It has always been a nice question of taste whether one prefers to observe the type or the individual. Would you have your love song one that could be sung by every lover, high or low, or one that would ring true for you alone? If you are quite honest you will probably have to admit that you will swing from one to the other from time to time. At times it will seem vulgar that you should be rejoicing in precisely the same sentiments as those which are sending the Italian bootblack into a seventh heaven; your delicacy, your sense of dignity will demand that your love be your own, like no one else’s on earth. And, again, the precious selfishness of cultivating your own soul with such conscious care when it is such a tiny part of humanity—such a reaction will make you praise heaven that you and the bootblack can sing the same love song and feel the same love.
However you feel about it the art-song has chosen to specialize on individuals. Not only on individual persons, but on particular feelings of those persons. The folk-song expresses the type emotion—love, sorrow, or patriotism; the art-song expresses some particular shade or nuance of these emotions. The Scotch folk-tune which we sing with Burns’s stirring words, ‘Scots Wha Hae,’ expresses magnificently the defiance of patriotic bravery. It might be the song of anybody facing odds in defense of his beliefs. Schubert’s song, ‘Courage,’ has exactly the same note of defiance, but, so to speak, only a particular section of the great general emotion. His defiance is that of a man broken down with sorrow and misfortune, who in one superb moment vows to conquer by pure force of will power—a vow which we know is impossible of fulfillment. The modern French composers are especially apt at catching a particular delicate phase of a mood or emotion and rendering it so that it would never be mistaken for another phase, however much the two resembled each other. Have you never caught yourself moodily looking at the last glow from a sunset and wondered whether you have ever had a moment just like that before—a moment which the slightest change in the things about you would have spoiled utterly? Such a moment it is the delight of the art-song to portray; it is almost unknown to the folk-song.
The folk-song, again, presents an emotion in its sum total; the art-song presents it in its component parts. With their capacity and zest for exactitude song composers have continually, since Schubert’s time, given more and more attention to accuracy of detail. In one of the earliest of Schubert’s songs, ‘Gretchen at the Spinning-wheel,’ the girl is musing of her lover while she is spinning. The whirr of the spinning-wheel is in the accompaniment and enframes the whole song. But when the girl sighs, ‘And, ah, his kiss!’ Schubert felt that she would surely not continue her mechanical spinning. So he makes the whirring stop in the accompaniment and in its place comes a lovely succession of chords—one would say like a blush. Now a folk-song would have paid no attention to such a detail. It would have caught and probably caught with wonderful accuracy the spirit of the whole song. But the variation of mood in the words would not have affected the music. It could not, because the folk-song, unpublished and disseminated among many untrained persons, must be easy to remember. It is accordingly most often cast in a regular stanza form and the same melody is repeated for each verse of the words, though the heroine change therein from the noon of joy to the midnight of sorrow. The great majority of art-songs, therefore, are not written in stanza form, but follow the words with specially adapted music from beginning to end. (This is the so-called durchkomponiertes Lied.) The form of the art-song tends to be free in the extreme, while that of the folk-song is usually strict and regular. In the art-song the tendency toward exactitude of delineation sometimes goes to extremes. The music tries to be just to each phrase, or even to each word, and the song as a whole is lost in the details. But in general the good art-song shows not only the emotion as a whole, by means of its formal or modal unity, but also the component parts of the emotion placed side by side. We might say that the art-song follows the impressionistic method of showing the component colors on the canvas and letting the eye blend them into the resultant, while the folk-song follows the older method of mixing the components on the palette and showing only the blended result to the eye.
The highest glory of the folk-song is to express what unites men. The highest glory of the art-song is to express what differentiates men. The folk-song includes; the art-song selects. The folk-song is general; the art-song precise. The folk-song tells of life as man found it; the art-song tells of life as man made it.
Nearly everything that is distinctive of the art-song involves conscious planning. However spontaneous and unrestrained a Lieder singer may appear on the concert platform, there is behind his or her interpretation a whole conscious network of selection and rejection. A good folk-song, as everyone has noticed, asks for no intellectual comprehension—it ‘sings itself.’ But an art-song rarely ‘sings itself.’ It must be sung. And this is precisely one of the beauties of the art-song—the feeling that it has been achieved by art, that it is the working-out of somebody’s intention, that it has been personally propelled.
VII
A good Lieder singer is like some weaver of a delicate design in silk. Every crossing is planned and the worker must not let a single thread slip through his fingers. Every detail of a song must be understood before it can be interpreted. This does not mean that the singer must have a ‘reason’—a logical argument in words—for everything done. Usually words and arguments about a song only befuddle the artistic sense. The song must be understood in musical terms—by comparing each phrase with similar phrases in the song, by trying different tempos, different phrasings, different qualities of voice. To understand a song in the musical sense is to know when you sing it that you could have sung it in ten or in fifty other specific ways, but that you chose to sing it exactly in this way. It requires a great deal of attention to fix in your ear accurately all the little beauties and peculiarities of the melody, the distinctions contained in tiny variations of tempo, and so on. The facts are all obvious in the song, but they demand attention. So the process is exactly that of the primitive folk-singer who noticed, to his delight, that bluebells were blue and that the deer had four legs. And, like the folk-singer, when you have consciously noted a multitude of these obvious facts you feel more at home in the world—you have completed a step in your education.
If the singer is obliged carefully to select and reject, he is only doing what the composer did before him. For the song writer’s task is one that will test the soundness of his musicianship and his art. The song is short. It will probably be sung among a number of other short songs. It has every chance of being forgotten. The composer can waste no time. With little or no preluding he must strike a melodic phrase that in smallest compass is worth hearing and worth remembering. He has none of the opportunities of the symphonist or the opera writer. He cannot lead up to his chief theme with a long expressive orchestral crescendo. He cannot introduce it at the moment when his audience is keyed up and receptive over a tense emotional story. If the melody of the song is not worth the trouble, no amount of decoration can make it so. If one phrase out of four in the song is good and the rest mediocre, the song is as much a failure as though it had no single bar of beauty. When the composer has written his song, he has committed himself. He stands exposed to the universe without protection, without excuse. He has chosen the test with which genius is tested—to be great within narrow limits. If his music speaks to the heart it speaks in words of one syllable.
If the basic materials of a song are so simple, it is evident that the misplacing of a single note is a very serious error. The expressive phrase might have stood in a dozen slightly different forms. It was a delicate judgment and selection that chose exactly this one. The phrase, if it is to express something of importance, must suggest a great deal more than it can say. This is the problem of the lyric—the personal song of the emotions—whether in words or music. If a poet is to express the whole tenderness and fury of love in eight, twelve, or sixteen lines he must select just the right details that will suggest the whole epic of love that he did not write. The structure and the language may be simple in the extreme. ‘My luv’ is like a red, red rose,’ sings Burns in one of the most beautiful love lyrics ever written. The poem is only a succession of the simplest poetic figures, similes; impressive effects of rhyme and metre are not to be found. But every one of the similes is a masterpiece, suggesting in striking manner the variety and extravagance of the lover’s feelings. ‘My luv’ is like a melody that’s sweetly play’d in tune,’ continues the poet. ‘As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, so deep in luv’ am I’—and from this point the imagery sweeps up and up with increasing majesty and frenzy—‘And I will luv’ thee still, my dear, till a’ the seas gang dry. Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun; Oh! I will luv’ thee still, my dear, while the sands o’ life shall run.’ We can imagine Milton building up a long and magnificent description, in a whole blank verse canto, of the rocks melting in the heat of the sun. But Burns dazzles our imagination by just mentioning the gorgeous picture and then pressing on to another.
The themes of a good song are like this. They picture the heart of an emotion that might be made the subject of an opera; they establish instantly a mood that might dominate a movement of a symphony. They picture one detail of the building and let it imply the whole vast edifice.