That which chiefly characterizes the melodies of Schubert, taken as a whole, is their depth of feeling. He is never at a loss to find accents which go at once to our hearts. He makes us weep with Rosemonde and love with Marguérite; “The Erl King” (Le Roi des Aulnes) freezes us with terror, and hurries us on, in spite of ourselves, towards the mysterious abyss of the legend; in “The Young Nun” (La Jeune Religieuse) we are made in turn to experience the sufferings of the struggle and the final transports of the soul’s victory over sense.
To know Schubert well, we must see how he has expressed the different sentiments of the human heart—not love and terror simply, but infinite varieties of intermediate and moderate feeling; and in these we shall find, as his common characteristics, grace and brilliancy.
“Haud ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco.”
Who shall sing of love unless he knows its pains? Schubert has felt it all—its timid tenderness, its ardent passion, and it may be its despair. In his “Pensées d’Amour” are not these six bars the unfolding, as it were, of a heart which is opening
for the first time, like a bud in the sunshine of a spring morning?—when
“Eden revives in the first kiss of love”
(thus sings Byron). A happy dream; a tenderness as shy as it is deep—were these ever rendered with a more delicate charm?
After this sweet and tranquil reverie follows impassioned devotion. The “Serenade” is too well known to require that we should linger over it. Who does not recall the appeals of that supplicating voice, and the plaintive answers of the accompaniment?
How immensely inferior for the most part are the serenades to which public favor has given a celebrity! All the masters of the modern Italian school have sung under a balcony; and without going so far back as Stradella, whose lovely romance in D minor has nothing in common with the modern Lied, we will say a few words on the serenades of Le Barbier and Don Pasquale, which appear to be the most extensively known.
The one addressed by Almaviva to Rosina—or, to speak more accurately, to the public—seems to us unworthy of Rossini’s reputation. A phrase, rather wanting in fulness, some passages for the voice, a few organ touches—this is all; the whole, however, very well written for giving relief to the fine notes of a tenor. But this is not enough to constitute a chef d’œuvre; and probably Rossini was thinking of this kind of music when he boasted before Bellini that he wrote from his mind rather than from his heart, at the same time assuring the young man’s simplicity that this was “quite sufficient for the worthy public.”