Page:A Dictionary of Music and Musicians vol 3.djvu/588

576 illustrate peculiarly in the history of music is the transition from the use of the idea, as shown in Beethoven's Sonatas on a grand and richly-developed scale, to the close and intensely emotional treatment of ideas in a lyrical manner, which has as yet found its highest exponent in Schumann. In this process Schubert seems to stand midway—still endeavouring to conform to sonata ways, and yet frequently overborne by the invincible potency of the powers his own imagination has called up. The tendency is further illustrated by the exquisite beauty of some of the smaller and more condensed movements, which lose nothing by being taken out of the sonatas; being, like many of Schumann's, specimens of intense concentration in short space, the fruit of a single flash of deep emotion. Among the longer movements, the one which is most closely unified is the first of the A minor, op. 143, in which a feature of the first subject is made to preponderate conspicuously all through, manifestly representing the persistence of a special quality of feeling through the varying phases of a long train of thought. Like many other movements, it has a strong dramatic element, but more under appropriate control than usual.

As a whole, though illustrating richly many of the tendencies of modern music, the Sonatas cannot be taken as representing Schubert's powers as a composer of instrumental music so satisfactorily as his Quartets, his String Quintet, and some of his finest Symphonies. In these he often rose almost to the highest point of musical possibility. And this serves further to illustrate the fact that since Beethoven the tendency has been to treat the sonata-form with the fresh opportunities afforded by combinations of instruments, rather than on the old lines of the solo sonata.

Two other composers of sonatas of Beethoven's time require notice. These are Woelfl and Hummel. The former chiefly on account of his once celebrated sonata called 'Ne plus ultra,' in which he showed some of the devices of technique which he was considered to have invented—such as passages in thirds and sixths, and ingenious applications of the shake. The matter is poor and vapid, and as throwing light upon anything except his powers as a player, is worthless. Its very title condemns it, for Woelfl had the advantage of being Beethoven's junior; and it is astonishing how, by the side of the genuine difficulty of Beethoven's masterpieces, such a collection of tricks could ever have been dignified, even by the supposition of being particularly difficult. It seems impossible that such work should have had any influence upon genuinely musical people; but the sonata has all the signs of a useful piece for second-rate popular occasions; for which the variations on 'Life let us cherish' would doubtless be particularly effective.

Hummel in comparison with Woelfl was a giant, and certainly had preeminent gifts as a pianoforte-player. Like Weber he had an aptitude for inventing effects and passages, but he applied them in a different manner. He was of that nature which cultivates the whole technical art of speech till able to treat it with a certainty which has all the effect of mastery, and then instead of using it to say something, makes it chiefly serviceable to show off the contents of his finger répertoire. However, his technique is large and broad, full of sound and brilliancy, and when the works were first produced and played by himself they must have been extremely astonishing. His facility of speech is also wonderful, but his ideas were for the most part old-fashioned, even when he produced them—for it must not be forgotten that he was eight years younger than Beethoven and twenty-six younger than Clementi. The spirit which seems to rule him is the consciousness of a pianist before an audience, guided by the chances of display. His modulations are free and bold, but they are often superfluous, because the ideas are not on the level of intensity or broad freedom which necessitates or even justifies them. He probably saw that modulation was a means of effect, but did not realise that there is a ratio between the qualities of subject and the development of the movement that springs from it. From this it will be obvious that his sonatas are not written in the mood to produce works that are musically important. He had the very finest possible opportunities through living in Mozart's house during his most impressionable days, and the fruit is sufficiently noticeable in the clearness with which he distributes his structural elements, and in much of his manner of expressing himself; but he had not the inventive gift for musical ideas, which contact and even familiar intercourse with great masters seems inadequate to supply. The survival of traits characteristic of earlier times is illustrated by some of his slow movements, in which he brought the most elaborate forces of his finished technique to serve in the old style of artificial adagio, where there is a hyper-elaborated grace at every corner, and a shake upon every note that is long enough; and if a chord be suitable to rest upon for a little, it is adorned with quite a collection of ingenious finger exercises, artificially manipulated scales and arpeggios, arid the like contrivances; which do not serve to decorate anything worthy of the honour, but stand on their own merits. There are occasional traits of expression and strokes of force in the sonatas, but the technique of the pianist preponderates excessively over the invention of the composer. At the same time the right and masterly use of the resources of an instrument is not by any means a matter of small moment in art, and Hummel's is right and masterly in a very remarkable degree.

After the early years of the present century, the sonata, in its conventional sense of instrumental work for a solo or at most for two instruments, occupies a smaller and decreasing space in the domain of music. Great composers have paid it proportionately very little attention, and the few examples they afford have rather an