The art of music, Vol. 05 (of 14)

by Unknown

In the sixth song, ‘Curiosity,’ he is in perplexity, and turns, as every romantic youth of the time did, to nature for help. ‘Does she love me?’ he is persistently asking, and he addresses his question to the brook. In the next song, ‘Impatience,’ his attraction for the girl has become a full-fledged passion. ‘Dein ist mein Herz!’ he cries ecstatically. In ‘Morning Greeting’ he addresses some pretty stanzas and compliments to the miller’s daughter. The tenth song is an excellent example, in simple form, of the delicate mood which, as we have said, it is the special province of the art-song to express. The young miller and the girl are sitting together—beside the brook, of course. She gets up and goes into the house, and the tears come to his eyes. In the next song the miller’s daughter has accepted and returned his love, and in the following one he is at joyful peace with nature, and is praising the green ribbon which his loved one wears.

But then enters the tragic complication. For we hear a hunter’s horn, and the handsome young hunter descends upon the peaceful mill. The miller previsages the meaning of this. In the fifteenth song he is struggling between pride and jealousy. Then he is once more praising the dear color—green, which his sweetheart loves because it is like the fresh green of nature. And in the next song he is cursing the hateful color (the same green) because its wearer is no longer true to him. In the eighteenth song the miller’s daughter has given her love to the huntsman, and the young miller has lost hope. The dead flowers (for fall has come) express the state of his heart. These flowers must lie upon his grave. But—when the loved one passes by the grave let the flowers burst once more into fresh bloom. In the nineteenth song the miller holds a conversation with his beloved brook, which suggests to him the sweet suicide which was ultra-fashionable in all romantic literature of the time. And in the beautiful last song of the cycle the brook sings to sleep the dead man by its side.

The poems are all truly lyrical, and invite musical setting. They rise to no marked poetic heights, but are thoroughly poetic and emotional in feeling. Though Schubert did not achieve a uniform standard of excellence throughout the series, the general average is high. The first song, ‘Wandering,’ has a memorable melody of a simple sort, and the second, which we have mentioned above, is one of his masterpieces. ‘Impatience,’ though formal and strophic in structure, has an unrestrained sweep of feeling which is rare in Schubert and looks forward to the later romanticists of music. The ‘Morning Greeting’ is a simple Italianate melody of great beauty, one which is likely to lead astray the singer who tries to give it overmuch ‘expression.’ ‘The Hunter’ is spirited, but has no great musical value. ‘Jealousy and Pride,’ though not very attractive musically, is interesting as an example of Schubert’s discriminating use of the simplest kind of accompaniment for precise emotional expression. Die liebe Farbe, however, is one of the masterpieces. It is almost French in its thread-like delicacy, but this will prove a pitfall for the singer who has not attained full control of the niceties of vocal expression. The formal daintiness of the song is like the allegretto of some toy symphony. And at the same time it is neatly expressive of the playful mood of the words. The contrast of the companion song, Die böse Farbe, of course offers a problem to the interpretive singer.

But perhaps the most masterful song of the cycle is the eighteenth, ‘Dead Flowers.’ This, in moderate two-four time, is strikingly like the allegretto movement of Schubert’s C major symphony, one of the loveliest of all his orchestral pieces. The entrancing modulation from an undecided minor to a spirited major on the words ‘Der Mai ist gekommen, der Winter ist aus,’ is a touch which any lover of Schubert would recognize as his unmistakably at the first hearing. But don’t miss the finer art of this lovely passage, for the joyousness of the major is deceptive; the miller is black at heart over his failure in love, and is only beguiling himself in a passing moment. Notice, therefore, the plaintiveness of the accompaniment on this passage.

‘The Miller and the Brook’ is an interesting example of the half lyrical, half declamatory style which Schubert sometimes adopts, as we have seen. But the last piece of the cycle is pure song. It is hard to analyze the plaintive character of this melody, and hard especially to understand how the augmented fourth, traditionally considered a harsh interval, becomes at Schubert’s hands an instrument of deep emotional expression.

It has often been pointed out that the motive of the brook gives a subtle unity to this song cycle, and that the motive is preserved in Schubert’s music. From the rippling triplets of the accompaniment of ‘Whither,’ the first song in which the brook enters, to the cradling motion of the accompaniment to the last, the brook is almost continuously in the piano part. But, though Schubert’s feeling here is extremely delicate, his technical means are of the simplest. If it is realism, it is realism of the most primitive sort. We should not be misled by the praise of the ‘brook music’ in this cycle. True descriptive music, whether for good or for bad, did not enter song until after Schubert. And we should further remember that, although Schubert was indeed the first great composer of the song-cycle, he never gave the form the unity and inner meaning which was imparted to it by Schumann, and which is typical of it to our minds.

The Müllerlieder reveal admirably the tender interpretation of sentiment of which Schubert was such a master. But they are by no means songs of a greatness equal to that of his next cycle, the Winterreise. The ‘winter journey’ taken by the hero (Müller again is the poet) is a pilgrimage in search of forgetfulness after an unhappy love affair. Even more than the Müllerlieder, it is an essay in the interpretation of nature in terms of human sentiments. The songs, indeed, are little more than a series of parallels drawn between the scene of the winter landscape and the feelings of the hero. They are a personalizing of the weather, a dramatization of the thermometer.

In the first song the hero tells of his lost sweetheart, and sings to the memory of her a touching ‘Good-night’ lullaby. The second hears the wind playing about the roof of the house, and suggests that even so circumstances play with man’s heart. In the third he finds the cold air freezing his tears—thus his very sorrow has become fixed and rigid. The fourth is a vision of the world paralyzed in the cold of winter: his heart is frozen and her picture is blotted out of it. In the fifth he remembers the linden tree under which they spent their happiest hours.

So the songs go, one after another. The ninth is the ‘Will-o’-the-wisp’ song; he will not be misled by these false lights, for his heart has been misled by such beacons before. In the next, ‘Rest,’ the hero tells how he is so occupied by the pain of his travelling and the pain of his sorrow that only when he lays his body down to rest at night does he realize how tired he is. From this point on the great songs of the cycle are numerous. The thirteenth, ‘The Post,’ pictures the galloping of the approaching mail coach, with the blowing of its horn. Is there a letter for him? No, for he is alone in the wide world. The post departs—in a minor key. In the fourteenth song, Der greise Kopf, he notices that the frost has made his hair white, and he thinks of himself as an old man, and wishes he could be many years removed from his sorrow. In the long and somewhat descriptive song, Im Dorfe, he enters a village and the dogs bark at the lonely wanderer; even so the world is strange and hostile to him. In Täuschung (‘Illusion’) he sees a light in the distance, and hopes it comes from a hospitable farmhouse. But, alas! the light was an illusion, like the rest of the things we hope for in life.

Then come five final songs—every one a masterpiece of the first order. The Wegweiser tells of the sign-post the hero sees on the road. But there is another sign-post which is also directing him on his longer road and it points relentlessly the way to Death. Yet, in the next song, Das Wirtshaus, when he approaches a graveyard, he finds no welcome awaiting: the rooms of this tavern are all occupied. Death itself will not soothe his loneliness. In the next song, ‘Courage,’ he makes a final despairing effort to free himself from his misery by pure force of will-power. If the snow flies in his face, he will dash it aside. He will laugh loud and merrily. If life is an illusion, he will make it worth while. If there are no gods on earth, we ourselves shall be gods. But this mood cannot last. He sees two false suns in the heavens, in addition to the one that has always been there. But they vanish, like the two suns of earlier years—the eyes of his beloved. Only one more sun need vanish and blessed night will come for him.