THE ROMANTIC
COMPOSERS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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ROBERT SCHUMANN
From a water color made in Vienna in his youth

The ROMANTIC
COMPOSERS

BY

DANIEL GREGORY MASON

AUTHOR OF "FROM GRIEG TO BRAHMS,"
"BEETHOVEN AND HIS FORERUNNERS," ETC.

"Consciously or unconsciously a new school is being
founded on the basis of the Beethoven-Schubert romanticism,
a school which we may venture to expect will mark
a special epoch in the history of art."

SCHUMANN

NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1940

COPYRIGHT, 1906,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

COPYRIGHT, 1934,

BY DANIEL G. MASON.

All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1906.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

This book completes the series of studies of composers and of their music, from Palestrina to the present day, which was begun with "From Grieg to Brahms" (1902), and continued in "Beethoven and his Forerunners" (1904). It will be noted that these three volumes should be read in an order different from that of their publication. First should come "Beethoven and his Forerunners," in which are made a general survey of the periods of musical history and the principles of musical style, and special studies of Palestrina, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; then "The Romantic Composers," in which the story is taken up at the death of Beethoven and carried through the period of romanticism, with essays on Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Berlioz, and Liszt; and finally "From Grieg to Brahms," comprising studies of the chief modern musicians, including Grieg, Dvořák, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Tschaïkowsky, and Brahms, and two more general papers on "The Appreciation of Music" and "The Meaning of Music." Thus read, the three books should serve as a commentary on the more important individual composers, æsthetic principles, and historical schools in modern instrumental music.

From the first I have had in mind the intention of illuminating the musical peculiarities of each composer by constant reference to his personal character and temperament. For this reason, while I have dealt as briefly as possible with colorless biographical facts, I have made free use of characteristic anecdotes, of contemporary descriptions of appearance, manners, etc., and of letters and table-talk where they are available. Music is indeed a unique artistic medium, and no man can express anything in it except through a technical mastery which has little to do with his character. Yet, given the medium, what he does express is bound to be permeated with his peculiar personality; and as the general reader can get a much clearer idea of a human being like himself than he can of so subtle a technique as that of music, it has seemed better to lay stress on that side, even though it is not the only or perhaps even the most important one. With the object of keeping awake, nevertheless, the reader's sense of those technical methods and traditions which so largely determine the nature of all music, I have included in each book some pages dealing with impersonal principles and historical schools.

Believing that one has no right to intrude, in such studies as these, one's own prejudices, but should transcend as far as possible one's temperamental limitations, I had hoped to be able to maintain throughout the attitude of the chronicler, and to exclude all special pleading. In the essays on Berlioz and Liszt I have perhaps not achieved this detachment of attitude. Realism is a tendency which seems to me quite mistaken and mischievous in music, and I have attacked it with some warmth. But in view of the great favor that realism enjoys in contemporary composition, the shoals of writers that rally every day to its defence, and the potency of its appeal to the average listener, whose dramatic sense and pictorial imagination are always livelier than his purely musical perception, I do not greatly fear that I shall dangerously disturb any reader's critical equilibrium.

These studies are intended simply as guides to the music they discuss. If they lead the reader to the concert-hall, to the piano, to the library of scores; if they help him to hear themes and their development where before he heard only masses of agreeable sound; if they incite him to repeat and analyze his musical experiences, to listen with his mind as well as his ears, to study a symphony as alertly as he would study a painting or an essay,—then only will they have justified their existence.

WASHINGTON, CONNECTICUT,
October 17, 1906.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I
INTRODUCTION
ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC

I
INTRODUCTION
ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC

I

Historians of music are accustomed to speak of the first half or three-quarters of the nineteenth century as the Romantic Period in music, and of those composers who immediately follow Beethoven, including Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and some others, as the Romantic Composers. The word "romantic," as thus used, forms no doubt a convenient label; but if we attempt to explain its meaning, we find ourselves involved in several difficulties. Were there then no romanticists before Schubert? Have no composers written romantically since 1870? Such questions, arising at once, lead us inevitably to the more general inquiry, What is romanticism?

In the broadest sense in which the word "romanticism" can be used, the sense in which it is taken, for example, by Pater in the Postscript of his "Appreciations," it seems to mean simply interest in novel and strange elements of artistic effect. "It is the addition of strangeness to beauty," says Pater, "that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper." Romanticism is thus the innovating spirit, as opposed to the conserving spirit of classicism; romanticists appear in every age and school; and Stendhal is right in saying that "all good art was romantic in its day." It is interesting, in passing, to note the relation of this definition to the widely prevalent notion that romanticism is extravagant and lawless. To the mind wedded to tradition all novelty is extravagant; and since an artistic form is grasped only after considerable practice, all new forms necessarily appear formless at first. Hence, if we begin by saying that romantic art is novel and strange art, it requires only a little inertia or intolerance in our point of view to make us add that it is grotesque and irrational art, or in fact not art at all. Critics have often been known to arrive at this conclusion.

Suggestive as Pater's definition is, however, it is obviously too vague and sweeping to carry us far in our quest. It does not explain why Monteverde, with his revolutionary dominant seventh chords, or the Florentine composers of the early seventeenth century, with their unheard-of free recitative, were not quite as genuine romanticists as Schubert with his whimsical modulation and Schumann with his harsh dissonances. We have still to ask why, instead of appending our label of "romantic" to the innovators of centuries earlier than the nineteenth, we confine it to that comparatively small group of men who immediately followed Beethoven.

The answer is to be found in the distinctness of the break that occurred in musical development at this time, the striking difference in type between the compositions of Beethoven and those of his successors. From Philipp Emanuel Bach up to Beethoven, the romanticism of each individual composer merely carried him a step forward on a well-established path; it prompted him to refine here, to pare away there, to expand this feature, to suppress that, in a scheme of art constantly maturing, but retaining always its essential character. With Beethoven, however, this particular scheme of art, of which the type is the sonata, with its high measure of formal beauty and its generalized expression, reached a degree of perfection beyond which it could not for the moment go. The romantic impulse toward novelty of Beethoven's successors had to satisfy itself, therefore, in some other way than by heightening abstract æsthetic beauty or general expressiveness; until new technical resources could be developed the limit was reached in those directions. Beethoven had himself, meanwhile, opened the door on an inviting vista of possibilities in a new field—that of highly specialized, idiosyncratic, subjective expression. He had shown how music, with Mozart so serene, detached, and impersonal, could become a language of personal feeling, of individual passion, even of whim, fantasy, and humor. It was inevitable that those who came after him should seek their novelty, should satisfy their curiosity, along this new path of subjectivism and specialized expression. And as this music of the person, as we may call it, which now began to be written, was different not only in degree but in kind from the objective art which prepared the way for it, it is natural that in looking back upon so striking a new departure we should give it a special name, such as romanticism.

As for the other line of demarcation, which separates the romantic period from what we call the modern, that is purely arbitrary. "Modern" is a convenient name for us to give to those tendencies from which we have not yet got far enough away to view them in large masses and to describe them disinterestedly. As the blur of too close a vision extends back for us to 1870 or thereabout, we find it wise to let our romantic period, about which we can theorize and form hypotheses, end there for the present. But it already seems clear enough that the prevalent tendency even in contemporary music is still the personal and subjective one that distinguished the early romantic period. Probably our grandchildren will extend that period from Beethoven's later works to those of some composer yet unborn. And thus we have, in studying the romantic composers, the added interest that we are in a very real sense studying ourselves.

II

If, with a view to getting a more precise notion of the new tendencies, we ask ourselves now what are the salient differences between a classical and a romantic or modern piece of music, we shall be likely to notice at once certain traits of the latter, striking enough, which are nevertheless incidental rather than essential to romanticism, and must be discounted before we can come at its inmost nature. These changes have come chiefly as a result of the general evolution of musical resources, and though necessarily modifying the romantic methods, are not primary causes or effects of them. Thus, for example, the nineteenth century has seen an extraordinary development in the mechanism of all musical instruments, and in the skilful use of them by musicians. This is impressed upon us by the most cursory glance at any modern orchestral score. Haydn's and Mozart's orchestra consisted of a nucleus of strings, with a few pairs of wood and brass wind instruments added casually for solos or to reinforce certain voices in the harmonic tissue. The scheme was fundamentally monochromatic, however much it might be set off by bits of color here and there. By the time of Wagner the orchestra was essentially a group of several orchestras of divers colors: the addition of a third flute, of English horn to the oboe family, of bass clarinet, and of contrafagotto made each group of the wood-wind instruments capable of fairly complete harmony; the horns were increased in number from two to six or eight, the bass trumpet made possible complete chords for the trumpets, and there were four trombones and a choir of tubas. Thus, instead of having a uniform foundation, with variety merely in the trimming, the modern orchestra has complete, independent choirs of most various instruments, capable of all sorts of combination, opposition, and contrast.

The manner of writing for the orchestra changed as much as its constitution. Beethoven usually writes three- or four-part harmony for the strings, and doubles the wood and brass as seems effective. Tschaïkowsky and Wagner are apt to put an entire family of instruments on one melodic voice, another on another, a third on a third—as in the second movement of the "Symphonie Pathétique," at the point where flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons sing the melody, while first and second violins and violas pick an obligato to it. In a word, much more attention is paid in the modern orchestra to richness and variety of tone-color and to an impressionistically effective disposition of the various timbres than in the classical scores.

The same tendency is observable in chamber and pianoforte music. Not only are modern composers fond of curious groupings of wind and string instruments, as in the trumpet septet of Saint-Saëns, the clarinet quintet and horn trio of Brahms, and other such works, but when they use only the four stringed instruments they combine contrasting rhythms and modes of phrasing, as well as pizzicato, the sordino, the high register of the 'cello, and other exotic devices, with an unfailing sense of color-values. Schubert is the first conspicuous example of this sort of quartet writing; Dvořák is his worthy follower. As for the piano, there is almost as much difference between the piano writing of Beethoven, so often thick, harsh, and lumpish, and the ramifying figuration of Schumann or the wide, clear arpeggiated accompaniments and flowering scale-figures of Chopin as there is between the coloring of Rembrandt and that of Monet.

All this gain in sensuous richness and technical elaboration is, however, to be considered largely as a concomitant rather than a direct result (though to some extent is was that) of the romantic movement. It was primarily merely a phase of that unparalleled material and mechanical progress so characteristic of the nineteenth century. The modern orchestra and the modern pianoforte are simply special examples of the ingenuity of that century in mechanical devices; the genius which turned the clavichord into the piano was the same as that which substituted the propeller for sails, and the electric telegraph for the lumbering mail-coach. But if this modern mechanical genius has indeed brought to the musician priceless gifts, it is still important to remember that perfected mechanisms do not account for romantic music, which might conceivably have existed without them. Instruments alone cannot make music, any more than a steam derrick can build a bridge. If we wish to seize the true spirit of the modern musical art, we must, after all, leave orchestra, and piano, and sensuous value behind, and ascertain to what use composers have turned all these resources, and to what manner of expression, embodied in what kind of forms, they have been spurred by the romantic spirit.

III

Difficult to make, and dangerous when made, as are sweeping generalizations about so many-sided a matter as the expressive character of whole schools or eras of art, there seem to be generic differences between classical and romantic expression which we can hardly avoid remarking, and of which it is worth while to attempt a tentative definition, especially if we premise that it is to be suggestive rather than absolute. The constant generality of classical expression, and the objectivity of attitude which it indicates in the worker, cannot but strike the modern student, especially if he contrasts them with the exactly opposite features of contemporary art. The classical masters aim, not at particularity and minuteness of expression, but at the congruous setting forth of certain broad types of feeling. They are jealous of proportion, vigilant to maintain the balance of the whole work, rigorous in the exclusion of any single feature that might through undue prominence distort or mar its outlines. Their attitude toward their work is detached, impersonal, disinterested—a purely craftsmanlike attitude, at the furthest pole from the passionate subjectivity of our modern "tone-poets." J. S. Bach, for example, the sovereign spirit of this school, is always concerned primarily with the plastic problem of weaving his wonderful tonal patterns; we feel that what these patterns turn out to express, even though it be of great, and indeed often of supreme, poignancy, is in his mind quite a secondary matter. The preludes and fugues of the "Well-tempered Clavichord" are monuments of abstract beauty, rather than messages, pleas, or illustrations. And even when their emotional burden is so weighty as in the B-flat minor prelude or the B-minor fugue of the first book, it still remains general and, as it were, communal. Bach is not relieving his private mind; he is acting as a public spokesman, as a trustee of the emotion of a race or nation. This gives his utterance a scope, a dignity, a nobility, that cannot be accounted for by his merely personal character.

Haydn and Mozart illustrate the same attitude in a different department of music. Their symphonies and quartets are almost as impersonal as his preludes and fugues. The substance of all Haydn's best work is the folk-music of the Croatians, a branch of the Slavic race; its gaiety, elasticity, and ingenuousness are Slavic rather than merely Haydnish. It is true that he idealizes the music of his people, as a gifted individual will always idealize any popular art he touches; but he remains true to his source, and accurately representative of it, just as the finest tree contains only those elements which it can draw from the soil in which it grows. Mozart, more personal than Haydn, shares with him the aloofness, the reticence, of classicism. What could be more Greek, more celestially remote, than the G-minor Symphony, or the quintet in the same key? What could be less a detailed biography of a hero, more an ideal sublimation of his essential character, than the "Jupiter Symphony"? And even in such a deeply emotional conception as the introduction to the C-major quartet, can we label any specific emotion? Can we point to the measures and say, "Here is grief; here is disappointment; here is unrequited love"?

In Beethoven we become conscious of a gradually changing ideal of expression. There are still themes, movements, entire works, in which the dominant impulse is the architectonic zeal of classicism; and there is the evidence of the sketchbooks that this passionate individualist could subject himself to endless discipline in the quest of pure plastic beauty. But there are other things, such as the third, fifth, and ninth symphonies, the "Egmont" and "Coriolanus" overtures, the slow movement of the G-major concerto (that profoundly pathetic dialogue between destiny and the human heart), and the later quartets, in which a novel particularity and subjectivity of utterance make themselves felt. In such works the self-forgetful artist, having his vicarious life only in the serene beauty of his creations, disappears, and Ludwig van Beethoven, bursting with a thousand emotions that must out, steps into his place and commands our attention, nobly egotistic, magnificently individual. And then there is the "Pastoral Symphony," in which he turns landscape painter, and with minutest details of bird-notes and shepherds' songs and peasants' dances delineates the external objects, as well as celebrates the inner spirit, of the countryside. These things mark the birth of romanticism.

For romanticism is, in essence, just this modern subjectivity and individualism, just this shifting of the emphasis from abstract beauty, with its undifferentiated expressiveness, to personal communication, minute interest in the uttermost detail, impassioned insistence on each emotion for itself rather than as a subordinate member in an articulate organism, and, in extreme cases, to concrete objects, persons, and scenes in the extra-musical world. Musicians since Beethoven have inclined to exploit more and more that aspect of their art which is analogous to language, even when this means neglect of the other aspect, the nearest analogue of which is to be found in sculpture, architecture, and decorative painting. The modern watchword has come to be initiative rather than obedience, originality rather than skill, individuality rather than truth to universal human nature. It is, after all, one impulse, the impulse toward specialization, that runs through all the various manifestations of the romantic spirit, and may be traced alike in the lyricism of Schubert, the fanciful whimsicality of Schumann, the picturesqueness of Mendelssohn, the introspection of Chopin, and the realism of Berlioz and Liszt.

In Schubert, the first of the out-and-out romanticists, and the eldest of them all in point of time (his birth date falls in the eighteenth century), we find a curious grafting of a new spirit on an old stem. Brought up on the quartets and symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, making his first studies in boyishly literal imitation of them, he acquired the letter of the classical idiom as none of the others save Mendelssohn ever did. His works in sonata form, written up to 1816, might well have emanated from Esterhaz or Salzburg; the C-major Symphony, so far as general plan is concerned, would have done no discredit to Beethoven. Yet the spirit of Schubert is always lyrical. It was fated from his birth that he should write songs, for his was a typically sentimental temperament; and when he planned a symphony, he instinctively conceived it as a series of songs for instruments, somewhat more developed than those intended for a voice, but hardly different in kind. As a naturalist can reconstruct in fancy an extinct animal from a fossil jaw-bone, a musical historian might piece out a fair conception of what romanticism is, in the dearth of other evidence, from a study of "Erlkönig," or "Ständchen," or "Am Meer"; and the ideas he might thus form would be extended rather than altered by acquaintance with the "Unfinished Symphony" or the D-minor Quartet. The lyrical Schubert contrasts always with the heroic and impersonal Bach or Beethoven, much as Tennyson contrasts with Shakespeare, or Theocritus with Sophocles.

Schumann adds to the lyrical ardor of Schubert insatiable youthful enthusiasm, whimsicality, a richly poetic fancy, and a touch of mysticism. His songs are even more personal than Schubert's, and his piano pieces, especially the early ones, bristle with eccentricities. The particularity, minute detail, and personal connotation of the "Abegg Variations," the "Davidsbündertänze," the "Papillons," the "Carnaval," the "Kreisleriana," are almost grotesque. He confides to us, through this music, his friendships, his flirtations, his courtship, his critical sympathies, his artistic creed, his literary devotions. Never was music so circumstantial, so autobiographic. In later years, when he had passed out of the enchanted circle of youthful egotism, and was striving for a more universal speech, his point of view became not essentially less personal but only less wayward. Till the last his art is vividly self-conscious—that is his charm and his limitation. No one has so touchingly voiced the aspirations of the imprisoned soul, no one has put meditation and introspection into tones, as he has done in the adagio of the C-major Symphony, the "Funeral March" of the Quintet, the F-sharp major Romance for piano.

If Schumann sounds, as no other can, the whole gamut of feeling of a sensitive modern soul, Mendelssohn, quite dissimilar in temperament,—correct, reserved, dispassionate,—is nevertheless also romantic by virtue of his picturesqueness, his keen sense for the pageantry of life, his delicate skill as an illustrator of nature and of imaginative literature. His "Songs without Words" reveal a strain of mild lyricism, but he is never intimate or reckless, he never wholly reveals himself. His discreet objectivity is far removed from the frankly subjective enthusiasms of Schubert and Schumann. He was, in fact, by tradition, training, and native taste, a classicist; the exhibition of deep feeling was distasteful to his fastidious reticence; and he is thus emotionally less characteristic of his period than any of his contemporaries. But for all that he shows unmistakably in the felicity of his tone-painting the modern interest in picturesque detail, in the concrete circumstance, the significant particular. Illustration rather than abstract beauty—that is one of the special interests of the new school. No one has cultivated it more happily than the composer of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" music, the "Hebrides Overture," and the "Scotch" and "Italian" Symphonies.

Chopin presents an even more singular instance than Schumann affords of what introspection can make of a composer, of how resolute self-communion can individualize his work until its intense personal savor keeps little to remind us of other music. All Chopin's tastes were so aristocratic that the exclusiveness of his style seems a matter of course, and was probably to his mind a supreme merit. And if it debarred him from some musical experiences, if it made his music sound better in a drawing-room than in a concert hall, it certainly gave it a marvellous delicacy, finesse, originality, and fragile beauty. It is, so to speak, valetudinarian music, and preserves its pure white complexion only by never venturing into the full sunlight. Here, then, is another differentiation in musical style, a fresh departure from the classic norm, due to the exacting taste of the mental aristocrat, the carefully self-bounded dreamer and sybarite.

Markedly specialized as the expression is, however, in Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, and strikingly contrasted as it is with the serene generality of the classical music, the two schools after all differ rather in the degree of emphasis they lay on the various elements of effect than in kind. Both, we feel, are using the same means, though to such different ends. But with Berlioz and Liszt we pass into a new world, in which not only emphasis and intention, but the actual materials and the fundamental principles of art, have undergone a change. These men have pushed the romantic concreteness even beyond the range of sentiments and emotions, to invade that of facts and events. They are no longer satisfied with the minutiæ of feelings; they must depict for us the external appearance of the people who feel, give us not only heroes, but these heroes' coats, with the exact number of buttons and the proper cut, according to the fashion of the particular decade. If Schumann and his fellows are the sentimental novelists of music, the Thackerays and the George Eliots, here are the naturalists, the scientific analysts, the "realists" with microscope and scalpel in hand, the Zolas and the Gorkys.

This insistence on the letter is quite instinctive with Berlioz. In the first place, he was a Frenchman; and the French have a genius for the concrete, and in music have shown their bias by approaching it always from the dramatic, histrionic point of view. Opera is the norm of music to the Frenchman. For him, music originates in the opera-house, quite as inevitably as for the German it originates in the concert room. Berlioz's "symphonies," therefore, as a matter of course, took the form of operas, with the characters and action suppressed or relegated to the imagination.

In the second place, the active impulses in Berlioz's personal temperament predominated over the contemplative to a degree unusual even in his countrymen; he conceived a work of art in terms not of emotion but of action; and his musical thinking was a sort of narration in tones. He accordingly wrote, with ingenuous spontaneity, in a style that was, from the German standpoint, revolutionary, unprecedented, iconoclastic—a style the essence of which was its matter-of-fact realism. His "Symphonie Fantastique," which Mr. Hadow calls his most uncompromising piece of program music, sets forth the adventures of a hero (whose identity with the composer is obvious) in five movements or acts, and with the most sedulous particularity. We first see him struggling with love, tormented by jealousy, consoled by religion; then in a ball-room, pausing in the midst of the dance to muse on his beloved; then in the country, listening to idyllic shepherds and hearing the summer thunder. He dreams that he has murdered the beloved, that he is to be beheaded at the guillotine; he is surrounded by witches, his mistress has herself become a witch, the Dies Iræ clangs its knell of death across the wild chaos of the dance....

Now in all this the striking point is the concreteness of the imagery, the plenitude of detail, the narrative and descriptive literalness of the treatment—and above all the subordination of the music to a merely symbolic function. Berlioz here brings into prominence for the first time the device, so frequent in later operatic and program music, of treating his themes or motives as symbols of his characters, associated with these by a purely arbitrary but nevertheless effective bond. When we hear the melody we are expected to think of the character, and all the changes rung on it are prompted not by the desire for musical development, but by psychological considerations connected with the dramatic action. Thus, for example, in this symphony the motive known as "l'idée fixe" represents the beloved; its fragmentary appearances in the second, third, and fourth movements tell us that the thought of her is passing through our hero's mind; and in the last movement, when she endues the horrid form of a witch, we hear a distorted, grotesque version of it sardonically whistled by the piccolo. Highly characteristic of Berlioz is this use of melodies, so dearly valued in classic music for themselves alone, as mere counters for telling off the incidents in the plot, or cues for the entrances of the dramatis personæ.

Liszt, a man of keener musical perception than Berlioz, placed himself also, in obedience to his strong dramatic sense, on the same artistic platform. In such a work as the "Faust Symphony" we discern a more musical nature producing practically the same kind of music. There is the same narrative and descriptive intention; the three movements take their names from the chief characters in the action, Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles; and though the second is more general in expression than Berlioz ever is, the other two are good examples of his method. There is also the same machinery of leading motives and their manipulation according to the requirements of symbolism, even to the parodying of the Faust themes in the "Mephistopheles" section. In the symphonic poem, "Les Préludes," however (and in the "Dante Symphony" and other compositions), Liszt shows his German blood in a treatment more imaginative, the actuating subjects being often not persons and events, but emotional and mental states. But the fact that many of the transformations of the themes are from the musical standpoint travesties, justified only by their psychological intention, shows that the attitude even here is still that of the dramatist, not that of the abstract musician. The art, in a word, is still representative, not presentative and self-sufficing. Again, the representative function of music for Liszt is shown by his tendency to approach composition indirectly, and through extraneous interests of his many-sided mind, instead of with the classic single-mindedness: his pieces are suggested by natural scenery, historical characters, philosophic abstractions, poems, novels, and even statues and pictures.

In all these ways and degrees we see exemplified the inclination of the nineteenth-century composers to seek a more and more definite, particular, and concrete type of expression. Subjective shades and nuances take the place of the ground-colors of classicism; music comes to have so personal a flavor that it is as impossible to confound a piece of Chopin with one of Schumann as it is difficult, by internal evidence alone, to say whether Mozart or Haydn is the author of an unfamiliar symphony; ultimately, insistence upon special emotions opens the way to absorption in what is even more special—individual characters, events, and situations,—and on the heels of the lyrical treads the realistic. The artistic stream thus reverses the habit of natural streams: as it gets farther and farther from its source it subdivides and subdivides itself again, until it is no longer a single large body, but a multitude of isolated brooks and rivulets. Our contemporary music, unlike the classical, is not the expression of a single social consciousness, but rather a heterogeneous aggregate of the utterances of many individuals. What is most captivating about it is the sensitive fidelity with which it reflects its composers' idiosyncrasies.

IV

All things human, however, have their price, and romanticism is no exception to the rule. The composers of the romantic period, in becoming more particular, grew in the same proportion less universal; in bowing to the inexorable evolutionary force that makes each modern man a specialist, they inevitably sacrificed something of the breadth, the catholicity, the magnanimity, of the old time. It is doubtless a sense of some such loss as this, dogging like a shadow all our gains, that takes us back periodically to a new appreciation of the classics. There is often a feeling of relief, of freer breathing and ampler leisure, as when we leave the confusion of the city for the large peace of the country, in turning from the modern complexities to the old simplicities, and forgetting that there is any music but Bach's. The reasons for this contrast between the two schools must of course lie deeply hidden in the psychology of æsthetics, but a clew to them at least may be found near at hand, in the conditions of life, the everyday environments, of the two groups of artists.

It has often been remarked that the composers of the nineteenth century have been men of more cultivation, of greater intellectual elasticity and resulting breadth of interest, than their predecessors. Palestrina, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, even Beethoven, concentrating their whole minds on music, were far less curious as to other human pursuits than their later brethren. The six composers we are studying are impressive instances of this modern many-sidedness of mind. At least three of them, Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, were skilled journalists and men of letters; Schumann with the finely judicial, fancifully conceived sketches of his New Journal of Music, Berlioz with his brilliant, fantastically humorous feuilletons, and Liszt with his propaganda, in book and pamphlet, of Wagner, Chopin, and other contemporaries. (Fancy Bach interrupting his steady stream of cantatas to write an exposition of the genius of Handel!) Schumann was, moreover, something of a poet, and Mendelssohn was one of the most voluminous and picturesque of letter-writers. Chopin was as versed in social as in musical graces and Liszt was—what was he not?—a courtier, a Lovelace, a man of the world, and an abbé. Schubert alone, of them all the eldest and the nearest to classical traditions, was a composer pure and simple.

The versatility of these men was no accident or freak of coincidence; it was the effective trait that made their work so profusely allusive, so vividly minute, in short, so romantic. And what is more to our purpose just here, it was the underlying cause of a defect which is quite as symptomatic of romanticism as its merits. So various a mental activity must needs lack something in depth; if attention is spread wide it must be spread thin; thought given to avocations must be borrowed from the vocation. We should expect to find, accordingly, division of energy resulting, here as elsewhere, in a lack of concentration, a failure of power; and herein we are not disappointed. With the possible exception of Mendelssohn, no one of our six composers can compare, simply as a handicraftsman, with Bach or Mozart. Schubert was so little a contrapuntist that he had just engaged lessons when death interrupted his brief career. Schumann and Chopin gave in their youth innumerable hours that should have counted for systematic to routine the fanciful improvisation so seductive to poetic temperaments. Berlioz kicked down all the fences in his coltish days, and ever after looked askance at the artistic harness. Liszt, for all his diabolical cleverness, remained the slave of mannerisms, and became a dupe of his own rhetorical style.

Now there is doubtless in all this waywardness something that strikes in us a chord such as vibrates in sympathy with the small boy who, regardless of barbed wire, invades the orchard and carries off the delectable green apples. It is a fine thing to be young, it is glorious to be free. But sober second thought relentlessly follows: we know that apples must be sent to market in due course, and that that exciting green fruit is, after all, indigestible and unripe; and we know equally that musicians must undergo their apprenticeship, and that all art executed without adequate technical mastery is crude. The crudity of the art of our musical orchard-robbers becomes at once evident when we compare a single melody, or an entire movement, of Schubert or his successors with one by Mozart or Beethoven.

The single melody is the molecule of music, the smallest element in it that cannot be subdivided without loss of character. Every great melody has an indefinable distinction, a sort of personal flavor or individuality, which we may discern but cannot analyze. It has also, however, an organic quality, depending upon both the unity and the variety of its phraseology, that we can to a certain extent study and define. Assuming, to start with, the subtle distinction without which it would sink into the commonplace, we can compare and contrast it with other melodies in respect of its organic quality, its simultaneous presentation of unity and variety—in a word, its plastic beauty. Such a melody as the second theme of the first movement of Mozart's G-minor Quintet, for example, gains a wonderful charm from the complexity, and at the same time the final simplicity, of its phrase structure. The several musical figures, or motives, of which it is composed follow each other without the least impression of crass mechanical dovetailing; yet one feels, as they proceed, such a sense of logical progression, of orderly sequence, that the final cadence seems like an audible "Q. E. D." Contrasted with such dexterous phrase-weaving as this, many of Schubert's and Schumann's tunes, with their literal repetitions of short phrases, their set thesis and antithesis, seem pitifully bald and trite. It is hardly fair to take extreme cases, but they best bring out the point. Schubert's "Drang in die Ferne," ten consecutive measures of which repeat literally the same rhythm, and the theme in Schumann's "Abegg Variations," in which a single phrase recurs sixteen times, will make it almost painfully evident. This tendency to rhythmic monotony, to an unvaried singsong reiteration of phrase, besets constantly these two composers, too often takes Chopin in its grasp, and in Mendelssohn is aggravated by an inclination to stay in one key, page after page, until our heads droop with drowsiness. Berlioz, on the other hand, errs in the opposite direction. Variety, with him, degenerates into a chaotic miscellaneousness, and what should be an agreeably diversified landscape becomes a pathless jungle. In both cases there is a failure of the constructive faculty, due to a lack of mental coördination and concentration. The price paid for interesting detail is monotony or instability in the organism.

Similar weaknesses reveal themselves when we pass from considering the elemental melodies to survey the ways in which they are built up into larger sections and whole movements—when we pass, that is, from form to structure.[1] None of the romantic composers attained a breadth, diversity, and solidity of construction in any wise comparable to Beethoven's. Schubert was intellectually too indolent, if not indifferent, to attempt intricate syntheses of his materials, but relied instead on their primitive charm to justify endless repetitions. Schumann, less tolerant of platitude, and gifted with more intense, if hardly more disciplined, imagination, resorted to constant kaleidoscopic change, resulting in those "mosaic forms" which are related to true cyclic forms much as a panorama is related to a picture. Mendelssohn was naturally a better master of construction, but the knots he ties are somewhat loose and inclined to ravel out. Chopin, a born miniaturist, obviously fails to make his sonatas and concertos anything but chance bundles of lyrical pieces. As for Berlioz and Liszt, they frankly faced their dilemma, and had the shrewdness to disclaim the desire to do that for which they wanted the faculty. They fell back on the "poetic forms," and let their works pile up without internal coherence, held together only by the thread of the story they were illustrating.

For this failure to work out the highest degree of plastic beauty possible to them, the romanticists frequently have to pay in a serious loss of power. Keenly interesting as are the details of their work, the whole impression is apt to lack fusion, clearness, integrity. Not without terrible risks may the musician neglect form, since form is itself, for him, perhaps more than for any of his brother artists in other mediums, a fundamental means of expression. Of this matter popular thought is inclined to take a superficial view; it is fond of confusing vital form with dry formalism, of speaking contemptuously of formal analysis as the pedantic dissection of lovely melodies, the plucking and counting of the petals of the flowers of art, and of reiterating ad nauseam its irritating half-truth, "Music is the language of the emotions." Popular thought would do well to pause and consider; to ask itself whether language too has not its form, without which it is unintelligible; to inquire how much of the expressive power of a lovely melody would remain were its pitch and time relations (that is, its form) materially altered, how long we could be inspired by the most exciting rhythms, were they ceaselessly reiterated without relief, and how eloquent we should find even the most moving symphony, were it written all in one key, or in several keys that had no relation to one another. Such consideration soon suggests the truth, which impresses us the more the more deeply we study music, that there is a general expressiveness underlying all particular expressions, a fundamental beauty by which all special beauties are nourished as flowers are nourished by the soil, a symmetry and orderly organization that can no more be dispensed with in music without crippling its eloquence than a normal regularity of the features can be dispensed with in the human face without distorting it into absurdity or debasing it into ugliness. Without its pervasive presence, all special features, however amusing or superficially appealing, fail to inspire or charm. They become as wild flowers plucked to languish indoors, as seaweeds taken from their natural setting of liquid coolness. Or again, the particular expressions of music may be compared to the strings of an instrument, of which the sounding board is plastic beauty; without its sympathetic reinforcement the strings, strike them as we may, give forth a scarcely audible murmur; with it, there is clear and powerful sonority. So the most ingenious music is dull and dead if it lack the vitality of organic form, but if it be beautiful it will make its way directly to the heart.

It is surely not necessary to add that this discussion of the primal importance of form is not intended to impeach all romantic music as deficient in the appeal that beauty alone can make. This were indeed a reductio ad absurdum. Much of the music of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin is of the rarest beauty, and, by the same token, of the most moving eloquence. The intention of our analysis is rather to secure that aid to the appreciation of just such beauties which discrimination alone can give, and by means of comparison to sharpen the focus of our mental image of what romanticism achieves and of what it fails to achieve. At its best, we shall rejoice to find, it shares the serene loveliness, the impersonal grandeur, of classicism. At its less than best, it offers us a vivid intellectual interest, a keen pleasure in following its wide ramifications and its faithful illustrations of many phases of life. At its worst only does its exaggerated passion for detail mislead it into petty and prosaic literalism.

V

A slightly different angle of approach to this whole problem of musical expression is afforded by psychological analysis. Here, again, as we might expect, modern theory, the learned as well as the popular, is somewhat biassed by the prominence in modern practice of certain special features of effect. The psychologists dwell with a pardonable partiality of vision on the means of special expression; to complete their theories the reader has often to add for himself a consideration of the psychology of form. An article by M. Edmond Goblot, entitled "La Musique Descriptive,"[2] is interesting, like others of its kind, both for what it explains and for what it ignores.

M. Goblot classifies expressive music under three headings, to which he gives the names of "la musique emotive," "la musique descriptive," and "la musique imitative." His first rubric is somewhat vague, a sort of rag-bag into which he stuffs "toute musique qui provoque l’emotion sans aucun intermediaire conscient." The other two are not only more precise, but serve to call attention to devices which have become very prominent in romantic, and especially in modern realistic, music. "Imitative" music, by reproducing literally sounds heard in the extra-musical world of nature, suggests to the listener the objects and events associated with them. Examples are the bird-notes in Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony," the thunder in Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," the bleating of sheep in Strauss's "Don Quixote," the striking of the clock and the wailing of the baby in his "Symphonia Domestica." "Descriptive" music suggests actions and events by means of analogies, chiefly of movement and of utterance, between the music and the object, and is of course far commoner than the more literal and narrowly circumscribed imitation. Beethoven is descriptive when he represents the even flowing of the brook, in the "Pastoral Symphony," by rippling figures in eighth notes, or when in the bass recitatives of the Ninth Symphony he suggests the impassioned utterance of an imaginary protagonist; Mendelssohn describes in his "Hebrides Overture" the heaving of the ocean, and in his "Midsummer Night's Dream" the dancing of fairies; Saint-Saëns reproduces in "Le Rouet d'Omphale" the very whirr of the spinning-wheel, and Wagner in his fire-music the ceaseless lapping of flames.

Such devices as these certainly occupy a prominent place in modern music. Almost every composer of the later nineteenth century has taken his fling at this sort of sketching from nature. One cannot resist, nevertheless, the suspicion that M. Goblot attaches too great an importance to what is, after all, a casual and desultory element in most compositions, and that he inclines to lay on the narrow shoulders of imitation and description a greater burden of explanation than they can carry. Beethoven's birds and brooks are attractive features in a great work; Saint-Saëns' spinning-wheel makes a charming arabesque on a harmony of solid musicianship; but what are we to say to M. Goblot's assertion that a passage cited from Alexandre George, modulating upward by whole steps, is emphatically expressive because it "reminds us of a person reiterating with growing exaltation the same authoritative or impassioned affirmation, and each time advancing a step, in an attitude of menace or defiance"? Can we accept as unquestioningly as he does a series of thirteen consecutive fifths, descriptive of sunrise, on the ground that it "wounds our ears as the light of the sun wounds our eyes"? And listen to his comment on Schubert's "Trout," that long-suffering denizen of Teutonic waters: "En courant sur son lit de pierres, elle se creuse de plis profonds, se hérisse de crêtes saillantes, et ces plis et ces crêtes se croisent obliquement en miroitant." Schubert's fat shoulders, we suspect, would have shaken could he have read this ingenious commentary on his work.

If such finical transcription of natural sights and sounds is the aim of music, why do we prefer Beethoven's thunder, which clings cravenly to the diatonic scale, to Berlioz's, so much more realistic in its daring dissonance? Why do we not forthwith turn about face on the road our art has so long been travelling, and forsake musical intervals, those quite artificial figments, for the noises which surround us everywhere in the actual world? Noise is indeed the hidden goal toward which all description and imitation aspire, and sound could never have passed into music under their guidance, but only in quest of a far deeper, more subtle expressiveness. It is hard to believe that any sane listener would long continue to patronize music in which there was not something more truly satisfying than the lapping of brooks, the crashing of storm or battle, and the whirring of spinning-wheels or the creaking of wind-mills. If such were the case, we should have to admit sadly that music had fallen to the level to which dramatic art falls in the real-tank-and-practicable-saw-mill melodrama, to which painting falls in those pictures from which we try to pluck the too tangible grape.

M. Goblot evidently realizes himself that there is a subtler appeal than that of description and imitation; for it is in order to account for it that he makes his separate heading of "la musique emotive," by which he indicates all music which acts directly upon the emotions, without the aid of any recognition of external objects, any intellectual concepts, or, as he says, "aucun intermediaire conscient." The appeal he here has in mind is that of thousands of melodies, which, without describing or imitating any concrete object, suggest vividly special states of feeling, by recalling to us, in veiled, modified, and idealized form, those gestures or cries we habitually make under the spur of such feelings. Since the spontaneous vocal expressions of strong emotion—wailing, crying, pleading, moaning, and the like—have all their characteristic cadences, which can be more or less accurately reproduced in a bit of melody, and since the natural bodily gesticulations can be similarly suggested by divers rhythmical movements, music has the power to induce a great variety of emotional states by what we may call direct contagion, without the intermediation of any mental images. It can act upon us like the infection of tears or laughter, to which we involuntarily succumb, without asking for any reasons. And it certainly exercises this power much more constantly and steadily than it imitates or describes. Almost all lyrical melodies, such as Schumann's "Ich Grolle Nicht," with its persistently rising inflection of earnest protestation, or Chopin's "Funeral March," with its monotone of heavy grief, will be found on analysis to reëcho, in an idealized and transfigured form, the natural utterance of passion. This kind of expression, which has been frequently described, appeals to our subconscious associations rather than to those conscious processes of thought by which we follow realistic delineation. Operating at a deeper level in our natures, it is proportionately more potent and irresistible.

But is even this type of expression, more general and pervasive though it be than the types so interestingly studied by M. Goblot—is even this style of expression universal, omnipresent, fundamental? Does it suffice to explain the overwhelming emotional appeal of an organ-fugue of Bach, for example, of which the impression seems to be vague, general, indefinable in specific terms, in the exact measure of its profundity? If "la musique emotive" works at a deeper level and upon a more subconscious element in our nature than "la musique imitative" and "la musique descriptive," is there not still another kind of music, which we may perhaps best call simply "la musique belle," which, addressing still deeper instincts, exercises an even more magical persuasiveness?

The case of the Bach fugue forces us to the conclusion that there is indeed a kind of expression depending neither on the portrayal of natural objects nor on the suggestion of such special feelings as joy and grief, but penetrating by a still deeper avenue to the primal springs of our emotion. The more compelling the experience, it seems, the more is it idealized away from concrete references and provocations in the direction of abstract musical beauty. By presenting to us a perfect piece of form, a highly complex yet ultimately single organism of tones, it calls into full play our most fundamental perceptions; and this satisfying exercise of our faculties gives us a pervasive happiness, a diffused sense of efficient vitality, ineffably more delightful than any particularized emotion or isolated intellectual process. Perfection of form thus turns out to be the most indispensable of all the means of expression at the command of the composer.

Psychological analysis, carried to its legitimate end, verifies, we see, the conclusions of the naïve musical observer. All expression, for psychology, is the product of an association between two "terms" in the mind—the first that which is given by experience, the expressive object, the second that system of thoughts and feelings at which the mind arrives through the associative act, that which, as we say, is expressed. This being the case, it is evident that, other things being equal, that expression will be most potent the first term of which most deeply stirs our instinctive, subconscious life. When the first term is a basic activity of our minds, such as the perception of a beautiful form, the feelings to which it leads us will have a peculiar depth and amplitude. Our whole organism, like the sounding-board of the well-attuned instrument, will be set in vibration. This is what happens when we listen sympathetically to music that is really beautiful. When, on the other hand, the mental trigger pulled is only some special emotion, so that the stimulation is superficial or local, the impression will reverberate less far-reachingly. We shall be less profoundly moved. And when it is not even an emotion, however special, that starts off the train of thought, but the intellectual concept of some object or event, we shall likely be not so much moved as interested; our curiosity rather than our passions will respond; and we shall call the music bizarre, original, or striking, but hardly beautiful. Something like the same gradation in the power of various appeals, according to their generality, is observable in ordinary life. To read a love-story, labyrinthine in minute detail, is a less seizing experience than to overhear the impassioned speech of some actual lover, even if we catch none of the words; and this in turn commoves us less than to feel in our own frames that boiling of the blood, that surging of the vitals, which is the raw material of love. Brisk exercise on a fine autumn day of sun and wind gives a richer happiness than is dreamed of in our philosophies. It communicates no particular ideas, but attunes our whole being so exquisitely that the fancies spring up spontaneously, like wild-flowers in a fertile meadow. So lovely music simply establishes in us a mood, leaving all the furniture of that mood to our imaginations. And this is why it is that artistic expression, as it becomes more minute and meticulously precise, is apt to lose in persuasive power, and that the composer, if he understands his medium, must needs hesitate long before sacrificing the least degree of beauty, however interstitial and inconspicuous, to any isolated feature of interest, no matter how salient or seductive.

VI

Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the foregoing analysis, incomplete and tentative as it is, affords us something like a rational basis for our instinctive attitudes toward the various types of music. Though its intention is to suggest rather than to dogmatize, it may by this time have fixed clearly in our minds certain fundamental principles of artistic effect; and by constant reference to these it may have established in us a measure of judicial impartiality and poise. Especially, it may have clarified our notions, likely to remain confused so long as they are unconscious, of the essential achievements of the romantic school, both in its lyrical and in its realistic phases, as well as of the peculiar drawbacks and limitations to which it is subject.

The abiding charm of the lyrical work of the romantic composers, typical of which are Schubert's songs, Schumann's novelettes and phantasiestücke, and Chopin's nocturnes and preludes, lies in its intimateness, its strong personal flavor. It fascinates us by its impulsive self-revelation, its frankness, spontaneity, and enthusiasm. Its subjectivity and introspection, even when they are troubled or touched with sadness, stir a sympathetic chord in the self-conscious modern breast. To those moods which the classic reticence chills and repels, romantic music speaks with tender, caressing humanity. Even its limitations are then an added appeal; for when we are too weary or dull to brace ourselves to the perception of impersonal beauty, the accent of private grief, aspiration, struggle, and disappointment seems better pitched to our capacity, and has a pathos we can understand. Schumann and Chopin are the best companions for hours of reverie and self-communion. On the other hand, when those hours overtake us in which we realize the pathetic incompleteness of all merely personal life, in which we discern what fragmentary creatures we are, and how little of truth we can ever see, then all living to ourselves alone is touched with the sense of vanity. Then every utterance of our petty private griefs, and even of our nobler but still private joys, seems like a breath dissipated in a universe; we find true existence, solid reality, only in an identification of our interests with those of all mankind. As morals finds its escape from this sense of the vanity of individual living in social devotion, æsthetics finds it in the impersonality of classic art. Romanticism is sometimes silent, or speaks to unattending ears. We turn from all special expressions, touched as they are with human mortality and evanescence, to the eternal abstract beauty.

If lyrical music is unsatisfactory to these moods of highest vitality and severest demand, realistic music is exasperating, intolerable. When we have nothing better to do it is amusing enough to note the ingenuity with which a composer can introduce the bray of an ass into his delicate tissue of tones, as Mendelssohn does in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or make three bird-notes sound a harmonic triad as Beethoven does in his "Pastoral Symphony." There is a fascinating technical problem involved in the suggestion of natural noises by musical tones, and when we are indifferent to such technical interests, we may still find diversion in following a series of tonal cues to the events of a familiar story. But when we crave the sublimity of music, when we long to feel once more the thrill of its transcendent beauty, how can we endure to be put off with the barking of a dog, the mewing of a cat, the galloping of a horse, or the crying of a baby? Most program music is incredibly trivial in intention, and gives an impression of maladaptation of means to ends, the former are so elaborate, the latter so paltry and mean. To elicit from a modern orchestra of a hundred instruments a feeble imitation of a battle seems, as some one has piquantly phrased it, "like using a steam-hammer to kill a fly."

We read with impatience the annals of this school. John Mundy, an English composer of the seventeenth century, writes a "Fantasia on the Weather," in four parts: "Faire Weather; Lightning; Thunder; a Faire Day." Adam Krieger, in 1667, composes a four-part vocal fugue "entirely imitative of cats," on a chromatic subject set to the words "Miau, miau." Dussek produces a series of pieces entitled "The Sufferings of the Queen of France," some of which are: "The Queen's Imprisonment" (largo); "She reflects on her Former Greatness" (maestoso); "Her Invocation to the Almighty just before her Death" (devotamente); "The Guillotine drops" (a glissando descending scale); "Apotheosis." We smile patronizingly over these first childish attempts of an art essentially childish. No longer satisfied with such innocent delineations of natural and political history, we must have autobiography, domesticity, and even metaphysics, translated into tones. But will posterity take a truly keener delight in our triumphs of realism than we do in the works of Mundy and Krieger? Already Mr. Arthur Symons, in his essay on Richard Strauss, cries in pardonable irritation: "If I cared more for literature than for music, I imagine that I might care greatly for Strauss. He offers me sound as literature. But I prefer to read my literature, and to hear nothing but music."

Were triviality the only sin of program music we might leave it, without further ado, to the gradual oblivion which overtakes the jejune in art. But, unfortunately, program music not merely bores the music-lover; it does him a positive injury, which criticism ought, so far as it can, to mitigate. By its false emphasis it distracts attention from what music can do supremely to what it can only botch and bungle, brings true masterpieces into discredit with hearers not sensitive or disciplined enough to appreciate them, and plunges the simple into a hopeless æsthetic quagmire. Pitiable is the frequency of such questions, on the lips of aspiring students, as, "Ought I, when I listen to music, to have in mind a series of pictures, or a story?" To judge by the minuteness of its detail the art which beyond all others is great by virtue of indefinite suggestion, and inspires by appealing to faculties far below the level of intellectual consciousness, is to be sadly duped. "We forget," writes Vernon Lee, "that music is neither a symbol which can convey an abstract thought, nor a brute cry which can express an instinctive feeling; we wish to barter the power of leaving in the mind an indelible image of beauty for the miserable privilege of awakening the momentary recollection of one of nature's sounds, or the yet more miserable one of sending a momentary tremor through the body; we would rather compare than enjoy, and rather weep than admire."

The upshot of all this is, that not even in enjoying the novel delights, the picturesque glimpses, and the fancy-provoking allusiveness which romanticism has introduced into music should we give ourselves too unreservedly to what may be, after all, but a partial and limited pleasure. If these things make us indifferent to deeper beauties they do us a disservice. If, however, we can keep, in spite of their seductions, our sense of proportion, our perception of relative values, we shall enjoy them in security. The romantic movement has undoubtedly led to a widening of our artistic sympathies, has enriched our music with new expressive possibilities and technical resources. It has been one of those periods of ebullience, corresponding perhaps in the consciousness of the race to the storm and stress of adolescence in the individual, which are bound to come so long as we are growing. We cannot fully maintain our poise at the very moment in which we are extending our field of experience; periods of conquest must alternate with periods of assimilation; and as in walking we constantly lose our balance in order to progress, so in mental life we willingly forego control until it can supervene on a broader consciousness.

The romantic composers, eagerly developing the expressive possibilities of music, may have forgotten sometimes in their enthusiasm the organic beauty without which music can never wholly satisfy, but nevertheless they have enriched their art. The available resources of music are to-day more various than ever before. Not only have its mechanical facilities been wonderfully perfected by the ingenuity of the nineteenth century, but its potentialities for vivid and detailed expression have been permanently raised by the subjective intentness of the modern temperament. It remains for future composers to make a new synthesis of all these novel elements, and without sacrificing their vividness to impose upon them the ultimate integrity of impression which at present they too often lack. A classical unity and beauty must supervene upon our romantic multiplicity and interesting confusion. Expression, without losing the minuteness that modern speculation has gained for it, must regain something of the classical serenity. We have had already one musician who, profiting by his heritage, has vied with Schumann in versatility and with Bach in intimacy, who has combined in his single mind something of the sensitive sympathy of the romanticists and the rugged power of the classicists. It may be that Brahms but points the way to a music of the future which will be as grand as it is vivid, as universal in scope as it is personal in accent and inspiration, and in which beauty of form and richness of expression will be reunited in perfect coöperation to one great artistic end.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Properly speaking, "form" refers to the molecular constitution of music, to the ways in which relations of pitch and rhythm are manipulated in melody and harmony; "structure" to the molar constitution of music, the subsequent grouping of the melodies into complete pieces. The difference between a sonata, a fugue, and a nocturne is a difference of structure; the difference between a good melody and a bad one is a difference of form.

[2] La Revue Philosophique, Vol. LII.

II
FRANZ SCHUBERT

FRANZ SCHUBERT
From an original water color by W. A. Rieder

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, Câtel, Mehul, Boïeldieu, 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" (from convivo, not convinco), 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.

For the instinct of imitation had started him composing at an age when most boys nowadays are learning arithmetic. At thirteen he broke the ice with a four-hand piano fantasia, and from that moment swam contentedly through a sea of manuscripts. His teeming fecundity and his carelessness for the children of his brain once they were hatched showed themselves from the first. When he mislaid thirty minuets written at the Convict, he would not trouble to recopy them; what he enjoyed was the activity, not its product; and it was dull to bottle old water while the spring was flowing so cool and fresh. The figure of a spring does scant justice to Schubert's inexhaustible fancy; it was more like one of those magic knapsacks in the fairy stories—the more he took out of it, the more remained behind. By 1815 his fertility had become almost uncanny, especially when we remember that he had for music only the leisure hours of a young schoolmaster of eighteen. In March he wrote the Mass in G; between March 25 and April 1 a string quartet in G-minor; in May a symphony (his third) in D-major; in June an entire operetta; during six days in July another operetta, of which the libretto fills forty-two closely printed pages; on October 15 seven songs; on the 19th four more; and in the interstices of time, another symphony, four other operettas, two piano sonatas, and one hundred and thirty-five songs, headed by "The Erl-King." One rubs one's eyes. Compared with Schubert's pen, Aladdin's lamp seems a poor affair.

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.

But if he was poor, he had at least the temperament and tastes suitable to poverty. Not even Mozart, whose character and destiny had much in common with Schubert's, was more light-hearted and easy-going. "Perfect freedom of action," says his biographer, "was the element in which he by preference moved, and for which he was content to make every sacrifice." To drink his mug of beer and eat his sausage, to flirt with pretty servant-maids and peasant girls, to discourse youthful philosophy and play practical jokes with convivial poets, painters, and students, above all to fill reams of music paper with the melodies that were always flooding his brain—this was his conception of sufficing happiness. It is curious to read of his daily routine—how, rising early, he would proceed, often before dressing, to improvise until breakfast; how, after a morning spent in composition, he would dine at the Gasthaus for a Zwanziger (ten cents); how he would divide the rest of the day between walking in the suburbs, calling on the ladies of his acquaintance, and discussing beer and friendship in Bogner's coffee-house, or the "Zur Ungarischen Krone," or the "Zum rothen Kreuz,"—sometimes, in these latter haunts, jotting down immortal melodies on the backs of wine cards in the midst of the tavern pandemonium. When he was in high spirits he would challenge a friend to a mock duel with walking-sticks, or sing the "Erl-King," in parody, through the teeth of a comb. And then there were the Schubertiaden, or Schubert evenings, held by his friends of both sexes in some one of the Vienna suburbs, at which the diversions consisted of dancing, lieder-singing, and theatricals, all to the accompaniment of the flowing bowl. "When the juice of the grape flowed in his veins," says one of his biographers, "he became a laughing tyrant, and would destroy everything he could, without making a noise,—glasses, plates, and cups,—and sit simpering and screwing up his eyes into the smallest possible compass." Altogether we get the picture of a Bohemian, irresponsible, bachelor life, innocent enough, but not troubled with embarrassing refinements. Schubert was not at his ease in highly cultivated circles. In his first letter from Zelész, the seat of the Esterhazys, he describes the servants in detail before giving a word to their princely employers. Physically Schubert was a short, stout man, with round shoulders, thick, blunt fingers, low forehead, projecting lips, stumpy nose, and short curly hair. Very near-sighted, he wore spectacles from boyhood. His friends' somewhat boorish wit compared him to a negro, a cabman, and even a tallow-candle, and afflicted him with the nickname of "Schwammerl," or "The Sponge"—whether in reference to his fondness for beer or to his superfluous flesh does not transpire.

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.

Schubert's best songs fulfil this requirement in an almost inimitable degree. Simple in style and design, wonderfully direct and sincere, conceived as idealizations of the beautiful old German Volkslieder, and carried out with all the artistic perfection and appropriateness of detail that good craftsmanship could give, they are among the few things in music that are absolutely achieved. Especially remarkable is the art-concealing art by which Schubert, through some perfectly simple and unobtrusive feature of rhythm, melody, or harmony, knows how to suggest exactly the spirit and atmosphere of his text. In the well-known "Serenade," for example, the deftly managed mixture of minor and major harmonies (a favorite device, by the way, with Schubert) strikes just the right emotional note of loverly solicitude and tenderness. In "Am Meer" four chords at the beginning, and again at the end, bring the sombre, majestic ocean visibly before us, while the sudden dissonances introduced with the line "Fielen die Thränen nieder" bring home to us with a terrible poignancy the human tragedy which the poet has so vividly outlined against this stern natural background. And then turn to "Hark! Hark! the Lark," perhaps the most purely lovely, in a musical sense, of all the songs, and note the adorable elasticity of the rhythm, the lambent grace of the tune, the idyllic change of key at the words, "And winking Mary-buds begin to ope their golden eyes," and the poising flight of the melody at the final, "Arise—arise—arise":—truly Elizabethan this music, in its graciousness and childlike joy. In short, Schubert strikes at once, and in each case, in such songs as "Hark, hark! the Lark," "Who is Sylvia?" "Am Meer," "Du bist die Ruh," "Die Forelle," "Heidenröslein," and perhaps a dozen others, the exact tone and style needed to transfigure the particular feeling with all the magic of music, and throughout the song maintains the mood perfectly, with no mixture or clouding. And this, too, with the greatest actual diversity of mood in the different songs, to which his art flexibly responds. This group of his fifteen or twenty best songs is not only the crown of his own work, but one of the brightest jewels in the crown of romanticism.

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 Doppelgänger," "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," "Heidenröslein," "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":—

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Figure I.

An even more amusing case is that of a passage in the E-major Quartet (opus 125, no. 2), written in the following year (1817), 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.

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SCHUBERT.

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And later

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MOZART.

Figure II.

Before 1818 there is little internal evidence that Schubert had felt at all the influence of the greatest musician of the period, Beethoven, with whom, if we may judge from his diary, he was not yet in complete sympathy. Under date of June, 1816, he compares disparagingly "that bizarrerie for which we have chiefly to thank one of the greatest German artists" with the "naturalness" and "purity" of the Italian, Salieri. In the C-major symphony of 1818, however, he has evidently fallen completely under the sway of the master. The first movement of this work shows a great advance over earlier symphonies; the orchestral resources are increased, and used with more skill; the themes are more concise and vigorous, more truly symphonic, though still showing a tendency to rhythmic monotony; the construction is ampler and more carefully planned, there being a slow introduction and a Beethovenish coda. The transition by which the repetition of the first section of the movement is approached shows afresh the curious literalness with which Schubert copied his models.

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Figure III.

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 (opus 100), about four dollars and a half; for the great A-major Pianoforte Quintet (opus 114), 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" (including the manuscript of the C-major Symphony), 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 (a dotted half-note followed by a group of four sixteenths); 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 Dvořák, 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 (inner melodiousness); but though it may to a certain extent be that, there can be no doubt of its sensuous effectiveness.

Another similarity between Schubert and Dvořák, also indicative of their romantic interest in special momentary features, is their coloristic use of harmony, and especially of modulation. Sudden transitions to remote keys are no commoner perhaps in Schubert than in Beethoven, but in Schubert they are prompted by considerations of color rather than of design. Like Dvořák, he loves unexpected recrystallizations of tone. He shakes the kaleidoscope of his fancy, and all the bits of glass fall into a new pattern (tonality). Such a fascinating change as that immediately after the forte chord of D, in the second entr'acte of "Rosamunde," is an illustration. Even better ones, because showing so clearly the lack of any element of formal design in these changes, are those casual alternations of major and minor mode which are so frequent as to constitute a mannerism. At the close of the first movement of the G-major Quartet is an extreme case. Four measures consist entirely of abrupt alternations of the major and minor tonic chords, with no melodic binding together. This is obviously purely a color effect, and its motive is of course unequivocally romantic.

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 Tschaïkowsky 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 (see Figure IV.), with its lapses of triads down through intervals of a whole step, is that of César 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.

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Figure IV.

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 æsthetically 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.

III
ROBERT SCHUMANN

ROBERT SCHUMANN
From a painting by E. Bendemann

III
ROBERT SCHUMANN

In the year 1830, in the old German university town of Heidelberg, Robert Schumann, then a youth of twenty, a reluctant student of law, and a devoted lover of music, was making the most momentous decision of his life. For us, to whom his music is a fait accompli, it is easy enough to see the way his genius pointed; for him it was a time of self-searching, of beckoning hopes and haunting fears, of long hesitation before the final courageous adventure into an unknown land. "My whole life," he writes his mother, "has been a twenty years' struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law. Now I am standing at the crossroads, and am scared at the question 'Which way to choose.'" "Let me draw a parallel," he continues. "Art says: 'If you are industrious, you may reach the goal in three years.' Jurisprudence says: 'In three years you may perhaps be an "Accessist," earning sixteen groschen a year.' Art continues: 'I am as free as air; the whole world is open to me.' Jurisprudence shrugs her shoulders, and says: 'I am nothing but red tape, from the clerk to the judge, and always go about spick-and-span, and hat in hand.' Art goes on to say: 'Beauty and I dwell together, and my whole world and all my creations are in the heart of man. I am infinite and untrammelled, and my works are immortal.' Jurisprudence says, with a frown: 'I can offer you nothing but bumpkins and lawsuits, or at the utmost a murder, but that is an unusual excitement. I cannot edit new Pandects.' My beloved mother, I can but faintly indicate the thoughts which are surging through my brain. I wish you were with me now, and could look into my heart. You would say: 'Start on your new career with courage, industry, and confidence, and you cannot fail.'"[3]

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.

By such a youth the choice between law and music could hardly be decided but in one way. He persuaded his mother and his guardian to allow him six months in Leipsic, under the teaching of Friedrich Wieck, to show what he could make of himself as a pianist. His letters during this period of the first steady labor he had known, when the reaction necessarily following the feverish weeks of decision plunged him into a dull and relaxed state, show the sterling side of his meteoric nature. They complete the picture of one of the most lovable of youths. "I just keep jogging on," he writes in May, 1831. "It is the fault of all vivid young minds that they aspire to too much at once; it only makes their work more complicated, and their spirit more restless.... If only I could do one thing well, instead of many things badly, as I have always done! Still, the principal thing for me to keep in mind is to lead a pure, steady, sober life. If I stick to that, my guardian angel will not desert me; he now sometimes almost possesses me for a little." A few months later he continues, more tranquilly: "If one has at last come to a conclusion, and is quiet and satisfied in one's own mind, the ideas of honor, glory, and immortality, of which one dreams, without doing anything toward their accomplishment, all resolve themselves into gentle rules, only to be learned from time, life, and experience. To bring to light anything great and calmly beautiful, one ought only to rob Time of one grain of sand at a time; the complete whole does not appear all at once, still less does it drop from the sky. It is only natural that there should be moments when we think we are going back, while in reality we are only hesitating in going on. If we let such moments pass, and then set to work again quickly and bravely, we shall get on all right."

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" (in which the technical interest of the virtuoso is still paramount), the "Intermezzi," and the fascinating "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck"; 1833 added to the list two more primarily technical works, the "Concert Études 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 "Davidsbündlertänze," the "Carnaval," and "Kriesleriana," the somewhat less successful, because more ambitious, Sonatas, opuses 11, 14, and 22, and the more mature "Symphonic Études," "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,[4] 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.

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Figure V.

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.

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"PIERROT."

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"ARLEQUIN."

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"VALSE NOBLE."

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"FLORESTAN."

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"COQUETTE."

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"PAPILLONS."

Figure VI.

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" ("Gade, farewell"); 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 "Davidsbündlertänze" 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:—

"Durch alle Töne Tönet
Im bunten Erdentraum
Ein leiser Ton gezogen
Für den der heimlich lauschet."[5]

In the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien" (Carnival Prank at Vienna) 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.

Of all his compositions, the "Davidsbündlertänze" is fullest of this tricksy play of imagination, in which he took, as Oscar Bie says, "the pleasure of the delicate man of taste in labelling." From about 1834, when he founded his musical journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the imaginary society of the Davidsbund played an important part in his mental life. Believing that it was a part of his duty to oppose the philistinism, the dulness, pedantry, and sensuality which pervaded the music of the day, he dramatized the conflict as a struggle between the Davidsbund, or club of Davidites, and the forces of Philistia. His fancy played about this central conception until it had evolved a whole company of Davidites, individualizing each one. Several were merely single aspects of their creator's complex temperament. Florestan was the impassioned Schumann, Eusebius the dreamy and tender Schumann, Raro the philosophical mediator between the two. Others indicated friends: Felix Meritis was Mendelssohn; Chiarina, Clara Wieck; Estrella, Ernestine von Fricken, an early sweetheart. Once projected into the actual world, these figments of fancy became very real to their creator. His Sonata, opus 11, was originally printed as "by Florestan and Eusebius." Each of the numbers of the "Davidsbündlertänze" is signed "F.," or "E.," or "F. and E.," and the ascription is always conscientiously justified by the character of the music. In the first edition there are even "stage directions," such as, "Here Florestan stops, his lips trembling painfully," and "Eusebius said too much about this; but his eyes were full of joy." These finical particularities, however, as well as the motto in verse, were in the second edition stricken out.

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 "Davidsbündlertänze," "Préambule," "Coquette," "Chiarina," "Valse Allemande," and the final march in the "Carnaval," "Aufschwung" in the "Phantasiestücke," 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 "Phantasiestücke," 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 "Davidsbündlertänze" also present attractive oppositions of metre.

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Figure VII.

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."

Taken all together, these piano compositions of the decade 1830-1840, which may be called the first period of Schumann's artistic life, reveal an extraordinarily mobile and fanciful temperament, working with the greatest freedom and spontaneity, though without the guidance of regular discipline. Their crudities are undeniable: the flights are short, the forms are fragmentary and often badly proportioned, the style is highly subjective, eccentric, arbitrary. Yet there is in these things such unflagging vitality, such rare and various beauty, such abounding youthful enthusiasm and freshness, that one would hardly sacrifice them for anything else that music has to offer, and it has even been questioned whether in the final analysis there is not more of the true Schumann in them than in the later, larger, and more technically perfect works. In a sense Hans von Bülow was right in saying that the ipsissimus Schumann was to be found only in the early works up to opus 50.

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.

The anxieties, doubts, fears, and disappointments connected with his courtship of Clara Wieck probably did more than anything else to chasten and to steady his character at this time.[6] The two artists, so diverse in talents, so remarkably at one in musical ideals, had first met in Leipsic in 1828, when one was a law student and amateur musician of eighteen, and the other an accomplished pianist, though only nine years old. Their relation was for a while purely musical; but as Clara's mind gradually developed, and especially after she began to play Schumann's compositions, they discerned more and more how deep-seated an artistic and personal congeniality was destined to bind them together. It is most interesting to trace in his letters and published music the successive steps of their comradeship. In 1832 he composes his "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck"; in 1833 he writes: "I have had a sympathetic idea, namely that to-morrow, exactly at eleven o'clock, I shall play the Adagio from Chopin's 'Variations,' and shall think intensely, exclusively, of you. My petition is that you will do the same, so that we may meet and communicate in spirit;" in 1834 he says: "When I am thinking of you very intently I invariably find myself at the piano, and seem to prefer writing to you in chords of the ninth, and especially with the familiar chord of the thirteenth." "Chiarina," in the "Carnaval," written in 1835 and 1837, is a musical portrait of the already beloved Clara, and the F-sharp minor Sonata, dating from the same period, one of his most romantic and impassioned works, is dedicated to her. The "Davidsbündlertänze" (1837) opens with a motive by her, and in 1839, while he is busy with the "Phantasie," he tells her, "I suppose you are the Ton in the motto." As time goes on, musical sympathy merges more and more into love. "The 'Davidsbündlertänze,' and 'Phantasiestücke,'" he writes in January, 1838, "will be finished in another week. There are many bridal thoughts in the dances, which were suggested by the most delicious excitement that I ever remember. My Clara will understand all that is contained in the dances, for they are dedicated to her more emphatically than any of my other things. The whole story is a Polterabend."[7] In April he observes ingenuously, "I have just noticed that Ehe[8] [the German for "marriage">[ is a very musical word, and a fifth, too." A year later he exclaims: "From your Romance I see plainly that we are to be man and wife. Every one of your thoughts comes out of my soul, just as I owe all my music to you.... Once I can call you mine you shall hear plenty of new things.... And we will publish some things under our two names, so that posterity may regard us as one heart and one soul, and may not know which is yours and which mine. How happy I am!"

Meanwhile, however, the narrow selfishness of the father, Friedrich Wieck, was raising all sorts of obstacles to this union. His daughter being, by her playing in public, a source of financial gain to him, he steadily opposed a marriage, as unfavorable to his interests. He forbade the lovers to meet, circulated false and damaging stories of Schumann, and when the couple, goaded to despair by his insensate obstinacy, had resolved to take matters into their own hands, thwarted even so radical a step by pretending to yield, but imposing conditions that could not possibly be carried out. On the whole, considering his impulsive temperament, Schumann bore this persecution with admirable patience, though not without an occasional plaint. "Your father calls me phlegmatic? 'Carnaval' and phlegmatic! F-sharp minor Sonata and phlegmatic! Being in love with such a girl and phlegmatic! And you can listen calmly to all this? He says that I have written nothing in the Journal for six weeks. In the first place, it is not true; secondly, even if it were, how does he know what other work I have been doing? Up to the present the Journal has had about eighty sheets of my own ideas, not counting the rest of my editorial work, besides which, I have finished ten great compositions in two years, and they have cost me some heart's blood. To add to all this, I have given several hours' hard study every day to Bach and Beethoven, and to my own work, and conscientiously managed a large correspondence. I am a young man of twenty-eight, with a very active mind, and an artist to boot; yet for eight years I have not been out of Saxony, and have been sitting still, saving my money, without a thought of spending it on amusement or horses, and quietly going my own way, as usual. And do you mean to say that all my industry and simplicity, and all that I have done, is quite lost upon your father?"

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 (something new), 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 (nine lyrics by Heine, opus 24) 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 [the 'Liederkreis,' opus 39, containing the dramatic 'Waldesgespräch,' the ethereal 'Mondnacht,' and the splendidly passionate 'Frühlingsnacht'], but I have nearly forgotten them, and begun something else."

All together, over one hundred songs were produced during this single year, including such immortal masterpieces as "Er, der Herrlichste von Allen," "Im wunderschönen Monat Mai," "Ich grolle nicht," "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet," and "Die Beiden Grenadiere," in addition to those already mentioned. In general, the songs have the same melodic freshness, richness of harmony, color, vigor of rhythm, and individuality of style that distinguish the earlier piano works. It is noteworthy, however, that in a certain directness of utterance, in freedom from eccentricities of manner and perversity of fancy, and in an increased breadth and coherence of structure, they show a distinct advance. They mark, indeed, a point of transition in Schumann's career, a point at which, still retaining the exuberance of youth, he has just learned to direct and control it by means of a more efficient artistry, and in the service of a maturer ideal. To most of his other works a strict criticism has reluctantly to admit the pertinence, on one side or the other, of the proverb "Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait"; but the songs seem as thoroughly achieved as they are richly inspired.

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.[9] 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 Düsseldorf 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.

Technically, Schumann was handicapped in this new departure by his exclusively pianistic early training. He had acquired a habit of thinking in terms of the piano which it was almost impossible to break, and he had not, like most symphonists, familiarized himself with orchestral instruments from boyhood. The consequence was that he made many blunders in his first essays in instrumentation, and never scored with the ease, certainty, and effectiveness of a master. An oft-cited instance is the opening horn-phrase of the first symphony, originally written as at (a) in Figure VIII, in which form it is grotesquely ineffective on account of the muffled quality, on the horn, of the fifth and sixth tones, and changed only on second thought, after rehearsal, to its present form, (b).

(a)

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(b)

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Figure VIII.

Another is the first trio of the scherzo in the second symphony. Curiously oblivious of tonal monotony, he cast this passage entirely for the strings, despite the fact that they had been prominent throughout the whole of the preceding scherzo. It was Mendelssohn who suggested the use of the wood-wind instruments here, certainly a marked improvement. Isolated errors or miscalculations like these, however, are much less serious than the pervasive heaviness and muddiness of scoring that constantly mar the sound-mass. A mistaken desire for richness of color led him to double his instruments until all transparency was lost. It is as if a painter should use all his pigments all the time: the potency of each would be cancelled by the others, and the eye, through a surfeit of impressions, would become dulled and jaded. Only by the silence of some instruments can others come into relief. "Schumann's symphonies," says Mr. Weingartner,[10] "are composed for the pianoforte, and arranged—unhappily, not well at that—for the orchestra. Whenever I compare, as a conductor, the labor of the rehearsals and the performance with the final effect, there comes over me a feeling similar to that I have towards a person in whom I expected to find mutual friendship and was disappointed. No sign of life gleams in this apathetic orchestra, which, if given even a simple Mendelssohnian piece to play, seems quite transformed." There are, it is true, as Mr. Weingartner would doubtless admit, many single passages of great tonal beauty and originality scattered here and there in these overladen scores. Such are the sombre trombone harmonies at the end of the slow movement of the B-flat Symphony, the celestial violin melody in the adagio of the C-major Symphony (to which Mr. Weingartner gives the highest praise), and the violin solo in the Romance of the Symphony in D-minor. Above all, there is the wonderful horn-call in the "Genoveva Overture"—one of the loveliest moments in all music.

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Figure IX.

But these are the high lights in a picture which for the rest is too often gray and blurred. In the chamber music, too, we feel the same shortcomings. The three quartets sound patchy or dry, like piano pieces played without pedal;[11] only in the quintet and the quartet with piano does Schumann's favorite instrument introduce elasticity and sparkle.

Another problem, even more fundamental than that of instrumentation, which Schumann, in approaching the larger forms, had to solve as best he could, was that of melodic variety and breadth. Here again he was at a disadvantage. All his experience had been with short lyrical melodies or germs of melodies such as are appropriate to piano pieces in the romantic vein and to songs; but larger works require a wider sweep in the initial themes, a more complex differentiation of themes, and a power of mental synthesis that can combine the most diverse elements in a coherent organism. Mr. Hadow[12] names the two types of melody, which are suitable respectively to the large and to the small forms, the "Continuous" and the "Discrete." "In the former," he explains, "a series of entirely different elements is fused into a single whole: no two of them are similar, yet all are so fitted together that each supplies what the others need. In the latter a set of parallel clauses are balanced antithetically: the same rhythmic figure is preserved in all, and the differences depend entirely upon qualities of tone and curve. The former is the typical method of Beethoven, the latter that of Schumann." And he cites as examples Beethoven's violoncello sonata in A, and the opening movement of Schumann's piano quintet. Now, the construction of extended works out of melodies of the discrete or lyrical type presents certain inevitable difficulties that the romantic composers, who instinctively think only in such melodies, are always having to meet in one way or another. We have already seen[13] how Schubert, on the whole, failed to solve the problem, and contented himself with monotonous repetitions of his ideas, or with variations of their mere ornamentation or timbre. We shall later see how Chopin declined, and how Berlioz and Liszt evaded, the same embarrassment. It will be enlightening to examine how far Schumann succeeded and how far he failed in readjusting his musical imagination to the new requirements.

In many cases he fails as Schubert failed. Beginning a symphonic movement with a song-like melody, grouped in parallel phrases, generally of four measures' length, he is able to proceed only by more or less "vain repetitions." The result is a monotony, a flatness and lack of contrast and relief, something like that of a wall-paper with its endless re-presentations of a single pattern. This defect is especially felt in the development sections of his first movements and finales, in which he has, by the compulsion of circumstances, to forego the charm of melodic novelty. In the allegro of the first quartet, the development is founded on two or three patterns, many times reiterated in various keys. The first movement of the piano quartet, in spite of its harmonic originality, is open to the same criticism, as are also, in fact, most of the development sections in all four of the symphonies. A welcome contrast is found in the corresponding parts of the first movement in the quintet, where an ingenious "diminution" of the theme gives opportunity for much genuine variation, and of the finale of the concerto, with its inexhaustible fertility of rhythms and melodic figures. It must be added, also, that even when Schumann is most helplessly shackled to his initial themes, these are of such intrinsic beauty that the effect is infinitely to be preferred to that of more skilful mediocrity.

Next to the primordial charm of his melodies, his most efficient aid in the solution of the problem is his instinct for counterpoint, with all its matchless power to vitalize the musical tissue. This instinct was educated by a long and earnest study of Bach. As early as 1829 he made thorough acquaintance with the "Well-tempered Clavichord." In 1832 he writes: "I have taken the fugues one by one, and dissected them down to their minutest parts. The advantage of this is great, and seems to have a strengthening effect on one's whole system; for Bach was a thorough man. There is nothing sickly or stunted about him, and his works seem written for eternity." One of the most striking passages in the letters is that which acknowledges the supreme importance of such study to the romantic composers. "Haydn and Mozart," he says, "had only a partial and imperfect knowledge of Bach, and we can have no idea how Bach, had they known him in all his greatness, would have affected their creative powers. Mendelssohn, Bennett, Chopin, Hiller, in fact all the so-called romantic school, approach Bach far more nearly in their music than Mozart ever did: indeed all of them know Bach most thoroughly. I myself confess my sins daily to that mighty one, and endeavor to purify and strengthen myself through him." Besides this general purification and strengthening of his musical thought, Schumann found in Bach an invaluable antidote for his wayward, youthful subjectivism; for Bach is of all composers the most deeply and abstractly musical, the most thoroughly founded on natural tonal laws, the least infected with extraneous ideals and meretricious methods. His art is wholly objective, quite universal; he makes no concession to vulgarity or to insensibility, and his taste is as exacting as his skill is impeccable. Technically, too, he gave Schumann, too long habituated to the narrow scope and rigid rhythmical balance of the lyrical forms, just the emancipation, the mental liberation and broadening, which he needed. The way of escape from the prosodic monotony of the song lies through polyphony, through the conceiving of music as a group or bundle of melodies each of which has its own vitality and its own provocation to fancy. Once the composer learns to follow each strand in this web, for its own sake, and to attain coherence by the persistence of characteristic motives of all types, rather than by a slavish alternation of phrase and equal counter-phrase, the creation widens in his view, and he writes with a hitherto undreamed-of elasticity.

The wholesome influence of the polyphonic or contrapuntal habit of mind makes itself felt very early in Schumann's works, even in the piano pieces of the first period. Oscar Bie detects its earliest manifestations in opuses 13 and 14, but it is certainly noticeable in the "Impromptus," opus 5. The very scheme of this work, which is a set of variations on a fixed bass quite as much as on the "Romance" of Clara Wieck, suggests the Bach standpoint. The dexterous weaving of motives in sections four and eight show the same spirit. Above all, the fugato in the finale, with its bold contour and its steadily cumulative sonority and thematic interest, and with its striking stretto (see the figure), not only gives evidence of minute study, but is a far from unskilful imitation of a great model.

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Figure X.
Theme and Stretto from the Finale of the Impromptus, opus 5.

The habitual use of the sequence, the canon, and even the fugato, though always in an impressionistic, romantic vein, also presses itself constantly upon our attention. Such contrapuntal habits soon became instinctive and unconscious with Schumann. "In my latest compositions," he remarks in 1838, "I often hear many things that I cannot explain. It is most extraordinary how I write almost everything in canon, and then only detect the imitation afterwards, and often find inversions, rhythms in contrary emotion, etc." But the explanation is given by a sentence in the same letter: "Bach is my daily bread; he comforts me and gives me new ideas."

So beneficent in the small pieces, the inspiration of the Bach polyphony became invaluable in the larger works. To it are traceable the supreme passages in the symphonies, such as the profoundly thoughtful introduction of the C-major, with the rugged dissonances resulting from the superposing of the call of horns and trumpets upon the inexorable progression of the strings, the insistently climactic introduction of the D-minor, and the entire movement in the E-flat major known as the "Cathedral Scene," which is surely not the least of the monuments of Gothic art, though its massive pediments and soaring arches are carved of immaterial tones. In his three essays in the string quartet, the most exacting of all mediums, Schumann's contrapuntal skill is less secure. Failing often to conceive the inner voices independently, he falls into a jerkiness resulting from the constant stoppages of the little phrases; instead of letting the melodies germinate and soar, he constricts them within a predetermined harmonic mould; and the wall-paper patterns inevitably creep in. But in the quartet with piano and still more in the quintet, the contrapuntal stimulus is again efficiently felt. From the soaring imitations of the first page to the two exciting fugatos in the coda of the finale, one on the theme of that movement, and the other, by a happy inspiration, on the theme of the opening allegro, structurally rounding out the entire work, the music bubbles and throbs with melody.

One other great work there is, belonging to this period, which for fecundity of invention, luxuriant richness of coloring, and stoutness of structure deserves to rank with the quintet, if not above it. This is the piano concerto in A-minor, begun in 1841 and completed in 1845,—that is to say, written in the brief prime of Schumann's troubled life, when his powers had been marshalled and coordinated by discipline, and before they had become blighted by disease. It is thus quite up to his early standard in the matter of freshness of melody, rhythmic animation, and exotic gorgeousness of harmony, and at the same time far more firmly knit, more justly proportioned, and more flexibly conceived than the piano sonatas or the string quartets. The sincerity, tenderness, grace, and impetuous enthusiasm of the youthful romanticist are not in the least abated. What could be more contagious than the exuberant first movement, in which one hardly knows which to admire the more, the felicity of such details as the clarinet cantabile, the Andante expressivo for solo piano, and the nobly polyphonic cadenza, or the broadly climactic plan of the whole? What could appeal more simply and directly to the heart than the delicate and yet ecstatic Andante grazioso, with its winding intermeshed melodies, clustering about the violoncello phrases as a grapevine festoons itself upon a tree? Yet perfectly wedded with all this feminine suavity and grace is a more masculine quality, a fine poise, restraint, reservation of force, which counteracts all tendency to feverishness, and gives the work a sort of impersonal dignity and beauty at the opposite pole from the perverse individualism of the "Davidsbündlertänze" and the "Carnaval." One feels that the composer, no longer the victim of his moods, is shaping his work with the serene detachment of the artist. Particularly manifest is this new mastery in the rhythmical treatment of the finale. The rhythms here are as salient, as seizing, as ever, but they are far more various. The contrast between the strongly "three-beat" quality of the initial motif, (a) in Figure XI, and the cross accent of twos in the second theme (b), is a stroke of positive genius.

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(a)

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(b)

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(c)

Figure XI.

One should note also the subtlety with which the regular three-beat meter is gradually resumed after the interregnum (c in the figure). Indeed, to do justice to the plastic beauty of this movement would require nothing less than a measure-by-measure analysis of its charmingly varied phraseology. To play it after the "Abegg Variations" is like passing from a schoolboy's singsong delivery of "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" to the reading of an ode of Shelley or a sonnet of Keats.

In our desire to comprehend how much Schumann gained by his study of Bach and other great masters of composition (such as his contemporary, Mendelssohn, for instance, whose perfection of form he vainly tried to emulate, possibly to the disadvantage of his own originality), we must not fail to note certain indications that his enthusiasm sometimes overleaped itself. A strong will like his easily falls, by the overuse or abuse of special artistic devices, into mannerisms; and he, with his fondness for sequences, inversions, canons, and other contrapuntal traits, did not escape this danger. So long as he used these tools with a certain romantic freedom and geniality, inspired by their spirit rather than enslaved by their letter, as he uses for example the canon in the andante of the piano quartet, the device of diminution in the development section of the first movement of the quintet, and the fugato in the finale of the same, they enriched and guided his fancy. But when he writes canonically throughout a whole movement, as in the scherzo of the D-minor Trio or the third movement of the F-major Trio, when he puts upon his genius the manacles of strict counterpoint, as in the Studies in Canon Form for Pedal Piano, opus 56, and in the Four Fugues, opus 72, above all when he indulges, as in the organ fugues on B-A-C-H, in those inversions and retrogressions of themes dear to the schoolmen, then learning becomes baneful, and music degenerates into a pedantic exercise.

A far more insidious and fatal blight than such occasional pedantry was now, however, beginning to overspread his music. The story of the long, gradual eclipse and final extinction some years before death, by the ravages of physical and mental disease, of a genius which had dawned so brightly and reached its meridian in such ample and yet tempered splendor, is one of the most pathetic chapters in the history of art. The exact nature of the disease was somewhat obscure, but the basis of it seems to have been a tendency, inherited from the mother, toward abnormal activity of the brain, and a resulting congestion, distention of the blood-vessels, and final ossification of cerebral tissue, carrying with it mental paralysis and degeneration. The trouble was no doubt aggravated by overwork and by the constant excitement of musical composition. A peculiar feature was its reaction on Schumann's spirits. Generally this sort of cerebral atrophy is attended by unreasoning high spirits, a baseless self-satisfaction uncanny to observe but merciful to the sufferer. But Schumann's native moral force and mental power were so great that he struggled with his fate as a lesser man would not have done; and the result of the unequal fight was a terrible melancholy, sinking sometimes into a blank lethargy of depression, and rising at other times into acute despair. It was in one of these frenzied moments that, in February, 1854, he attempted to drown himself in the Rhine. Rescued from suicide, he had for safety's sake to be put in an asylum, where after two years of merely vegetative existence, he died on July 29, 1856.

This deep-seated physical disability is responsible for the curious impotence of those compositions which he so restlessly produced all through the afflicted years. Such things as the violin sonata, opus 121, the "Introduction and Allegro Appassionata," opus 92, the Concert Allegro, opus 134, and the overtures "Julius Caesar," "Braut von Messina," and "Hermann und Dorothea," negligible from the artistic standpoint, are as human documents deeply pathetic. In them we see the crippled master in fruitless travail. The intention is always noble, the old fire flashes out now and then, the ideal of expression is the same as ever, but the path from will to act is clogged, the musical fancy is paralyzed; and all that results is page after dreary page of rigidly unchanging rhythms, stagnant harmonies, manufactured melodies, and climaxes that reach no goal. Particularly saddening is it to note the hysterical character of the emotional passages. In the overture to "Manfred," one of his immortal masterpieces, he showed once for all his marvellous power for impassioned expression. Alas! that in the fever of sickness he was goaded to parody his own immortal work in futile replicas that imitate its qualities only to trivialize them.

It is a relief to turn from the sorry spectacle of these galvanic twitchings of the once so virile intellect to the one happy episode that lightens this period of gloom. This was the coming of Brahms in 1853. In order to understand fully what the apparition of a youth of so pure and high a genius meant to Schumann, we must remember the depth and unselfishness of his love for art, the lifelong labors he had undertaken in order to purify public taste, the grim and often single-handed battle he had waged against Philistinism and mediocrity. Composition, the service of the gods of music at their inmost shrine, had been only one aspect of his life; the other side had been his literary and editorial labors, in which, like a true priest, he had gone forth to spread the faith among heretics and idolaters. The New Journal of Music, which he founded in 1834, had for its object, in his own words, "the elevation of German taste and intellect by German art, whether by pointing to the great models of old time, or by encouraging younger talents." "The musical situation," he wrote some years afterwards, "was not then very encouraging. On the stage Rossini reigned, at the pianoforte nothing was heard but Herz and Hünten; and yet but a few years had passed since Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert had lived amongst us. One day the thought awakened in a wild heart, 'Let us not look on idly; let us also lend our aid to progress, let us bring again the poetry of art to honor among men.'" The proposal thus made, in a spirit of altruistic devotion to art unhappily too rare among creative musicians, was faithfully carried out in a series of appreciative, generally discriminating, and always entertaining articles on such men as Mendelssohn, Gade, Bennett, Franz, Henselt, Heller, Berlioz, Liszt, Thalberg, and Moscheles, alternating with others of a more historical or general character, always wise, fair, suggestive, and pleasantly pointed with humor, wit, and the play of that irresponsible fancy which revelled in Jean Paul and created the Davidsbund.

One of the most touching features of the New Journal, to a reader of to-day, is the almost too generous kindliness of its judgments, the eager enthusiasm with which it proclaims the advent of geniuses who have already fallen into oblivion. Its editor proceeded so heartily on the principle that it is wiser to encourage the good than to discourage the bad that he often "discovered" nonentities only to have them left helpless on his hands. The experience must have been disappointing to the most sanguine. Seldom as he condemns, too, he must frequently have had the petty egotists swarming and buzzing about him, black flies and gnats in human form, such as will beset the stanchest crusader. To one engaged in so humane and disinterested a task, and pursuing it through such annoyances, the advent of a true genius like Brahms must have been the most joyful of events. Schumann at once recognized and welcomed it. When Brahms, then a tow-headed, high-voiced boy of twenty, arrived from Hamburg with a parcel of manuscripts, he gave him, in the famous article, "New Paths," the most royal greeting a neophyte has ever received from a brother musician. "He has come, the chosen youth, over whose cradle the Graces and the Heroes seem to have kept watch. May the Highest Genius help him onward! Meanwhile another genius—that of modesty—seems to dwell within him. His Comrades greet him at his first step in the world, where wounds may perhaps await him, but also the bay and the laurel." "It is a fitting reward," says Mr. Hadow, "that the voice which had so often been raised in commendation of lesser men should devote its last public utterance to the honor of Johannes Brahms."

Indeed, despite the struggles of his youth, the hardships and disappointments of his manhood, and the cruel affliction that maimed and killed him before his time, Schumann's destiny, look at it with but sufficient largeness, was a happy one. It is not given to men to attain their ideals; and in this respect, as in so many others, he was most human. His life, in its mere actualities, is, like all lives, a thing of incomplete beginnings, disappointed hopes, defeated or unrealized aspirations. But to look at the individual is to see but a partial, and therefore a distorted and misleading, picture. Only in his relations to others, in his service to the common good, in the seeds of social benefit which he plants and the ways of social progress which he discovers, is his true life to be found. If he has wrought faithfully, purely, single-mindedly, his work will suggest and imply more than it attains; and it will partake by virtue of this suggestion in all future attainment of the same kind. All Schumann's work tends in the direction of what is highest and most beautiful in music. Much he achieved, but much more he realized only as an ideal realizes that to which it points, and in some sense gives it solid reality in the world. Whenever and wherever men pursue what is pure, high, fresh, noble, and fair in music, there the spirit of Schumann will be at work.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] "Early Letters of Robert Schumann," trans. by M. Herbert, London, 1888, pp. 113, 118.

[4] In German the terminology of letters standing for tones is richer than in English. B is our B-flat, while H stands for our B-natural; Es is E-flat; As, A-flat, etc.

[5] See page 128 for Schumann's comment on this motto.

[6] The remarkable story of this courtship is told at length in "Clara Schumann, Ein Künstlerleben," by Berthold Litzmann, Zweiter Band, Leipsic, 1906. It has also been vividly sketched in English by Mr. Richard Aldrich, in an article in Music, vol. 18.

[7] Eve of a wedding day.

[8] H, it will be remembered, stands in German for the note B-natural, which makes the musical interval of a fifth with E.

[9] "Clara Schumann, Ein Künstlerleben," by Berthold Litzmann, 1903-1906.

[10] "The Symphony since Beethoven," Eng. trans., p. 31.

[11] See the Adagio of the Quartet, opus 41, no. 1. The accompaniment is essentially a piano accompaniment, transcribed for 'cello and viola; but without the pedal it lacks fluidity.

[12] "Studies in Modern Music," First Series, Essay on Schumann, p. 213.

[13] Essay on Schubert, p. 98.