Yet there is in these later works, also, an intensity and breathlessness of utterance, a white heat of passion burning away all dross and surplusage, and giving the style an incisiveness strongly contrasted with Schubert's usual genial prolixity, which seem to emanate from some sterner, wilder element in his nature. There is a nervous tenseness here which is distinctively modern; the D-minor Quartet particularly has the modern closeness of texture and rapidity of pulse. Its first theme, unlike most of Schubert's, is a short and trenchant motive of five notes, compelling attention from the very outset. The entire first movement is treated with great depth of feeling and sustained power, and the coda is of a wonderful dignity and reticence. The final presto, too, reminds us of Schumann in its emotional richness, and of Tschaïkowsky in the passion of its broken rhythms and headlong harmonic progressions. On the other hand, the harmonic idiom of the first movement of the quartet in G-major (see Figure IV.), with its lapses of triads down through intervals of a whole step, is that of César Franck. Schubert is here the prototype of the most advanced modern symphonists, as in his piano pieces he anticipates the methods of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, and in his songs gives the cue to Franz, Rubinstein, Grieg, and Brahms.
Figure IV.
The chief faults of Schubert's instrumental works—and they are grave ones—result in part from his way of composing, and in part from the untraversable opposition between the lyrical expression native to him and the modes of construction suitable to extended movements. Schubert was an easy-going, careless, and indolent writer. He wrote music as most people write letters; often he would scribble off half a dozen songs in a single day; he thought nothing of making an overture in three hours, or a whole operetta in a week; to a friend who asked him how he composed, he replied, "As soon as I finish one thing I begin another." What all this means, practically, is that he did not "compose" at all in the strict sense of placing together tones with care and forethought, but merely improvised on paper. And as a result, while he certainly attained a delightful spontaneity of effect, he also fell into the pitfalls of monotony and diffuseness. He is constantly becoming hypnotized by a rhythm, keeping it up relentlessly, page on page, without relief. When he has once hit upon a phrase that appeals to him, such, for example, as the second subject in the G-major Quartet, he is apt to adhere to it pretty closely through a whole section of the piece. Such insistence, in contrast to the variety of phraseology of composers like Mozart, is comparable in effect to the singsong couplets of Pope or Dryden, as contrasted with the pliant versification of Shelley. This weaker aspect of Schubert, connected with his lack of intellectual vigor and possibly with a certain flabbiness of moral fibre, has been exhaustively discussed by Mr. H. H. Statham, an English critic, who reaches the conclusion that "in music, as in literature, easy writing is hard reading," and that in Schubert's larger pieces "lovely melodies follow each other, but nothing comes of them." Whether or not we agree with so extreme a view, we cannot deny Schubert's weakness in musical construction.
We usually find in his music five pages of repetition to one of real development. Mr. Statham is right in contrasting the "vain repetitions" in the andante of the C-major Symphony with the logical evolution of matter in the allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. And even where, as in the fine coda of the finale of the C-major Symphony, Schubert has a truly broad design to work out, he fills in his detail in the easiest, least exacting way by repeating identical phrases at a higher and higher pitch. The effect of the long, gradual climax is intensely dramatic, but when upon familiarity we realize that the ideas generate, so to speak, by fission, or exact reduplication, rather than by organic evolution, we are left æsthetically unsatisfied. The truth seems to be that Schubert, being essentially a lyrical writer, makes beautiful symphonies and quartets in spite of, rather than by means of, the natural conditions of these epic musical forms. His symphonies are expanded songs, delightful, as songs are delightful, for their directness of feeling, their beauty of detail, their warmth of color and sensuous charm.
His last work, however, the great C-major Symphony, has enough of the heroic about it to make us cautious in saying what he might or might not have done had he not died at thirty-one, when he was just entering the period of artistic maturity. There is a grandeur of scale and intention, a deliberation and solidity, a sustained power, large touch, and freedom of execution about this symphony that place it above all his other works. The long climaxes bespeak a reserve power not associated with Schubert the song-writer; the themes wear their possibilities less upon the surface, and unfold them more cumulatively; the harmony is firmer, plainer, and stronger; the scoring is done as it were with a larger brush, the colors laid on in wider spaces and freer patterns; and in the last movement the romantic note is for once well drowned in a deeper cry of tragic heroism. It is not a mere coincidence that the theme at the beginning of the development section so strongly suggests Beethoven's "Hymn of Joy"; the spirit here is Beethoven's, and the spaciousness of the scheme of construction, if not the detail with which it is filled in, are worthy of the greatest symphonist. Here surely the graciousness of childhood and the romantic dalliance of youth are laid aside, and Schubert speaks with the deep, deliberate voice of manhood. Death never came to an artist more untimely. Had he lived, we cannot tell what new and even profounder expressions of the ripe earnestness that lies beyond romance he might not have planned and achieved.