High above all poets of the time stood Heine. No German poet, except possibly Goethe, ever produced such a quantity of short poems which have become the property of every German child. The whole literature of lyric poetry can show only three or four men who can equal him in brief and direct expression. It was Heine who brought German literature down from the mountain tops and made it inhabit the homes of men. His poetry was no ‘mighty line,’ with inverted phrasings and high astounding polysyllables. He never spoke the speech of the gods, as did Schiller. He had no use for the paraphernalia of Greek mythology that had been popular in the Sturm und Drang period. He spoke a German that easily fits into men’s mouths as they converse with their neighbors. Out of this he fashioned poetry. His syntax is as simple as that of the King James Bible (a rare thing in German literature). Each statement is a unit. And so with each of his thoughts and observations. Each comes to us in its simplest terms. Heine’s vocabulary (in his poems) is that of a child. His thoughts are those of any callow love-sick youth. His statement is so literal that it seems always to be on the verge of foolishness. He even seems careless in literary art; his lines are uneven, his rhymes the simplest imaginable, his rhythm disordered. Yet beneath and beyond this simplicity is the art of a careful workman, and the charm of a sensitive observer of men. Heine’s poems have the true lyric quality in that their real charm can never be finally analyzed. We can only say that beneath those childlike statements of the obvious was the genius of a poet.
Heine’s genius, like that of Rückert, Platen, Chamisso, Kerner, Eichendorff, and other contemporaries mentioned in the preceding chapter, always tended a bit toward the morbid. These poets partook of the common malady of over-individualism. ‘It is not good for man to be alone.’ The commonest and truest of truths is that man is a social animal. It is impossible for him to conduct his life except in company with others. The stories of hermits who have gone mad with loneliness have an excellent foundation in fact. And just as man seems meant to act socially, so he seems obliged to feel socially. It is a spiritual necessity to think a good deal of others. ‘Whoso saveth his soul shall lose it.’ The man who seeks to discover all the treasures within him usually ends by finding nothing there. And when it is the literary fashion (as it was in Schumann’s time) to look exclusively within one’s own soul, the age ends in helplessness with a moan of despair. This condition is implicit in the poetry of Heine. It is, as we have said, never the poetry of a hero. It can console us in our leisure; it can never inspire us in our labor. Yet the fault is not so serious as it may sound. Few people have contracted serious spiritual diseases from Heine’s poetry. The very simplicity and brevity of it prevent the reader from taking it too seriously. Read before the fire in the still hours of the evening Heine cannot harm the tenderest soul of a child of twelve. He was too genuine a humanist, as well as too excellent a literary man, to be utterly removed from health. He is a far more harmless amusement than Byron, for instance, just as he was a far greater poet than Byron. He was, of course, taken much more seriously in his day than we can take him in ours. Schumann in particular shows that he regarded his poet as a text for the highest tragedy and passion of which he as musician was capable. Yet even in his own time Heine’s influence must have been essentially healthy. For he had in abundance two qualities that always tend to keep men in the path of health, simplicity and humor. The mind that can think simply is not wholly diseased. And we need never fear the pessimist who can laugh at his own despair.
I
Two things preëminently Schumann brought to his songs beyond what any composer had brought previously. First there was an accurate regard for the text. It is not to belittle Schubert to say that he did not show Schumann’s accurate regard for the words. Schubert’s regard for the text was conscientious and faithful; his melodies are marvellously faithful to the spirit and his musical prosody never does violence to the metre and accent. But Schubert was working under a somewhat different tradition from Schumann. He is more the melodist, pure and simple. His attitude toward musical prosody was somewhat negative; he demanded of his melody only that it should not do violence to the metre; beyond that it could follow its own musical course. Hence, we not infrequently in his songs have such passages as this, from Die Allmacht:
verkünden seine Macht
![[PNG]](#4078758979312882140_score-p235.png.id-6124296336473183823.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
This, of course, is in no way reprehensible or violent to the canons of art. But it differs from Schumann’s method in that it puts a higher value on pure song—on the mere joyous exercise of the vocal organs. Schumann’s attitude toward musical prosody was more positive; he demanded of his melody not only that it should do no obvious violence to the metre, but that it should take pains accurately to fit the minor accents and quantities. He tried to make the text as sung not very different from the text as declaimed. True, he sometimes wrote mere lyric passages of melody on an open vowel, like that in the above example from Schubert. But such passages in Schumann are far more rare. And the whole body of his songs shows that he took the text more as his collaborator in matters of detail. His songs are not valuable primarily because of their melody. He has written many lovely melodies, but a large proportion of his songs would be of comparatively little musical value (at least in the voice part) without the words. And his melodic invention, taking his songs as a whole, is far below the exalted work of Schubert. Besides, Schubert’s texts, though not generally chosen without discrimination, do not show the same careful selection as those of Schumann. The poems of the latter are carefully selected for the purpose of specific musical treatment, and in consequence seem to have a higher literary value, whether they have or not. Finally, Schumann had the immense advantage of possessing nearly all of Heine’s wonderful lyrics to choose from, a fact that in many an instance gave him the opportunity of writing immortal music ‘married to immortal verse.’
The second all-important factor which Schumann, over and above Schubert, brought to his song-writing was a matured harmonic and pianistic technique for the accompaniments. However truly Schubert divined the possibilities of the modern pianoforte, just nearing perfection in his day, he never wrote thoroughly in the new style. His chords in the bass were apt to be heavy and thick, his accompaniment is not spread as widely as it might advantageously be, and his inner voices never show the free and sprightly polyphony which is peculiarly adapted to the piano. Had he lived he would doubtless have become one of the greatest masters of the new pianoforte style. But it was left for Schumann consciously and reverently to take up the work. Schumann did not write a single song, for publication at least, until he had been working for full ten years for the piano. His first enthusiasm was for the piano. The shattering of his hopes to become a virtuoso forced him to turn his enthusiasm toward piano composition. And in his early years of creative activity he developed the possibilities of the new instrument with all the enthusiasm of his youthful nature. His first twenty-three works, written between the years 1830 and 1840, were almost exclusively for the piano. In them he developed a pianoforte idiom which was unique in its day. With this new and mature technique he approached his song writing. Inevitably he looked as lovingly toward the accompaniment as toward the voice part—some critics say even more so. He had learned how to make the most of the mechanical peculiarity of the piano—its struck strings which are incapable of a true sustained legato; he treated the piano, in other words, essentially as a hammer instrument and not as a wind instrument, like the organ. He developed a surprising adeptness at enharmonic modulation, for which the complete piano keyboard is so peculiarly adapted. He learned the full use of the damper pedal—not so much for sustaining chords as for permitting a wide separation of notes. He learned how to make his inner voices pianistic instead of vocal, making them depend wholly on their contour and position (as opposed to tone quality) for their independence. Finally, he had learned how to give each composition a style of its own—a peculiarity of pianistic manner over and above its individuality of musical content. All these qualities of Schumann’s piano technique should be kept in mind in studying his accompaniments. They represent a good half of the musical value of Schumann’s songs. If the vocal parts of the Dichterliebe cycle had never been written the accompaniments would still have a high value as proof of Schumann’s mastery over pianistic writing. Without an appreciation of the pianistic side of Schumann’s vocal work no singer can begin to appreciate the songs; he cannot even satisfactorily sing his part of them. A large share of Schubert’s accompaniments can be played satisfactorily by a pianist of slight ability, if only he have the knack of following the singer. But scarcely any of Schumann’s accompaniments can be played satisfactorily except by a performer who is an artist at his instrument.