great virtue is to select just the right phrase to express the particular mood. Fine sensibilities are needed to appreciate a good song, for the song is a personal confession, and one can understand a friend’s confession only if one has sensitive heart-strings.
Thus the song was peculiarly fitted to express a large part of the spirit of the romantic period. This period, which appreciated the individual more than any other age since the time of Pericles (with the possible exception of the Italian Renaissance), which sought to make the form subsidiary to the sense, which sought to get at the inner reality of men’s feelings, which longed for sensation and experience above all other things—this period expressed itself in a burst of spontaneous song as truly as the drama expressed Elizabethan England, or the opera expressed eighteenth century Italy.