In point of natural genius no composer, excepting possibly Mozart, excelled him. His rich and pure vein of melody is unmatched in all the history of music. We have already pointed out the strong influence of the great Viennese classics upon Schubert. In forming an estimate of his style we must recur to a comparison with them. We think immediately of Mozart when we consider the utter spontaneity, the inevitableness of Schubert’s melodies, his inexhaustible well of inspiration, the pure loveliness, the limpid clarity of his phrases. Yet in actual subject matter he is more closely connected to Beethoven—it is no detraction to say that in his earlier period he freely borrowed from him, for, in Mr. Hadow’s words, Schubert always ‘wears his rue with a difference.’ Again, in his procedure, in his harmonic progression and the rhythmic structure of his phrases, he harks back to Haydn; the abruptness of his modulations, the clear-cut directness of his articulation, the folk-flavor of some of his themes are closely akin to that master’s work. But out of all this material he developed an idiom as individual as any of his predecessors’.
The essential quality which distinguishes that idiom is lyricism. Schubert is the lyricist par excellence. More than any of the Viennese masters was he imbued with the poetic quality of ideas. His musical phrases are poetic where Mozart’s are purely musical. They have the force of words, they seem even translations of words, they are the equivalents of one certain poetic sentiment and no other; they fit one particular mood only. In the famous words of Lizst, Schubert was le musicien le plus poète qui fût jamais (the most poetic musician that ever lived). We may go further. Granting that Mozart, too, was a poetic musician, Schubert was a musical poet. What literary poet does he resemble? Hadow compares him to Keats; a German would select Heine. For Heine had all of that simplicity, that unalterable directness which we can never persuade ourselves was the result of intellectual calculation or of technical skill; he is so artless an artist that we feel his phrases came to him ready-made, a perfect gift from heaven, which suffered no criticism, no alteration or improvement.
Schubert died but one year after Beethoven, a circumstance which alone gives us reason to dispute his place among the romantic composers. He himself would hardly have placed himself among them, for he did not relish even the romantic vagaries of Beethoven at the expense of pure beauty, though he worshipped that master in love and awe. ‘It must be delightful and refreshing for the artist,’ he wrote of his teacher Salieri upon the latter’s jubilee, ‘to hear in the compositions of his pupils simple nature with its expression, free from all oddity, such as is now dominant with most musicians and for which we have to thank one of our greatest German artists almost exclusively....’ Yet, as Langhans says, ‘not to deny his inclination to elegance and pure beauty, he was able to approach the master who was unattainable in these departments (orchestral and chamber music) more closely than any one of his contemporaries and successors.’[76] Yes, and in some respects he was able to go beyond. ‘With less general power of design than his great predecessors he surpasses them all in the variety of his color. His harmony is extraordinarily rich and original, his modulations are audacious, his contrasts often striking and effective and he has a peculiar power of driving his point home by sudden alterations in volume of sound.’[77] In the matter of form he could allow himself more freedom—he could freight his sonatas with a poetic message that stretched it beyond conventional bounds, for his audience was better prepared to comprehend it. And while his polyphony is never like that of Beethoven, or even Mozart, his sensuous harmonic style, crystal clear and gorgeously varied, with its novel and enchanting use of the enharmonic change and its subtle interchange of the major and minor modes, supplies a richness and variety of another sort and in itself constitutes an advance, the starting point of harmonic development among succeeding composers. By these tokens and ‘by a peculiar quality of imagination in his warmth, his vividness and impatience of formal restraint, he points forward to the generation that should rebel against all formality.’ But, above all, by his lyric quality. He is lyric where Beethoven is epic; and lyricism is the very essence of romanticism. Whatever his stature as a symphonist, as a composer in general, his position as song writer is unique and of more importance than any other. Here he creates a new form, not by a change of principle, by a theoretically definable process, but ‘a free artistic creative activity, such as only a true genius, a rich personality not forced by a scholastic education into definitely limited tracks, could accomplish.’
The particular merit of this accomplishment of Schubert will have more detailed discussion in the following chapter. But, aside from that, he touched no form that he did not enrich. By his sense of beauty, unaided by scholarship or the inspiration of great deeds in the outer world, he made himself one of the great pioneers of modern music. Together with Weber, he set the spirit for modern piano music and invented some of its most typical forms. His Moments Musicals, impromptus, and pieces in dance forms gave the impulse to an entire literature—the Phantasiestücke of Schumann, the songs without words of Mendelssohn are typical examples. His quartets and his two great symphonies (the C major and the unfinished B minor) have a beauty hardly surpassed in instrumental music, and are inferior to the greatest works of their kind only in grasp of form. His influence on posterity is immeasurable. Not only in the crisp rhythms and harmonic sonorities of Schumann, in the sensuous melodies and gracious turns of Mendelssohn, but in their progeny, from Brahms to Grieg, there flows the musical essence of Schubert. Who can listen to the slow movement of the mighty Brahms C minor symphony without realizing the depth of that well of inspiration, the universality of the idiom created by the last of the Vienna masters?
Schubert’s music was indeed the swan-song of the Viennese period of the history of music, and it is remarkable that a voice from that city, more than any other in Europe bound to the old régime, should have sung of the future of music. But so Schubert sang from a city of the past. Meanwhile new voices were raised from other lands, strong with the promise of the time.
III
The great significance of Weber in musical history is that he may fairly be called the first German national composer. Preceding composers of the race had been German in the sense that they were of German blood and their works were paid for by Germans, and also in that their music usually had certain characteristics of the German nature. But they were not consciously national in the aggressive sense. Weber’s works are the first musical expression of a German patriotism, cultivating what is most deeply and typically German, singing German unity of feeling and presenting something like a solid front against foreign feelings and art. But we are too apt to wave away such a statement as a mere phrase. At a distance we are too liable to suppose that a great art can come into being in response to a mere sentimental idea. But German patriotism was a passion which was fought for by the best brains and spirits of the time. It was in the heat of conflict that Weber’s music acquired its deep meaning and its spiritual intensity.
To understand the state of affairs we must again go back to the French Revolution. Germany was at the end of the eighteenth century more rigidly mediæval than any other European country, save possibly Russia and parts of Italy. The German patriot Stein thus described the condition of Mecklenburg in a letter written in 1802: ‘I found the aspect of the country as cheerless as its misty northern sky; great estates, much of them in pastures or fallow; an extremely thin population; the entire laboring class under the yoke of serfage; stretches of land attached to solitary ill-built farm houses; in short, a monotony, a dead stillness, spreading over the whole country; an absence of life and activity that quite overcame my spirits. The home of the Mecklenburg noble, who weighs like a load on his peasants instead of improving their condition, gives me the idea of the den of some wild beast, who devastates everything about him and surrounds himself with the silence of the grave.’ If Stein was perhaps inclined to be pessimistic in his effort to arouse German spirits, it is because he has in his mind’s eye the possibility of better things, and the actual superiority of conditions in France and England. Most observers of the time viewed conditions with indifference. Goethe showed little or no patriotism; ‘Germany is not a nation,’ he said curtly.
After the peace of Lunéville and the Diet of Ratisbon the greater part of Germany fell under Napoleon’s influence. The German people showed no concern at thus passing under the control of the French. The German states were nothing but the petty German courts. Fyffe[78] humorously describes the process of political reorganization which the territory underwent in 1801: ‘Scarcely was the Treaty of Lunéville signed when the whole company of intriguers who had touted at Rastadt posted off to the French capital with their maps and their money-bags, the keener for the work when it became known that by common consent the free cities of the empire were now to be thrown into the spoil. Talleyrand and his confidant, Mathieu, had no occasion to ask for bribes, or to maneuver for the position of arbiters in Germany. They were overwhelmed with importunities. Solemn diplomatists of the old school toiled up four flights of stairs to the lodging of the needy secretary, or danced attendance at the parties of the witty minister. They hugged Talleyrand’s poodle; they played blind-man’s buff and belabored each other with handkerchiefs to please his little niece. The shrewder of them fortified their attentions with solid bargains, and made it their principal care not to be outbidden at the auction. Thus the game was kept up as long as there was a bishopric or a city in the market.’
Such were the issues which controlled the national destiny of Germany in 1801. Napoleon unintentionally gave the impetus to the German resurgence by forcing some vestige of rational organization upon the land. The internal condition of the priest-ruled districts was generally wretched; heavy ignorance, beggary, and intolerance kept life down to an inert monotony. The free cities, as a rule, were sunk in debt; the management of their affairs had become the perquisite of a few lawyers and privileged families. The new régime centralized administration, strengthened the financial system, and relieved the peasants of the most intolerable of their burdens, and thus gave them a stake in the national welfare.