Weber’s pianoforte works have astonishing individuality in spite of the commonplaceness of the stuff which he often brings in, either to fill them up or to add brilliancy. There is an effusion in most of them of manly vigor that never becomes weakened into sentimentality, and there is a great deal of romance in the chivalric strain. His harmonies are simple, though often richly scored, and he is a master of the art of suggestion by silence. His melodies have the stamp of the Teutonic folk-song. Though some years of his youth and manhood were spent in Prague and in Vienna, he assimilated practically nothing of the Slavic characteristics which can be found in the music of Haydn and Schubert, even in that of Brahms. He made use of the entire keyboard in relatively huge dynamic effects, and he had, as we have said, an almost unique power to bring forth suggestions of orchestral coloring.
His compositions are not architectural as Beethoven’s are. They suggest great canvases, full of color and movement. Thus the pianoforte sonatas seem to manifest the same quality of imagination which was able to make of the overtures to his operas brilliantly colored fantasies, after which Mendelssohn and Wagner shaped their art. And it is worthy of note that the same stereotyped figure work which plays such a part in his keyboard music is abundantly evident in these overtures. The figures out of which the allegro sections of the overture to Oberon are made are just such figures as one will find in the pianoforte sonatas, variations and concertos.
No subsequent composer down to the present day has procured from the pianoforte the special kind of mysterious, colorful effects which Weber was able to procure therefrom; but both Schumann and Brahms are clearly indebted to him for more general and more technical procedures. In connection with this it may be mentioned that by comparison with Chopin, the perfect, the pianoforte music of both Schumann and Brahms often appears orchestral. And it may be added that Chopin was not especially familiar with Weber’s work.
III
If the certain chivalric romanticism of Weber’s music is hard to analyze, the special charm of Schubert’s is wholly elusive. We have to do with an utterly different nature. Weber was an aristocrat, a rover among wild companions, a hanger-on at the theatre for a while, if you will, but none the less of distinguished birth, of polished manners and of fine wit. Schubert was more than any other of the composers, even more than Haydn, a man of the people. He was happy to mingle with the peasants, happy to play hours at a time for their dancing. Beethoven is said to have modelled the music of the country people’s dance in the ‘Pastoral Symphony’ upon the music he heard played in a certain country tavern to which at one time he delighted to go. Brahms in his impoverished boyhood used to earn a few pence by playing for the sailors’ dancing in the taverns along the waterfront of Hamburg. But Beethoven regarded himself, as we have said, as the high priest of an exalted art; and Brahms was hardly less imperious. Yet Schubert, for all his ideals which rose ever and ever higher, for all the fact that he numbered acquaintances in the same aristocratic families which had seen Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven come and go, remained a man of the people, a singer in the sway of his art, a loveable, reckless, sentimental and affectionate boy.
All his music is lyrical. The song is never absent from his pianoforte works, no matter how instrumental parts of them may be. He is essentially a melodist. His rhythms have the lilt of a dance. These two elements are not disguised. They undergo no intellectual transformations. They are as obvious as in the folk-songs and dances of the country people with whom he loved to associate. Hence the almost complete lack of sophistication in his music, the naturalness which distinguishes it from all other music.
His harmonies are strange and warm. They lack the subtlety of Mozart on the one hand, the frankness of Weber on the other. They have not the expressive significance of Beethoven. They seem rather to go beside his music than to go under it. One listens through them, so to speak, as one might look upon a procession through a colored mist that now conceals, now discloses, that always plays magic tricks with the sight. Two harmonic procedures appear more or less regularly in his music. One is the interchange of major and minor, the other the bodily shifting of the harmonic fabric up and down the scale. The latter are changes rather than modulations. By reason of these unexpected, unaccountable harmonies, his music sounds now near, now far. One moment it is with us and familiar, the next it is aloof and strange.
Schubert’s hands were thick, his fingers short and fat. Though he was not an elegant or a polished player, he had great beauty of touch and a natural, easy fluency, especially in the rapid passages of his own works. Richard Heuberger, in his excellent book on Schubert, points to the fact that most of Schubert’s pianoforte music is written in keys that require the use of many black notes on the keyboard; and suggests, as one reason for this, that Schubert found it easier to play in such keys. It is generally admitted that the key of G major is the most difficult for the pianist.
Schubert’s pianoforte music comprises many long sonatas, two sets of impromptus, a set of short pieces called ‘Musical Moments’ and a number of waltzes and other dances. The sonatas are for the most part unsatisfactory as such. In such extended forms there is need of an intellectual command of the science of music, and a sense of great proportions, both of which Schubert lacked. Hence the separate movements, the first and even more often the last, are loose and rambling in structure, and too long for the work as a whole. There is so little cohesion in the group that one may in most cases take the individual movements quite out of it and play them with perfect satisfaction.
Not all the movements are over-long, and some of the sonatas can be enjoyed in their entirety. Perhaps the most satisfactory from the point of view of structure is that in A minor, opus 42. In this the first movement is admirably constructed, firmly knit, full of distinct contrast, and in the middle section well developed. The andante and variations is undeniably long, but the formal preciseness of the following movement and of the rondo succeeds in giving to the group a definiteness and balance which will pass muster.