If the sentimentalist's tendency to value emotion for itself, as the voluptuary wallows in sensation, and the realist's fondness for crudely detailed effect, sometimes led Schubert into an artificial and fevered style, his very simplicity at other times played him false. Simplicity in art, as the case of Wordsworth has notoriously proved, covers a wide range, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Schubert is often sublimely simple, as in "Du bist die Ruh," "Heidenröslein," "Der Leiermann"; but sometimes he is merely flat and obvious. Indeed, writing, as he did, over six hundred songs in a score of years, not the most inspired of men could always have avoided platitude. Thus we must set aside many melodramatic and many trite compositions before we can get an unimpeded view of his real masterpieces. But after that has been done, we have left about twenty or thirty songs of such incomparable loveliness as to give him a secure place among the great masters of the musical lyric.
The careful discrimination between quantity and quality in Schubert's work, so obviously important in judging his songs, becomes perhaps even more indispensable when we come to his instrumental works. The facts that here present themselves to the intending student on his first approach to the subject are entirely misleading. Schubert wrote, he learns, ten symphonies and twenty string quartets, besides much other chamber and orchestral music. Remembering that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and sixteen string quartets, he is likely to assume that the essential Schubert is to be found permeating the one set of works just as the essential Beethoven permeates the other, and that if he can take, so to speak, a critical average of them all, he will come at the true musical personality of their author. Nothing could be more erroneous. For it must be borne in mind that while the works of Beethoven were written during the entire period of his artistic maturity, from his twenty-fifth to his fifty-sixth year, and with the most laborious care, those of Schubert are largely youthful exercises, and were in many cases thrown off as one would write a letter. Schubert wrote voluminously and carelessly, and died at thirty-one, just as he was entering the prime of life. His works are thus, if one may say so, like his person, embedded in superfluous flesh. The bulk of them are, so far as representing him goes, pure surplusage, to be stripped off and thrown aside before we can see the outline and stature of his genius. The compositions produced before 1820 are interesting to-day only as documents bearing on the peculiar way in which his individual style was gradually developed.
What they chiefly reveal is the ingenuousness, one might almost say the unconsciousness, with which he habitually composed. He seems to have made no effort to draw forth, by taking thought, his shy and retiring individuality; his method was rather to copy, often almost literally, the music he knew and liked, especially that of Haydn and Mozart. The quartet in G-minor, written in 1815, for example, contains a perfectly Mozartish minuet, while its finale is pure Haydn, except for occasional gleams of Schubert in the happy exuberances of detail and in the quick, informal modulations. Of the symphony in B-flat, written in 1816, the first and fourth movements are Haydn, the second and third Mozart. The closeness of the imitation is at times fairly disconcerting, as in the last eight measures of the minuet, which sound like a rejected sketch for the minuet of the "Jupiter Symphony":—
Figure I.
An even more amusing case is that of a passage in the E-major Quartet (opus 125, no. 2), written in the following year (1817), so startlingly like a portion of Mozart's G-minor Symphony that we can hardly resist the theory of unconscious plagiarism. The passages in question merit a careful comparison. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, Schubert was paying an eloquent tribute, indeed, to the genius of Haydn and Mozart in his works of 1815-1817.
