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Title: The Romantic Composers

Author: Daniel Gregory Mason

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
ROMANTIC COMPOSERS ***

THE ROMANTIC
COMPOSERS

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN AND CO.,
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LIMITED
TORONTO

ROBERT SCHUMANN
From a water color made in Vienna in his
youth

The ROMANTIC
COMPOSERS
BY

DANIEL GREGORY MASON

AUTHOR OF "FROM GRIEG TO
BRAHMS,"
"BEETHOVEN AND HIS
FORERUNNERS," ETC.

"Consciously or unconsciously a
new school is being
founded on the basis of the
Beethoven-Schubert romanticism,
a school which we may venture to
expect will mark
a special epoch in the history of
art."
SCHUMANN

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1940

COPYRIGHT, 1906,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
COPYRIGHT, 1934,
BY DANIEL G. MASON.

All rights reserved—no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
permission in writing from the
publisher, except by a reviewer who
wishes to quote brief passages in
connection with a review written for
inclusion in magazine or newspaper.

Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1906.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE
This book completes the series of studies of composers and of their music,
from Palestrina to the present day, which was begun with "From Grieg to
Brahms" (1902), and continued in "Beethoven and his Forerunners" (1904).
It will be noted that these three volumes should be read in an order different
from that of their publication. First should come "Beethoven and his
Forerunners," in which are made a general survey of the periods of musical
history and the principles of musical style, and special studies of Palestrina,
Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; then "The Romantic Composers," in
which the story is taken up at the death of Beethoven and carried through
the period of romanticism, with essays on Schubert, Schumann,
Mendelssohn, Chopin, Berlioz, and Liszt; and finally "From Grieg to
Brahms," comprising studies of the chief modern musicians, including
Grieg, Dvořák, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Tschaïkowsky, and Brahms, and two
more general papers on "The Appreciation of Music" and "The Meaning of
Music." Thus read, the three books should serve as a commentary on the
more important individual composers, æsthetic principles, and historical
schools in modern instrumental music.
From the first I have had in mind the intention of illuminating the musical
peculiarities of each composer by constant reference to his personal
character and temperament. For this reason, while I have dealt as briefly as
possible with colorless biographical facts, I have made free use of
characteristic anecdotes, of contemporary descriptions of appearance,
manners, etc., and of letters and table-talk where they are available. Music
is indeed a unique artistic medium, and no man can express anything in it
except through a technical mastery which has little to do with his character.
Yet, given the medium, what he does express is bound to be permeated with
his peculiar personality; and as the general reader can get a much clearer
idea of a human being like himself than he can of so subtle a technique as
that of music, it has seemed better to lay stress on that side, even though it
is not the only or perhaps even the most important one. With the object of
keeping awake, nevertheless, the reader's sense of those technical methods

and traditions which so largely determine the nature of all music, I have
included in each book some pages dealing with impersonal principles and
historical schools.
Believing that one has no right to intrude, in such studies as these, one's
own prejudices, but should transcend as far as possible one's temperamental
limitations, I had hoped to be able to maintain throughout the attitude of the
chronicler, and to exclude all special pleading. In the essays on Berlioz and
Liszt I have perhaps not achieved this detachment of attitude. Realism is a
tendency which seems to me quite mistaken and mischievous in music, and
I have attacked it with some warmth. But in view of the great favor that
realism enjoys in contemporary composition, the shoals of writers that rally
every day to its defence, and the potency of its appeal to the average
listener, whose dramatic sense and pictorial imagination are always livelier
than his purely musical perception, I do not greatly fear that I shall
dangerously disturb any reader's critical equilibrium.
These studies are intended simply as guides to the music they discuss. If
they lead the reader to the concert-hall, to the piano, to the library of scores;
if they help him to hear themes and their development where before he
heard only masses of agreeable sound; if they incite him to repeat and
analyze his musical experiences, to listen with his mind as well as his ears,
to study a symphony as alertly as he would study a painting or an essay,—
then only will they have justified their existence.
WASHINGTON, CONNECTICUT,
October 17, 1906.

CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION:
I. 1
ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC
II. FRANZ SCHUBERT 61
III. ROBERT SCHUMANN 103
IV. FELIX MENDELSSOHN 163
V. FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN 195
VI. HECTOR BERLIOZ 253
VII. FRANZ LISZT 307

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
SCHUMANN AS A
Title
YOUNG MAN
SCHUBERT 63
SCHUMANN 105
MENDELSSOHN 165
CHOPIN 197
BERLIOZ 255
LISZT 309

I
INTRODUCTION
ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC

I
INTRODUCTION
ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC

I

Historians of music are accustomed to speak of the first half or three-
quarters of the nineteenth century as the Romantic Period in music, and of
those composers who immediately follow Beethoven, including Schubert,
Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and some others, as the
Romantic Composers. The word "romantic," as thus used, forms no doubt a
convenient label; but if we attempt to explain its meaning, we find
ourselves involved in several difficulties. Were there then no romanticists
before Schubert? Have no composers written romantically since 1870?
Such questions, arising at once, lead us inevitably to the more general
inquiry, What is romanticism?
In the broadest sense in which the word "romanticism" can be used, the
sense in which it is taken, for example, by Pater in the Postscript of his
"Appreciations," it seems to mean simply interest in novel and strange
elements of artistic effect. "It is the addition of strangeness to beauty," says
Pater, "that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of
beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition
of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper."
Romanticism is thus the innovating spirit, as opposed to the conserving
spirit of classicism; romanticists appear in every age and school; and
Stendhal is right in saying that "all good art was romantic in its day." It is
interesting, in passing, to note the relation of this definition to the widely
prevalent notion that romanticism is extravagant and lawless. To the mind
wedded to tradition all novelty is extravagant; and since an artistic form is

grasped only after considerable practice, all new forms necessarily appear
formless at first. Hence, if we begin by saying that romantic art is novel and
strange art, it requires only a little inertia or intolerance in our point of view
to make us add that it is grotesque and irrational art, or in fact not art at all.
Critics have often been known to arrive at this conclusion.
Suggestive as Pater's definition is, however, it is obviously too vague and
sweeping to carry us far in our quest. It does not explain why Monteverde,
with his revolutionary dominant seventh chords, or the Florentine
composers of the early seventeenth century, with their unheard-of free
recitative, were not quite as genuine romanticists as Schubert with his
whimsical modulation and Schumann with his harsh dissonances. We have
still to ask why, instead of appending our label of "romantic" to the
innovators of centuries earlier than the nineteenth, we confine it to that
comparatively small group of men who immediately followed Beethoven.
The answer is to be found in the distinctness of the break that occurred in
musical development at this time, the striking difference in type between
the compositions of Beethoven and those of his successors. From Philipp
Emanuel Bach up to Beethoven, the romanticism of each individual
composer merely carried him a step forward on a well-established path; it
prompted him to refine here, to pare away there, to expand this feature, to
suppress that, in a scheme of art constantly maturing, but retaining always
its essential character. With Beethoven, however, this particular scheme of
art, of which the type is the sonata, with its high measure of formal beauty
and its generalized expression, reached a degree of perfection beyond which
it could not for the moment go. The romantic impulse toward novelty of
Beethoven's successors had to satisfy itself, therefore, in some other way
than by heightening abstract æsthetic beauty or general expressiveness;
until new technical resources could be developed the limit was reached in
those directions. Beethoven had himself, meanwhile, opened the door on an
inviting vista of possibilities in a new field—that of highly specialized,
idiosyncratic, subjective expression. He had shown how music, with Mozart
so serene, detached, and impersonal, could become a language of personal
feeling, of individual passion, even of whim, fantasy, and humor. It was
inevitable that those who came after him should seek their novelty, should
satisfy their curiosity, along this new path of subjectivism and specialized
expression. And as this music of the person, as we may call it, which now

began to be written, was different not only in degree but in kind from the
objective art which prepared the way for it, it is natural that in looking back
upon so striking a new departure we should give it a special name, such as
romanticism.
As for the other line of demarcation, which separates the romantic period
from what we call the modern, that is purely arbitrary. "Modern" is a
convenient name for us to give to those tendencies from which we have not
yet got far enough away to view them in large masses and to describe them
disinterestedly. As the blur of too close a vision extends back for us to 1870
or thereabout, we find it wise to let our romantic period, about which we
can theorize and form hypotheses, end there for the present. But it already
seems clear enough that the prevalent tendency even in contemporary music
is still the personal and subjective one that distinguished the early romantic
period. Probably our grandchildren will extend that period from
Beethoven's later works to those of some composer yet unborn. And thus
we have, in studying the romantic composers, the added interest that we are
in a very real sense studying ourselves.

II

If, with a view to getting a more precise notion of the new tendencies, we
ask ourselves now what are the salient differences between a classical and a
romantic or modern piece of music, we shall be likely to notice at once
certain traits of the latter, striking enough, which are nevertheless incidental
rather than essential to romanticism, and must be discounted before we can
come at its inmost nature. These changes have come chiefly as a result of
the general evolution of musical resources, and though necessarily
modifying the romantic methods, are not primary causes or effects of them.
Thus, for example, the nineteenth century has seen an extraordinary
development in the mechanism of all musical instruments, and in the skilful
use of them by musicians. This is impressed upon us by the most cursory
glance at any modern orchestral score. Haydn's and Mozart's orchestra
consisted of a nucleus of strings, with a few pairs of wood and brass wind
instruments added casually for solos or to reinforce certain voices in the
harmonic tissue. The scheme was fundamentally monochromatic, however
much it might be set off by bits of color here and there. By the time of

Wagner the orchestra was essentially a group of several orchestras of divers
colors: the addition of a third flute, of English horn to the oboe family, of
bass clarinet, and of contrafagotto made each group of the wood-wind
instruments capable of fairly complete harmony; the horns were increased
in number from two to six or eight, the bass trumpet made possible
complete chords for the trumpets, and there were four trombones and a
choir of tubas. Thus, instead of having a uniform foundation, with variety
merely in the trimming, the modern orchestra has complete, independent
choirs of most various instruments, capable of all sorts of combination,
opposition, and contrast.
The manner of writing for the orchestra changed as much as its constitution.
Beethoven usually writes three- or four-part harmony for the strings, and
doubles the wood and brass as seems effective. Tschaïkowsky and Wagner
are apt to put an entire family of instruments on one melodic voice, another
on another, a third on a third—as in the second movement of the
"Symphonie Pathétique," at the point where flutes, oboes, clarinets, and
bassoons sing the melody, while first and second violins and violas pick an
obligato to it. In a word, much more attention is paid in the modern
orchestra to richness and variety of tone-color and to an impressionistically
effective disposition of the various timbres than in the classical scores.
The same tendency is observable in chamber and pianoforte music. Not
only are modern composers fond of curious groupings of wind and string
instruments, as in the trumpet septet of Saint-Saëns, the clarinet quintet and
horn trio of Brahms, and other such works, but when they use only the four
stringed instruments they combine contrasting rhythms and modes of
phrasing, as well as pizzicato, the sordino, the high register of the 'cello, and
other exotic devices, with an unfailing sense of color-values. Schubert is the
first conspicuous example of this sort of quartet writing; Dvořák is his
worthy follower. As for the piano, there is almost as much difference
between the piano writing of Beethoven, so often thick, harsh, and lumpish,
and the ramifying figuration of Schumann or the wide, clear arpeggiated
accompaniments and flowering scale-figures of Chopin as there is between
the coloring of Rembrandt and that of Monet.
All this gain in sensuous richness and technical elaboration is, however, to
be considered largely as a concomitant rather than a direct result (though to
some extent is was that) of the romantic movement. It was primarily merely

a phase of that unparalleled material and mechanical progress so
characteristic of the nineteenth century. The modern orchestra and the
modern pianoforte are simply special examples of the ingenuity of that
century in mechanical devices; the genius which turned the clavichord into
the piano was the same as that which substituted the propeller for sails, and
the electric telegraph for the lumbering mail-coach. But if this modern
mechanical genius has indeed brought to the musician priceless gifts, it is
still important to remember that perfected mechanisms do not account for
romantic music, which might conceivably have existed without them.
Instruments alone cannot make music, any more than a steam derrick can
build a bridge. If we wish to seize the true spirit of the modern musical art,
we must, after all, leave orchestra, and piano, and sensuous value behind,
and ascertain to what use composers have turned all these resources, and to
what manner of expression, embodied in what kind of forms, they have
been spurred by the romantic spirit.

III

Difficult to make, and dangerous when made, as are sweeping
generalizations about so many-sided a matter as the expressive character of
whole schools or eras of art, there seem to be generic differences between
classical and romantic expression which we can hardly avoid remarking,
and of which it is worth while to attempt a tentative definition, especially if
we premise that it is to be suggestive rather than absolute. The constant
generality of classical expression, and the objectivity of attitude which it
indicates in the worker, cannot but strike the modern student, especially if
he contrasts them with the exactly opposite features of contemporary art.
The classical masters aim, not at particularity and minuteness of expression,
but at the congruous setting forth of certain broad types of feeling. They are
jealous of proportion, vigilant to maintain the balance of the whole work,
rigorous in the exclusion of any single feature that might through undue
prominence distort or mar its outlines. Their attitude toward their work is
detached, impersonal, disinterested—a purely craftsmanlike attitude, at the
furthest pole from the passionate subjectivity of our modern "tone-poets." J.
S. Bach, for example, the sovereign spirit of this school, is always
concerned primarily with the plastic problem of weaving his wonderful

tonal patterns; we feel that what these patterns turn out to express, even
though it be of great, and indeed often of supreme, poignancy, is in his mind
quite a secondary matter. The preludes and fugues of the "Well-tempered
Clavichord" are monuments of abstract beauty, rather than messages, pleas,
or illustrations. And even when their emotional burden is so weighty as in
the B-flat minor prelude or the B-minor fugue of the first book, it still
remains general and, as it were, communal. Bach is not relieving his private
mind; he is acting as a public spokesman, as a trustee of the emotion of a
race or nation. This gives his utterance a scope, a dignity, a nobility, that
cannot be accounted for by his merely personal character.
Haydn and Mozart illustrate the same attitude in a different department of
music. Their symphonies and quartets are almost as impersonal as his
preludes and fugues. The substance of all Haydn's best work is the folk-
music of the Croatians, a branch of the Slavic race; its gaiety, elasticity, and
ingenuousness are Slavic rather than merely Haydnish. It is true that he
idealizes the music of his people, as a gifted individual will always idealize
any popular art he touches; but he remains true to his source, and accurately
representative of it, just as the finest tree contains only those elements
which it can draw from the soil in which it grows. Mozart, more personal
than Haydn, shares with him the aloofness, the reticence, of classicism.
What could be more Greek, more celestially remote, than the G-minor
Symphony, or the quintet in the same key? What could be less a detailed
biography of a hero, more an ideal sublimation of his essential character,
than the "Jupiter Symphony"? And even in such a deeply emotional
conception as the introduction to the C-major quartet, can we label any
specific emotion? Can we point to the measures and say, "Here is grief; here
is disappointment; here is unrequited love"?
In Beethoven we become conscious of a gradually changing ideal of
expression. There are still themes, movements, entire works, in which the
dominant impulse is the architectonic zeal of classicism; and there is the
evidence of the sketchbooks that this passionate individualist could subject
himself to endless discipline in the quest of pure plastic beauty. But there
are other things, such as the third, fifth, and ninth symphonies, the
"Egmont" and "Coriolanus" overtures, the slow movement of the G-major
concerto (that profoundly pathetic dialogue between destiny and the human
heart), and the later quartets, in which a novel particularity and subjectivity

of utterance make themselves felt. In such works the self-forgetful artist,
having his vicarious life only in the serene beauty of his creations,
disappears, and Ludwig van Beethoven, bursting with a thousand emotions
that must out, steps into his place and commands our attention, nobly
egotistic, magnificently individual. And then there is the "Pastoral
Symphony," in which he turns landscape painter, and with minutest details
of bird-notes and shepherds' songs and peasants' dances delineates the
external objects, as well as celebrates the inner spirit, of the countryside.
These things mark the birth of romanticism.
For romanticism is, in essence, just this modern subjectivity and
individualism, just this shifting of the emphasis from abstract beauty, with
its undifferentiated expressiveness, to personal communication, minute
interest in the uttermost detail, impassioned insistence on each emotion for
itself rather than as a subordinate member in an articulate organism, and, in
extreme cases, to concrete objects, persons, and scenes in the extra-musical
world. Musicians since Beethoven have inclined to exploit more and more
that aspect of their art which is analogous to language, even when this
means neglect of the other aspect, the nearest analogue of which is to be
found in sculpture, architecture, and decorative painting. The modern
watchword has come to be initiative rather than obedience, originality
rather than skill, individuality rather than truth to universal human nature. It
is, after all, one impulse, the impulse toward specialization, that runs
through all the various manifestations of the romantic spirit, and may be
traced alike in the lyricism of Schubert, the fanciful whimsicality of
Schumann, the picturesqueness of Mendelssohn, the introspection of
Chopin, and the realism of Berlioz and Liszt.
In Schubert, the first of the out-and-out romanticists, and the eldest of them
all in point of time (his birth date falls in the eighteenth century), we find a
curious grafting of a new spirit on an old stem. Brought up on the quartets
and symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, making his first studies in boyishly
literal imitation of them, he acquired the letter of the classical idiom as none
of the others save Mendelssohn ever did. His works in sonata form, written
up to 1816, might well have emanated from Esterhaz or Salzburg; the C-
major Symphony, so far as general plan is concerned, would have done no
discredit to Beethoven. Yet the spirit of Schubert is always lyrical. It was
fated from his birth that he should write songs, for his was a typically

sentimental temperament; and when he planned a symphony, he
instinctively conceived it as a series of songs for instruments, somewhat
more developed than those intended for a voice, but hardly different in kind.
As a naturalist can reconstruct in fancy an extinct animal from a fossil jaw-
bone, a musical historian might piece out a fair conception of what
romanticism is, in the dearth of other evidence, from a study of "Erlkönig,"
or "Ständchen," or "Am Meer"; and the ideas he might thus form would be
extended rather than altered by acquaintance with the "Unfinished
Symphony" or the D-minor Quartet. The lyrical Schubert contrasts always
with the heroic and impersonal Bach or Beethoven, much as Tennyson
contrasts with Shakespeare, or Theocritus with Sophocles.
Schumann adds to the lyrical ardor of Schubert insatiable youthful
enthusiasm, whimsicality, a richly poetic fancy, and a touch of mysticism.
His songs are even more personal than Schubert's, and his piano pieces,
especially the early ones, bristle with eccentricities. The particularity,
minute detail, and personal connotation of the "Abegg Variations," the
"Davidsbündertänze," the "Papillons," the "Carnaval," the "Kreisleriana,"
are almost grotesque. He confides to us, through this music, his friendships,
his flirtations, his courtship, his critical sympathies, his artistic creed, his
literary devotions. Never was music so circumstantial, so autobiographic. In
later years, when he had passed out of the enchanted circle of youthful
egotism, and was striving for a more universal speech, his point of view
became not essentially less personal but only less wayward. Till the last his
art is vividly self-conscious—that is his charm and his limitation. No one
has so touchingly voiced the aspirations of the imprisoned soul, no one has
put meditation and introspection into tones, as he has done in the adagio of
the C-major Symphony, the "Funeral March" of the Quintet, the F-sharp
major Romance for piano.
If Schumann sounds, as no other can, the whole gamut of feeling of a
sensitive modern soul, Mendelssohn, quite dissimilar in temperament,—
correct, reserved, dispassionate,—is nevertheless also romantic by virtue of
his picturesqueness, his keen sense for the pageantry of life, his delicate
skill as an illustrator of nature and of imaginative literature. His "Songs
without Words" reveal a strain of mild lyricism, but he is never intimate or
reckless, he never wholly reveals himself. His discreet objectivity is far
removed from the frankly subjective enthusiasms of Schubert and

Schumann. He was, in fact, by tradition, training, and native taste, a
classicist; the exhibition of deep feeling was distasteful to his fastidious
reticence; and he is thus emotionally less characteristic of his period than
any of his contemporaries. But for all that he shows unmistakably in the
felicity of his tone-painting the modern interest in picturesque detail, in the
concrete circumstance, the significant particular. Illustration rather than
abstract beauty—that is one of the special interests of the new school. No
one has cultivated it more happily than the composer of the "Midsummer
Night's Dream" music, the "Hebrides Overture," and the "Scotch" and
"Italian" Symphonies.
Chopin presents an even more singular instance than Schumann affords of
what introspection can make of a composer, of how resolute self-
communion can individualize his work until its intense personal savor
keeps little to remind us of other music. All Chopin's tastes were so
aristocratic that the exclusiveness of his style seems a matter of course, and
was probably to his mind a supreme merit. And if it debarred him from
some musical experiences, if it made his music sound better in a drawing-
room than in a concert hall, it certainly gave it a marvellous delicacy,
finesse, originality, and fragile beauty. It is, so to speak, valetudinarian
music, and preserves its pure white complexion only by never venturing
into the full sunlight. Here, then, is another differentiation in musical style,
a fresh departure from the classic norm, due to the exacting taste of the
mental aristocrat, the carefully self-bounded dreamer and sybarite.
Markedly specialized as the expression is, however, in Schubert, Schumann,
Mendelssohn, and Chopin, and strikingly contrasted as it is with the serene
generality of the classical music, the two schools after all differ rather in the
degree of emphasis they lay on the various elements of effect than in kind.
Both, we feel, are using the same means, though to such different ends. But
with Berlioz and Liszt we pass into a new world, in which not only
emphasis and intention, but the actual materials and the fundamental
principles of art, have undergone a change. These men have pushed the
romantic concreteness even beyond the range of sentiments and emotions,
to invade that of facts and events. They are no longer satisfied with the
minutiæ of feelings; they must depict for us the external appearance of the
people who feel, give us not only heroes, but these heroes' coats, with the
exact number of buttons and the proper cut, according to the fashion of the

particular decade. If Schumann and his fellows are the sentimental novelists
of music, the Thackerays and the George Eliots, here are the naturalists, the
scientific analysts, the "realists" with microscope and scalpel in hand, the
Zolas and the Gorkys.
This insistence on the letter is quite instinctive with Berlioz. In the first
place, he was a Frenchman; and the French have a genius for the concrete,
and in music have shown their bias by approaching it always from the
dramatic, histrionic point of view. Opera is the norm of music to the
Frenchman. For him, music originates in the opera-house, quite as
inevitably as for the German it originates in the concert room. Berlioz's
"symphonies," therefore, as a matter of course, took the form of operas,
with the characters and action suppressed or relegated to the imagination.
In the second place, the active impulses in Berlioz's personal temperament
predominated over the contemplative to a degree unusual even in his
countrymen; he conceived a work of art in terms not of emotion but of
action; and his musical thinking was a sort of narration in tones. He
accordingly wrote, with ingenuous spontaneity, in a style that was, from the
German standpoint, revolutionary, unprecedented, iconoclastic—a style the
essence of which was its matter-of-fact realism. His "Symphonie
Fantastique," which Mr. Hadow calls his most uncompromising piece of
program music, sets forth the adventures of a hero (whose identity with the
composer is obvious) in five movements or acts, and with the most sedulous
particularity. We first see him struggling with love, tormented by jealousy,
consoled by religion; then in a ball-room, pausing in the midst of the dance
to muse on his beloved; then in the country, listening to idyllic shepherds
and hearing the summer thunder. He dreams that he has murdered the
beloved, that he is to be beheaded at the guillotine; he is surrounded by
witches, his mistress has herself become a witch, the Dies Iræ clangs its
knell of death across the wild chaos of the dance....
Now in all this the striking point is the concreteness of the imagery, the
plenitude of detail, the narrative and descriptive literalness of the treatment
—and above all the subordination of the music to a merely symbolic
function. Berlioz here brings into prominence for the first time the device,
so frequent in later operatic and program music, of treating his themes or
motives as symbols of his characters, associated with these by a purely
arbitrary but nevertheless effective bond. When we hear the melody we are

expected to think of the character, and all the changes rung on it are
prompted not by the desire for musical development, but by psychological
considerations connected with the dramatic action. Thus, for example, in
this symphony the motive known as "l'idée fixe" represents the beloved; its
fragmentary appearances in the second, third, and fourth movements tell us
that the thought of her is passing through our hero's mind; and in the last
movement, when she endues the horrid form of a witch, we hear a distorted,
grotesque version of it sardonically whistled by the piccolo. Highly
characteristic of Berlioz is this use of melodies, so dearly valued in classic
music for themselves alone, as mere counters for telling off the incidents in
the plot, or cues for the entrances of the dramatis personæ.
Liszt, a man of keener musical perception than Berlioz, placed himself also,
in obedience to his strong dramatic sense, on the same artistic platform. In
such a work as the "Faust Symphony" we discern a more musical nature
producing practically the same kind of music. There is the same narrative
and descriptive intention; the three movements take their names from the
chief characters in the action, Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles; and
though the second is more general in expression than Berlioz ever is, the
other two are good examples of his method. There is also the same
machinery of leading motives and their manipulation according to the
requirements of symbolism, even to the parodying of the Faust themes in
the "Mephistopheles" section. In the symphonic poem, "Les Préludes,"
however (and in the "Dante Symphony" and other compositions), Liszt
shows his German blood in a treatment more imaginative, the actuating
subjects being often not persons and events, but emotional and mental
states. But the fact that many of the transformations of the themes are from
the musical standpoint travesties, justified only by their psychological
intention, shows that the attitude even here is still that of the dramatist, not
that of the abstract musician. The art, in a word, is still representative, not
presentative and self-sufficing. Again, the representative function of music
for Liszt is shown by his tendency to approach composition indirectly, and
through extraneous interests of his many-sided mind, instead of with the
classic single-mindedness: his pieces are suggested by natural scenery,
historical characters, philosophic abstractions, poems, novels, and even
statues and pictures.

In all these ways and degrees we see exemplified the inclination of the
nineteenth-century composers to seek a more and more definite, particular,
and concrete type of expression. Subjective shades and nuances take the
place of the ground-colors of classicism; music comes to have so personal a
flavor that it is as impossible to confound a piece of Chopin with one of
Schumann as it is difficult, by internal evidence alone, to say whether
Mozart or Haydn is the author of an unfamiliar symphony; ultimately,
insistence upon special emotions opens the way to absorption in what is
even more special—individual characters, events, and situations,—and on
the heels of the lyrical treads the realistic. The artistic stream thus reverses
the habit of natural streams: as it gets farther and farther from its source it
subdivides and subdivides itself again, until it is no longer a single large
body, but a multitude of isolated brooks and rivulets. Our contemporary
music, unlike the classical, is not the expression of a single social
consciousness, but rather a heterogeneous aggregate of the utterances of
many individuals. What is most captivating about it is the sensitive fidelity
with which it reflects its composers' idiosyncrasies.

IV

All things human, however, have their price, and romanticism is no
exception to the rule. The composers of the romantic period, in becoming
more particular, grew in the same proportion less universal; in bowing to
the inexorable evolutionary force that makes each modern man a specialist,
they inevitably sacrificed something of the breadth, the catholicity, the
magnanimity, of the old time. It is doubtless a sense of some such loss as
this, dogging like a shadow all our gains, that takes us back periodically to a
new appreciation of the classics. There is often a feeling of relief, of freer
breathing and ampler leisure, as when we leave the confusion of the city for
the large peace of the country, in turning from the modern complexities to
the old simplicities, and forgetting that there is any music but Bach's. The
reasons for this contrast between the two schools must of course lie deeply
hidden in the psychology of æsthetics, but a clew to them at least may be
found near at hand, in the conditions of life, the everyday environments, of
the two groups of artists.

It has often been remarked that the composers of the nineteenth century
have been men of more cultivation, of greater intellectual elasticity and
resulting breadth of interest, than their predecessors. Palestrina, Bach,
Handel, Haydn, Mozart, even Beethoven, concentrating their whole minds
on music, were far less curious as to other human pursuits than their later
brethren. The six composers we are studying are impressive instances of
this modern many-sidedness of mind. At least three of them, Schumann,
Berlioz, and Liszt, were skilled journalists and men of letters; Schumann
with the finely judicial, fancifully conceived sketches of his New Journal of
Music, Berlioz with his brilliant, fantastically humorous feuilletons, and
Liszt with his propaganda, in book and pamphlet, of Wagner, Chopin, and
other contemporaries. (Fancy Bach interrupting his steady stream of
cantatas to write an exposition of the genius of Handel!) Schumann was,
moreover, something of a poet, and Mendelssohn was one of the most
voluminous and picturesque of letter-writers. Chopin was as versed in
social as in musical graces and Liszt was—what was he not?—a courtier, a
Lovelace, a man of the world, and an abbé. Schubert alone, of them all the
eldest and the nearest to classical traditions, was a composer pure and
simple.
The versatility of these men was no accident or freak of coincidence; it was
the effective trait that made their work so profusely allusive, so vividly
minute, in short, so romantic. And what is more to our purpose just here, it
was the underlying cause of a defect which is quite as symptomatic of
romanticism as its merits. So various a mental activity must needs lack
something in depth; if attention is spread wide it must be spread thin;
thought given to avocations must be borrowed from the vocation. We
should expect to find, accordingly, division of energy resulting, here as
elsewhere, in a lack of concentration, a failure of power; and herein we are
not disappointed. With the possible exception of Mendelssohn, no one of
our six composers can compare, simply as a handicraftsman, with Bach or
Mozart. Schubert was so little a contrapuntist that he had just engaged
lessons when death interrupted his brief career. Schumann and Chopin gave
in their youth innumerable hours that should have counted for systematic to
routine the fanciful improvisation so seductive to poetic temperaments.
Berlioz kicked down all the fences in his coltish days, and ever after looked
askance at the artistic harness. Liszt, for all his diabolical cleverness,

remained the slave of mannerisms, and became a dupe of his own rhetorical
style.
Now there is doubtless in all this waywardness something that strikes in us
a chord such as vibrates in sympathy with the small boy who, regardless of
barbed wire, invades the orchard and carries off the delectable green apples.
It is a fine thing to be young, it is glorious to be free. But sober second
thought relentlessly follows: we know that apples must be sent to market in
due course, and that that exciting green fruit is, after all, indigestible and
unripe; and we know equally that musicians must undergo their
apprenticeship, and that all art executed without adequate technical mastery
is crude. The crudity of the art of our musical orchard-robbers becomes at
once evident when we compare a single melody, or an entire movement, of
Schubert or his successors with one by Mozart or Beethoven.
The single melody is the molecule of music, the smallest element in it that
cannot be subdivided without loss of character. Every great melody has an
indefinable distinction, a sort of personal flavor or individuality, which we
may discern but cannot analyze. It has also, however, an organic quality,
depending upon both the unity and the variety of its phraseology, that we
can to a certain extent study and define. Assuming, to start with, the subtle
distinction without which it would sink into the commonplace, we can
compare and contrast it with other melodies in respect of its organic quality,
its simultaneous presentation of unity and variety—in a word, its plastic
beauty. Such a melody as the second theme of the first movement of
Mozart's G-minor Quintet, for example, gains a wonderful charm from the
complexity, and at the same time the final simplicity, of its phrase structure.
The several musical figures, or motives, of which it is composed follow
each other without the least impression of crass mechanical dovetailing; yet
one feels, as they proceed, such a sense of logical progression, of orderly
sequence, that the final cadence seems like an audible "Q. E. D." Contrasted
with such dexterous phrase-weaving as this, many of Schubert's and
Schumann's tunes, with their literal repetitions of short phrases, their set
thesis and antithesis, seem pitifully bald and trite. It is hardly fair to take
extreme cases, but they best bring out the point. Schubert's "Drang in die
Ferne," ten consecutive measures of which repeat literally the same rhythm,
and the theme in Schumann's "Abegg Variations," in which a single phrase
recurs sixteen times, will make it almost painfully evident. This tendency to

rhythmic monotony, to an unvaried singsong reiteration of phrase, besets
constantly these two composers, too often takes Chopin in its grasp, and in
Mendelssohn is aggravated by an inclination to stay in one key, page after
page, until our heads droop with drowsiness. Berlioz, on the other hand,
errs in the opposite direction. Variety, with him, degenerates into a chaotic
miscellaneousness, and what should be an agreeably diversified landscape
becomes a pathless jungle. In both cases there is a failure of the
constructive faculty, due to a lack of mental coördination and concentration.
The price paid for interesting detail is monotony or instability in the
organism.
Similar weaknesses reveal themselves when we pass from considering the
elemental melodies to survey the ways in which they are built up into larger
sections and whole movements—when we pass, that is, from form to
structure.[1] None of the romantic composers attained a breadth, diversity,
and solidity of construction in any wise comparable to Beethoven's.
Schubert was intellectually too indolent, if not indifferent, to attempt
intricate syntheses of his materials, but relied instead on their primitive
charm to justify endless repetitions. Schumann, less tolerant of platitude,
and gifted with more intense, if hardly more disciplined, imagination,
resorted to constant kaleidoscopic change, resulting in those "mosaic forms"
which are related to true cyclic forms much as a panorama is related to a
picture. Mendelssohn was naturally a better master of construction, but the
knots he ties are somewhat loose and inclined to ravel out. Chopin, a born
miniaturist, obviously fails to make his sonatas and concertos anything but
chance bundles of lyrical pieces. As for Berlioz and Liszt, they frankly
faced their dilemma, and had the shrewdness to disclaim the desire to do
that for which they wanted the faculty. They fell back on the "poetic forms,"
and let their works pile up without internal coherence, held together only by
the thread of the story they were illustrating.
For this failure to work out the highest degree of plastic beauty possible to
them, the romanticists frequently have to pay in a serious loss of power.
Keenly interesting as are the details of their work, the whole impression is
apt to lack fusion, clearness, integrity. Not without terrible risks may the
musician neglect form, since form is itself, for him, perhaps more than for
any of his brother artists in other mediums, a fundamental means of
expression. Of this matter popular thought is inclined to take a superficial

view; it is fond of confusing vital form with dry formalism, of speaking
contemptuously of formal analysis as the pedantic dissection of lovely
melodies, the plucking and counting of the petals of the flowers of art, and
of reiterating ad nauseam its irritating half-truth, "Music is the language of
the emotions." Popular thought would do well to pause and consider; to ask
itself whether language too has not its form, without which it is
unintelligible; to inquire how much of the expressive power of a lovely
melody would remain were its pitch and time relations (that is, its form)
materially altered, how long we could be inspired by the most exciting
rhythms, were they ceaselessly reiterated without relief, and how eloquent
we should find even the most moving symphony, were it written all in one
key, or in several keys that had no relation to one another. Such
consideration soon suggests the truth, which impresses us the more the
more deeply we study music, that there is a general expressiveness
underlying all particular expressions, a fundamental beauty by which all
special beauties are nourished as flowers are nourished by the soil, a
symmetry and orderly organization that can no more be dispensed with in
music without crippling its eloquence than a normal regularity of the
features can be dispensed with in the human face without distorting it into
absurdity or debasing it into ugliness. Without its pervasive presence, all
special features, however amusing or superficially appealing, fail to inspire
or charm. They become as wild flowers plucked to languish indoors, as
seaweeds taken from their natural setting of liquid coolness. Or again, the
particular expressions of music may be compared to the strings of an
instrument, of which the sounding board is plastic beauty; without its
sympathetic reinforcement the strings, strike them as we may, give forth a
scarcely audible murmur; with it, there is clear and powerful sonority. So
the most ingenious music is dull and dead if it lack the vitality of organic
form, but if it be beautiful it will make its way directly to the heart.
It is surely not necessary to add that this discussion of the primal
importance of form is not intended to impeach all romantic music as
deficient in the appeal that beauty alone can make. This were indeed a
reductio ad absurdum. Much of the music of Schubert, Schumann,
Mendelssohn, and Chopin is of the rarest beauty, and, by the same token, of
the most moving eloquence. The intention of our analysis is rather to secure
that aid to the appreciation of just such beauties which discrimination alone
can give, and by means of comparison to sharpen the focus of our mental

image of what romanticism achieves and of what it fails to achieve. At its
best, we shall rejoice to find, it shares the serene loveliness, the impersonal
grandeur, of classicism. At its less than best, it offers us a vivid intellectual
interest, a keen pleasure in following its wide ramifications and its faithful
illustrations of many phases of life. At its worst only does its exaggerated
passion for detail mislead it into petty and prosaic literalism.

V

A slightly different angle of approach to this whole problem of musical
expression is afforded by psychological analysis. Here, again, as we might
expect, modern theory, the learned as well as the popular, is somewhat
biassed by the prominence in modern practice of certain special features of
effect. The psychologists dwell with a pardonable partiality of vision on the
means of special expression; to complete their theories the reader has often
to add for himself a consideration of the psychology of form. An article by
M. Edmond Goblot, entitled "La Musique Descriptive,"[2] is interesting,
like others of its kind, both for what it explains and for what it ignores.
M. Goblot classifies expressive music under three headings, to which he
gives the names of "la musique emotive," "la musique descriptive," and "la
musique imitative." His first rubric is somewhat vague, a sort of rag-bag
into which he stuffs "toute musique qui provoque l’emotion sans aucun
intermediaire conscient." The other two are not only more precise, but serve
to call attention to devices which have become very prominent in romantic,
and especially in modern realistic, music. "Imitative" music, by reproducing
literally sounds heard in the extra-musical world of nature, suggests to the
listener the objects and events associated with them. Examples are the bird-
notes in Beethoven's "Pastoral Symphony," the thunder in Berlioz's
"Symphonie Fantastique," the bleating of sheep in Strauss's "Don Quixote,"
the striking of the clock and the wailing of the baby in his "Symphonia
Domestica." "Descriptive" music suggests actions and events by means of
analogies, chiefly of movement and of utterance, between the music and the
object, and is of course far commoner than the more literal and narrowly
circumscribed imitation. Beethoven is descriptive when he represents the
even flowing of the brook, in the "Pastoral Symphony," by rippling figures

in eighth notes, or when in the bass recitatives of the Ninth Symphony he
suggests the impassioned utterance of an imaginary protagonist;
Mendelssohn describes in his "Hebrides Overture" the heaving of the ocean,
and in his "Midsummer Night's Dream" the dancing of fairies; Saint-Saëns
reproduces in "Le Rouet d'Omphale" the very whirr of the spinning-wheel,
and Wagner in his fire-music the ceaseless lapping of flames.
Such devices as these certainly occupy a prominent place in modern music.
Almost every composer of the later nineteenth century has taken his fling at
this sort of sketching from nature. One cannot resist, nevertheless, the
suspicion that M. Goblot attaches too great an importance to what is, after
all, a casual and desultory element in most compositions, and that he
inclines to lay on the narrow shoulders of imitation and description a
greater burden of explanation than they can carry. Beethoven's birds and
brooks are attractive features in a great work; Saint-Saëns' spinning-wheel
makes a charming arabesque on a harmony of solid musicianship; but what
are we to say to M. Goblot's assertion that a passage cited from Alexandre
George, modulating upward by whole steps, is emphatically expressive
because it "reminds us of a person reiterating with growing exaltation the
same authoritative or impassioned affirmation, and each time advancing a
step, in an attitude of menace or defiance"? Can we accept as
unquestioningly as he does a series of thirteen consecutive fifths,
descriptive of sunrise, on the ground that it "wounds our ears as the light of
the sun wounds our eyes"? And listen to his comment on Schubert's
"Trout," that long-suffering denizen of Teutonic waters: "En courant sur
son lit de pierres, elle se creuse de plis profonds, se hérisse de crêtes
saillantes, et ces plis et ces crêtes se croisent obliquement en miroitant."
Schubert's fat shoulders, we suspect, would have shaken could he have read
this ingenious commentary on his work.
If such finical transcription of natural sights and sounds is the aim of music,
why do we prefer Beethoven's thunder, which clings cravenly to the
diatonic scale, to Berlioz's, so much more realistic in its daring dissonance?
Why do we not forthwith turn about face on the road our art has so long
been travelling, and forsake musical intervals, those quite artificial
figments, for the noises which surround us everywhere in the actual world?
Noise is indeed the hidden goal toward which all description and imitation
aspire, and sound could never have passed into music under their guidance,

but only in quest of a far deeper, more subtle expressiveness. It is hard to
believe that any sane listener would long continue to patronize music in
which there was not something more truly satisfying than the lapping of
brooks, the crashing of storm or battle, and the whirring of spinning-wheels
or the creaking of wind-mills. If such were the case, we should have to
admit sadly that music had fallen to the level to which dramatic art falls in
the real-tank-and-practicable-saw-mill melodrama, to which painting falls
in those pictures from which we try to pluck the too tangible grape.
M. Goblot evidently realizes himself that there is a subtler appeal than that
of description and imitation; for it is in order to account for it that he makes
his separate heading of "la musique emotive," by which he indicates all
music which acts directly upon the emotions, without the aid of any
recognition of external objects, any intellectual concepts, or, as he says,
"aucun intermediaire conscient." The appeal he here has in mind is that of
thousands of melodies, which, without describing or imitating any concrete
object, suggest vividly special states of feeling, by recalling to us, in veiled,
modified, and idealized form, those gestures or cries we habitually make
under the spur of such feelings. Since the spontaneous vocal expressions of
strong emotion—wailing, crying, pleading, moaning, and the like—have all
their characteristic cadences, which can be more or less accurately
reproduced in a bit of melody, and since the natural bodily gesticulations
can be similarly suggested by divers rhythmical movements, music has the
power to induce a great variety of emotional states by what we may call
direct contagion, without the intermediation of any mental images. It can
act upon us like the infection of tears or laughter, to which we involuntarily
succumb, without asking for any reasons. And it certainly exercises this
power much more constantly and steadily than it imitates or describes.
Almost all lyrical melodies, such as Schumann's "Ich Grolle Nicht," with its
persistently rising inflection of earnest protestation, or Chopin's "Funeral
March," with its monotone of heavy grief, will be found on analysis to
reëcho, in an idealized and transfigured form, the natural utterance of
passion. This kind of expression, which has been frequently described,
appeals to our subconscious associations rather than to those conscious
processes of thought by which we follow realistic delineation. Operating at
a deeper level in our natures, it is proportionately more potent and
irresistible.

But is even this type of expression, more general and pervasive though it be
than the types so interestingly studied by M. Goblot—is even this style of
expression universal, omnipresent, fundamental? Does it suffice to explain
the overwhelming emotional appeal of an organ-fugue of Bach, for
example, of which the impression seems to be vague, general, indefinable
in specific terms, in the exact measure of its profundity? If "la musique
emotive" works at a deeper level and upon a more subconscious element in
our nature than "la musique imitative" and "la musique descriptive," is there
not still another kind of music, which we may perhaps best call simply "la
musique belle," which, addressing still deeper instincts, exercises an even
more magical persuasiveness?
The case of the Bach fugue forces us to the conclusion that there is indeed a
kind of expression depending neither on the portrayal of natural objects nor
on the suggestion of such special feelings as joy and grief, but penetrating
by a still deeper avenue to the primal springs of our emotion. The more
compelling the experience, it seems, the more is it idealized away from
concrete references and provocations in the direction of abstract musical
beauty. By presenting to us a perfect piece of form, a highly complex yet
ultimately single organism of tones, it calls into full play our most
fundamental perceptions; and this satisfying exercise of our faculties gives
us a pervasive happiness, a diffused sense of efficient vitality, ineffably
more delightful than any particularized emotion or isolated intellectual
process. Perfection of form thus turns out to be the most indispensable of all
the means of expression at the command of the composer.
Psychological analysis, carried to its legitimate end, verifies, we see, the
conclusions of the naïve musical observer. All expression, for psychology,
is the product of an association between two "terms" in the mind—the first
that which is given by experience, the expressive object, the second that
system of thoughts and feelings at which the mind arrives through the
associative act, that which, as we say, is expressed. This being the case, it is
evident that, other things being equal, that expression will be most potent
the first term of which most deeply stirs our instinctive, subconscious life.
When the first term is a basic activity of our minds, such as the perception
of a beautiful form, the feelings to which it leads us will have a peculiar
depth and amplitude. Our whole organism, like the sounding-board of the
well-attuned instrument, will be set in vibration. This is what happens when

we listen sympathetically to music that is really beautiful. When, on the
other hand, the mental trigger pulled is only some special emotion, so that
the stimulation is superficial or local, the impression will reverberate less
far-reachingly. We shall be less profoundly moved. And when it is not even
an emotion, however special, that starts off the train of thought, but the
intellectual concept of some object or event, we shall likely be not so much
moved as interested; our curiosity rather than our passions will respond; and
we shall call the music bizarre, original, or striking, but hardly beautiful.
Something like the same gradation in the power of various appeals,
according to their generality, is observable in ordinary life. To read a love-
story, labyrinthine in minute detail, is a less seizing experience than to
overhear the impassioned speech of some actual lover, even if we catch
none of the words; and this in turn commoves us less than to feel in our
own frames that boiling of the blood, that surging of the vitals, which is the
raw material of love. Brisk exercise on a fine autumn day of sun and wind
gives a richer happiness than is dreamed of in our philosophies. It
communicates no particular ideas, but attunes our whole being so
exquisitely that the fancies spring up spontaneously, like wild-flowers in a
fertile meadow. So lovely music simply establishes in us a mood, leaving
all the furniture of that mood to our imaginations. And this is why it is that
artistic expression, as it becomes more minute and meticulously precise, is
apt to lose in persuasive power, and that the composer, if he understands his
medium, must needs hesitate long before sacrificing the least degree of
beauty, however interstitial and inconspicuous, to any isolated feature of
interest, no matter how salient or seductive.

VI

Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the foregoing analysis, incomplete
and tentative as it is, affords us something like a rational basis for our
instinctive attitudes toward the various types of music. Though its intention
is to suggest rather than to dogmatize, it may by this time have fixed clearly
in our minds certain fundamental principles of artistic effect; and by
constant reference to these it may have established in us a measure of
judicial impartiality and poise. Especially, it may have clarified our notions,
likely to remain confused so long as they are unconscious, of the essential

achievements of the romantic school, both in its lyrical and in its realistic
phases, as well as of the peculiar drawbacks and limitations to which it is
subject.
The abiding charm of the lyrical work of the romantic composers, typical of
which are Schubert's songs, Schumann's novelettes and phantasiestücke,
and Chopin's nocturnes and preludes, lies in its intimateness, its strong
personal flavor. It fascinates us by its impulsive self-revelation, its
frankness, spontaneity, and enthusiasm. Its subjectivity and introspection,
even when they are troubled or touched with sadness, stir a sympathetic
chord in the self-conscious modern breast. To those moods which the
classic reticence chills and repels, romantic music speaks with tender,
caressing humanity. Even its limitations are then an added appeal; for when
we are too weary or dull to brace ourselves to the perception of impersonal
beauty, the accent of private grief, aspiration, struggle, and disappointment
seems better pitched to our capacity, and has a pathos we can understand.
Schumann and Chopin are the best companions for hours of reverie and
self-communion. On the other hand, when those hours overtake us in which
we realize the pathetic incompleteness of all merely personal life, in which
we discern what fragmentary creatures we are, and how little of truth we
can ever see, then all living to ourselves alone is touched with the sense of
vanity. Then every utterance of our petty private griefs, and even of our
nobler but still private joys, seems like a breath dissipated in a universe; we
find true existence, solid reality, only in an identification of our interests
with those of all mankind. As morals finds its escape from this sense of the
vanity of individual living in social devotion, æsthetics finds it in the
impersonality of classic art. Romanticism is sometimes silent, or speaks to
unattending ears. We turn from all special expressions, touched as they are
with human mortality and evanescence, to the eternal abstract beauty.
If lyrical music is unsatisfactory to these moods of highest vitality and
severest demand, realistic music is exasperating, intolerable. When we have
nothing better to do it is amusing enough to note the ingenuity with which a
composer can introduce the bray of an ass into his delicate tissue of tones,
as Mendelssohn does in the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or
make three bird-notes sound a harmonic triad as Beethoven does in his
"Pastoral Symphony." There is a fascinating technical problem involved in
the suggestion of natural noises by musical tones, and when we are

indifferent to such technical interests, we may still find diversion in
following a series of tonal cues to the events of a familiar story. But when
we crave the sublimity of music, when we long to feel once more the thrill
of its transcendent beauty, how can we endure to be put off with the barking
of a dog, the mewing of a cat, the galloping of a horse, or the crying of a
baby? Most program music is incredibly trivial in intention, and gives an
impression of maladaptation of means to ends, the former are so elaborate,
the latter so paltry and mean. To elicit from a modern orchestra of a
hundred instruments a feeble imitation of a battle seems, as some one has
piquantly phrased it, "like using a steam-hammer to kill a fly."
We read with impatience the annals of this school. John Mundy, an English
composer of the seventeenth century, writes a "Fantasia on the Weather," in
four parts: "Faire Weather; Lightning; Thunder; a Faire Day." Adam
Krieger, in 1667, composes a four-part vocal fugue "entirely imitative of
cats," on a chromatic subject set to the words "Miau, miau." Dussek
produces a series of pieces entitled "The Sufferings of the Queen of
France," some of which are: "The Queen's Imprisonment" (largo); "She
reflects on her Former Greatness" (maestoso); "Her Invocation to the
Almighty just before her Death" (devotamente); "The Guillotine drops" (a
glissando descending scale); "Apotheosis." We smile patronizingly over
these first childish attempts of an art essentially childish. No longer
satisfied with such innocent delineations of natural and political history, we
must have autobiography, domesticity, and even metaphysics, translated
into tones. But will posterity take a truly keener delight in our triumphs of
realism than we do in the works of Mundy and Krieger? Already Mr. Arthur
Symons, in his essay on Richard Strauss, cries in pardonable irritation: "If I
cared more for literature than for music, I imagine that I might care greatly
for Strauss. He offers me sound as literature. But I prefer to read my
literature, and to hear nothing but music."
Were triviality the only sin of program music we might leave it, without
further ado, to the gradual oblivion which overtakes the jejune in art. But,
unfortunately, program music not merely bores the music-lover; it does him
a positive injury, which criticism ought, so far as it can, to mitigate. By its
false emphasis it distracts attention from what music can do supremely to
what it can only botch and bungle, brings true masterpieces into discredit
with hearers not sensitive or disciplined enough to appreciate them, and

plunges the simple into a hopeless æsthetic quagmire. Pitiable is the
frequency of such questions, on the lips of aspiring students, as, "Ought I,
when I listen to music, to have in mind a series of pictures, or a story?" To
judge by the minuteness of its detail the art which beyond all others is great
by virtue of indefinite suggestion, and inspires by appealing to faculties far
below the level of intellectual consciousness, is to be sadly duped. "We
forget," writes Vernon Lee, "that music is neither a symbol which can
convey an abstract thought, nor a brute cry which can express an instinctive
feeling; we wish to barter the power of leaving in the mind an indelible
image of beauty for the miserable privilege of awakening the momentary
recollection of one of nature's sounds, or the yet more miserable one of
sending a momentary tremor through the body; we would rather compare
than enjoy, and rather weep than admire."
The upshot of all this is, that not even in enjoying the novel delights, the
picturesque glimpses, and the fancy-provoking allusiveness which
romanticism has introduced into music should we give ourselves too
unreservedly to what may be, after all, but a partial and limited pleasure. If
these things make us indifferent to deeper beauties they do us a disservice.
If, however, we can keep, in spite of their seductions, our sense of
proportion, our perception of relative values, we shall enjoy them in
security. The romantic movement has undoubtedly led to a widening of our
artistic sympathies, has enriched our music with new expressive
possibilities and technical resources. It has been one of those periods of
ebullience, corresponding perhaps in the consciousness of the race to the
storm and stress of adolescence in the individual, which are bound to come
so long as we are growing. We cannot fully maintain our poise at the very
moment in which we are extending our field of experience; periods of
conquest must alternate with periods of assimilation; and as in walking we
constantly lose our balance in order to progress, so in mental life we
willingly forego control until it can supervene on a broader consciousness.
The romantic composers, eagerly developing the expressive possibilities of
music, may have forgotten sometimes in their enthusiasm the organic
beauty without which music can never wholly satisfy, but nevertheless they
have enriched their art. The available resources of music are to-day more
various than ever before. Not only have its mechanical facilities been
wonderfully perfected by the ingenuity of the nineteenth century, but its

potentialities for vivid and detailed expression have been permanently
raised by the subjective intentness of the modern temperament. It remains
for future composers to make a new synthesis of all these novel elements,
and without sacrificing their vividness to impose upon them the ultimate
integrity of impression which at present they too often lack. A classical
unity and beauty must supervene upon our romantic multiplicity and
interesting confusion. Expression, without losing the minuteness that
modern speculation has gained for it, must regain something of the classical
serenity. We have had already one musician who, profiting by his heritage,
has vied with Schumann in versatility and with Bach in intimacy, who has
combined in his single mind something of the sensitive sympathy of the
romanticists and the rugged power of the classicists. It may be that Brahms
but points the way to a music of the future which will be as grand as it is
vivid, as universal in scope as it is personal in accent and inspiration, and in
which beauty of form and richness of expression will be reunited in perfect
coöperation to one great artistic end.

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Properly speaking, "form" refers to the molecular constitution of music, to
the ways in which relations of pitch and rhythm are manipulated in melody and
harmony; "structure" to the molar constitution of music, the subsequent grouping
of the melodies into complete pieces. The difference between a sonata, a fugue,
and a nocturne is a difference of structure; the difference between a good melody
and a bad one is a difference of form.
[2] La Revue Philosophique, Vol. LII.

II
FRANZ SCHUBERT

FRANZ SCHUBERT
From an original water color by W. A. Rieder

II
FRANZ SCHUBERT

As the earliest full-fledged representative of the romantic school of
composers which succeeded Beethoven, Schubert occupies a peculiar
position in the history of music. His work forms the link between the
classical music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and the romantic music
of Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, having certain qualities in
common with each. Traditions, training, and environment allied him with
the older order; but instinct led him into new paths. Scattered plentifully
through the thousands of pages covered by his racing pen, many of which
might be the work of some humdrum eighteenth-century kapellmeister, are
features of surprising novelty, pointing unmistakably to the future rather
than to the past—gleams of the true gold in a vast heap of sand. Nine-tenths
of the time he is content to imitate, with amiable, unthinking garrulity, the
quartets and sonatas he grew up with; the other tenth he breaks forth
incontinently, an inspired pioneer. This mingling of the matter-of-course
and the unexpected, of the sand and the gold, makes his music a curious
study.
Born in Vienna, January 31, 1797, Schubert began the study of music when
still a child, under the direction of his father, a school-teacher by profession,
and his two brothers. While in his teens the boy began playing the viola
pans in the family string quartet. His brothers took the violin parts, and his
father played the 'cello: not always impeccably, it is to be feared, for we
read how little Franz, looking doubtless very solemn and gnomelike in the
spectacles he already wore, would from time to time, without stopping to
look at the score, comment on the wrong notes the paternal fingers were
sounding. This informal quartet was the nucleus of an orchestra, known as
the Orchestral Society of Amateurs, which flourished at a somewhat later
period, and served to make Schubert acquainted with the works of
Krommer, Romberg, Cherubini, Spontini, Câtel, Mehul, Boïeldieu, Weigl,

Winter, and others of that category, as well as with some Haydn and
Mozart, and the first two symphonies of Beethoven. There was also an
orchestra in the government school for the Emperor's choir, known as the
"Convict" (from convivo, not convinco), which the boy, thanks to his clear
soprano voice, attended from his eleventh to his sixteenth year; and of this
he was not only a member, but for some time a conductor. One can readily
imagine that with all this music-making there was little time for general
schooling. Indeed, from the moment he left the Convict, in 1813, he seems
to have given little thought to any but a technical education; and though he
attended a normal school for a while, and later even tried teaching under his
father for three years, his main interests were his lessons with the famous
opera composer, Salieri, and his first essays in composition.
For the instinct of imitation had started him composing at an age when most
boys nowadays are learning arithmetic. At thirteen he broke the ice with a
four-hand piano fantasia, and from that moment swam contentedly through
a sea of manuscripts. His teeming fecundity and his carelessness for the
children of his brain once they were hatched showed themselves from the
first. When he mislaid thirty minuets written at the Convict, he would not
trouble to recopy them; what he enjoyed was the activity, not its product;
and it was dull to bottle old water while the spring was flowing so cool and
fresh. The figure of a spring does scant justice to Schubert's inexhaustible
fancy; it was more like one of those magic knapsacks in the fairy stories—
the more he took out of it, the more remained behind. By 1815 his fertility
had become almost uncanny, especially when we remember that he had for
music only the leisure hours of a young schoolmaster of eighteen. In March
he wrote the Mass in G; between March 25 and April 1 a string quartet in
G-minor; in May a symphony (his third) in D-major; in June an entire
operetta; during six days in July another operetta, of which the libretto fills
forty-two closely printed pages; on October 15 seven songs; on the 19th
four more; and in the interstices of time, another symphony, four other
operettas, two piano sonatas, and one hundred and thirty-five songs, headed
by "The Erl-King." One rubs one's eyes. Compared with Schubert's pen,
Aladdin's lamp seems a poor affair.
The natural result, in worldly matters, of this imaginative preoccupation
was abject poverty. Never did Apollo turn his back on Admetus with a more
sublime indifference than in the avatar of this otherwise modest musician. It

is true that he gave some scattering music lessons, and that for a time he
acted as music-master in that same Esterhazy family which so long
patronized Haydn; but of any lasting patronage, any remunerative
appointment, or any systematic teaching, we hear nothing. Even his
compositions brought him but a farcical revenue. He published nothing
until 1821, when the first batch of songs, including "The Erl-King," was
printed by subscription. Later, the publishers being still unwilling to take
risks on a virtually unknown composer, twenty more songs were similarly
issued. Only when popular favor had become manifest could he use the
regular channels of publication; and then he had to content himself with the
merest pittances. Diabelli, who in forty years is said to have gained over ten
thousand dollars on "The Wanderer," paid Schubert for the plates and
copyright of that and nineteen other songs only three hundred and fifty
dollars. Haslinger, in the composer's last year, when his reputation was
made and his work practically done, paid him one dollar and a quarter for
half a dozen of his finest songs. That he was himself largely to blame for
this pecuniary misfortune, through his aversion to drudgery and his
carelessness in the conduct of business affairs, hardly reconciles us to the
fact of his constant and often extreme poverty, but for which he might have
lived longer and wrought to even better purpose.
But if he was poor, he had at least the temperament and tastes suitable to
poverty. Not even Mozart, whose character and destiny had much in
common with Schubert's, was more light-hearted and easy-going. "Perfect
freedom of action," says his biographer, "was the element in which he by
preference moved, and for which he was content to make every sacrifice."
To drink his mug of beer and eat his sausage, to flirt with pretty servant-
maids and peasant girls, to discourse youthful philosophy and play practical
jokes with convivial poets, painters, and students, above all to fill reams of
music paper with the melodies that were always flooding his brain—this
was his conception of sufficing happiness. It is curious to read of his daily
routine—how, rising early, he would proceed, often before dressing, to
improvise until breakfast; how, after a morning spent in composition, he
would dine at the Gasthaus for a Zwanziger (ten cents); how he would
divide the rest of the day between walking in the suburbs, calling on the
ladies of his acquaintance, and discussing beer and friendship in Bogner's
coffee-house, or the "Zur Ungarischen Krone," or the "Zum rothen
Kreuz,"—sometimes, in these latter haunts, jotting down immortal melodies

on the backs of wine cards in the midst of the tavern pandemonium. When
he was in high spirits he would challenge a friend to a mock duel with
walking-sticks, or sing the "Erl-King," in parody, through the teeth of a
comb. And then there were the Schubertiaden, or Schubert evenings, held
by his friends of both sexes in some one of the Vienna suburbs, at which the
diversions consisted of dancing, lieder-singing, and theatricals, all to the
accompaniment of the flowing bowl. "When the juice of the grape flowed
in his veins," says one of his biographers, "he became a laughing tyrant, and
would destroy everything he could, without making a noise,—glasses,
plates, and cups,—and sit simpering and screwing up his eyes into the
smallest possible compass." Altogether we get the picture of a Bohemian,
irresponsible, bachelor life, innocent enough, but not troubled with
embarrassing refinements. Schubert was not at his ease in highly cultivated
circles. In his first letter from Zelész, the seat of the Esterhazys, he
describes the servants in detail before giving a word to their princely
employers. Physically Schubert was a short, stout man, with round
shoulders, thick, blunt fingers, low forehead, projecting lips, stumpy nose,
and short curly hair. Very near-sighted, he wore spectacles from boyhood.
His friends' somewhat boorish wit compared him to a negro, a cabman, and
even a tallow-candle, and afflicted him with the nickname of
"Schwammerl," or "The Sponge"—whether in reference to his fondness for
beer or to his superfluous flesh does not transpire.
The noteworthy fact toward which all these bits of otherwise insignificant
personal detail point, the thesis in support of which they are here cited, is
that Schubert was an unusually pure case of the sentimental temperament.
All the external evidence—his contentedly ambling, unbuttoned existence,
his combination of sweetness and a sort of involuntary nobility of aim, with
an utter lack of intellectual distinction, his gullibility in business matters
and practical affairs, his devotion to day-dream and revery, even his
indolence and resulting sponginess of physique—points in the one
direction. And these matters of ordinary observation are reinforced by the
internal evidence of his music, as for example the preference for short
pieces, each vividly expressive of a single mood; the pervasive tone of
tender sadness, frequently irradiated by charming fancy, but seldom swept
aside by tumultuous passion and energy; the fondness for minor keys,
delicious modulations, and persistent hypnotizing rhythms; the incapacity
for complex structure and sustained imagination. Here, obviously, is no

hero of abstract thought, like Bach, or of intellectual and emotional passion,
like Beethoven, but a gracious sentimentalist, a man of feeling, a sort of
Burns or Heine of music.
The natural medium of musical expression for such a temperament is the
brief lyric, the song for single voice with piano accompaniment; and it was
inevitable that Schubert, constituted as he was, should become "the father
of the song." Before his time, this had been a form not favored by the great
composers; Mozart's and Beethoven's songs, as Mr. Hadow has remarked,
were merely the chips thrown off in a great workshop; for them the norm of
expression was the symphony. But Schubert, as a new sort of man among
composers, treated the song with a new kind of earnestness, and with an
unprecedented spontaneity. Each of his best songs is an unsophisticated
utterance of simple sentiment, a wondrously vivid presentment of a single
isolated feeling, a "moment's monument," as Rossetti said the sonnet should
be. And this was precisely what the artistic situation required. As in a short
story of the kind that Kipling, Stevenson, and others have made familiar to
us we do not demand that evolution of character, that complex nodation of
plot, that subtle action and reaction of motive, which every great novel must
have, but simply vividness, brilliant depiction of a single person, idea, or
situation, so in a song we desire no symphonic grandeur of scope and
wealth of ordered detail, but rather perfect utterance of a single highly
specialized emotion.
Schubert's best songs fulfil this requirement in an almost inimitable degree.
Simple in style and design, wonderfully direct and sincere, conceived as
idealizations of the beautiful old German Volkslieder, and carried out with
all the artistic perfection and appropriateness of detail that good
craftsmanship could give, they are among the few things in music that are
absolutely achieved. Especially remarkable is the art-concealing art by
which Schubert, through some perfectly simple and unobtrusive feature of
rhythm, melody, or harmony, knows how to suggest exactly the spirit and
atmosphere of his text. In the well-known "Serenade," for example, the
deftly managed mixture of minor and major harmonies (a favorite device,
by the way, with Schubert) strikes just the right emotional note of loverly
solicitude and tenderness. In "Am Meer" four chords at the beginning, and
again at the end, bring the sombre, majestic ocean visibly before us, while
the sudden dissonances introduced with the line "Fielen die Thränen nieder"

bring home to us with a terrible poignancy the human tragedy which the
poet has so vividly outlined against this stern natural background. And then
turn to "Hark! Hark! the Lark," perhaps the most purely lovely, in a musical
sense, of all the songs, and note the adorable elasticity of the rhythm, the
lambent grace of the tune, the idyllic change of key at the words, "And
winking Mary-buds begin to ope their golden eyes," and the poising flight
of the melody at the final, "Arise—arise—arise":—truly Elizabethan this
music, in its graciousness and childlike joy. In short, Schubert strikes at
once, and in each case, in such songs as "Hark, hark! the Lark," "Who is
Sylvia?" "Am Meer," "Du bist die Ruh," "Die Forelle," "Heidenröslein,"
and perhaps a dozen others, the exact tone and style needed to transfigure
the particular feeling with all the magic of music, and throughout the song
maintains the mood perfectly, with no mixture or clouding. And this, too,
with the greatest actual diversity of mood in the different songs, to which
his art flexibly responds. This group of his fifteen or twenty best songs is
not only the crown of his own work, but one of the brightest jewels in the
crown of romanticism.
In critical justice it is necessary to add, however, that in another group of
his songs, even more popular than this supreme one, Schubert's
romanticism inspired him less happily. Whenever, giving free rein to his
passion for detailed expression, he directed his effort less towards
reproducing an emotional mood than towards illustrating actual incidents,
whenever, that is, he allowed dramatic rather than musical considerations to
sway him, he produced a type of song which, in spite of its popularity, is
intrinsically inferior, and hence likely to lose favor as musical taste
develops. The most famous examples of this type are "The Erl-King" and
"The Wanderer"; others scarcely less known are "Der Atlas," "Die
Doppelgänger," "Die Junge Nonne," "Die Allmacht," "Kolma's Klage," and
"Hagar's Klage." To hear the music of some of the songs of this class,
unhappily large, after reading the commentaries of their admirers, is almost
as cruel a disillusion as to eat the food at a cheap restaurant after a perusal
of the pretentious and highly decorated bill of fare. Of "Die Allmacht," for
example, Mr. A. B. Bach, in his book on "The Art Ballad," writes as
follows:—
"This composition I would call a great tone-picture; it is a hymn of praise,
stately and full of splendor. We seem to hear some prophet, who, with a

voice of thunder, speaks to the people of the power and glory of the
Almighty. The greatness of God in nature is first proclaimed. The tone-
painting is full of grandeur and majesty. Not with the delicate, charming
pencil of Fra Angelico, but with the strong, energetic, and powerful brush of
Michael Angelo, does Schubert paint the raging of the storm, the forest's
boisterous violence, the thunder and the lightning. The painting is softer,
milder, sweeter, only when he comes to the beautiful and calming words
that the power of God is high above all, and greater when man feels it in his
inmost heart.... Then follows a great crescendo, ending with the powerful
and mighty exclamation, 'Great is Jehovah, the Lord!' which produces an
overpowering effect. In this composition, as scarcely in any other, Schubert,
usually so charming, is very dramatic, and shows command of the loftiest
expression."
Turning, with expectation keyed high, from this rhapsody to the music of
"Die Allmacht," what do we find? An annoyingly loud thumping of the
piano, in its muddy lower register, for four pages on end, with no rhythmic
relief; a vocal part more like a second-rate operatic recitative than one of
those divine tunes of which Schubert had the secret; and to fill the cup of
boredom, three rumbles of conventional musical "thunder," as threadbare
and outworn as the antiquated theatrical properties described by Steele in
the "Tatler." It is hard to understand how any true lover of music can turn
from "Hark, hark! the Lark," or "Who is Sylvia?" or "Du bist die Ruh," to
such songs as these, with their physically exciting tremolos, crashing
diminished-seventh chords, chromatic climaxes, mysterious staccato
octaves, pianissimo, in the bass, and other such claptrap effects, better
suited to accompany the drowning of the heroine of melodrama than to
edify the sense of musical beauty. They reveal pitilessly the seamy side of
romanticism, and make us wish that Schubert's fecund imagination had
been controlled by a more fastidious taste.
If the sentimentalist's tendency to value emotion for itself, as the voluptuary
wallows in sensation, and the realist's fondness for crudely detailed effect,
sometimes led Schubert into an artificial and fevered style, his very
simplicity at other times played him false. Simplicity in art, as the case of
Wordsworth has notoriously proved, covers a wide range, from the sublime
to the ridiculous. Schubert is often sublimely simple, as in "Du bist die
Ruh," "Heidenröslein," "Der Leiermann"; but sometimes he is merely flat

and obvious. Indeed, writing, as he did, over six hundred songs in a score of
years, not the most inspired of men could always have avoided platitude.
Thus we must set aside many melodramatic and many trite compositions
before we can get an unimpeded view of his real masterpieces. But after
that has been done, we have left about twenty or thirty songs of such
incomparable loveliness as to give him a secure place among the great
masters of the musical lyric.
The careful discrimination between quantity and quality in Schubert's work,
so obviously important in judging his songs, becomes perhaps even more
indispensable when we come to his instrumental works. The facts that here
present themselves to the intending student on his first approach to the
subject are entirely misleading. Schubert wrote, he learns, ten symphonies
and twenty string quartets, besides much other chamber and orchestral
music. Remembering that Beethoven wrote nine symphonies and sixteen
string quartets, he is likely to assume that the essential Schubert is to be
found permeating the one set of works just as the essential Beethoven
permeates the other, and that if he can take, so to speak, a critical average of
them all, he will come at the true musical personality of their author.
Nothing could be more erroneous. For it must be borne in mind that while
the works of Beethoven were written during the entire period of his artistic
maturity, from his twenty-fifth to his fifty-sixth year, and with the most
laborious care, those of Schubert are largely youthful exercises, and were in
many cases thrown off as one would write a letter. Schubert wrote
voluminously and carelessly, and died at thirty-one, just as he was entering
the prime of life. His works are thus, if one may say so, like his person,
embedded in superfluous flesh. The bulk of them are, so far as representing
him goes, pure surplusage, to be stripped off and thrown aside before we
can see the outline and stature of his genius. The compositions produced
before 1820 are interesting to-day only as documents bearing on the
peculiar way in which his individual style was gradually developed.
What they chiefly reveal is the ingenuousness, one might almost say the
unconsciousness, with which he habitually composed. He seems to have
made no effort to draw forth, by taking thought, his shy and retiring
individuality; his method was rather to copy, often almost literally, the
music he knew and liked, especially that of Haydn and Mozart. The quartet
in G-minor, written in 1815, for example, contains a perfectly Mozartish

minuet, while its finale is pure Haydn, except for occasional gleams of
Schubert in the happy exuberances of detail and in the quick, informal
modulations. Of the symphony in B-flat, written in 1816, the first and
fourth movements are Haydn, the second and third Mozart. The closeness
of the imitation is at times fairly disconcerting, as in the last eight measures
of the minuet, which sound like a rejected sketch for the minuet of the
"Jupiter Symphony":—

[PDF]

Figure I.

An even more amusing case is that of a passage in the E-major Quartet
(opus 125, no. 2), written in the following year (1817), so startlingly like a
portion of Mozart's G-minor Symphony that we can hardly resist the theory
of unconscious plagiarism. The passages in question merit a careful
comparison. If imitation is the sincerest flattery, Schubert was paying an
eloquent tribute, indeed, to the genius of Haydn and Mozart in his works of
1815-1817.

[PDF]
SCHUBERT.

[PDF]
And later

[PDF]

[PDF]
MOZART.

Figure II.

Before 1818 there is little internal evidence that Schubert had felt at all the
influence of the greatest musician of the period, Beethoven, with whom, if
we may judge from his diary, he was not yet in complete sympathy. Under
date of June, 1816, he compares disparagingly "that bizarrerie for which we
have chiefly to thank one of the greatest German artists" with the
"naturalness" and "purity" of the Italian, Salieri. In the C-major symphony

of 1818, however, he has evidently fallen completely under the sway of the
master. The first movement of this work shows a great advance over earlier
symphonies; the orchestral resources are increased, and used with more
skill; the themes are more concise and vigorous, more truly symphonic,
though still showing a tendency to rhythmic monotony; the construction is
ampler and more carefully planned, there being a slow introduction and a
Beethovenish coda. The transition by which the repetition of the first
section of the movement is approached shows afresh the curious literalness
with which Schubert copied his models.

[PDF]

Figure III.

The long poising, pianissimo, on a single harmony, and the final almost
imperceptible lapse into the original key, are Beethoven to the letter. The
other movements show the same influence. Especially noteworthy are the

substitution of a scherzo for the old-fashioned minuet, and, in the finale, the
many sudden shifts of tonality by a semitone, and sudden alternations of
extreme loud and soft. Here, as much as in the earlier things, it is true,
Schubert remains the obedient and passive student; he is still, in the phrase
of Stevenson, "playing the sedulous ape"; but his model is much more
complex, his touch is surer, his technical facility greater, and he needs only
to grow a little older, a little more mature and self-conscious, in order to
stamp all these gradually acquired materials with his own individuality.
Now maturity comes to most men, the romanticists like the others, as a
result of the suffering, misunderstanding, and disappointment that years
have a way of bringing. The youth interprets all the world by his own
freshness of enthusiasm, keen sensation, untrammelled imagination.
Everything seems possible to him, and life is one long, romantic adventure.
But when he actually comes in contact with that world which looked so fair
from a distance, through the rosy glasses of temperament, he discovers that
it is stubborn to his purposes, that it is full of alien wills with which he
struggles in vain, and that this struggle reveals insurmountable weaknesses
and limitations in himself. Then either bitterness, or a new understanding of
himself, resignation to the inevitable, and interpretation of life in more
universal terms, is bound to displace the old romantic egotism. Experience
regroups itself in soberer colors, and if he be generous enough to escape
cynicism he emerges from the ordeal chastened and humanized.
This transition from self-absorbed youth to magnanimous manhood came to
Schubert between his twenty-third and twenty-seventh years, hastened by
the adverse conditions of his life. We have seen how poverty held him in its
sullen grasp; ill-health was added in 1824; and all through his last decade
the sense of the indifference of the public to his higher artistic aims must
have been dispiriting in the extreme. His songs were favorably enough
received, but little interest was taken in his chamber and orchestral music
except by a small circle of friends. That he could nevertheless go on, year
after year, producing so splendid a series of compositions, in a spirit of such
uncompromising devotion to art, almost entirely unsupported by public
recognition, buoyed up by inward conviction alone, proves that underneath
the careless Bohemianism of his everyday existence there was developing
in him the stuff of real heroism. Like Columbus, he

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

The story of the last year of his short life is most pathetic. In March, 1828,
he made an attempt to mend his fortunes by giving a concert of his own
works, by which he earned one hundred and fifty dollars, to him a large
sum. But no temporary help like this could count for much, so long as his
compositions, the main business of his life, were so shamefully underrated
by the publishers. For six of the best of the "Winterreise" songs he received
a little over one dollar; for the E-flat Trio (opus 100), about four dollars and
a half; for the great A-major Pianoforte Quintet (opus 114), a little over six
dollars. His health being now seriously impaired, he wished to spend the
summer in the country with friends, but was compelled by poverty to
remain in the heat and confusion of Vienna. A momentary encouragement
offered in a projected performance of his greatest work, the C-major
Symphony, but it was given up as too difficult, and he never heard it. It was
first performed eleven years after his death, by Mendelssohn, in Leipsic. In
the fall he rapidly failed, and had just arranged to take lessons in
counterpoint, with a view to yet greater works, when, after a comparatively
short illness, he died, on November 19, 1828. He left no will, but from the
official inventory of his effects we learn that he left behind him twenty-six
dollars' worth of clothing and house furniture, and "a quantity of old music"
(including the manuscript of the C-major Symphony), valued at five dollars.
Such were the dingy outer circumstances of this man's life. But his spirit
soared above them. "My compositions," he wrote in his diary, "are the
product of my mind, and spring from my sorrow; those only that were born
of grief give the greatest delight to the outside world;" and in another place,
more profoundly: "Certainly that happy joyous time is gone when every
object seemed encircled with a halo of youthful glory; ... and yet I am now
much more than formerly in the way of finding peace and happiness in
myself." But the best evidence we have that Schubert learned the lesson of
sorrow, and not only transmuted bitter experience into immortal beauty but
under the stress of that experience first found his true self, lies in the
wonderful series of compositions which he wrote between 1820 and 1828.
Here we find at last the essential Schubert. In the single movement in C-

minor for string quartet, dated 1820, he discloses a new world of dramatic
expression, earnest feeling, daring modulation, intricate harmony, and
chromatic melody. And from this time on masterpiece followed
masterpiece: the "Unfinished Symphony" in 1822; the A-minor Quartet and
the Octet in 1824; the G-major and D-minor Quartets in 1826; the first two
piano trios a year later; and to cap the climax, the C-major Quintet and the
immortal C-major Symphony in 1828.
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.

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Figure IV.

The chief faults of Schubert's instrumental works—and they are grave ones
—result in part from his way of composing, and in part from the
untraversable opposition between the lyrical expression native to him and
the modes of construction suitable to extended movements. Schubert was an
easy-going, careless, and indolent writer. He wrote music as most people
write letters; often he would scribble off half a dozen songs in a single day;
he thought nothing of making an overture in three hours, or a whole
operetta in a week; to a friend who asked him how he composed, he replied,
"As soon as I finish one thing I begin another." What all this means,
practically, is that he did not "compose" at all in the strict sense of placing
together tones with care and forethought, but merely improvised on paper.
And as a result, while he certainly attained a delightful spontaneity of
effect, he also fell into the pitfalls of monotony and diffuseness. He is
constantly becoming hypnotized by a rhythm, keeping it up relentlessly,
page on page, without relief. When he has once hit upon a phrase that
appeals to him, such, for example, as the second subject in the G-major
Quartet, he is apt to adhere to it pretty closely through a whole section of
the piece. Such insistence, in contrast to the variety of phraseology of
composers like Mozart, is comparable in effect to the singsong couplets of
Pope or Dryden, as contrasted with the pliant versification of Shelley. This
weaker aspect of Schubert, connected with his lack of intellectual vigor and
possibly with a certain flabbiness of moral fibre, has been exhaustively
discussed by Mr. H. H. Statham, an English critic, who reaches the
conclusion that "in music, as in literature, easy writing is hard reading," and
that in Schubert's larger pieces "lovely melodies follow each other, but
nothing comes of them." Whether or not we agree with so extreme a view,
we cannot deny Schubert's weakness in musical construction.
We usually find in his music five pages of repetition to one of real
development. Mr. Statham is right in contrasting the "vain repetitions" in
the andante of the C-major Symphony with the logical evolution of matter
in the allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. And even where, as in

the fine coda of the finale of the C-major Symphony, Schubert has a truly
broad design to work out, he fills in his detail in the easiest, least exacting
way by repeating identical phrases at a higher and higher pitch. The effect
of the long, gradual climax is intensely dramatic, but when upon familiarity
we realize that the ideas generate, so to speak, by fission, or exact
reduplication, rather than by organic evolution, we are left æsthetically
unsatisfied. The truth seems to be that Schubert, being essentially a lyrical
writer, makes beautiful symphonies and quartets in spite of, rather than by
means of, the natural conditions of these epic musical forms. His
symphonies are expanded songs, delightful, as songs are delightful, for their
directness of feeling, their beauty of detail, their warmth of color and
sensuous charm.
His last work, however, the great C-major Symphony, has enough of the
heroic about it to make us cautious in saying what he might or might not
have done had he not died at thirty-one, when he was just entering the
period of artistic maturity. There is a grandeur of scale and intention, a
deliberation and solidity, a sustained power, large touch, and freedom of
execution about this symphony that place it above all his other works. The
long climaxes bespeak a reserve power not associated with Schubert the
song-writer; the themes wear their possibilities less upon the surface, and
unfold them more cumulatively; the harmony is firmer, plainer, and
stronger; the scoring is done as it were with a larger brush, the colors laid
on in wider spaces and freer patterns; and in the last movement the romantic
note is for once well drowned in a deeper cry of tragic heroism. It is not a
mere coincidence that the theme at the beginning of the development
section so strongly suggests Beethoven's "Hymn of Joy"; the spirit here is
Beethoven's, and the spaciousness of the scheme of construction, if not the
detail with which it is filled in, are worthy of the greatest symphonist. Here
surely the graciousness of childhood and the romantic dalliance of youth are
laid aside, and Schubert speaks with the deep, deliberate voice of manhood.
Death never came to an artist more untimely. Had he lived, we cannot tell
what new and even profounder expressions of the ripe earnestness that lies
beyond romance he might not have planned and achieved.

III
ROBERT SCHUMANN

ROBERT SCHUMANN
From a painting by E. Bendemann

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.
A curious feature of most of these early pieces, due to the literary
cultivation and to the fanciful bias of their composer's mind, is their
constant reference to all sorts of extra-musical interests. Schumann, at this
time almost as much a man of letters as of tones, took pleasure in equipping
his pieces with an ingenious and amusing series of allusions to places and
people, real and fictitious, a kind of running commentary of footnotes on
the music, comprehensible only to the initiated. This is managed partly by
means of spelling out words in the letters which stand for musical tones,[4]
partly by directions printed above the music, like stage directions in a play,
and partly by mottoes, both musical and literary, and quotations of original
and other melodies. The "Variations," opus 1, are founded on a theme which
spells A-B-E-G-G—a pseudonym given by Schumann to a lady whose
beauty he had admired.

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Figure V.

Most of the pieces in the "Carnaval" are founded on four tones spelling A-
S-C-H, in honor of a friend who lived in the town of that name, the rhythms
being so ingeniously varied that each theme sounds new in spite of its set
tonal basis.

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"PIERROT."

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"ARLEQUIN."

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"VALSE NOBLE."

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"FLORESTAN."

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"COQUETTE."

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"PAPILLONS."

Figure VI.

In later life Schumann wrote six organ fugues on the name B-A-C-H; in the
album of Gade, the Danish composer, he wrote a theme spelling "G-A-D-E,
A-D-E" ("Gade, farewell"); and the "Northern Song," in his "Piano Pieces
for the Young," is founded on the same letters, in honor of the same
musician.

Mottoes and quotations meet us at every turn. Printed above one of the
melodies in the "Intermezzi" are the words "Meine Ruh' ist hin"—"My
peace is gone." The "Davidsbündlertänze" bear at their head a stanza of
verses, and commence with a musical motto by Clara Wieck. In the final
march of the "Carnaval," a melody of the seventeenth century, "The
Grandfather's Dance," is used to symbolize the futile resistance of pedantic
conservatism to the progress of art. The "Phantasie," opus 17, was to have
been called "Obolos," the purpose of its composition being to contribute to
a fund for a monument of Beethoven, and the separate movements were to
have received the highly fanciful titles, "Ruins," "Triumphal Arch," and
"The Starry Crown"; but Schumann finally contented himself with a motto
from Schlegel:—
"Durch alle Töne Tönet
Im bunten Erdentraum
Ein leiser Ton gezogen
Für den der heimlich lauschet."[5]

In the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien" (Carnival Prank at Vienna) he
manages the musical quotation with felicitous humor. It seems that the
playing of the "Marseillaise" was at that time forbidden by the German
authorities, on account of the strongly revolutionary tendencies of public
feeling. This police taboo did not prevent Schumann from letting a single
strain of the splendid tune flash out from his mosaic of melodies, to the
unbounded delight of his audience and the discomfiture of the helpless
officials.
Of all his compositions, the "Davidsbündlertänze" is fullest of this tricksy
play of imagination, in which he took, as Oscar Bie says, "the pleasure of
the delicate man of taste in labelling." From about 1834, when he founded
his musical journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the imaginary society of
the Davidsbund played an important part in his mental life. Believing that it
was a part of his duty to oppose the philistinism, the dulness, pedantry, and
sensuality which pervaded the music of the day, he dramatized the conflict
as a struggle between the Davidsbund, or club of Davidites, and the forces
of Philistia. His fancy played about this central conception until it had
evolved a whole company of Davidites, individualizing each one. Several
were merely single aspects of their creator's complex temperament.
Florestan was the impassioned Schumann, Eusebius the dreamy and tender

Schumann, Raro the philosophical mediator between the two. Others
indicated friends: Felix Meritis was Mendelssohn; Chiarina, Clara Wieck;
Estrella, Ernestine von Fricken, an early sweetheart. Once projected into the
actual world, these figments of fancy became very real to their creator. His
Sonata, opus 11, was originally printed as "by Florestan and Eusebius."
Each of the numbers of the "Davidsbündlertänze" is signed "F.," or "E.," or
"F. and E.," and the ascription is always conscientiously justified by the
character of the music. In the first edition there are even "stage directions,"
such as, "Here Florestan stops, his lips trembling painfully," and "Eusebius
said too much about this; but his eyes were full of joy." These finical
particularities, however, as well as the motto in verse, were in the second
edition stricken out.
All these elaborate paraphernalia with which Schumann equipped his first
essays in composition are noteworthy not so much for any intrinsic
significance as for the light they throw on his peculiar attitude toward an art
which most of his predecessors had approached in a wholly objective and
detached spirit. The persistent and minute subjectivity they reveal is
remarkable in so young a man, working by instinct and in despite of the
powerful influence of tradition. Most men approach music through a
systematic technical discipline, and achieve individuality of style only with
maturity; Schumann, reversing the process, turns to music at first simply as
to one of several available ways of expressing a lively imagination, and
gains technical skill but gradually and by arduous effort. His eloquence is
that of a man filled with matter and enthusiasm, but untrained in oratory; he
stammers, hesitates, coins words, improvises phraseology as he goes, and in
the end attains fluency by dint of sheer earnestness and conviction. The
inner impulse to expression creates its own medium, instead of being itself
formed by the medium available; and while a language thus derived offhand
has necessarily certain crudities, it has also, of course, a delightful freshness
and happy spontaneity.
The inexhaustible tunefulness of the early Schumann is little short of
marvellous. Few composers have been so prodigal of lovely melodies. They
are like the king's daughters in the fairy tales, each more beautiful than the
last; and though there is doubtless a family resemblance, each has a distinct
physiognomy, a pronounced individuality. They are, for the most part,
indeed, brief, striking motives rather than deliberately composed tunes,

perfect but minute crystals of most various shapes, forming spontaneously
in the highly saturated solution of the musical thought. No effort is made to
purify, separate, or collect them; what their composer seems chiefly to value
is their profusion and luxuriance. To state the same thing in more technical
terms, there is next to no thematic development; there is simply the
presentation of one charming phrase after another. The result is of course a
certain fragmentariness and whimsicality; the music impresses us not by its
cumulative power, its orderly advance, but by the sheer charm of its
primitive elements.
The vigor of the rhythms never flags. Short notes in "dotted rhythms," holds
from unaccented to accented beats, and all manner of devices for
intensifying accentuation, give an inimitable elasticity to such things as the
first of the "Intermezzi," the sixth, seventh, ninth, and final sections of the
"Impromptus on a Theme of Clara Wieck," the ninth of the
"Davidsbündlertänze," "Préambule," "Coquette," "Chiarina," "Valse
Allemande," and the final march in the "Carnaval," "Aufschwung" in the
"Phantasiestücke," and many others. There is to be observed also a constant
tendency to emphasize the metre by slight but systematic deviations from it,
such as syncopation and the shifting of motives into artificial relations to
the measure, and the simultaneous use of two or more metrical schemes at
once. Interesting examples of this sort of intensive syncopation occur in
"Grillen," one of the "Phantasiestücke," in the B-flat major section of the
eighth "Novelette," and in the "Faschingsschwank aus Wien." A delightfully
quaint use of shifted motives is made in the finale of the Sonata, opus 11.
The theme of the movement, though written in triple measure, consists
entirely of two-beat motives, so that there is a constantly felt, and very
exciting, opposition between metrical and rhetorical accents.
The motive of the scherzo of the same work is treated in a somewhat
similar way. Of all the many instances which might be mentioned of a
simultaneous use of two metrical schemes, one of the most consummate is
the employment, in "Des Abends," of three groups of two sixteenth-notes in
the melody, against two groups of three sixteenths in the accompaniment—
a subtlety often missed by pianists, but essential to the charm of the piece.
The first two numbers of the "Davidsbündlertänze" also present attractive
oppositions of metre.

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Figure VII.

The same waywardness finds further expression in certain harmonic
eccentricities. Schumann loves to surprise, waylay, disappoint, and
otherwise cajole his hearer. Strong unprepared dissonances, entrances of
chords before we expect them, delays of the expected ones, entire evasions
of the seemingly inevitable, and felicitous transitions into the seemingly
impossible are a constant feature of his program. He loves to hit upon a note
as if by accident, and then to justify and even emphasize it, as in the eighth
and succeeding measures of the theme of the "Papillons"; to wound our ears
with the harshest intervals, and then compel our acquiescence by a resulting
felicity, as in the introduction to the F-sharp minor Sonata; to toss us
restlessly upon a chromatic sea and bring us out at last into diatonic
tranquillity, as in the first two pages of the "Toccata." At the beginning of
the "Kreisleriana" he keeps the right hand half a pace ahead of the left, thus
producing a great richness of tone as well as emphasizing the vigorous
progression of the bass. In the first variation in opus 5 just the reverse of
this occurs; the bass takes the lead, while the chords in the right hand lag
behind, making temporary discords, but always coming out right in the end.
Many of these peculiarities of harmony are doubtless due simply to
Schumann's sensuous susceptibility to good ear-filling sound, long
intensified and developed by his habit of improvisation. Sir Hubert Parry
remarks that "he loved to use all the pedal that was possible, and had but
little objection to nearing all the notes of the scale sounding at once. He is
said to have liked dreaming to himself, by rambling through all sorts of
harmonies with the pedal down; and the glamour of crossing rhythms and
the sound of clashing and antagonistic notes was most thoroughly adapted
to his nature." There is, indeed, evidence of this taste for rich tonal effects
on almost every page of his piano music. Like Chopin he finds a Mozartian

clarity of sound a little tame, and prefers to obscure the outlines of his
consonant chords by means of plentifully sprinkled dissonances; but while
Chopin, more fastidiously delicate, makes his dissonances float like a
diaphanous veil over the pure chords, Schumann, with true Teutonic
luxuriousness, fills up all the chinks and crannies with suspensions and
passing notes, and holds down the pedal to boot. His piano style is much
more massive than Chopin's. He has the true Johnsonian taste for
sonorousness and resonance. His ear is insatiably curious, too; witness the
final chord in the "Papillons," with its tones released successively until but
one remains sounding, the extraordinary clangor of low thirds and final
emergence of ghostly pianissimo chord at the end of "Paganini" in the
"Carnaval," and the many bizarre sonorities he obtains by making the left
hand play above the right, as in the second of the "Abegg Variations" and in
the section marked "Langsamer" in number two of the "Kreisleriana."
Taken all together, these piano compositions of the decade 1830-1840,
which may be called the first period of Schumann's artistic life, reveal an
extraordinarily mobile and fanciful temperament, working with the greatest
freedom and spontaneity, though without the guidance of regular discipline.
Their crudities are undeniable: the flights are short, the forms are
fragmentary and often badly proportioned, the style is highly subjective,
eccentric, arbitrary. Yet there is in these things such unflagging vitality, such
rare and various beauty, such abounding youthful enthusiasm and freshness,
that one would hardly sacrifice them for anything else that music has to
offer, and it has even been questioned whether in the final analysis there is
not more of the true Schumann in them than in the later, larger, and more
technically perfect works. In a sense Hans von Bülow was right in saying
that the ipsissimus Schumann was to be found only in the early works up to
opus 50.
However this may be, it is certain that at about his thirtieth year Schumann's
artistic ideal began to undergo a gradual but radical transformation. We see
him in the compositions of this time paying less and less attention to those
purely personal whims and fancies that had at first dominated his
imagination, and beginning to work very earnestly toward objective beauty
and impersonal expression. The fictitious characters, the mottoes, the stage
directions, the whole elaborate machinery of allusion to extra-musical
interests, are forgotten, and the interest of the music itself becomes all in all.

There had been already, among the works of his "storm and stress period,"
single compositions in which the dramatic interest was wholly subordinated
to the musical, as, for example, the great "Toccata," opus 7, the "Allegro,"
opus 8, and the "Novelettes," opus 21; but now what had been only
occasional in the days when fancy and a self-involved emotional life
absorbed him grew to be normal and constant, and he became for the first
time a liberal and devoted artist. Of the causes underlying this important
change, the most fundamental was doubtless simply increasing maturity.
Youth is naturally and innocently egotistical; the young man of sensibility
loses himself in day dreams and whimsical fancies, which have no basis in
experience, and no reference to anything beyond themselves; age brings a
sense of the values of real life, sobers and domesticates the passions, and
enlarges the interests until they spread from the self to all humanity. In an
artistic nature this general change of attitude involves a change of artistic
ideal; poignancy, intensity of expression, become less valued than justice
and proportion; the merely self-expressive comes to seem trivial, and
whimsicalities are discarded as interfering with the serenity of a universal
beauty. Schumann's change of attitude was simply an unusually striking
case of what happens to every perceptive mind when experience has been
sufficiently assimilated.
The anxieties, doubts, fears, and disappointments connected with his
courtship of Clara Wieck probably did more than anything else to chasten
and to steady his character at this time.[6] The two artists, so diverse in
talents, so remarkably at one in musical ideals, had first met in Leipsic in
1828, when one was a law student and amateur musician of eighteen, and
the other an accomplished pianist, though only nine years old. Their relation
was for a while purely musical; but as Clara's mind gradually developed,
and especially after she began to play Schumann's compositions, they
discerned more and more how deep-seated an artistic and personal
congeniality was destined to bind them together. It is most interesting to
trace in his letters and published music the successive steps of their
comradeship. In 1832 he composes his "Impromptus on a Theme of Clara
Wieck"; in 1833 he writes: "I have had a sympathetic idea, namely that to-
morrow, exactly at eleven o'clock, I shall play the Adagio from Chopin's
'Variations,' and shall think intensely, exclusively, of you. My petition is that
you will do the same, so that we may meet and communicate in spirit;" in
1834 he says: "When I am thinking of you very intently I invariably find

myself at the piano, and seem to prefer writing to you in chords of the ninth,
and especially with the familiar chord of the thirteenth." "Chiarina," in the
"Carnaval," written in 1835 and 1837, is a musical portrait of the already
beloved Clara, and the F-sharp minor Sonata, dating from the same period,
one of his most romantic and impassioned works, is dedicated to her. The
"Davidsbündlertänze" (1837) opens with a motive by her, and in 1839,
while he is busy with the "Phantasie," he tells her, "I suppose you are the
Ton in the motto." As time goes on, musical sympathy merges more and
more into love. "The 'Davidsbündlertänze,' and 'Phantasiestücke,'" he writes
in January, 1838, "will be finished in another week. There are many bridal
thoughts in the dances, which were suggested by the most delicious
excitement that I ever remember. My Clara will understand all that is
contained in the dances, for they are dedicated to her more emphatically
than any of my other things. The whole story is a Polterabend."[7] In April
he observes ingenuously, "I have just noticed that Ehe[8] [the German for
"marriage"] is a very musical word, and a fifth, too." A year later he
exclaims: "From your Romance I see plainly that we are to be man and
wife. Every one of your thoughts comes out of my soul, just as I owe all my
music to you.... Once I can call you mine you shall hear plenty of new
things.... And we will publish some things under our two names, so that
posterity may regard us as one heart and one soul, and may not know which
is yours and which mine. How happy I am!"
Meanwhile, however, the narrow selfishness of the father, Friedrich Wieck,
was raising all sorts of obstacles to this union. His daughter being, by her
playing in public, a source of financial gain to him, he steadily opposed a
marriage, as unfavorable to his interests. He forbade the lovers to meet,
circulated false and damaging stories of Schumann, and when the couple,
goaded to despair by his insensate obstinacy, had resolved to take matters
into their own hands, thwarted even so radical a step by pretending to yield,
but imposing conditions that could not possibly be carried out. On the
whole, considering his impulsive temperament, Schumann bore this
persecution with admirable patience, though not without an occasional
plaint. "Your father calls me phlegmatic? 'Carnaval' and phlegmatic! F-
sharp minor Sonata and phlegmatic! Being in love with such a girl and
phlegmatic! And you can listen calmly to all this? He says that I have
written nothing in the Journal for six weeks. In the first place, it is not true;

secondly, even if it were, how does he know what other work I have been
doing? Up to the present the Journal has had about eighty sheets of my own
ideas, not counting the rest of my editorial work, besides which, I have
finished ten great compositions in two years, and they have cost me some
heart's blood. To add to all this, I have given several hours' hard study every
day to Bach and Beethoven, and to my own work, and conscientiously
managed a large correspondence. I am a young man of twenty-eight, with a
very active mind, and an artist to boot; yet for eight years I have not been
out of Saxony, and have been sitting still, saving my money, without a
thought of spending it on amusement or horses, and quietly going my own
way, as usual. And do you mean to say that all my industry and simplicity,
and all that I have done, is quite lost upon your father?"
But all these difficulties and disappointments, all these occasions for
patience, tact, industry, loyalty, and self-control, painful as they were to
experience, were slowly transforming the capricious and dreamy youth into
a man of mature will and seasoned resourcefulness. "No man is any use,"
says Stevenson, "until he has dared everything." Some such conviction must
have been in Schumann's mind when at last, early in 1840, he resolved to
avail himself of the law of Saxony that when parents withhold their consent
to a marriage without good reason, the consent of the courts may be
substituted. For such a man, so public a step in so sacredly private a matter
must have been doubly difficult; to decide upon it must have involved a
long mental turmoil. But he did finally take his case to the courts, and
eventually married Clara Wieck, with the sanction of the law, in September,
1840. With this manly and courageous action his youth may be said to have
ended, and the responsibilities, anxieties, labors, and sober joys of his
manhood to have commenced.
It thus happens that the last purely lyrical expression of his essentially
lyrical genius is to be found in the fine series of songs which he poured
forth in 1840. In the early months of this, his "song-year," he was in a most
sensitive and exalted state. The prospect of attaining the goal so long vainly
striven for had fired his imagination to fever heat; and according to his habit
he relieved this excitement by incessant composition. "Since yesterday
morning," he writes in February, "I have written about twenty-seven pages
of music (something new), and I can tell you nothing more about it, except
that I laughed and cried over it with delight. Ah, Clara, what bliss it is

writing for the voice, and I have had to do without it for so long!" This
"something new" was the cycle of "Myrthen" songs, opus 25, among which
are "Widmung," "Der Nussbaum," "Die Lotosblume," "Du Bist wie eine
Blume," and others almost equally earnest, tender, and passionate. With his
first published songs (nine lyrics by Heine, opus 24) he sends the message:
"Here is a slight reward for your last two letters. While I was composing
these songs I was quite lost in thoughts of you. If I were not engaged to
such a girl, I could not write such music." "I have been composing so
much," he writes in May, "that it really seems quite uncanny at times. I
cannot help it, and should like to sing myself to death, like a nightingale.
There are twelve songs of Eichendorff's [the 'Liederkreis,' opus 39,
containing the dramatic 'Waldesgespräch,' the ethereal 'Mondnacht,' and the
splendidly passionate 'Frühlingsnacht'], but I have nearly forgotten them,
and begun something else."
All together, over one hundred songs were produced during this single year,
including such immortal masterpieces as "Er, der Herrlichste von Allen,"
"Im wunderschönen Monat Mai," "Ich grolle nicht," "Ich hab' im Traum
geweinet," and "Die Beiden Grenadiere," in addition to those already
mentioned. In general, the songs have the same melodic freshness, richness
of harmony, color, vigor of rhythm, and individuality of style that
distinguish the earlier piano works. It is noteworthy, however, that in a
certain directness of utterance, in freedom from eccentricities of manner
and perversity of fancy, and in an increased breadth and coherence of
structure, they show a distinct advance. They mark, indeed, a point of
transition in Schumann's career, a point at which, still retaining the
exuberance of youth, he has just learned to direct and control it by means of
a more efficient artistry, and in the service of a maturer ideal. To most of his
other works a strict criticism has reluctantly to admit the pertinence, on one
side or the other, of the proverb "Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait";
but the songs seem as thoroughly achieved as they are richly inspired.
After his marriage he turned to the larger forms of composition, which he
took up in a curiously methodical rotation. First came, in 1841, three
symphonies, the B-flat major, opus 38, the so-called "Overture, Scherzo,
and Finale," and the D-minor, published many years later as opus 120. The
piano concerto was also begun. In 1842 his interest was shifted to chamber
music, and the three quartets for strings, the piano quartet, and the piano

quintet appeared in rapid succession. Not until 1843 did he essay, in
"Paradise and the Peri," a large choral work, but thereafter several such
works appeared from time to time. Thus we see that while his more
romantic compositions were for the most part produced in the years of
youth and courtship, he turned, when once he had begun to face life as it is,
in all its tragedy and difficulty as well as its human beauty and sweetness,
to the severer, grander forms of music. In spite of the happiness he found in
one of the most perfect of marriages, we must remember that this union also
involved new responsibilities, anxieties, and distractions. It brought with it
novel social and professional duties, children to be protected, guided, and
helped, and above all the grinding routine by which the daily bread of an
artist has to be earned. How severe the conditions were we have only
recently learned from the complete biography of Clara Schumann.[9] In her
diary we read of the constant struggles of these sensitive people to get the
mere necessaries of life; of the husband's steadily increasing ill-health,
physical and mental, ending in insanity and early death; of enforced
migrations to Dresden and Düsseldorf in search of more lucrative posts for
him as an orchestral conductor, and of the defeat of even these efforts by the
incompetence of disease; and of the wife's loyal resumption of concert
playing, in order to fill the family purse. All this experience of the sordid
actualities with which the world always tests its idealists was well
calculated to make even Schumann take a sober, and at times a tragic, view
of life; and though he is always noble and devoted, there is often in his
chance remarks, as years go on, a note of weariness, melancholy, or
philosophic resignation. It is not that he surrenders his ideals—only that he
finds them more difficult of realization than he had supposed in the flush of
youth, and under the buffets of fate retires somewhat into himself, and
chastens his enthusiasm into a stoical faith and a more patient loyalty. This
change of temper inevitably makes itself felt in such characteristic music as
the solemn introduction and the aspiring adagio of the C-major Symphony,
the mystical "Cathedral Scene" of the "Rhenish Symphony," the sombre and
restless "Manfred Overture," the noble "Funeral March" in the Piano
Quintet, and the infinitely tender Andante grazioso of the Piano Concerto.
The same sincere, simple nature as ever is felt behind these things, but the
stream of its emotion is now more profound and quiet, as a river, when it
reaches the plains, no longer sparkles and bubbles, but flows tranquil and
deep.

Technically, Schumann was handicapped in this new departure by his
exclusively pianistic early training. He had acquired a habit of thinking in
terms of the piano which it was almost impossible to break, and he had not,
like most symphonists, familiarized himself with orchestral instruments
from boyhood. The consequence was that he made many blunders in his
first essays in instrumentation, and never scored with the ease, certainty,
and effectiveness of a master. An oft-cited instance is the opening horn-
phrase of the first symphony, originally written as at (a) in Figure VIII, in
which form it is grotesquely ineffective on account of the muffled quality,
on the horn, of the fifth and sixth tones, and changed only on second
thought, after rehearsal, to its present form, (b).

(a)

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(b)

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Figure VIII.

Another is the first trio of the scherzo in the second symphony. Curiously
oblivious of tonal monotony, he cast this passage entirely for the strings,
despite the fact that they had been prominent throughout the whole of the
preceding scherzo. It was Mendelssohn who suggested the use of the wood-
wind instruments here, certainly a marked improvement. Isolated errors or

miscalculations like these, however, are much less serious than the
pervasive heaviness and muddiness of scoring that constantly mar the
sound-mass. A mistaken desire for richness of color led him to double his
instruments until all transparency was lost. It is as if a painter should use all
his pigments all the time: the potency of each would be cancelled by the
others, and the eye, through a surfeit of impressions, would become dulled
and jaded. Only by the silence of some instruments can others come into
relief. "Schumann's symphonies," says Mr. Weingartner,[10] "are composed
for the pianoforte, and arranged—unhappily, not well at that—for the
orchestra. Whenever I compare, as a conductor, the labor of the rehearsals
and the performance with the final effect, there comes over me a feeling
similar to that I have towards a person in whom I expected to find mutual
friendship and was disappointed. No sign of life gleams in this apathetic
orchestra, which, if given even a simple Mendelssohnian piece to play,
seems quite transformed." There are, it is true, as Mr. Weingartner would
doubtless admit, many single passages of great tonal beauty and originality
scattered here and there in these overladen scores. Such are the sombre
trombone harmonies at the end of the slow movement of the B-flat
Symphony, the celestial violin melody in the adagio of the C-major
Symphony (to which Mr. Weingartner gives the highest praise), and the
violin solo in the Romance of the Symphony in D-minor. Above all, there is
the wonderful horn-call in the "Genoveva Overture"—one of the loveliest
moments in all music.

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Figure IX.

But these are the high lights in a picture which for the rest is too often gray
and blurred. In the chamber music, too, we feel the same shortcomings. The
three quartets sound patchy or dry, like piano pieces played without pedal;

[11]
only in the quintet and the quartet with piano does Schumann's favorite
instrument introduce elasticity and sparkle.
Another problem, even more fundamental than that of instrumentation,
which Schumann, in approaching the larger forms, had to solve as best he
could, was that of melodic variety and breadth. Here again he was at a
disadvantage. All his experience had been with short lyrical melodies or
germs of melodies such as are appropriate to piano pieces in the romantic
vein and to songs; but larger works require a wider sweep in the initial
themes, a more complex differentiation of themes, and a power of mental
synthesis that can combine the most diverse elements in a coherent
organism. Mr. Hadow[12] names the two types of melody, which are suitable
respectively to the large and to the small forms, the "Continuous" and the
"Discrete." "In the former," he explains, "a series of entirely different
elements is fused into a single whole: no two of them are similar, yet all are
so fitted together that each supplies what the others need. In the latter a set
of parallel clauses are balanced antithetically: the same rhythmic figure is
preserved in all, and the differences depend entirely upon qualities of tone
and curve. The former is the typical method of Beethoven, the latter that of
Schumann." And he cites as examples Beethoven's violoncello sonata in A,
and the opening movement of Schumann's piano quintet. Now, the
construction of extended works out of melodies of the discrete or lyrical
type presents certain inevitable difficulties that the romantic composers,
who instinctively think only in such melodies, are always having to meet in
one way or another. We have already seen[13] how Schubert, on the whole,
failed to solve the problem, and contented himself with monotonous
repetitions of his ideas, or with variations of their mere ornamentation or
timbre. We shall later see how Chopin declined, and how Berlioz and Liszt
evaded, the same embarrassment. It will be enlightening to examine how far
Schumann succeeded and how far he failed in readjusting his musical
imagination to the new requirements.
In many cases he fails as Schubert failed. Beginning a symphonic
movement with a song-like melody, grouped in parallel phrases, generally
of four measures' length, he is able to proceed only by more or less "vain
repetitions." The result is a monotony, a flatness and lack of contrast and
relief, something like that of a wall-paper with its endless re-presentations
of a single pattern. This defect is especially felt in the development sections

of his first movements and finales, in which he has, by the compulsion of
circumstances, to forego the charm of melodic novelty. In the allegro of the
first quartet, the development is founded on two or three patterns, many
times reiterated in various keys. The first movement of the piano quartet, in
spite of its harmonic originality, is open to the same criticism, as are also, in
fact, most of the development sections in all four of the symphonies. A
welcome contrast is found in the corresponding parts of the first movement
in the quintet, where an ingenious "diminution" of the theme gives
opportunity for much genuine variation, and of the finale of the concerto,
with its inexhaustible fertility of rhythms and melodic figures. It must be
added, also, that even when Schumann is most helplessly shackled to his
initial themes, these are of such intrinsic beauty that the effect is infinitely
to be preferred to that of more skilful mediocrity.
Next to the primordial charm of his melodies, his most efficient aid in the
solution of the problem is his instinct for counterpoint, with all its matchless
power to vitalize the musical tissue. This instinct was educated by a long
and earnest study of Bach. As early as 1829 he made thorough acquaintance
with the "Well-tempered Clavichord." In 1832 he writes: "I have taken the
fugues one by one, and dissected them down to their minutest parts. The
advantage of this is great, and seems to have a strengthening effect on one's
whole system; for Bach was a thorough man. There is nothing sickly or
stunted about him, and his works seem written for eternity." One of the
most striking passages in the letters is that which acknowledges the
supreme importance of such study to the romantic composers. "Haydn and
Mozart," he says, "had only a partial and imperfect knowledge of Bach, and
we can have no idea how Bach, had they known him in all his greatness,
would have affected their creative powers. Mendelssohn, Bennett, Chopin,
Hiller, in fact all the so-called romantic school, approach Bach far more
nearly in their music than Mozart ever did: indeed all of them know Bach
most thoroughly. I myself confess my sins daily to that mighty one, and
endeavor to purify and strengthen myself through him." Besides this
general purification and strengthening of his musical thought, Schumann
found in Bach an invaluable antidote for his wayward, youthful
subjectivism; for Bach is of all composers the most deeply and abstractly
musical, the most thoroughly founded on natural tonal laws, the least
infected with extraneous ideals and meretricious methods. His art is wholly
objective, quite universal; he makes no concession to vulgarity or to

insensibility, and his taste is as exacting as his skill is impeccable.
Technically, too, he gave Schumann, too long habituated to the narrow
scope and rigid rhythmical balance of the lyrical forms, just the
emancipation, the mental liberation and broadening, which he needed. The
way of escape from the prosodic monotony of the song lies through
polyphony, through the conceiving of music as a group or bundle of
melodies each of which has its own vitality and its own provocation to
fancy. Once the composer learns to follow each strand in this web, for its
own sake, and to attain coherence by the persistence of characteristic
motives of all types, rather than by a slavish alternation of phrase and equal
counter-phrase, the creation widens in his view, and he writes with a
hitherto undreamed-of elasticity.
The wholesome influence of the polyphonic or contrapuntal habit of mind
makes itself felt very early in Schumann's works, even in the piano pieces
of the first period. Oscar Bie detects its earliest manifestations in opuses 13
and 14, but it is certainly noticeable in the "Impromptus," opus 5. The very
scheme of this work, which is a set of variations on a fixed bass quite as
much as on the "Romance" of Clara Wieck, suggests the Bach standpoint.
The dexterous weaving of motives in sections four and eight show the same
spirit. Above all, the fugato in the finale, with its bold contour and its
steadily cumulative sonority and thematic interest, and with its striking
stretto (see the figure), not only gives evidence of minute study, but is a far
from unskilful imitation of a great model.

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Figure X.
Theme and Stretto from the Finale of the Impromptus, opus 5.

The habitual use of the sequence, the canon, and even the fugato, though
always in an impressionistic, romantic vein, also presses itself constantly
upon our attention. Such contrapuntal habits soon became instinctive and
unconscious with Schumann. "In my latest compositions," he remarks in
1838, "I often hear many things that I cannot explain. It is most
extraordinary how I write almost everything in canon, and then only detect
the imitation afterwards, and often find inversions, rhythms in contrary
emotion, etc." But the explanation is given by a sentence in the same letter:
"Bach is my daily bread; he comforts me and gives me new ideas."
So beneficent in the small pieces, the inspiration of the Bach polyphony
became invaluable in the larger works. To it are traceable the supreme
passages in the symphonies, such as the profoundly thoughtful introduction
of the C-major, with the rugged dissonances resulting from the superposing

of the call of horns and trumpets upon the inexorable progression of the
strings, the insistently climactic introduction of the D-minor, and the entire
movement in the E-flat major known as the "Cathedral Scene," which is
surely not the least of the monuments of Gothic art, though its massive
pediments and soaring arches are carved of immaterial tones. In his three
essays in the string quartet, the most exacting of all mediums, Schumann's
contrapuntal skill is less secure. Failing often to conceive the inner voices
independently, he falls into a jerkiness resulting from the constant stoppages
of the little phrases; instead of letting the melodies germinate and soar, he
constricts them within a predetermined harmonic mould; and the wall-paper
patterns inevitably creep in. But in the quartet with piano and still more in
the quintet, the contrapuntal stimulus is again efficiently felt. From the
soaring imitations of the first page to the two exciting fugatos in the coda of
the finale, one on the theme of that movement, and the other, by a happy
inspiration, on the theme of the opening allegro, structurally rounding out
the entire work, the music bubbles and throbs with melody.
One other great work there is, belonging to this period, which for fecundity
of invention, luxuriant richness of coloring, and stoutness of structure
deserves to rank with the quintet, if not above it. This is the piano concerto
in A-minor, begun in 1841 and completed in 1845,—that is to say, written
in the brief prime of Schumann's troubled life, when his powers had been
marshalled and coordinated by discipline, and before they had become
blighted by disease. It is thus quite up to his early standard in the matter of
freshness of melody, rhythmic animation, and exotic gorgeousness of
harmony, and at the same time far more firmly knit, more justly
proportioned, and more flexibly conceived than the piano sonatas or the
string quartets. The sincerity, tenderness, grace, and impetuous enthusiasm
of the youthful romanticist are not in the least abated. What could be more
contagious than the exuberant first movement, in which one hardly knows
which to admire the more, the felicity of such details as the clarinet
cantabile, the Andante expressivo for solo piano, and the nobly polyphonic
cadenza, or the broadly climactic plan of the whole? What could appeal
more simply and directly to the heart than the delicate and yet ecstatic
Andante grazioso, with its winding intermeshed melodies, clustering about
the violoncello phrases as a grapevine festoons itself upon a tree? Yet
perfectly wedded with all this feminine suavity and grace is a more
masculine quality, a fine poise, restraint, reservation of force, which

counteracts all tendency to feverishness, and gives the work a sort of
impersonal dignity and beauty at the opposite pole from the perverse
individualism of the "Davidsbündlertänze" and the "Carnaval." One feels
that the composer, no longer the victim of his moods, is shaping his work
with the serene detachment of the artist. Particularly manifest is this new
mastery in the rhythmical treatment of the finale. The rhythms here are as
salient, as seizing, as ever, but they are far more various. The contrast
between the strongly "three-beat" quality of the initial motif, (a) in Figure
XI, and the cross accent of twos in the second theme (b), is a stroke of
positive genius.

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(a)

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(b)

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(c)

Figure XI.

One should note also the subtlety with which the regular three-beat meter is
gradually resumed after the interregnum (c in the figure). Indeed, to do
justice to the plastic beauty of this movement would require nothing less
than a measure-by-measure analysis of its charmingly varied phraseology.
To play it after the "Abegg Variations" is like passing from a schoolboy's
singsong delivery of "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" to the reading
of an ode of Shelley or a sonnet of Keats.
In our desire to comprehend how much Schumann gained by his study of
Bach and other great masters of composition (such as his contemporary,
Mendelssohn, for instance, whose perfection of form he vainly tried to
emulate, possibly to the disadvantage of his own originality), we must not
fail to note certain indications that his enthusiasm sometimes overleaped

itself. A strong will like his easily falls, by the overuse or abuse of special
artistic devices, into mannerisms; and he, with his fondness for sequences,
inversions, canons, and other contrapuntal traits, did not escape this danger.
So long as he used these tools with a certain romantic freedom and
geniality, inspired by their spirit rather than enslaved by their letter, as he
uses for example the canon in the andante of the piano quartet, the device of
diminution in the development section of the first movement of the quintet,
and the fugato in the finale of the same, they enriched and guided his fancy.
But when he writes canonically throughout a whole movement, as in the
scherzo of the D-minor Trio or the third movement of the F-major Trio,
when he puts upon his genius the manacles of strict counterpoint, as in the
Studies in Canon Form for Pedal Piano, opus 56, and in the Four Fugues,
opus 72, above all when he indulges, as in the organ fugues on B-A-C-H, in
those inversions and retrogressions of themes dear to the schoolmen, then
learning becomes baneful, and music degenerates into a pedantic exercise.
A far more insidious and fatal blight than such occasional pedantry was
now, however, beginning to overspread his music. The story of the long,
gradual eclipse and final extinction some years before death, by the ravages
of physical and mental disease, of a genius which had dawned so brightly
and reached its meridian in such ample and yet tempered splendor, is one of
the most pathetic chapters in the history of art. The exact nature of the
disease was somewhat obscure, but the basis of it seems to have been a
tendency, inherited from the mother, toward abnormal activity of the brain,
and a resulting congestion, distention of the blood-vessels, and final
ossification of cerebral tissue, carrying with it mental paralysis and
degeneration. The trouble was no doubt aggravated by overwork and by the
constant excitement of musical composition. A peculiar feature was its
reaction on Schumann's spirits. Generally this sort of cerebral atrophy is
attended by unreasoning high spirits, a baseless self-satisfaction uncanny to
observe but merciful to the sufferer. But Schumann's native moral force and
mental power were so great that he struggled with his fate as a lesser man
would not have done; and the result of the unequal fight was a terrible
melancholy, sinking sometimes into a blank lethargy of depression, and
rising at other times into acute despair. It was in one of these frenzied
moments that, in February, 1854, he attempted to drown himself in the
Rhine. Rescued from suicide, he had for safety's sake to be put in an

asylum, where after two years of merely vegetative existence, he died on
July 29, 1856.
This deep-seated physical disability is responsible for the curious impotence
of those compositions which he so restlessly produced all through the
afflicted years. Such things as the violin sonata, opus 121, the "Introduction
and Allegro Appassionata," opus 92, the Concert Allegro, opus 134, and the
overtures "Julius Caesar," "Braut von Messina," and "Hermann und
Dorothea," negligible from the artistic standpoint, are as human documents
deeply pathetic. In them we see the crippled master in fruitless travail. The
intention is always noble, the old fire flashes out now and then, the ideal of
expression is the same as ever, but the path from will to act is clogged, the
musical fancy is paralyzed; and all that results is page after dreary page of
rigidly unchanging rhythms, stagnant harmonies, manufactured melodies,
and climaxes that reach no goal. Particularly saddening is it to note the
hysterical character of the emotional passages. In the overture to "Manfred,"
one of his immortal masterpieces, he showed once for all his marvellous
power for impassioned expression. Alas! that in the fever of sickness he was
goaded to parody his own immortal work in futile replicas that imitate its
qualities only to trivialize them.
It is a relief to turn from the sorry spectacle of these galvanic twitchings of
the once so virile intellect to the one happy episode that lightens this period
of gloom. This was the coming of Brahms in 1853. In order to understand
fully what the apparition of a youth of so pure and high a genius meant to
Schumann, we must remember the depth and unselfishness of his love for
art, the lifelong labors he had undertaken in order to purify public taste, the
grim and often single-handed battle he had waged against Philistinism and
mediocrity. Composition, the service of the gods of music at their inmost
shrine, had been only one aspect of his life; the other side had been his
literary and editorial labors, in which, like a true priest, he had gone forth to
spread the faith among heretics and idolaters. The New Journal of Music,
which he founded in 1834, had for its object, in his own words, "the
elevation of German taste and intellect by German art, whether by pointing
to the great models of old time, or by encouraging younger talents." "The
musical situation," he wrote some years afterwards, "was not then very
encouraging. On the stage Rossini reigned, at the pianoforte nothing was
heard but Herz and Hünten; and yet but a few years had passed since

Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert had lived amongst us. One day the thought
awakened in a wild heart, 'Let us not look on idly; let us also lend our aid to
progress, let us bring again the poetry of art to honor among men.'" The
proposal thus made, in a spirit of altruistic devotion to art unhappily too
rare among creative musicians, was faithfully carried out in a series of
appreciative, generally discriminating, and always entertaining articles on
such men as Mendelssohn, Gade, Bennett, Franz, Henselt, Heller, Berlioz,
Liszt, Thalberg, and Moscheles, alternating with others of a more historical
or general character, always wise, fair, suggestive, and pleasantly pointed
with humor, wit, and the play of that irresponsible fancy which revelled in
Jean Paul and created the Davidsbund.
One of the most touching features of the New Journal, to a reader of to-day,
is the almost too generous kindliness of its judgments, the eager enthusiasm
with which it proclaims the advent of geniuses who have already fallen into
oblivion. Its editor proceeded so heartily on the principle that it is wiser to
encourage the good than to discourage the bad that he often "discovered"
nonentities only to have them left helpless on his hands. The experience
must have been disappointing to the most sanguine. Seldom as he
condemns, too, he must frequently have had the petty egotists swarming
and buzzing about him, black flies and gnats in human form, such as will
beset the stanchest crusader. To one engaged in so humane and disinterested
a task, and pursuing it through such annoyances, the advent of a true genius
like Brahms must have been the most joyful of events. Schumann at once
recognized and welcomed it. When Brahms, then a tow-headed, high-
voiced boy of twenty, arrived from Hamburg with a parcel of manuscripts,
he gave him, in the famous article, "New Paths," the most royal greeting a
neophyte has ever received from a brother musician. "He has come, the
chosen youth, over whose cradle the Graces and the Heroes seem to have
kept watch. May the Highest Genius help him onward! Meanwhile another
genius—that of modesty—seems to dwell within him. His Comrades greet
him at his first step in the world, where wounds may perhaps await him, but
also the bay and the laurel." "It is a fitting reward," says Mr. Hadow, "that
the voice which had so often been raised in commendation of lesser men
should devote its last public utterance to the honor of Johannes Brahms."
Indeed, despite the struggles of his youth, the hardships and
disappointments of his manhood, and the cruel affliction that maimed and

killed him before his time, Schumann's destiny, look at it with but sufficient
largeness, was a happy one. It is not given to men to attain their ideals; and
in this respect, as in so many others, he was most human. His life, in its
mere actualities, is, like all lives, a thing of incomplete beginnings,
disappointed hopes, defeated or unrealized aspirations. But to look at the
individual is to see but a partial, and therefore a distorted and misleading,
picture. Only in his relations to others, in his service to the common good,
in the seeds of social benefit which he plants and the ways of social
progress which he discovers, is his true life to be found. If he has wrought
faithfully, purely, single-mindedly, his work will suggest and imply more
than it attains; and it will partake by virtue of this suggestion in all future
attainment of the same kind. All Schumann's work tends in the direction of
what is highest and most beautiful in music. Much he achieved, but much
more he realized only as an ideal realizes that to which it points, and in
some sense gives it solid reality in the world. Whenever and wherever men
pursue what is pure, high, fresh, noble, and fair in music, there the spirit of
Schumann will be at work.

FOOTNOTES:
[3] "Early Letters of Robert Schumann," trans. by M. Herbert, London, 1888, pp.
113, 118.
[4] In German the terminology of letters standing for tones is richer than in
English. B is our B-flat, while H stands for our B-natural; Es is E-flat; As, A-flat,
etc.
[5] See page 128 for Schumann's comment on this motto.
[6] The remarkable story of this courtship is told at length in "Clara Schumann,
Ein Künstlerleben," by Berthold Litzmann, Zweiter Band, Leipsic, 1906. It has
also been vividly sketched in English by Mr. Richard Aldrich, in an article in
Music, vol. 18.
[7] Eve of a wedding day.
[8] H, it will be remembered, stands in German for the note B-natural, which
makes the musical interval of a fifth with E.
[9] "Clara Schumann, Ein Künstlerleben," by Berthold Litzmann, 1903-1906.
[10] "The Symphony since Beethoven," Eng. trans., p. 31.
[11] See the Adagio of the Quartet, opus 41, no. 1. The accompaniment is
essentially a piano accompaniment, transcribed for 'cello and viola; but without
the pedal it lacks fluidity.
[12] "Studies in Modern Music," First Series, Essay on Schumann, p. 213.
[13] Essay on Schubert, p. 98.

IV
FELIX MENDELSSOHN

FELIX MENDELSSOHN
From the painting by Edward Magnus

IV FELIX MENDELSSOHN

In studying the relations of a number of contemporary artists to the general
tendency of their age it is interesting to note how, in spite of the influence
exerted upon them all by prevailing conditions and available opportunities,
each responds to the occasion in his own way, always maintaining, in the
common enterprise, his own particular ideals, tastes, and methods. Despite
all the schools and movements in the history of art, each artist remains
himself. So it was in the period of romanticism. The romantic tendency was
in the air—the tendency to subjectivism, to picturesqueness, to specialized
expression, to a richly sensuous embodiment of ideas; but nevertheless,
each individual composer approached music from his own standpoint,
seized upon those elements in it for which he had a native affinity, and
quietly ignored what did not attract him.
That Mendelssohn should have been a romanticist at all is a proof of the
strength of the romantic tendency in his day; he seemed born rather for the
severest, purest, most uncompromising classicism; and if he did, as a matter
of fact, come to share the ideals of his age, it was in his own way and for
his own ends. The crudities, the exaggerations, the morbid self-involution
of the extreme phases of the movement, certainly never infected him. For
this happy immunity he was indebted largely to the fortunate conditions of
his life, both personal and artistic. Crudity is usually a result of narrowness
of culture or of a deficiency in technique; and Mendelssohn grew up in a
singularly refined domestic and social circle, and was a skilled musician
before he was breeched. Exaggeration springs from a lack of taste; and
Mendelssohn's taste, both by native endowment and by training, was
consummate. Self-consciousness, whether blessed or baneful, is the child of
suffering; how, then, should it come to one whose whole life was so
protected, so guided, so lapped in material prosperity, family affection, and
social respect?

Mendelssohn's life reads like the story of some fairy prince, beautiful,
brave, and virtuous, who is rocked in his cradle by the gentle godmother,
Good-fortune, who runs his race amid the plaudits of admiring friends, and
who dies young, untarnished, and full of honors, as one loved by the gods.
He never knew the squalor of poverty, the paralysis of drudgery, the
bitterness of inaptitude, the dull ache of disappointment. In his bright,
precocious childhood he was the idol of a wise father, a fond mother,
brothers and sisters who shared his tastes and in some measure his abilities,
and a circle of literary and artistic friends at the head of which was the aged
Goethe. In later years he had all the advantages of university training, the
best teachers in music, foreign travel, varied friendships, a happy marriage,
and a fame extending to all corners of Europe. Appropriately indeed was he
named Felix.
The influence of a long-established, carefully bred, and highly cultivated
family played an important part in the formation of his personality.
Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and Liszt blazed out suddenly,
meteoric individuals, from respectable but obscure origins; but
Mendelssohn was the last bright flower put forth by an ancient stock. Only
as such can he be understood. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, an
orthodox Jew of the old school and a self-made man, was a famous scholar
in his day. He was prominent in the intellectual circles of Berlin in the
middle of the eighteenth century, participated in a famous controversy with
Lavater, was a friend of Lessing, and was the author of "Phædon, or the
Immortality of the Soul," a work translated into all European languages. His
son Abraham inherited his strong character and something of his mental
power, without his genius. An independent thinker, an unusually wise and
devoted father, he was yet singularly modest, and used to say that he began
by being "the son of his father" and ended by being "the father of his son."
He married Leah Solomon, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family of Berlin.
It was her brother, a man of some reputation as an art critic, who, turning
Christian, adopted and induced Abraham Mendelssohn to adopt the name of
Bartholdy, as a distinction from the branches of their families which
retained the ancient faith. Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix's sister, was also an
unusual person. She had a genius for music second only to his, and would
doubtless have become famous had it not been for her father's prejudice
against a professional life for women. Some of the "Songs without Words"
are of her composition, and her criticism was always eagerly welcomed by

her brother. She married Hensel the painter, who added still further to the
artistic interests and associations of the Mendelssohn family.[14]
In Felix's sixteenth year his father bought the mansion known as "Leipziger
Strasse no. 3," in the suburbs of Berlin, which became the scene of a most
idyllic family and social life. There were separate suites of apartments for
the various groups of the clan, Fanny Hensel and her husband occupying
one side, and her sister Rebecca and her husband, Edward Devrient, the
other; there was a room suitable for theatrical performances, which were
frequently given; there was a large garden, and in the middle of it a garden-
house with a hall accommodating several hundred persons, in which
informal musicales were arranged every Sunday afternoon. No pains were
spared to grace the everyday life. "In the summer-houses," we read,[15]
"writing materials were provided, and Felix edited a newspaper, called in
the summer 'The Garden Times,' and in the winter 'The Snow and Tea
Times.' To this all comers were invited to contribute, and the young people
were joined in their fun by their elders, including such distinguished
personages as Humboldt and Zelter." We can readily imagine that music
was the constant accompaniment of all that went on; for not only did Felix
and Fanny play the piano and compose, but Rebecca and her husband were
singers, and Paul, the youngest of the family, was a good violoncellist. For
the Sunday afternoon musicales Felix constantly wrote new things, of
which the most important was the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture,"
played before a crowded audience in the garden-house at the end of 1826.
Had Mendelssohn not been surrounded, thanks to the wealth and cultivation
of his parents, by this atmosphere of social friendliness and artistic charm,
he might have had reason to regret the nervous sensibility he had inherited
from them. The abnormal delicacy of constitution indicated by the fact that
his grandfather, father, mother, and sister all died of cerebral paralysis took
in him the form of such an excitability, physical, emotional, and mental, as
would have brought much suffering upon a youth whose conditions of life
had been less ideal. Extreme sensitiveness was the most radical trait of his
character and temperament. His affection for his relatives was of passionate
intensity; a slight misunderstanding or coolness would reduce him to tears,
he could not work when his brother or sisters were ill, and the death of his
sister Fanny was a shock from which he never recovered. His friendships
were romantic in their ardor and in their exacting demands; he showed in

them, indeed, the childish egotism of the oversensitive. "Write soon, and
love me," he ends one of his letters; and a friend said of him, significantly,
"He loved only in the measure that he was loved."[16] His brother-in-law,
Devrient, in his reminiscences, says that when crossed or disappointed he
sometimes lost all self-control, and in illustration tells the story of some
theatricals planned for the silver-wedding celebration of his parents, for
which he had written the music, and in which Devrient was to sing the
principal part. At the last moment Devrient was summoned to sing at the
Crown Prince's on the very evening appointed. With singular blindness to
everything but his own plans, Mendelssohn begged him not to go, and when
all were assembled began to talk incoherently, and in English. "The stern
voice of his father," says Devrient, "at last checked the wild torrent of
words; they took him to bed, and a profound sleep of twelve hours restored
him to his normal state." It was the same sensitiveness, doubtless, that
underlay his vanity in regard to his work, and made indifference so
intolerable to him. "The atmosphere of love and appreciation," says
Devrient, "in which he had been nurtured was a condition of life to him; to
receive his music with coldness or aversion was to be his enemy, and he
was capable of denying genuine merit in any one who did so. A blunder in
manners, or an expression that displeased him, could alienate him
altogether."
But fortunately, at least for the moment, the cold winds of the outside world
rarely invaded the quiet garden of art and friendship in which he passed his
youth. Inside the barriers which his father's wealth and devotion, his
mother's tender solicitude, and his sisters' comradeship and admiration
reared about him, he composed, studied, and dreamed in idyllic peace. For
variety there were conversations with men skilled in art and literature,
studies in the classics and modern languages, harmless flirtations, letter-
writing, water-color sketching, and tours in Italy and Switzerland. For
recreation there were bowling, fencing, and swimming. And if the
disagreeable could not be entirely eliminated, if there must be an occasional
headache or fit of lassitude, or if, in spite of one's personal charm and
graceful, lovable nature one's friends would not always take the trouble to
understand one, then one could resort to a sort of Epicurean stoicism, refuse
to attend to the painful and the annoying, and dwell insistently on all that
was bright, gracious, and delightful.

Mendelssohn's earliest compositions reflect all the freshness and gaiety of
his youthful nature, all the ease and charm of the circumstances in which it
developed. From the first their technical skill is perfect; for Mendelssohn
had had no distracting struggles for daily bread, like Schubert, no moiling
in arid, uncongenial studies, like Schumann; he had been placed under the
best masters, and had assimilated harmony, counterpoint, and fugue as
unconsciously as most boys assimilate reading, writing, and arithmetic.
What was even better, their style was entirely individual; for the spirit of
Ariel had never before been incarnated in a musician—or, if it had been, it
had smothered under impeding conditions. In the scherzo of the octet
written at sixteen there are all the Mendelssohnian traits: fluent
melodiousness, correct harmony, carefully polished detail, and an inimitable
delicacy, finesse, and lightness of style. "The whole piece," wrote his sister
Fanny, "is to be played staccato and pianissimo, the tremulandos coming in
now and then, the trills passing away with the quickness of lightning;
everything new and strange, and at the same time most insinuating and
pleasing, one feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air, half
inclined to snatch up a broomstick and follow the aërial procession. At the
end the first violin takes a flight with a featherlike lightness, and—all has
vanished."[17] The last words are quoted from a stanza of the Walpurgis
Night Dream in "Faust," of which it was Mendelssohn's intention to give a
musical illustration:—

"The flight of the clouds and the veil of mist
Are lighted from above.
A breeze in the leaves, a wind in the reeds,
And all has vanished."

The same kind of intention was carried out even more brilliantly in the
"Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," of which it is not too high praise to
say that it is worthy of its Shaksperian inspiration. In the immaterial dance
of the violins and the strange calls of the trumpets and wood-wind
instruments, as if from some cloudy No-man's-land, of this wonderful work,
conceived by a genius and executed by a master only seventeen years old, a
new type of music is born.
It is worthy of remark that in neither of these works is there the slightest
trace of the turgidity so often observable in youthful productions. On the

contrary, one of their most prominent traits is a cool dispassionateness, as of
the deliberate, detached artist, remarkable in so young a man. The more one
studies Mendelssohn's music the more one becomes convinced that this
cool dispassionateness is one of his fundamental qualities. Everywhere it
reveals itself—in the suavity of his melody, in the purity of his harmony, in
the smooth fluency of his part-writing. Violence of contrast, dramatic
trenchancy of expression, the overemphasis of hysterical eloquence, he
punctiliously avoids; he is always clear, unperturbed, discreet, harmonious.
The lavish sensuousness of Schubert, the impulsive sincerity of Schumann,
are impossible if not distasteful to this Addisonian temperament; personal
sentiment, self-revelation, the autobiographic appeal, he avoids as the purist
in manners avoids a blush, an exclamation, or a grimace. If he is romantic
in his love of the picturesque, in his sense of color, and in his fondness for
literary motives, his emotional reticence is entirely classic. He is more
observant than introspective, and his art is more pictorial than passionate.
Compare, for a moment, by way of illustration, the overtures "Manfred" and
"Hebrides." Schumann's work is intensely human from the opening
onslaught of syncopated chords to the final, deep-drawn sighs of the
contrabasses. There is unassuagable desire in the melody so appropriately
marked "In leidenschaftlichem Tempo," there is the very accent of a lover's
longing in the beautiful Astarte theme. The music constantly rushes on into
feverish excitement, only to expend its force and die away to tender
sadness, whence in a moment it lashes itself again into new fury. From this
so human world—
"Of infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn"—

Mendelssohn transports us, in his "Hebrides," to an island set in a boundless
expanse of the sea, where we watch only the rise and fall of great billows
and hear the long sigh of the wind and the cries of sea-birds. The fierce
dissonances of Schumann, his ceaseless modulation, his never resting
movement, give place to clear ethereal harmonies, to high, pure trumpet
calls, poising violin melodies, and the thin note of the oboe suggesting
infinite distance, and to an undulating movement like the ebb and flow of
winds and waves. These two works are typical. If Schumann is
incomparable in his insight into the storm and stress of the human heart,
Mendelssohn is one of the greatest of landscape painters.

What is true of the "Hebrides Overture" is in greater or less degree true of
all Mendelssohn's compositions which can be called really successful. They
charm us not by their personal appeal, their introspective veracity, as
Schumann's so constantly do, but precisely by their freedom from personal
bias, their objective truth, their universal interest. When he makes us see the
winds and waves of the "Hebrides Overture," the marching pilgrims of the
"Italian Symphony," the dancing fairies of the "Midsummer Night's Dream"
music, it is not as through a temperament, but as in the white light of pure
imagination. It is such a view of the world as some visitant from another
planet might get—some gentle, happily organized being, whose intelligence
was unperturbed by human passions and undistorted by practical interests.
It is the view rather of a Tennyson than of a Browning. "In the eyes of
Mendelssohn," a keen observer has recorded, "there was none of that rapt
dreaminess so often seen among men of genius in art. The gaze was rather
external than internal; the eye had more outwardness than inwardness of
expression." What is said here of the physical eye might with equal truth be
applied to that mind's eye with which the artist envisages his work.
Mendelssohn's attention, we feel, was never engaged with his own
emotions, but played like a disembodied spirit about the impressions he was
imagining. He himself is as elusive as the elves and fairies he so loved to
depict. He is always behind his work rather than in it.
The chief technical peculiarities of Mendelssohn's music, as we should
expect in an art pursued in this spirit of cool and competent impersonality,
are fluency, grace, and elegance. His melody, lacking to an unusual degree
the suggestion of impassioned utterance, is more decorative than expressive
—a sort of tonal arabesque, often exquisitely wrought, but curiously
unexciting. There is no boldness in the physiognomy of his tunes; they
conform closely to the average type of traditional German melody; and their
charm is due to the neatness and facility with which they follow the paths of
least resistance. His harmony is solid and correct, but hardly ever
unconventional; he prefers an authorized to a novel progression, values
clearness above richness, and treats dissonances with the utmost
circumspection. His attitude toward modulation is conservative. Certain of
his works, such as the "Scotch Symphony," with its endless A-minor and D-
minor, have justly been charged with monotony, so fond he is of hovering
gently about among a few closely related keys. In polyphony his ideal is
smoothness of progression. Those daring momentary collisions between

different voices, each progressing independently, which give Bach's fabric
such a stoutness, he shrinkingly avoids. His part-writing is almost too
conciliatory, too considerate of the prejudices of the ear; the natural
roughnesses are all ironed out or glossed over. In a word, whenever he has a
choice between the original and the established, he chooses the latter; he is
too urbane to risk startling his hearer, and prefers to ingratiate himself with
familiar charms; but so deftly does he manage these that he constantly gives
us the pleasure of recognizing "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well
expressed."
In the matter of orchestration his delicate ear and fine taste made him a
great master. His instinct for proper balance and fusion of timbres is
unerring, he knows how to be sonorous without becoming opaque or
blatant, and his scores abound in the purest, clearest, and freshest colors.
Where shall we find a parallel for that ethereal shimmer of the violins in the
"Midsummer Night's Dream Overture," or for the magical chord of the
wood-wind that arrests it? or for the serene beauty of the violin melody, so
airily poised, at the end of the same overture? or for the liquid coolness of
the flutes, violins, and trumpets in the "Hebrides"? or for the elastic vitality
of the violins at the opening of the "Italian Symphony"? Here, we cry with
delight, is a master who can make flutes and clarinets and violins in their
upper register, and trumpets playing piano, sound not like mere orchestral
instruments, but like angelic voices in remote skies. This magical charm is
largely due to the limpid transparency of his coloring. He never overscores,
never surfeits the ear and confuses the mind by laying on the tints too
thickly or piling up colors that will not coalesce. Few composers have so
fully realized how little an effect is due to the mere quantity of the sounds,
how much to their skilful composition.[18] As an example may be cited the
last page of the "Con moto moderato" movement in his "Italian Symphony,"
where the same motive is sounded first by horns and bassoons, then by
trumpets and drums, then by flutes and oboes, all together building up the
loveliest, most diaphanous fabric of tone.

[PDF]

Figure XII.

An even more striking instance, remarkable both for the economy of the
means employed and for the indescribable charm of the resultant effect, is
the passage for violins and two flutes, in the "Pilgrim's March" of the same
symphony.

[PDF]

Figure XIII.

[PDF]

Figure XIV.

As a master of pigments like Monet knows how to set on the canvas spots
of pure color which merge only in the eye of the beholder, so Mendelssohn
builds Æolian harmonies with a few pure tones that fill but never cloy our
ears.
So long as Mendelssohn maintained his instinctive aloofness from human
emotion, so long as, dwelling in his heaven of imagination, he painted
delicate aquarelles of fairyland and romantic natural scenery, he was an
incomparable master. In that rarefied atmosphere sentiments, like objects,
were quite properly somewhat ghostly, tenuous, impalpable; the cheerful
Mendelssohnian contentment sufficed for joy, the tender Mendelssohnian
melancholy for sorrow. But as time went on it was perhaps inevitable that
he, too, like Schubert and Schumann, and indeed all sincere romanticists,
should strive to leave his fanciful boyish world behind him, and to express
something of those deeper realities with which the years were making him

acquainted. Accumulating experience may well have brought to the man of
forty a distaste for the gracious insubstantiality which was entirely
charming in the work of a youth of seventeen. But, unfortunately, a serious
difficulty presented itself at this point.
From the outset a thoughtful observer might have doubted whether so
artificially protected a life as that of Mendelssohn's youth would develop
his character and genius, in the long run, so favorably as it at first promised
to do. There is such a thing as a good fortune so unrelieved that, by
removing the prick of adversity, the challenge of obstacles, the illumination
of sympathy, it becomes in truth misfortune. This is the fate that seems to
have overtaken Mendelssohn. The smile of Destiny, constant from his
youth, became at last fixed and vacuous. As in his boyhood he had been the
pet of his family, so in manhood he became, as conductor of the famous
Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipsic, and general dictator of musical affairs,
the pet of a larger but still almost invariably indulgent circle. As his fame as
a composer, conductor, pianist, and organist increased, the admiring
audience widened until it comprised all Germany; and when in his last
years he turned to oratorio writing he had England too at his feet. A wit has
vividly pictured the atmosphere of adulation in which he lived in the
remark: "Mendelssohn could not stick his head out of the window but some
one would shout 'Hurrah!'"
The tendency of such an environment is to cramp the sympathies, smother
the sense of humor, and intrench the petty pride of the most magnanimous
of men; Mendelssohn was peculiarly at its mercy, because extreme
sensitiveness inclined him to be wounded rather than enlightened by such
adverse criticism as he got, because consciousness of real merit put him off
his guard against the exaggerations of hero-worshippers, and because the
innate bias of his mind was more toward a fastidious distinction than
toward a rugged catholicity. Even in his youth his affections, as we have
seen, were exclusive and jealous; and on the intellectual side a similar
narrowness showed itself in a certain preciosity that we should call bigotry
had it been less amiably expressed. That is a significant incident that
Berlioz relates of his sojourn with Mendelssohn in Rome in their student
days. "One evening," he says, "we were exploring together the Baths of
Caracalla, debating the question of the merit or demerit of human actions,
and their remuneration during this life. As I replied with some enormity, I

know not what, to his entirely religious and orthodox opinions, his foot
slipped, and down he rolled, with many scratches and contusions, in the
ruins of a very hard staircase. 'Admire the divine justice,' said I, helping him
to rise; 'it is I who blaspheme, and it is you who fall!' This impiety,
accompanied with peals of laughter, appeared to him too much, it seemed;
and, from that time, religious discussions were always avoided." The lack
of plasticity here shown in a religious matter is also observable in his
literary and musical opinions. Lampadius quotes his comment on Shelley's
"Cenci": "No, it is too horrible! It is too abominable! I cannot read such a
poem." Mr. Hadow tells how he "praised the treatment of the double-basses
in Berlioz's Requiem, just as he afterwards told Wagner that 'a canonic
answer in the second act of "Tannhauser" had given him pleasure,'" and
remarks, "There was always a little touch of Atticus in Mendelssohn's
relations to his fellow-composers."
In the artificial air he was condemned to breathe, this pallor of intellectual
anemia gradually became habitual. As a rare plant, kept always under glass,
withers at a breeze which would invigorate the hardy weed so he could but
shiver and shrink from those winds of impartial opinion which ruder natures
inhale with zest. His youthful exquisiteness of taste thus grew peevish and
fretful with advancing years. Too frequently we read of incidents like his
studied coldness, throughout a long rehearsal, toward a favorite singer, and
his curt explanation at the end: "Your curls provoke me, Fräulein Schloss.
Wear your hair smooth; curls ought never to be black, but light brown or
fair." Great, however, was the provocation. To set yourself a pace no mortal
could maintain by writing the "Midsummer Night's Dream Overture" at
seventeen; to marry an angelic creature who agreed with your most casual
word and kissed your hand when you improvised in public; to move among
admiring friends, relatives, pupils, and acquaintances as a king might move
in a never ending triumphal procession; to find all qualms you might feel
from time to time as to the superiority of your work immediately drowned
by the immemorial habit of passive self-acceptance; to see other men, with
other ideals, winning a success which your universally recognized fair-
mindedness would not let you deny,—all this might bring pangs of
bitterness to a saint.
Perhaps this spiritual and professional exclusiveness, and the isolation it
resulted in, did not really grow with the years, but only seems more

anomalous in age, which should be mellow, than in naturally arrogant
youth. Certainly there were not lacking many evidences of a more
wholesome development, of a growth toward larger ideals, of cordial
services to fellow-artists. True self-respect, a very different thing from
narrow conceit, is shown in the following passage from a letter. "As time
goes on I think more deeply and sincerely of that—to write only as I feel, to
have less regard than ever to outward results, and when I have produced a
piece that has flowed from my heart—whether it is afterwards to bring me
fame, honors, orders, or snuff-boxes, does not concern me." A fine modesty
prompts the confession: "All I have done appears to me somewhat
miscellaneous.... I know what ought to be, and is not." And in spite of the
reserve that always impeded his social efforts, there is plenty of evidence
that he put himself to much trouble to help such brother musicians as Liszt,
Berlioz, and Spohr to gain a hearing.[19]
Above all, he was raised quite above all petty personal considerations by his
whole-souled enthusiasm for the great ancient masters. His efforts to
educate popular taste by familiarity with classical works were as
unremitting and as disinterested as Schumann's. He was the most active of
all the champions of Bach, at that time so shamefully neglected. His
performance of the great "St. Matthew Passion" in Berlin, in March, 1829,
the first since the composer's death in the middle of the eighteenth century,
is one of the most important events in musical history; the significance of it,
and of his other labors in behalf of Bach propaganda, to the entire
subsequent progress of music, and especially to the romantic movement, of
which Bach is one of the corner-stones, cannot be exaggerated.
Yet, in spite of all this, if we compare Mendelssohn with men like
Beethoven, or Schumann, or Tschaïkowsky, in whom feeling is cordial and
expression impulsive, we cannot escape the impression of a certain thinness
of blood, straitness of sympathy, and inelasticity of mind. His personality is
tenuous, over-rarefied; he seems more like a faun than a man. And hence it
comes about that when, leaving his world of fairies, elves, visionary
landscapes, and ethereal joys and sorrows, he tries to sound a fuller note of
human pain and passion, he is felt to be out of his element. His style is too
fluent, too suave, too insinuating and inoffensive, to embody tragic
emotion. It lacks the rugged force, the virile energy, the occasional
harshness and discordance even, of the natural human voice; its reading of

life, in which there is ugliness, crudity, and violence as well as beauty, is too
fastidiously expurgated. Which are the best of his piano works? Certainly
not the "Songs without Words," with their facile melody, their monotonous
rhythms and their cloyingly consonant harmony; nor the respectable,
harmless, unexciting sonatas, cut from the same stuff, but by the yard
instead of the square inch. Rather the "Variations Sérieuses" and the
"Preludes and Fugues," in which there is some of the vigor of Bach, and the
elusive immaterial whimsies, in the true Mendelssohn vein, such as the
"Capriccio," opus 118, the scherzos, the "Spinning Song," the "E-minor
Fantasie," and the "Rondo Capriccioso." Similarly, in the chamber music, it
is the Canzonetta of the E-flat quartet, the scherzos of the trios, and the
finale of the violin concerto, that most please us. As for the symphonies,
even the noble adagio of the "Scotch" is just the least bit soporific; but the
scherzo or the Scottish jig, and the fresh allegro vivace and stirring
saltarello of the "Italian" are delightful. Mendelssohn gay and gracious is
the best of company; Mendelssohn sentimental makes us "begin to loathe
the taste of sweetness, whereof a little more than a little is by much too
much."
The effeminate element in his work is probably chiefly responsible for the
indifference, boredom, or distaste with which it is nowadays so often
received. Since his romanticism was a matter of imagination rather than of
passion, of fancy and delicate sentiment rather than of turbulent feeling, it is
inevitably voted dull by a generation given over like ours to the pursuit of
thrills, tolerant of any turgidity that can excite, and preferring intensity to
clarity of emotion. He represents a mild, tentative, and restrained
application of artistic principles that have been much more brilliantly and
thoroughly illustrated by bolder spirits like Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt,
who have accordingly somewhat eclipsed him. His conservatism also made
him retain many of the traditional formulæ and mannerisms of classicism,
which have become repugnant to our less conventional age. The result is
that it has become almost a fashion to sneer or to smile at his music. But it
is conceivable that we err in one direction as much as his contemporaries
did in the other. It may be that we call his art stale and vapid merely
because our palates are jaded by over-indulgence in spices and condiments.
Mendelssohn is undeniably, for the present, among the fallen gods; but
whether a maturer and less sophisticated taste than our own may some day
set him up again is a question we must be content to leave unanswered.

FOOTNOTES:
[14] See S. Hensel's "The Mendelssohn Family, from Letters and Journals," a
fascinating book. English translation published in London, 1881.
[15] "Mendelssohn," by S. S. Stratton, p. 40.
[16] Compare what is said of Chopin at page 231.
[17] "The Mendelssohn Family," p. 131.
[18] Compare the remarks on Schumann's scoring, at page 139.
[19] See the story of the banquet he tendered to Liszt in Leipsic, in Lampadius'
"Life," p. 167.

V
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

V
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

Critics of literature and painting have succeeded in disseminating pretty
widely the idea that the style of each artistic species is determined largely
by the technical conditions under which it develops. We all know that one
style is appropriate to engraving, another to oil-painting, and still another to
pastel work; we recognize that the prose-writer and the versifier must use
different vocabularies. Musical critics, however, whether from ignorance or
from a disposition to involve their subject in an impenetrable haze of
sentiment, have for the most part left us undisturbed to the enjoyment of our
primitive notion that music, as a product of pure "inspiration," remains
unmodified by such practical considerations as what voices can best sing, or
instruments best play. We have to reach largely without their aid the
conclusion that, in music quite as much as in literature or painting, the kind
of body available to a composition determines in no small degree the sort of
spirit which is to inhabit it.
The style of Palestrina, for example, the greatest master of the sixteenth
century, bears the unmistakable stamp of the medium which at that time
was firmly entrenched by tradition—the ecclesiastical choir of mixed
voices. His polyphonic texture came in obedience to the necessity of
making many melodies, simultaneous and intertwined, for the various
groups of singers; the movement and range of his melodies were restricted
by the rather narrow capacities of the human voice; his harmony, in the
interests of accurate intonation, had to be kept simple and transparent.
When, somewhat later, the organ came into vogue, it suggested certain
modifications of style, splendidly realized by J. S. Bach. The natural
capacities of the hands on the keyboard tended to focus attention quite as
much on the chord as on the separate strands of melody, and the massive
effects of chord-patterns began to vie in importance with the more
polyphonic traits. At the same time harmony was free to become much

more complex, since pipes cannot sing out of tune, and the mechanically
even tone, free from the vibrato and incapable of the accentuation of voices,
made feasible a grand impersonality of style, felt at its maximum in Bach's
fugues. A little later still the orchestra became the dominating medium, and
Beethoven, ignoring altogether the ecclesiastical tradition, founded his
work on the secular dance and song, immemorially associated with bowed
and wind instruments. Melody became lyrical rather than contrapuntal, the
exact balance of phrase by phrase instead of the imitation of motive by
motive grew to be the chief means of coherence, and a systematic extension
of this balance resulted in the sonata-form. At the same time the marvelous
expressive power of the bowed instruments was nobly utilized: on the
emotional side music became more than ever before profound, impassioned,
mystical, and poignant.
As Palestrina, Bach, and Beethoven reflect in their musical individualities
the technique of the chorus, the organ, and the orchestra, so Chopin is in
large measure a resultant of the peculiar qualities of the most influential of
modern instruments, the pianoforte. This instrument had already assumed
an important rôle during the life of Beethoven, and by the time of Schubert
and Schumann it had made its influence deeply felt; but in no composer
before Chopin do we find so delicate a divination of its capacities, so
thorough a mastery of its mechanism, so willing an acquiescence in its
limitations, so single-minded a formation of style upon the peculiar dialect
it speaks in the language of music. Of none of his predecessors can it be
said, as it can of him, that had the voice, the organ, and the orchestra not
existed, his art would still have been essentially what it was. Indeed, his
work is the offspring of so perfect a marriage between the artistic impulses
of a sensitive human organism and the peculiar potentialities of a special
instrument that it can be properly understood only through a study of both.
The most serious defect of the piano is its inability to sustain its tones. The
tones of the voice and of wind instruments are limited in duration only by
the air capacity of the lungs, those of bowed string instruments can be held
indefinitely, and an organ pipe will sound as long as the air pressure is
maintained in the bellows. The vibrations of a piano string, on the contrary,
are at their maximum only during the moment in which it is struck by the
hammer operated by pressing the key, and from that moment gradually
decrease, giving forth a sound constantly fainter and fainter. Once the key is

struck, the player's control over the mechanism ceases, and he has no choice
but either to wait passively for silence or to strike another key. For this
reason the broad, poising melodies and the slow-moving, deliberate
harmonies of the choral and organ schools are ineffective on the piano. The
long notes, fading momently away, fail, because of the insufficiency of their
physical embodiment, to receive their due share of attention, and so lose
their musical value. Still more do purely polyphonic passages, which
depend for their effect on the leisurely succession of dissonances and their
resolutions, subtly interlinked, suffer from the discontinuity of the piano
tone. The indifference, or even insensibility, to the beauty of pure line,
which characterizes so much of our modern musical taste, is probably in
large measure due to the prevalence of an instrument so little suited to
exhibit it.[20]
At a very early period after the piano came into common use, musicians
began to recognize the necessity of minimizing its characteristic defect by
modifying their manner of writing. They soon discovered that if the tones
would not sustain themselves, they must be struck over and over again as
rapidly as possible: repetition must counteract evanescence. An early
application of this principle is the use, by Bach and other clavichordists, of
trills, mordants, and other ornaments as a means of keeping long melody-
notes audible. A more important one is the breaking up of chords into
figures of short notes in the accompaniments of Haydn and Mozart, a
device which soon became so indispensable that a glance at any modern
piano score will discover hundreds of such groups of short notes, which are
nothing but chords played piecemeal in order to make them sound.

[PDF]
(a) MOZART: Piano Sonata, A-major.

[PDF]
(b) BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata, Op. 2, No. 1.

[PDF]
(c) SCHUBERT: Fantasia, Op. 15.

[PDF]
(d) CHOPIN: Nocturne, Op. 53, No. 2.

Figure XV.

A melody in the right hand, accompanied by these broken chords in the left
—this soon became the normal texture of music intended for the piano.
The first great merit of Chopin was that he carried to its logical extreme this
system of counteracting the piano's defective sonority. The great advance
made by him is shown even in the brief quotations of Figure XV. The
Mozart example is rudimentary—the device at its lowest terms. In the
Beethoven passage the chords are placed too low; they sound muddy,
opaque, inelastic. In the Schubert passage the sonority is better, but the
figures are so arranged as to be very difficult to play, on account of the wide
jump the hand has to make at the middle of each measure. Chopin, on the
other hand, avoids muddiness by clustering his harmony fairly high (about
the region of middle C), at the same time gets a sufficient bass for his
chords, which he is able to do by covering a great deal of ground in each
figure, and in spite of the wide space traversed on the keyboard respects the
comfort of the player by not requiring any sudden leaps. It is furthermore
worthy of note that by introducing two tones foreign to the harmony (the
fourth and the sixteenth) he gains a richness of sound lacking in the other
examples. We get here, however, but the merest inkling of the inexhaustible
ingenuity with which he manages this matter of "figuration," or the
ornamental disintegration of chords. In order really to appreciate it we

should have to examine those nocturnes, say, like the second, third, seventh,
and eighth, in which with the left hand unaided he supplies a good firm bass
and an intricate texture of accompaniment; we should have to study those
pieces, such as the first, fifth, and eighth of the Études, opus 10, and the
Prelude, opus 28, no. 23, in which it is the right hand that, racing back and
forth over the keyboard, fills in the chinks of the harmony as a painter
"stipples" an even tint with an infinite number of tiny brush-strokes; we
should have to analyze in detail such a masterpiece as the Étude in A-flat
major, opus 25, no. 1, in which it is both hands that weave together a
diaphanous web of sound, while the outer fingers of one sing the tune, and
those of the other the bass.[21]
Chopin's negative merit of minimizing the disadvantages of his instrument
is, however, very intimately connected with a more positive skill in utilizing
its peculiar advantages, in order to understand which we shall have to revert
for a moment to our examination of the mechanism of the piano. The most
characteristic feature of this mechanism—a feature so vital that it has been
called the soul of the piano, and so unique that no other instrument except
the harp presents a parallel to it—is the damper pedal, generally known by
the inaccurate and misleading name of "the loud pedal." Its function is to
raise all the dampers which control the vibrations of the strings, leaving
them free to respond to any impulse they may receive. It thus secures two
important results.
In the first place, it counteracts the non-sustainment of single tones by
fusing a great many such individual tones, separately produced, into one
impression. It will readily be seen, for instance, how indispensable is the
pedal to the intended effect of the broken chords of Figure XV: only
through its coöperation do they become worthy equivalents, in the piano
idiom, of what the organ or voices would present in the form of sustained
chords in long notes. Moreover, every tone sounded on the piano, with the
pedal down, is reinforced, through what is known as sympathetic vibration,
by many other tones not sounded by the hands at all. For, since every tone
produced by a piano string is in reality, as proved by scientific analysis, by
no means simple, but a complex of many elements known as "partial tones,"
and since any elastic body capable of producing a given tone will actually
produce it, through sympathetic vibration, whenever the tone is already
being otherwise sounded in its vicinity, it will readily be understood that all

the partial tones set going by striking a piano key will, if the dampers are,
by means of the pedal, kept from interfering, start into activity whatever
strings are tuned to their respective pitches. Thus the pedal turns the entire
body of strings into one vast Æolian harp, ready to take up, reëcho, and
multiply the slightest breath of sound produced through the keyboard.
Some idea of the extraordinary enrichment of timbre or tone-quality which
accrues to the piano through the sympathetic vibration made possible by the
pedal may be gained by striking a single key, say middle C, first without,
then with, the pedal. The first tone stands out hard and angular, like a
leafless tree in a desert; the second is liquid, murmurous, palpitant, its
outlines softened as a landscape is softened by a misty atmosphere. When a
chord rather than a single key is struck, the effect is, of course, multiplied in
direct proportion to the number of its constituent tones. The hard nucleus of
the impression is clothed in a soft web of subordinate sounds, the result of
sympathetic vibration. Suppose, for example, we play the chord of four
whole notes in Figure XVI. If at the same time we free the strings by
pressing the pedal, we shall summon from them an attendant train of
ghostly "harmonics" for each of the four, represented in the figure by
quarter-notes. These auxiliary tones, to be sure, will be exceedingly faint
and individually indistinguishable, but they will nevertheless give to the
impression that curious mellowness, depth, or liquidity (one calls vainly on
the divers experiences of other senses to describe it) which is one of the
fundamental charms of the piano tone.

[PDF]

Figure XVI.

The second important result of the damper pedal is a still greater richness of
tone which it enables composers to attain by artificially pushing still farther
the fusion of many single tones which is illustrated on the plane of nature
by the foregoing examples. The student of harmony will observe that
though most of the "harmonics," written in quarter-notes, of Figure XVI,
are consonant to the fundamental chord, and thus enrich without obscuring
it, there are several, notably the G-sharp, which, being foreign to the chord,
tend slightly to blur its clarity. These dissonant harmonics are, however, so
faint that their effect is practically nil. But if the composer, acting on the
hint they give him, introduces into his chords similar foreign tones, sounded
more distinctly by the hands, he at once imparts to the harmony a curious
opacity and thickness which it is almost impossible to describe, but which
affords a pleasant contrast to the uniform clearness of purely consonant
chords. The fourth and the sixteenth notes in the bit of Chopin already cited
(Figure XV) illustrate this device. The effect of such dissonant tones may
be likened to the effect of mixtures and body-colors in painting; they afford
relief from the monotony of consonance just as those afford relief from the
monotony of the pure colors. They provide the musical picture with
chiaroscuro and atmosphere, softening the sharpness of its lines, spreading
over it, so to speak, a delicate translucent haze. Used to excess, of course,
they make a mere smutch, a meaningless, chaotic daub; the music reverts to
primitive noise; the nice point is to use them just enough to gain depth,
solidity, light and shade, without blackening and confusing the whole
impression.[22]
Now Chopin is one of the supreme masters in the coloristic use of the
dissonance. His nocturnes, especially the first, seventh, eighth, and
fourteenth, may fairly be said to inaugurate by this means a new era in
music, comparable in many respects to the era of impressionism in painting.
Their tremulous, vaporous harmonies seem to come from no common
piano, but from some wind-swept Æolian harp. Take, for instance, such a
passage as the following, at the end of the third nocturne:—

[PDF]

Figure XVII.

Here it is as if, after placing on his canvas the two main chords of the
cadence, dominant and tonic, he took, while the colors were still wet, a
brush, and with the softest imaginable touch drew it across the entire face of

the picture. The grace-notes, most of which, it will be noted, are dissonant
to the main harmony, are no more meant to be heard individually than the
spots of paint in a Monet are meant to be seen individually; they are a
running of the colors, blurring the otherwise too bald outline. Chopin's
scores are full of these delicate veilings and obscurations. In a majority of
cases they are produced, as in this instance, by the right hand, above a clear
harmony in the lower register. But sometimes, more daringly,[23] he assigns
the web of dissonance to the left hand, in the middle register or even in the
bass, thus gaining an extraordinary lurid gorgeousness of coloring. The
passage in the third ballade, beginning at the change of signature to four
sharps (Figure XVIII), is an instance.

[PDF]
and later

[PDF]
Figure XVIII.
Or again, as in the "Meno mosso" of the Scherzo, opus 39, both hands first
deliver bold, clear chords, and then weave a shimmer of light above them.
In all such cases, it is obvious that the dissonances in question do not
belong to the essential melodic and harmonic lines of the composition; they
are, as Mr. Hadow says, "effects of superficies, not effects of substance,"
and may be compared to those local blurs made by a draughtsman's stump
in a charcoal sketch, or, as before suggested, to those surprisingly rich
mixed tints produced in impressionistic paintings by a multitude of minute
brush-strokes.
The at first sight very elaborate modulations of Chopin which have
provoked so much discussion are but a further application of the same
principle. They are really not modulations at all, in the classic sense of
transitions from one key to another having a structural value, but rather
amplifications of the groups of grace-notes that constantly embroider the
tunes. Their function is sensuous rather than structural, and we might
describe them by coining the word "grace-chords." Of the twelfth measure
of the second nocturne, for example, Mr. Hadow well says that "when we

see it on paper it seems to consist of a rapid series of remote and recondite
modulations, but when we hear it played ... we feel that there is only one
real modulation, and that the rest of the passage is an iridescent play of
color." Another striking instance is the following measure in the "Polonaise-
Fantaisie," a composition in which effects of this sort abound.

[PDF]

Figure XIX.

The pedantic scholiast would say that the composer here modulated, with
startling speed, through the keys of B-flat, C, D, and A-minor; but all that
the mind grasps is the two chords at the beginnings of the measures,
connected by a gorgeous pageant of inarticulate sound. The sketch is being
rubbed with the draughtsman's stump again, this time with even finer
temerity and more splendid result than before.
It is a lesson in the meaning of that much-abused word "originality" to
observe that Chopin arrived at all these novel effects, which differentiate his
style so strikingly from those of the conservatives and the virtuosos of his
day, simply by discerning through a superior sensitiveness, and working out
with a matchless skill, the peculiar potentialities of the medium at his hand.
Realizing as no one else had done that the piano compensates for its
inability to bring out the beauties of pure line (due to the non-sustainment
of single tones), by the wealth of color made available through the pedal's

fusion of many tones, both consonant and dissonant, in one composite
impression, he shrewdly arranged his campaign accordingly. He adjusted all
his technical resources, both as a composer and as a pianist, in the interests
of the greatest possible transfusion and intermixture of impressions. This is
the secret of his harmonic scheme, so chromatic and full of dissonance; of
his lavish melodic embroidery; of his tempo rubato, by which the outline of
meter itself, so arithmetical and inexorable, is gently relaxed; of his curious
soft, light touch, which seemed to glide over rather than strike the keys
—"so insinuating and gossamer a touch," says an ear-witness, "that the
crudest and most chromatic harmonies floated away under his hand,
indistinct yet not unpleasing"; and this is the secret of his lavish use of the
damper pedal, equalled, among his contemporaries, only by that of
Schumann.[24]
The unprecedented individuality of the style he thus developed profoundly
impressed all observers. "In the marvellous art of carrying and modulating
the tone, in the expressive, melancholy manner of shading it off," says
Marmontel in his "Pianistes Célébres," "Chopin was entirely himself. He
had quite an individual way of attacking the keyboard, a supple, mellow
touch, sonorous effects of a vaporous fluidity of which only he knew the
secret." "Imagine," writes Schumann in the New Journal of Music, "an
Æolian harp that had all the scales, and that these were jumbled together by
the hand of an artist into all sorts of fantastic ornaments, but in such a
manner that a deeper fundamental tone and a softly singing higher part were
always audible, and you have an approximate idea of his playing." Liszt's
testimony is that he "imprinted on all his pieces one knows not what
nameless color, what vague appearance, what pulsations akin to vibration,"
and that "his modulations were velvety and iridescent as the robe of a
salamander."
Nor do the scholastic musicians of the time fail to pay this pioneer the
eloquent tribute of misunderstanding him. Moscheles, a man of the old
régime, writes, after hearing him play, "The harsh modulations which strike
me disagreeably when I am playing his compositions no longer shock me,
because he glides over them in a fairylike way with his delicate fingers."
This comment is most significant. Moscheles found Chopin's modulations
harsh because he played them with the punctilious accuracy, the absolute
literalness, which is appropriate to the music of line, but not to the music of

color. In rendering a Bach fugue we cannot get each tone too distinct, since
it is sure to be a part of some melody, a clear perception of which is
necessary to our appreciation of the design. But Chopin's polyphony is not
Bach's polyphony, as is illustrated by the former's Prelude, opus 28, no. 1.
Both the right- and the left-hand parts here are melodic; but if both are
played with an equally salient touch, the conflicts between the voices
become unpleasant. The proper way is to let the lower part sink into the
background, giving merely a certain depth and opacity to the general
impression; the two melodies are as it were on different planes, the lower
one more remote and heard but dimly as through a slight haze. So it is
everywhere in Chopin. To play him too distinctly is as fatal an error as to
examine a charcoal sketch with a magnifying glass, or to bend over a
canvas of Monet and peer curiously at each spot of paint. One must stand
off, and half close one's eyes, until the details are lost in the masses. In a
word, here is a new type of art, demanding a new mode of apperception. If
a Bach fugue and a Mozart quartet are the steel engravings of music,
Chopin's pieces are its impressionistic paintings and pastels.
But it is time to pass to some other phases of the extraordinary sensibility
and unerring taste of Chopin, thus evidenced by his originality in technique,
as they showed themselves in his everyday life and in the more intellectual
aspects of his art. The chief events of his short career may be very
summarily recounted. Born in Zelazowa-Wola, a small village in Poland, in
1809, he studied music in Warsaw, and at twenty-two established himself as
a pianist and teacher in Paris, where he passed most of his life. In 1837 ill
health, which soon developed into the pulmonary disease of which he died,
compelled him to seek a warmer climate, and he passed the winter in the
island of Majorca with George Sand, the eminent novelist, and her children.
Thus began a connection which lasted for ten years, and which has given
rise to endless discussion. The true inner history of this love-affair will
probably never be known, as the evidence is fragmentary and distorted by
prejudice. It is obvious, however, that neither the composer nor the novelist
(whose real name was Madame Dudevant, but who had obtained a divorce
from her husband before she met Chopin) was sufficiently unselfish to
sustain permanently such a relation; nor were their temperaments
fundamentally congenial. They separated in 1847. By this time Chopin's
consumption was far advanced, and after two more years of extreme
feebleness, complicated by poverty, he died at Paris, October 17, 1849.

In physique Chopin was slender and of middle height, fragile even before
disease had wasted him, but supple and elastic; his hands and feet were
small, his gestures varied and full of grace; with his pale, almost sallow,
complexion, his long, fine, chestnut-brown hair, parted at one side, his high
aquiline nose, limpid yet bright eyes, and sweet half-melancholy smile, he
impressed Moscheles as "exactly like his music, tender and
schwärmerisch."[25] Liszt says that the timbre of his voice was subdued, and
that his movements had such a distinction and his manners such an impress
of good society that one treated him unconsciously like a prince. In the
matter of dress he was as fussy as a woman, sparing no pains (to the friends
who served him in these affairs) to secure just the distinguished mean
between the insignificant and the ostentatious. "I forgot," he writes from
Nohant, George Sand's country estate, to his friend Fontana, "to ask you to
order for me a hat from my Duport, in your street, Chaussée d'Antin. Let
him give the hat of this year's shape, not too much exaggerated, for I do not
know how you are dressing yourself just now.... Call at my tailor's, on the
Boulevards, and order him to make me at once a pair of gray trousers—
something respectable, not striped, but plain and elastic. Also a quiet black
velvet waistcoat, but with very little and no loud pattern, something very
quiet but very elegant. Should he not have the best velvet of this kind, let
him make a quiet, fine silk waistcoat, but not too much open."
Another letter of the same time amply proves the truth of his biographer's
statement that he had the "coquetterie des appartements." "Select wall-
paper," he directs, "such as I had formerly, dove-color, only bright and
glossy, for the two rooms, also dark green with not too broad stripes. For
the anteroom something else, but still respectable. If there are any nicer and
more fashionable papers that are to your liking, take them. I prefer the
plain, unpretending, and neat ones to the shopkeeper's staring colors.
Therefore pearl-color pleases me, for it is neither too loud nor does it look
vulgar." In his later years, as health waned, the habit of luxury grew upon
him. Near the end, just before leaving London for home, he writes another
of his willing servitors, this time his friend Grzymala: "Please see that the
sheets and pillows are quite dry, and cause fir-nuts to be bought; Madame
Étienne is not to spare anything, so that I may warm myself when I arrive. I
have written to D—— that he is to provide carpets and curtains. I shall pay
the paper-hanger at once after my arrival. Tell Pleyel to send me a piano on
Thursday; let it be closed and a nosegay of violets be bought, so that there

may be a nice fragrance in the salon. I should like to find a little poesy in
my rooms and in my bedroom, where in all probability I shall lie down for a
long time."
The same fastidiousness is discernible in his musical and intellectual tastes.
Liszt says that he ranked Mozart above all other masters, "because Mozart
condescended more rarely than any other composer to cross the steps which
separate refinement from vulgarity." "Yet," adds Liszt, "his sybaritism of
purity, his apprehension of what was commonplace, were such that even in
'Don Giovanni' he discovered passages the presence of which we have
heard him regret." Next to Mozart came Bach, whose works were the only
music he carried with him to Majorca, and whose exquisitely lucid style
exercised an important formative influence on his own. His pupil Mikuli
says it was difficult to tell which of the two composers he loved better.
Beethoven he accepted only with reservations. "Certain parts of
Beethoven's works," says Liszt, "seemed to him too rudely fashioned. Their
structure was too athletic to please him; their wraths seemed to him too
violent." Mendelssohn he considered "common"; of Schumann's "Carnaval"
he remarked that it was not music; Meyerbeer and Berlioz he heartily
disliked, though for different reasons; Liszt, according to Niecks, he often
found "guilty of making concessions to bad taste for the sake of success," a
sin which he "viewed with the greatest indignation." On the other hand, he
liked the music of Bellini and Rossini, on account of its southern suavity
and grace.
Chopin took slight interest in philosophy and literature, and detested
argument, whether political or religious. "Of universality" says Niecks,
"there was not a trace in him;" and the composer Stephen Heller, himself a
man of marked cultivation, pronounced him "uneducated." What little we
do learn of his reading, however, is most characteristic. His friend Gavard,
who read to him, in his last illness, out of Voltaire's "Dictionnaire
Philosophique," remarks: "He valued very highly the finished form of that
clear and concise language, and that so sure judgment on questions of taste.
Thus, for instance, I remember that the article on taste was one of the last I
read to him." The graphologist will supplement these bits of evidence with
the testimony of his handwriting, inimitably neat and small. His
manuscripts are marvels of penmanship: the notes like pin-points, the slurs
mere filaments of spider's web, the stems painstakingly vertical, even the

erasures ornamental latticework, so that the whole is as much a drawing as
a writing.
The least pleasing of all the manifestations of Chopin's exquisiteness is seen
in his social habits. Here his refinement, his shrinking aversion to all that
was crude, ugly, or grotesque, his sybaritic love of ease and elegance, made
of him an ultra-aristocrat, a précieux,—one is often tempted to say, in good
round English, a "snob." Dazzled by the brilliance and poisoned by the
perfume of those salons to which his talent gave him access, his taste, so
unerring in matters of art, failed to distinguish between the genuine
aristocracy of mind and the spurious aristocracy of wealth and fashion. It is
at once pathetic and exasperating to see such a genius, of whom an honest,
simple man like Delacroix could say, "he was the most true artist I have
met," anxiously striving to be borne aloft by that haute volée which was so
immeasurably beneath him, limiting his society to that small section of
humankind which proudly styled itself "le monde," and dedicating his
leisure and his compositions, not to brother artists, but to the baronesses,
countesses, and princesses who gave him their half-patronizing homage.[26]
In his letters one too frequently comes upon passages like this, from
Vienna: I have pleased the nobility here exceedingly. As a proof I may
mention the visit which Count Dietrichstein paid me on the stage," or this
from Paris, on his first arrival: "I move in the highest society—among
ambassadors, princes, and ministers."
There is in the "Lettres Parisiennes" of Madame de Girardin a description of
a soirée at Madame de Courbonne's, which brings this whole nauseous
atmosphere with painful vividness under our very nostrils. "It was for
passionate admirers," writes Madame de Girardin, "the torment of Tantalus
to see Chopin going about a whole evening in a salon, and not to hear him.
The mistress of the house took pity on us; she was indiscreet, and Chopin
played, sang his most delicious songs; we set to these joyous or sad airs the
words which came into our heads; we followed with our thoughts his
melodious caprices. There were some twenty of us, sincere amateurs, true
believers, and not a note was lost, not an intention was misunderstood; it
was not a concert, it was intimate, serious music such as we love; he was
not a virtuoso who comes and plays the air agreed up and then disappears;
he was a beautiful talent, monopolized, worried, tormented, without
consideration and scruples, whom one dared to ask for the most beloved

airs.... Madame So-and-so said, 'Please, play this pretty nocturne dedicated
to Mdlle. Stirling.'—The nocturne which I called the dangerous one.—He
smiled, and played the fatal nocturne. 'I,' said another lady, 'should like to
hear once played by you this mazurka, so sad and so charming.' He smiled
again, and played the delicious mazurka. The most profoundly artful among
the ladies sought expedients to attain their ends: 'I am practising the grand
sonata which commences [sic] with this beautiful funeral march,' and 'I
should like to know the movement in which the finale ought to be played.'
He smiled a little at the stratagem, and played the finale of the grand
sonata."
Decidedly, there is too sickly a flavor of the boudoir about the salons in
which "this beautiful talent ... whom one dared to ask for the most beloved
airs" deigned to spend his time. We cannot wonder that in such a hothouse
atmosphere the ugly weeds of his character throve almost as well as the
delicate flowers, that under such long-continued coddling he grew vain,
captious, pettily egotistical. It is distressing to note how much he is willing
to ask of his friends Fontana and Grzymala, in the way of laborious and
disagreeable commissions—errands to tailors, landlords, paper-hangers, and
furniture-makers, and bickerings with publishers—and how he is content to
repay them with a few perfunctory protestations of regard, nicely
proportioned, in each case, to the magnitude of the favor exacted. Nor does
he hesitate to speak slightingly, behind their backs, of such associates as
Pleyel the publisher, Leo the banker, and even his fellow-countryman
Matuszynski, at the same time that he is addressing them directly in the
most cordial and even affectionate language. In short, it is impossible to
deny that he was exacting, ungenerous, and disingenuous in his relations
with comrades and friends.
In the more casual relations the same shortcomings revealed themselves in a
malicious wit which was quite devoid of the magnanimity and exuberance
of humor. His description of Thalberg, his rival as a virtuoso, is a little
masterpiece of irony: "He is younger than I, pleases the ladies very much,
makes potpourris on 'Masaniello,' plays the forte and piano with the pedal
but not with the hand, takes tenths as easily as I do octaves, and wears studs
with diamonds." When Liszt, who in the consciousness of his splendor was
inclined to patronize, volunteered to write a review of one of his concerts,
he said, "He will give me a little kingdom in his empire." To a wealthy

Philistine who invited him to dinner, and as soon as the coffee was removed
requested him to play, he responded sweetly, "Ah, but I have eaten so
little!" Obviously Liszt is right in describing him as "a fine connoisseur in
raillery and an ingenious mocker."
But just as the sneer is physiologically the incipient uncovering of the teeth,
in self-defence, of the animal at bay, so Chopin's sarcasms are the
retaliations of a man constantly harassed, upon a dull and cruel world. He
had to resort to innuendo because he was too fragile for rougher warfare.
The needles of his wit had to be sharply pointed and dipped in venom, to
make any impression on people accustomed to fight with sledge-hammers.
All his weaknesses of character, indeed,—his malice, his extreme caution,
his secretiveness, his vanity, even his snobbishness,—are in large measure
but the necessary reflexes of inherent weaknesses of constitution, and may
be explained, if not altogether condoned, as the normal reactions of a too
sensitive nature, placed without protection in a sordid, difficult, phlegmatic
world. Never, surely, was human being more delicately adjusted than
Chopin to receive painful impressions at every point. His senses were so
keen that as a child he cried at the mere sound of music; disease made him
shrink from minute changes of temperature or slightly unfavorable
conditions of weather, of which ordinary people are unconscious; imperious
pride made him similarly susceptible to his social climate; and his high
artistic ideal condemned him to constant disappointment even with his
work. Peculiarly pathetic is the story of the last year of his life, when,
unable to compose or to teach, almost penniless, and so weak that he had to
be carried upstairs by his valet, he undertook an ill-fated concert tour in
Scotland and England. It was a sad jest of destiny to bring this subtle artist,
dying of consumption, into contact with a Manchester audience, in a large
hall which his tone could not fill. He begged his friend Osborne not to be
present—"My playing will be lost in such a large room, and my
compositions will be ineffective." Hueffer describes a similar scene in
London, a Grand Polish Ball, at which "the people, hot from dancing, who
went into the room where he played, were but little in the humor to pay
attention, and anxious to return to their amusement. He was in the last stage
of exhaustion, and the affair resulted in disappointment." It was an
excusable bitterness with which, on the way back to Paris, pointing at the
cattle by the wayside, he murmured "Ça a plus d'intelligence que les

Anglais." But, alas! to a temperament, like his, too delicately strung, the
whole world, always and everywhere, is somewhat British.
The single, but perhaps sufficing, good fortune in Chopin's in many ways
unhappy lot was that he was able to find a refuge from the irritations,
failures, and disappointments of everyday existence in artistic expression.
However stubborn an aspect life presented to him, in art at least he was
successful. The great law of compensation never wrought more subtly than
when it made the very qualities which defeated him in the one realm the
sources of his joyful conquest in the other. The keenness of sense which
found in the hurly-burly of the world so many painful impressions, also
discovered, as we have seen, wonderful new possibilities of tonal coloring
in pianoforte music. The minute discrimination which made him
unpleasantly conscious of all that was vulgar, crude, and ugly in human
nature, also enabled him to winnow out unerringly, from his musical
resources, all trite formulæ, all hackneyed conventional progressions, all
threadbare adornments, and so to attain a marvellous individuality and
distinction of style. The very exclusiveness which condemned the man to
solitude, safeguarded the artist against dissipation of energy and futile
eclecticisms of method. Finally, his ideal of perfection, a cruel autocrat to
serve in a world so imperfect, proved the best of guides in the less
refractory medium of art, and led him near to the verge of complete
realization. In a word, the paradox of Chopin is that his fastidious taste—
the radical, fundamental trait of his nature—plunges him, as a human being,
into a jungle of distresses, but guides him, as a musician, to a mountain-top
of commanding superiority.
The unfailing interest of the analysis of his music lies in the recognition, at
every turn, of this fineness of nature, this mental and spiritual high-
breeding, this exquisitely sensitive taste, and in the detection of the various
kinds of excellence it produces. One easily traces it through several planes
of achievement, in an ascending series. On the first and lowest plane it
appears merely as an inimitable finesse in the execution of light, playful,
and even frivolous designs: no one has brought so delicate and yet firm a
touch, and so sure an instinct for dainty elegance of style, to the treatment
of the salon-piece (a genre for which we find perhaps the best parallel in the
paintings of Watteau or the verses of Mr. Austin Dobson) as the Chopin of
the waltzes, the mazurkas, many of the études and preludes, and even of the

more old-fashioned concert fantasias and "variations brillantes." Weber is
as polished, but less subtle; Schubert is as spontaneous, but by no means so
distinguished. Schumann exerts the same fascination, but with less
ingratiation, less politesse; Liszt's musical garment is equally sparkling, but
it is gemmed with rubies rather than with diamonds. The technical sources
of Chopin's success in this genre are his graceful, smoothly-moulded
melodies, frequently recalling those of Bellini and other Italians, with
whom he had much in common; his simple, transparent harmonies, built up
always with an unfailing sense of tone-color; and his lambent, coruscating
ornamentation, which always seems to effloresce spontaneously from the
melody. In all these matters he is the supreme model of purity and felicity in
this style.
But the same punctilious taste which guided him so safely among the
pitfalls of virtuosity and bravura soon led him beyond this entire scheme of
art, which is, after all, based on the somewhat frivolous ideal of ostentation,
up to the higher level of lyrical expression, based on quiet and deep
personal feeling. The virtuoso was transformed into the poet. In the
nocturnes, some of the études and preludes, portions even of the ballades
and polonaises, and most strikingly of all in the slow movements of the
concertos and sonatas, his object is no longer to dazzle his audience, but to
portray subjective emotion, often of a profound earnestness and spiritual
beauty. If in his early pieces he was the prestidigitator, the brother-in-art of
Thalberg and Liszt, here he is the dreamer, the rhapsodist, and his nearest of
kin is Robert Schumann. The largo of the B-minor Sonata is
Schumannesque in its contemplativeness, its innigkeit, its marked note of
mysticism; the funeral march in the B-flat minor Sonata equals that of the
great quintet in poignancy and dignity, though it is a feminine version of
what in the German composer we find expressed with more virile force. In
the nocturnes the feminine quality is even more evident. Their tender beauty
has a pallor, a fragility, almost an emaciation, which has often brought upon
them the charge of morbidity. It is certain that in the pieces of this type
Chopin has carried his fastidiousness a stage farther than in the display
pieces, attaining an even greater distinction and a rarer individuality. The
nocturnes and preludes, the larghettos of the two concertos, the largo of the
Sonata in B-minor, and a few other things of the same sort constitute one of
the few perfect manifestations of the romantic spirit in music.

There is still a third phase of Chopin's work, which some will probably
consider as much higher than the lyrical phase as that is higher than the
decorative. This may be called the heroic or epic phase, and is exemplified
in the polonaises, the ballades, the Fantaisie, opus 49, the twelfth étude, the
thirteenth nocturne, and the finale of the Sonata in B-minor.[27] A study of
these works will open the eyes of any one who knows Chopin only through
his virtuoso or lyrical pieces to the scope and many-sidedness of his genius.
There is about them a largeness of utterance, a sustainment of mood, an
intensity of emotion hardly ever degenerating into the hysterical or the
sentimental, which it is strange to find in the graceful salon writer, the
delicate miniaturist. Yet this final quality, too, by which Chopin proves
himself akin to Beethoven as well as to Thalberg and Schumann (an oddly
assorted trio), is, like the others, due to his characteristic fineness of nature.
It is the heroism of high breeding, the vigor of intelligence, the dignity of
impeccable taste. It bespeaks a strength rather subtle than brutal—the
strength of the mettlesome thoroughbred, not that of the stolid dray-horse. It
is a spiritual superiority (like the technical and emotional superiority) born
of distinction and nourished by exclusiveness. Even in the most virile of the
polonaises, with the possible exception of the so-called "Military
Polonaise," which is unique in its fresh, open-air athleticism, we feel that
the power which surges through them is a nervous rather than a muscular
power. Thus when he is heroic, no less than when he is gay or introspective,
Chopin remains true to his slender, aquiline, subtle, aristocratic self.
It is interesting to examine the evolution of technique that went hand in
hand with his growth in emotional earnestness. In the first place the Bellini-
like tunefulness, illustrated in the theme of the Rondeau, opus 1, with its
agile turns and trills and its skipping staccato movement, gives place in the
maturer works to a freer, more chromatic, more impassioned and rhapsodic
type of melody. It recrudesces, to be sure, here and there, as in the ninth
nocturne, the larghetto of the E-minor concerto, the moderato cantabile of
the "Fantaisie Impromptu"; for the languid southern luxuriousness was once
for all a part of Chopin's temperament. But the deeper and more intimate
the mood he is trying to express, the broader and less trammelled becomes
his melodic curve. How sinuous the line, how gradual the climax, how
deliberate the subsidence, of this theme from the fourteenth nocturne (a, in
Figure XX):

[PDF]
(a)

[PDF]
(b)

Figure XX.

How majestically the phrases rise, tier on tier, in the chief melody of the
Polonaise, opus 44! How nobly rhapsodical, how genially spontaneous and
flexible, is the phraseology of the second theme in the allegro of the B-
minor Sonata (b, in Figure XX)! Well may Mr. Edward Dannreuther call
Chopin "the supreme master of elegiac melody."
In his greatest tunes Chopin indeed touches a point which few purely
romantic writers ever reach. We have noted, from time to time, in the course
of these studies, the tendency of all lyrical composers to build up their
music out of a few short phrases many times repeated, like the patterns in a
wall-paper; we have seen how Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn fell
into this pitfall even in their orchestral works, which therefore, in
comparison with Mozart's or Beethoven's, seem patchy, breathless, or
monotonous. We have seen that melodies of "long breath" are conceivable
only by minds of sufficient synthetic power to entwine many phrases,
diverse in length, contour, and rhythm, into a single organism. Now Chopin,

like the rest, writes only too often in the "wall-paper" style, as may be seen
especially in the waltzes, mazurkas, and nocturnes. But at other times he
shows a synthetic faculty rare among lyrists, by which he attains a noble
breadth. Look, for example, at the passage marked "sostenuto" in the
Grande Valse, opus 42, at the surging bass theme of the Polonaise, opus 40,
no. 2, or at the second theme of the allegro of the B-flat minor Sonata,
noting the sustained flight of the second eight measures of the tune. Better
still, examine with some particularity, studying the diversity of the rhythmic
figures employed, the two melodies in Figure XXI, one from the Ballade,
opus 23, and one from the finale of the Sonata, opus 58. Mark the
deliberation, the suspension of interest, of the sequence in measures 5-8 of
the first, the exciting inevitability of the chromatic descending scale near
the end of the second.[28] In such tunes as these, which are frequent in his
later works, Chopin proves himself capable of the veritable "longue
haleine" of the epic melodist.[29]

[PDF]
(a)

[PDF]
(b)

Figure XXI.

A second technical result of the gradual deepening of Chopin's ideal of
expression was a wonderful development of his harmonic sense. In the
works of his prime he is one of the greatest of all masters of expressive
harmony. His originality in modulation and enharmonic transition, his
employment of chromatic progressions cheek by jowl with passages based
on the old diatonic modes of the Polish folk-music, his daring use of
consecutive fifths and other such bugbears of the scholastic, entitle him to a
high place among the pioneers of modern methods. He constantly surprises
us with premonitions of Liszt, Wagner, the French and Russian composers
of to-day, and even Richard Strauss. Thus, for instance, the opening of the
great Polonaise-Fantaisie, with its constantly shifting tonality, its groping
bass, its murky, mysterious minor-ninth and diminished-seventh chords,
seems like a page from "Tristan"; the series of kaleidoscopic modulations,
marked "stretto," near the end of the fourth ballade, recall Tschaïkowsky in

one of his most reckless moods; and we must go to César Franck to find a
parallel for the lapsing chromatic dominant-seventh chords of the twenty-
first mazurka.

[PDF]

Figure XXII.

Nor does Chopin make the mistake, so fatal to some modern writers, of
surfeiting our ears on these complexities until they become apathetic. His
taste is too sensitive for that. Scarcely are we launched on an admiring
study of his harmonic intricacies (which it must be confessed became in his
latest pieces, as Mr. Niecks suggests, almost too fine-spun) before we are
arrested by some fascinating bit of utter simplicity and bell-like clarity.
How grateful, after the ominous harmonics at the beginning of the
Polonaise, opus 26, no. 2, in the lower register, the restless seventh chords
of the principal tune, and the clanging dissonances above the pedal-point on
F at the middle of the first section—how grateful, after all this clamor and
stridency, are the triads and dominant sevenths of the Meno mosso (see
Figure XXII). It is as if some bright band of pilgrims marched, to the clear

peal of trumpets, out of the dust and blood of a battlefield. Exquisitely
beautiful, again, is the celestial purity of those chords, transparent and
colorless as crystal, which are introduced near the beginning of the second
impromptu:—

[PDF]

Figure XXIII.

Other similar passages are the "religioso" section in the sixth nocturne, and
the middle section of the eleventh, both of which, in their ecclesiastical
serenity and severity, take one back to Palestrina. And with all his diversity
of vocabulary, Chopin never confuses his effects. He can pass from the
extreme plainness of the fifth étude to the chromatic complexity of the
sixth, without the least adulteration of either.
Why the works of a master so various yet always so elevated in style,
animated by so high an ideal of what it is worth while to say, and of how it
should be said, should be specially marked out for sentimentalization and
degradation at the hands of performers too dull to divine their distinction, is

one of the mysteries of perverse destiny. It is hard to see what justification
can be found, either in the internal evidence of the works themselves or in
the recorded opinions of their composer, by the misguided enthusiasts who
drag out his lovely melodies into mawkish recitatives, break his chords into
arpeggios, and vulgarize his tempo rubato into license of meter and
confusion of rhythm. There is, to be sure, in much of his music, a subjective
quality, an intimacy of mood, which gives the debauchee of sentiment an
opportunity he does not find in abstract classic art. There are even a few
instances, to give him countenance, of actual affectation, the tiresome
posturing of the "dramatic" tone-poet, as in the pompous ending of the ninth
nocturne and the theatrical opening of the third scherzo, where Chopin
seems to borrow a gesture from his friend Liszt. But the entire object of the
foregoing analysis will have been missed if it has not convinced the reader
of the essential distinction, the superiority to all claptrap eloquence and
feverish emotion, of Chopin's mind. He was not a man to strut and pose; he
was too busy with an artistic ideal, too bent upon expressing a high vein of
feeling in a faultless technical medium.
There is also plenty of documentary evidence to prove his abhorrence of all
sickly sentiment, and of the messy technique it induces. Take, for example,
the matter of the much discussed tempo rubato. Chopin regarded this as a
sensitive adjustment of time values, a delicate elasticity or flexibility of
pace—by no means as a departure from essential metrical accuracy. "The
left hand," he said to his pupil Von Lenz, "is the conductor; it must not
waver or lose ground; do with the right hand what you will and can." "He
required adherence," says another pupil, "to the strictest rhythm, hated all
lingering and dragging, misplaced rubatos and exaggerated ritardandos. 'Je
vous prie de vous asseoir,' he said on such an occasion, with gentle
mockery." His aversion to melodramatic expressiveness, in which the artist
surrenders himself weakly to a momentary excitement, may be inferred
from his remark on Liszt's performance of a Beethoven sonata: "Must one,
however, always speak so declamatorily (si declamatoirement)?" and from
a comment on his own playing by Cramer, a pedant who, without entirely
comprehending him, yet could not but discern the dignity of his art: "I do
not understand him, but he plays beautifully and correctly, he does not give
way to his passion like other young men." Finally, if Chopin had really been
a mere voluptuary and sentimentalist, is it likely that he would have
composed with such concentrated intensity of labor? "He shut himself up in

his room for whole days," writes George Sand, "weeping, walking, breaking
his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing
it as many times, and recommencing the next day with a minute and
desperate perseverance."
No, Chopin may not be a giant like Bach, or Mozart, or Handel, or
Beethoven, but he is a sincere and earnest artist, who feels vividly, and
spares no pains to give his feelings worthy expression, and to attain a
supreme plastic beauty. Above all, he is a man of the most delicate
sensibility, the most discriminating taste, the most exacting ideal of artistic
perfection. In leaving him, it is pleasant to attend less to the sufferings to
which these qualities condemned him as a man, than to the achievements to
which they led him as an artist. This shifting of emphasis is what he would
himself have desired, for his aspirations and standards were æsthetic rather
than ethical; he lived as he could, it was only in composing that his will was
free and efficient; his very individuality takes definite shape only in the
favoring medium of musical imagination and emotion. In that firmament of
music he will continue to shine, a fixed star, not perhaps of the first
magnitude, but giving a wondrously clear, white light, and, as he would
have wished, in peerless solitude.

FOOTNOTES:
[20] Bach's "Well-tempered Clavichord" is an example of a work to which, since
its beauty is largely one of line, the piano cannot do justice. See, for instance,
Prelude IV, in C-sharp minor, in the first book, measures 4-7, inclusive. The
tenor part, of a wonderful nobility, is concealed by the more rapidly moving, and
therefore on the piano more sonorous, soprano. In order fully to bring it to our
consciousness we must sing or otherwise reinforce it.
[21] Schumann reports of Chopin's playing of this étude: "It would be a mistake
to suppose that he brought out every one of the little notes with distinctness; it
was more like a billowing of the A-flat major chord, swelled anew here and there
by means of the pedal; but through the harmonies were heard the sustained tones
of a wondrous melody, and only in the middle of it did a tenor part once come
into greater prominence amid the chords, along with that principal cantilena."
[22] Of course, the amount of dissonance acceptable is not a fixed quantity, but
increases as the perceptive power of the ear develops.
[23] More daringly, because the lower the pitch of a dissonant tone, the greater
the number of its audible harmonics, and hence the greater the degree of its
obscuration of the harmony. Even a consonance, such as the major third, sounds
"muddy" when placed in the lower register. Readers interested in this matter
should consult some convenient handbook of acoustics, such as Broadhouse's
"The Student's Helmholtz," on the subjects of harmonics or partial tones,
sympathetic vibration, etc., and Mr. Arthur Whiting's "Pedal Studies," for a
highly suggestive discussion of color in piano music.
[24] It is, however, interesting to note that, lavish as Chopin's use of the pedal
seems when compared to the general practice of his time, the fondness for the
turbid and cloudy colors produced by commingled dissonances has grown so
rapidly that to-day we prefer sometimes even more pedal than he gives us. In the
Ballade, opus 52, during that brilliant passage which debouches into the simple
chords in B-flat major, modern taste would prefer a continuous pedal through six
measures, instead of through only three, as Chopin has directed. We should also
blur the eleventh Étude more recklessly than he does, and many other instances
will occur to the reader.
[25] Schwärmerisch—visionary, imaginative, dreamy.
[26] Three of his pieces are dedicated to baronesses, nine to countesses, and four
to princesses.
[27] It is noteworthy that most of these compositions bear opus numbers higher
than 40, and belong to the last decade of the composer's life.
[28] Cf. also the subsequent, even more extended, treatment in the sequel.
[29] It may be asked why, possessing this enviable longue haleine, Chopin did
not turn it to better advantage in writing his sonatas and concertos, which are

structurally not satisfactory examples of their types. In answer it may be
suggested (1) that in the concertos he was hampered by the orchestra, his
technique being essentially pianistic; and (2) that his melodies, however broad in
scope, are generally lyrical in character, and hence not adapted to symphonic
treatment. With his characteristic caution, however, he used these most extended
forms but sparingly; and in the more rhapsodic long forms, such as the
polonaises and ballades on a large scale, he is highly successful.

VI
HECTOR BERLIOZ

HECTOR BERLIOZ

VI
HECTOR BERLIOZ

Not many years ago three Americans, coming, late one afternoon, in the
course of a walking tour in northern France, to the little cathedral town of
Beauvais, found its ordinarily quiet air filled with tumult, bustle, and
confusion. The streets, gay with colored bunting and venders' booths, were
thronged with crowds of merrymakers; the hum of insatiable conversation
was everywhere; no rooms were to be had at the hotels, and their dining
rooms were preëmpted by crowds of men in uniform, engaged in an endless
round of toasts and speeches. Beauvais was, in a word, the scene of a
"Grande Fête des Pompiers," or Firemen's Festival. The firemen of all the
surrounding country had assembled there, had taken possession of the town,
and had surrendered themselves to conviviality and joy. It was a spectacle
interesting from many points of view; but the fancy of the American
observers was most of all struck by certain long strips of bunting which
spanned the streets at intervals, bearing in large letters the legend, "Honneur
aux victimes du devoir." This, it seemed to them, was the note in this
motley symphony most perfectly, inimitably, and deliciously French. These
festive firemen, in the midst of their jollifications, did not forget for a
moment that it was their proud privilege to stand before the world, so long
as cognac allowed them to stand at all, as the honored victims of duty. One
hardly knew whether to smile at their ingenuousness, or to thrill in
sympathy with their emotion, which, however theatrical, was perfectly
sincere; on consideration one did both.
Something of the quandary of these American observers of the very Gallic
firemen of Beauvais must perhaps always be experienced by the Anglo-
Saxon who tries to understand the French attitude toward life or art, so
essentially different are the two types of temperament. It is hard for the
stolid, matter-of-fact, insensitive, self-satisfied Anglo-Saxon, singly set
upon his business, indifferent to what the world may think of him, to

comprehend the subtleties and indirections of the Gaul, who conceives
personal conduct as an actor conceives a rôle, spares no pains or labor to do
justice to his part, and feeds on the applause or starves on the indifference
of his audience. To your Englishman or American such an ideal seems
trivial, artificial. His sense of humor, a faculty in which it must be
confessed that the French, for all their wit, are deficient, seizes at once upon
the incongruities that must always exist between an ordinary human life and
a histrionically conceived rôle, and in his amusement he often fails to do
justice to the intelligence, imagination, and courage that may be brought
into play by such a dramatic exercise. Possibly to a higher point of view his
own attitude, which he likes to call "practical," and which less friendly
critics sometimes call stupid, might seem essentially no better than the
playful chivalry of his fellow.
Such thoughts as these are bound to occur to the candid critic of that
singular man, that quintessential Frenchman, Hector Berlioz. On first
acquaintance he seems a creature of postures and pretence, grandiloquent,
artificial, specious. He resorts to any means to make an impression, keeps
his name before the public by journalism, by social eccentricities, by
Byronic love-affairs, by all manner of ingenious indirect advertising, thrives
only in the smile of the public, and writes much less to express an inner
conception of beauty than to dazzle, startle, and stun. He seems to make a
religion of idiosyncrasy, and to shrink from nothing but the natural. He
lives, speaks, writes, composes, only in the interest of his carefully laid plot
to be unprecedented. But then, as one studies him more, one begins to find
admirable traits under this fantastic exterior. However artificial his ideal
may be, he brings a most vivid and many-sided intelligence to its service; in
spite of the opposition to the world in which his excessive individuality
places him, his stock of good-nature and of half-ironical, half-kindly wit is
inexhaustible; and if he does not worship at an orthodox shrine, he can
suffer, and endure, and strive, like a true martyr. And so Berlioz's critic, like
the Americans at Beauvais, finally decides to smile at and at the same time
to admire him.
Hector Berlioz, born December 11, 1803, at La Côte St. André, a small
town in south-eastern France, began his long struggle with the world when,
in his nineteenth year, in Paris, whither his parents had sent him to become
a doctor like his father, he resolved to abandon the study of medicine for

that of music. It was a daring, indeed a rash, resolve, worthy of a born
dissenter like Berlioz; for not only were all external forces clearly in league
to keep him in the beaten path, but his vocation for music was as yet far
from obvious. He played only the flageolet, the flute, and the guitar; his
knowledge of harmony was of the slightest; and he himself tells us in his
autobiography that he had never seen a full score, but that one day when he
found a sheet of paper ruled with twenty-five staves he "realized in a
moment the wondrous instrumental and vocal combinations to which they
might give rise, and cried out, 'What an orchestral work one might write on
that!'" The impulse was there, if the technique was wanting; and when the
young medical student chanced to hear a performance of Gluck's "Iphigénie
en Tauride," his smouldering enthusiasm burst at once into unquenchable
flame, and he resolved at all hazards to become a musician.
He introduced himself to Lesueur, professor of composition at the
Conservatoire, with a cantata in which there were many blunders in
harmony, but a good deal of dramatic power also, and on the strength of it
became his pupil. He studied the scores of Gluck's operas in the
Conservatoire library. With characteristic audacity he proposed to the aged
Andrieux, lecturer on literature in the school of medicine, that he should
write for him an opera libretto, but received a courteous refusal. He did not
hesitate to borrow twelve hundred francs from a friend as a means of
producing at the church of Saint-Roch a mass he had written. And all this
time he was raising obstacles for himself by his enthusiastic impulsiveness
and his utter lack of tact and worldly discretion. The story of his first
meeting with Cherubini, a man of far-reaching influence as the director of
the Conservatoire, will serve as an example. Cherubini, who was a cold and
formal precisian, had made a strict ruling that the male and female readers
at the Conservatoire library should enter by different doors. Berlioz "did not
see the notice," entered by the women's door, and immediately buried
himself in the score of "Alceste." Presently he was recalled to this world by
finding Cherubini standing beside him, "a thin, cadaverous figure with a
pale face, tumbled hair, and fierce, gleaming eyes." Then arose an angry
altercation, ended by the director's ordering the porter to eject the offending
student, and a lively chase among the desks. Berlioz, reaching the door,
only stopped to announce to the enraged Cherubini that he was "soon
coming back to study Gluck again." He did so; but he never conciliated the

ill-will of his powerful enemy, who from that day lost no opportunity to
frustrate his ambitions.
It was indeed his failure to win one of the Conservatoire prizes, which lost
for him the countenance of his parents and plunged him into many
misfortunes. His mother at this time threw him off entirely, in anger for
which there was much justification; his father, more patient, allowed him a
period of probation, after which, if he could not show himself a successful
musician, he was to return to the study of medicine. Thus put upon his
mettle, he rented a closet of a room up five flights of stairs, lived on bread,
raisins, prunes, and dates, and eked out his allowance by taking pupils on
the guitar and the flute, and in solfeggio. In this way he even managed to
pay half of his debt to the friend who had helped him produce his mass. But
alas! this man, as careless and devoid of tact as Berlioz himself, then wrote
to the father the story of the loan, requesting a payment in full. Who can
wonder that Dr. Berlioz, his toleration at last exhausted, upon paying the
balance of the debt cut off entirely the allowance? Not even then, however,
would Berlioz accept defeat, but, getting a post as chorus singer in one of
the small theatres, continued the struggle to attain the prize on which so
much depended. Could he but gain the Prix de Rome, he would be assured
an annuity of three thousand francs for five years, the first two to be spent
in the French Academy at Rome, the third in Germany, and the last two at
home: he would be free to study and compose at leisure, he could show the
world and his parents what was in him.
The subject prescribed for the competition in 1826 was the death of
Orpheus, on which he proceeded to wreak himself with an ardor we can
well imagine. The result was that his bacchanal scene was pronounced
unplayable by the mediocre pianist provided to play the pieces to the jury.
Berlioz was furious—and most of all, characteristically, at the injustice
done his orchestration. "The piano," he cries, "at once reduces all
composers to the same level, and places the clever, profound, ingenious
instrumentalist on the same platform with the ignorant dunce who knows
nothing of this branch of his art. The piano is a guillotine, and severs the
head of noble or of churl with the same impartial indifference." As the time
of the next trial approached, Berlioz with his usual impolitic frankness
made such a nuisance of himself, by criticising in a loud voice, from the pit
of the opera house, the liberties taken with the scores of the great masters,

that he was debarred altogether by the scandalized authorities. In 1828,
missing the first prize by two votes, one of them Cherubini's, he obtained
the second prize, consisting of a laurel wreath, a not very valuable gold
medal, and a free pass to the opera-house. Still invincible, he prepared
himself to storm once more the pedantry of the judges; he did his best, but,
in the words of Boïeldieu, "they found his best too good," and in 1829 the
prize was not awarded at all. It was not until 1830 that, at last learning by
experience, he wrote his cantata of "Sardanapalus" in the dryest and most
conservative style he could compass, leaving out altogether the
conflagration scene, which might have proved unplayable, and at any rate
would have disturbed the tranquillity of the judges. Discretion won the day;
the prize was awarded him, and he was free to depart for Rome, and to
finish his cantata to his own satisfaction, which we may be sure he lost no
time in doing.
In the meantime, as if these struggles were not enough to engage all his
energies, he had been busy playing the first scene of that love-tragedy, or
melodrama, or farce—one hardly knows what to call it—which ended by
joining him in uneasy and brief wedlock with Henriette Smithson, an Irish
actress. It is hard to tell how far the throes of his very Gallic heart were
genuine, how far they were manufactured by his susceptible fancy, his
literary imagination, and his keen sense for dramatic effect. There is ever
about Berlioz a trace of the little boy playing pirate chief; he goes through
life with something of that youthful ecstasy of make-believe; and when he
tells us of his passions for Mdlles. S——, R——, and M——, when he
enumerates his thrills, commemorates his tears, and confides his plans for
capture, flight, suicide, or double murder, we wonder whether he really felt
all this, or is merely convinced, as a poet and journalist, that he ought thus
to have acted.
It was in 1827 that Berlioz first beheld his future wife, who was acting
Shakespeare at the Odéon in a troupe of English players. Of the effect of
her Juliet upon him he writes, "After the third act, hardly breathing, in pain
as if a hand of iron were squeezing at my heart, I said to myself, with the
fullest conviction: 'Ah! I am lost.'" Did he make any attempt to meet the
lady whose beauty and genius had so singularly affected him? Not he; such
a course would have been painfully commonplace, a terrible descent from
poetry to prose. He followed her about with gaunt eyes and dishevelled

mien, so that, believing him mad, she asked her friends for protection. He
lost himself in melancholy revery, he roamed about the streets at night, in
such despair that on one occasion Liszt and Chopin followed him, fearing
he might kill himself. Then he rallied his forces in a great resolve; he would
win his indifferent mistress by his art; he would give a concert of his own
works, and she should hear it. "I will show her," he cried, forgetting in his
enthusiasm that she had no ear for music, "that I too am an artist." After
heroic labors and economies (for it was at this time that he was supporting
himself by singing in the theatre chorus, and he had to work sixteen hours a
day copying instrumental parts), after endless struggles with his conductor,
who did not understand the music, and with Cherubini, who refused him the
only available concert hall, he succeeded in bringing off the concert, only to
find that Miss Smithson did not hear of it at all. Shortly afterward she left
France for some years.
Disconsolate, Berlioz turned for comfort to a certain Mademoiselle Mooke,
to whom he became engaged in 1830, soon after winning the Prix de Rome.
This affair, however, went little more smoothly than the other, for hardly
had he arrived in Italy before he received a letter from Madame Mooke,
informing him that her daughter had married M. Pleyel. His rôle was thus
suddenly changed to that of the abandoned lover, thirsting for revenge; and
it must be conceded that he entered upon it with his usual artistic
enthusiasm. "Two tears of rage started from my eyes, and my mind was
made up on the spot. I meant to fly to Paris, where I had two guilty women
and one innocent man"—one sees that magnanimity was a part of the rôle
—"to kill without mercy. As for killing myself afterwards, you can well
believe that that was indispensable." Behold him, then, in Florence,
supplying himself with two double-barrelled pistols, "two vials of
refreshment, such as laudanum and strychnine," and, as a disguise, the
entire costume of a lady's-maid—no less—dress, bonnet, green veil, and all.
Behold him hesitating but one moment, just long enough to write upon the
unfinished score of the Ball Scene in his "Symphonie Fantastique"
directions as to how, if the work is played "in his absence," the flute part
may be doubled with the clarinets and horns. Behold him, after this lucid
interval, travelling to Genoa, where he either attempts suicide by drowning
or falls into the water and is fished out by bystanders—his account is
somewhat ambiguous—and where he buys a second lady's-maid's costume,
having absent-mindedly left the first one in the coach. And then, with his

arrival at Nice, he feels that he has done his duty by the part of the wronged
lover, he feels that it would be a pity to deprive the world of his still
unwritten compositions; youth pleads the charm of life, the beauty of the
Italian landscape, and prudence suggests a brief note to the director of the
Academy at Rome, providing for a possible return to the fold. "I stop in
Nice a whole month, wandering through the orange groves, diving in the
sea, sleeping on the mountain heaths.... I live wholly alone, and write the
overture to 'King Lear.' I sing, I believe in God. Convalescence has set in."
"It is thus," he ingenuously concludes his account of this episode, "that I
passed in Nice the twenty happiest days of my life."
On returning to Paris, in 1832, and finding Miss Smithson again playing
there, Berlioz tried again, and this time with success, the device of giving a
concert of his own works. His "Symphonie Fantastique" and its sequel
"Lelio," a monodrama with recitation, were given entire. Whatever might
be her ignorance of music, Miss Smithson could hardly fail to divine the
reference to herself of a typical passage in the text of "Lelio": "O that I
could find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia, that my heart calls to. That I could
drink in the intoxication of that mingled joy and sadness that only true love
knows! Could I but rest in her arms one autumn evening, rocked by the
north wind on some wild heath, and sleep my last, sad sleep!" This
somewhat florid wooing was effective; on the day after the concert the
oddly assorted pair met for the first time, and in the following summer were
married. In taking this daring step Berlioz seems for once to have manfully
forgotten his audience and his dramatic unities, and to have acted quite
simply and from the heart. His Ophelia was no longer a favorite of the
public; she was now neglected and deeply in debt; she had had the
misfortune to break her leg in stepping from her carriage, an accident which
threatened to end her career on the stage; her parents, as well as his own,
were bitterly opposed to the match. In spite of all, Berlioz married her, and
made no literary material out of the event except to weave about it one of
his incisive antitheses: "On the day of our wedding she had nothing but
debts; I, for my part, had three hundred francs ... and had quarrelled again
with my parents. But she was mine, I bade defiance to everything." It is
much to his credit, too, that when his wife was ill, he quite simply set aside
a symphony at which he was working, and wrote feuilletons in order to
make more money for her.

But the one thing to which Berlioz could never effectually bid defiance was
the radical inconstancy of his own temperament. Once captured and
domesticated, his Ophelia began to prove dull; the part of husband gave
little play to his romantic capacities; and when he took less and less pains to
disguise his boredom, she became jealous even to shrewishness. Presently
he sought distraction in the least creditable of all his amours. If the
Smithson affair had been drama, or at the least melodrama, and the Mooke
episode harmless comedy, the liaison with Mademoiselle Recio, aside from
its tragic results, was broad farce. This lady was a second-rate vocalist with
an insatiable ambition to sing Berlioz's works, in order to defeat which he
had often to resort to ignominious flight, covered by petty prevarication.
His devotion to her cannot have resulted in much happiness, and it entirely
alienated him from his wife, from whom he separated about 1840.
Nevertheless, when she died in 1854, he promptly married this
Mademoiselle Recio, with whom he lived in uneasy partnership for eight
years.
One of the strangest instances of his morbid appetite for effect at any cost,
of the habit of posturing and parading his emotions which ruled him even in
matters which should be most private and sacred, is the passage in the
autobiography in which he describes, with a Poe-like zest for revolting
detail, the reburial of his first wife beside the second in the cemetery of
Mont-Martre. The incredible passage need not be quoted in detail, but ends
with this sentence, in which the egotism of the sentimentalist stands as
naked as it is unashamed: "The two departed ones rest here in peace [sic] to
this hour, awaiting the time when I shall bring my own portion of rottenness
to that charnel-house." This is an extreme instance of the posturing, the
attitudinizing, the grandiloquence and rhetoric, to which Berlioz is always
tempted more or less in his accounts of his personal doings and feelings. He
does not wilfully misrepresent, but he balks at the grayness of mere fact; he
is not exactly a liar, but his romantic imagination simply cannot envisage
the commonplace; involuntarily he suppresses here, distorts or exaggerates
there, in order that his story may have the spectacular vividness, the
dramatic éclat, which alone can satisfy him.
On the other hand, whenever, treating of general topics, as he does in the
"Soirées d'Orchestre," the "A Travers Chants," and the "Grotesques de la
Musique," he can avoid the pitfall of the confidential, he is one of the most

charming of writers. Here his instinct for the salient leads him to put
everything in the most vivid, captivating way, but without perversion; one
no longer has the uncomfortable sense of being hoaxed, and can give
oneself up to the enjoyment of his rich play of metaphor and allusion, his
subtle irony, his unfailing good-nature, and his nervous, incisive style. Here,
in short, his extraordinary intellectual vivacity is revealed at its best,
undegraded by being made to serve those posings which, if not precisely
dishonest, are still not quite ingenuous. His description, for example, of the
machinations of the claqueurs or hired applauders at the opera house,
known in Parisian slang as "Romans," in the seventh and eighth evenings of
the "Soirées d'Orchestre,"[30] deserves a niche of its own in the literature of
satire. After writing at some length "de viris illustribus urbis Romae," he
goes on to enumerate the amateurs who swell the ranks of the claque, as
follows:—
"They are: simple friends, who admire in good faith all that is to be done on
the stage before the lamps are lighted; relations, those claqueurs given by
nature; editors, ferocious claqueurs; and especially lovers and husbands.
That is why women, besides the host of other advantages they have over
men, have still one more chance of success than they. For a woman can
hardly applaud her husband or lover to any purpose in a theatre or concert
room; besides, she always has something else to do; while the husband or
lover, provided he has the least natural capacity or some elementary notions
of the art, can often bring about a success of renewal at the theatre....
Husbands are better than lovers for this sort of operation. The latter usually
stand in fear of ridicule; they also fear in petto that a too brilliant success
may make too many rivals; they no longer have any pecuniary interest in
the triumphs of their mistresses. But the husband, who holds the purse-
strings, who knows what can be done by a well-thrown bouquet, a well
taken-up salvo, a well-communicated emotion, a well-carried recall, he
alone dares to turn to account what faculties he has. He has the gift of
ventriloquism and of ubiquity. He applauds for an instant from the
amphitheatre, crying out: Brava! in a tenor voice, in chest tones; thence he
flies to the lobby of the first boxes, and sticking his head through the
opening cut in the door, he throws out an Admirable! in a voice of basso
profundo while passing by, and then bounds breathless up to the third tier,
from whence he makes the house resound with exclamations: 'Delicious!
ravishing! Heavens! what talent! it is too much!' in a soprano voice, in

shrill feminine tones stifled with emotion. There is a model husband for
you, and a hard-working and intelligent father of a family."
The impression of paradox so markedly given by Berlioz's prose writings,
in which such insight, wit, and good humor as we have here coexist with
the tendency to pose revealed in his accounts of his love affairs, is
intensified by his musical compositions. In them also he seems actuated by
a desire, not to communicate his real feelings in their simplicity, but to
project them into a dramatic conception, and to present that with all the
pomp and circumstance of which he is capable. Not truth to inner
experience, but vividness of external effect, is his ideal. Yet to the service of
this ideal he brings admirable intellectual qualities: ingenuity,
resourcefulness, imagination, an originality that scorns all platitude, and, at
least in the matter of instrumentation, a matchless technical skill. The
brilliant performance of rather specious undertakings—that is Berlioz's
artistic cue.
This combination of trivial ends with highly clever means may be
illustrated by the "Symphonie Fantastique," a work which, though written
early in his career, remains one of his most characteristic productions. How
different, to begin with, are the inspirations which a romanticist and a realist
derive from the passion of love! Schumann, married to Clara Wieck after
years of waiting, utters his joy in a series of songs, the most lyrical, the
most intimate, that song literature has to show. Chopin, in an amorous
revery, writes in the larghetto of the F-minor Concerto one of the quietest,
simplest, most devout of all his pieces. Berlioz, on the contrary, is goaded
by the thought of his Ophelia to conceive "a young musician of unhealthily
sensitive nature," who "has poisoned himself with opium in a paroxysm of
love-sick despair," and to carry this hero through a very detailed drama in
five acts.[31] His impulse is, in short, realistic rather than lyrical, and the art
in which he embodies it is descriptive and narrative rather than emotionally
expressive.
The most important technical result of this realistic attitude is that Berlioz,
as we have already noted, treats his melodies, not as materials for a purely
musical development, but as symbols of characters or other dramatic
motives, thereby anticipating the leit-motif idea which later became so
prominent in the work of Wagner and Liszt. The central motive in the

"Symphonie Fantastique" is the melody known as "l'idée fixe," symbolizing
the beloved, roughly transcribed for the piano in Figure XXIV.

[PDF]

Figure XXIV.

This melody, though it appears in each of the five movements, undergoes
but little evolution; it is complete in the first place, and in its later phases is
often modified hardly at all, or if so chiefly for dramatic reasons. In the Ball
Scene two phrases of it are sounded pianissimo, by the clarinet, just after a
sounding climax of the full orchestra,[32] to indicate the hero's remembrance

of the beloved in the midst of the festivities. In the third movement, "In the
Country," it is given to the oboe and flute (full score, p. 66), and is treated
somewhat more ingeniously, its fifth phrase being interrupted by a rough
tumult in all the strings. In "The Procession to the Stake" it figures purely as
a theatrical property in a highly characteristic and amusing passage. The
hero has finished his long march to the place of execution; as he puts his
head on the block silence descends upon the scene, and then a single
clarinet plays four measures of the theme—"Ah! he thinks of her once
more"—but the thought is cut short by a blow of the axe (fortissimo chord,
tutti) and the death-rattle (tremolando on three kettle-drums) ends the
movement and his life together. Only in the last movement, the frenetic
"Witches' Sabbath," is the theme really varied. Here, at p. 102, it appears as
in Figure XXV, turned by change of rhythm and the addition of ornament
into a grotesque, undignified dance tune.

[PDF]

Figure XXV.

This is certainly clever, but the incentive, we must remember, is still
dramatic rather than musical—it is intended to show the loved one degraded
to the horrid form of a witch.
There are many other subordinate features of the technique in which may be
discerned the same preoccupation with spectacular effect rather than with

musical beauty. The mere noise resorted to by the composer in tuning his
drums in the third movement, in order to imitate thunder, has already been
mentioned;[33] there is a deal of even more chaotic pandemonium in the last
two movements. When the harmonies are in themselves consonant, they are
sometimes combined so incongruously as to obliterate all sense of tonality
and to generate merely a feeling of haste and confusion, as at page 94 in the
score, where the chords of D-flat-major and G-minor tread on one another's
heels; so unprecedented was this association of remote harmonies that
Berlioz thought it necessary to point out in a foot-note that it was no clerical
error, and to beg the violins and violas not to "correct" their parts. Even the
scholastic and highly formal device of the fugato he treats with the sang
froid of the habitual impressionist in that weird section of the "Witches'
Sabbath" in which he makes a sort of devil's fugue, lost in limbo, on the
rhythm of the witches' round dance (score, p. 132).
Yet how remarkable is the skill with which he works out his so perverse
ideal! His melodies, however they may lack lyrical quality, are always of
definite contour and arresting individuality, and frequently of an odd half-
insidious, half-challenging appeal. Though Mr. Hadow's charge that "time
after time he ruins his cause by subordinating beauty to emphasis, and is so
anxious to impress that he forgets how to charm" is undoubtedly just, yet
equally true is his further remark that "his sense of rhythm was, at the time
when he lived, without parallel in the history of music." Thanks to this
sense of rhythm he entirely avoided those wall-paper patterns which make
much of the music of romanticism so formally monotonous, and he attained
often a splendidly complex, though generally slightly mechanical,
organization of phrases. The idée fixe is a good example of this prosodic
elasticity. It consists of an eight-measure phrase balanced by one of seven
measures, four phrases of four measures each in climactic sequence, and a
codetta made up of a pair of two-measure phrases and a final phrase of five
measures; and with all this variety, the unity of the tune as a whole is
unimpeachable. The melody of the song "La Captive" (see Figure XXVI) is
most fascinating in its irregular regularity, in the perfect naturalness with
which three-measure and two-measure groups alternate and intertwine. In
fact, Berlioz is a master of what in poetry we call versification.

[PDF]

Figure XXVI.

His skill in orchestration is notorious. "Berlioz claims attention first and
foremost," says one critic, "as a master of orchestration, perhaps the most
ingenious and versatile among all modern composers";[34] and another
ranks him with Beethoven, Wagner, and Dvořák as "one of the four greatest
masters of instrumentation the world has ever seen."[35] Unfortunately even
in this department he could not entirely resist that craving for
sensationalism which was the characteristic vice of his temperament; so that
his name has become associated in many minds with merely noisy or
eccentric effects that are far from representing him at his best. He loved to
pile Pelion upon Ossa, scored his Requiem for sixteen trombones, sixteen
trumpets, five ophicleides, twelve horns, eight pairs of kettle-drums, two
bass drums, and a gong, in addition to the usual resources, and told with
pride of its having frightened one of the listeners into a fit. He was
frequently rallied for what Mr. Nordau would call his "megalomania."

"Prince Metternich," he tells us in his memoirs, "said to me one day: 'Are
you not the man, monsieur, who composes music for five hundred
performers?' To which I replied: 'Not always, monseigneur; I sometimes
write for four hundred and fifty.'"
Love of the bizarre and the unusual led him often to employ rare
instruments, or to use the ordinary ones in freakish ways. The harp, the
English horn, and the cornet figure frequently in his scores, and he likes to
direct that the horns be put in bags, that the cymbal be suspended and struck
with a stick, that the drums be played with sticks covered with sponge. In
one instance he ventures a duet between a piccolo and a bass trombone. He
describes, in a letter from Germany, a trick by which a trombone player
sounds four tones at once, and adds in all seriousness: "Acousticians ought
to explain this new phenomenon in the resonance of sonorous tubes; we
musicians ought to study it thoroughly and turn it to account when the
opportunity presents itself." He was one of the earliest and most
indefatigable champions of the valve horns and trumpets made by Sax of
Paris, and also, by a less happy inspiration, made propaganda for the cornet
à pistons, which is in comparison with its noble cousin, the trumpet, a most
vulgar instrument. He was a daring, but not always a cautious, innovator,
frequently seeming to set a higher value upon novelty than upon inherent
worth.

[PDF]

[PDF]

Figure XXVII.

His real claim to distinction as a master of the orchestra, however, rests not
upon his extravagances, but upon his wonderfully delicate, unerring instinct
for the capacities of the common instruments for tone color, both alone and
in combination. It has been well said of him that he "thought orchestrally,"
that with him "the tone color was an essential part of the original design."
The themes of the "Dance of Sprites" and the "Dance of Sylphs," in the
"Damnation of Faust" (see Figure XXVII), are not merely "tunes," in the
generic sense of the word, adaptable to any medium; the first is distinctively
a piccolo tune, the second a violin melody. This instinctive sense of what
each member of the orchestral family can best do gives Berlioz's sound-
mass an unrivalled clarity, felicity, and distinction; it enables him to solve
every problem that arises in a quite unconventional way, proceeding,
without regard to tradition, to the precise timbre he has imagined, with the
economy and certainty of a master. His scores are apt to look rather empty,
because he allows so many instruments to remain silent; but they do not
sound empty, for each tone is placed where it will "tell" to the utmost, yet
without blurring any other. The two dances just mentioned are models of
this kind of discretion, as also is the Ball Scene in the "Symphonie
Fantastique," in which the variety of the combinations obtained from a few
instruments is surprising. First the violins alone play the tune, accompanied
by the other strings (page 37 in the full score); then (page 39) the
accompaniment is shared between the strings on the first beat of the
measure, two harps on the second beat, and the wood wind on the third;
next (page 42) second violins, violas, and 'cellos unite on the melody, the
wood wind and a cornet emphasize the accent, the first violin embroiders a
delicate turn at the end of each measure, and the basses pluck insistent
eighth-notes; and finally all the wood wind and the harps take up the tune
(at page 47) to an accompaniment of horns and harps. The marvel of it is
that all these tonal schemes are of such a perfect elasticity, such a brilliant
lightness; this is musical champagne, that makes most other scores seem
vapid and heavy, like wine too long uncorked.
The same intellectual ingenuity, curiously dissociated from emotional
earnestness, which made Berlioz so clever a melodist and so inimitable a
master of orchestral effects, enabled him also to achieve those innovations
in the general scheme and intention of instrumental music on which his
historical importance mainly depends. By discerning that, although the
principle of coherence in all classical and lyrico-romantic music was the

interplay and logical evolution of melodies or themes, that is, of purely
musical elements, yet a composition might be unified rather by the interplay
of characters and events, or in other words of dramatic motives, of which
the music was merely representative, he opened the way for Liszt and the
modern program composers. He thus became the pioneer of that realistic
movement which in our own day has assumed such prominence, providing,
as early as 1830, in the "Symphonie Fantastique," which is essentially a
realistic work, with program and leading motives, the prototype of many
famous modern masterpieces.
The most striking, and to us nowadays the most familiar, of all applications
of this scheme of dramatic form is of course that of Wagner in his music-
dramas. So far as Wagner's art was conscious it was planned entirely from
the dramatic point of view. In the matter of tune he laid stress on "emotive
expression," to borrow once more M. Goblot's term, rather than on
symmetry of form, discarding regular phrase-balance and definite metre in
favor of a loosely knit recitative, quickly responsive to all changes of mood,
which he called "infinite melody." So far as definite musical figures
appeared at all, they were conceived, not as having any intrinsic value, but
as standing for extra-musical ideas: that is, they were not "subjects" or
"themes," they were "leading-motives." The larger forms underwent a
similar modification; the Italian aria, consisting of a melody, a second
contrasting melody, and a repetition of the first, was discarded, in spite of
its architectonic beauty, as being undramatic, since action never repeats
itself, but ceaselessly changes. Even in purely instrumental pieces the
principle of coherence became the imitation of a natural series of events or
ideas. One looks in vain, in the "Funeral March" in "Götterdämmerung," for
the kind of thematic development which makes so splendidly organic the
"Funeral March" of Beethoven's "Eroica Symphony"; the unity of Wagner's
piece depends on its being the narration of the events in the life of a single
hero, Siegfried. The Prelude to "Lohengrin," though incidentally a
masterpiece of purely musical structure, was conceived as a tone-picture of
the descent from heaven, and the return thither, of an angel host bearing the
Holy Grail. A more extreme case is the Prelude to the "Rheingold," in
which there is no musical structure at all, the whole piece being written
upon one unchanging harmony; the motive there is entirely pictorial.
Finally, the descriptive and imitative elements in expression are prominent

in such characteristic Wagnerian passages as the fire-music and the
"Waldweben."
Wagner has thus become the standard instance of a musician dominated by
a dramatic ideal, and has proved conclusively the powers of music
associated with action. But this "music associated with action," it must be
noted, is not, strictly speaking, any longer music at all, but a new art, to
which its creator gave the name of music-drama: it appeals not only to the
ear through sounds, but to the eye through scenery and actors, and to the
understanding through language. To apply the principles which naturally
dominate so composite an art as this to the writing of pure instrumental
music is a daring and a questionable innovation, which we owe to Berlioz
and Liszt. It is one thing to compose in this style a work to be played, sung,
and acted in an opera-house, and quite another to cut from the same stuff a
symphony to be performed by staid musicians in conventional dress in the
concert-room. That Wagner himself was well aware of the difference is
shown by a passage in his essay on Liszt's Symphonic Poems, striking
enough to be quoted at some length.
"I pardon everybody," says the great music-dramatist, "who has doubted the
benefit of a new art-form for instrumental music, for I must own to having
so fully shared that doubt as to join those who saw in our program-music a
most unedifying spectacle—whereby I felt the drollness of my situation, as
I myself was classed among just the program-musicians, and cast into one
pot with them. Whilst listening to the best of this sort ... it had always
happened that I so completely lost the musical thread that by no manner of
exertion could I re-find and knit it up again. This occurred to me quite
recently with the love-scene, so entrancing in its principal motives, of our
friend Berlioz's 'Romeo and Juliet Symphony'; the great fascination which
had come over me during the development of the chief motive was
dispelled in the further course of the movement, and sobered down to an
undeniable malaise; I discovered at once that, while I had lost the musical
thread (i.e. the logical and lucid play of definite motives), I now had to hold
on to scenic motives not present before my eye, nor even so much as
indicated in the program.... The musician looks quite away from the
incidents of ordinary life, entirely upheaves its details and its accidents, and
sublimates whatever lies within it to its quintessence of emotional content
—to which alone can music give a voice, and music only. A true musical

poet, therefore, would have presented Berlioz with this scene in a
thoroughly compact ideal form."
Wagner here puts his finger on the chief points of weakness in Berlioz's
ingenious scheme. The lack of what he calls the musical thread, and defines
most concisely as "the logical and lucid play of definite motives," is indeed
a most serious defect, as we have already seen in the case of the
"Symphonie Fantastique." Because of it, the composer's best effects seem
fragmentary and uncoördinated; however we enjoy his brilliant, affecting,
or powerful moments, we miss the sense of inexorable progress, of
deliberate accumulation of force, of efflorescence of melodic germs as slow
and as steady as a process of nature, which is so overwhelming in the music
of Bach and Beethoven. His music is almost always interesting rather than
beautiful; he lets our attention dissipate itself upon picturesque details,
instead of seizing and concentrating it by the grandeur of his design, the
symmetry of his forms, the logic of their evolution. His structures,
considered as wholes, however massive and imposing, are fundamentally
incoherent; his rhythms, for all their ingenuity, are over-whimsical, restless;
his harmony is often awkward, strained, non-sequacious. He cares less for
purity than for pungency of style, and seems to be entirely unconscious of
the large alloy of incongruity and anticlimax that adulterates his finest
conceptions.
These shortcomings were by no means accidental; their cause lay deep in
his peculiar temperament. "Berlioz's disposition," says one of his critics
with penetration,[36] "was instinctively somewhat inclined to the grotesque;
he had not that inborn reverence for the proprieties of nature which is the
secret of the highest art achievement. He set his individuality ... above
immutable law." Indeed, Berlioz had more than the usual share of the
romanticist's indifference to abstract beauty in art, and of the romanticist's
impatience of the discipline which alone gives command of it. When he was
a boy he showed on every occasion his "unquestioning intolerance of
prescriptive right"; he dismissed Lesueur's harmony as "antediluvian," and
Reicha's counterpoint as "barbarous." When he was a man he frankly
expressed his boredom at the most perfect of musical forms: "A theme
without a fugue," he writes in one of his letters, "is rare good luck"; in
another he exclaims, "May God preserve you from fugues with four themes
on a choral!"; and his attitude towards Bach, the touchstone of all musical

taste, is in strange contrast with that of Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin,
and indeed almost all of his great contemporaries. "When I was in St.
Petersburg," he tells us, "they played me a triple concerto of Bach's.... I do
not think they intended to annoy me." In the light of such a confession we
are not surprised to find him, in the famous passage in the autobiography
wherein he sets forth his pretensions as a composer, making no claim to the
highest qualities, to grandeur, restraint, poise, proportion, beauty, but
contenting himself with the words, "The dominant qualities of my music are
passionate expression, internal fire, rhythmic animation, and unexpected
changes."
On the other hand, if he was in some degree forced into the dramatic vein
by deficiencies on the musical side, he had also some strong positive
qualifications for the work he undertook. A degree of literary cultivation
rare among musicians gave him a large choice of motives to draw upon.
The symphony, "Romeo and Juliet," the overture, "King Lear," the opera,
"Beatrice and Benedict," the "Tempest" fantasia in "Lelio," and some minor
pieces, all owe their inspiration to Shakespeare; Byron is drawn upon for
the "Corsair" overture and the symphony, "Harold in Italy," and Scott for
the overtures, "Waverley" and "Rob Roy"; Goethe for "The Damnation of
Faust"; the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini for the overture which bears
his name, and Virgil's "Æneid" for the opera, "The Trojans at Carthage." It
is true that both in his choice and his utilization of texts he was often
characteristically perverse. He considered Thomas Moore one of the great
pathetic poets of the world; he garbled "Romeo and Juliet"; he placed Faust
in Hungary in order to introduce the Rakoczy March; he made the demons
in "Faust" sing in Swedenborg's infernal language—"Irimiru Karabrao!
Has! Has! Tradioun Marexil firtrudinxé burrudixé" ...; in his own programs
he perpetrated, with entire gravity, the most mirth-provoking medleys of the
sublime and the ridiculous. Yet in spite of his lack of humor, and even at
times of ordinary common sense, he brought to the planning and execution
of his fantastic conceptions an extraordinary cleverness.
Berlioz is, however, even as a dramatist, open to severe criticism, the nature
of which is again suggested by Wagner. In pointing out that in the absence
of a purely musical thread one has to hold on to "scenic motives not present
to the eye, nor even so much as indicated in the program," Wagner touches
upon one of the ineradicable defects of all program-music, its ambiguity.

Doubtless it is quite possible, and mildly amusing, to follow, on hearing the
"Symphonie Fantastique," the general outlines of the story, but did Berlioz
suppose that any one would be able to recognize in his music, otherwise
often unintelligible, the details of the "plot"? If so, he was certainly
overrating the descriptive powers of sound, and placing too much
dependence on the definiteness of a medium which is by nature vague and
indeterminate. He was himself conscious of the difficulty; but with his usual
arrogance he attributed it, not to any shortcoming in his own art, but to his
audience's lack of imagination. To the sixth division of the score of "Romeo
and Juliet" he appends this foot-note: "The public has no imagination;
pieces which address themselves solely to the imagination have
consequently no public. The following instrumental scene is in this
predicament, and I think it should be suppressed except when the symphony
is to be heard by an audience of the élite, to whom the fifth act of
Shakespeare's tragedy, with Garrick's dénoûement, is extremely familiar,
and whose poetic sentiment is very elevated." The thought that possibly a
piece of music should not address itself solely to the pictorial imagination
does not seem to have occurred to him.
When Berlioz's music does not fail of its effect through being ambiguous, it
is very apt to lose itself in triviality; indeed, this, as we have already seen,
[37]
is one of the imminent dangers besetting all program-music. Why is it
that we are rather more inclined to smile than to shudder at the piled-up
horrors of the "Witches' Sabbath"? Why does the elaborate machinery
which Berlioz assembles in order to stun us leave us so often rather amused
or bored? Why is it that we enjoy more than we resent that parody of his
style perpetrated by Arnal, in which we are asked "to understand from the
second repetition of the first allegro how my hero ties his cravat"? Is it not
that there is involved in the programmistic method a subtle insult to our
intelligence, that we instinctively rebel against the use of musical tones, by
nature so uniquely expressive of inner verities, for the mere delineation of
external objects? Wagner seems to think so when, in the last part of his
criticism, he says that the musician "looks quite away from the incidents of
ordinary life ... and sublimates whatever lies within it to its quintessence of
emotional-content." Bourget certainly thinks so when he commands the
artist, "Sois belle et tais-toi."

This highest simplicity of the great creative artist, who ignores the accidents
and the externals of life, who "looks into his heart and writes," was just
what Berlioz, with all his mobile intelligence, all his ingenuity, all his
earnest aspiration, could never achieve. There was in him a perversity of
temper, a disharmony between the emotional and the intellectual nature, a
lack of the sense of proportion or the sense of humor, which made it
impossible. The natural seemed to him jejune; the simple, vulgar; the
impulsive, crude. To be elaborate, theatrical, calculated, was a necessity of
his highly artificial imagination. Just as in his love affairs he was never
following an unsophisticated passion, but forever masquerading as an ideal
hero, and as in his essays and autobiography he never chronicled, but
always dramatized, so in his compositions he could not bring himself to
express spontaneous intuitions in naïve forms, but built up elaborate
programs with all the ingenuity of his tireless and resourceful intelligence.
All life appeared to him as a magnificent glittering spectacle in which he
was playing a leading rôle; and whether he loved or hated, whether he
suffered or enjoyed, whether he succeeded or failed, he hugged close to his
Gallic heart the consciousness that he was acting well, and that he had an
audience. Like the firemen of Beauvais, he had, too, the ineffable
satisfaction of placarding the heavens, in his autobiography, with the
inspiring legend, "Honneur aux victimes du devoir."
The boast in his case, nevertheless, was far from an empty one; not the least
strange element in his strangely mixed character was the real heroism, the
splendid faith, with which he clung to an artistic ideal which was received
with contempt or indifference on every side. In his devotion to an unpopular
cause, through a lifetime of difficulties, he was a true martyr. His career,
after his return from Rome to Paris in 1832, was one long uphill fight, not
only for recognition, but for a bare livelihood. His accounts of his hated
labors as a feuilletonist, up to the time when, by a generous gift from
Paganini, he was freed from such servitude, are among the sincerest and
most pathetic pages in his writings. He never won the appreciation from his
countrymen that his vain, sensitive, and thoroughly Parisian nature most
craved. Realizing, about 1840, that a man is never a prophet in his own
country, he reluctantly sought abroad the support denied him at home, and
in a series of tours in Germany, Austria, Russia, and England met with a
large measure of success. Yet his first care, after each foreign triumph, was
to know "what they thought of it in Paris"—and alas! they never thought

about it at all. Tardily, in 1856, already over fifty years old, he obtained a
fauteuil in the Academy, and was appointed Librarian of the Conservatoire.
But the cheering effect of this recognition was clouded by the fiasco, in
1863, of the opera on which he had been working for years, "Les Troyens à
Carthage." This blow broke his heart. He wrote no more, and after six years
of loneliness and ill-health, died on March 8, 1869. As so often happens, his
funeral orations contained the enthusiastic praises his living ears had craved
in vain, and he was shortly pronounced the greatest of French composers.
The faith in himself and his art, which kept him steadfast through all his
discouragements and temptations, which enabled him to persist in a path of
almost complete solitude, which armed him with the sword of conviction
and the shield of a good conscience, was, as Mr. Apthorp says, "the one
pure, sterling element in a character in which all else was more or less
distorted." He was a man of overweening vanity and egotism, often blind to
the needs of those nearest him; an uncertain friend, a spiteful enemy, an
intolerable husband; he could descend to petty deceits and unworthy
animosities, and was willing to sacrifice the most sacred relations on the
altar of his dramatic sense. And yet he could say with truth, "The love of
money has never allied itself in a single instance with my love of art; I have
always been ready to make all sorts of sacrifices to go in search of the
beautiful, and insure myself against contact with those paltry platitudes
which are crowned by popularity." He had also many minor virtues which,
if not like this precisely heroic, are nevertheless charming. He was a
sprightly narrator, a witty and keen critic where his prejudices were not
involved, and a taster of life in whom discrimination did not embitter good
nature.
Concerning his achievement as a musician there will always be extreme
oppositions of opinion, so uncompromising was his theory of art, and so
relentless his execution of it. The ultimate problem of whether a realism so
thoroughgoing as his is justified by the nature of music will perhaps always
remain an open one. But the most recalcitrant critic must admit the
greatness of his incidental services to the art which he practised with such
headlong perversity. He was a good iconoclast. He helped to break the
bonds of a narrow conservatism which was in danger of confining all music
to the forms of the symphony and the sonata, and to the type of expression
perfected by the classicists. By his daring imagination he abashed pedantry

and opened up vistas of new possibilities. And he was, at least in one
department, that of orchestration, a triumphant innovator. By using
instruments, not in traditional, hackneyed ways, but with an intuition of
their latent possibilities, he added permanently to the resources of all
composers and to the sensitiveness of all listeners. Whether, therefore, the
tendency of all music toward the realistic, which is so prominent to-day,
and in relation to which he stands as one of the greatest of pioneers, shall
continue indefinitely, or shall give place to some new movement in another
direction, as certain signs seem to indicate—in any event Berlioz's place as
a contributor to the unresting progress of art is secure.

FOOTNOTES:
[30] See "Selections from Berlioz's Writings," translated by W. F. Apthorp, New
York, 1879, pp. 228-261.
[31] See the summary of the program of the "Symphonie Fantastique" at p. 24.
[32] Full score, Breitkopf and Härtel edition, p. 54.
[33] See Introduction, p. 43.
[34] E. Dickinson, "The Study of the History of Music," p. 264.
[35] W. H. Hadow, "Studies in Modern Music," p. 141.
[36] Francis Hueffer, "Half a Century of Music in England," pp. 231-232.
[37] Introduction, p. 53.

VII
FRANZ LISZT

FRANZ LISZT

VII
FRANZ LISZT

A flood of light is thrown upon the opposing aspects of Franz Liszt's
contradictory character by a story told of a certain occasion on which "The
Master," as he loved to be called, sat for his portrait to the painter Schaffer.
One of those key-stories it is, dear to biographers, which condense in single
acts or speeches entire facets of personality. In Paris, in his youth, Liszt
went to Schaffer to have his portrait painted. Instinctively he assumed one
of those theatrical poses he was in the habit of taking when, at the end of
one of his already famous recitals, he stood upon the stage receiving the
plaudits of his audience. We can readily imagine it: the head thrown back,
the eyes flashing fire, the right hand, perhaps, thrust between the second
and third buttons of the coat, the left resting on some conveniently
composed piece of furniture. But when Schaffer indicated that this
histrionism did not impress him, Liszt, greatly embarrassed, cried out
impulsively, "Forgive, dear master, but you do not know how it spoils one
to have been an infant prodigy." Here are the two opposing sides of this
curious character for once set in a clear antithesis: on the one hand, the
affectation, the strut and posture, the cheap theatricality, of the prodigy
playing to his audience; on the other, the frankness, the magnanimity, the
humility even, of the true artist. Liszt's whole career is one long exhibition
of these two attitudes in constant alternation; he is a mingling in one person
of the charlatan and the idealist.
Born in Raiding, a small town in Hungary, October 22, 1811, an only child
of Adam Liszt, a Hungarian, and Anna Lager, a German, Franz Liszt
showed at once such extraordinary talent for music that in his tenth year his
parents resolved to educate him in Vienna as a professional musician. After
a year and a half in the Austrian capital, where the brilliancy of his piano
playing and the cleverness of his improvisations attracted much attention,
and where he studied with Czerny and Salieri, he was taken by his parents

to Paris. Here, in the autumn of 1823, only twelve years old, he took his
first plunge into the atmosphere of adulation which was to become to him in
later years almost a necessary of life. It was now that he became the petted
darling of the fashionable salons of the Boulevard St. Germain, and made
the great ladies of Parisian society forget for a time their lap-dogs and their
love-intrigues in order to caress this fascinating composite of the child and
the virtuoso. After his first public concert in Paris, in March, 1824, he
"made the round of the boxes," a sort of triumphal progress across the laps
of great ladies, who wooed him, we must suppose, with a discreet mixture
of compliments and bonbons. In the following spring he extended his
dominion to England, and saw his name in large type on a hand-bill such as
nowadays we associate with circuses rather than with concerts. "An Air,"
we read, "with Grand Variations by Herz, will be performed on Erard's New
Patent Grand Pianoforte, by

MASTER LISZT,

who will likewise perform an Extempore Fantasia, and respectfully request
Two Written Themes from any of the Audience, upon which he will play his
Variations."
There are not wanting signs, however, that the artist in Liszt was already,
with approaching adolescence, beginning to disdain the spectacular
triumphs of the virtuoso. He began to suspect that "the praise belongs to the
child and not the artist"; the indignity of being advertised as a year or two
younger than he really was, and being carried upon the stage in his
manager's arms, like an infant, aroused his disgust; "I would rather be
anything in the world," he cries, "than a musician in the pay of great folk,
patronized and paid by them like a conjurer or the clever dog Munito."[38]
He became more and more reluctant to appear in public, grew moody and
melancholy, occupied himself with religious meditations, and even
cherished a half-formed desire to withdraw from the brilliant world into
monastic solitude.
This is the first appearance of a mystical tendency of mind which in later
years gained great ascendancy over him, and finally led him to take orders
in the Roman Catholic Church. The event, however, which decisively
ended, for the time, his public piano playing, was the death, in August,

1827, of his father, whose assistance in all practical details was
indispensable to his virtuoso tours.
The young pianist now settled with his mother in Paris, where eight quiet
years of piano teaching succeeded the excitement of his adventurous
boyhood. His conduct at this crisis illustrates that keen sense of honor
which was so agreeable a trait in his character. Considering that the money
he had accumulated by his many successful concerts was rightfully his
mother's, because of all the sacrifices she had made to his career, he made it
over to her in a lump sum, and took up teaching for his own livelihood. It
was an act of delicate justice, freely and cheerfully performed. Outwardly
Liszt's life now became quite simple and laborious, almost plodding; but
inwardly it was developing apace, and ramifying in many directions, under
the provocations of this brilliant and complex Paris.
The Paris of 1830 was indeed a surrounding well fitted to encourage the
most varied growth in the character of a young man so sensitive to
influences, so complex in mental and moral constitution, as Liszt. There
was, on the purely musical side, the powerful irritant of a public languid
and frivolous, devoted to the showy tinsel of Kalkbrenner, Herz, Pixis, and
Pleyel, and so indifferent to real music that Liszt had to coat the pill of a
Beethoven Concerto with sugary ornamentation to make it go down. Such a
public was a good stolid quarry for the marksmanship of an enthusiastic
artist. In general intellectual life there was, on the other hand, a brisk
fermentation highly exciting to Liszt's active mind. Paris was a seething pot
of ideas, theories, heresies, aspirations, scepticisms, individualities. "Here is
a whole fortnight," he writes in 1832, "that my mind and fingers have been
working like two lost spirits—Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron,
Hugo, Lamartine, Châteaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart,
Weber, are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with
fury; besides this I practise four to five hours of exercises.... Ah, provided I
don't go mad, you will find an artist in me!"[39] Above all, there was in the
French romanticism of 1830 an emotional delirium, a fever of the
sentiments, which profoundly affected the high-strung young musician.
French literary romanticism was in essence an extension into the
intellectual world of those principles which had received so striking a
political embodiment in the French Revolution of 1789. About a generation
was required for these principles to propagate themselves from the realm of

practice into that of theory; in the Revolution they appeared as crude
instincts; romanticism refined and systematized them into self-conscious
doctrines. The revolutionary mob murdered the aristocrats who oppressed
them; the romanticists proclaimed the effeteness of all arbitrary rules and all
traditional ordinances, whether in life or in art. The revolutionists cried, in
effect, "Each man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost"; the
romanticists asserted, more politely but in as anarchic a spirit, "The
individual alone is sacred; his development is of greater import than the
welfare of society." And if romanticism had its analogue for the "Liberty" of
the famous formula in its emancipation from traditional law, and its own
version of the "Equality" as the "sacredness of the individual," it also had its
equivalent for "Fraternity" in that somewhat hectic sentiment which usually
proved too vaporous to bear the stress of an actual human situation. Both
movements, too, were passionate exaggerations; they overshot their mark,
and have had to be limited, qualified, and restrained by the saner sense of
later generations.
If romanticism had everywhere this general character of revolt against
authority, assertion of the individual, and deification of the sentiments, it is
notable that while in England it applied its theories chiefly to political and
religious life, and in Germany to metaphysical realms, in France it
concentrated itself largely upon the relations of the sexes. In such typical
romantic documents as Châteaubriand's "René" and George Sand's "Leone
Leoni," the traditional bugaboo is marriage (especially the mariage de
convenance, which indeed was a fair mark for reformers), the extolled
individualism takes the form of free love, and the sentiments deified are the
thrills of the amorous heart. The results of the over-enthusiastic application
of these romantic ideas to so complex a matter as sexual relations are
sometimes bewildering, sometimes absurd, sometimes pathetic. George
Sand's utterances on love and friendship, for example, often leave one
uncertain whether to laugh or to cry, so generous is her primary impulse, so
sophistical and topsy-turvy are the conclusions to which it opens the way.
When she writes, "The greater the crime, so much the more genuine the
love it accomplishes," our anger at the sophism quickly gives place to pity
for the sophist. When we learn that her ideal of friendship between a man
and a woman, or, as she called it, camaraderie, involved "unlimited
confidential conversations," we know not which to doubt, her insight or her
good faith. And in all this she is typical of her age and school, which made

a fetich of the "demoniac power of love," and pursued liaisons with a fervor
that can only be called religious.
The effect of such doctrines as these on a young man like Liszt may readily
be imagined. Too keen-minded to be really deceived by the current
fallacies, but at the same time not austere or independent enough to reject
what was so universally accepted, he let himself go with the current, and
half-blindly, half-ironically, played the game he saw others playing. Almost
before he knew it he found that he had staked nothing less than his honor,
and that this game, begun in a mood of dalliance, must be played through in
sober earnest. The heroine of his love affair was the Countess d'Agoult,
better known by her literary pseudonym of Daniel Stern, a woman of great
beauty and fascination, but apparently consumed by vanity and a thirst for
power. In 1834, when her connection with the idolized young musician
began, she was twenty-eight years old, had been married for six years to the
Count d'Agoult, and had had three children. In the following spring, Liszt
tried in vain to bring the affair to an end; finding this impossible, he
accepted the situation with the best grace he could summon, and entered
upon a period of travel with the countess which lasted a decade. Three
children resulted from this union, Daniel, Blandine, and Cosima, who
became the wife of Von Bülow, and later of Wagner.
It is difficult to arrive at a just conception of Liszt's behavior in this relation,
so conflicting are the available accounts of it. The biography by Ramann,
for example, states that he offered marriage, which the lady indignantly
refused on the score of his inferiority in rank. Janka Wohl, in her
"Reminiscences," on the contrary, quotes Liszt's emphatic denial that he
ever offered marriage. Again, the very zeal with which his admirers depict
the Countess as hurling herself upon him, tend to arouse the suspicion of a
judicious reader. One thing is certain, the uncongeniality of the pair was
fundamental and cumulative. Liszt himself testifies to this in no uncertain
way, and, one may add, with more sarcastic animus than is quite to his
credit. He reports a conversation in which she expressed a desire to be his
inspirer in art, a desire which he attributes to her vanity. "She wished to be
my Beatrice," he says; and continues: "But I told her: 'You are wrong. It is
the Dantes who create the Beatrices, and the real Beatrices die at the age of
eighteen—that is all.' Louis de Ronchaud was present at the time. 'There's
the man,' said I, 'who would have pleased you.'" This was ungallant almost

to the verge of brutality. That verge was overpassed when Liszt, to a request
for suggestions as to the title of some souvenirs the countess had been
writing, proposed "Swagger and Lies." He always spoke of the countess,
says Janka Wohl, with irony.
This picture of a disillusion such as inevitably follows a "grande passion" of
the romantic order, unpleasant as it is, helps us to a realization of one side
of Liszt, his cynicism. An ironical bitterness such as often lay just below the
saccharine smile of this finished man of the world is one of the most
familiar by-products of sentimental romanticism, one which has been made
historically famous by the case of Byron. It is the reaction of the enthusiast
disappointed in unrealizable ideals, the dreary awakening from overfanciful
dreams, the exaggerated contraction of a heart too long artificially
expanded, the acidity produced by a diet all of sugar. It sounds unpleasantly
enough in certain sayings of Liszt quoted by Janka Wohl: "Women do not
believe in a passion which avoids notoriety." "Misunderstood women are
generally women who have been too well understood." Madame Moscheles
writes, in her reminiscences of Liszt: "His high-flying notions are made
more interesting by all the arts of dialectics; but there is a good deal of
satire in them, and that satire is like an ill-tuned chord in conversation. The
sugared charm of his most excellent French cannot make some of his
principles palatable to me."
Closely connected with this cynicism of Liszt is another marked trait of his
character which at first sight seems to have little connection with it, but on
careful scrutiny is seen to be but another form of reaction against the
sentimental interpretation of life with its unsocial lawlessness and its self-
defeating egotism. That strong leaning of Liszt's toward the extreme phases
of Roman Catholicism, which made him even in boyhood a mystic and a
devoted reader of Lamennais, Ballanche, and other ecclesiastical writers,
which impelled him later to take orders, and which inspired the exclusively
devotional works of his last years, what was it but the perverse impulse to
escape from the world of a man whom the world has disappointed?
Monasticism is in large part merely the romanticism of the disillusioned.
Complete isolation from human pursuits and feelings is in essence quite as
antisocial, quite as wilfully individual, as the excesses which carry an
exhausted spirit to its threshold. Liszt's passion for religion, which has so

often puzzled his critics, was in large degree only the longing for repose of
a soul too long overwrought by the religion of passion.
It is one of the curiosities of the psychology of temperament that this new
mood of Liszt's, the mood of mystical passion, found its aspirations
crystallizing, no less than those of the earlier worldly passion had done, in a
woman. If paganism had for a time summed itself for him in the person of
the Countess d'Agoult, the monastic Christianity to which he now reacted
found its avatar and priestess in the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, a
remarkable woman with whom he lived in intimate but what are called
platonic relations from 1847 on. The daughter of a Polish nobleman, and the
wife of a Russian field marshal of erratic character whom, after thrice
refusing, she married without love at seventeen, she had suffered much, and
like many other sufferers had found her consolation in religion. The story of
her relation with Liszt is a pathetic one. She deserted her husband to follow
him to Weimar, where he settled as a conductor and composer in 1847, after
his many years of wandering as a virtuoso; for thirteen years she was his
secretary, friend, and adviser; in 1860 she succeeded in getting a divorce
from her husband, whose infidelities were notorious, only to have it
retracted at the last moment by the Pope. Her spirit was so broken by this
cruel freak of fate that, although Prince Wittgenstein died four years later,
she never married Liszt. She died in Rome in 1887, only six weeks after
Liszt, leaving in manuscript a treatise in twenty-four volumes entitled "Des
Causes Intérieures de la Faiblesse Extérieure de l'Église," with directions
that it should not be printed for twenty-five years. The subject is one on
which she may well have written with passion; but it is sad to think of this
woman consoling herself, by twenty-four volumes of literary discussion, for
a vital tragedy.
During the fourteen years that Liszt spent in Weimar as Music-Director to
the Grand Duke, he accomplished an extraordinary amount of work, in
musical and literary composition, in teaching, and in making propaganda
for struggling composers by performing their works. His cordial interest in
other artists, perhaps the finest trait of his character, was at this time most
strikingly evinced. His baton, his pen, and his powerful personal influence
were constantly employed in the service of young musicians of merit
striving to make themselves known. His efforts in Wagner's behalf,
especially, have become famous. By his performance of "Lohengrin" at

Weimar in 1850, by his articles on four of the music-dramas, and by his
financial aid to the struggling composer during many years, he did more
than any other one man to secure this uncompromising genius a foothold in
the world. Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Raff, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and a
host of less gifted men also owed much to Liszt; and his leaving Weimar
was the indirect result of his zealous championship of an unpopular opera
by his friend Peter Cornelius. It is true that even this benevolence was not
quite unalloyed by his besetting egotism. In our mental image of Liszt
dispensing his artistic charity there is always a trace of that bland smile of
the professional philanthropist. Saint-Saëns suggests that Liszt
contemplated, in his relations with Wagner, a sort of alliance of two men of
genius, in which Wagner should represent the hero of music-drama, and
himself the hero of instrumental music. His rupture with Brahms, who did
not appreciate his piano sonata,[40] suggests an inability to forget the first
person, excusable perhaps in one so long used to constant adulation, but
still not to be neglected in a delineation of his character. Tschaïkowsky's
testimony on the point is very blunt. "Liszt, the old Jesuit," he writes in a
letter, "speaks in terms of exaggerated praise of every work which is
submitted to his inspection. He is at heart a good man, one of the very few
great artists who has never known envy; but he is too much of a Jesuit to be
frank and sincere." And again: "Liszt was a good fellow, and ready to
respond to every one who paid court to him. But as I never toadied to him,
or any other celebrity, we never got into correspondence." But if the great
man had thus his petty vanities, if he liked to take a toll of self-satisfaction,
so to speak, out of the gifts he so lavished upon others, this human
weakness did not, happily, destroy the efficacy of his many services to
music.
We have now glanced at three distinct phases in the life of this protean
spirit, three rôles successively assumed by him in his triumphal progress
across the stage of European society. First there was the infant prodigy, the
boy virtuoso, "le petit Litz," electrifying vast audiences by his piano
playing, and after his concerts "making the round of the boxes." Then came
the slender, romantic youth, Monsieur Liszt the piano teacher in the Paris of
1830, with his polished manners, his attractive irony, his devotion to his
mother, and a thousand suspected gallantries to make him interesting to the
ladies. And then—the third phase—Liszt without the Monsieur, Liszt of
Weimar, the conductor and propagandist, the composer of symphonic

poems, the prophet of "poetic" instrumental music, the patron and almoner
of Wagner, the teacher to whom pupils flocked from all over the world. But
now we come to a fourth phase, stranger, more seizing to the imagination
(especially the feminine imagination) than any of the others: we behold the
former man of the world seated in pious solitude in the monastery of Monte
Mario, near Rome, his personable figure swathed in the long black robe of
an ecclesiastical order, his ingratiating smile touched with a celestial joy, his
thronging thoughts transferred from Paris to Paradise. Here he sits, in rapt
devotion, for seven years. He has thrown aside the secular pen, and writes
only masses and oratorios. He has become, in two words, the Abbé Liszt.
From his retirement, however, he again reappears in the arena of his early
triumphs, in 1868; and from this time until his death in 1886, at one of those
Bayreuth festivals which but for him could not have existed, we see him in
a sort of apotheosis, making a triumphal progress each year from Rome to
Weimar and from Weimar to Pesth, the beloved teacher, the admired
composer, the revered abbé, the distinguished gentleman. Phase five, in
which he is named simply "The Master," is thus a sort of composite and
bright blending of all the other incarnations. Hear the description, by an
eye-witness, of his appearance at this time:[41] "He is the most interesting
and striking man imaginable, tall and slight, with deep-set eyes, shaggy
eyebrows, and iron-gray hair. He wears a long abbé's coat, reaching nearly
to his feet. His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives, when he smiles,
a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression. His hands are very narrow,
with long, slender fingers, which look as if they had twice as many joints as
other people's. They are so flexible and supple that it makes you nervous to
look at them. Anything like the polish of his manners I never saw. When he
got up to leave his box, for instance, after his adieus to the ladies, he laid his
hand on his heart and made his final bow, with a quiet courtliness which
made you feel that no other way of bowing to a lady was right or proper.
His variety of expression is wonderful. One moment his face will look
dreamy, shadowy, tragic, the next insinuating, amiable, ironic, sarcastic. All
Weimar adores him. When he goes out, every one greets him as if he were a
king."
"All Weimar adores him,"—let us confess, for we can no longer blink the
fact, that there is something nauseous about the atmosphere in which Liszt
lived, and that we cannot acquit him of a liking for it. Does not every man

choose, at least within certain limitations set by fate, his own environment?
Was Liszt entirely indifferent to the attentions of the Polish countess who
received him in a boudoir spread ankle-deep with rose leaves, or of the four
celebrated beauties who had their portraits painted as Caryatides supporting
his bust?[42] Was it the sleep of boredom, or of comfortable self-satisfaction,
that swathed him on that occasion when he was "discovered sitting on a
high platform surrounded by all sorts of pianos and harmoniums, and in full
view of six or eight ladies, several of whom were busy fixing his striking
features on canvas?"[43] Was it pure kindness to a young literary woman
that prompted him to invite Janka Wohl to his house to partake of "un répas
très appétissant," and to read aloud to him afterwards "l'article
biographique sur F. L. que nous avons commencé hier"? If this same Janka
Wohl, who by the way was one of those flattering friends from whom the
proverb prays Heaven to preserve us, had said to Beethoven, or Schumann,
or Brahms what she said to Liszt: "The others play pieces beautifully, but
you always play the soul, the thoughts, and the sentiments of Liszt. You
transport us into a world which will die with you, and of which we shall
have nothing left but the paradise of recollection—a paradise out of which,
as the poets say, we cannot be driven"—would these great self-forgetful
artists have given her such an answer as Liszt's: "Come, come, it is you who
are the poet, dear child; but perhaps there is some truth in what you say"?
No, if the idealist in Liszt was often smothered and drugged into lethargy by
this miasma of flattery, it was still within his power to seek a clearer, more
inspiring air. And it was because he did not do so that there grew up beside
the idealist in him that other ego of the poseur and charlatan; and it is his
fault as well as his misfortune that posterity will see him, as a youth,
posturing in Schaffer's studio, and, as an old man, laying his hand on the
left lapel of his abbé's coat as he bows to the ladies in his box.
These grimaces and airs, thin masks as they are to the heart of the man,
have unfortunately projected themselves over into his music, and what is
more surprising, have imposed upon countless listeners, and even trained
critics, who have somehow failed to discern their artificiality. They are
traceable chiefly in the fundamental themes; for however skilfully a
musician may master his technic, however much he may learn to make of
his original ideas by a clever treatment, he cannot materially alter these
ideas themselves, which are, so to speak, the instinctive thoughts of his

mind; in them he stands revealed for what he finally and essentially is.
Now, despite all the mental virtuosity with which Liszt develops his ideas, a
virtuosity as astounding, and possibly as deceptive, as the physical
virtuosity for which he is more famous, the ideas themselves are for the
most part commonplace. They are not spontaneous expressions of his own
feeling, but studied efforts to impress his audience. They strut and maunder
before us just as "The Master" strutted and maundered, tossed his hair, fixed
his eyes on heaven, threw his hands in air, crouched over the keys, smiled
and almost wept, before his audience. They are written, not from the heart,
but "to the gallery"; their magniloquence is rhetoric, their sparkle is of
tinsel, their sentiment is sentimentality. Liszt does not alternate, like
Beethoven, Schumann, Tschaïkowsky, or any composer who is profoundly
in earnest, between manly force and feminine tenderness; he alternates
between empty pomposity and equally empty mawkishness.

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Figure XXVIII.

In these thematic counterfeits of his he makes remarkably plausible
imitations of the real thing. Take, for example, the first theme of his piano
sonata in B-minor (Figure XXVIII), a grandiloquent recitative in octaves.
This sounds magnificent enough at a first hearing, with its strongly
individualized rhythm, its staccato notes followed by pauses, its exciting
use of the diminished seventh harmonies; but on longer acquaintance its
theatricality, its obvious artificiality, its purely rhetorical effectiveness,
become only too apparent; like a sentence printed all in italics, it is
impotent through very excess of emphasis. Or take the well-known opening

motive of the E-flat Piano Concerto. With its attention-seizing rhythm and
its chromatic melody it seems at first fraught with untold meaning, a fiat, an
edict, a proclamation. But what does it proclaim? Little, it turns out as we
go on, except that the composer intends to electrify his hearer; and the
hearer, at first duly astonished, gradually becomes indifferent. "Give him a
piece of bread," said Wagner of Liszt, "he will cover it with red pepper." So
with the main themes of the "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies. He is too
anxious to impress us with the vague emotions, the indefinable thrills, of his
chromatic harmonies. Both themes are so insistently chromatic that the
listener's mind becomes satiated, jaded, numbed. Wagner knew how to
manage these things better when, in his "Pilgrim's March," he relieved the
wonderful chromatic passage beginning at the seventeenth measure by
setting against it the simple, strong triad harmonies of the opening.
If Liszt is unrestrained in his use of the italics and points of exclamation of
the musical language, so that his impressiveness generally degenerates into
ranting, when he tries the emotional he fairly wallows. It is hard to find a
parallel in any other composer for those passages of his, fairly redolent with
sentimentality, in which he reiterates, over and over again, a single note, as
the poet rolls under his tongue his mistress's name, or the gourmand, under
his, a morsel of paté de fois gras. (See Figure XXIX, a and b.) It is hard, in
any other composer who has had the advantage of German traditions, to
find bits of melody so feebly Italian, so sunk in an amiable but insidious
sensuality, as the themes of his "Sonnetto del Petrarca" or his Album Leaf
no. 2, in which he writes with the pen dipped in violet water of a Donizetti
or a Bellini. His harmonic idiom, too, is degraded by a similar sensuality,
however disguised. How else than as proceeding from a love for thrills and
swoons can we explain his passion for those chords, such as diminished
sevenths, minor ninths, and all manner of chromatically altered chords, as
the theorists call them, which, for some reason never yet explained, exhale
mawkishness as some women exhale musk?[44]

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(a) From the Piano Sonata in B-minor.

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(b) From the Liebestraum No. 3.

Figure XXIX.

It would be interesting, did it not involve a general discussion here out of
place, to inquire how far the exaggerated expression of Liszt is due to the
lack of spiritual, moral, and intellectual balance already noted as
characteristic of French romanticism. Surely there is more than a striking
analogy, there is an actual relation of cause and effect, were we but learned
and keen enough to trace it out, between the unrestrained individualism of

the romanticist, in politics, religion, love—and the hysterical, unreal feeling
of this music. Both alike lose poise by taking an over-personal view of life.
Liszt, so singly set on being magnificent or heart-rending in passion that he
ignores the restraints of good taste, forgets artistic reserve, and becomes in
turn blustering and craven, reminds us of Rousseau, so in love with his
fixed idea of "freedom" that he undermines the foundations of the social
order on which true freedom depends.
If Liszt were quite sincere in his passionate extremes, we should have to
forgive them as on the whole we forgive the often crude grandiloquence of
the Gallic Berlioz. What makes the Hungarian artist peculiarly exasperating
is the impression of hypocrisy in his heroics that we cannot escape or argue
away. He does not really feel these things, we discern; he is ogling us, he is
posing for our benefit; all the while that one of his eyes is so proudly
flashing fire, or so devoutly gazing heavenward, or so touchingly secreting
a tear, the other is winking at his alter ego, the ego that sits behind the
scenes and pulls the strings. What those ladies to whom he bowed with such
an irresistible chivalry, such a noble humility, would have felt could they
have read the cynical thoughts about women which meanwhile filled his
mind, that we feel when we realize that for all his pompous utterance, for
all his dreamy emotion, he is in his heart laughing at us for being so
obligingly impressed by his rhodomontade. We can forgive, we can even
rather enjoy, the poseur who is himself in love with his pose, but not the
charlatan who makes capital of our gullibility.
Liszt shows to far better advantage, however, in his manipulation of his
ideas than in the ideas themselves; for whereas in the latter artificiality is a
damning fault, in the former art, especially such skilful art as his, is a
shining merit. His plan of combining the musical organization of the
classicists with the dramatic organization of Berlioz was an interesting and
in some ways a felicitous one. By the use of program and leading motives
he secured the advantages of the realistic school: freedom from the shackles
of the strict traditional sonata-form, and a "poetic" principle of coherence.
By retaining thematic development, he reinforced this poetic coherence by
musical logic, and avoided to some extent the fragmentary effects into
which unmodified realism generally falls. To the thirteen orchestral pieces
in which he most strikingly embodied this plan of interlinked dramatic and
musical structure he gave the name of "Poèmes Symphoniques," generally

translated as "Symphonic Poems" though more precisely as "Orchestral
Poems." He owes his chief historical importance to his creation of this
form, which he exemplified also on a larger scale in his "Faust" and
"Dante" symphonies.
A brief analysis of his most popular symphonic poem, "Les Préludes," will
make clear the peculiarities of the type. This work has a program, taken
from Lamartine's "Méditations poétiques," as follows:—
"What is our life but a series of Preludes to that unknown song of which
death strikes the first solemn note? Love is the enchanted dawn of every
life; but where is the destiny in which the first pleasures of happiness are
not interrupted by some storm, whose deadly breath dissipates its fair
illusions, whose fatal thunderbolt consumes its altar? And where is the soul
which, cruelly wounded, does not seek, at the coming of one of these
storms, to calm its memories in the tranquil life of the country? Man,
however, cannot long resign himself to the kindly tedium which has at first
charmed him in the companionship of nature, and when 'the trumpet has
sounded the signal of alarms,' he hastens to the post of peril, whatever may
be the strife which calls him to its ranks, in order to regain in combat the
full consciousness of himself and the complete command of his powers."
This program, it will at once be seen, is far more favorable to musical
treatment than Berlioz's hotch-potches of petty details and wild,
incongruous fancies. It is but slightly narrative and descriptive, presenting
rather such abstract emotional states as music can best depict. And it has a
natural symmetry and completeness of its own which the composer has only
to reproduce in order to give his music the same desirable qualities. This he
does by dividing his piece into six sections, which might be called
Introduction, Love, Storm, Country Life, War, and Coda or Conclusion.

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(a)

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(b)

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(c)

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(d)

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(e)

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(f)

Figure XXX.

To this natural poetic structure Liszt adds a most ingenious musical form,
by basing his entire work on two leading motives (a and b in Figure XXX),
which he subjects to all manner of variation, melodic, harmonic, rhythmic,
as opportunity suggests. Some of the more important of these variants, set
down in Figures XXX-XXXIII, deserve careful attention. The work begins
with a recitative for strings, andante (c), derived from (a) by a modification
of rhythm. At page 7 of the full orchestral score, published by Breitkopf and
Härtel, appears another variant of the same theme, andante maestoso in bass
strings and brass (d). Motive (a) is sung by the 'cellos, in very nearly its
primitive form, at page 13 (e); in the last measure of this excerpt the very
clever echoing of the three characteristic notes of the theme, in the bass,
marked by asterisks, should be especially noted. Motive (b), symbolizing
love, first appears at page 21, sensuously set forth by four horns, strings,
and harp, is taken up by the wood wind, and is developed in a powerful
climax, at the end of which appears for a moment the variant of it
represented at (f). Thus in the first two sections of the poem are the
underlying motives expounded and somewhat developed.
Section three, Storm, begins (allegro ma non troppo, page 30) with a very
theatrical variant of motive a, highly characteristic of Liszt, in which he
resorts to the chromatic scale beloved of all musical storm-makers (g,
Figure XXXI), and later to an endless series of diminished sevenths,
intended for nothing but to make our flesh creep (h). It is unnecessary to
follow out this section in detail; it is the least interesting of all, and

illustrates that element of claptrap which Liszt could never entirely
eliminate.

[PDF]
(g)

[PDF]
(h)

[PDF]
(i)

Figure XXXI.

[PDF]
(j)

[PDF]
(k)

Figure XXXII.

The mood now changes again, and with (i) (Figure XXXII), a charmingly
expanded version of motive a, intrusted to the oboe, an allegretto pastorale
is ushered in, beginning the fourth section, Country Life. A new theme, of
fascinating grace and freshness (j), now enters in the horn, and is presently
combined with motive b in what seems on the whole the most delightful
moment, musically, of the entire composition (k). A somewhat lengthy
working out of these combined motives follows, gradually growing more
and more agitated, until, with an adaptation of the protean motive (a) for
horns and trumpets, allegro marziale (l) (Figure XXXIII), the fifth section,
War, is introduced. Piccolos and drums become prominent, and at page 82
of the score even the love motive (b) takes on a militant character (m,
Figure XXXIII). Turmoil now increases steadily until a sort of apotheosis is
reached with the reëntrance of the majestic passage (d), in Figure XXX, and
the poem comes to an impressive close.

[PDF]
(l)

[PDF]
(m)

Figure XXXIII.

The advantages of such a scheme of form as is exemplified in "Les
Préludes" are many; and they are made the most of by Liszt, with his
accustomed cleverness and long-headed sense for practical values. For both
of the two classes of listeners that make up the average concert audience
music made on this recipe has an appropriate appeal. That class, usually a
majority, which has little ear for music, but likes to indulge itself in vague
dreams, pictorial imaginings, and nervous thrills, finds its account in the
program, follows out with interest the suggestions of the various moods,
such as, in the present instance, the amorous, the stormy, the pastoral, the
warlike, and gets its fill, all along the way, of brilliant and gorgeous tone-
coloring, exciting rhythms, sombre, rich, or mysterious harmonies. At the
same time the minority of true music-lovers have, as they have not in the
works of Berlioz, a "logical and lucid play of definite motives" to enjoy;
they trace with never failing interest the transformations of a few simple
themes; they may entirely forget the program, and yet have plenty of
opportunity for an agreeable activity of attention, perception, memory, and
imagination. Thus each hearer may pick out from the mass of conglomerate
impressions something that appeals to him.

There is a fine freedom about the symphonic poem which degenerates into
lawlessness only when the composer's skill is insufficient to hold it firmly
in hand. It is not, like the sonata and the symphony, condemned beforehand
to follow a certain course, to fill a predetermined mould; it can ramify, as it
proceeds, in obedience to its own latent possibilities. A development here
may be expanded to great length, an episode or repetition there may be
abbreviated to the slightest possible compass; so long as each link securely
engages the next, so long as there is no break in the coherence of the thread,
the hearer will be satisfied. Through all the twists and turns the presence of
the fundamental melodies will save him from that sense of mere drifting
which was so painful to Wagner in listening to Berlioz's "Romeo and
Juliet." The symphonic poem bears, in fact, somewhat the same relation to
the symphony that rhymed couplets bear to a sonnet, triolet, or other
conventional verse-form. It exacts little of strict formalism; but by
retaining, underneath all its free ramification, certain basic principles of
balance and symmetry, it escapes the pitfall of amorphousness, and
constantly satisfies, though in unexpected ways, the radical expectations of
the intelligent listener.
Unfortunately, however, Liszt himself fell short of realizing the finer
potentialities of his own device. Just as his primal melodies, as we have
already seen, are usually of a stilted, rhetorical, and artificial character, his
treatment of them, the second but scarcely less important of the processes of
composition, is generally labored; it is apt to be a clever feat of intelligence,
a sort of mental legerdemain, rather than a spontaneous germination of idea.
What he said of Chopin's larger works, that they showed "plus de volonté
que d'inspiration," is true of his own. His developments are as often
distortions as fulfilments, and among his melodies there are many monsters.
Plausible, and even winning, as are at first sight some of the thematic
transformations (for we are apt to be won by any display of intelligence, no
matter how specious its ends), on closer inspection they are seen to be mere
juggling. The variants of motive (a), in "Les Préludes," shown at (c) and (d)
in Figure XXX, at (g) in Figure XXXI, and at (l) in Figure XXXIII, have an
unpleasant sub-flavor of artificiality; analysis reveals their derivation from
the parent motive, but affection, so to speak, repudiates them. Even more is
this the case with (f) in Figure XXX, and (m) in Figure XXXIII, which,
though we see that they come from motive b, we feel to be parodies or
caricatures of it, bearing only a superficial resemblance to it, and quite

devoid of its essential character. Such observations make us wonder
whether a theme is not truly as inconvertible into anything else as any other
individual being, and whether the kind of thematic transformation, or
deformation, adopted by Liszt, is not after all intrinsically mechanical and
inartistic. If the reader will take the trouble to look at some typical example
of thematic evolution as it is practised by a master like Beethoven, such as
the first movement, for instance, of the "Eroica Symphony,"[45] he will see
what a vast difference there is between such inevitable drawing forth of the
very soul of a melody, by a process as august and beyond human whim as
the processes of nature, and the laborious ingenuity of the composer of "Les
Préludes."
As in this all-important matter of thematic development, so is it in other
subordinate matters of technic: Liszt, allowing mere ostentation, immediate
effect upon an audience, to have too large a part in his artistic ideal, falls
thereby into a hundred artificialities. While he was alive the extraordinary
magnetism of his personality carried it all off, by disguising the
factitiousness of his methods, and reinforcing immensely their superficial
appeal; but stripped from himself and scanned in the cold impersonal light
of criticism, his gorgeous artistic accoutrements look thin and tawdry, and
prove to be made, not of genuine gold, but of theatrical tinsel. His melody,
when it neither struts nor fawns, is apt to stagnate. His "furiously
chromatic" harmony gains its effectiveness at the expense of solidity; by too
completely forgetting key-relationship, on which all genuine harmony must
depend, it falls into chaos, as the harmony of a master such as Wagner never
does. When it is based on the old ecclesiastical modes instead of on the
chromatic scale, as in many passages of the later religious works, it is no
less a fabrication, an artifice: the Palestrina-like ending of the Credo in the
"Gran Mass," for example, is pseudo-mediævalism, such as no modern
composer could write spontaneously. His orchestration, much praised, is
indeed skilful, but radically vulgar; his amorous 'cellos and braying
trombones are enemies fatal to artistic moderation and restraint. Even in his
piano-writing, so large an element in his fame, his methods are those of
barbarism. He ignores the lesson of fitness that Chopin might have taught
him, and overstrains the resources of the poor instrument until, instead of
achieving its own unique possibilities, it becomes a forlorn imitation of an
orchestra, without an orchestra's variety, sonority, and grandeur.

Thus is the virtuoso spirit of Liszt, which had thriven on adulation only too
well from the days when, as "le petit Litz," he made the tour of the boxes, to
those later days when, as "The Master," he oscillated between Rome and
Weimar in one prolonged triumph, responsible for errors of taste and
judgment which seriously impair the value of all his work. Yet there was in
him, besides the virtuoso who fed on applause and was not superior to
charlatanisms when they served his purpose, quite another being, who
aspired honestly to be a faithful servant of art, and who brought to the
service rare intellectual powers. This was the Liszt who befriended all
worthy composers, who gave freely of his time, his money, and his strength,
whenever he saw merit unacknowledged or genius struggling for bread.
This was the Liszt who kept Wagner alive until the world could learn to
appreciate him, who sought out César Franck when he was the obscure
organist of St. Clotilde, who risked his post as Kapellmeister in order to
produce an opera by his friend Cornelius. And this was the Liszt whose
keen wit discerned the principles of combined musical and dramatic form
on which works intrinsically far superior to his own were later written by
Dvořák, Smetana, Tschaïkowsky, Saint-Saëns, and Richard Strauss.
Whatever his purely musical powers, his indefatigable and highly cultivated
mind and his generous heart enabled him to play an important rôle in the
history of music.

FOOTNOTES:
[38] Ramann, "Life of Liszt," Eng. trans., I, 218.
[39] "Letters of Liszt," ed. by La Mara, Eng. trans., I, 8.
[40] Brahms is said to have fallen asleep during Liszt's performance of it. See
Dr. William Mason's "Memories of a Musical Life."
[41] Amy Fay, "Music Study in Germany."
[42] Janka Wohl, "Recollections of Liszt," Eng. trans., p. 9.
[43] Ibid., p. 187.
[44] See, as examples of this cloying harmonization, both excerpts in Figure
XXIX, or almost any of the "Consolations" and "Liebesträume." An especially
flagrant instance may be found in the Piano Sonata in B-minor, edition of
Breitkopf and Härtel, p. 29, the last measure.
[45] See the present author's "Beethoven and his Forerunners," pp. 316-321.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated
and non-hyphenated variants. For the words with both
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The musical examples that are discussed in the book can
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