Schubert never appears a slave to the arrangement he adopts; but the movement flows so naturally from his pen that there is no want of harmony between his idea and its realisation. He is just as little a special artist of the form. He has written many sonatas—four-handed and two-handed; but he cares little for the form. Where he can subject his dainty ideas to this mould, as in the first three movements of the duet in B flat major, he is interesting to us. When he cannot easily do so, he has recourse to variations in the style of the time or to all kinds of academic free fantasias. In this case he speedily becomes antiquated. But we must again remember that he has left us only youthful works. His latest sonatas, particularly those in A major and in B flat major; his latest chamber-music and symphonies, the wonderful Schumann-like F minor fantasia, and the Beethoven-like duet “Lebensstürme” in rondo form, are more weighty in structure and show him on the way to throw his great conceptions into more recognised forms: in this style he would have grown into a great artist.
The “Wanderer” Fantasia stands on the boundary line. The method of writing a free fantasia on a song-motive—on this occasion one of his own—by which the ordinary four movements are preserved, was then à la mode. That the last movement should begin with a fugato, which soon passes over into more general virtuosity, was equally common. In the more purely virtuoso passages, specially in the quite conventional coda, Schubert is the very child of the Viennese school. The free fantasias are rather in Hummel’s than in Beethoven’s style—preserving a middle path between the two. The form is so free that from the waltz movement of the scherzo to the weighty fugue, from the song of the adagio to the conventional conclusion, almost all the styles of piano music that exist are packed in. But if a song or a waltz rhythm or a special tone expression appears, then we observe with what alacrity Schubert sets about his work. He prepares it beforehand with a certain effort. He caresses the new theme; for example, on the entrance of the melodic E flat major theme in the first movement, in the dramatic deep tremolo in the adagio, and in the pianissimo D flat major waltz in the third movement.
Nothing is more distinctive of Schubert than the development of the Fantasia Sonata Op. 78. The first movement hardly hangs together. A wonderful theme, depending on delicate touch, is mingled with empty technical intermediate passages. The Andante is a Volkslied, arranged as in sonatas; as a whole treated somewhat feebly, but with sudden small intermezzos, at first in F sharp major (bar 47), where suspensions in Schubert’s true style sound in softest pianissimo in the middle voices. In the third movement a ravishing minuet meets us, running in cheerful rhythms, with a waltz-like conclusion which anticipates one side of Schumann, and with a dainty trio in B major, in bell-like tones and magical retardations such as Schubert himself hardly surpassed. Thus a G sharp[126] in the chord of the dominant seventh, with which the melodic chain is ornamentally interwoven, was a discovery rich in wonders. And the last movement with its original popular dance, which he overheard directly from the heart of the people where the basses rumble below and the fiddle-bows spring on the strings; with the two laughing trios, in which Johann Strauss is entirely anticipated; national dances with a dainty melody, which conclude so lingeringly in the spiritual chorale-tone (in C major)—pictures like these music had not hitherto known. All kinds of foreign national airs had, of course, been dealt with in artistic style; and Schubert himself, in his brilliant Hungarian Divertissement for four hands, has painted a gipsy picture with all his dexterity in rhythm; but the German national airs had received but scanty attention. Here, at last, we find the German folk-music, which found in the Viennese dance-composers its popular embellishment, and in Schumann its artistic treatment.
With his Impromptus and Moments Musicals, those small impressionist forms, Schubert placed piano-literature upon a new basis. Here is found that form of chamber music which is most peculiar to the piano as a solo instrument with full harmony. It is not a sonata, which is founded by the great laws of universal tonic art; nor a concerto, which drags the piano before a many-headed multitude which delights in distraction; nor an operatic fantasia or variation on an air, which forbids the charm of free improvisation; no technical elaborated étude, nor a scientifically constructed fugato;—but a piece which brings single selected musical thoughts into a short artistic form, no longer in extent than the tone-colour of the instrument permits; yet, with all infelt genuineness, informed with the best effects of the piano, which the player, as he composes in solitude, feels in full intensity. Almost all Schubert’s pieces retain something of the spirit of the time. Some are a kind of variations; others études, a third class dances; but they are constantly more than mere echoes of the time; they are founded on an inner genuineness, and much too full in expression to permit of being included under any category of the external. In Beethoven’s life we witnessed the way in which a world-embracing genius gradually threw off the traditional form; in Schubert we see how an intimate spirit gradually rises above the style of the time. This development is included between the Sonatas and the Wanderer Fantasia on the one hand, and the Moments Musicals on the other. At the same period in which the technical musicians accomplished the outward emancipation of the clavier, these short pieces (Kurze Geschichten) made it inwardly free.
Lithograph of 1846, by J. Kriehuber (1801-1876).
As Impromptus the two groups, Op. 90 and Op. 142, were published. Those of the first group have all penetrated deeply into our musical consciousness. All roads lead us back again to the first Impromptu with its simple popular melody in two sections, which is varied in so many extraordinary ways; and with that melodious middle-movement, more joyous and ethereal, than any that had ever been heard before on the pianoforte. Who can forget the second with the light étude-like triplet-swinging in E flat major and the mighty B minor middle section; or the third with its wonderful G flat major melody, its divine modulations and its captivatingly simple conclusion, revealing unexpected melodic wonders in a broken chord of the seventh; or the fourth, a light floating figure with its short Volkslied intermezzi and the long drawn out melody of the trio in C♯ minor—Schumann all over!
The second group of Impromptus (Op. 142) stands below the first in importance. It was with Schubert as with Mozart; good and bad inspirations came to him alike, and he could not discriminate them. Yet they contain the dainty A flat major piece, which demands nothing but a gentle touch; and in the variations of the third Impromptu (which is therefore no impromptu) the likeness to Schumann is once more astonishing. It is a peculiar pleasure to detect Schumann in Schubert, and it is a piece of historic justice which has often been neglected.
More successful, indeed Schubert’s greatest achievement, was the “Moments Musicals,” which appeared in 1828, the year of his death. The first of these is a naturalistic free musical expatiation; the second a gentle movement in A flat major; the third the well-known F minor dance—in which a dance became a penetrating and sorrow-laden tongue—the fourth the Bach-like C sharp minor moderato, with its placid middle section in D flat major; the fifth a fantastic march with a sharply cut rhythm; and the sixth, perhaps Schubert’s most profound piano-piece, that reverie in still chords, which only once are more violently shaken in order to lull us to sleep with its pensive and dainty sorrow, its delicate connections, its singing imitations, its magic enharmonics, and its sweet melodies rising like flowers from the soft ground. The conclusion of the trio, in the style of a popular chorale, with its harmonisation in thirds, is (like many of his harmonic passages in octaves or sixths) exceedingly characteristic of the popular nature of Schubert’s music.