Famous composers and their works, Vol. 2

by Unknown

We have seen that the Erl King was at first coldly received. It marked a new departure in the dramatic treatment of musical themes; the ears of the listeners were not taught to expect such treatment; they were disturbed by the intensity of passion and bewildered by the boldness of the harmonies. In particular at the superb discord where the child cries that the Erl King is seizing him—where the G flat of the voice comes against the rushing triplets on F natural in octaves resting upon E flat in the bass—much doubt was expressed, and the worthy Ruzicka's ingenuity was somewhat taxed to explain and justify such a combination. But indeed since the beginning of this century the modern ear has received a remarkable education in appreciating the use and beauty of dissonances. Schubert's treatment of the Erl King ballad was at first disapproved by Goethe himself; as he said, "it did not agree with his view of the subject." But Goethe's opinions on musical matters were of small value; the range of his appreciativeness was in this direction narrowly limited. He was fond of the worthy old Zelter, who set to music more than a hundred of his songs. Of these Goethe said "he could scarcely have believed music capable of producing such delicious tones." Zelter's music was certainly not without merit, and his setting of the "König im Thule" is still sung and deservedly admired; but to go from Zelter to Schubert required a sorcery more potent than that which brought Helen of Troy to become the bride of mediæval Faust. At any rate Goethe found it so. Toward the end of his life, when he heard the Erl King sung with its full dramatic effect by Madame Schröder-Devrient, he acknowledged its power, but it was probably the superb woman and her style of singing that moved him rather than the music. At one time the modest Schubert, at the instigation of some friend, ventured to send to the great poet some of the settings of his songs accompanied by a letter tremulous with awe. But Goethe never answered the letter, and apparently took no notice of the music. "Neither in Goethe's works," says Kreissle, "nor in his correspondence with Zelter, nor in his conversations with Eckermann, do we find a syllable in connection with Schubert's name." Little did either the poet or the musician realize that throughout all future time their names were to be inseparably associated. It was the poems of Goethe that inspired Schubert with some of his most beautiful and sublime conceptions. He set sixty-seven of them to music, and of the whole number there is perhaps not one in which we do not feel that the song of the greatest of German poets has been invested with a higher spiritual life by the music of the most poetical composer the world has seen. How full of the most delicate fragrance of poetry are the lines "Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh," etc.! but when one has once associated them with Schubert's music, one feels that to break this association (were it possible) and return to the verses pure and simple would be a far greater descent than from poetry to prose.

In spite of the startling originality already evinced in the Erl King, we find a decided conservatism alleged for some of Schubert's musical judgments at this youthful period. It was a time when Beethoven was still by many people regarded with suspicion as a reckless innovator upon the orthodox forms and methods. Since the middle of the century, indeed, one has often heard some of the magnificent works of Beethoven's third period, including his four latest piano sonatas and some of his quartets, set down as eccentric vagaries instead of being comprehended in their true light as the ripe fruits of his most consummate artistic maturity. At the beginning of the century more or less opposition was excited even by the earlier works of Beethoven which transgressed the limits of expression within which Haydn and Mozart had been confined. Schubert was at that time a friend and to some extent a pupil of the Venetian composer, Antonio Salieri, conductor of the choir in the Emperor's chapel. Salieri gave Schubert more or less instruction in thorough-bass and used to correct and criticise his compositions. He advised him not to waste his time over ballads and lyrics by Goethe and Schiller, but to set to music by preference the old and formal Italian stanzas. Another piece of advice, as applied to the inexhaustible Schubert, is deliciously grotesque; Salieri thought he had better "husband his resources of melody." There is a point of view, as we shall presently see, from which a grain of sound sense can be descried in such counsel; but these incidents sufficiently indicate Salieri's conservatism of temperament. He wrote about forty operas, a dozen oratorios and cantatas, and a quantity of miscellaneous vocal and and instrumental works, not without merit, all of which have virtually sunk into oblivion. In June 1816 there was a jubilee festival to celebrate Salieri's residence of fifty years in Vienna, and many compositions of his pupils, written especially for the occasion, were produced. The music ended with a chorus from Salieri's oratorio, "Christ in Hades," in which the composer had caught some of his inspiration from Gluck. After returning from the performance, Schubert wrote that same evening in his diary as follows:—"It must be pleasant and invigorating to the artist to see his pupils gathered about him, every one striving to do his best for his master's jubilee feast; to hear in all their compositions a simple and natural expression, free from all that bizarrerie which prevails with the majority of composers of our time, and for which we are in the main indebted to one of our greatest German artists; free, I say, from that bizarrerie which links the tragic with the comic, the agreeable with the repulsive, the heroic with the whimpering, the most sacred themes with buffoonery,—and all without discrimination; so that the hearers are goaded to frenzy instead of dissolving in love, and tickled into senseless laughter rather than raised toward heaven. The fact that this miserable bizarrerie has been proscribed and exiled from the circle of his pupils, so that their eyes may rest on pure, holy Nature, must be a source of lively satisfaction to the artist who, with a Gluck for a pioneer, has learned to know Nature, and has clung to her in spite of the most unnatural influences of our day."

Fac-simile letter from Schubert, to committee of Austrian Musical Society which accompanied his score of the C-minor symphony. Original in possession of the "Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde" in Vienna.

Now the person here mentioned as "one of our greatest German artists" can hardly be any other than Beethoven, and the following clauses, in which the bizarrerie ascribed to him is defined, give expression to the stock objections that were urged in those days, by an unintelligent public and by musicians of narrow vision, against his music. Did the youthful Schubert mean to echo and approve these shallow criticisms? Sir George Grove seems to think so, and quotes from the same diary a passage, dated three days earlier, in which most intense love and admiration is expressed for Mozart's music; from which it is inferred that there can be no doubt to which of the two great masters Schubert was most strongly attached at that time. Kreissle, on the other hand, without offering any explanation of the passage above quoted, simply comments on it as a series of "somewhat misty and confused remarks."

In those days there was nothing strange in a young musician, even if endowed with vast powers of comprehension, finding Mozart always satisfactory and Beethoven sometimes unintelligible. That was one of the musical limitations of that particular moment in the history of music. If the entry in Schubert's diary is to be taken seriously, it is only one among many illustrations of the difficulty which one creative genius often finds in comprehending the methods and results of another creative genius. But in Schubert's case there is some improbability in such a view. His early symphonies and string quartets, indeed, show that the influence of Haydn and Mozart was at that time quite masterful with him, while the influence of Beethoven was comparatively slight. But he had already spoken of Beethoven in terms of most enthusiastic and reverent admiration; and it is not easy to believe that at the age of nineteen the composer of the Erl King could have seriously repeated the crude stock objections that were urged against the composer of the C-minor symphony by old fossils like Salieri. The entry in Schubert's diary is redolent of irony, and was probably intended as a harmless vent for his satirical amusement at the foibles of the kindly old master who tried to repress his youthful exuberance and advised him not to meddle with German ballads. This kind of humor without bitterness was eminently characteristic of Schubert.

Schubert's one fault was one to which allusion has already been made. As is so often the case, it was closely connected with his chief attribute of strength. His unrivalled spontaneity often led him into diffuseness. Melodies tumbled forth in such lavish profusion as to interfere with the conciseness of his works and mar their artistic form. This is chiefly true of his earlier instrumental works. It is not often the case with his vocal songs. There his musical creativeness is constrained into perfection of form through his completely adequate poetical conception of the words. From the Erl King to "Am Meer" his greatest songs are remarkable for saying just enough and knowing exactly when to stop. It is noticeable that he very seldom repeats the same verbal phrases, with changes of melody or harmony, as is customary in arias. In the arias, as well as in the grand choruses, of oratorios, cantatas, and operas, such repetition is often of the highest value as leading to an accumulation of sublime or gorgeous effects hardly otherwise attainable. But inasmuch as it is an artificial means of producing effects and would thus interfere with the simple spontaneity of the Lied, it would generally be out of place there. With Schubert the words of the poem are not merely a vehicle for the melody, but poetry and music are fused into such identity that when one has once known them it becomes impossible to separate them. In his earlier instrumental works, however, released from the guidance of the poetical thought expressed in words, Schubert's exuberance of fancy often runs away with him, and takes him into a trackless forest of sweet melodies and rich harmonies from which he finds it difficult to emerge. But in his more mature works we find him rapidly outgrowing this fault and acquiring complete mastery of his resources. In the A-minor sonata, the D-minor quartet, and the last two symphonies, the form is as perfect as the thought; and we are thus again reminded that Schubert, like young Lycidas and others whom the gods have dearly loved, was cut off in his early prime.

So careless of fame was Schubert, so suddenly did death seize him, and so little did the world suspect the untold wealth of music written upon musty sheets of paper tucked away in sundry old drawers and cupboards in Vienna, that much of it has remained unknown until the present day. As from time to time new songs, sonatas, trios, or symphonies were brought to light, a witty French journal began to utter doubts of their genuineness and to scoff at the "posthumous diligence" of "the song-writer Schubert." This was in 1839. Schumann was one of the first to bring to light the great merits of Schubert's genius, as we have seen in the case of his Symphony in C major, and his enthusiasm for Schubert knew no bounds. "There was a time," he said, "when it gave me no pleasure to speak of Schubert; I could only talk of him by night to the trees and stars. Who amongst us, at some time or another, has not been sentimental? Charmed by his new spirit, whose capacities seemed to me boundless, deaf to everything that could be urged against him, my thoughts were absorbed in Schubert."

Since then much more has been done toward collecting and editing these wonderful manuscripts, and the thanks of the whole world of music-lovers are due to Sir George Grove for his devoted persistence in this work. Vast as Schubert's fame has come to be, it is probably destined to grow yet greater as his works and his influence are more intimately studied. Few indeed have been the composers who have ever brought us nearer to the eternal fountains of divine music.