CHAPTER VIII

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Art-song and the romantic spirit--Precursors of Schubert--Schubert’s contribution to song; Schubert’s poets--Classification of Schubert’s songs--Faults and virtues--The songs in detail; the cycles--Schubert’s contemporaries.

If the art-song begins with Franz Schubert there are two reasons for it. The first is the comparatively accidental one that Schubert was the greatest of lyric geniuses--the song writer _par excellence_. The second is that just as he arrived upon the scene the romantic element in music began to gain the upper hand.

For modern song is nine-tenths a romantic product. There might be such a thing as a classic art-song, but its existence is hardly more than hypothetical. Almost by definition the art-song is opposed to what we call the ‘classic’ spirit in music. For the art-song, let us recall, is, above all, a personal, detailed expression. It is intimate, subjective, predominantly emotional. The classic spirit (in music as well as in the other arts) avoids the emotion that is too personal and too subjective as something immodest--much as a young girl would avoid telling the details of her love affairs to strangers. The classic is always inclined to stress the formal elements. But the very definition of the _durchkomponiertes Lied_ (which is almost synonymous with the term ‘art-song’) is that it does not adhere to a common form, being free to formulate itself according to the requirements of the text.

It must be more than a coincidence, then, that Schubert, the master song-writer, came at a time when music was bursting forth into romantic expression. Romantic song could not have been born much earlier. For music, as an instrument of emotional expression, did not come to maturity much earlier. Emotion we do find expressed in Haydn and Mozart certainly, but it is subordinate, restrained, and not very precise. It rarely seems to be the prime object of the music. The prime object seems rather to be the giving of pleasure through the beauty of musical patterns. The music must not be obviously inappropriate to the words of an aria, but it is not thought of as expressing their sense in itself. The movements of a Mozart symphony may have for us some mild emotional connotation; but in the composer’s mind, in all probability, it was not the emotion which germinated the music, but the music which germinated the emotion. The music of the long period before Schubert was predominantly formal. It became increasingly complex and refined. It greatly enlarged musical technique and the means of expression. From the emotional point of view the eighteenth century was _storing up_ the technical materials which the nineteenth was destined to _use up_.

It was Beethoven who developed the expressive power of music to its grandest proportions. Never has emotion been shown more powerful, beauty more dignified, than in his symphonies. The art of music, as it passed from his hands into those of younger men, was a grand and universal instrument, equal to any emotional demand men might want to make upon it. But, if Beethoven had developed all these capacities in music, he had by no means used them all. Emotion in his music is that of the epic poet, broad and grand, rather than that of the lyricist, personal and subtle. He had developed his instrument to marvellous perfection. He had played upon it only a few of its tunes. The greatest of the classicists, he was the man who taught the romanticists their trade. He indicated how music could be used primarily for emotional expression. But the doing of it he necessarily left largely to those who came after.

Among the first and the greatest of these was Schubert. He was born to sing. He loved a beautiful melody beyond anything else. In some ways he was like a woman, responding with infinite tenderness and delicacy to the impressions that came to him from without, divining shades of feeling which a man can rarely catch.

And, just when this man came, burning to write personal and emotional songs, Beethoven had forged the finished instrument for the purpose. By this time all the conceptions of rhythm and design had been agreed upon among musicians. The scales and the modes had been adopted, the sense of the tonic deeply inculcated in every hearer, the independence of all the keys had been established and their relation agreed upon. All the ordinary positions of chords had been tested, and all the normal progressions agreed upon. Composers had experimented with many forms and had worked out the capacities of each. In short, men had come to an almost complete agreement concerning the conventions of musical technique. If this had not been so, it would not yet have been time for romantic song. For, just as a poem can have no precise meaning until all matters of words and syntax have been agreed upon, so music cannot become accurately expressive while people are vague in their minds about the identity of this or that chord. In the same way freedom of form could have no meaning for people until the laws of form were wholly understood. The subtleties of emotion could not be expressed until people generally had begun to feel in music the emotions to be subdivided.

The things that Schubert did with music in 1815 were hardly dreamt of twenty years before. There were occasional foreshadowings, nothing else. Mozart, always technically flawless, did not approach his full creative maturity until toward his death, when he gave evidence of becoming one of the greatest of innovators. And it is Mozart, whose music Schubert knew well and admired beyond measure, who chiefly foreshadowed romantic song before Beethoven’s great period. In the famous ‘Statue’ scenes of _Don Giovanni_ Mozart seems suddenly to have peeped into a whole new world of music--the world of primary emotional expression. The same sense of half-discovered expressive possibilities we catch in some of his later symphonies. And in his last opera, ‘The Magic Flute,’ there are songs preserving the emotional richness of the best German folk-songs. Such arias as _In diesen heil’gen Hallen_ or _Isis und Osiris_ are the last word in song before Schubert broke through the bonds of form and established the _durchkomponiertes Lied_.

I

But song proper before Schubert is largely in the hands of men who by no means hold a primary place in musical history. Of course, it can nowhere be said to have a beginning. But we can sense the feeling for romantic song as far back as the _Geistliche Lieder_ of Philipp Emanuel Bach, published in the middle of the eighteenth century. The preface to these songs is a remarkable document. Bach says that he has tried to set fitting melodies to the words; that where the various stanzas of a song were so different in spirit that a single melody could not express both with equal faithfulness he has tried to strike an average between all the stanzas and to compose the tune which will be most appropriate to all; that he considers it unjust to the poem to compose a tune which is suitable only to the first stanza, as is the usual practice; and, finally, that he realizes that Gellert’s poems, being didactic, are not of the sort best suited for musical settings, yet the high earnestness of the poet’s work justifies musical treatment.

These remarks foreshadow the romantic spirit in more than one respect. First, Bach recognizes the importance and integrity of the text: the music exists in order to enhance the poem, not the poem in order to sing the music. Next, Bach feels the power and the obligation to express the spirit of the words in detail. Further, he clearly feels the contradiction inherent in the strophic form--making one tune do service for various dissimilar stanzas. Finally, he feels that song is at its best when it is emotional. In all this he is entirely at one with the romantic song writers, from Schubert on. In his criticism of the strophic form he has put his finger on the central problem of the art-song. It is true, his solution of the difficulty was different from that of the romanticists, as was inevitable with a composer who came half a century before the problem was ripe. But he shows in his preface that he regards his solution as no more than tentative.

The songs themselves are not remarkable. They are much like the _Geistliche Lieder_ of the composer’s great father, except that a subtle and almost indefinable change has come over them in the direction of the ‘intimate.’ They are short melodies, much like a German chorale, except that they have a gentler, smoother movement. The strophes are sometimes in one of the recognized melodic forms and sometimes comparatively free. When closely compared they reveal not a little individuality (which is undoubtedly what the composer was aiming at), but, taken as a whole, they seem too much like short cantata arias to suggest expressive song.

The real spirit of song was preserved in the German _singspiele_. These were lively dramatic entertainments, interspersed with songs, like the English ballad operas, except that the music was usually composed especially for the piece. The _singspiele_ were not taken seriously by the educated classes, hence the lightest kind of joyousness reigned in them, and the music was that which would appeal most quickly to the hearts of the people. The tunes were, in fact, generally as much like true folk-songs as their composers could make them. _Singspiele_ were written and performed by the hundreds during the eighteenth century. Many of the more popular songs were remembered and sung by the people as half-naturalized folk-songs, and the successful composers were usually fertile producers of songs independent of the _singspiele_. This was the true song-tradition of Germany before Schubert’s time. It grew out of the art of the people and spoke familiarly to all. It was a dignified and firmly established art institution, though it was given hardly more recognition by the great musicians of the time than the symphony composers of to-day give to operetta. The _singspiel_ folk-song type, moreover, was the type which was called into service for the setting of the works of the standard poets of the time. Zelter’s settings of Goethe’s poems were scarcely to be distinguished, in point of form, from the songs that were sung in the cheap theatres.

Among the best of the _singspiel_ composers was Johann Adam Hiller (1728-1804), also distinguished as the first director of the famous Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig and as perhaps the first writer of true _durchkomponierte Lieder_. His songs kept the popular flavor, but strove for vigorous expression of the text and, in doing this, broke out of the simple strophe or stanza form. The spirited character of Hiller’s _singspiele_ is suggested by the names of some of them--‘The Devil is Loose,’ ‘The Hunt,’ and ‘The Village Barber.’ Johann André (d. 1799), fertile composer of _singspiele_, has a place alongside of Hiller as a pioneer in that he was probably the first to adapt the _durchkomponiert_ style to the ballad, setting Bürger’s famous ‘Lenore’ soon after it appeared in 1775. The true ballad style, however, was more freely cultivated by Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg (d. 1802), commonly known as the inventor of the ballad form. He composed settings for several poems to which Schubert and Löwe later set their hands, notably Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ _Des Pfarrer’s Tochter_, and _Ritter Toggenburg_. Johann Schulz, who was another prolific _singspiel_ writer, is chiefly famous for his beautiful ‘Songs in the Folk-Manner,’ which appeared between 1782 and 1790, when Herder’s pioneer collection of _Volkslieder_ (words only) had just commenced to create an interest in the subject of popular song.

But the most famous _singspiel_ composer of the time, and one of the most interesting personalities among the lesser musicians, was Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752-1814). Unlike most musicians of the age, Reichardt was a man of wide interests and excellent education. At the age of twenty-three he became royal choirmaster under Frederick the Great at Berlin. But he was a radical by temperament and seems to have caused the head that wore the crown to lie uneasy. His visits to Paris gave him such a sympathy with the approaching French revolution that he later lost his position in Berlin on account of his radical politics. For a time he was choirmaster at Cassel to Jerôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who was anxious to pose as a patron of art. Reichardt caught the ‘folk-manner’ in his _singspiele_, but he was not a naïve musician in the technical sense of the word. His choruses and concerted pieces sometimes show a grace and artistry which suggests Mozart, and his songs are always organically and artistically conceived. He set in the simple strophe style some sixty of Goethe’s songs and Goethe’s delightful _singspiel_, _Erwin und Elmire_ (as did also André). We must give Reichardt praise for working in musicianly style, with a fresh vein of melody and a graceful sense in the organizing of it. But we should make a mistake if we gave him a very high place in the history of the development of song, for Schubert’s earliest efforts tower far above his and they surely owe but little to them.

[Illustration: Precursors of Schubert. Top: Johann Zumsteeg and Johann Adam Hiller Bottom: Johann Friedrich Reichardt and Carl Friedrich Zelter]

Schubert’s admiration for Zumsteeg and for his use of the ballad form (to which we doubtless owe ‘The Erl King’) was extended to another song writer of the time, Karl Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832). This composer, who did a notable service as director at the Berlin _Singakademie_, was a personal friend of Goethe and had an extensive correspondence with him, which has been preserved and published. He set a great number of Goethe’s songs in the simple and unpretentious style of Reichardt. This much pleased the poet, who was professedly not much of a musician. In fact, it seems likely that Zelter frankly directed the great man’s musical tastes. Zelter’s songs, some of which are still sung by German singing societies, are spirited and musicianly. In their manly and straightforward way they compel one’s liking. If they do not figure as an element in musical history it is because their simple form offered little that was of service to the genius of Schubert.

II

This genius was, along with that of Mozart, the most spontaneous the world of music had ever seen. It seemed to work by a sort of divination. Whereas Beethoven’s musical ideas developed slowly and under great mental pressure from themes of little value, Schubert’s songs often came into his mind almost in an instant complete from beginning to end. From the age of thirteen (and probably earlier) he was continually writing songs. Often he would compose as many as three or four in a single morning, especially when he was unusually pressed for money. Most of the time he did but little revising. If the musical idea as it came was not of fine quality, then it could go to the scrap-basket or to anybody who cared for it; there were plenty more good tunes where that came from. Schubert’s supply of beautiful melodies was inexhaustible. He never had to nurse and pet a tune in order to get the maximum of musical service out of it. More than any other song-writer Schubert ‘sings himself.’ And his songs, for the most part, ‘wrote themselves.’ The poet would pick up a book on a friend’s table and, discovering therein some lovely poems, would be seized by musical settings for them. Sometimes he wrote as though in a trance. The music seemed to come from some anterior source, and, passing through his brain on its way to the paper, to make him intoxicated. When he died at the age of thirty he left behind him some eleven hundred musical works, of which more than six hundred were songs of all descriptions. This was the product of scarcely more than fifteen years of activity. It is obvious there could not have been much revision. But this is hardly evidence that Schubert was incapable of self-criticism. He had his favorites among his songs and doubtless realized that many were as worthless as later generations have found them. And he did, in certain cases, spend considerable effort in revision; there exist, for instance, several different versions of ‘The Erl King’ in Schubert’s handwriting. But his lack of revision was a result of his overpowering fertility rather than of carelessness. If he kept on writing new songs he might strike a masterpiece any time. Why waste his time polishing second-rate pieces?

Briefly stated, what Schubert did for song was to establish it as one of the great departments of music. We know what it was before his time--an unpretentious amusement, considered appropriate chiefly for the vaudeville theatres and the banquet tables of roistering students. Among the educated classes song was loved, but hardly respected. The great composers wrote songs only as bagatelles for their amusement or for a special occasion. It was hardly realized that the song form, so slight and so modest, could receive the burden of great ideas and radical innovation.

Schubert, by force of genius, proved that the song could be as great intensively as an opera or oratorio could be extensively; that to write a perfect song was as difficult and worthy a task for a great artist as to write an oratorio. To prove this he showered all the riches of his artistic equipment on the song. First of all, he gave to it great melodies. The melodies of the best art-songs before his time could not be compared with the great melodies which musicians had put into symphonies and operas. Musicians had felt that songs were not worthy of their best melodies, but only of their second and third best. Schubert gave to song his very best.

Next, Schubert chose (among his many texts) some of the greatest short poems in German literature. Musicians previously had generally considered the words a very unimportant part of vocal music. True, the music of the eighteenth century (especially in Germany) is full of exceptions to this rule, but the exceptions occur as if by accident and prove that composers either didn’t care or didn’t know which texts were better and which were worse. It is true, also, that Reichardt Zelter, and others set the poems of Goethe to music, but their settings were unpretentious and hardly aspired to be in themselves adequate to express Goethe’s thoughts. With Schubert, for the first time, we find the greatest poetry married to the greatest music. It must be admitted, also, that Schubert’s taste was not highly critical in the matter of poetry. Among his six hundred songs are a great many with insipid or pompous words. But some of these texts were written by Schubert’s personal friends (such as his room-mate Mayrhofer) and were set as a personal compliment. Further, Schubert, who worked daily, did not always find the best of poems at hand, and was obliged to take what he could get, though he probably knew which were better and which were worse. And, finally, he was generally best inspired by the best poems, which should be a proof of his sensitiveness to poetic excellence. At any rate, one finds the texts of Schubert’s songs almost an anthology of the best German lyrical poems written in the century before his death. And with some of the verses is music that seems to have been made by one and the same master artist to fit for all time. On the whole, though Schubert was not a man educated in _belles lettres_, he showed a vivid appreciation of poetic excellence which has been a mark of great song writers ever since.

Next, Schubert showed a marvellous sense of poetry in music. The music before him had been, as we have said, predominantly formal. With Beethoven it had reached its most perfect formal development and with the symphony and sonatas of Beethoven’s later years broke through formal bonds in its search after more intense expression. The violent conflict between form and expression is the glory (and to some minds the defect) of Beethoven’s later work. But Schubert in his songs seems to feel nothing of this struggle. It is as though he had been born on the other side; as though Beethoven had done the fighting for him. Or it is as though a mountain stream had struggled through rocks and over a precipice to reach the quiet level of the plains below. With Schubert we feel only joyous spontaneous expression of the words. The expressive resources of music which his forerunners had prepared are laid at his feet, and from them he chooses with wonderful acuteness the details and devices he needs. This sense of poetry could hardly be found in the songs of Reichardt and Zelter. Sung with the words their music would doubtless seem appropriate. But played without the words to point the meaning they would seem pleasing but colorless. On the other hand, if you play the songs of Schubert on the piano you will get, to a surprising degree, the feelings conveyed by the words. It is not too much to say that before Schubert song music was appropriate only; with Schubert song became _expressive_.

Finally, Schubert gave to the art-song that freedom of form which has been a characteristic of it ever since. Not that he was the first to write the _durchkomponierte_ song or any of the other freer forms, but he was the first with the genius necessary to establish such forms (or formlessness) for all time. Schubert’s predecessors had not been pedants. Within their limited capacities some of them had been genuine poets of sentiment. But form had nevertheless retained its hold on the spirit of their song writing. The regular recurrence of measured lines, or the building up of the song according to a scheme of regular repetitions or alterations, had been to them a matter of second nature (except when a Hiller or a Zumsteeg tentatively broke through for experiment’s sake). Such a song as Schubert’s _Aufenthalt_ or the early ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel,’ in which there is no discoverable scheme yet a most cogent unity, would have been hardly conceivable to these early pioneers.

Schubert, then, with a marvellous fund of melody, a sense of poetic values in words and music, and a free instinct for expressive form, did for the song what Haydn had done for the symphony--put it on the musical map. He was able to do this not alone because he was a great musician, but because there were great poets in Germany whose lyrics he could set. Let us see who and of what character these poets were.

The poets whom Schubert set to music (over 100 in all) represent several stages of a tremendous upheaval in German life and literature--roughly, the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. For convenience we may divide them into three classes--the ‘Storm and Stress’ poets, the Romantic poets, and the ‘young-German’ poets. The _Sturm und Drang_, or ‘Storm and Stress,’ tendency was the German equivalent of the pre-revolutionary upheaval among the educated classes of France. Its ideal was that of the highest perfection for the individual--personal rights rather than social duties. The so-called Romantic movement (in the narrower meaning of the term) was at its height during Napoleon’s period of power. It was double. On the one hand, it was _Sturm und Drang_, individualism carried to its extreme, with a high premium set on the imagination and a morbid interest in what we should to-day call ‘psychology.’ On the other hand, it was the growth of the social and national spirit which aroused a sense of nationalism in Germany under Napoleon’s tyranny and enabled the Germans gloriously to shake off the French yoke. The third period, in which Schubert did most of his actual work, was that of disillusionment, when the liberal dreams of the German enthusiasts had been met by the stupid reactionism of the German princes and the Congress of Vienna. The German uprising against Napoleon had been synonymous in the minds of most with a movement toward liberal institutions and political freedom. Under the royal houses of Germany the people were forced back, at the point of the sword, to a state little better than mediævalism. The poets of the ‘young-German’ movement saw that the dreams of the previous generation had been made a fiasco and turned to cynicism, with just a shadow of a bitter dream of vengeance stored up for the future.

The great poets of the _Sturm und Drang_ movement were, of course, Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, one of the most universal minds the world has ever known, was able to enter into a situation or a human emotion so intensely that he was an ideal lyric poet. His command over the music of the German language was complete. All Germany was dazzled by the wealth of color and nuance which he found in life and reflected in his poetry. Schiller was in every way his inferior. His inflated rhetoric always stole the lyric quality from his poems, which never pictured truth, either outer or inner. But by the sheer energy of his spirit Schiller was a man of the time. It is worth noting that though Schubert set nearly fifty of his texts, not a single masterpiece resulted. For there is in Schiller, properly considered, little or nothing to inspire a genuinely lyric poet. And, as is often the case in lyric poetry, the minor men do some of the best work. Some of Schubert’s best texts are supplied by Claudius, Schubart, Stollberg, and Hölty, minor members of the fraternity which stirred up all Germany to the expectation of a profound revolution. These men were crying out against the vices of the aristocracy, or praising the simple life of the peasants, as Herder had taught them. Their songs were a glorification of the individual, proclaiming the intensity and beauty of his spontaneous feelings--ideal lyric material.

The era of the Napoleonic wars brought a new generation of poets to Germany. It was the period when the vision of great deeds was stirring every one to demonstrate his own power. This side of the movement, represented in Schubert’s songs by the brothers Schlegel, was decidedly morbid. But there was another side. For Napoleonic oppression had aroused a new sense of dignity and national solidarity in German hearts, and there arose a group of poets to sing of it. Most typical is Körner, author of the famous sword song, who volunteered for the army, saying to his father: ‘Germany is rising; my art sighs for her fatherland’--and died in battle. This adoption by art of a new fatherland was signalized by a new return of poetry to all that was popular and traditional in German life and history. It is to this inspiration that we owe poems by Uhland and Müller, which Schubert set to music.

The third era was that of disillusionment, when Platen could write

‘... man kann hienieden Nichts Schlech’res als ein Deutscher sein.’

The lyric poetry of the time became either a cynical grasping of selfish interests, as often in Heine, or a renunciation of the outer word, a peace which is to be found in contemplation and humble love, as in Rückert.

In translation, also, Schubert was familiar with the work of certain foreign poets, notably Shakespeare and Walter Scott. To the inspiration of the former we owe at least two masterpieces, ‘Who Is Sylvia?’ and ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark!’ From the latter we have the wonderful ‘Ave Maria.’ We should not forget, also, the songs of Ossian, now almost forgotten. These were forgeries (in all probability) by a Scotch schoolmaster, purporting to be translations from the Gaelic of the songs of the minstrel Ossian, who had been no more than a tradition for centuries. The literary world took them in earnest, and such men as Goethe became enthusiastic over their wild and rugged imagery. But to us they seem rhetorical and far removed from the simplicity of genuine folk-poetry. And Schubert seems to have felt this, for, though he set eight of the long Ossian songs, not one of his settings is memorable. Again the absence of the true lyric spark had left him cold.

[Illustration: Poets of the Romantic Period. Top: Goethe and Hugo Bottom: Schiller and Heine]

III

Among Schubert’s songs we find an extraordinarily wide range of form and subject-matter--so wide that all song writers since his time have not been able much to enlarge it. We have said that he was the first to apply musical genius to the _durchkomponiertes Lied_. But he was not a specialist in this form. He seems to have had no especial preferences, but to have been guided by the nature of his poem. A number of his songs are in the strophe form--simply contrasting phrases of the music forming the tune, which is repeated without change for each stanza of the words, as in the simple folk-tune type. Of this class are some of Schubert’s best songs, such as ‘The Heather Rose,’ ‘The Fisher,’ ‘Praise of Tears,’ ‘Wandering,’ ‘The Brook’s Lullaby,’ ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark!’[20] and many others.

Next we find what we might call the ‘developed strophe’ form, in which the simple stanza organization is preserved in spirit, but some change enters into the make-up of the whole song in accordance with the demands of the text. Examples of this are the famous _Du bist die Ruh_, in which the final strophe is much altered to express the intenser feelings of the poet; or the _Gute Nacht_, from the _Winterreise_ series, in which the melody of one stanza is sung in the major to convey the contrasting effect of calmness; or the ‘Serenade,’ in which the repeated strophe is followed by a free coda necessary to give completeness to the idea. In the class of the ‘developed strophe’ form we might group such pieces as ‘Her Portrait,’ which repeats the main strophe after a contrasting middle section. Or there are such songs as ‘By the Sea,’[1] which are almost in the strict strophe form, but varied here and there in some minor detail, proving that however much Schubert felt the beauty of form he did not feel its dogma.

Finally, there is the quite free or _durchkomponierte_ form. The examples of this are innumerable in Schubert’s works: we recall easily the famous _Aufenthalt_ (‘Abode’) and _Doppelgänger_ (‘The Double’),[21] _Der Wanderer_, and _Das Wirtshaus_. In these songs there is every variation from a deceptive strophic form to the utmost dissimilarity, and yet there remains always a _sense_ of unity which is the work of a master.

Besides the pure lyrics Schubert wrote ballads and scenas. The former are simply stories told in verse. Unlike the lyric, the ballad is highly objective, seeing the characters as things apart and as acting for themselves; yet like the lyric it is highly sympathetic with emotions, and sometimes identifies itself alternately with one character and another as completely as though it were a lyric. This is because of the dramatic quality implicit in every story,--a quality which is particularly attractive to the primitive imagination. The ballad, in short, is a miniature drama, in which the characters speak in their own words with each other, and in which rapid and vigorous action is abundant. Examples of this form in Schubert’s songs are Schiller’s ‘The Diver,’ and of course ‘The Erl King.’

We should also distinguish a third class of songs--the _scena_. This is a combination of the lyric and the ballad; it is essentially an emotional utterance, but it usually pictures the characters and the scene, and often involves some sort of dramatic action. The Ossian Songs partake of the nature of the _scena_, but the best example is Schiller’s _Erwartung_, in which the singer is waiting for his sweetheart to come to him, and is beguiled by various noises of the night into thinking it is she.

The scenas and the ballads involve not a little of the declamatory style, which is quite unlyrical. Declamation in song is familiar to us in the recitatives of the older operas, but declamation in the true sense is more melodious than dry recitative. It is, in fact, genuine melody, with all elements of melodic beauty, except that it is independent of strict measure and rhythm, receiving all its accents from the words which it follows with greatest nicety. The possibilities of this style of music have only begun to be developed in the last two or three decades. In Schubert declamation is usually on the right track, but is pretty likely to be uninteresting. We must make an exception, however, of such masterly bits of declamation as the last line of ‘The Erl King,’ in which the half-spoken announcement, ‘Lo, in his arms the child was dead,’ closes the ballad abruptly and seems to frame it off from the workaday world; or the last line of ‘The Wanderer,’ in which Schubert’s poetic sense reinforced the emphatic word with an emphatic melodic note: _Dort, wo du nicht bist, dort ist das Glück_. But on the whole we must admit that the whole body of Schubert’s declamatory and dramatic songs is hardly worth the trouble of study, except for the purpose of enlarging one’s knowledge of the composer. If it were not for the wonderful ‘Erl King,’ greatest of ballads, people would doubtless be saying that Schubert was a lyric song-writer only, and had no feeling for the ballad form.

IV

Of Schubert’s six hundred songs, as we have said, many are of little or no musical value. Sometimes the melody seems too facile; it expresses nothing; it is like every other ordinary tune. And sometimes, especially in the longer ballads and scenas, there is a lack of any musical character; commonplace chords and scraps of indifferent melody succeed each other to fatigue. The length is sometimes enormous. ‘The Diver’ occupies nearly forty printed pages, and many others between fifteen and twenty.

It is more regrettable that some of the songs should be sad mixtures of greatness and triviality. ‘Death-Music’ is such a song. The opening bars have a deep solemnity, which is almost equal to the dignity of the theme, but seems just a little too thin or facile. Then on the words _Hebe aus dem ird’schen Ringen_ comes a passage which is one of Schubert’s great moments, and this is repeated in finer development on the words: _Alles grosses werd’ ich sehen_, until one can almost feel one’s self carried into the mysteries of death. But then follow three pages of melody which are irritating, for they have much beauty and expressiveness, but seem aimless and disorganized. In ‘Viola,’ which is a matter of twenty-one pages, there are one or two of the most gracious melodies Schubert ever wrote, but the song as a whole, what with length and formlessness, is hopeless. _Fülle der Liebe_, again, is both beautiful and expressive, altogether a distinguished piece of work, except that its movement soon becomes so monotonous that it is unendurable.

So Schubert is often betraying the rapidity with which he worked. But he has left us at least one hundred songs which are immortal. First of all, they are worth knowing for their wonderful stock of melodies, as pure and rich as any composer in the world has ever given us. The enchantment can hardly wear off with such melodies as those of ‘Praise of Tears,’ ‘The Trout,’ _Du bist die Ruh_, ‘The Linden Tree,’ ‘The Inn,’ ‘To Sylvia,’ ‘Litany,’ and ‘The Serenade.’

It is by no means the melody of the drawing-room. The dainty, snobbish grace of the French _bergerette_ is foreign to Schubert. He seems anxious to sing with everybody. It is recorded that one of his favorite pastimes was walking out with a friend on a Sunday afternoon to one of the villages in the neighborhood of Vienna, and watching the peasants dance and hearing them sing their songs. This popular sense persists in all Schubert’s music, however delicate may be his delineation of mood. He had nothing of the aristocrat in him. The son of a schoolmaster, accustomed to poverty, and accustomed to teach in an almost menial capacity in the house of Count Esterhazy, he acquired none of the tastes of the aristocrat and was content to take his pleasures as other people did. Besides, the whole tradition of German music has been remarkably close to the people. Even Mozart, the most polished of composers, wrote in ‘The Magic Flute’ music that would have delighted any peasant. So we are not surprised to find in Schubert’s lyrics a strain of folk-song, especially in the cadences and progressions which the Germans love so well. Take, for instance, the continually recurring cadence of the song _Sei mir gegrüsst_, or that of ‘Praise of Tears.’ It sets the spirit for the whole of the song. And it is taken from the very bone and sinew of German music. Or take the short middle section of ‘The Wanderer,’--in which the Wanderer cries out, ‘Where art thou, Where art thou, My beloved land!’--or the first of the Erl King’s songs in the ballad ‘The Erl King’; or the whole strophic tune of ‘The Fisher.’ Hum these over two or three times. Then take at random two or three German folk-songs--_Ach du lieber Augustin_ and _Immer langsam voran_, or what not, and hum these. And then two or three French _bergerettes_. The relationship of Schubert will then be quite clear. These matters of musical analogy are subtle and slippery. They cannot be established by analysis. But they can always be proved or disproved by the sympathetic ear.

But Schubert was writing art-songs, not folk-songs. Accordingly he was obliged to give more precise meanings to his melodies than folk-songs choose to give. He must not sing only of love or sorrow, but of a certain mood of love or sorrow. This is what we mean by the refinement of melody. Not that the unrefined melody is less worthy or less beautiful, only that it is less precise. In refining his tunes Schubert’s delicate artistic sense stood him in glorious stead. The _Ave Maria_ is first of all a beautiful German melody. But it is also a delicate, sensitive melody, which might have been sung by the essentially aristocratic Ellen. Or notice the delicacy of mood implied in Heine’s poem _Ihr Bild_. It is essentially a civilized mood, one which comes over a person inside of a house with the lights turned low, a mood which a folk-song would never be called upon to express. Schubert catches it in a few simple notes. He does not strain his melody in order to make it express an unusual mood. He selects his notes--that is, refines the melody--until its expression has become specific and accurate instead of broad and general.

This matter of melodic refinement (which must be divined by a sort of sixth sense) leads us to one of the essential characteristics of Schubert’s songs (and of art-songs in general)--namely, detailed expression. Here we can be more specific. Compared to later song-writers, Schubert makes very little effort to emphasize details in his texts. He is never willing in his lyrical pieces to distort or disturb the flow of the melody or the design of the whole, in order to illustrate a detail. But a slight study of his songs will show that he is never overlooking these details. And when it seems to him proper to give them precise expression, the device is always at his finger-tips. Take one of the loveliest of all his songs, _Das Wirthshaus_--‘The Inn’--from the cycle _Winterreise_. The whole song should be played through first to get the mood of weariness, of spiritual hunger and thirst, that pervades it. Then on the words _die müden Wandrer_--‘tired wanderers,’ comes this progression:

[Illustration: Music score]

die müden Wandrer laden ins kühle Wirtshaus ein

Notice the wonderful D flat of the accompaniment. And notice too with what magic the simple chords of the next measure seem to fit the word _kühle Wirtshaus_,--the ‘cool tavern.’ A little later, on the words: _bin matt zum Niedersinken_--‘tired to exhaustion’--is the following passage:

[Illustration: Music score]

bin matt zum Niedersinken und tötlich schwer verletzt

Notice the G flat of the accompaniment, how it creeps into the harmonic framework and gives poignancy to the expression. And then four measures further on, on the words: _doch weisest du mich ab?_--‘and do you turn me away?’--there is this very simple musical passage:

[Illustration: Music score]

Doch weisest du mich ab

Only one altered chord, that containing the B natural, but what pathos lies in it!

An even finer instance of musical delineation is the song _Der Doppelgänger_, the last but one that Schubert ever wrote. Mr. Henderson, in his ‘Songs and Song Writers,’ justly says that this wonderful song anticipates Wagner’s theories and methods. Here we have the continuous melody, the leit-motif (the first four measures of the accompaniment), the declamatory voice part, and the ‘orchestral comment’ which we associate with the Wagnerian music-dramas. We cannot fail to notice in this song the ghostly effect of the thick chords kept in the bass section of the pianoforte’s range, nor the uncanny effect of the short, almost gasping, phrases for the voice, nor the fierce picturing of terror on the words _meine eigne Gestalt_. What couldn’t Schubert have been in the history of music, asks Mr. Henderson, if he had lived!

Schubert’s command over modulation is facile and abundant. Sometimes there is no rest in the matter of modulation. Yet the changes of key and mode never seem strange. Tonalities melt into one another, and voices lead as naturally as they do in the simple key-schemes of Haydn. The best of examples is the wonderful song, _Die Allmacht_. Nominally in the key of C major, it remains actually in this key for only about a fifth of its length. The astonishing simplicity and inevitableness of Schubert’s modulations are well exemplified by the change from F major to G flat major on the words _Gross ist Jehovah der Herr_ (at their next to last appearance). Wagner used precisely this modulation about ten years later for the climax to the great prayer in the opera _Rienzi_. But we find it no uncommon thing to discover that strokes of genius in other composers have been anticipated in Schubert.

But the richness and smoothness of Schubert’s modulations, which are everywhere to be discovered in his songs, are not the most important qualities from the artistic standpoint. The important thing is the marvellous deftness with which the composer uses his modulation for expressive purposes. Let us return to _Das Wirtshaus_, a thorough knowledge of which is a liberal education in Schubert’s art. Modulation here is like flowing water. But notice especially the last (repeated) line of the poem: _Nun weiter denn, nun weiter, mein treuer Wanderstab_--‘then on again, my faithful wanderer’s staff.’ The first half of the line is in C minor. Then on the words _mein treuer Wanderstab_ it goes again into its original F major. The effect is past all analysis. We feel the tragic vista of life ahead of the man, the eternal trudging along white dusty roads. The human pathos of the modulation is intense.

It is interesting to notice, in passing, that Schubert gets his most tragic and pathetic effects out of the major mode rather than out of the minor. Besides the example just quoted one recalls the entrance of the major in _Ihr Bild_,--an effort of most delicate pathos; and the ending of ‘Death and the Maiden,’ in which the coming of the minor brings with it the feeling of deep human tragedy as contrasted with the somewhat spooky tragedy of the preceding minor. Schubert’s effects, though usually very simple, rarely come from a reliance on conventional means.

Another of Schubert’s expressive devices is famous. It is the dissonance of D flat against D against C (or a corresponding combination), recurring in ‘The Erl King’ when the boy shrieks in terror at the sight of the evil ghost. It was strenuously objected to by certain ones who heard it in Schubert’s time, and it is recorded that one of the objectors withdrew his criticism because the compound dissonance resolved so smoothly. The justification, if justification is needed, is something other than this. It is that the device is tremendously expressive.

In ‘The Erl King’ we cannot fail to notice how the triplet motive in the accompaniment binds the song closely together. In nearly every case Schubert finds some means of accomplishing this end, when the free form of the song might threaten to distract one’s attention. In a number of the _Müllerlieder_, in which the brook figures constantly, the rippling water is suggested (not imitated) in the accompaniment. The devices by which the suggestion is accomplished seem naïve to us to-day, but it is perhaps more artistic than an attempt at imitation would be.

Suggestive devices are innumerable. Note the movement of the breeze in ‘Suleika’s Second Song’; the opening chords, suggestive of deepening night over the sea, in _Am Meer_; the delicate will-o’-the-wisp figure in _Irrlicht_; the bass figure that suggests huge weight in _Atlas_; the leaping triplet figure in ‘The Trout’; the tragic snatches of melody in the bass of _Aufenthalt_, and so on without limit. It must be remembered that such details as these were much more of a novelty in Schubert’s time than now. A century ago the use of music for detailed expression was comparatively strange.

We should bear in mind, also, how slightly this attention to detail in Schubert affects the external unity of the song. Schubert’s method (except in the long declamatory pieces) was essentially lyrical. He wanted to write a piece of music which, while truly expressive of the words, would be a beautiful piece of music even without them. He kept the organization and proportion of his music, as such, always in view. The whole course of song after him illustrates the conflict (which was the origin of the art-song in the first place) between this formal design and accuracy of expression. A simple strophic song can, as we know, be quite perfect in design. But only rarely can it also be quite accurate in the expression of the words. The musical realist will seek to make the music detailed and expressive at all costs. The many to whom beauty comes first, on the other hand, will admit the realistic detail only when it accords with the beauty of the pattern. It is instructive to note how Schubert solves the problem. While he was never a formalist in the stricter sense of the word, his sense of pattern beauty was such as would be pained at a realistic detail that was detrimental to form. Judged by modern standards he was conservative in his procedure. But considering his conservatism he managed to get a wonderful amount of detailed expression into his songs. No song-writer has ever had a more delicate and accurate feeling for these details of human realism.

V

Schubert’s genius will never be known to people who imagine they know it from the half dozen hackneyed songs that are most famous--the ‘Serenade,’ ‘Hark, Hark the Lark!’ ‘Who Is Sylvia?’ and one or two others. There is a little group of Schubert songs which are rarely heard and almost forgotten, which are of great beauty, such as the _Wiegenlied_, _An die Sonne_, _Gretchen’s Gebet_, and _Clärchen’s Lied_. And there are scores of others, which are known in a vague way, but not well known to many a singer. No singer should attempt to sing one of Schubert’s songs in public without being familiar with most of these other lyrics.

Schubert reveals the folk genius in being able to achieve the highest beauty within the smallest compass. Such a snatch of melody as the first line of the ‘Litany’ is a work of pure genius. They say that the test of a picture is its ability to be ‘lived with.’ The same is true of a melody. The first line of the ‘Litany,’ as well as the whole of it, can be sung each day and never lose its charm. It has all the suave grace of a tune out of Italian opera. It might become cloying and sentimental. But it does not. It remains dignified and sincere. It reveals ever new beauties and adorable traits of character which could not be suspected at first glance. This kind of genius is beyond the analytical powers of the musical theorist to explain. The greatness of large forms--for instance, a symphony by Beethoven--can in part be explained, just as a very correct symphony can be written by a man without talent. But to write greatly within half a dozen bars--this is a miracle. Only the folk-composer and the highest conscious genius can achieve it.

We see the same genius in the final measures of ‘Death and the Maiden.’ The Maiden sees Death approaching, and begs him to pass by. He replies that he has not come to cause her pain. He is a friend and will give her peace and joy. And the music, a succession of the simplest chords, glides gradually into a major that seems to wring the tears by main force from the eyes. Every now and then Schubert introduces unexpectedly such a musical phrase, which seems to concentrate into half a dozen notes all the sincerity of the German genius. We find it in the ‘Second Harper’s Song’ of the Mignon series, on the words: _Ihr lässt den Armen schuldig werden_:

[Illustration: Music score]

Ihr lässt Armen schulig werden

or in the ‘Praise of Tears’:

[Illustration: Music score]

aler lenza und Jugendlust

or in _Der Lindenbaum_:

[Illustration: Music score]

so manches liebe Wort

Of the songs that ‘sing themselves,’ Schubert has written many. We must mention ‘The Fisher,’ which is unusual in song literature as being a true ballad in strophe form; the ‘Heather Rose,’ which retains the quality of Goethe’s words in that it must be intimately known to be appreciated; _Wohin_, from the _Müllerlieder_, in which the tune seems to flow as inevitably as the brook which is the motive of it; ‘The Trout,’ the melody of which Schubert used as the theme of the last movement of his famous string quartet; and the ‘Lullaby,’ mentioned above. The flowing quality of these songs is due to the fact that they are closely in accord with the felt traditions of German music, containing a maximum of the usual and a minimum of the unusual, while remaining unique and creative as a whole. In other words, they have an abundance of the expected and nothing of the commonplace. And this is why it is of such extreme value for every musician to be familiar with a quantity of songs. Simple songs which are great in their human appeal have concentrated within themselves all that people throughout the centuries have agreed upon as beautiful. They contain in the simplest form the elements of all great complex music. The singer who can appreciate and love the simple song is not likely to go astray in singing the works of Strauss and Reger.

But Schubert’s particular historic claim to greatness is his introduction of precise musical expression into the Song. This takes all forms--a variety as broad as his wonderful genius. In ‘Sea Calm’ it is a succession of quiet and slow chords, which preserve the evenness of the calm sea without its monotony. In ‘The Wanderer,’ it is a succession of slightly different emotions, each lyrically expressed, culminating in the impressive recitative. First the Wanderer announces that he has come from the mountains, ever searching for something. Then the lovely melody which Schubert later used in one of his quartets--the motive of unsatisfied wandering. Then, with a change of sentiment, comes the cause of the unrest--‘Where art thou, My Native Land?’--a mere snatch of rich song. Then a quick movement as the Wanderer sees in his mind’s eye the fresh greenness of his native hills. Then the moody wanderer’s motive once more. And finally the two lines of recitative--with all the beauty of poetry and all the force of prose--‘There, where thou art not, there is happiness.’

‘The Young Nun,’ though it has perhaps been overrated, shows a powerful dramatic expression of the singer’s feeling as interpreted by surrounding nature (a favorite device of the Romantic poets). The song rises into religious exaltation, with the thunderstorm outside, as the nun returns resignedly to the praise of her religious contemplation. _Die Allmacht_ is a song in the most exalted style of Beethoven, but executed with a technique which is utterly of the romantic school. God is praised by all his works, by the storm no less than by the devout heart in prayer. Each is expressed by Schubert in a musical passage of great beauty. Yet each section is but an inextricable part of the symphonic movement--for religious adoration is not a collection of separate feelings, but a great emotional synthesis. The music for Goethe’s wonderful ‘Wanderer’s Evensong’ is no less remarkable for the musical blending of shades of emotion. But it is something more, something which is in the highest degree typical of the art-song. For it follows the words, not only in expression but in accent, so that not a syllable is falsified. No recitative could be more just to the spoken value of the words. In fact, this song can be read as a pure recitative, in which the words, spoken sincerely and unaffectedly, correspond exactly with the music. And yet, looked at from the other side, it is a perfect melody. This blending of the declamatory and lyrical elements in a perfect synthesis is true to the spirit of the art-song. For no art-song is good that does any sort of violence to the text, as it would be spoken. And yet no art-song is a song if it has not a musical beauty of its own. And it is one of the highest tests of the trained singer to give full value to both these elements, without letting either crowd out the other. ‘Gretchen’s Prayer’ is another fine example of this, less simple but no less perfect. Here, as the supplication rises into emotional entreaty, the music becomes more independently lyrical, floating in air as though to bear the petition to a higher sphere.

Schubert is the great exemplar of a form which has been cultivated by almost every composer since his time--the song-cycle. He was not the originator of the form, for Beethoven (in addition to others) had written a true song-cycle in _An die Ferne Geliebte_. But Schubert was the first to show the full possibilities of the song-cycle.

He has left us three such works--the _Müllerlieder_, of twenty songs; the _Winterreise_, of twenty-four; and the _Schwanengesang_, of fourteen. The last was not planned by the composer as a cycle, but was issued as such by his publisher just after his death, when (as has so often been the case) the Germans had waked up partially to the genius they had lost. And for once the commercial publisher was justified. For the songs were actually Schubert’s swansong, being written in the last few weeks of his life (the final one of the series was the very last of his compositions). Moreover, they are of a pessimistic character which is rarely betrayed in Schubert’s earlier works.

The _Müllerlieder_, or ‘Miller’s Songs,’ were composed by Schubert in his first enthusiasm over Wilhelm Müller’s poems. It is related that he went to call upon a friend one evening, found the friend out but discovered the book lying upon his table, became immersed in it while waiting, and finally walked away with it in his pocket. The next day he apologized for the borrowing, pleading that the poems had inspired some beautiful melodies, and he felt he had to write the music for them all. The friend forgave him, as have all who have since learned to know the songs he wrote to those words.

The Miller Songs tell a connected story, after the manner of Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’ by making each one of the poems the lyrical expression of the hero in his successive moods. The hero of Müller’s cycle is a typical figure of the German romanticism. He is a wanderer on the face of the earth, a sensitive, introspective man, a friend of sorrow and in love with unhappiness. To us he seems a rather ridiculous figure. But he was taken seriously enough by the Germans of the time, who had good cause to be pessimistic over the disorganized state of their country and their national life. This miller hero is suffering from unrequited love, which was a favorite theme of the romanticists. But, above all, in the spirit of the time, he is a lover of nature. He sees in nature a reflection of his own moods and sorrows. Nature seems to us to be one of the staples of lyric poems--worn to the bone. But, as a matter of fact, nature is a rather recent invention of civilized man’s. The Alps were ‘discovered’ by the poets no earlier than the eighteenth century. Certain early poems, notably the Iliad, show a feeling for natural beauty. But the study of nature as a cult, the conscious effort to find moods and meanings in her, is hardly more than a century and a half old. Folk poetry contains very little of it, and then usually only in sentimental connotations. In Schubert’s time nature was still a recent discovery and a thrilling one. So Schubert’s contemporaries, apart from their pessimism, were able to immerse themselves in such poetry as that of the _Müllerlieder_ and the _Winterreise_ without feeling the strained preciosity which we inevitably feel in it in our realistic age. As they stood and in their time the _Müllerlieder_ were admirably suited to romantic musical treatment by Schubert.

In the first song, ‘Wandering,’ the hero is happy enough in his simple melodic tramping about the countryside. Knowing Schubert’s own predilections in that direction, we feel that he must have put some of his own enthusiasm into the song. In the second song of the series, ‘Whither?’ he meets a rippling brook, and is filled with romantic wonderings and presentiments concerning its destination. Can we doubt that it leads him to his future beloved? He follows it and comes upon a lovely mill, whose wheel is propelled by the brook, simple, of beneficent and sympathetic nature. The wanderer applies to the miller for work and is taken on. Thereupon, in a beautiful song, he pays his thanks--to the brook. In the fifth song, _Feierabend_, he has become as one of the miller’s family. He loves, like a true apprentice out of Wagner’s _Meistersinger_, to hear the master, at the close of a day’s work, say ‘Well done!’ But most of all he is happy because he has met the miller’s daughter.

In the sixth song, ‘Curiosity,’ he is in perplexity, and turns, as every romantic youth of the time did, to nature for help. ‘Does she love me?’ he is persistently asking, and he addresses his question to the brook. In the next song, ‘Impatience,’ his attraction for the girl has become a full-fledged passion. ‘_Dein ist mein Herz!_’ he cries ecstatically. In ‘Morning Greeting’ he addresses some pretty stanzas and compliments to the miller’s daughter. The tenth song is an excellent example, in simple form, of the delicate mood which, as we have said, it is the special province of the art-song to express. The young miller and the girl are sitting together--beside the brook, of course. She gets up and goes into the house, and the tears come to his eyes. In the next song the miller’s daughter has accepted and returned his love, and in the following one he is at joyful peace with nature, and is praising the green ribbon which his loved one wears.

But then enters the tragic complication. For we hear a hunter’s horn, and the handsome young hunter descends upon the peaceful mill. The miller previsages the meaning of this. In the fifteenth song he is struggling between pride and jealousy. Then he is once more praising the dear color--green, which his sweetheart loves because it is like the fresh green of nature. And in the next song he is cursing the hateful color (the same green) because its wearer is no longer true to him. In the eighteenth song the miller’s daughter has given her love to the huntsman, and the young miller has lost hope. The dead flowers (for fall has come) express the state of his heart. These flowers must lie upon his grave. But--when the loved one passes by the grave let the flowers burst once more into fresh bloom. In the nineteenth song the miller holds a conversation with his beloved brook, which suggests to him the sweet suicide which was ultra-fashionable in all romantic literature of the time. And in the beautiful last song of the cycle the brook sings to sleep the dead man by its side.

The poems are all truly lyrical, and invite musical setting. They rise to no marked poetic heights, but are thoroughly poetic and emotional in feeling. Though Schubert did not achieve a uniform standard of excellence throughout the series, the general average is high. The first song, ‘Wandering,’ has a memorable melody of a simple sort, and the second, which we have mentioned above, is one of his masterpieces. ‘Impatience,’ though formal and strophic in structure, has an unrestrained sweep of feeling which is rare in Schubert and looks forward to the later romanticists of music. The ‘Morning Greeting’ is a simple Italianate melody of great beauty, one which is likely to lead astray the singer who tries to give it overmuch ‘expression.’ ‘The Hunter’ is spirited, but has no great musical value. ‘Jealousy and Pride,’ though not very attractive musically, is interesting as an example of Schubert’s discriminating use of the simplest kind of accompaniment for precise emotional expression. _Die liebe Farbe_, however, is one of the masterpieces. It is almost French in its thread-like delicacy, but this will prove a pitfall for the singer who has not attained full control of the niceties of vocal expression. The formal daintiness of the song is like the allegretto of some toy symphony. And at the same time it is neatly expressive of the playful mood of the words. The contrast of the companion song, _Die böse Farbe_, of course offers a problem to the interpretive singer.

But perhaps the most masterful song of the cycle is the eighteenth, ‘Dead Flowers.’ This, in moderate two-four time, is strikingly like the allegretto movement of Schubert’s C major symphony, one of the loveliest of all his orchestral pieces. The entrancing modulation from an undecided minor to a spirited major on the words ‘_Der Mai ist gekommen, der Winter ist aus_,’ is a touch which any lover of Schubert would recognize as his unmistakably at the first hearing. But don’t miss the finer art of this lovely passage, for the joyousness of the major is deceptive; the miller is black at heart over his failure in love, and is only beguiling himself in a passing moment. Notice, therefore, the plaintiveness of the accompaniment on this passage.

‘The Miller and the Brook’ is an interesting example of the half lyrical, half declamatory style which Schubert sometimes adopts, as we have seen. But the last piece of the cycle is pure song. It is hard to analyze the plaintive character of this melody, and hard especially to understand how the augmented fourth, traditionally considered a harsh interval, becomes at Schubert’s hands an instrument of deep emotional expression.

It has often been pointed out that the motive of the brook gives a subtle unity to this song cycle, and that the motive is preserved in Schubert’s music. From the rippling triplets of the accompaniment of ‘Whither,’ the first song in which the brook enters, to the cradling motion of the accompaniment to the last, the brook is almost continuously in the piano part. But, though Schubert’s feeling here is extremely delicate, his technical means are of the simplest. If it is realism, it is realism of the most primitive sort. We should not be misled by the praise of the ‘brook music’ in this cycle. True descriptive music, whether for good or for bad, did not enter song until after Schubert. And we should further remember that, although Schubert was indeed the first great composer of the song-cycle, he never gave the form the unity and inner meaning which was imparted to it by Schumann, and which is typical of it to our minds.

The _Müllerlieder_ reveal admirably the tender interpretation of sentiment of which Schubert was such a master. But they are by no means songs of a greatness equal to that of his next cycle, the _Winterreise_. The ‘winter journey’ taken by the hero (Müller again is the poet) is a pilgrimage in search of forgetfulness after an unhappy love affair. Even more than the _Müllerlieder_, it is an essay in the interpretation of nature in terms of human sentiments. The songs, indeed, are little more than a series of parallels drawn between the scene of the winter landscape and the feelings of the hero. They are a personalizing of the weather, a dramatization of the thermometer.

In the first song the hero tells of his lost sweetheart, and sings to the memory of her a touching ‘Good-night’ lullaby. The second hears the wind playing about the roof of the house, and suggests that even so circumstances play with man’s heart. In the third he finds the cold air freezing his tears--thus his very sorrow has become fixed and rigid. The fourth is a vision of the world paralyzed in the cold of winter: his heart is frozen and her picture is blotted out of it. In the fifth he remembers the linden tree under which they spent their happiest hours.

So the songs go, one after another. The ninth is the ‘Will-o’-the-wisp’ song; he will not be misled by these false lights, for his heart has been misled by such beacons before. In the next, ‘Rest,’ the hero tells how he is so occupied by the pain of his travelling and the pain of his sorrow that only when he lays his body down to rest at night does he realize how tired he is. From this point on the great songs of the cycle are numerous. The thirteenth, ‘The Post,’ pictures the galloping of the approaching mail coach, with the blowing of its horn. Is there a letter for him? No, for he is alone in the wide world. The post departs--in a minor key. In the fourteenth song, _Der greise Kopf_, he notices that the frost has made his hair white, and he thinks of himself as an old man, and wishes he could be many years removed from his sorrow. In the long and somewhat descriptive song, _Im Dorfe_, he enters a village and the dogs bark at the lonely wanderer; even so the world is strange and hostile to him. In _Täuschung_ (‘Illusion’) he sees a light in the distance, and hopes it comes from a hospitable farmhouse. But, alas! the light was an illusion, like the rest of the things we hope for in life.

Then come five final songs--every one a masterpiece of the first order. The _Wegweiser_ tells of the sign-post the hero sees on the road. But there is another sign-post which is also directing him on his longer road and it points relentlessly the way to Death. Yet, in the next song, _Das Wirtshaus_, when he approaches a graveyard, he finds no welcome awaiting: the rooms of this tavern are all occupied. Death itself will not soothe his loneliness. In the next song, ‘Courage,’ he makes a final despairing effort to free himself from his misery by pure force of will-power. If the snow flies in his face, he will dash it aside. He will laugh loud and merrily. If life is an illusion, he will _make_ it worth while. If there are no gods on earth, we ourselves shall be gods. But this mood cannot last. He sees two false suns in the heavens, in addition to the one that has always been there. But they vanish, like the two suns of earlier years--the eyes of his beloved. Only one more sun need vanish and blessed night will come for him.

We are spared the suicide which we might expect in the final song of the cycle. The wanderer comes upon an old man playing the grind-organ. He grinds out what music he can, but his little money-box remains ever empty. The wanderer feels the brotherhood between himself and the old man. ‘Play my songs on your grind-organ,’ he asks. People have suggested that this bit of verse must have come very close to Schubert’s heart; for he, too, had made what music he could, he too was alone in the world, and he too found his little money-box always empty.

Of the songs of this cycle at least a third rank with Schubert’s best. ‘The Lindentree,’ with its simple strophic melody, is almost a folk-song among the German people. _Die Post_ is justly admired because of the way it blends a mild realism with high melodic and interpretative beauty. _Der greise Kopf_ is especially interesting as pointing forward to the more complex and delineative style of several of Schubert’s later songs, with its melodic peculiarity of outline and the extreme importance given the accompaniment. In superficial texture it much resembles _Die Stadt_ (‘The Town’) from his last song group.

‘The Signpost’ however, is more truly representative of Schubert’s genius. The movement of the song is symphonic, much like that of the ‘Dead Flowers’ in the _Müllerlieder_. Its steady pulse of rhythm avoids monotony by the most delicate of harmonic movement in the inner parts. As the tragedy deepens toward the end of the song the steady beat of the melody continues for whole measures on a single tone. And in half notes a bass and an alto voice move chromatically toward each other through the best part of an octave. The device would be a trick in the hands of a lesser genius; with Schubert it becomes poetic interpretation. This wonderful song is abundantly worth careful study; in particular, the harmonic freedom, combined with liquid smoothness of voice progression, reveals the romantic strain in the composer’s equipment and something of his peculiar contribution to the development of music’s expressive resources.

Of ‘The Inn’ we have already spoken. The deep and tragic sweetness of it grows on one, impressive as it is at first hearing. This particular mood of tragic sweetness is a pitfall for composers. With any but the genius it is sure to become maudlin. With Schubert it became heartrending.

Such a song as ‘Courage’ cannot be overpraised. The compressed energy of its movement is not that of animal life, but of moral effort. Human will-power is felt throughout it. The change from minor to major (Schubert to the bone) in the last lines makes the hearer’s blood surge to dizziness. It is one of the most difficult songs to sing. For its energy may so easily be taken for animal spirits. It is just the song to ‘run away’ with the singer. And when once the singer has lost mental control of it, it becomes pitiless toward him. The tonic arpeggio of the last line requires ultimate exactness of vocal control. And from beginning to end the least inaccuracy of intonation or accent will be evident to the audience like a black streak on a white shirt-front.

_Nebensonnen_ (‘Satellites’) is of utmost simplicity. It is so unassuming that for a moment it seems all but trivial. Yet this is the tender modesty of great lyric expression. The song is a test of the singer’s taste. The least over-sentimentalization of it will make the judicious grieve. A thousand times better to make it too simple and too prosaic than too emotional.

The last song, ‘The Organ Grinder,’ is written over a monotonous ‘drone bass,’ imitative of a primitive grind-organ. The melody is apparently as crude as the instrument that is supposed to have played it. But somewhere in it one hears--one knows not how--the deep strain of pathos which is one of Schubert’s miracles.

The third cycle, ‘Swan Songs,’ is matter for amazement to every student of Schubert. For its composer, in the space of fifteen years since he first began writing in earnest, seems to have become a totally new man with a totally new musical technique. It is traditionally hard for a musician to change his technique once it is firmly ingrown. The greatest musicians only--Beethoven, Wagner, and a few others--have been able to do it. That Schubert could do it--in addition to the fact that he was thus willing further to endanger his chances of material success--proves the marvellous richness of his natural endowment. When one considers that these songs were written by a man who had just passed his thirtieth year one is ‘teased out of thought’ with the curiosity as to what he would have become in music had he lived. Some have answered--‘the greatest composer of all time.’ The speculation is fascinating, and it makes us love our Schubert the better.

The fourteen ‘Swan Songs’ are written to seven texts by Rellstab, one by J. G. Seydl, and six by Heine. The last fact makes us pause. Rarely has there been so rich a lyric poet as Heine, probably never one who could so inspire song writers. His first book of lyrics had been published only shortly before Schubert’s death, and the composer had set six of them before his final illness. Of these six, five are enduring masterpieces. If only Schubert’s genius could have been mated to Heine’s through the succeeding ten years!

The seven Rellstab songs include the universally known ‘Serenade,’ the beauty of which is too obvious and too familiar to need further comment. Another and greater song of the list is _Aufenthalt_. The speaker’s ‘abode’ is among the rugged cliffs, and he reflects that his sorrow is as unshakable as the eternal rocks. The furious sweep of the song’s movement is breathless. Beneath and above the triplets of the accompaniment is always a passionate and despairing melody. When the voice rests for a moment the piano, in marvellous imitation, takes up the strain. The climax, on the words ‘_starrender Fels_,’ is terrific. The final half-declaimed phrase is almost Greek in its severe nobility.

Of the Heine songs the best known is _Am Meer_ (‘By the Sea’). The introductory chords scored in the bass express the impenetrable mystery of the sea. The very simple melody is the essence of moody retrospection. Such a work as this is as supreme among songs as the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in orchestral music. _Die Stadt_ and _Der Atlas_ show the great importance which Schubert accorded to the accompaniment and the freedom with which he had come to handle it. In _Ihr Bild_ (‘Her Picture’) we have another of Schubert’s very simple melodies--and how impressive in its simplicity! Perhaps Heine was never more perfectly set to music than in this instance.

The wonderful _Doppelgänger_, unique among Schubert’s works, has already been mentioned. Mr. Henderson is right in his judgment of this piece. It is Wagnerism before Wagner’s time. It is the technique of the latter half of the nineteenth century previsaged by the genius of a poor and shy school-teacher living in a cheap Vienna lodging. It is a vision and a prophecy.

Of the ballads we need say little. Strangely enough not one of them is of the finest quality, or truly representative of Schubert, except that one which was the first of his songs to be published, and one of the half dozen to be most widely known--the ‘Erl King.’ It is strange, and disappointing, when we consider the perfection of this early attempt, that Schubert left the ballad, one of the most attractive of song forms, to his contemporary, Löwe, a man who had not a tenth part of his talent. ‘The King of Thule’ is one of the best of the remainder, but it is immensely surpassed by Liszt’s setting. The ‘Fisher Boy’ is charming, but being in the strophic form, is no contribution to the development of the form. ‘The Young Nun,’ fine as it is, is too rhetorical to satisfy a true lover of Schubert. In his more declamatory style Schubert often fails even to be interesting. ‘The Singer,’ to words by Goethe, is workmanly declamation such as any man of talent might have written. The Ossian songs, of which ‘Kolma’s Complaint’ is the best, reflect the somewhat strained verbosity of the words, and fail to convince with their beauty. The same is true of Schubert’s setting to Klopstock’s scena, ‘Hermann and Thusnelda.’ Pomp and circumstance drown out the music. For the true Schubert we must leave the larger forms and return to the shorter lyrics, which reveal the composer’s highest glory--the greatest beauty in the simplest terms.

VI

The writing of songs during Schubert’s time, and immediately before, was carried on on an amazing scale. It is not unusual to find composers of the time writing thousands of them. These songs have practically vanished from modern song-programs. But many of them were extremely popular at the time, and remain staples in the repertories of singing societies. Not a few of them have become folk-songs second to none in popularity. The simple form of most of these little lyrics almost precludes their having any importance in the history of song development, but it would be a pity if they were lost altogether to the student of singing.

The age in which they were written was, as we have seen, the great age of German national feeling. The intense sincerity and manliness of a Körner or an Arndt filled the whole nation with generous sentiments, contrasting with the delicate refinement of the French culture on the one hand, and the morbid introspection of the German romanticists on the other. Patriotic and military songs abounded. It was also the age of the formation of the male singing-societies which have since become such a typical feature of German life, and composers wrote freely for the four-part male chorus, or for the male solo voice. It was also the age of the awakening interest in folk-literature, and German history or legend furnished many a tale for men to sing around the festive board, or for nurses to sing to the children at night. Finally, it was the age of republican sentiment in Germany, the age when an idealistic and naïve nation was still expecting the reigning house to give constitutional government once the people had freed themselves from French rule. It was a Germany very different from the Germany we have seen since the Franco-Prussian war--a Germany that was less practical, less commercial, less ambitious, but infinitely more simple and lyric. Hence the output of fine songs was enormous. Never was the German genius more spontaneous; never was it more truly German. The songs of the time, which repose by the thousands in old _Kommersbücher_, and have sifted by scores into modern song collections, are the very breath of fresh air and generous spirits.

At the period of Schubert’s early activity Weber was the great national composer of the Germans. We have seen elsewhere[22] how German national sentiment centred around his music when the German kings turned traitor and sought to force the people back into an age of eighteenth-century reactionism. His opera, _Der Freischütz_, was a sort of Marseillaise in time of exile for the lovers of German liberty and union. But earlier than this Weber had made himself the chief national musical figure in Germany. His settings of Körner’s fiery _Leyer und Schwert_ songs had raised him from a hardworking kapellmeister into a household name. The newly formed singing societies took up the songs, and at least one, the ‘Sword Song,’ has lived to this day. But in addition to these purely national and military songs, Weber wrote a great number of others, all in simple form and in the direct folk-spirit which he mastered as no other composer mastered it before or since. Many of them are sung still. But the great majority have by this time become quite outdated. We need only refer to one--the charming lullaby _Schlaf, Herzenssöhnchen, mein Liebling bist du_.

Three composers preëminently continued Weber’s work as composer of German opera--Conradin Kreutzer (1780-1849), Albert Lortzing (1801-1851), and Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861). Of these, Kreutzer was peculiarly close to the German popular genius. His settings of Uhland’s _Wanderlieder_ are very fine, _In die Ferne_ being particularly worthy of study. Kreutzer, too, was one of the most successful composers of male choruses; his elaborate chorale, _Das ist der Tag des Herrn_, will probably be remembered as long as German music exists. Lortzing and Marschner freely introduced simple strophic songs into their operas, and by these are chiefly known. Their style was as simple as Weber’s and the historical development of song at their hands (slight in any case) is in a different direction from that which Schubert took. Their melodies are not inappropriate, but we look in vain in them for any of the close emotional interpretation which we find so abundantly in Schubert.

But the finest songs of this semi-popular style (_volkstümliche Lieder_) were written by men who have no other claim to greatness. We may mention F. H. Himmel (1765-1814), Methfessel (1785-1869), Nägeli (1773-1836), Lindpainter (1791-1861), and Silcher (1789-1860). These are the true writers of modern German folk-songs. The energy of their music is of an elementary sort which the more highly trained composer rarely equals. They live to-day in every gathering of German students, in every Männerchor, in every nursery. Ten people are familiar with their songs to one who knows who the composers were. But the gifts these composers have left to their people are co-extensive with German culture.

Methfessel is direct and virile, the singer of battles and of the manly virtues of the great ancestors. How compelling is the vigor of ‘_Stimmt an, mit hellem Klang_’! And what a boiling of the blood is in his fiery setting of Arndt’s ‘The God Who Made the Iron Grow!’ Nägeli is softer and more sentimental. We remember him chiefly by _Freut euch des Lebens_ and the charming ‘Good-Night.’ Lindpainter was less talented, and his songs, which partook of a romantic nature, have almost disappeared. But Himmel is among the greatest. His setting of Körner’s ‘Prayer on the Eve of Battle’ (vastly superior to Schubert’s) is one of the deepest expressions of religious faith in all song literature. His ‘Ballad of the Three Tailors,’ from _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_, is a delightful example of the typical Studentenlied. And one should not overlook his four songs from _Alexis und Ida_, in which he shows a delicacy of sentiment approaching that of Schubert though he wrote them some years before the composition of the ‘Erl King.’

Finally, there is Silcher, who is to Germany exactly what Stephen Foster is to America. His songs are innumerable, and the number of great folk-songs among them is astonishing. The very heart of German music pulses in Silcher. The famous ‘Loreley’ melody is his, and also _Zu Strassburg auf der Schanz_ and the wonderful _Lebewohl_. He is one of the three or four composers in the world who could with any considerable frequency equal the beauty and directness of folk-songs. He is a text for this chapter. Only the student who knows and loves Silcher can truly know and love Schubert.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

[21] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).

[22] Vol. II, p. 230 ff.