The real spirit of song was preserved in the German singspiele. These were lively dramatic entertainments, interspersed with songs, like the English ballad operas, except that the music was usually composed especially for the piece. The singspiele were not taken seriously by the educated classes, hence the lightest kind of joyousness reigned in them, and the music was that which would appeal most quickly to the hearts of the people. The tunes were, in fact, generally as much like true folk-songs as their composers could make them. Singspiele were written and performed by the hundreds during the eighteenth century. Many of the more popular songs were remembered and sung by the people as half-naturalized folk-songs, and the successful composers were usually fertile producers of songs independent of the singspiele. This was the true song-tradition of Germany before Schubert’s time. It grew out of the art of the people and spoke familiarly to all. It was a dignified and firmly established art institution, though it was given hardly more recognition by the great musicians of the time than the symphony composers of to-day give to operetta. The singspiel folk-song type, moreover, was the type which was called into service for the setting of the works of the standard poets of the time. Zelter’s settings of Goethe’s poems were scarcely to be distinguished, in point of form, from the songs that were sung in the cheap theatres.
Among the best of the singspiel composers was Johann Adam Hiller (1728-1804), also distinguished as the first director of the famous Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig and as perhaps the first writer of true durchkomponierte Lieder. His songs kept the popular flavor, but strove for vigorous expression of the text and, in doing this, broke out of the simple strophe or stanza form. The spirited character of Hiller’s singspiele is suggested by the names of some of them—‘The Devil is Loose,’ ‘The Hunt,’ and ‘The Village Barber.’ Johann André (d. 1799), fertile composer of singspiele, has a place alongside of Hiller as a pioneer in that he was probably the first to adapt the durchkomponiert style to the ballad, setting Bürger’s famous ‘Lenore’ soon after it appeared in 1775. The true ballad style, however, was more freely cultivated by Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg (d. 1802), commonly known as the inventor of the ballad form. He composed settings for several poems to which Schubert and Löwe later set their hands, notably Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ Des Pfarrer’s Tochter, and Ritter Toggenburg. Johann Schulz, who was another prolific singspiel writer, is chiefly famous for his beautiful ‘Songs in the Folk-Manner,’ which appeared between 1782 and 1790, when Herder’s pioneer collection of Volkslieder (words only) had just commenced to create an interest in the subject of popular song.
But the most famous singspiel composer of the time, and one of the most interesting personalities among the lesser musicians, was Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814). Unlike most musicians of the age, Reichardt was a man of wide interests and excellent education. At the age of twenty-three he became royal choirmaster under Frederick the Great at Berlin. But he was a radical by temperament and seems to have caused the head that wore the crown to lie uneasy. His visits to Paris gave him such a sympathy with the approaching French revolution that he later lost his position in Berlin on account of his radical politics. For a time he was choirmaster at Cassel to Jerôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who was anxious to pose as a patron of art. Reichardt caught the ‘folk-manner’ in his singspiele, but he was not a naïve musician in the technical sense of the word. His choruses and concerted pieces sometimes show a grace and artistry which suggests Mozart, and his songs are always organically and artistically conceived. He set in the simple strophe style some sixty of Goethe’s songs and Goethe’s delightful singspiel, Erwin und Elmire (as did also André). We must give Reichardt praise for working in musicianly style, with a fresh vein of melody and a graceful sense in the organizing of it. But we should make a mistake if we gave him a very high place in the history of the development of song, for Schubert’s earliest efforts tower far above his and they surely owe but little to them.
Precursors of Schubert.
Top: Johann Zumsteeg and Johann Adam Hiller
Bottom: Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Carl Friedrich Zelter
Schubert’s admiration for Zumsteeg and for his use of the ballad form (to which we doubtless owe ‘The Erl King’) was extended to another song writer of the time, Karl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832). This composer, who did a notable service as director at the Berlin Singakademie, was a personal friend of Goethe and had an extensive correspondence with him, which has been preserved and published. He set a great number of Goethe’s songs in the simple and unpretentious style of Reichardt. This much pleased the poet, who was professedly not much of a musician. In fact, it seems likely that Zelter frankly directed the great man’s musical tastes. Zelter’s songs, some of which are still sung by German singing societies, are spirited and musicianly. In their manly and straightforward way they compel one’s liking. If they do not figure as an element in musical history it is because their simple form offered little that was of service to the genius of Schubert.
II
This genius was, along with that of Mozart, the most spontaneous the world of music had ever seen. It seemed to work by a sort of divination. Whereas Beethoven’s musical ideas developed slowly and under great mental pressure from themes of little value, Schubert’s songs often came into his mind almost in an instant complete from beginning to end. From the age of thirteen (and probably earlier) he was continually writing songs. Often he would compose as many as three or four in a single morning, especially when he was unusually pressed for money. Most of the time he did but little revising. If the musical idea as it came was not of fine quality, then it could go to the scrap-basket or to anybody who cared for it; there were plenty more good tunes where that came from. Schubert’s supply of beautiful melodies was inexhaustible. He never had to nurse and pet a tune in order to get the maximum of musical service out of it. More than any other song-writer Schubert ‘sings himself.’ And his songs, for the most part, ‘wrote themselves.’ The poet would pick up a book on a friend’s table and, discovering therein some lovely poems, would be seized by musical settings for them. Sometimes he wrote as though in a trance. The music seemed to come from some anterior source, and, passing through his brain on its way to the paper, to make him intoxicated. When he died at the age of thirty he left behind him some eleven hundred musical works, of which more than six hundred were songs of all descriptions. This was the product of scarcely more than fifteen years of activity. It is obvious there could not have been much revision. But this is hardly evidence that Schubert was incapable of self-criticism. He had his favorites among his songs and doubtless realized that many were as worthless as later generations have found them. And he did, in certain cases, spend considerable effort in revision; there exist, for instance, several different versions of ‘The Erl King’ in Schubert’s handwriting. But his lack of revision was a result of his overpowering fertility rather than of carelessness. If he kept on writing new songs he might strike a masterpiece any time. Why waste his time polishing second-rate pieces?
Briefly stated, what Schubert did for song was to establish it as one of the great departments of music. We know what it was before his time—an unpretentious amusement, considered appropriate chiefly for the vaudeville theatres and the banquet tables of roistering students. Among the educated classes song was loved, but hardly respected. The great composers wrote songs only as bagatelles for their amusement or for a special occasion. It was hardly realized that the song form, so slight and so modest, could receive the burden of great ideas and radical innovation.
Schubert, by force of genius, proved that the song could be as great intensively as an opera or oratorio could be extensively; that to write a perfect song was as difficult and worthy a task for a great artist as to write an oratorio. To prove this he showered all the riches of his artistic equipment on the song. First of all, he gave to it great melodies. The melodies of the best art-songs before his time could not be compared with the great melodies which musicians had put into symphonies and operas. Musicians had felt that songs were not worthy of their best melodies, but only of their second and third best. Schubert gave to song his very best.