Part 4
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":--
[Illustration: score]
[Illustration: score]
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.
[Illustration: score] SCHUBERT.
[Illustration: score]
And later
[Illustration: score] 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.
[Illustration: score] 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.