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# The Romantic Composers ### By Mason, Daniel Gregory

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THE ROMANTIC COMPOSERS

[Illustration]

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN AND CO.,

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED

TORONTO

[Illustration: ROBERT SCHUMANN From a water color made in Vienna in his youth]

_The_ ROMANTIC COMPOSERS

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

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

PAGE

I. INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC 1

II. FRANZ SCHUBERT 61

III. ROBERT SCHUMANN 103

IV. FELIX MENDELSSOHN 163

V. FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN 195

VI. HECTOR BERLIOZ 253

VII. FRANZ LISZT 307

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

SCHUMANN AS A YOUNG MAN Title

SCHUBERT 63

SCHUMANN 105

MENDELSSOHN 165

CHOPIN 197

BERLIOZ 255

LISZT 309

I INTRODUCTION ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC

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.

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.