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II FRANZ SCHUBERT

As the earliest full-fledged representative of the romantic school of composers which succeeded Beethoven, Schubert occupies a peculiar position in the history of music. His work forms the link between the classical music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and the romantic music of Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, having certain qualities in common with each. Traditions, training, and environment allied him with the older order; but instinct led him into new paths. Scattered plentifully through the thousands of pages covered by his racing pen, many of which might be the work of some humdrum eighteenth-century kapellmeister, are features of surprising novelty, pointing unmistakably to the future rather than to the past--gleams of the true gold in a vast heap of sand. Nine-tenths of the time he is content to imitate, with amiable, unthinking garrulity, the quartets and sonatas he grew up with; the other tenth he breaks forth incontinently, an inspired pioneer. This mingling of the matter-of-course and the unexpected, of the sand and the gold, makes his music a curious study.

Born in Vienna, January 31, 1797, Schubert began the study of music when still a child, under the direction of his father, a school-teacher by profession, and his two brothers. While in his teens the boy began playing the viola pans in the family string quartet. His brothers took the violin parts, and his father played the 'cello: not always impeccably, it is to be feared, for we read how little Franz, looking doubtless very solemn and gnomelike in the spectacles he already wore, would from time to time, without stopping to look at the score, comment on the wrong notes the paternal fingers were sounding. This informal quartet was the nucleus of an orchestra, known as the Orchestral Society of Amateurs, which flourished at a somewhat later period, and served to make Schubert acquainted with the works of Krommer, Romberg, Cherubini, Spontini, C?tel, Mehul, Bo?eldieu, Weigl, Winter, and others of that category, as well as with some Haydn and Mozart, and the first two symphonies of Beethoven. There was also an orchestra in the government school for the Emperor's choir, known as the "Convict" , which the boy, thanks to his clear soprano voice, attended from his eleventh to his sixteenth year; and of this he was not only a member, but for some time a conductor. One can readily imagine that with all this music-making there was little time for general schooling. Indeed, from the moment he left the Convict, in 1813, he seems to have given little thought to any but a technical education; and though he attended a normal school for a while, and later even tried teaching under his father for three years, his main interests were his lessons with the famous opera composer, Salieri, and his first essays in composition.

The natural result, in worldly matters, of this imaginative preoccupation was abject poverty. Never did Apollo turn his back on Admetus with a more sublime indifference than in the avatar of this otherwise modest musician. It is true that he gave some scattering music lessons, and that for a time he acted as music-master in that same Esterhazy family which so long patronized Haydn; but of any lasting patronage, any remunerative appointment, or any systematic teaching, we hear nothing. Even his compositions brought him but a farcical revenue. He published nothing until 1821, when the first batch of songs, including "The Erl-King," was printed by subscription. Later, the publishers being still unwilling to take risks on a virtually unknown composer, twenty more songs were similarly issued. Only when popular favor had become manifest could he use the regular channels of publication; and then he had to content himself with the merest pittances. Diabelli, who in forty years is said to have gained over ten thousand dollars on "The Wanderer," paid Schubert for the plates and copyright of that and nineteen other songs only three hundred and fifty dollars. Haslinger, in the composer's last year, when his reputation was made and his work practically done, paid him one dollar and a quarter for half a dozen of his finest songs. That he was himself largely to blame for this pecuniary misfortune, through his aversion to drudgery and his carelessness in the conduct of business affairs, hardly reconciles us to the fact of his constant and often extreme poverty, but for which he might have lived longer and wrought to even better purpose.

The noteworthy fact toward which all these bits of otherwise insignificant personal detail point, the thesis in support of which they are here cited, is that Schubert was an unusually pure case of the sentimental temperament. All the external evidence--his contentedly ambling, unbuttoned existence, his combination of sweetness and a sort of involuntary nobility of aim, with an utter lack of intellectual distinction, his gullibility in business matters and practical affairs, his devotion to day-dream and revery, even his indolence and resulting sponginess of physique--points in the one direction. And these matters of ordinary observation are reinforced by the internal evidence of his music, as for example the preference for short pieces, each vividly expressive of a single mood; the pervasive tone of tender sadness, frequently irradiated by charming fancy, but seldom swept aside by tumultuous passion and energy; the fondness for minor keys, delicious modulations, and persistent hypnotizing rhythms; the incapacity for complex structure and sustained imagination. Here, obviously, is no hero of abstract thought, like Bach, or of intellectual and emotional passion, like Beethoven, but a gracious sentimentalist, a man of feeling, a sort of Burns or Heine of music.

The natural medium of musical expression for such a temperament is the brief lyric, the song for single voice with piano accompaniment; and it was inevitable that Schubert, constituted as he was, should become "the father of the song." Before his time, this had been a form not favored by the great composers; Mozart's and Beethoven's songs, as Mr. Hadow has remarked, were merely the chips thrown off in a great workshop; for them the norm of expression was the symphony. But Schubert, as a new sort of man among composers, treated the song with a new kind of earnestness, and with an unprecedented spontaneity. Each of his best songs is an unsophisticated utterance of simple sentiment, a wondrously vivid presentment of a single isolated feeling, a "moment's monument," as Rossetti said the sonnet should be. And this was precisely what the artistic situation required. As in a short story of the kind that Kipling, Stevenson, and others have made familiar to us we do not demand that evolution of character, that complex nodation of plot, that subtle action and reaction of motive, which every great novel must have, but simply vividness, brilliant depiction of a single person, idea, or situation, so in a song we desire no symphonic grandeur of scope and wealth of ordered detail, but rather perfect utterance of a single highly specialized emotion.

In critical justice it is necessary to add, however, that in another group of his songs, even more popular than this supreme one, Schubert's romanticism inspired him less happily. Whenever, giving free rein to his passion for detailed expression, he directed his effort less towards reproducing an emotional mood than towards illustrating actual incidents, whenever, that is, he allowed dramatic rather than musical considerations to sway him, he produced a type of song which, in spite of its popularity, is intrinsically inferior, and hence likely to lose favor as musical taste develops. The most famous examples of this type are "The Erl-King" and "The Wanderer"; others scarcely less known are "Der Atlas," "Die Doppelg?nger," "Die Junge Nonne," "Die Allmacht," "Kolma's Klage," and "Hagar's Klage." To hear the music of some of the songs of this class, unhappily large, after reading the commentaries of their admirers, is almost as cruel a disillusion as to eat the food at a cheap restaurant after a perusal of the pretentious and highly decorated bill of fare. Of "Die Allmacht," for example, Mr. A. B. Bach, in his book on "The Art Ballad," writes as follows:--

"This composition I would call a great tone-picture; it is a hymn of praise, stately and full of splendor. We seem to hear some prophet, who, with a voice of thunder, speaks to the people of the power and glory of the Almighty. The greatness of God in nature is first proclaimed. The tone-painting is full of grandeur and majesty. Not with the delicate, charming pencil of Fra Angelico, but with the strong, energetic, and powerful brush of Michael Angelo, does Schubert paint the raging of the storm, the forest's boisterous violence, the thunder and the lightning. The painting is softer, milder, sweeter, only when he comes to the beautiful and calming words that the power of God is high above all, and greater when man feels it in his inmost heart.... Then follows a great crescendo, ending with the powerful and mighty exclamation, 'Great is Jehovah, the Lord!' which produces an overpowering effect. In this composition, as scarcely in any other, Schubert, usually so charming, is very dramatic, and shows command of the loftiest expression."

Turning, with expectation keyed high, from this rhapsody to the music of "Die Allmacht," what do we find? An annoyingly loud thumping of the piano, in its muddy lower register, for four pages on end, with no rhythmic relief; a vocal part more like a second-rate operatic recitative than one of those divine tunes of which Schubert had the secret; and to fill the cup of boredom, three rumbles of conventional musical "thunder," as threadbare and outworn as the antiquated theatrical properties described by Steele in the "Tatler." It is hard to understand how any true lover of music can turn from "Hark, hark! the Lark," or "Who is Sylvia?" or "Du bist die Ruh," to such songs as these, with their physically exciting tremolos, crashing diminished-seventh chords, chromatic climaxes, mysterious staccato octaves, pianissimo, in the bass, and other such claptrap effects, better suited to accompany the drowning of the heroine of melodrama than to edify the sense of musical beauty. They reveal pitilessly the seamy side of romanticism, and make us wish that Schubert's fecund imagination had been controlled by a more fastidious taste.

If the sentimentalist's tendency to value emotion for itself, as the voluptuary wallows in sensation, and the realist's fondness for crudely detailed effect, sometimes led Schubert into an artificial and fevered style, his very simplicity at other times played him false. Simplicity in art, as the case of Wordsworth has notoriously proved, covers a wide range, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Schubert is often sublimely simple, as in "Du bist die Ruh," "Heidenr?slein," "Der Leiermann"; but sometimes he is merely flat and obvious. Indeed, writing, as he did, over six hundred songs in a score of years, not the most inspired of men could always have avoided platitude. Thus we must set aside many melodramatic and many trite compositions before we can get an unimpeded view of his real masterpieces. But after that has been done, we have left about twenty or thirty songs of such incomparable loveliness as to give him a secure place among the great masters of the musical lyric.

The careful discrimination between quantity and quality in Schubert's work, so obviously important in judging his songs, becomes perhaps even more indispensable when we come to his instrumental works. The facts that here present themselves to the intending student on his first approach to the subject are entirely misleading. Schubert wrote, he learns, ten symphonies and twenty string quartets, besides much other chamber and orchestral music. Remembering that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and sixteen string quartets, he is likely to assume that the essential Schubert is to be found permeating the one set of works just as the essential Beethoven permeates the other, and that if he can take, so to speak, a critical average of them all, he will come at the true musical personality of their author. Nothing could be more erroneous. For it must be borne in mind that while the works of Beethoven were written during the entire period of his artistic maturity, from his twenty-fifth to his fifty-sixth year, and with the most laborious care, those of Schubert are largely youthful exercises, and were in many cases thrown off as one would write a letter. Schubert wrote voluminously and carelessly, and died at thirty-one, just as he was entering the prime of life. His works are thus, if one may say so, like his person, embedded in superfluous flesh. The bulk of them are, so far as representing him goes, pure surplusage, to be stripped off and thrown aside before we can see the outline and stature of his genius. The compositions produced before 1820 are interesting to-day only as documents bearing on the peculiar way in which his individual style was gradually developed.

What they chiefly reveal is the ingenuousness, one might almost say the unconsciousness, with which he habitually composed. He seems to have made no effort to draw forth, by taking thought, his shy and retiring individuality; his method was rather to copy, often almost literally, the music he knew and liked, especially that of Haydn and Mozart. The quartet in G-minor, written in 1815, for example, contains a perfectly Mozartish minuet, while its finale is pure Haydn, except for occasional gleams of Schubert in the happy exuberances of detail and in the quick, informal modulations. Of the symphony in B-flat, written in 1816, the first and fourth movements are Haydn, the second and third Mozart. The closeness of the imitation is at times fairly disconcerting, as in the last eight measures of the minuet, which sound like a rejected sketch for the minuet of the "Jupiter Symphony":--

An even more amusing case is that of a passage in the E-major Quartet , written in the following year , so startlingly like a portion of Mozart's G-minor Symphony that we can hardly resist the theory of unconscious plagiarism. The passages in question merit a careful comparison. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, Schubert was paying an eloquent tribute, indeed, to the genius of Haydn and Mozart in his works of 1815-1817.

SCHUBERT.

And later

MOZART.

The long poising, pianissimo, on a single harmony, and the final almost imperceptible lapse into the original key, are Beethoven to the letter. The other movements show the same influence. Especially noteworthy are the substitution of a scherzo for the old-fashioned minuet, and, in the finale, the many sudden shifts of tonality by a semitone, and sudden alternations of extreme loud and soft. Here, as much as in the earlier things, it is true, Schubert remains the obedient and passive student; he is still, in the phrase of Stevenson, "playing the sedulous ape"; but his model is much more complex, his touch is surer, his technical facility greater, and he needs only to grow a little older, a little more mature and self-conscious, in order to stamp all these gradually acquired materials with his own individuality.

Now maturity comes to most men, the romanticists like the others, as a result of the suffering, misunderstanding, and disappointment that years have a way of bringing. The youth interprets all the world by his own freshness of enthusiasm, keen sensation, untrammelled imagination. Everything seems possible to him, and life is one long, romantic adventure. But when he actually comes in contact with that world which looked so fair from a distance, through the rosy glasses of temperament, he discovers that it is stubborn to his purposes, that it is full of alien wills with which he struggles in vain, and that this struggle reveals insurmountable weaknesses and limitations in himself. Then either bitterness, or a new understanding of himself, resignation to the inevitable, and interpretation of life in more universal terms, is bound to displace the old romantic egotism. Experience regroups itself in soberer colors, and if he be generous enough to escape cynicism he emerges from the ordeal chastened and humanized.

This transition from self-absorbed youth to magnanimous manhood came to Schubert between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years, hastened by the adverse conditions of his life. We have seen how poverty held him in its sullen grasp; ill-health was added in 1824; and all through his last decade the sense of the indifference of the public to his higher artistic aims must have been dispiriting in the extreme. His songs were favorably enough received, but little interest was taken in his chamber and orchestral music except by a small circle of friends. That he could nevertheless go on, year after year, producing so splendid a series of compositions, in a spirit of such uncompromising devotion to art, almost entirely unsupported by public recognition, buoyed up by inward conviction alone, proves that underneath the careless Bohemianism of his everyday existence there was developing in him the stuff of real heroism. Like Columbus, he

"found a world, and had no chart Save one that faith deciphered in the skies. To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art."

The story of the last year of his short life is most pathetic. In March, 1828, he made an attempt to mend his fortunes by giving a concert of his own works, by which he earned one hundred and fifty dollars, to him a large sum. But no temporary help like this could count for much, so long as his compositions, the main business of his life, were so shamefully underrated by the publishers. For six of the best of the "Winterreise" songs he received a little over one dollar; for the E-flat Trio , about four dollars and a half; for the great A-major Pianoforte Quintet , a little over six dollars. His health being now seriously impaired, he wished to spend the summer in the country with friends, but was compelled by poverty to remain in the heat and confusion of Vienna. A momentary encouragement offered in a projected performance of his greatest work, the C-major Symphony, but it was given up as too difficult, and he never heard it. It was first performed eleven years after his death, by Mendelssohn, in Leipsic. In the fall he rapidly failed, and had just arranged to take lessons in counterpoint, with a view to yet greater works, when, after a comparatively short illness, he died, on November 19, 1828. He left no will, but from the official inventory of his effects we learn that he left behind him twenty-six dollars' worth of clothing and house furniture, and "a quantity of old music" , valued at five dollars.

Such were the dingy outer circumstances of this man's life. But his spirit soared above them. "My compositions," he wrote in his diary, "are the product of my mind, and spring from my sorrow; those only that were born of grief give the greatest delight to the outside world;" and in another place, more profoundly: "Certainly that happy joyous time is gone when every object seemed encircled with a halo of youthful glory; ... and yet I am now much more than formerly in the way of finding peace and happiness in myself." But the best evidence we have that Schubert learned the lesson of sorrow, and not only transmuted bitter experience into immortal beauty but under the stress of that experience first found his true self, lies in the wonderful series of compositions which he wrote between 1820 and 1828. Here we find at last the essential Schubert. In the single movement in C-minor for string quartet, dated 1820, he discloses a new world of dramatic expression, earnest feeling, daring modulation, intricate harmony, and chromatic melody. And from this time on masterpiece followed masterpiece: the "Unfinished Symphony" in 1822; the A-minor Quartet and the Octet in 1824; the G-major and D-minor Quartets in 1826; the first two piano trios a year later; and to cap the climax, the C-major Quintet and the immortal C-major Symphony in 1828.

In spite of the emotional depth of these last works, the dominant note remains in them, as in everything that emanated from Schubert, romantic. Everywhere in them the interest of the romanticist in color for its own sake, in the primary sensuous charm of the tone combinations, is strikingly manifest. One of the hallmarks of Schubert's symphonies is his impressionistic treatment of orchestral tints, both pure and in mixture. None knows better than he how to make the oboe sultry or menacing, the clarinet mellow and liquid, the horn hollow, vague, mystical, the 'cellos passionate, and the violins clear, aspiring, and ethereal. The score of his C-major Symphony is a marvel of ingenuity and felicity in the weaving of various colors and modes of playing, as staccato and legato, pizzicato, etc. Look, for instance, at page 162 of Eulenberg's miniature score, and see how the wood-wind instruments chatter in staccato against the long rise and fall of the strings playing in octaves, legato; or at page 139, noting how, after a powerful climax and a moment of complete silence, the 'cello, against plucked chords by the other strings, sings a languorous melody, which is presently taken up by the oboe; or at pages 30-35, where, under the shimmering veil of the strings, the trombones gradually work out their sinister call, rising ever higher and higher, and finally precipitating all into the sounding turmoil of the climax on page 36. In such passages as these every tone sounds, and all unite harmoniously to produce the intended effect. In few scores will one find at once such richness and such clear transparency of coloring.

Nor is Schubert dependent for variety of color, as unimaginative composers are, on the richly diversified palette of the full orchestra. His chamber music shows how much he can accomplish with limited means. In his two trios, op. 99 and 100, by making the most of the percussion quality of the piano as well as of both the pizzicato and the sustained tones of the strings, he evolves a surprising variety from the three instruments. Even with the string quartet, the most monochromatic of chamber combinations, he achieves great differentiation and contrast, largely by rhythmically individualizing each voice. The opening of the A-minor Quartet is a good example: viola and 'cello give a drone bass in a peculiar and striking rhythm ; the second violin holds the tone-mass together by means of a graceful legato running figure in eighth-notes; the first violin sings a melody that follows its own free and untrammelled rhythm. One is reminded by such a passage of Dvo??k, who is of close artistic kin to Schubert. Both men, in their writing for strings, secure fascinating texture by opposing many diverse rhythms simultaneously. The device has been assailed as being a mask to cover a poverty of real polyphony ; but though it may to a certain extent be that, there can be no doubt of its sensuous effectiveness.

Romantic also is the persistent lyricism of all Schubert's music, the symphonies and quartets as well as the songs and piano pieces. In the larger almost as much as in the smaller works, the fundamental trait of the peculiar type of expression used is its subjectivity, its strong personal flavor. If the songs of the classicists seem often like condensed symphonies, the symphonies of this romanticist are in many respects magnified songs. In several of his instrumental movements Schubert actually transcribes his themes from songs already written, as for example in the variations of the D-minor Quartet, founded on "Death and the Maiden," and those of the "Forellen Quintet," founded on "Die Forelle." When he uses entirely new material, he is apt to conceive it in the lyrical style, and even to cast it in the lyrical form, with an exact balance of phrases of equal length. The second subject in the "Unfinished Symphony," for instance, is like a stanza or strophe; the imagination easily adds words to it; it is an instrumental song. Most of Schubert's more emotional themes share this quality of utterances, and seem rather communications of personal feeling than objects of abstract beauty. Even in the later works, like the D-minor and G-major Quartets and the C-major Quintet, in which the romance is tinged with tragedy, it is still, one feels, romantic tragedy, the tragedy of sentiment and sensibility, and not universal cosmic tragedy like Beethoven's or Bach's.

Yet there is in these later works, also, an intensity and breathlessness of utterance, a white heat of passion burning away all dross and surplusage, and giving the style an incisiveness strongly contrasted with Schubert's usual genial prolixity, which seem to emanate from some sterner, wilder element in his nature. There is a nervous tenseness here which is distinctively modern; the D-minor Quartet particularly has the modern closeness of texture and rapidity of pulse. Its first theme, unlike most of Schubert's, is a short and trenchant motive of five notes, compelling attention from the very outset. The entire first movement is treated with great depth of feeling and sustained power, and the coda is of a wonderful dignity and reticence. The final presto, too, reminds us of Schumann in its emotional richness, and of Tscha?kowsky in the passion of its broken rhythms and headlong harmonic progressions. On the other hand, the harmonic idiom of the first movement of the quartet in G-major , with its lapses of triads down through intervals of a whole step, is that of C?sar Franck. Schubert is here the prototype of the most advanced modern symphonists, as in his piano pieces he anticipates the methods of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, and in his songs gives the cue to Franz, Rubinstein, Grieg, and Brahms.

The chief faults of Schubert's instrumental works--and they are grave ones--result in part from his way of composing, and in part from the untraversable opposition between the lyrical expression native to him and the modes of construction suitable to extended movements. Schubert was an easy-going, careless, and indolent writer. He wrote music as most people write letters; often he would scribble off half a dozen songs in a single day; he thought nothing of making an overture in three hours, or a whole operetta in a week; to a friend who asked him how he composed, he replied, "As soon as I finish one thing I begin another." What all this means, practically, is that he did not "compose" at all in the strict sense of placing together tones with care and forethought, but merely improvised on paper. And as a result, while he certainly attained a delightful spontaneity of effect, he also fell into the pitfalls of monotony and diffuseness. He is constantly becoming hypnotized by a rhythm, keeping it up relentlessly, page on page, without relief. When he has once hit upon a phrase that appeals to him, such, for example, as the second subject in the G-major Quartet, he is apt to adhere to it pretty closely through a whole section of the piece. Such insistence, in contrast to the variety of phraseology of composers like Mozart, is comparable in effect to the singsong couplets of Pope or Dryden, as contrasted with the pliant versification of Shelley. This weaker aspect of Schubert, connected with his lack of intellectual vigor and possibly with a certain flabbiness of moral fibre, has been exhaustively discussed by Mr. H. H. Statham, an English critic, who reaches the conclusion that "in music, as in literature, easy writing is hard reading," and that in Schubert's larger pieces "lovely melodies follow each other, but nothing comes of them." Whether or not we agree with so extreme a view, we cannot deny Schubert's weakness in musical construction.

We usually find in his music five pages of repetition to one of real development. Mr. Statham is right in contrasting the "vain repetitions" in the andante of the C-major Symphony with the logical evolution of matter in the allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. And even where, as in the fine coda of the finale of the C-major Symphony, Schubert has a truly broad design to work out, he fills in his detail in the easiest, least exacting way by repeating identical phrases at a higher and higher pitch. The effect of the long, gradual climax is intensely dramatic, but when upon familiarity we realize that the ideas generate, so to speak, by fission, or exact reduplication, rather than by organic evolution, we are left aesthetically unsatisfied. The truth seems to be that Schubert, being essentially a lyrical writer, makes beautiful symphonies and quartets in spite of, rather than by means of, the natural conditions of these epic musical forms. His symphonies are expanded songs, delightful, as songs are delightful, for their directness of feeling, their beauty of detail, their warmth of color and sensuous charm.

His last work, however, the great C-major Symphony, has enough of the heroic about it to make us cautious in saying what he might or might not have done had he not died at thirty-one, when he was just entering the period of artistic maturity. There is a grandeur of scale and intention, a deliberation and solidity, a sustained power, large touch, and freedom of execution about this symphony that place it above all his other works. The long climaxes bespeak a reserve power not associated with Schubert the song-writer; the themes wear their possibilities less upon the surface, and unfold them more cumulatively; the harmony is firmer, plainer, and stronger; the scoring is done as it were with a larger brush, the colors laid on in wider spaces and freer patterns; and in the last movement the romantic note is for once well drowned in a deeper cry of tragic heroism. It is not a mere coincidence that the theme at the beginning of the development section so strongly suggests Beethoven's "Hymn of Joy"; the spirit here is Beethoven's, and the spaciousness of the scheme of construction, if not the detail with which it is filled in, are worthy of the greatest symphonist. Here surely the graciousness of childhood and the romantic dalliance of youth are laid aside, and Schubert speaks with the deep, deliberate voice of manhood. Death never came to an artist more untimely. Had he lived, we cannot tell what new and even profounder expressions of the ripe earnestness that lies beyond romance he might not have planned and achieved.

Certainly there was little enough in the legal profession to attract a youth such as these early letters reveal, ardent, imaginative, romantically intolerant of the humdrum and the prosaic. From the first we see him, in this clear mirror of his own words, marked for a life of artistic expression and free creation. He has all the artist's susceptibility to impressions, both sensuous and intellectual, as we gather from his rhapsodies over the landscapes, peasant maidens, and wines of the Rhine Valley, and from his interest in the individualities of his travelling companions. He is a creature of moods, plunged in a day from heights of joy into abysses of melancholy. He is impetuous, generous, and volatile in his boyish friendships and love affairs; an affectionate but inconsiderate son, an ardent but desultory worker, a voluminous but irregular correspondent, irresponsible in money matters, impatient of social usages, inconstant in almost everything but his devotion to beauty. The idol of his boyish hero worship is Jean Paul Richter, that curiously German compound of sentimentality, mysticism, and wayward humor; he wishes that all mankind might read Richter and become "better and more unhappy;" and he often favors his mother with Jean-Paulish apothegms, reflections, and fantasies, in which platitude and sincerity are mixed as only enthusiastic boyhood can mix them. Byron, Heine, and the other romantic poets of the day he reads, too, with avidity, and imitates them in erotic ballads and plays about picturesque robbers. And all along, music is the language of his deepest moods, and he spends hours communing with his piano in rhapsodic improvisation, and devotes his leisure to composing musical character-sketches of his friends.

The philosophic calm thus gained by habits of regular work was soon to be sorely taxed; for in that very year all Schumann's hopes of ever becoming a piano virtuoso were shattered by an accident to his right hand. With characteristic impatience he had devised a mechanism for hastening the independence of the refractory fourth finger by holding it up with a string while the others practised. Of course the result of this violence was a permanent lameness. Under this affliction, however, was hidden an incidental benefit; for piano playing became now no longer one of the many things that he did badly, as he had complained, and he had at last all his attention to concentrate upon composition. He had written his opus 1, "Variations on the name of Abegg," in 1830; he now followed this up with an endless stream of charming piano pieces, the like of which had never before been seen. In 1830-31 came the "Papillons," opus 2, and the "Allegro," opus 8; in 1832 the "Studies after Paganini" , the "Intermezzi," and the fascinating "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck"; 1833 added to the list two more primarily technical works, the "Concert ?tudes on Caprices of Paganini" and the splendid "Toccata," opus 7; and in the next six years, up to 1839, came a long series of unique and lovely things, among which stand forth in especial prominence those romantic whimsicalities, the "Davidsb?ndlert?nze," the "Carnaval," and "Kriesleriana," the somewhat less successful, because more ambitious, Sonatas, opuses 11, 14, and 22, and the more mature "Symphonic ?tudes," "Kinderscenen," "Phantasie," and "Novelettes."

These piano works, conceived with most daring originality and executed with inimitable verve, deserve to take rank with Schubert's songs, Mendelssohn's overtures, and Chopin's nocturnes and preludes, among the very few supreme and perfect attainments of the romantic spirit in music. Their exuberant vitality, their prodigal wealth of melodic invention, their rhythmic vigor and harmonic luxuriance, their absolutely novel pianistic effects, their curious undercurrent of fanciful imagery and extra-musical allusion, the peculiarly personal, even perverse, idiom in which they are couched, all conspire to make them unique even among their author's works, and in some respects more happily representative of him than the later productions in which he was more influenced by conventional or borrowed ideals. In them we have the wild-flavored first fruits of his genius, fresh with all the aroma and bloom of unsophisticated youth.

A curious feature of most of these early pieces, due to the literary cultivation and to the fanciful bias of their composer's mind, is their constant reference to all sorts of extra-musical interests. Schumann, at this time almost as much a man of letters as of tones, took pleasure in equipping his pieces with an ingenious and amusing series of allusions to places and people, real and fictitious, a kind of running commentary of footnotes on the music, comprehensible only to the initiated. This is managed partly by means of spelling out words in the letters which stand for musical tones, partly by directions printed above the music, like stage directions in a play, and partly by mottoes, both musical and literary, and quotations of original and other melodies. The "Variations," opus 1, are founded on a theme which spells A-B-E-G-G--a pseudonym given by Schumann to a lady whose beauty he had admired.

Most of the pieces in the "Carnaval" are founded on four tones spelling A-S-C-H, in honor of a friend who lived in the town of that name, the rhythms being so ingeniously varied that each theme sounds new in spite of its set tonal basis.

"PIERROT."

"ARLEQUIN." "VALSE NOBLE."

"FLORESTAN." "COQUETTE."

"PAPILLONS."

In later life Schumann wrote six organ fugues on the name B-A-C-H; in the album of Gade, the Danish composer, he wrote a theme spelling "G-A-D-E, A-D-E" ; and the "Northern Song," in his "Piano Pieces for the Young," is founded on the same letters, in honor of the same musician.

Mottoes and quotations meet us at every turn. Printed above one of the melodies in the "Intermezzi" are the words "Meine Ruh' ist hin"--"My peace is gone." The "Davidsb?ndlert?nze" bear at their head a stanza of verses, and commence with a musical motto by Clara Wieck. In the final march of the "Carnaval," a melody of the seventeenth century, "The Grandfather's Dance," is used to symbolize the futile resistance of pedantic conservatism to the progress of art. The "Phantasie," opus 17, was to have been called "Obolos," the purpose of its composition being to contribute to a fund for a monument of Beethoven, and the separate movements were to have received the highly fanciful titles, "Ruins," "Triumphal Arch," and "The Starry Crown"; but Schumann finally contented himself with a motto from Schlegel:--

In the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien" he manages the musical quotation with felicitous humor. It seems that the playing of the "Marseillaise" was at that time forbidden by the German authorities, on account of the strongly revolutionary tendencies of public feeling. This police taboo did not prevent Schumann from letting a single strain of the splendid tune flash out from his mosaic of melodies, to the unbounded delight of his audience and the discomfiture of the helpless officials.

All these elaborate paraphernalia with which Schumann equipped his first essays in composition are noteworthy not so much for any intrinsic significance as for the light they throw on his peculiar attitude toward an art which most of his predecessors had approached in a wholly objective and detached spirit. The persistent and minute subjectivity they reveal is remarkable in so young a man, working by instinct and in despite of the powerful influence of tradition. Most men approach music through a systematic technical discipline, and achieve individuality of style only with maturity; Schumann, reversing the process, turns to music at first simply as to one of several available ways of expressing a lively imagination, and gains technical skill but gradually and by arduous effort. His eloquence is that of a man filled with matter and enthusiasm, but untrained in oratory; he stammers, hesitates, coins words, improvises phraseology as he goes, and in the end attains fluency by dint of sheer earnestness and conviction. The inner impulse to expression creates its own medium, instead of being itself formed by the medium available; and while a language thus derived offhand has necessarily certain crudities, it has also, of course, a delightful freshness and happy spontaneity.

The inexhaustible tunefulness of the early Schumann is little short of marvellous. Few composers have been so prodigal of lovely melodies. They are like the king's daughters in the fairy tales, each more beautiful than the last; and though there is doubtless a family resemblance, each has a distinct physiognomy, a pronounced individuality. They are, for the most part, indeed, brief, striking motives rather than deliberately composed tunes, perfect but minute crystals of most various shapes, forming spontaneously in the highly saturated solution of the musical thought. No effort is made to purify, separate, or collect them; what their composer seems chiefly to value is their profusion and luxuriance. To state the same thing in more technical terms, there is next to no thematic development; there is simply the presentation of one charming phrase after another. The result is of course a certain fragmentariness and whimsicality; the music impresses us not by its cumulative power, its orderly advance, but by the sheer charm of its primitive elements.

The vigor of the rhythms never flags. Short notes in "dotted rhythms," holds from unaccented to accented beats, and all manner of devices for intensifying accentuation, give an inimitable elasticity to such things as the first of the "Intermezzi," the sixth, seventh, ninth, and final sections of the "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck," the ninth of the "Davidsb?ndlert?nze," "Pr?ambule," "Coquette," "Chiarina," "Valse Allemande," and the final march in the "Carnaval," "Aufschwung" in the "Phantasiest?cke," and many others. There is to be observed also a constant tendency to emphasize the metre by slight but systematic deviations from it, such as syncopation and the shifting of motives into artificial relations to the measure, and the simultaneous use of two or more metrical schemes at once. Interesting examples of this sort of intensive syncopation occur in "Grillen," one of the "Phantasiest?cke," in the B-flat major section of the eighth "Novelette," and in the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien." A delightfully quaint use of shifted motives is made in the finale of the Sonata, opus 11. The theme of the movement, though written in triple measure, consists entirely of two-beat motives, so that there is a constantly felt, and very exciting, opposition between metrical and rhetorical accents.

The motive of the scherzo of the same work is treated in a somewhat similar way. Of all the many instances which might be mentioned of a simultaneous use of two metrical schemes, one of the most consummate is the employment, in "Des Abends," of three groups of two sixteenth-notes in the melody, against two groups of three sixteenths in the accompaniment--a subtlety often missed by pianists, but essential to the charm of the piece. The first two numbers of the "Davidsb?ndlert?nze" also present attractive oppositions of metre.

The same waywardness finds further expression in certain harmonic eccentricities. Schumann loves to surprise, waylay, disappoint, and otherwise cajole his hearer. Strong unprepared dissonances, entrances of chords before we expect them, delays of the expected ones, entire evasions of the seemingly inevitable, and felicitous transitions into the seemingly impossible are a constant feature of his program. He loves to hit upon a note as if by accident, and then to justify and even emphasize it, as in the eighth and succeeding measures of the theme of the "Papillons"; to wound our ears with the harshest intervals, and then compel our acquiescence by a resulting felicity, as in the introduction to the F-sharp minor Sonata; to toss us restlessly upon a chromatic sea and bring us out at last into diatonic tranquillity, as in the first two pages of the "Toccata." At the beginning of the "Kreisleriana" he keeps the right hand half a pace ahead of the left, thus producing a great richness of tone as well as emphasizing the vigorous progression of the bass. In the first variation in opus 5 just the reverse of this occurs; the bass takes the lead, while the chords in the right hand lag behind, making temporary discords, but always coming out right in the end.

Many of these peculiarities of harmony are doubtless due simply to Schumann's sensuous susceptibility to good ear-filling sound, long intensified and developed by his habit of improvisation. Sir Hubert Parry remarks that "he loved to use all the pedal that was possible, and had but little objection to nearing all the notes of the scale sounding at once. He is said to have liked dreaming to himself, by rambling through all sorts of harmonies with the pedal down; and the glamour of crossing rhythms and the sound of clashing and antagonistic notes was most thoroughly adapted to his nature." There is, indeed, evidence of this taste for rich tonal effects on almost every page of his piano music. Like Chopin he finds a Mozartian clarity of sound a little tame, and prefers to obscure the outlines of his consonant chords by means of plentifully sprinkled dissonances; but while Chopin, more fastidiously delicate, makes his dissonances float like a diaphanous veil over the pure chords, Schumann, with true Teutonic luxuriousness, fills up all the chinks and crannies with suspensions and passing notes, and holds down the pedal to boot. His piano style is much more massive than Chopin's. He has the true Johnsonian taste for sonorousness and resonance. His ear is insatiably curious, too; witness the final chord in the "Papillons," with its tones released successively until but one remains sounding, the extraordinary clangor of low thirds and final emergence of ghostly pianissimo chord at the end of "Paganini" in the "Carnaval," and the many bizarre sonorities he obtains by making the left hand play above the right, as in the second of the "Abegg Variations" and in the section marked "Langsamer" in number two of the "Kreisleriana."

However this may be, it is certain that at about his thirtieth year Schumann's artistic ideal began to undergo a gradual but radical transformation. We see him in the compositions of this time paying less and less attention to those purely personal whims and fancies that had at first dominated his imagination, and beginning to work very earnestly toward objective beauty and impersonal expression. The fictitious characters, the mottoes, the stage directions, the whole elaborate machinery of allusion to extra-musical interests, are forgotten, and the interest of the music itself becomes all in all. There had been already, among the works of his "storm and stress period," single compositions in which the dramatic interest was wholly subordinated to the musical, as, for example, the great "Toccata," opus 7, the "Allegro," opus 8, and the "Novelettes," opus 21; but now what had been only occasional in the days when fancy and a self-involved emotional life absorbed him grew to be normal and constant, and he became for the first time a liberal and devoted artist. Of the causes underlying this important change, the most fundamental was doubtless simply increasing maturity. Youth is naturally and innocently egotistical; the young man of sensibility loses himself in day dreams and whimsical fancies, which have no basis in experience, and no reference to anything beyond themselves; age brings a sense of the values of real life, sobers and domesticates the passions, and enlarges the interests until they spread from the self to all humanity. In an artistic nature this general change of attitude involves a change of artistic ideal; poignancy, intensity of expression, become less valued than justice and proportion; the merely self-expressive comes to seem trivial, and whimsicalities are discarded as interfering with the serenity of a universal beauty. Schumann's change of attitude was simply an unusually striking case of what happens to every perceptive mind when experience has been sufficiently assimilated.

But all these difficulties and disappointments, all these occasions for patience, tact, industry, loyalty, and self-control, painful as they were to experience, were slowly transforming the capricious and dreamy youth into a man of mature will and seasoned resourcefulness. "No man is any use," says Stevenson, "until he has dared everything." Some such conviction must have been in Schumann's mind when at last, early in 1840, he resolved to avail himself of the law of Saxony that when parents withhold their consent to a marriage without good reason, the consent of the courts may be substituted. For such a man, so public a step in so sacredly private a matter must have been doubly difficult; to decide upon it must have involved a long mental turmoil. But he did finally take his case to the courts, and eventually married Clara Wieck, with the sanction of the law, in September, 1840. With this manly and courageous action his youth may be said to have ended, and the responsibilities, anxieties, labors, and sober joys of his manhood to have commenced.

It thus happens that the last purely lyrical expression of his essentially lyrical genius is to be found in the fine series of songs which he poured forth in 1840. In the early months of this, his "song-year," he was in a most sensitive and exalted state. The prospect of attaining the goal so long vainly striven for had fired his imagination to fever heat; and according to his habit he relieved this excitement by incessant composition. "Since yesterday morning," he writes in February, "I have written about twenty-seven pages of music , and I can tell you nothing more about it, except that I laughed and cried over it with delight. Ah, Clara, what bliss it is writing for the voice, and I have had to do without it for so long!" This "something new" was the cycle of "Myrthen" songs, opus 25, among which are "Widmung," "Der Nussbaum," "Die Lotosblume," "Du Bist wie eine Blume," and others almost equally earnest, tender, and passionate. With his first published songs he sends the message: "Here is a slight reward for your last two letters. While I was composing these songs I was quite lost in thoughts of you. If I were not engaged to such a girl, I could not write such music." "I have been composing so much," he writes in May, "that it really seems quite uncanny at times. I cannot help it, and should like to sing myself to death, like a nightingale. There are twelve songs of Eichendorff's , but I have nearly forgotten them, and begun something else."

After his marriage he turned to the larger forms of composition, which he took up in a curiously methodical rotation. First came, in 1841, three symphonies, the B-flat major, opus 38, the so-called "Overture, Scherzo, and Finale," and the D-minor, published many years later as opus 120. The piano concerto was also begun. In 1842 his interest was shifted to chamber music, and the three quartets for strings, the piano quartet, and the piano quintet appeared in rapid succession. Not until 1843 did he essay, in "Paradise and the Peri," a large choral work, but thereafter several such works appeared from time to time. Thus we see that while his more romantic compositions were for the most part produced in the years of youth and courtship, he turned, when once he had begun to face life as it is, in all its tragedy and difficulty as well as its human beauty and sweetness, to the severer, grander forms of music. In spite of the happiness he found in one of the most perfect of marriages, we must remember that this union also involved new responsibilities, anxieties, and distractions. It brought with it novel social and professional duties, children to be protected, guided, and helped, and above all the grinding routine by which the daily bread of an artist has to be earned. How severe the conditions were we have only recently learned from the complete biography of Clara Schumann. In her diary we read of the constant struggles of these sensitive people to get the mere necessaries of life; of the husband's steadily increasing ill-health, physical and mental, ending in insanity and early death; of enforced migrations to Dresden and D?sseldorf in search of more lucrative posts for him as an orchestral conductor, and of the defeat of even these efforts by the incompetence of disease; and of the wife's loyal resumption of concert playing, in order to fill the family purse. All this experience of the sordid actualities with which the world always tests its idealists was well calculated to make even Schumann take a sober, and at times a tragic, view of life; and though he is always noble and devoted, there is often in his chance remarks, as years go on, a note of weariness, melancholy, or philosophic resignation. It is not that he surrenders his ideals--only that he finds them more difficult of realization than he had supposed in the flush of youth, and under the buffets of fate retires somewhat into himself, and chastens his enthusiasm into a stoical faith and a more patient loyalty. This change of temper inevitably makes itself felt in such characteristic music as the solemn introduction and the aspiring adagio of the C-major Symphony, the mystical "Cathedral Scene" of the "Rhenish Symphony," the sombre and restless "Manfred Overture," the noble "Funeral March" in the Piano Quintet, and the infinitely tender Andante grazioso of the Piano Concerto. The same sincere, simple nature as ever is felt behind these things, but the stream of its emotion is now more profound and quiet, as a river, when it reaches the plains, no longer sparkles and bubbles, but flows tranquil and deep.

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