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 BerlinSingakademie, 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.
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 hewas 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 roisteringstudents. 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 bySchubert’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 inbelles 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 songsof 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 becameexpressive.
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 thedurchkomponiertesong 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’sAufenthaltor 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 inall) 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. TheSturm 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 wasSturm 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 theSturm und Drangmovement were, of course, Goethe and Schiller. Goethe, one ofthe 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 herfatherland’—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 hieniedenNichts 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.