For modern song is nine-tenths a romantic product. There might be such a thing as a classic art-song, but its existence is hardly more than hypothetical. Almost by definition the art-song is opposed to what we call the ‘classic’ spirit in music. For the art-song, let us recall, is, above all, a personal, detailed expression. It is intimate, subjective, predominantly emotional. The classic spirit (in music as well as in the other arts) avoids the emotion that is too personal and too subjective as something immodest—much as a young girl would avoid telling the details of her love affairs to strangers. The classic is always inclined to stress the formal elements. But the very definition of the durchkomponiertes Lied (which is almost synonymous with the term ‘art-song’) is that it does not adhere to a common form, being free to formulate itself according to the requirements of the text.
It must be more than a coincidence, then, that Schubert, the master song-writer, came at a time when music was bursting forth into romantic expression. Romantic song could not have been born much earlier. For music, as an instrument of emotional expression, did not come to maturity much earlier. Emotion we do find expressed in Haydn and Mozart certainly, but it is subordinate, restrained, and not very precise. It rarely seems to be the prime object of the music. The prime object seems rather to be the giving of pleasure through the beauty of musical patterns. The music must not be obviously inappropriate to the words of an aria, but it is not thought of as expressing their sense in itself. The movements of a Mozart symphony may have for us some mild emotional connotation; but in the composer’s mind, in all probability, it was not the emotion which germinated the music, but the music which germinated the emotion. The music of the long period before Schubert was predominantly formal. It became increasingly complex and refined. It greatly enlarged musical technique and the means of expression. From the emotional point of view the eighteenth century was storing up the technical materials which the nineteenth was destined to use up.
It was Beethoven who developed the expressive power of music to its grandest proportions. Never has emotion been shown more powerful, beauty more dignified, than in his symphonies. The art of music, as it passed from his hands into those of younger men, was a grand and universal instrument, equal to any emotional demand men might want to make upon it. But, if Beethoven had developed all these capacities in music, he had by no means used them all. Emotion in his music is that of the epic poet, broad and grand, rather than that of the lyricist, personal and subtle. He had developed his instrument to marvellous perfection. He had played upon it only a few of its tunes. The greatest of the classicists, he was the man who taught the romanticists their trade. He indicated how music could be used primarily for emotional expression. But the doing of it he necessarily left largely to those who came after.
Among the first and the greatest of these was Schubert. He was born to sing. He loved a beautiful melody beyond anything else. In some ways he was like a woman, responding with infinite tenderness and delicacy to the impressions that came to him from without, divining shades of feeling which a man can rarely catch.
And, just when this man came, burning to write personal and emotional songs, Beethoven had forged the finished instrument for the purpose. By this time all the conceptions of rhythm and design had been agreed upon among musicians. The scales and the modes had been adopted, the sense of the tonic deeply inculcated in every hearer, the independence of all the keys had been established and their relation agreed upon. All the ordinary positions of chords had been tested, and all the normal progressions agreed upon. Composers had experimented with many forms and had worked out the capacities of each. In short, men had come to an almost complete agreement concerning the conventions of musical technique. If this had not been so, it would not yet have been time for romantic song. For, just as a poem can have no precise meaning until all matters of words and syntax have been agreed upon, so music cannot become accurately expressive while people are vague in their minds about the identity of this or that chord. In the same way freedom of form could have no meaning for people until the laws of form were wholly understood. The subtleties of emotion could not be expressed until people generally had begun to feel in music the emotions to be subdivided.
The things that Schubert did with music in 1815 were hardly dreamt of twenty years before. There were occasional foreshadowings, nothing else. Mozart, always technically flawless, did not approach his full creative maturity until toward his death, when he gave evidence of becoming one of the greatest of innovators. And it is Mozart, whose music Schubert knew well and admired beyond measure, who chiefly foreshadowed romantic song before Beethoven’s great period. In the famous ‘Statue’ scenes of Don Giovanni Mozart seems suddenly to have peeped into a whole new world of music—the world of primary emotional expression. The same sense of half-discovered expressive possibilities we catch in some of his later symphonies. And in his last opera, ‘The Magic Flute,’ there are songs preserving the emotional richness of the best German folk-songs. Such arias as In diesen heil’gen Hallen or Isis und Osiris are the last word in song before Schubert broke through the bonds of form and established the durchkomponiertes Lied.
I
But song proper before Schubert is largely in the hands of men who by no means hold a primary place in musical history. Of course, it can nowhere be said to have a beginning. But we can sense the feeling for romantic song as far back as the Geistliche Lieder of Philipp Emanuel Bach, published in the middle of the eighteenth century. The preface to these songs is a remarkable document. Bach says that he has tried to set fitting melodies to the words; that where the various stanzas of a song were so different in spirit that a single melody could not express both with equal faithfulness he has tried to strike an average between all the stanzas and to compose the tune which will be most appropriate to all; that he considers it unjust to the poem to compose a tune which is suitable only to the first stanza, as is the usual practice; and, finally, that he realizes that Gellert’s poems, being didactic, are not of the sort best suited for musical settings, yet the high earnestness of the poet’s work justifies musical treatment.
These remarks foreshadow the romantic spirit in more than one respect. First, Bach recognizes the importance and integrity of the text: the music exists in order to enhance the poem, not the poem in order to sing the music. Next, Bach feels the power and the obligation to express the spirit of the words in detail. Further, he clearly feels the contradiction inherent in the strophic form—making one tune do service for various dissimilar stanzas. Finally, he feels that song is at its best when it is emotional. In all this he is entirely at one with the romantic song writers, from Schubert on. In his criticism of the strophic form he has put his finger on the central problem of the art-song. It is true, his solution of the difficulty was different from that of the romanticists, as was inevitable with a composer who came half a century before the problem was ripe. But he shows in his preface that he regards his solution as no more than tentative.
The songs themselves are not remarkable. They are much like the Geistliche Lieder of the composer’s great father, except that a subtle and almost indefinable change has come over them in the direction of the ‘intimate.’ They are short melodies, much like a German chorale, except that they have a gentler, smoother movement. The strophes are sometimes in one of the recognized melodic forms and sometimes comparatively free. When closely compared they reveal not a little individuality (which is undoubtedly what the composer was aiming at), but, taken as a whole, they seem too much like short cantata arias to suggest expressive song.