CHAPTER VII

SONG LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Lyric poetry and song--The song before Schubert--Franz Schubert; Carl Löwe--Robert Schumann; Robert Franz; Mendelssohn and Chopin; Franz Liszt as song writer.

Song in the modern sense (the German word _Lied_ expresses it) is peculiarly a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. In the preceding centuries it can hardly be said to have claimed the attention of composers. Vocal solos of many sorts there had, of course, been; but they were of one or another formal type and are sharply to be contrasted with the song of Schubert, Schumann, and Franz. If a prophet and theorist of the year 1800, foreknowing what was to be the spirit of the romantic age, had sketched out an ideal art form for the perfect expression of that spirit he would surely have hit upon the song. The fact that song was not composed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proves how predominantly formal and how little expressive in purpose the music of that time was.

It is strange how little of the lyrical quality (in the poet’s sense of the term) there was in the music of the eighteenth century. The lyric is that form of poetry which expresses individual emotion. It is thus sharply to be contrasted in spirit with all other forms--the epic, which tells a long and heroic story; the narrative, which tells a shorter and more special story; the dramatic, which pictures the characters as acting; the satiric, the didactic, and the other forms of more or less objective intent. No less is the lyric to be contrasted with the other types in point of form. For, whereas the epic, the dramatic, and the rest can add detail upon detail at great length, and lives by its quantity of good things, the lyric stands or falls at the first blow. Either it transmits to the reader the emotion it seeks to express, or it does not, and if it does not then the longer it continues the greater bore it becomes. For all the forms of objective poetry can get their effect by reproducing objective details in abundance. But to transmit an emotion one must somehow get at the heart of it--by means of a suggestive word or phrase or of a picture that instantly evokes an emotional experience. The accuracy of the lyrical expression depends upon selecting just the right details and omitting all the rest. Thus the lyric must necessarily be short, while most of the other poetic forms can be indefinitely extended.

And, besides, an emotion usually lasts in its purity only for a moment. You divine it the instant it is with you, or you have lost it. It cannot be prolonged by conscious effort; it cannot be recalled by thinking about it. The expression of it will therefore last but for a moment. It must be caught on the wing. And the power so to catch an emotion is a very special power. Few poets have had it in the highest degree. Those who have had it, such as Burns, Goethe, or Heine, can, in a dozen lines or so, take their place beside the greatest poets of all time. The special beauty of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ or ‘_Der du von dem Himmel bist_’ or ‘_Du bist wie eine Blume_’ is as far removed from that of the longer poem--say, ‘Il Penseroso’ or Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Man’--as a tiny painting by Vermeer is from a canvas by Veronese. Emotional expression, of course, exists in many types of poetry, but it cannot be sustained and hence is only a sort of recurrent by-product. The lyric is distinguished by the fact that in it individual emotional expression is the single and unique aim.

This lyric spirit is obviously seldom to be found in the ‘art’ music of the eighteenth century. It is not too much to say that music in that age was regarded as dignified in proportion to its length. The clavichord pieces of Rameau or Couperin were hardly more than after-dinner amusements; and the fugues and preludes of Bach, for all the depth of the emotion in them and despite their flexible form, were primarily technical exercises. The best creative genius of the latter half of the century was expended upon the larger forms--the symphony, the oratorio, the opera, the mass.

All the qualities which are peculiar to the lyric in poetry we find in the song--the _Lied_--of the nineteenth century. A definition or description of the one could be applied almost verbatim to the other. The lyric song must be brief, emotional, direct. Like the lyric poem, it cannot waste a single measure; it must create its mood instantly. It is personal; it seeks not to picture the emotion in general, but the particular emotion experienced by a certain individual. It is unique; no two experiences are quite alike, and no two songs accurately expressive of individual experiences can be alike. It is sensuous; emotions are felt, not understood, and the song must set the hearer’s soul in vibration. It is intimate; one does not tell one’s personal emotions to a crowd, and the true song gives each hearer the sense that he is the sole confidant of the singer. Musical architecture, in the older sense, has very little to do with this problem. Individual expression goes its own way, and the music must accommodate itself to the form of the text. Abundance of riches is only in a limited way a virtue in a good song. The great virtue is to select just the right phrase to express the particular mood. Fine sensibilities are needed to appreciate a good song, for the song is a personal confession, and one can understand a friend’s confession only if one has sensitive heart-strings.

Thus the song was peculiarly fitted to express a large part of the spirit of the romantic period. This period, which appreciated the individual more than any other age since the time of Pericles (with the possible exception of the Italian Renaissance), which sought to make the form subsidiary to the sense, which sought to get at the inner reality of men’s feelings, which longed for sensation and experience above all other things--this period expressed itself in a burst of spontaneous song as truly as the drama expressed Elizabethan England, or the opera expressed eighteenth century Italy.

I

Lyrical song begins with Schubert. Before him there was no standard of that form which he brought almost instantaneously to perfection. It is hard for us to realize how little respect the eighteenth century composer had for the short song. His attitude was not greatly unlike the attitude of modern poets toward the limerick. Gluck set his hand to a few indifferent tunes in the song-form, and Haydn and Mozart tossed off a handful, most of which are mediocre. These men simply did not consider the song worthy of the best efforts of a creative artist.

If we take a somewhat broader definition of the word song we find that it has been a part of music from the beginning. Folk-song, beginning in the prehistoric age of music, has kept pretty much to itself until recent times, and has had a development parallel with art music. From time to time it has served as a reservoir for this art music, opening its treasures richly when the conscious music makers had run dry. Thus it was in the time of the troubadours and trouvères (themselves only go-betweens) who took the songs of the people and gave them currency in fashionable secular and church music. So it was again in the time of Luther, who used the familiar melodies of his time to build up his congregational chorales (a great part of the basis of German music from that day to this). So it was again in the time of Schubert, who enjoyed nothing better than walking to country merry-makings to hear the country people sing their songs of a holiday. And so it has been again in our own day, when national schools--Russian, Spanish, Scandinavian and the rest--are flourishing on the treasures of their folk-songs. And when we say that song began with Schubert we must not forget that long before him, though almost unrecognized, there existed songs among the people as perfect and as expressive as any that composers have ever been able to invent. But these songs are constructed in the traditional verse-form and are, therefore, very different from most of the art songs of the nineteenth century, which are detailed and highly flexible.

Of the songs composed before the time of Schubert, mostly by otherwise undistinguished men, the greater part were in the simple form and style of the folk-song. A second element in pre-Schubertian song was the chorale. The _Geistliche Lieder_ (Spiritual Songs) of J. S. Bach were nothing but chorales for solo voice. And the spirit and harmonic character of the chorale, little cultivated in romantic song, are to be found in a good part of the song literature of the eighteenth century. A third element in eighteenth century song was the _da capo_ aria of the opera or oratorio. Many detached lyrics were written in this form, or even to resemble the more highly developed sonata form--as, for instance, Haydn’s charming ‘My Mother Bids Me Bind My Hair,’ which is otherwise as expressive and appropriate a lyric as one could ask for. The effect of such an artificial structure on the most intimate and delicate of art forms was in most cases deadly, and songs of this type were little more than oratorio arias out of place.

It will be seen that each of these sorts of song has some structural form to distinguish it. The folk-song, which must be easy for untechnical persons to memorize, naturally is cast in the ‘strophic’ form--that is, one in which the melody is a group of balanced phrases (generally four, eight, or sixteen), used without change for all the stanzas of the song. The chorale or hymn tune is much the same, being derived from the folk-song and differing chiefly in its more solid harmonic accompaniment. And the _da capo_ aria is distinguished and defined by its formal peculiarity.

Now it is evident that for free and detailed musical expression the melody must be allowed to take its form from the words and that none of these three traditional forms can be allowed to control the musical structure. And the _Lied_ of the nineteenth century is chiefly distinguished, at least as regards externals, by this freedom of form. Such a song, following no traditional structure, but answering to the peculiarities of the text throughout, is the _durchkomponiertes Lied_, or song that is ‘composed all the way through,’ which Schubert established once and for all as an art-type.

But in its heart of hearts the ‘art’ song at its best remains an own cousin to the folk-song. This art, the mother of art and the fountain of youth to all arts that are senescent, takes what is typical, what is common to all men, casts it into a form which is intelligible to all men, and passes through a thousand pairs of lips and a thousand improvements until it is past the power of men further to perfect it. Its range of subject is as wide as life itself, only it chooses not what is individual and peculiar, but what is universal and typical. It has a matchless power for choosing the expressive detail and the dramatic moment. An emotion which shakes nations it can concentrate into a few burning lines. It is never conscious that it is great art; it takes no thought for the means; it is only interested in expressing its message as powerfully and as simply as possible. In doing this it hits upon the phrases that are at the foundation of our musical system, at the cadences which block in musical architecture upon the structure from which all conscious forms are derived.

This popular art, as we have said, has revivified music again and again. It was the soul of the Lutheran chorale, which, the Papists sneeringly said, was the chief asset of the Reformation, since it furnished the sensuous form under which religion took its place in the hearts of the people. It is the foundation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music from beginning to end. And it is therefore the foundation of the work of Bach’s most famous son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, from whom the ‘art song’ takes its rise. In the fifties he published the several editions of his ‘Melodies’ to the spiritual songs of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert; these may be taken as the beginning of modern song. In his preface Bach shows the keenness of his understanding, stating in theory the problem which Schubert solved in practice. He says that he has endeavored to invent, in each case, the melody which will express the spirit of the whole poem, and not, as had been the custom, merely that which accords with the first stanza. In other words, he recognizes the incongruity of expecting one tune to express the varying moods of several dissimilar stanzas. His solution was to strike a general average among the stanzas and suit his tune to it. Schubert solved the problem by composing his music continuously to suit each stanza, line, and phrase--in other words, by establishing the _durchkomponiertes Lied_, the modern art song.

Philipp Emanuel Bach thus saw that the _Lied_ should do what the folk-song and the formal aria could not do. It is a nice question, whether the conscious _durchkomponiertes Lied_ is more truly expressive than the strophic folk-song. Mr. Henderson, in his book ‘Songs and Song Writers’[88] illustrates the problem by comparing Silcher’s well-known version of Heine’s _Die Lorelei_ with Liszt’s. Silcher’s eight-line tune has become a true folk-song. It keeps an unvarying form and tune through three double stanzas, using, to express the lively action of the end, the same music that expresses the natural beauty of the beginning. Liszt, on the other hand, with masterful imaginative precision, follows each detail of the picture and action in his music. Mr. Henderson concludes that he would not give Liszt’s setting for a dozen of Silcher’s. Some of us, however, would willingly give the whole body of Liszt’s music for a dozen folk tunes like Silcher’s. It is, of course, a matter of individual preference. But we should give an understanding heart to the method of the folk-song, which offers to the poem a formal frame of great beauty, binding the whole together in one mood, while it allows the subsidiary details to play freely, and perhaps the more effectually, by contrast with the dominant tone. Whatever may be one’s final decision in the matter, a study and comparison of the two settings will make evident the typical qualities of the folk-song and ‘art’ song as nothing else could.

Emanuel Bach also showed his feeling for the lyrical quality of the _Lied_ by apologizing, between the lines, for his poems, saying that, although the didactic is not the sort of poetry best suited to musical treatment, Gellert’s fine verses justified the procedure in his case. There is in the melodies, as we have said, something of the feeling of the folk-song and of the Lutheran chorale. And there is also in them an indefinable quality which in a curious way looks forward to the free melodic expression of Schubert.

Throughout the eighteenth century the chief representative of pure German song was the singspiel, or light and imaginative dramatic entertainment with songs and choruses interspersed with spoken dialogue. The singspiel was not a highly honored form of art; it held a place somewhat analogous to the vaudeville among us--that is, loved by the people, but regarded as below the dignity of a first-class musician (Italian opera being _à la mode_). Nevertheless, we find some excellent light music among these singspiele. Reichardt’s _Erwin und Elmira_, to Goethe’s text, contains numbers which in simple charm and finish of workmanship do not fall far below Mozart. These singspiele maintained the German spirit in song in the face of the Italian tradition until Weber came and made the tinder blaze in the face of all Europe. Reichardt felt the spirit of the time. He was one of those valuable men who make things move while they are living and are forgotten after they are dead. As kapellmeister under Frederick the Great he introduced reforms which made him unpopular among the conservative spirits. His open sympathy with the principles of the French revolution led to his dismissal from his official post. From such a man we should expect exactly what we find--an admiration for folk-songs and an insistence that art songs should be founded on them. He was widely popular and had a considerable influence on his time. He was thus a power in keeping German song true to the best German traditions until the time when Schubert raised it to the first rank. Reichardt was also the first to make a specialty of Goethe’s songs, having set some hundred and twenty-five of them.

Zelter,[89] likewise, was best known in his time for his settings of Goethe’s lyrics, and the poet preferred them to those of Schubert. This fact need not excite such indignation as is sometimes raised in reference to it, for Goethe was little of a musician. Zelter kept true to the popular tradition and some of his songs are still sung by the German students. Zumsteeg[90] was another important composer of the time, the first important composer of ballads, and a favorite with Schubert, who based his early style on him.

Historically the songs of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven are of less importance than those of the composers just named. Haydn’s are predominantly instrumental in character. Mozart was much more of a poet for the voice, and has to his credit at least one song, ‘The Violet,’ a true _durchkomponiertes Lied_, which can take its place beside the best in German song literature. Beethoven’s songs are often no more than musical routine. His early ‘Adelaide,’ a sentimental scena in the Italian style, is his best known, but his setting to Gellert’s ‘The Heavens Declare the Glory of the Eternal’ is by far the finest. Except that it is a little stiff in its grandeur it would be one of the noblest of German songs. Yet Beethoven’s place in the history of song rests chiefly upon the fact that he was one of the first to compose a true song cycle having poetical and musical unity. In some ways he anticipated Schumann’s practises.

II

With Schubert the _Lied_ appears, so to speak, ready made. After his early years there is no more development toward the _Lied_; there is only development _of_ the _Lied_. In his eighteenth year Schubert composed a song which is practically flawless (‘The Erlking’) and continued thereafter producing at a mighty pace, sometimes nodding, like Homer, and ever and again dashing off something which is matchless. In all he composed some six hundred and fifty songs. Many of them are mediocre, as is inevitable with one who composes in such great quantity. Many others, like the beautiful _Todesmusik_, are uneven, passages of highest beauty alternating with vapid stretches such as any singing teacher might have composed. He wrote as many as six or seven songs between breakfast and dinner, beginning the new one the instant he had finished the old. He sometimes sold them at twenty cents apiece (when he could sell them at all). It is easy to say that he should have composed less and revised more, but it does not appear that it cost him any more labor to compose a great song than a mediocre one. On the whole, it seems that Schubert measured his powers justly in depending on the first inspiration. At the same time, it has been established that he was not willfully careless with his songs--not, at any rate, with the ones he believed in. A number were revised and copied three and four times. But generally his first inspiration, whether it was good or bad, was allowed to stand.

Now this facility is not to be confounded with superficiality. Schubert, taking an inspiration from the poems he read, went straight for the heart of the emotion. No amount of painstaking could have made _Am Meer_ more profound in sentiment. His course was simply that of Nature, producing in great quantity in the expectation that the inferior will die off and the best will perpetuate themselves. The range of his emotional expression is very great. It is safe to say that there is no type of sentiment or mood in any song of the last hundred years which cannot find its prototype in Schubert. His songs include ballads with a touch of the archaic, like ‘The Erlking’; lyrics with the most delicate wisp of symbolism, like _Das Heidenröslein_ (‘Heather Rose’); with the purest lyricism, like the famous ‘Serenade’ or the ‘Praise of Tears’; lyrics of the deepest tragedy, like ‘The Inn,’ or pathos, like ‘Death and the Maiden’; of the most intense emotional energy, like _Aufenthalt_; of the merriest light-heartedness, like ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark’ or the _Wanderlied_; and of the most exalted grandeur, like _Die Allmacht_.

It would be out of place here to estimate these songs in any detail. For they have a personal quality which makes the estimating of them for another person a ridiculous thing. Like all truly personal things, they have, to the individual who values them, a value quite incommensurable. Each of the best songs is unique, and is not to be compared with any other. They are irreplaceable and their value seems infinite. Hence the praise of one who loves these songs would sound foolishly extravagant to another. We can here only review and point out the general qualities and characteristics of Schubert’s output.

With one of his earliest songs--‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’--composed when he was seventeen, Schubert establishes the principle of detailed delineation in the accompaniment, developed so richly in the succeeding decades. The whole of the melody is bound together by the whirring of the wheel in the accompaniment. But when Gretchen comes to her exclamation, ‘And ah, his kiss!’ she stops spinning for a moment and the harmonies in the piano become intense and colorful. This principle of delineative detail, even more than the _durchkomponierte_ form, constitutes the difference between the ‘art’ song and its prototype, the folk-song. The details become more and more frequent in Schubert’s songs as his artistic development continues. They are rarely realistic, as in Liszt, but they always catch the mood or the emotional nuance with eloquent suggestiveness. A free song, like _Die Allmacht_, follows the varying moods of the text line for line. But Schubert did not follow his text word for word as later song-writers did. He felt what the folk-singer feels, the formal musical unity of his song as apart from the unity in the meaning of the words. He was never willing to admit a delineative detail that involved a harsh break in the flow of beautiful melody. It was his choice of melody, much more than his choice of delineative detail, that gave eloquence to his songs.

This melody is of great beauty and fluency from the beginning. The lovely songs of the spectral tempter in ‘The Erlking’ could not be more beautiful. Yet this gift of lovely melody becomes richer, deeper, and even more spontaneous as Schubert grew older--richer and more spontaneous than has been known in any other composer before or since. It is nearly always based on the regular and measured melody of folk-song, and rarely becomes anything approaching the free ‘endless melody’ of Wagner. But beyond such a generalization as this it can scarcely be covered with a single descriptive phrase. It was adequate to every sort of emotional expression, and was so gently flexible in form that it could fit any sort of poem without losing its graceful contour.

‘The Erlking,’ perhaps Schubert’s best known song (it is certainly one of his greatest), is a perfect example of the ballad, or condensed dramatic-narrative poem, a type which had been cultivated by Zumsteeg, but had never reached real artistic standing. It demands sharp characterization of the speaking characters, and especially some means of setting the mood of the poem as a whole, in order to keep the story within its frame and give it its artistic unity. The former Schubert supplies with his melodies; the latter with the accompaniment of triplets, with the recurring figure representing the galloping of the horse. Without interrupting the musical flow of his song he introduces the delineative detail where it is needed, as in the double dissonance at the repeated shriek of the child--a musical procedure that was revolutionary at the time it was written. And, if there were nothing else in the song to prove genius, it would be proved by the last line in which, for the first time, the triplets cease and the announcement that the child was dead is made in an abrupt recitative, carrying us back to a realization of the true nature of the ballad as a tale that is told, a legend from the olden times. It must always be a pity that Schubert did not write more ballads. He is commonly known as a lyric genius, but he could be equally a descriptive genius. Yet only ‘The Young Nun,’ among the better known of his songs, is at all narrative in quality.

Schubert’s form, as we have said, ranges all the way from the simple strophe, or verse form, up to the verge of the declamatory. He was extremely fond of the strophe, and usually used it with perfect justice, as in the famous ‘Who is Sylvia,’ ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark,’ and ‘Ave Maria.’ Very often he uses the strophe form modified and developed for the last stanza, as in _Du bist die Ruh_, or the ‘Serenade.’ Again, as in _Die Allmacht_ and _Aufenthalt_, the melody, while being perfectly measured and regular, follows the text with utmost freedom. And, finally, there is _Der Doppelgänger_, which is scarcely more than expressive declamation over a delineative accompaniment. ‘The music of the future!’ exclaims Mr. Henderson. ‘Wagner’s theories a quarter of a century before he evolved them.’

A number of Schubert’s are grouped together in ‘cycles,’ a procedure practised by Beethoven in his _An die Ferne Geliebte_, and brought to perfection by Schumann. Schubert’s twenty-four songs, ‘The Fair Maid of the Mill,’ to words by Müller, tell the story of a love affair and its consequent tragedy, enacted near the mill, by the side of the brook, which ripples all through the series. The songs tell a consecutive story somewhat in the fashion of Tennyson’s ‘Maud,’ but the group has little of the inner unity of Schumann’s cycles. The ‘Winter Journey’ series, also to Müller’s text, is more closely bound together by its mood of old-aged despair. The last fourteen songs which the composer wrote were published after his death as ‘Swan Songs,’ and the name has justly remained, for they seem one and all to be written under the oppressive fear of death. They include the six songs composed to the words of Heine, whose early book of poems the composer had just picked up. What a pity, if Schubert could not have lived longer, that Heine did not live earlier! Each of, these Heine songs is a masterpiece.

Schubert’s literary sense may not have been highly critical, but it managed to include the greatest poets and the best poems that were to be had. His settings include seventy-two to words by Goethe, fifty-four of Schiller, forty-four of Müller, forty-eight of his friend Mayrhofer, nineteen of Schlegel, nineteen of Klopstock, nineteen of Körner, ten of Walter Scott, seven of Ossian, three of Shakespeare, and the immortal six of Heine. And, though he was not inspired in any very direct proportion to the literary worth of his poems, he responded truly to the lyrical element wherever he found it.

Writing at about the same time with Schubert were the opera composers Ludwig Spohr, Heinrich Marschner, and Weber. The song output of these men has not proved historically important, but they have to their credit the fact that they were true to the German faith. Marschner’s songs are not altogether dead to-day, and Weber’s are in a few instances excellent. They come nearer than those of any other composer to the true style and spirit of the folk-song, and reveal from another angle the presiding genius of Weber’s operas.

The place for the ballad which Schubert left almost vacant in his work was filled by Johann Carl Gottfried (Carl) Löwe, born only a few months before him.[91] The numerous compositions of his long life have been forgotten, except for his ballads. And these have lived, in spite of their feeble melodic invention, by their sheer dramatic energy. Löwe’s ballads depend wholly on their words--that is their virtue; as music apart they have scarcely any existence. But Löwe’s dramatic sense was abundant and vigorous. A study of his setting of ‘The Erlking’ as compared with that of Schubert will instantly make evident the differences between the two men. The motif of the storm is more complex and wild; the speeches of the Erlking are strange and mystical, as far as possible removed from the suave melody of Schubert. The voice part is at every turn made impressive rather than beautiful. Superficially Schubert’s method looks the more superficial and inartistic, but it conquers by the matchless expressive power of its melody. Löwe’s ballads compel our respect, in spite of their lack of melodic invention. They are carefully selected and include some of the best poetry of the time. They are worked out with great care, and are conscientiously true to the meaning of the words as songs rarely were in his day. They are designed to make an impressive effect in a large concert hall. They have a considerable range, from the mock-primitive heroics of Ossian to the boisterous humor of Goethe’s ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’ And in their cultivation of the declamatory style and of the delineative accompaniment they were important in the musical development of the age.

III

Schumann was not, like Schubert, a singer from his earliest years. He was at first a dilettante of the piano, and as he grew up dreamed of becoming a virtuoso. He was enchanted by the piano, told it his thoughts, and was fascinated by its undiscovered possibilities. His genius came to its first maturity in his piano works, and all his thoughts were at first for this instrument.

He did not write his first song until 1840; that is, until almost the end of his thirtieth year. When he did take to song-writing he wrote furiously. There was a reason for it. For after several years of passionate love-making to his Clara, and of almost more passionate stubbornness on the part of her father, the young people took the law into their own hands (quite literally, since they had to invoke the courts) and were married in 1840. The first happiness of married life and the anticipations leading up to it seem to have generated in Schumann that demand for a more personal and intimate expression than his beloved piano could offer. Though he had never been a rapid writer he now wrote many songs at a stretch, as many as three or four in a day. He seemed unable to exhaust what he had to say. By the time the year was over he had composed more than a hundred songs. He declared himself satisfied with what he had done. He might come back to song-writing, he said; but he wasn’t sure.

He did come back to it, but not until his creative powers were on the wane. In the last six or seven years of his life he wrote more than a hundred new songs, but hardly one of them rises above mediocrity. All the songs that have made him famous, and all that are worthy of his genius, date from the year of his marriage.

Just what, in a technical way, Schumann was trying to do in his first songs we do not know. It is probable that the ammunition for his unusual harmonic progressions and his freer declamatory style came from his own piano pieces. Fundamentally we know he admired Schubert almost without reserve, having already spent the best part of a year in Vienna, unearthed a number of Schubert scores, and spread Schubert’s reputation to the best of his ability. Yet there is hardly one of Schumann’s songs that could for a moment be mistaken for Schubert’s, so different was the musical genesis of the two composers in their song-writing. Schumann is a part of the Schubert tradition; but he is just so much further developed (whether for the better or for the worse may be left to the theorists).

With Schumann the tendency of detailed musical description is carried into a greater number of songs and into a greater variety of details. The declamatory element increases, both in the number of songs which it dominates and in the extent to which it influences the more melodic songs. The part of the piano is tremendously increased, so much so that the _Waldesgespräch_ has been called a symphonic poem with recitative accompaniment by the voice. The harmony, while lacking in Schubert’s entrancingly simple enharmonic changes, is more unusual, showing in particular a tendency to avoid the perfect cadence, which would have hurt Franz Schubert’s ear for a time. Schumann’s songs are commonly called ‘psychological,’ and this much-abused word may be allowed to stand in the sense that Schumann offered a separate statement of the separate strands of an emotional state, while Schubert more usually expressed the emotional state pure and simple. No songs could be more subjective than some of Schubert’s later ones, but many, including Schumann’s, have been more complex in emotional content. But perhaps the first thing one feels on approaching the Schumann songs is that they are consciously wrought, that they are the work of a thinker. This is no doubt partly because Schumann, with all his gifts, did not have at his disposal Schubert’s wonderfully rich melody and was obliged to weigh and consider. But it is also quite to be expected from the nature of the man. While Schumann’s songs are by no means so rich as Schubert’s in point of melody, there are a few of his tunes, especially the famous _Widmung_, which can stand beside any in point of pure musical beauty. Still, it must be admitted that Schumann’s truly great songs, even from the output of 1840, are decidedly limited in number.

To understand better what is meant by the word ‘psychological’ in connection with Schumann’s songs, let us turn to his most famous group, the ‘Woman’s Life and Love.’ The first of the group, ‘Since My Eyes Beheld Him,’ tells of the young girl who has awakened to her first half-consciousness of love. It is hero worship, but it is disconcerting, making her strangely conscious of herself, anxious to be alone and dream, surrounded by a half sensuous, half sentimental mist. The music is hesitating and broken, with many chromatic progressions and suspensions in the piano part which rob it of any firm harmonic outline. In the whole of the voice part there is not a single perfect cadence. The melody is utterly lovely, but it sounds indefinite, as though it were always just beginning; only here and there it rises into a definite phrase of moody longing. In the second song, the famous _Er, der Herrlichste von Allen_ the girl has come to full consciousness of her emotion. Her loved one is simply her hero, the noblest of men. The music is straightforward and decisive; the main theme begins with the notes of the tonic chord (the ‘bugle notes’). There is no lack of full cadence and pure half cadences. In the third song the girl has received the man’s avowal of love, and is overcome with amazement, almost terror, that her hero should look with favor upon _her_. The voice part is scarcely more than a broken recitative, and the accompaniment is largely of short sharp chords. Only for one ecstatic instant the melody becomes lyrically lovely, in the richest German strain: it is on the words ‘I am forever thine.’ In the sixth song the mother is gazing at her newborn baby and weeping. The voice part is free declamation, with a few rich chords in the accompaniment to mark the underlying depth of emotion. In the eighth and last song the husband has died. The form of the song is much the same as that of the sixth, only the chords are now heavy and tragic. As the lamenting voice dies away the piano part glides into the opening song, played softly; the wife dreams of the first awakening of her love. The effect is to cast the eight songs into a long backward vista, magically making us feel that we have lived through the years of the woman’s life and love.

This, easily the most famous of song cycles, is the type of all of them. Beethoven wrote a true cycle, but his songs are by no means equal to Schumann’s. Schubert wrote cycles, but none with the close bond and inner unity of this one. Nor are Schumann’s other cycles--‘Myrtles,’ the _Liederkreis_, song series from Eichendorff and another under the same name from other poets, the ‘Poet’s Love’ from Heine, the Kerner cycle, and the ‘Springtime of Love’ cycle--so closely bound as this. The song cycle, on this plane, is a triumph of the accurate delineative power of music.

Almost as much as of this type of ‘psychology’ Schumann is master of the delicate picture of mood, as in _Die Lotosblume_, _Der Nussbaum_, and the thrice lovely _Mondnacht_. His musical high spirits often serve him in good stead, as in Kerner’s ‘Wanderer’s Song.’ In ‘To the Sunshine’ he imitates the folk-song style with remarkable success. In the short ballad he has at least two works of supreme beauty, the _Waldesgespräch_, already referred to, and the well known ‘Two Grenadiers.’ There is a certain grim humor (one of the few lyrical qualities which Schubert never successfully attempted) in his setting of Heine’s masterly ‘The Old and Bitter Songs.’ And, finally, one song that stands by itself in song literature--the famous _Ich grolle nicht_, admired everywhere, yet not beyond its deserts. Here is tragedy deep and exalted as in a Greek drama--though it is disconcerting to note how much more seriously Schumann took the subject than did his poet, Heine.

IV

In 1843, when Schumann had made his first success as a song writer, he received from an unknown young man a batch of songs in manuscript. With his customary promptitude and sureness, he announced the young man in his journal, the _Neue Zeitschrift für Musik_. This man was Robert Franz, who, many insist, is the greatest song writer in the world, barring only Schubert.[92] Franz, it seems, had had an unhappy love affair, and had taken to song-writing to ease his feelings, having burned up all his previous compositions as worthless. Schumann did for Franz what he did for Brahms and to some extent for Chopin--put him on the musical map--and that on the strength of an examination of only a few early compositions. Through his influence Franz’s Opus I was published, and thereafter, steadily for many years, came songs from Franz’s pen. He wrote little other original music, save a few pieces for church use. His reputation refused to grow rapidly, for there was little in his work or personality on which to build _réclame_, but it has grown steadily. The student of his songs will discover a high proportion of first-rate songs among them--higher, probably, than in any other song composer.

Franz is one of those composers of whose work little can be told in print. It is all in the music. Unlike Schubert and Schumann, he limited himself in his choice of subjects, taking mostly poems of delicate sentiments, and avoiding all that was realistic. Unlike Schubert, he worked over his songs with greatest care, sometimes keeping them for years before he had fashioned them to perfection. His voice parts are, on the whole, more independent than Schumann’s. They combine perfect declamatory freedom and accurate observance of the text with a delicate finish of melodic grace. The accompaniments are in many styles. Broken chords he uses with distinction, so that the individual notes seem not only harmonic but melodic in their function. In him, more than in previous song writers, polyphony (deriving from his familiarity with Bach) plays a prominent part. He is a master in the use of delicate dissonance, and in some ways the poetry of his accompaniments looks forward to the ‘atmospheric’ effects of what we loosely term the ‘impressionistic school.’ He does not strike the heights or depths of emotion, but his music at times is as moving as any in song literature. Above all, he stands for the perfect and intimate union of text and music, in a more subtle way than was accomplished either by Schubert or Schumann.

Mendelssohn wrote many songs during his days of fame, which had a popularity far outshining that of the songs we have been speaking of. They sold in great abundance, especially in England, and fetched extraordinary prices from publishers. But by this time they have sunk pretty nearly into oblivion. They are polished, as all his work is, and have the quality of instantly pleasing a hearer who doesn’t care to listen too hard. Needless to say, their musicianship is above reproach. But their melody, while graceful, is undistinguished, and their emotional message is superficial.

Chopin, however, composed a little book of Polish songs which deserves to be immortal. They purported to be arrangements of Polish melodies together with original songs in the same spirit. As a matter of fact, they are probably almost altogether Chopin’s work. In them we find the highest refinement of melodic contour, and an exotic poetry in the accompaniments such as none but Chopin, at the time, could write. ‘The Maiden’s Wish’ is perhaps the only one familiar to the general public, and that chiefly through Liszt’s piano arrangement of it. But among the others there are some of the first rank, particularly the ‘Baccanale,’ ‘My Delights,’ and ‘Poland’s Dirge.’

In the intervals of his busy life Liszt managed to pen some sixty or more _Lieder_, of which a large proportion are of high quality. They suffer less than the other classes of his compositions from the intrusion of banality and gallery play. In them Liszt is never the poet of delicate emotion, but certain things he did better than either Schubert or Schumann. The high heroism, often mock, which we feel in his orchestral writing is here, too. He had command of large design; he could paint the splendid emotion. His ballads are, on the whole, among the best we have. In his setting of Uhland’s ‘The Ancestral Tomb,’ he caught the mysterious aura of ancient balladry as few others have. When there is a picture to be described Liszt always has a musical phrase that suits the image. And in a few instances, as in his settings of _Der du von dem Himmel bist_ and _Du bist wie eine Blume_, he achieved the lyric at its least common denominator--the utmost simplicity of sentiment expressed by the utmost simplicity of musical phrase. It was a feat he rarely repeated. For in these songs he painted not only the picture, but also the emotion. In Mignon’s song, ‘Know’st thou the Land?’ he has put into a single phrase the very breath of homesickness. His setting of ‘The Loreley’ has already been mentioned. It could hardly be finer in its style. The preliminary musing of the poet, the quivering of a dimly remembered song, the flow of the Rhine, the song of the Loreley, the sinking of the ship, are all described. Still finer is ‘The King of Thule,’ which, with all its elaboration of detail, keeps to the sense of archaic simplicity that is in Goethe’s poem. In his settings of Victor Hugo, Liszt was as appropriate as with Goethe, and we find in them all the transparency of technique and the delicacy of sentiment that distinguishes French verse. In all these songs Liszt uses the utmost freedom of declamation in the voice part, with fine regard for the integrity of the text.

H. K. M.

FOOTNOTES:

[88] W. J. Henderson: ‘Songs and Song Writers,’ pp. 182 ff.

[89] Carl Friedrich Zelter, b. Petzow-Werder on the Havel, 1758; d. Berlin, 1832.

[90] Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, b. Sachsenflur (Odenwald), 1760; d. Stuttgart, 1802.

[91] In 1796 at Löbejün, near Köthen. He was educated in Halle, patronized by King Jerome of Westphalia, Napoleon’s brother, and later became municipal musical director at Stettin. He died in Kiel, 1869.

[92] Originally his name was Knauth, but his father changed it by royal consent to Franz. He was born in Halle in 1815 and died there in 1892. He became organist, choral conductor, and university musical director in his native city. An assiduous student of Bach and of Handel, his townsman, he combined a contrapuntal style with Schumannesque sentiment in his songs, of which there appeared 350, besides some choral works. His critical editions of Bach and Handel works are of great value. Almost total deafness cut short Franz’s professional activity.