Un seul moment te revoir et mourir!”[166]
Her suffering has become almost insupportable. She stops, and the
agitation continues only in her heart. After a few bars she resumes in a low voice: “C’en est fait, il m’oublie,” etc., and the melody ends on the fifth, then a very new effect, though now frequently employed.
If, after a short pause, we read the “Plaintes de la Jeune Fille,” we are soon under the influence of an entirely different emotion. The agitation of the preceding melody is changed for a more self-contained but even more poignant pain. The maiden, ripened by long suffering, confides to the tossing waves the woe which consumes her. A solemn and lugubrious phrase escapes her; her words are slow, her sorrow fearfully calm. Ten years of tears and contemplation were needed to change Marguérite to this.
To find repose from violent emotions we need not have recourse to any other than Schubert, among whose eminent characteristics are those of sweetness, gracefulness, and contrasting brilliancy and splendor. From among a multitude of admirable melodies we will mention only “La Truite,” “Le Nautonnier,” and “Le Départ” (“The Trout,” “The Sailor,” and “The Departure”).
In “La Truite” Schubert unexpectedly finds himself met by a great difficulty. If it be true that people are soon tired of descriptive poetry, it is still more incontestable that the descriptive style is ill suited to music.
We must make an exception for certain powerful physical effects, such as tempest under all its forms; and yet here again what we are most sensible of in the storms of Gluck, Beethoven, and Weber is the troubled state of the human mind in presence of the disturbance of nature.
One day, when the genius of the
great and good Haydn was taking a nap, it came into his head to attempt to express in his Creation the roaring of lions and tigers, the swiftness of the stag, together with other equally unmusical ideas; he consequently fell into the grotesque. Schubert had to describe the joyous sportings of the trout “in its limped crystal.” He had the good taste to trouble himself very little about it. To find a melodic phrase full of charm and feeling was his first care; and need we say that he succeeded? The light and graceful design of the accompaniment may perhaps remind us of the trout—“His graceful dartings and his rapid course” (“Ses élans gracieux, sa course volage”)—but it is nothing more than a detail of the description which comes merely as an addition to the dominant sentiment.
“Le Nautonnier” is the triumphal song of the mariner who, after braving the violence of the tempest, returns safely into port. Rapid as the wind which fills the sails of his bark, agitated as the waves which threaten to engulf him—such is the rhythm of the two first phrases; but soon, with the major and the E flat of the treble, the song of victory bursts forth: man has conquered the force of the elements. This is undeniably one of the most vigorous melodies ever written by Schubert.