But has its chord in melancholy.
No one has treated the passion of love more purely. Love with the modern French composer is too often merely a pronounced phase of eroticism, or it is purely, or impurely, cerebral. With Wagner it is as a rule heroically sensuous if not sensual. Is there one page of Schubert’s music that is characterized first of all by sensuousness? A few measures are played or sung; the music may be unknown to the hearer, but he says to himself “Schubert,” and not merely because he recognizes restless changes from major to minor and from minor to major, tremulous tonalities, surprising ease in modulation, naïve, direct melody. The sedulous ape may sweat in vain; there is no thought of Schubert, whose mannerisms are his whole individuality.
This individuality defies analysis. It was finely said by Walt Whitman that all music is “what awakens from you when you are reminded by the instruments”; the hearer’s thoughts are sweeter and purer, his soul is cheered or soothed, when he is reminded by the music of Schubert.
Pompous eulogies have been paid this homely, human, inspired man, who knew poverty and distress, who was ignored by the mob while he lived his short life, who never heard some of his most important works, whose works were scattered.
“Schubert, turning round, clutched at the wall with his poor, tired hands, and said in a slow voice, ‘Here, here is my end.’ At three in the afternoon of Wednesday, November 19, 1828, he breathed his last, and his simple, earnest soul took its flight from the world. There never has been one like him, and there will never be another.” When you read these words of Sir George Grove, something chokes you; they outweigh the purple phrases and dexterously juggled sentences of the rhetorician.
SYMPHONY NO. 8, IN B MINOR (“UNFINISHED”)
I. Allegro moderato II. Andante con moto
Let us be thankful that Schubert never finished the work. Possibly the lost arms of the Venus of Milo might disappoint if they were found and restored. The few measures of the scherzo that are in the manuscript furnish but slight hope that here at last Schubert would not, as in so many of his works of long breath, maintain a steady decrescendo of interest.
Surely, no one would deny the melancholy beauty of the first movement of Schubert’s symphony, with its lyricism that is appealingly feminine, with its melancholy that is without touch of peevishness and without taint of pessimism; and the second movement has the serenity—that is, Schubert’s romantic serenity, which is another thing than the classic serenity of Mozart.
The symphony is eminently Schubertian in its beauty and in its weakness. In the first movement there are measures of a grandeur that is seldom found in Schubert’s compositions. In these measures we recognize the Schubert that conceived the “Doppelgänger,” the “Gruppe aus dem Tartarus,” and a few other songs in which dramatic force comes before charming lyricism.