Next, Schubert chose (among his many texts) some of the greatest short poems in German literature. Musicians previously had generally considered the words a very unimportant part of vocal music. True, the music of the eighteenth century (especially in Germany) is full of exceptions to this rule, but the exceptions occur as if by accident and prove that composers either didn’t care or didn’t know which texts were better and which were worse. It is true, also, that Reichardt Zelter, and others set the poems of Goethe to music, but their settings were unpretentious and hardly aspired to be in themselves adequate to express Goethe’s thoughts. With Schubert, for the first time, we find the greatest poetry married to the greatest music. It must be admitted, also, that Schubert’s taste was not highly critical in the matter of poetry. Among his six hundred songs are a great many with insipid or pompous words. But some of these texts were written by Schubert’s personal friends (such as his room-mate Mayrhofer) and were set as a personal compliment. Further, Schubert, who worked daily, did not always find the best of poems at hand, and was obliged to take what he could get, though he probably knew which were better and which were worse. And, finally, he was generally best inspired by the best poems, which should be a proof of his sensitiveness to poetic excellence. At any rate, one finds the texts of Schubert’s songs almost an anthology of the best German lyrical poems written in the century before his death. And with some of the verses is music that seems to have been made by one and the same master artist to fit for all time. On the whole, though Schubert was not a man educated in belles lettres, he showed a vivid appreciation of poetic excellence which has been a mark of great song writers ever since.
Next, Schubert showed a marvellous sense of poetry in music. The music before him had been, as we have said, predominantly formal. With Beethoven it had reached its most perfect formal development and with the symphony and sonatas of Beethoven’s later years broke through formal bonds in its search after more intense expression. The violent conflict between form and expression is the glory (and to some minds the defect) of Beethoven’s later work. But Schubert in his songs seems to feel nothing of this struggle. It is as though he had been born on the other side; as though Beethoven had done the fighting for him. Or it is as though a mountain stream had struggled through rocks and over a precipice to reach the quiet level of the plains below. With Schubert we feel only joyous spontaneous expression of the words. The expressive resources of music which his forerunners had prepared are laid at his feet, and from them he chooses with wonderful acuteness the details and devices he needs. This sense of poetry could hardly be found in the songs of Reichardt and Zelter. Sung with the words their music would doubtless seem appropriate. But played without the words to point the meaning they would seem pleasing but colorless. On the other hand, if you play the songs of Schubert on the piano you will get, to a surprising degree, the feelings conveyed by the words. It is not too much to say that before Schubert song music was appropriate only; with Schubert song became expressive.
Finally, Schubert gave to the art-song that freedom of form which has been a characteristic of it ever since. Not that he was the first to write the durchkomponierte song or any of the other freer forms, but he was the first with the genius necessary to establish such forms (or formlessness) for all time. Schubert’s predecessors had not been pedants. Within their limited capacities some of them had been genuine poets of sentiment. But form had nevertheless retained its hold on the spirit of their song writing. The regular recurrence of measured lines, or the building up of the song according to a scheme of regular repetitions or alterations, had been to them a matter of second nature (except when a Hiller or a Zumsteeg tentatively broke through for experiment’s sake). Such a song as Schubert’s Aufenthalt or the early ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,’ in which there is no discoverable scheme yet a most cogent unity, would have been hardly conceivable to these early pioneers.
Schubert, then, with a marvellous fund of melody, a sense of poetic values in words and music, and a free instinct for expressive form, did for the song what Haydn had done for the symphony—put it on the musical map. He was able to do this not alone because he was a great musician, but because there were great poets in Germany whose lyrics he could set. Let us see who and of what character these poets were.
The poets whom Schubert set to music (over 100 in all) represent several stages of a tremendous upheaval in German life and literature—roughly, the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. For convenience we may divide them into three classes—the ‘Storm and Stress’ poets, the Romantic poets, and the ‘young-German’ poets. The Sturm und Drang, or ‘Storm and Stress,’ tendency was the German equivalent of the pre-revolutionary upheaval among the educated classes of France. Its ideal was that of the highest perfection for the individual—personal rights rather than social duties. The so-called Romantic movement (in the narrower meaning of the term) was at its height during Napoleon’s period of power. It was double. On the one hand, it was Sturm und Drang, individualism carried to its extreme, with a high premium set on the imagination and a morbid interest in what we should to-day call ‘psychology.’ On the other hand, it was the growth of the social and national spirit which aroused a sense of nationalism in Germany under Napoleon’s tyranny and enabled the Germans gloriously to shake off the French yoke. The third period, in which Schubert did most of his actual work, was that of disillusionment, when the liberal dreams of the German enthusiasts had been met by the stupid reactionism of the German princes and the Congress of Vienna. The German uprising against Napoleon had been synonymous in the minds of most with a movement toward liberal institutions and political freedom. Under the royal houses of Germany the people were forced back, at the point of the sword, to a state little better than mediævalism. The poets of the ‘young-German’ movement saw that the dreams of the previous generation had been made a fiasco and turned to cynicism, with just a shadow of a bitter dream of vengeance stored up for the future.
The great poets of the Sturm und Drang movement were, of course, Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, one of the most universal minds the world has ever known, was able to enter into a situation or a human emotion so intensely that he was an ideal lyric poet. His command over the music of the German language was complete. All Germany was dazzled by the wealth of color and nuance which he found in life and reflected in his poetry. Schiller was in every way his inferior. His inflated rhetoric always stole the lyric quality from his poems, which never pictured truth, either outer or inner. But by the sheer energy of his spirit Schiller was a man of the time. It is worth noting that though Schubert set nearly fifty of his texts, not a single masterpiece resulted. For there is in Schiller, properly considered, little or nothing to inspire a genuinely lyric poet. And, as is often the case in lyric poetry, the minor men do some of the best work. Some of Schubert’s best texts are supplied by Claudius, Schubart, Stollberg, and Hölty, minor members of the fraternity which stirred up all Germany to the expectation of a profound revolution. These men were crying out against the vices of the aristocracy, or praising the simple life of the peasants, as Herder had taught them. Their songs were a glorification of the individual, proclaiming the intensity and beauty of his spontaneous feelings—ideal lyric material.
The era of the Napoleonic wars brought a new generation of poets to Germany. It was the period when the vision of great deeds was stirring every one to demonstrate his own power. This side of the movement, represented in Schubert’s songs by the brothers Schlegel, was decidedly morbid. But there was another side. For Napoleonic oppression had aroused a new sense of dignity and national solidarity in German hearts, and there arose a group of poets to sing of it. Most typical is Körner, author of the famous sword song, who volunteered for the army, saying to his father: ‘Germany is rising; my art sighs for her fatherland’—and died in battle. This adoption by art of a new fatherland was signalized by a new return of poetry to all that was popular and traditional in German life and history. It is to this inspiration that we owe poems by Uhland and Müller, which Schubert set to music.
The third era was that of disillusionment, when Platen could write
‘... man kann hienieden
Nichts Schlech’res als ein Deutscher sein.’
The lyric poetry of the time became either a cynical grasping of selfish interests, as often in Heine, or a renunciation of the outer word, a peace which is to be found in contemplation and humble love, as in Rückert.