Schubert’s magnificent symphony in C is one of the most beautiful works of the kind ever written, and lovers of orchestral music always delight to find it on the programme of an evening concert. It is a charm, an enchantment; it awakens feelings that are only active in the soul under exceptional influences. Yet the listener does not know to what he is listening: it is all a mystery; no one can tell what the composer intended to express by this symphony. We know that the theme is a noble one,—but what? that the soul of the writer must have been powerfully moved during its composition,—by what influences? It is an enigma: each listener may guess at the theme, and each will associate it with the subject most in harmony with his own taste.
In 1844 Robert Schumann, while looking over a heap of dusty manuscripts at Vienna, found this wonderful symphony, until then unknown. He was so much charmed with it that he sent it to Mendelssohn at Leipzig. It was there produced at the Gewandhaus concerts, won the admiration it deserved, and thence found its way to all the orchestras of the world. The youthful composer had been dead nearly twenty years when the discovery was made.
One of the best known of the dramatic German ballads is the Erl King.
The Erl King is Death. He rides through the night. He comes to a happy home, and carries away a child, galloping back to the mysterious land whence he came.
In this ballad a father is represented as riding with a dying child under his cloak. The Erl King pursues them.
Schubert gave the ballad its musical wings. I need not describe the music. It is on your piano. Let it tell the story.
BEETHOVEN’S BOYHOOD AT BONN.
Literary men have often produced their best works late in life. Longfellow cites some striking illustrations of this truth in Morituri Salutamus:—
“It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Œdipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years.
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his Characters of Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past.”
Such examples of late working are seldom found in musical art. Men seem to become musicians because of the inspiration born within them. This impelling force is very early developed.