In translation, also, Schubert was familiar with the work of certain foreign poets, notably Shakespeare and Walter Scott. To the inspiration of the former we owe at least two masterpieces, ‘Who Is Sylvia?’ and ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark!’ From the latter we have the wonderful ‘Ave Maria.’ We should not forget, also, the songs of Ossian, now almost forgotten. These were forgeries (in all probability) by a Scotch schoolmaster, purporting to be translations from the Gaelic of the songs of the minstrel Ossian, who had been no more than a tradition for centuries. The literary world took them in earnest, and such men as Goethe became enthusiastic over their wild and rugged imagery. But to us they seem rhetorical and far removed from the simplicity of genuine folk-poetry. And Schubert seems to have felt this, for, though he set eight of the long Ossian songs, not one of his settings is memorable. Again the absence of the true lyric spark had left him cold.
Poets of the Romantic Period.
Top: Goethe and Hugo
Bottom: Schiller and Heine
III
Among Schubert’s songs we find an extraordinarily wide range of form and subject-matter—so wide that all song writers since his time have not been able much to enlarge it. We have said that he was the first to apply musical genius to the durchkomponiertes Lied. But he was not a specialist in this form. He seems to have had no especial preferences, but to have been guided by the nature of his poem. A number of his songs are in the strophe form—simply contrasting phrases of the music forming the tune, which is repeated without change for each stanza of the words, as in the simple folk-tune type. Of this class are some of Schubert’s best songs, such as ‘The Heather Rose,’ ‘The Fisher,’ ‘Praise of Tears,’ ‘Wandering,’ ‘The Brook’s Lullaby,’ ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark!’[20] and many others.
Next we find what we might call the ‘developed strophe’ form, in which the simple stanza organization is preserved in spirit, but some change enters into the make-up of the whole song in accordance with the demands of the text. Examples of this are the famous Du bist die Ruh, in which the final strophe is much altered to express the intenser feelings of the poet; or the Gute Nacht, from the Winterreise series, in which the melody of one stanza is sung in the major to convey the contrasting effect of calmness; or the ‘Serenade,’ in which the repeated strophe is followed by a free coda necessary to give completeness to the idea. In the class of the ‘developed strophe’ form we might group such pieces as ‘Her Portrait,’ which repeats the main strophe after a contrasting middle section. Or there are such songs as ‘By the Sea,’[1] which are almost in the strict strophe form, but varied here and there in some minor detail, proving that however much Schubert felt the beauty of form he did not feel its dogma.
Finally, there is the quite free or durchkomponierte form. The examples of this are innumerable in Schubert’s works: we recall easily the famous Aufenthalt (‘Abode’) and Doppelgänger (‘The Double’),[21] Der Wanderer, and Das Wirtshaus. In these songs there is every variation from a deceptive strophic form to the utmost dissimilarity, and yet there remains always a sense of unity which is the work of a master.
Besides the pure lyrics Schubert wrote ballads and scenas. The former are simply stories told in verse. Unlike the lyric, the ballad is highly objective, seeing the characters as things apart and as acting for themselves; yet like the lyric it is highly sympathetic with emotions, and sometimes identifies itself alternately with one character and another as completely as though it were a lyric. This is because of the dramatic quality implicit in every story,—a quality which is particularly attractive to the primitive imagination. The ballad, in short, is a miniature drama, in which the characters speak in their own words with each other, and in which rapid and vigorous action is abundant. Examples of this form in Schubert’s songs are Schiller’s ‘The Diver,’ and of course ‘The Erl King.’
We should also distinguish a third class of songs—the scena. This is a combination of the lyric and the ballad; it is essentially an emotional utterance, but it usually pictures the characters and the scene, and often involves some sort of dramatic action. The Ossian Songs partake of the nature of the scena, but the best example is Schiller’s Erwartung, in which the singer is waiting for his sweetheart to come to him, and is beguiled by various noises of the night into thinking it is she.
The scenas and the ballads involve not a little of the declamatory style, which is quite unlyrical. Declamation in song is familiar to us in the recitatives of the older operas, but declamation in the true sense is more melodious than dry recitative. It is, in fact, genuine melody, with all elements of melodic beauty, except that it is independent of strict measure and rhythm, receiving all its accents from the words which it follows with greatest nicety. The possibilities of this style of music have only begun to be developed in the last two or three decades. In Schubert declamation is usually on the right track, but is pretty likely to be uninteresting. We must make an exception, however, of such masterly bits of declamation as the last line of ‘The Erl King,’ in which the half-spoken announcement, ‘Lo, in his arms the child was dead,’ closes the ballad abruptly and seems to frame it off from the workaday world; or the last line of ‘The Wanderer,’ in which Schubert’s poetic sense reinforced the emphatic word with an emphatic melodic note: Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück. But on the whole we must admit that the whole body of Schubert’s declamatory and dramatic songs is hardly worth the trouble of study, except for the purpose of enlarging one’s knowledge of the composer. If it were not for the wonderful ‘Erl King,’ greatest of ballads, people would doubtless be saying that Schubert was a lyric song-writer only, and had no feeling for the ballad form.