Part 5

This transition from self-absorbed youth to magnanimous manhood came to Schubert between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years, hastened by the adverse conditions of his life. We have seen how poverty held him in its sullen grasp; ill-health was added in 1824; and all through his last decade the sense of the indifference of the public to his higher artistic aims must have been dispiriting in the extreme. His songs were favorably enough received, but little interest was taken in his chamber and orchestral music except by a small circle of friends. That he could nevertheless go on, year after year, producing so splendid a series of compositions, in a spirit of such uncompromising devotion to art, almost entirely unsupported by public recognition, buoyed up by inward conviction alone, proves that underneath the careless Bohemianism of his everyday existence there was developing in him the stuff of real heroism. Like Columbus, he

"found a world, and had no chart Save one that faith deciphered in the skies. To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art."

The story of the last year of his short life is most pathetic. In March, 1828, he made an attempt to mend his fortunes by giving a concert of his own works, by which he earned one hundred and fifty dollars, to him a large sum. But no temporary help like this could count for much, so long as his compositions, the main business of his life, were so shamefully underrated by the publishers. For six of the best of the "Winterreise" songs he received a little over one dollar; for the E-flat Trio (opus 100), about four dollars and a half; for the great A-major Pianoforte Quintet (opus 114), a little over six dollars. His health being now seriously impaired, he wished to spend the summer in the country with friends, but was compelled by poverty to remain in the heat and confusion of Vienna. A momentary encouragement offered in a projected performance of his greatest work, the C-major Symphony, but it was given up as too difficult, and he never heard it. It was first performed eleven years after his death, by Mendelssohn, in Leipsic. In the fall he rapidly failed, and had just arranged to take lessons in counterpoint, with a view to yet greater works, when, after a comparatively short illness, he died, on November 19, 1828. He left no will, but from the official inventory of his effects we learn that he left behind him twenty-six dollars' worth of clothing and house furniture, and "a quantity of old music" (including the manuscript of the C-major Symphony), valued at five dollars.

Such were the dingy outer circumstances of this man's life. But his spirit soared above them. "My compositions," he wrote in his diary, "are the product of my mind, and spring from my sorrow; those only that were born of grief give the greatest delight to the outside world;" and in another place, more profoundly: "Certainly that happy joyous time is gone when every object seemed encircled with a halo of youthful glory; ... and yet I am now much more than formerly in the way of finding peace and happiness in myself." But the best evidence we have that Schubert learned the lesson of sorrow, and not only transmuted bitter experience into immortal beauty but under the stress of that experience first found his true self, lies in the wonderful series of compositions which he wrote between 1820 and 1828. Here we find at last the essential Schubert. In the single movement in C-minor for string quartet, dated 1820, he discloses a new world of dramatic expression, earnest feeling, daring modulation, intricate harmony, and chromatic melody. And from this time on masterpiece followed masterpiece: the "Unfinished Symphony" in 1822; the A-minor Quartet and the Octet in 1824; the G-major and D-minor Quartets in 1826; the first two piano trios a year later; and to cap the climax, the C-major Quintet and the immortal C-major Symphony in 1828.

In spite of the emotional depth of these last works, the dominant note remains in them, as in everything that emanated from Schubert, romantic. Everywhere in them the interest of the romanticist in color for its own sake, in the primary sensuous charm of the tone combinations, is strikingly manifest. One of the hallmarks of Schubert's symphonies is his impressionistic treatment of orchestral tints, both pure and in mixture. None knows better than he how to make the oboe sultry or menacing, the clarinet mellow and liquid, the horn hollow, vague, mystical, the 'cellos passionate, and the violins clear, aspiring, and ethereal. The score of his C-major Symphony is a marvel of ingenuity and felicity in the weaving of various colors and modes of playing, as staccato and legato, pizzicato, etc. Look, for instance, at page 162 of Eulenberg's miniature score, and see how the wood-wind instruments chatter in staccato against the long rise and fall of the strings playing in octaves, legato; or at page 139, noting how, after a powerful climax and a moment of complete silence, the 'cello, against plucked chords by the other strings, sings a languorous melody, which is presently taken up by the oboe; or at pages 30-35, where, under the shimmering veil of the strings, the trombones gradually work out their sinister call, rising ever higher and higher, and finally precipitating all into the sounding turmoil of the climax on page 36. In such passages as these every tone sounds, and all unite harmoniously to produce the intended effect. In few scores will one find at once such richness and such clear transparency of coloring.

Nor is Schubert dependent for variety of color, as unimaginative composers are, on the richly diversified palette of the full orchestra. His chamber music shows how much he can accomplish with limited means. In his two trios, op. 99 and 100, by making the most of the percussion quality of the piano as well as of both the pizzicato and the sustained tones of the strings, he evolves a surprising variety from the three instruments. Even with the string quartet, the most monochromatic of chamber combinations, he achieves great differentiation and contrast, largely by rhythmically individualizing each voice. The opening of the A-minor Quartet is a good example: viola and 'cello give a drone bass in a peculiar and striking rhythm (a dotted half-note followed by a group of four sixteenths); the second violin holds the tone-mass together by means of a graceful legato running figure in eighth-notes; the first violin sings a melody that follows its own free and untrammelled rhythm. One is reminded by such a passage of Dvořák, who is of close artistic kin to Schubert. Both men, in their writing for strings, secure fascinating texture by opposing many diverse rhythms simultaneously. The device has been assailed as being a mask to cover a poverty of real polyphony (inner melodiousness); but though it may to a certain extent be that, there can be no doubt of its sensuous effectiveness.

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

Romantic also is the persistent lyricism of all Schubert's music, the symphonies and quartets as well as the songs and piano pieces. In the larger almost as much as in the smaller works, the fundamental trait of the peculiar type of expression used is its subjectivity, its strong personal flavor. If the songs of the classicists seem often like condensed symphonies, the symphonies of this romanticist are in many respects magnified songs. In several of his instrumental movements Schubert actually transcribes his themes from songs already written, as for example in the variations of the D-minor Quartet, founded on "Death and the Maiden," and those of the "Forellen Quintet," founded on "Die Forelle." When he uses entirely new material, he is apt to conceive it in the lyrical style, and even to cast it in the lyrical form, with an exact balance of phrases of equal length. The second subject in the "Unfinished Symphony," for instance, is like a stanza or strophe; the imagination easily adds words to it; it is an instrumental song. Most of Schubert's more emotional themes share this quality of utterances, and seem rather communications of personal feeling than objects of abstract beauty. Even in the later works, like the D-minor and G-major Quartets and the C-major Quintet, in which the romance is tinged with tragedy, it is still, one feels, romantic tragedy, the tragedy of sentiment and sensibility, and not universal cosmic tragedy like Beethoven's or Bach's.

Yet there is in these later works, also, an intensity and breathlessness of utterance, a white heat of passion burning away all dross and surplusage, and giving the style an incisiveness strongly contrasted with Schubert's usual genial prolixity, which seem to emanate from some sterner, wilder element in his nature. There is a nervous tenseness here which is distinctively modern; the D-minor Quartet particularly has the modern closeness of texture and rapidity of pulse. Its first theme, unlike most of Schubert's, is a short and trenchant motive of five notes, compelling attention from the very outset. The entire first movement is treated with great depth of feeling and sustained power, and the coda is of a wonderful dignity and reticence. The final presto, too, reminds us of Schumann in its emotional richness, and of Tschaïkowsky in the passion of its broken rhythms and headlong harmonic progressions. On the other hand, the harmonic idiom of the first movement of the quartet in G-major (see Figure IV.), with its lapses of triads down through intervals of a whole step, is that of César Franck. Schubert is here the prototype of the most advanced modern symphonists, as in his piano pieces he anticipates the methods of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt, and in his songs gives the cue to Franz, Rubinstein, Grieg, and Brahms.

III ROBERT SCHUMANN

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

Certainly there was little enough in the legal profession to attract a youth such as these early letters reveal, ardent, imaginative, romantically intolerant of the humdrum and the prosaic. From the first we see him, in this clear mirror of his own words, marked for a life of artistic expression and free creation. He has all the artist's susceptibility to impressions, both sensuous and intellectual, as we gather from his rhapsodies over the landscapes, peasant maidens, and wines of the Rhine Valley, and from his interest in the individualities of his travelling companions. He is a creature of moods, plunged in a day from heights of joy into abysses of melancholy. He is impetuous, generous, and volatile in his boyish friendships and love affairs; an affectionate but inconsiderate son, an ardent but desultory worker, a voluminous but irregular correspondent, irresponsible in money matters, impatient of social usages, inconstant in almost everything but his devotion to beauty. The idol of his boyish hero worship is Jean Paul Richter, that curiously German compound of sentimentality, mysticism, and wayward humor; he wishes that all mankind might read Richter and become "better and more unhappy;" and he often favors his mother with Jean-Paulish apothegms, reflections, and fantasies, in which platitude and sincerity are mixed as only enthusiastic boyhood can mix them. Byron, Heine, and the other romantic poets of the day he reads, too, with avidity, and imitates them in erotic ballads and plays about picturesque robbers. And all along, music is the language of his deepest moods, and he spends hours communing with his piano in rhapsodic improvisation, and devotes his leisure to composing musical character-sketches of his friends.

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

The philosophic calm thus gained by habits of regular work was soon to be sorely taxed; for in that very year all Schumann's hopes of ever becoming a piano virtuoso were shattered by an accident to his right hand. With characteristic impatience he had devised a mechanism for hastening the independence of the refractory fourth finger by holding it up with a string while the others practised. Of course the result of this violence was a permanent lameness. Under this affliction, however, was hidden an incidental benefit; for piano playing became now no longer one of the many things that he did badly, as he had complained, and he had at last all his attention to concentrate upon composition. He had written his opus 1, "Variations on the name of Abegg," in 1830; he now followed this up with an endless stream of charming piano pieces, the like of which had never before been seen. In 1830-31 came the "Papillons," opus 2, and the "Allegro," opus 8; in 1832 the "Studies after Paganini" (in which the technical interest of the virtuoso is still paramount), the "Intermezzi," and the fascinating "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck"; 1833 added to the list two more primarily technical works, the "Concert Études on Caprices of Paganini" and the splendid "Toccata," opus 7; and in the next six years, up to 1839, came a long series of unique and lovely things, among which stand forth in especial prominence those romantic whimsicalities, the "Davidsbündlertänze," the "Carnaval," and "Kriesleriana," the somewhat less successful, because more ambitious, Sonatas, opuses 11, 14, and 22, and the more mature "Symphonic Études," "Kinderscenen," "Phantasie," and "Novelettes."

These piano works, conceived with most daring originality and executed with inimitable verve, deserve to take rank with Schubert's songs, Mendelssohn's overtures, and Chopin's nocturnes and preludes, among the very few supreme and perfect attainments of the romantic spirit in music. Their exuberant vitality, their prodigal wealth of melodic invention, their rhythmic vigor and harmonic luxuriance, their absolutely novel pianistic effects, their curious undercurrent of fanciful imagery and extra-musical allusion, the peculiarly personal, even perverse, idiom in which they are couched, all conspire to make them unique even among their author's works, and in some respects more happily representative of him than the later productions in which he was more influenced by conventional or borrowed ideals. In them we have the wild-flavored first fruits of his genius, fresh with all the aroma and bloom of unsophisticated youth.