Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 3.djvu/373

SCHUBERT. often are of other great musicians; the records of his life contain nothing to quote. His letters, some forty in all, are evidently forced from him. 'Heavens and Earth,' says he, 'it's frightful having to describe one's travels; I cannot write any more.' 'Dearest friend'—on another occasion—'you will be astonished at my writing: I am so myself.' Strange contrast to the many interesting epistles of Mozart and Mendelssohn, and the numberless notes of Beethoven! Beethoven was well read, a politician, thought much, and talked eagerly on many subjects. Mozart and Mendelssohn both drew; travelling was a part of their lives; they were men of the world, and Mendelssohn was master of many accomplishments. Schumann too, though a Saxon of Saxons, had travelled much, and while a most prolific composer, was a practised literary man. But Schubert has nothing of the kind to show. He not only never travelled out of Austria, but he never proposed it, and it is difficult to conceive of his doing so. To picture or work of art he very rarely refers. He expressed himself with such difficulty that it was all but impossible to argue with him. Besides the letters just mentioned, a few pages of diary and four or five poems are all that he produced except his music. In literature his range was wide indeed, but it all went into his music; and he was strangely uncritical. He seems to have been hardly able—at any rate he did not care—to discriminate between the magnificent songs of Goethe, Schiller, and Mayrhofer, the feeble domesticities of Kosegarten and Hölty, and the turgid couplets of the authors of his librettos. All came alike to his omnivorous appetite. But the fact is that, apart from his music, Schubert's life was little or nothing, and that is its most peculiar and most interesting fact. Music and music alone was to him all in all. It was not his principal mode of expression, it was his only one; it swallowed up every other. His afternoon walks, his evening amusements, were all so many preparations for the creations of the following morning. No doubt he enjoyed the country, but the effect of the walk is to be found in his music and his music only. He left, as we have said, no letters to speak of, no journal; there is no record of his ever having poured out his soul in confidence, as Beethoven did in the 'Will,' in the three mysterious letters to some unknown Beloved, or in his conversations with Bettina. He made no impression even on his closest friends beyond that of natural kindness, goodness, truth, and reserve. His life is all summed up in his music. No memoir of Schubert can ever be satisfactory, because no relation can be established between his life and his music; or rather, properly speaking, because there is no life to establish a relation with. The one scale of the balance is absolutely empty, the other is full to overflowing.

For when we come to the music we find everything that was wanting elsewhere. There we have fluency, depth acuteness and variety of expression, unbounded imagination, the happiest thoughts, never-tiring energy, and a sympathetic tenderness beyond belief. And these were the result of natural gifts and of the incessant practice to which they forced him; for it seems certain that of education in music—meaning by education the severe course of training in the mechanical portions of their art to which Mozart and Mendelssohn were subjected—he had little or nothing. As we have already mentioned, the two musicians who professed to instruct him, Holzer and Ruczicka, were so astonished at his ability that they contented themselves with wondering, and allowing him to go his own way. And they are responsible for that want of counterpoint which was an embarrassment to him all his life, and drove him, during his last illness, to seek lessons. [See p. 353 ]. What he learned, he learned mostly for himself, from playing in the Convict orchestra, from incessant writing, and from reading the best scores he could obtain; and, to use the expressive term of his friend Mayrhofer, remained a 'Naturalist' to the end of his life. From the operas of the Italian masters, which were recommended to him by Salieri, he advanced to those of Mozart, and of Mozart abundant traces appear in his earlier instrumental works. In 1814 Beethoven was probably still tabooed in the Convict; and beyond the Prometheus music, and the first two Symphonies, a pupil there would not be likely to encounter anything of his.

To speak first of the orchestral works.

The 1st Symphony dates from 1814 (his 18th year), and between that and 1818 we have five more. These are all much tinctured by what he was hearing and reading—Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, Beethoven (the last but slightly, for reasons just hinted at). Now and then—as in the second subjects of the first and last Allegros of Symphony 1, the first subject of the opening Allegro of Symphony 2, and the Andante of Symphony 5, the themes are virtually reproduced—no doubt unconsciously. The treatment is more his own, especially in regard to the use of the wind instruments, and to the 'working out' of the movements, where his want of education drives him to the repetition of the subject in various keys, and similar artifices, in place of contrapuntal treatment. In the slow movement and Finale of the Tragic Symphony, No. 4, we have exceedingly happy examples, in which, without absolutely breaking away from the old world, Schubert has revealed an amount of original feeling and an extraordinary beauty of treatment which already stamp him as a great orchestral composer. But whether always original or not in their subjects, no one can listen to these first six Symphonies without being impressed with their individuality. Single phrases may remind us of other composers, the treatment may often be traditional, but there is a fluency and continuity, a happy cheerfulness, an earnestness and want of triviality, and an absence of labour, which proclaim