Where definitions fail, the word appears at the right time. The word proves the existence of things, even if they cannot be sharply defined. The word is the artistic form of a transient emotion; it was made for things which were nameless till its creation; it was girded with associations which fastened themselves on to this conception. Such a word is Romance. Romance is not a return to the popular, to nature, nor to the mediæval, it is no love for the legendary or the symbolic or the most delicate forms of the most delicate stirrings of the soul. It was indeed the one of these things to one set of persons and another for others; but in reality it is none of these and all of these. If I say it is an oppositum to synthesis, or intimateness from the point of view of all possibilities, I have defined it very coldly. But its essential point seems to be its reactionary character. It aims not at raising structures, but at reading souls, and it finds a thousand ways of so doing. These thousand ways cannot be crammed into one definition. We strike only gently the chord of the word, so symbolic, so harmoniously chiming. It is a feeling whose value is not to be analysed.
Near the great architect Beethoven lived the first musical Romantic, the well-beloved Franz Schubert. He felt the burden of existence as only musicians can feel it. But he had inexhaustible fountains of consolation, which sang to him melodies almost more profusely than to Mozart, and he did his utmost to throw the melodies, without too much pedantry or Titan-pride, into songs, symphonies, quartets, and impromptus, as the inspiration took him. He had no long life for working, but he used his time well. It is now many, many years since his death, and still numbers of his works are unpublished. His best teacher was the people, and their songs and dances. The unsophisticated musical feeling, which came to light in this popular song and national dance—the simple natural phrases, the speaking soul, the genuine sense for drama—these were the formative principles of his immortal songs, and these gave the character to his piano music also. Men have been studying his numerous national dances as in a Bible of the dance for fifty years. There are still rare and beautiful flowers to be found among them; others have been picked out by the virtuosos, and transformed to hothouse plants in many forms, not always so stylish as Liszt’s Soirées de Vienne. The case has been the same with his four-hand Marches, whether Caractéristique, Héroique, or Militaire. If we return to their original forms, a surprising air as from country meadows meets us.
He lives entirely in music. From the far land of invention float the melodies, eternally varying, giving colour to the harmonies, and pouring themselves out to their very last note. The ear cannot have enough of them, and, full of the holiest delight, pursues them to the end of their heavenly course. In Paradise there is no time; and these melodies are a prologue to eternity. Schubert died at thirty-one. His D minor quartet, one of the loveliest compositions ever written, leads us to imagine that he would have been the greatest musician of the century. But he has left us only the works of his youth—a youth of intellectual intimateness and smiling sunshine. In delicacy of musical feeling we put no one above him. He stands before us in the small band of original and delicate minds, whose secret can make the life of higher emotions happy. Let not him who has not delicate fingers touch Schubert. To play him means to have a dainty touch. The keyboard appears unmaterialised: only so much of the mechanism seems to remain as is necessary to render living the conception of this beauty. In peaceful hours we enjoy him most, and confess that there is no tone-poet whom we love so deeply from the heart as Schubert.
In this, those things of their own accord are separated out, in which Schubert did not follow only his natural impulse to the popular song. He was in the first place no master or teacher of musical construction. His scores are simple, and even in his four-handed duets (he has left behind him duets of surpassing beauty) whole passages could often be rendered as they stand by a single player.
Schubert never appears a slave to the arrangement he adopts; but the movement flows so naturally from his pen that there is no want of harmony between his idea and its realisation. He is just as little a special artist of the form. He has written many sonatas—four-handed and two-handed; but he cares little for the form. Where he can subject his dainty ideas to this mould, as in the first three movements of the duet in B flat major, he is interesting to us. When he cannot easily do so, he has recourse to variations in the style of the time or to all kinds of academic free fantasias. In this case he speedily becomes antiquated. But we must again remember that he has left us only youthful works. His latest sonatas, particularly those in A major and in B flat major; his latest chamber-music and symphonies, the wonderful Schumann-like F minor fantasia, and the Beethoven-like duet “Lebensstürme” in rondo form, are more weighty in structure and show him on the way to throw his great conceptions into more recognised forms: in this style he would have grown into a great artist.
The “Wanderer” Fantasia stands on the boundary line. The method of writing a free fantasia on a song-motive—on this occasion one of his own—by which the ordinary four movements are preserved, was then à la mode. That the last movement should begin with a fugato, which soon passes over into more general virtuosity, was equally common. In the more purely virtuoso passages, specially in the quite conventional coda, Schubert is the very child of the Viennese school. The free fantasias are rather in Hummel’s than in Beethoven’s style—preserving a middle path between the two. The form is so free that from the waltz movement of the scherzo to the weighty fugue, from the song of the adagio to the conventional conclusion, almost all the styles of piano music that exist are packed in. But if a song or a waltz rhythm or a special tone expression appears, then we observe with what alacrity Schubert sets about his work. He prepares it beforehand with a certain effort. He caresses the new theme; for example, on the entrance of the melodic E flat major theme in the first movement, in the dramatic deep tremolo in the adagio, and in the pianissimo D flat major waltz in the third movement.
Nothing is more distinctive of Schubert than the development of the Fantasia Sonata Op. 78. The first movement hardly hangs together. A wonderful theme, depending on delicate touch, is mingled with empty technical intermediate passages. The Andante is a Volkslied, arranged as in sonatas; as a whole treated somewhat feebly, but with sudden small intermezzos, at first in F sharp major (bar 47), where suspensions in Schubert’s true style sound in softest pianissimo in the middle voices. In the third movement a ravishing minuet meets us, running in cheerful rhythms, with a waltz-like conclusion which anticipates one side of Schumann, and with a dainty trio in B major, in bell-like tones and magical retardations such as Schubert himself hardly surpassed. Thus a G sharp[126] in the chord of the dominant seventh, with which the melodic chain is ornamentally interwoven, was a discovery rich in wonders. And the last movement with its original popular dance, which he overheard directly from the heart of the people where the basses rumble below and the fiddle-bows spring on the strings; with the two laughing trios, in which Johann Strauss is entirely anticipated; national dances with a dainty melody, which conclude so lingeringly in the spiritual chorale-tone (in C major)—pictures like these music had not hitherto known. All kinds of foreign national airs had, of course, been dealt with in artistic style; and Schubert himself, in his brilliant Hungarian Divertissement for four hands, has painted a gipsy picture with all his dexterity in rhythm; but the German national airs had received but scanty attention. Here, at last, we find the German folk-music, which found in the Viennese dance-composers its popular embellishment, and in Schumann its artistic treatment.
With his Impromptus and Moments Musicals, those small impressionist forms, Schubert placed piano-literature upon a new basis. Here is found that form of chamber music which is most peculiar to the piano as a solo instrument with full harmony. It is not a sonata, which is founded by the great laws of universal tonic art; nor a concerto, which drags the piano before a many-headed multitude which delights in distraction; nor an operatic fantasia or variation on an air, which forbids the charm of free improvisation; no technical elaborated étude, nor a scientifically constructed fugato;—but a piece which brings single selected musical thoughts into a short artistic form, no longer in extent than the tone-colour of the instrument permits; yet, with all infelt genuineness, informed with the best effects of the piano, which the player, as he composes in solitude, feels in full intensity. Almost all Schubert’s pieces retain something of the spirit of the time. Some are a kind of variations; others études, a third class dances; but they are constantly more than mere echoes of the time; they are founded on an inner genuineness, and much too full in expression to permit of being included under any category of the external. In Beethoven’s life we witnessed the way in which a world-embracing genius gradually threw off the traditional form; in Schubert we see how an intimate spirit gradually rises above the style of the time. This development is included between the Sonatas and the Wanderer Fantasia on the one hand, and the Moments Musicals on the other. At the same period in which the technical musicians accomplished the outward emancipation of the clavier, these short pieces (Kurze Geschichten) made it inwardly free.
As Impromptus the two groups, Op. 90 and Op. 142, were published. Those of the first group have all penetrated deeply into our musical consciousness. All roads lead us back again to the first Impromptu with its simple popular melody in two sections, which is varied in so many extraordinary ways; and with that melodious middle-movement, more joyous and ethereal, than any that had ever been heard before on the pianoforte. Who can forget the second with the light étude-like triplet-swinging in E flat major and the mighty B minor middle section; or the third with its wonderful G flat major melody, its divine modulations and its captivatingly simple conclusion, revealing unexpected melodic wonders in a broken chord of the seventh; or the fourth, a light floating figure with its short Volkslied intermezzi and the long drawn out melody of the trio in C♯ minor—Schumann all over!
The second group of Impromptus (Op. 142) stands below the first in importance. It was with Schubert as with Mozart; good and bad inspirations came to him alike, and he could not discriminate them. Yet they contain the dainty A flat major piece, which demands nothing but a gentle touch; and in the variations of the third Impromptu (which is therefore no impromptu) the likeness to Schumann is once more astonishing. It is a peculiar pleasure to detect Schumann in Schubert, and it is a piece of historic justice which has often been neglected.
More successful, indeed Schubert’s greatest achievement, was the “Moments Musicals,” which appeared in 1828, the year of his death. The first of these is a naturalistic free musical expatiation; the second a gentle movement in A flat major; the third the well-known F minor dance—in which a dance became a penetrating and sorrow-laden tongue—the fourth the Bach-like C sharp minor moderato, with its placid middle section in D flat major; the fifth a fantastic march with a sharply cut rhythm; and the sixth, perhaps Schubert’s most profound piano-piece, that reverie in still chords, which only once are more violently shaken in order to lull us to sleep with its pensive and dainty sorrow, its delicate connections, its singing imitations, its magic enharmonics, and its sweet melodies rising like flowers from the soft ground. The conclusion of the trio, in the style of a popular chorale, with its harmonisation in thirds, is (like many of his harmonic passages in octaves or sixths) exceedingly characteristic of the popular nature of Schubert’s music.
We have been turning over the leaves of a book from which Schumann and Chopin might have found matter to fill years of their lives. In form and colour, melody and movement, the model was before them. This modest man, who in his Vienna solitude wrote such things as these for himself, loved a few good friends, but publicity he hated. A composer who never appeared in public—was the like ever seen before? In the aged Beethoven the world understood it; but in this young man it could only reward it with indifference. He remained willingly unknown, like so many of his companions in sorrow who wished to be artists in themselves without relation to others, and without the encumbrance of patronage. The times were altering in music as in painting. The patronage of the State or of the Prince is disappearing; the commissions the artist receives become fewer and more distasteful; he becomes more intimate and is constrained to offer his works to the public, and to supply what it will purchase. Supply and demand rule art as well as anything else: but nowhere is the severance so painful. Pensions are irksome, and official posts are not to be had otherwise than indirectly. The struggle after the ideal which is the life of the artist is purer than it ever was. The type which Feuerbach and Böcklin represent in painting, that new type of artist who can be happy without commissions and without honorarium, is first clearly exhibited by Schubert in the musical world. Publicity, to which Beethoven at first had recourse, and which he would have carried further had fate not opposed, was impossible to Schubert. He had to live on a pension, his applications for posts were rejected, publishers were timid, and very slowly indeed did his songs win their way to favour. Goethe never answered him on receiving his songs; and Beethoven, to whom he shyly dedicated his Variations (Op. 10) as “admirer and worshipper,” only learnt to know him in the last days. As he began, so he died. The publishers had still to work through the whole century in order to bring out his works, which they dedicated in very stylish manner to Liszt, Mendelssohn, or Schumann: as Schubert closed his eyes he knew as little as the world that his simple integrity had won a new realm for art.
Some years after Schubert’s death, in November 1831, a certain Robert Schumann published as his first work some Variations, whose theme was formed on the name Abegg (A B E G G). It was easy to see that the Countess Abegg, to whom they were dedicated, was a pseudonym for a good lady, whom the author had once admired as a beauty without otherwise troubling himself much about her. The theme was worked out a little too painfully, and the Variations moved in eclectic style among influences derived from Beethoven, Weber, and the contemporary virtuosos; but their originality was nevertheless unmistakable. It was not the worn-out contemporary style of variations; and many sound traces of that naive dilettantism, which always stands at the cradle of the new, were easily to be detected. Sudden pianissimo effects, single selected technical motives, an original melodic gift for singing with contrapuntal voice-parts and new forms of accompaniment, rapid harmonic changes by the chord of the seventh, legendary romance in the finale alla fantasia, the successive release of the notes of a chord, from the lowest to the highest—all this led men to wait eagerly for Schumann’s next work.
This next work bore the title of “Papillons”—a title not unknown in contemporary drawing-room music. But here there was nothing of the drawing-room style. These butterflies seemed to come from the regions where Schubert had found his flowers. Thence they brought a breath of short lyrical songs—a concentrated breath of severe and restrained beauty. A wonderfully penetrating heart-felt tone breathed through them. The world had now to do with a reflective, deeply musical nature, far removed from all the merely brilliant virtuosity of the time: it was a romantic spirit. After the short slow introduction came the waltz, whose outlines inevitably recalled Schubert; but its emotions were personally felt. There were melodic passages in octaves for alternate hands, dying away in the aria with the “nachschlagbegleitung”[127] down to pianissimo, a splendid fugato-march in spirited style, episodes of popular songs, sportive whisperings, sparkling polonaise rhythms, melodious effects working out of very gentle full chords, canonic melodies in lively motion, repetitions of earlier bars in later sections to represent the external unity of these little stories, and as a conclusion the “Grossvater” song. The whole is united contrapuntally with the first waltz. The carnival is silenced—this appears suddenly in words—the tower-clock strikes six (and high enough on the upper A); a full chord of the seventh piles itself up gradually and closes the piece.
No one knew what was the chief impulse which led Schumann to write these “Papillons.” Those who corresponded with him alone knew that he was thinking of the “Flegeljahre”[128] of Jean Paul. From Jean Paul he received his spiritual nourishment, and those to whom his letters came could tell that he hardly sent off one without including in them a rhapsody for the Bayreuth poet. In this intermediate world between the highest earnestness and endless laughter he preferred to live in ironic love and loving irony. To reflect deeply on immortality, and at the same time to drink in comfortably the sweet odour of the girdle cake which the goodwife is cooking in the kitchen—it is in this mixed light that the poet stands, who has so characterised himself. The fantastic boundaries of the real and the imaginary world, of the most insipid flatness of the animal nature and of the most ethereal heavenly flights, alike attract him. His delicate soul flies to Nature, and Nature is to him—so he writes to his mother—the great outspread handkerchief of God, embroidered with His eternal name, on which man can wipe away all his tears of sorrow. But the tears of joy too—and when every tear falls into a rapture of weeping—whence came these tones in the soul of a musician? The world had never yet understood them. It knew them in literary circles, which busied themselves with romantic new creations, where unknown regions seemed suddenly to open themselves between the everyday and the legendary, and which demanded new, painfully twisted words for the wild tumult of their representations. Where pure music had long wandered alone, the poets and the æsthetics had now penetrated; and was now a musician to give them a hand to speak in their tongue? This was a surprising turn. Upon the musical poet came the literary musician. The one could only gain; had the other anything to lose? No; Schumann seemed musician enough to prove that nothing was lost. None of his friends, to whom he recommended the perusal of the conclusion of the “Flegeljahre”—whose masked dance, he said, the Papillons were intended to transform into tones—would have expected this pure and genuine music from him. I imagine they all puzzled their heads to know what the wild Jean Paul had to do with these dainty musical butterflies. And it is to-day even harder for us.
A delicate musician read Jean Paul, and the grotesque figures of this “Walt und Vult” combined in him with a world of tone, which slumbered within him, in those deep regions of associated ideas which stand at the basis of artistic creation. They there formed a special union with their musical counterpart, the simplest, most natural, and least academical creations which the art of tone ever saw—those of Schubert. So early as 1829 Schumann, who was then a student, wrote to Frederick Wieck from Heidelberg: “When I play Schubert, it is as if I were reading a Romance of Jean Paul set to music.” Jean Paul and Schubert are the gods in Schumann’s first letters and other writings. He cannot shake off the ethereal melancholy, the “suppressed” lyrical tone, in Schubert’s four-handed A major Rondo: he sees Schubert, as it were, in bodily shape, experiencing his own piece. No music, he said, is so psychologically remarkable in the progress of its ideas and in its apparently logical leaps. There is a rare fire in him when he speaks of Schubert. How eager is he for new publications from Schubert’s remains! Yet, while he is devouring a volume of his national dances, he is weeping for Jean Paul. In the Papillons, we hear, there was Jean Paul; and what we find in them, is Schubert. What was to come of this conjunction?
This question was very satisfactorily answered in the next work (Op. 3). This was a collection of Études with a textual introduction on motives after Paganini, but adapted to the piano. Considered as a whole it was technical to a degree, yet without disguising the real Schumann. And what was the meaning of the Introduction? Every great pianist had already written his “School” or wanted to write it. Did these barren finger-directions speak for the virtuoso Schumann?
The Intermezzi (Op. 4) answered in the negative. These were genuine pure music without any external pretensions. It was possible already to recognise the true style of Schumann: the characteristic features were repeated. Dotted motives, built up in fugato style; delicate melodies with the “nachschlag” accompaniment and with other melodies superimposed; reflective repose in chords; syncopated rhythm; parallelisms of the air in octaves; all these were as before. In the slurred thirds and the sequences, and especially the diatonic runs, which seem to gather their strength as they go, the model was not Schubert but Sebastian Bach. There was something in this not merely of his absolute, self-contained music, but even of his means of expression. At this time of course this could do no harm. In the fifth and sixth intermezzos Schumann’s personality would seem to have entirely ripened. This marked propensity to “anticipations,” those pianissimo unisons, those sharp detonations of C and C sharp, D and D sharp; the singing legato middle voices developing in the canonic manner, the absolute transference of whole passages by means of a single note foreign to the scale, generally effected by an anticipation; all this had grown into a definite musical picture, extraordinarily sympathetic, in which soul and technique were united. With stern sadness the hands grip one within another, to bring out the “suppressed lyric” of the piano; and a delicate noble spirit guides them, which delights to express strange things in strange forms. With stern sadness, as in the style of Jean Paul, and right in the midst of the music, where an answering voice intrudes itself, Schumann writes over the notes the words, “Meine Ruh ist hin”—my peace has departed. This is not as text, but merely as a comment by the way.
Then came Op. 5, free variations in romantic style, on a theme by Clara Wieck; and Op. 6, called “Davidsbündlertänze.” They were dedicated to Walther von Goethe, and bore as motto the old proverb:—
In the later revised edition Schumann cut out this good old saying, as he omitted so much of the first and heartfelt edition. “Two readings may often be of equal value,” says Eusebius once in the aphorisms. “The original one is usually the best,” adds Raro. Why did not Schumann follow his own Raro? Raro was the most delicate of the “Davidsbündler.” He was in his irony, which had drunk deep of worldly wisdom, raised far above the storm and stress of Florestan and the gentle, simple complaisance of Eusebius. In Florestan there was much of Beethoven, in Eusebius an echo of Schubert. Raro was to surpass and combine them in a higher unity. But Raro is just—rare.
The “Davidsbündler” declare war on the Philistines, and of an evening bring their dances together, which are then published in a single volume. Florestan contributes the stormy ones, Eusebius the gentle ones; while Raro puts in his word as seldom as in actual life. Such bands of Romanticists we have heard of before; we think of Hoffmann’s Serapion Brothers, and their zeal against the Philistines. Herz and Hünten, and all the musical lions of the drawing-room were to be put aside. There was still music after Beethoven. David’s companions meant, like their prototype, to put the Philistines under a harrow. Even the explanatory notes of his “Bündler” were cut out by Schumann in his later revised edition. He smiled perhaps at the beautiful fancies of his youth, when he seemed to carry three temperaments warring in his soul. And yet this fictitious society was the truest expression of his romantic soul, in which living music and literary reflection met together. They were his fellow-workers in his life’s work, whom he could never renounce.
The moment had come when the world busied itself with Schumann in somewhat wider circles. It asked after his private circumstances, and gained the answer—surprising, and yet no longer utterly surprising—that here an academically educated man had become a musician—a phenomenon long unknown, and only possible in this new era of art, in which one could give oneself up to composition without having to wait for a commission for each single work.
Schumann had attended the Zwickau Gymnasium in due course; and at eighteen, in 1828, he entered the legal profession at Leipzig. His piano-lessons under Frederick Wieck of course attracted him far more than jurisprudence; and when, after an interval spent at Heidelberg, he returned to Leipzig, the die was cast. The letter to his mother in which he announces his decision is to-day interesting for the light it throws on his intentions. Naturally, he thought of the career of a virtuoso; and, in order to make his fingers supple, he hung one of them in a sling while practising, with the result that first the finger and then the whole hand was maimed, and Schumann was saved for pure composition. Composition is soon intimately knit with love for Clara Wieck, the daughter of his teacher, whose great talent was to compensate him for his own lost power. We cannot forget his youthful letters to Clara, which form the conclusion of the edition of “Schumann’s Letters,” which she issued. Never were more lyrical letters written. He dedicates to Clara his whole power of creation; it is she that lives in all his pieces, and to create was to think of her. Before this he tells her legends and supernatural tales. “Look now at your old Robert; is he not still the frivolous ghost-tale teller and terrifier? But now I can be very serious too, often the whole day long—but don’t trouble about that—they are generally processes in my soul, thoughts on music and compositions. Everything touches me that goes on in the world—politics, literature, people. I think after my own fashion of everything that can express itself through music, or can escape by means of it. This is why many of my compositions are so hard to understand, because they are bound up with very remote associations, and often very much so because everything of importance in the time takes hold of me and I must express it in musical form. And this, too, is why so few compositions satisfy my mind, because, apart from all defect in craftsmanship, the ideas themselves are often on a low plane, and their expression is often commonplace. The highest that is here attained scarcely reaches to the beginning of what is aimed at in my music. The former may be a flower, the latter is the poem, so much the more spiritual; the one is an impulse of raw nature; the other the work of poetical consciousness.”
In these words Schumann penetrated into his own heart; and there is nothing to be added to this characterisation of his literary music. The new type existed in its purity; namely, the musician, standing on the height of the representative art of the time, of which type Wagner was the best expression. There is a strange likeness in these two opposed natures. What in Wagner passed over into the external, in Schumann passed into the intimate. Where the one carries us along with him in an intoxicating rush, the latter is a personal enjoyment for retiring souls. The one lives in the orchestra, and plays the piano badly; the other dreamed first for the piano, then for the chorus, and never was able to express himself tolerably through the orchestra. Wagner never burst into tears, like Schumann, when he before his wanderings played for the last time on the beloved instrument which had heard all the sorrows and joys of his youth. And Wagner never wrote to Madame Cosima as Schumann wrote to Clara: “You speak in your last of a cosy place where you would like to have me—do not aim too high—I ask no better surroundings than a piano and you close by. You will never be a kapellmeisterin in your life; but inwardly we are a match for any pair of kapellmeisters, are we not? You understand me.”
This man of delicate feeling, who wished to reduce piano-culture to a system, was editor of a paper, which he founded at Leipzig in the year 1834, along with certain friends and men of like tastes, of whom he seems to have valued most Schunke, who died very soon. This “New Magazine of Music” was Schumann’s special medium, and in it he published his splendid and very spirited criticisms and aphorisms; later, when Brendel purchased it from him, it was of equal use to Wagner, his exact opposite. Till 1844 Schumann edited it for the most part personally; and his position aided the spread of his works, which laid themselves out so little for popular success. Still more effective was the career of his betrothed, who because of certain awkward obstacles only became his wife in 1840. This was his most productive year. It saw the appearance of a hundred and thirty-eight songs, and of the cycle of Heine’s lyrics (Op. 24). If the betrothed Clara and the piano were spiritually united, the married Clara and the song were equally so. Thus the songs stand precisely midway between his youthful piano-writings and the orchestral and choral efforts of his later years. And indeed the piano succeeds better in them than in any song hitherto written. The accompaniments of “Du, meine Seele” or of the F sharp major “Ueberm Garten durch die Lüfte,” are minute and scrupulous pieces of artistic work.
The eighteen “Davidsbündler,” Schumann’s first complete piano-work, were composed in 1837. Clara contributed the first bars—a cheerful musical motto. Schumann was fond of accepting his first bars as gifts from friends. The Romancist was fond of these incursions into actuality, this poetry in the real. As the letters A B E G G had once taken his fancy, so later did A S C H. And once he wrote in Gade’s family album a piece on “Gade, Ade” (Gade, farewell).
Schumann’s music is characterised in few strokes; it is never hard to recognise its features. The interwoven melodies, the love of “anticipations,” the rollicking humour, which might almost be borrowed from old drinking songs, the contrapuntal collisions of the bass on which the light waltz flutters down, the cheerfully pensive codas, the restlessness of his syncopated rhythms, the sweet lulling romantic tone mingled with wild and vigorous march-motives, the full effect of broken chord passages of mounting fifths, the conclusions of the sections abruptly broken off by a staccato chord—all these were to be seen in spring-like freshness in the “Davidsbündler.” We have there the “einfaches stück” of Eusebius, the free recitative in No. 7 beginning with arpeggiando chords for the left hand. Next, “Florestan’s lips quiver.” Then follow the extraordinarily beautiful E flat major (No. 14) with its airy melancholy; the staccato, passing humorously over into the “Wie aus der Ferne,” and finally “Happiness speaks out of his eyes.” Nothing so wonderfully simple, so old-new, so true, so German, had been painted on the piano since Schubert. And here was a yet more modern spirit—a mind whose depths were not merely over-flowed by the streams of music, but were pictured in delicate musical emotion. The construction is clean and simple; the language refined and lofty; the whole the consolidated improvisation of a mind standing at the highest point of representative art. More perfect improvisations it did not lie in the nature of the piano to produce. It was the high-water mark of piano literature.
I pass rapidly over Op. 7, one of his earliest composed pieces, the toccata, brilliant in colouring, delicately chased, bold in construction, wonderful in technique; and Op. 8, a concert allegro, in which he, certainly in an unusual way compared with the literature of the time, sacrifices a little to popularity, and thereby crushes out certain beauties. I pass on to Op. 9, the “Scenes Mignonnes” of the carnival, in which neither technical nor concert problems were to be mastered. The motive of the carnival is A S C H, which is the name of the home of one of his musical lady friends and which contains all the letters of Schumann’s name which are adapted to the stave.[129] A bustling ball-play develops itself, Pierrot and Harlequin appear, a Valse Noble unites the parties, the mask of Eusebius is seen through, and the gentleness of Florestan is resumed, the Coquette frisks by, Papillons flutter round, and the letters A S C H dance a rapid waltz. Chiarina and Estrella, not unknown characters, are represented; and Chopin appears in person between them. A short recognition scene in the time of the Polonaise, in which we hear the dainty causeries among the marching rhythms—the miniature ballet of Pantaloon and Columbine—a comfortable allemande, into which Paganini suddenly darts with his most extravagant leaps; in the distance a gentle confession of love;—all comes again together in the polite and festal promenade of the couples. There is a pause; and then reminiscences run through the memory; one melody restlessly pursues another; room is made; the final effect comes; the “Davidsbündler” begin an abusive march against the Philistines; they roar out the Grandfather song—“Grandfather wedded my Grandmother dear, so Grandfather then was a bridegroom, I fear”—and the people enjoy it, till they all, with a “Down with the Philistines,” join in, and a galloping stretto finishes the boisterous amusement.
The inscriptions Schumann inserted later. He took a literary delight in putting in an “Estrella,” as it is seen in old copper engravings. It was the pleasure of the delicate man of taste in labelling. But he laid no stress on this nomenclature; the relations indicated were as wide as before, when there were none of these labels. We are reminded of Couperin, whose miniature porcelain pictures were ticketed just like this moving panorama of tunes, and in surprisingly similar style. In both the titles were nothing but a halt in the midst of full musical representation; they involved no limitation, no point of departure. Under like tickets, works came into the world which were separated in time and in tone by whole centuries. Schumann himself almost thought the titles a trifle too theatrical. The Davidsbündler, he said, are related to the carnival like faces to masks.
Among the works that followed, technical and purely musical gifts alternated. As Op. 10 we have further Paganini Études, with wide stretches, contrapuntal, transformed in the spirit of Schumann. Here, as before, the order of publication did not correspond to that of composition. The F sharp minor sonata (Op. 11) was begun contemporaneously with the Impromptus. It was dedicated to Clara. It is a romantic deepening of the sonata form, cast throughout in these small lyrical sections which are peculiar to the time, but here are held together by an internal unity. We must feel this unity in order not to cut up the work into mere fragments. An oceanic vastness spreads over it, whose tone is struck in the broad introduction. It has a first theme, contrapuntal in style, and a second of full-voiced melody; the working-out attaching new ideas half in imitative, half in étude fashion. On the third, the A, which drags itself over, the aria begins its deep-felt lament, in three melodies with the genuine Schumann-like coda, sighing itself away under the final slurs. The fresh staccato canon work of the scherzo carries us with it. Two wonderful trios introduce themselves, the second with the remarkable recitative. The conclusion is formed by a modest movement which is put together like a mosaic out of a stormy quaver theme, two cantabiles, a syncopated motive, a section in full chords and a stretto. We shall only feel the unity if we give our playing a touch of improvisation. In a word the case is this; in a sonata of Schumann what most charms us is the movements regarded separately; and in the movements, the separate passages. This Sonata, like the others of his works, must be considered as a volume of lyrical poems.
The “Fantasie-stücke” were the next work. These again are a completed picture, for the most part broader in conception than the Davidsbündler, with which they were contemporaneous in composition. They were the ideal of delicate piano composition, and have remained so down to the present day. The sweet “Abendruhe,” the stormy “Aufschwung,” the dainty “Warum,” the capricious “Grillen,” the gloomy “Nachtscene,” in which Schumann was thinking of Hero and Leander, the “Fabel,” alternating in Ritornell and Staccato; the “Traumeswirren,” and the beautiful “Ende vom Lied,” whose humour sounds again wonderfully in the intellectual augmentation at the conclusion—all this formed an extraordinary picture-gallery. The height of art was attained in the “Nacht,” where the dark rolling accompaniment, the solitary sighs in the gloomy air, the deep returns to darkness, the gently sounding and wild shrieking cries and emotional songs, over the gurgling accompanying figure which runs through the whole, made one of the immortal piano-pieces.
A more purely technical work was the Études Symphoniques, written in 1834 simultaneously with the Carnival, on a theme of Fricken’s. These variations are as significant for Schumann as the Goldberg variations for Bach or the Diabelli variations for Beethoven. They are a breviary of all specialities in expression. All Schumann’s characteristics were here: the strongly accented fugue, the tied notes with repeated chord accompaniment, the cantabile with broken chords, the staccato chords in canon, the dotted rhythms of Var. IV., the complicated syncopations of Var. V., the bold phrasing of Var. VI., the Bach-like style of Var. VII., the hurrying rush of semiquavers in Étude IX., the duet of voices with tremolo accompaniment in Var. IX., the march with contrapuntal treatment on pedal points which concludes the work—all was here; and all was made into a delicate étude in which that union of technique and poetry was constantly completing itself in fresh form.
In the Sonata (or concerto) “without orchestra” (Op. 14) which he recast later without introducing much warmth of feeling, we observe chiefly the strong influence of Bach, which informs the last movement. If we look closely, indeed, we shall be often reminded of Bach in the last works, particularly in the Symphonic Études. Certain slurred ornamental figures, certain tricks of accompaniment, the play of dotted and triplet rhythms, the canonic carrying-out of the theme, left no doubt that Schumann had been trained on Bach, and that he had strengthened his musical consciousness by the study of a music in which there is not a superfluous line. The Letters make this certain. In 1832 he sat over the Wohltemperiertes Klavier, his Grammar, and occupied himself in analysing the fugues down to their minutest ramifications. “The use of such a process is great, and has a morally strengthening influence upon the whole man; for Bach was a man, through and through; in him there is nothing half-finished, nothing halting; all is written for eternity.” All this has a special and peculiar influence on Schumann. The abstract music of a Bach is mingled with the concrete representative secondary aims of romance, which find an entrance all the more easily as this absolute art, free from all words and all that is ephemeral, is by far the most expressive to the profoundly musical spirit. Bach’s art expresses every phase of feeling, and the emotions are so wide-embracing that they never find a boundary in the domain of reality. This art is the original realm of all transcendental desires. “The profound power of combination, poetry and humour in the new music,” wrote Schumann in 1846, “has its origin for the most part in Bach. Mendelssohn, Bennett, Chopin, Hiller, the so-called Romantics, as a whole, stand far nearer to Bach than to Mozart; for as a whole they know Bach through and through. I myself daily confess to this high power, to purify myself, and to strengthen myself through him.”
Along with Bach was mingled in his mind the author Hoffmann. There was a remarkable elective affinity in the sympathies of his nature. The “profoundly-combining” Bach took the place of Jean Paul, and the story-teller Hoffmann took the place of Schubert. The twists and turns of a writer, whose style might be called “contrapuntal,” found their continuation in the musician who brought all counterpoint into a wonderful “incommensurable” harmony; and the popular simplicity of a musician found its complement in the dreamy lyricism of a genius who had formed perhaps a more beautiful anticipation of the whole music of our century than its actual state has realised. This poet, himself a musician, valued the most romantic of all arts, “one might almost say, the only genuine romantic art; for its subject-matter is the eternal: music opens to man an unknown realm which has nothing in common with the external world of sense, and in which he leaves behind all defined feelings in order to give himself up to an inexpressible longing.” And the poet leads us into a realm of magic. In the “Kreisleriana,” the garden into which the author leads us is full of tone and song. The stranger comes up to the young squire and tells him of many distant and unknown lands, and strange men and animals; and his speech dies away into a wonderful tone, in which he expresses unknown and mysterious things, intelligibly, yet without words. But the castle maiden follows his enticements, and they meet every midnight at the old tree, none venturing to approach too near the strange melodies that sound therefrom. Then the castle maiden lies pierced through under the tree, and the lute is broken; but from her blood grow mosses of wonderful colour over the stone, and the young Chrysostom hears the nightingale, which since then makes its nest and sings its song in the tree. At home his father is accompanying his old songs on the clavicymbal, and songs, mosses, and castle-maiden, are all fused in his mind into one. In the garden of tone and song all sorts of internal melodies rise in his heart, and the murmur of the words gives them their breath. He tries to set them to the clavier, but they refuse to come forth from their hiding-places. He closes the instrument, and listens to see whether the songs will not now sound forth more clearly and brightly; for—“I knew well that the tones must dwell there as if enchanted.”
Out of a world like this floated all sorts of compositions into Schumann’s mind, as once from the “Flegeljahre” of Jean Paul. Thence came the “Scenes of Childhood,” where we listen to tales of foreign lands and men, and dream by the hearth, and play Blind-Man’s Buff, and then bend forward to hear, for the Poet is speaking. They are his miniature painting; of a gentle ineffable grace. Only a “Romantic” can love children thus. Schumann himself had a particular fondness for these little pieces, whose smallness was their very essence.
From Hoffmann also came the inspiration of the “Kreisleriana,” so called after Hoffmann’s tale of the eccentric Kapellmeister Kreisler. In 1834 Ludwig Böhner, the original of Kreisler, met Schumann. Once “as famous as Beethoven,” he jeered at men till they now jeer at him. In his Improvisations, here and there, we catch a glimpse of the old brilliancy; but elsewhere it is all dark and waste. “Had I time,” says Schumann, “I should like to write ana of Böhner to the papers. He himself has given me plenty of material. In his life there has been too much both of joy and of sorrow.” Here was a happy conjuncture for Schumann’s genius. A suggestive bit of life, and its poetic setting by Hoffmann, which had first appeared to him as literature, was transformed into music, and a work was born whose title, as so often, he borrowed from a fiction with whose contents it had but little connection, except as suggesting the groundwork. The “Kreisleriana” was his greatest work. The artist who brings life itself, gently transfigured by literary art, into musical emotion, never before or since became so clear a personality. The piano has advanced into the midst of a life-culture. A thousand threads run from all sides into this intimate web in which the whole lyrical devotion of a musical soul is interwoven. The piano is the orchestra of the heart. The joys and sorrows which are expressed in these pieces were never put into form with more sovereign power. For the external form Bach gave the impulse; for the content, Hoffmann. The garlanded roses of the middle section of No. 1, the shimmering blossoms of the “inverted” passage in the “Langsamer” of No. 2, the immeasurable depth of the emotions in the slow pieces (4 and 6), the bass unfettered by accent, in the final bars of No. 8, leading down to the final whisperings, are all among the happiest of inspirations.