Schumann is the most distinguished in the list of literary musicians. His early reactions to romantic tendencies in literature were intense, and when the time came for him to use his pen in defense of the music of the future he had an effective literary style at his command. It was the style of the time. Mere academic or technical criticism he despised, not because he despised scholarship, but because he felt it had no place in written criticism. He set himself to interpret the spirit of music. True to romantic ideals, he was subjective before all. He sent his soul out on adventures among the masterpieces—or, rather, his souls; for he possessed several. One he called ‘Florestan,’ fiery, imaginative, buoyant; another was ‘Eusebius,’ dreamy and contemplative. It was these two names which chiefly appeared beneath his articles. Then there was a third, which he used seldom, ‘Meister Raro,’ cool judgment and impersonal reserve. He set himself to ‘make war on the Philistines,’ namely, all persons who were stodgy, academic, and dry. He had a fanciful society of crusaders among his friends which he dubbed the Davidsbund. With this equipment of buoyant fancy he was the best exemplar of the romantic idealism of his time and race.
The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, organized in connection with enthusiastic friends, bravely battled for imagination and direct expression in music during the ten years of Schumann’s immediate editorship and during his contributing editorship thereafter. Schumann’s ‘announcement’ of Chopin in 1831, and of Brahms in 1853, have become famous. In most things his judgment was extraordinarily sound. Though he was frankly an apologist for one tendency, he appreciated many others, not excluding the reserved Mendelssohn, who was in many things his direct opposite. Sometimes, particularly in his prejudice against opera music, he disagreed with the tendencies of the time. After hearing ‘Tannhäuser’ in Dresden he could say nothing warmer than that on the whole he thought Wagner might some day be of importance to German opera. But, though Schumann was thus limited, he had the historical sense, and had scholarship behind his articles, if not in them. During a several months’ stay in Vienna he set himself to discovering forgotten manuscripts of Schubert, and the great C major symphony, first performed under Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus concerts in 1839, owes its recovery to him.
Schumann worked generously in all forms except church music. At first he was chiefly a composer for the piano, and his genre pieces, ‘pianistic’ in a quite new way, opened the field for much subsequent music from other pens. In them his romantic fervor best shows itself. They are buoyantly pictorial and suggestive, though avoiding extremes, and they abound in literary mottoes. In 1840 begins his chief activity as a song composer, and here he takes a place second only to Schubert in lovableness and second to none in intimate subjective expression. Between 1841 and 1850 come four lovely symphonies, uneven in quality and without distinction in instrumentation, but glowing with vigorous life. In the last ten years of his life come the larger choral works, the ‘Faust’ scenes, several cantatas, the—— and the opera ‘Genoveva.’ Throughout the latter part of his life are scattered the chamber works which are permanent additions to musical literature. These works, and their contributions to musical development, will be described in succeeding chapters.
These are the preëminent romantic composers. What they have in common is not so evident as seems at first glance. The very creed that binds them together makes them highly individual and dispartite. At bottom, the only possible specific definition of romantic music is a description of romantic music itself. ‘Romantic’ is at best a loose term; and it happens always to be a relative term.
But a brief formal statement of the old distinction between ‘romanticism’ and ‘classicism’ may be helpful in following the description of romantic music in the following chapters. For the terms have taken on some sort of precise meaning in their course down the centuries. Perhaps the chief distinction lies in the æsthetic theory concerning limits. The Greek temple and the Gothic cathedral are the standard examples. The Greek loved to work intensively on a specific problem, within definite and known limits, controlling every detail with his intelligence and achieving the utmost perfection possible to careful workmanship. The Greek temple is small in size, can be taken in at a glance; every line is clear and definitely terminated; details are limited in number and each has its reason for existing; the work is a unit and each part is a part of an organic whole. The mediæval workman, on the other hand, was impressed by the richness of a world which he by no means understood; he loved to see all sorts of things in the heavens above and the earth beneath and to express them in his art. Ruskin makes himself the apologist for the Gothic cathedral when he says: ‘Every beautiful detail added is so much richness gained for the whole.’ The mediæval cathedral, then, is an amazing aggregation of rich detail. Unity is a minor matter. The cathedral is never to be taken in at a glance. Its lines drive upward and vanish into space; it is filled with dark corners and mysterious designs. It is an attempt to pierce beyond limits and achieve something more universal.
Here is the distinction, and it is more a matter of individual temperament than of historical action and reaction. The poise and control that come from working within pre-defined limits are the chief glory of the classical; the imagination and energy that come from trying to pass beyond limits are the chief charm of the romantic. Let us never expect to settle the controversy, for both elements exist in all artists, even in Berlioz. But let us try to understand how the artist feels toward each of these inspirations, and to see what, in each age, is the specific impulse toward one or the other.
H. K. M.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] ‘Uhland’s Life,’ by his widow.