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                             THE ROMANTIC
                               COMPOSERS


                            [Illustration]


                         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


                    [Illustration: 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

           I. INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM IN MUSIC           1

          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 YOUNG MAN                    Title

             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


      [Illustration: 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":--

                         [Illustration: score]

                         [Illustration: score]

                               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.

                        [Illustration: score]
                              SCHUBERT.

                        [Illustration: score]

And later

                         [Illustration: score]
                                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.

                        [Illustration: score]
                              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.

                        [Illustration: score]
                              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

    [Illustration: 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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                               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.

                        [Illustration: score]
                              "PIERROT."

                        [Illustration: score]
                      "ARLEQUIN." "VALSE NOBLE."

                        [Illustration: score]
                       "FLORESTAN." "COQUETTE."

                        [Illustration: score]
                             "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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                              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_).

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_a_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_b_)

                             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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                              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.

                         [Illustration: score]

                         [Illustration: score]

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

                               Figure X.


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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_a_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_b_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_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


 [Illustration: 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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                              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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                             Figure XIII.

                         [Illustration: score]
                             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


                    [Illustration: 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.


                        [Illustration: score]
                 (_a_) MOZART: Piano Sonata, A-major.

                        [Illustration: score]
             (_b_) BEETHOVEN: Piano Sonata, Op. 2, No. 1.

                        [Illustration: score]
                   (_c_) SCHUBERT: Fantasia, Op. 15.

                        [Illustration: score]
                (_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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                              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:--

                         [Illustration: score]

                         [Illustration: score]

                             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.

                         [Illustration: score]

And later

                         [Illustration: score]

                             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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                              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):

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_a_)


                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_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]

                         [Illustration: score]
                                (_a_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                (_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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                             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:--

                         [Illustration: score]
                             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


                    [Illustration: 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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                             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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                              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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                             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.

                         [Illustration: score]

                         [Illustration: score]

                             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


                      [Illustration: 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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                            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]


     [Illustration: score] (_a_) From the Piano Sonata in B-minor.

        [Illustration: score] (_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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_a_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_b_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_c_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_d_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_e_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_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.

                          [Illustration: score]
                                 (_g_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_h_)

                             Figure XXXI.


                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_i_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_j_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_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.

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_l_)

                         [Illustration: score]
                                 (_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:

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
has been kept.

Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.





End of Project Gutenberg's The Romantic Composers, by Daniel Gregory Mason