V
All the work of Weber and most of that of Schubert fall within the lifetime of Beethoven. The three great men constitute the foundation of the pianoforte music of the great German composers of the next generation. But Beethoven’s influence is largely spiritual, as Bach’s. There was nothing more to be done with the sonata after he finished, and long before his death the progress of pianoforte music had taken a new turn. It is not inconceivable that before very long Beethoven’s sonatas will be regarded as the culmination and end of a period of growth, just as the music of Bach is already regarded; that he will appear materially related only to what came before him, and to have died without musical heir. The last sonatas rested many years generally unknown. His peculiar and varied treatment of the pianoforte in them found few or no imitators. The technique of the instrument that Schumann and Chopin employed was not descended from him; rather from Weber on the one hand and from Mozart and Hummel on the other.
Even in the matter of form he exercised hardly more than a spiritual influence, as regards pianoforte music alone. Schumann and Chopin both wrote sonatas, but the sonatas of neither show kinship to those of Beethoven. The Brahms sonatas are more closely related to Weber than to Beethoven. The Liszt sonata in B minor and the Liszt concertos are constructed on a wholly new plan that was suggested by Berlioz; and the two long works of César Franck are not even called sonatas. The sonata in pianoforte music alone had had its day. The form remained but the spirit had fled. If music came back to it at all, it came back to sit as it were among ruins.
The change which came over music was but the counterpart of the change which came over men and over society. It was evident in literature long before it affected music. It might in many ways be said to have reached music through literature. The whole movement of change and reformation has been given the name Romantic. It was accompanied in society by violent revolutions, prolonged restlessness, the awakening of national and popular feeling. It is marked in literature and in music by intensely self-conscious emotion, by an appeal to the senses rather than to the intellect, by a proud and undisguised assertion of individuality.
Most great music is romantic music. The preludes of Bach, the little pieces of Couperin, a great deal of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven have a personal warmth which is essentially romantic. Music draws its life more directly from emotions than the other arts. But there are signs in the music of these men of an objective, an external ideal, to which they have conformed the expression of their emotions. They do not work upon the spur of emotional excitement alone. That is but the germ from which their music starts. They have a power to sustain. They work with music; and the ideas which they choose to work with are chosen from a thousand others for the possibilities they contain of expansion, of alteration, of adaptability to the need of the work as a whole. Within the limits of this work emotional inspiration plays its part, adding here and there a bit of harmony, a new phrase. These are romantic touches. These reveal the quick or the inert nature back of the music. But back of it all the architectural brain presides, building a structure of broad design, or of exquisite proportions. The ideal is commonly known as classical; and these composers are properly called classical.
The Romantic composers, on the other hand, treasure their moods. They enshrine their separate inspirations. It is the manner of their time. They are, as we have said, emotionally self-conscious. This is one of the marks by which we may know them. The architectural ideal loses their devotion. They lack, in the first place, the prime desire to sustain, in the second place, the power. The change shows itself distinctly in the works of Weber and Schubert, both of whom are recognized as the first of the Romantic composers.
Take, for example, the sonatas of Weber. The movements are, as we have ventured to suggest, like broad pictures. They are a series of figures, of colors and shadows, like tapestries. They conform to the rules of form, but they have little or nothing of the spirit of it. They seem to cover the outlines of a story. They suggest the theatre. So little is their form all-sufficing that we are tempted to fit each with a chronicle taken from olden days of knighthood. At last Weber does so himself—gives us stories for two of his compositions.
And the sonatas of Schubert, what a ruin are they! Moments of hot inspiration, of matchless beauty; well-nigh hours of fatal indifference and ignorance. On the other hand, he has left us short pieces which the publishers must needs call impromptus for lack of any other name; ‘Musical Moments,’ each the full and perfect expression of a single, swift inspiration. His muse whispers in his ear and before she has flown away he has written down what she prompted. She makes short visits, this muse. So much the worse for him if she starts him upon a sonata. He is soon left with nothing but a pen in his hand.
Weber with his stories, Schubert with his short forms, are the prototypes of most of the Romantic composers to come. We shall find everywhere signs of the supremacy of the transient mood. Stories will be lacking, at least in pianoforte music; but there will be titles, both vague and specific, labelling the mood so that the music may exert an added charm. There will be something feverish, something not entirely healthy in it all. As we shall see, composers will expend their all in a single page. Yet there will come a warmth and a now sad, now wild poetry.
The virtuosi, and Weber among them with his showy polaccas and rondos, speak of the change. They appeal to the general public. They are sensationalists. The aristocratic amateurs will no longer hold musicians in dependence. There is a mass of people waking into life. The crowd makes money, it buys pianos; it will pay to hear a man, or a woman, perform on the household instrument. It will submit to the intoxicating, swift fingers, to the display of technique. Not that the aristocratic amateurs were always less open to such oratorical persuasion; but the public now holds the money bags, and it will pay to hear fingers, to see flying arms and streaming hair. Who will care to hear a man improvise a fugue in five parts? How will they judge virtue but by virtuosity?
On the other hand, men will begin to write about their art, to defend their new ideals, to criticize and appreciate the outpourings of each genius as he comes along, to denounce the virtuosi who have nothing to show but empty show. A musician holds a place now as a man, a man of the world and of affairs. He makes a name for himself as a poet, a critic, a satirist. And on the verge of all this new development stand Weber and Schubert; the brilliant, witty patriot, the man who spent his energy that a national opera might be established in the land of his birth; and the man who had no thoughts but the joy of his art, the warmth of music, no love but the love of song, the singer of his race and his companions.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Les pianistes célèbres. 2d edition, Paris, 1878.
CHAPTER VI
MENDELSSOHN, SCHUMANN AND BRAHMS
Influence of musical romanticism on pianoforte literature—Mendelssohn’s pianoforte music, its merits and demerits; the ‘Songs without Words’; Prelude and Fugue in D minor; Variations Sérieuses; Mendelssohn’s influence, Bennett, Henselt—Robert Schumann, ultra-romanticist and pioneer; peculiarities of his style; miscellaneous series of piano pieces; the ‘cycles’: Carnaval, etc.—The Papillons, Davidsbündler, and Faschingsschwank; the Symphonic Études; Kreisleriana, etc., the Sonatas, Fantasy and Concerto—Johannes Brahms; qualities of his piano music; his style; the sonatas, ‘Paganini Variations,’ ‘Handel Variations,’ Capriccios, Rhapsodies, Intermezzi; the Concertos; conclusion.
The progress of German pianoforte music is consistent and unbroken from the death of Schubert down to the end of the nineteenth century. All composers, both great and small, with the exception of a few who would have had music remain in the forms of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, even at the price of stagnation little better than death, submitted themselves and their art to the influences of the Romantic movement which had placed so distinct a mark on the music of Weber and Schubert. We meet with relatively few long works. The best of these are frankly called Fantasies, claiming little relation to the sonata. Hundreds of sets of short pieces make their appearance. Rarely have the separate pieces in a set any conventional or any structural relation. The set as a whole is given a name, simple and generic, or fantastical. We meet ‘Songs Without Words,’ ‘Fantasy Pieces,’ ‘Melodies for Piano,’ ‘Nocturnes,’ ‘Ballads,’ ‘Novelettes,’ ‘Romances,’ ‘Night Poems,’ ‘Love Dreams,’ ‘Rhapsodies,’ ‘Diaries,’ and ‘Sketch-books.’ There are Flower, Fruit, and Thorn pieces, Flying Leaves, Autumn Leaves, and Album Leaves, even the ‘Walks of a Lonely Man’ and Nuits Blanches.
Most of these short pieces conform to one of three types. Either they are moods in music, in which case they have no distinctive features; or they are genre pieces, a diluted, watery (usually watery) picture music; or, by reason of the constant employment of a definite technical figure, they are études or studies. Most of them are mild and inoffensive. Few of them show marked originality, genuine fervor or intensity of feeling. They are evaporations rather than outpourings; and as such most of them have been blown from memory. A cry against this vigorous wind of Time, harsh and indiscriminating as in many cases it may appear to be, is hopeless. Not refinement of style nor careful workmanship can alone save music from the obliterating cyclone. One may as well face the fact that only a few men’s moods and reveries are of interest to the world, that sentimentality must ever dress in a new fashion to win fresh tears and sighs.