The art of music, Vol. 05 (of 14)

by Unknown

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:

Ihr lässt Armen schulig werden

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or in the ‘Praise of Tears’:

aler lenza und Jugendlust

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or in Der Lindenbaum:

so manches liebe Wort

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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.