It would be out of place here to estimate these songs in any detail. For they have a personal quality which makes the estimating of them for another person a ridiculous thing. Like all truly personal things, they have, to the individual who values them, a value quite incommensurable. Each of the best songs is unique, and is not to be compared with any other. They are irreplaceable and their value seems infinite. Hence the praise of one who loves these songs would sound foolishly extravagant to another. We can here only review and point out the general qualities and characteristics of Schubert’s output.
With one of his earliest songs—‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’—composed when he was seventeen, Schubert establishes the principle of detailed delineation in the accompaniment, developed so richly in the succeeding decades. The whole of the melody is bound together by the whirring of the wheel in the accompaniment. But when Gretchen comes to her exclamation, ‘And ah, his kiss!’ she stops spinning for a moment and the harmonies in the piano become intense and colorful. This principle of delineative detail, even more than the durchkomponierte form, constitutes the difference between the ‘art’ song and its prototype, the folk-song. The details become more and more frequent in Schubert’s songs as his artistic development continues. They are rarely realistic, as in Liszt, but they always catch the mood or the emotional nuance with eloquent suggestiveness. A free song, like Die Allmacht, follows the varying moods of the text line for line. But Schubert did not follow his text word for word as later song-writers did. He felt what the folk-singer feels, the formal musical unity of his song as apart from the unity in the meaning of the words. He was never willing to admit a delineative detail that involved a harsh break in the flow of beautiful melody. It was his choice of melody, much more than his choice of delineative detail, that gave eloquence to his songs.
This melody is of great beauty and fluency from the beginning. The lovely songs of the spectral tempter in ‘The Erlking’ could not be more beautiful. Yet this gift of lovely melody becomes richer, deeper, and even more spontaneous as Schubert grew older—richer and more spontaneous than has been known in any other composer before or since. It is nearly always based on the regular and measured melody of folk-song, and rarely becomes anything approaching the free ‘endless melody’ of Wagner. But beyond such a generalization as this it can scarcely be covered with a single descriptive phrase. It was adequate to every sort of emotional expression, and was so gently flexible in form that it could fit any sort of poem without losing its graceful contour.
‘The Erlking,’ perhaps Schubert’s best known song (it is certainly one of his greatest), is a perfect example of the ballad, or condensed dramatic-narrative poem, a type which had been cultivated by Zumsteeg, but had never reached real artistic standing. It demands sharp characterization of the speaking characters, and especially some means of setting the mood of the poem as a whole, in order to keep the story within its frame and give it its artistic unity. The former Schubert supplies with his melodies; the latter with the accompaniment of triplets, with the recurring figure representing the galloping of the horse. Without interrupting the musical flow of his song he introduces the delineative detail where it is needed, as in the double dissonance at the repeated shriek of the child—a musical procedure that was revolutionary at the time it was written. And, if there were nothing else in the song to prove genius, it would be proved by the last line in which, for the first time, the triplets cease and the announcement that the child was dead is made in an abrupt recitative, carrying us back to a realization of the true nature of the ballad as a tale that is told, a legend from the olden times. It must always be a pity that Schubert did not write more ballads. He is commonly known as a lyric genius, but he could be equally a descriptive genius. Yet only ‘The Young Nun,’ among the better known of his songs, is at all narrative in quality.
Schubert’s form, as we have said, ranges all the way from the simple strophe, or verse form, up to the verge of the declamatory. He was extremely fond of the strophe, and usually used it with perfect justice, as in the famous ‘Who is Sylvia,’ ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark,’ and ‘Ave Maria.’ Very often he uses the strophe form modified and developed for the last stanza, as in Du bist die Ruh, or the ‘Serenade.’ Again, as in Die Allmacht and Aufenthalt, the melody, while being perfectly measured and regular, follows the text with utmost freedom. And, finally, there is Der Doppelgänger, which is scarcely more than expressive declamation over a delineative accompaniment. ‘The music of the future!’ exclaims Mr. Henderson. ‘Wagner’s theories a quarter of a century before he evolved them.’
A number of Schubert’s are grouped together in ‘cycles,’ a procedure practised by Beethoven in his An die Ferne Geliebte, and brought to perfection by Schumann. Schubert’s twenty-four songs, ‘The Fair Maid of the Mill,’ to words by Müller, tell the story of a love affair and its consequent tragedy, enacted near the mill, by the side of the brook, which ripples all through the series. The songs tell a consecutive story somewhat in the fashion of Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’ but the group has little of the inner unity of Schumann’s cycles. The ‘Winter Journey’ series, also to Müller’s text, is more closely bound together by its mood of old-aged despair. The last fourteen songs which the composer wrote were published after his death as ‘Swan Songs,’ and the name has justly remained, for they seem one and all to be written under the oppressive fear of death. They include the six songs composed to the words of Heine, whose early book of poems the composer had just picked up. What a pity, if Schubert could not have lived longer, that Heine did not live earlier! Each of, these Heine songs is a masterpiece.
Schubert’s literary sense may not have been highly critical, but it managed to include the greatest poets and the best poems that were to be had. His settings include seventy-two to words by Goethe, fifty-four of Schiller, forty-four of Müller, forty-eight of his friend Mayrhofer, nineteen of Schlegel, nineteen of Klopstock, nineteen of Körner, ten of Walter Scott, seven of Ossian, three of Shakespeare, and the immortal six of Heine. And, though he was not inspired in any very direct proportion to the literary worth of his poems, he responded truly to the lyrical element wherever he found it.
Writing at about the same time with Schubert were the opera composers Ludwig Spohr, Heinrich Marschner, and Weber. The song output of these men has not proved historically important, but they have to their credit the fact that they were true to the German faith. Marschner’s songs are not altogether dead to-day, and Weber’s are in a few instances excellent. They come nearer than those of any other composer to the true style and spirit of the folk-song, and reveal from another angle the presiding genius of Weber’s operas.
The place for the ballad which Schubert left almost vacant in his work was filled by Johann Carl Gottfried (Carl) Löwe, born only a few months before him.[91] The numerous compositions of his long life have been forgotten, except for his ballads. And these have lived, in spite of their feeble melodic invention, by their sheer dramatic energy. Löwe’s ballads depend wholly on their words—that is their virtue; as music apart they have scarcely any existence. But Löwe’s dramatic sense was abundant and vigorous. A study of his setting of ‘The Erlking’ as compared with that of Schubert will instantly make evident the differences between the two men. The motif of the storm is more complex and wild; the speeches of the Erlking are strange and mystical, as far as possible removed from the suave melody of Schubert. The voice part is at every turn made impressive rather than beautiful. Superficially Schubert’s method looks the more superficial and inartistic, but it conquers by the matchless expressive power of its melody. Löwe’s ballads compel our respect, in spite of their lack of melodic invention. They are carefully selected and include some of the best poetry of the time. They are worked out with great care, and are conscientiously true to the meaning of the words as songs rarely were in his day. They are designed to make an impressive effect in a large concert hall. They have a considerable range, from the mock-primitive heroics of Ossian to the boisterous humor of Goethe’s ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’ And in their cultivation of the declamatory style and of the delineative accompaniment they were important in the musical development of the age.