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

by Unknown

VII

Leading up to and even post-dating Schubert’s time we find two names which must enter into every history of song. The first is that of Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859). Spohr presents a peculiar problem. One of the most eminent musicians of his day and a man known before all else as an innovator, he has come to be the merest dead wood of musical history, a part of the gigantic tree, but a part which has become useless while other parts are still flourishing. Spohr felt, as Beethoven felt, that the old harmonic order had reached its zenith and that the time was ripe for freer and more daring expression. He was constantly straining to achieve this, but he lacked sufficient genius and his effort remains—only straining. He was always searching for expressive nuance, but his stock of tricks was limited and his emotional range slight. His many songs have completely dropped out of sight. In them detail is elaborated until one loses all sense of form and outline.

The other song writer who must be mentioned here is, of course, Beethoven. Beethoven’s songs do not often find a place in song recitals nowadays, but they are an organic link in the great German hierarchy from Heinrich Albert to Schubert. In addition to three songs of finest inherent quality we must credit him with the practical invention of the song cycle and the cultivation of free form and expressive detail in a way that clearly foreshadows Schubert. The three great songs mentioned are: ‘The Glory of God,’[19] In questa tomba, and the Busslied. The first is as noble a strain as anything in the great symphonies, a finer product because a simpler one than Schubert’s Die Allmacht in the same spirit. The Busslied has a long, half declamatory introduction following the words with faithful accuracy, presently, as the lyric element becomes more marked, settling into a measured song, over an impressive bass which is instinct with religious dignity. The second, In questa tomba, concentrates in a few lines of music the grim seriousness of the words. An die ferne Geliebte (‘To the Far-off Loved One’) is a true cycle, as Schumann later understood the form. The songs are connected by modulating intermezzos on the piano and the last song is followed by a piano postlude which introduces the melody of the first. The songs themselves are not of first quality, but the form and intent of the cycle are yet another proof of Beethoven’s astonishingly progressive genius. This cycle seems to look forward to Schumann rather than to Schubert. It uses, in fact not a few of Schumann’s own tricks—especially the deceptive cadence—to lend an ‘atmospheric’ quality to the music, or to prevent too great a finality in a musical phrase which accompanies an unfinished thought. The piano part shows a conscious effort to make the separate details expressive in their own right. Beethoven, in this cycle, was emphatically writing in the new and not in the old style. The singer should be familiar with this remarkable group if he is to appreciate the later work of Schumann. (The final song, Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder, is well worth knowing for its own sake.) Though Beethoven is not one of the great names in song literature, these pieces show eloquently that the great symphonist touched no form that he did not enrich.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Vol. I, Chapter IX (p. 258 ff).

[11] Chapter II (Sec. IV).

[12] Vol. I, Chapter IX.

[13] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

[14] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

[15] See Vol. II, Chapter VI.

[16] Cf. Vol. II, Chapter X.

[17] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

[18] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

[19] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

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.