CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



whole of his works by an obstinate adherence to 

 a chromatic mannerism. ' He never leaves a tone 

 undivided if he can help it ; never uses an essential 

 note when he can put an altered one in its place.' 



Franz Schubert, who was born when Beethoven 

 was in his prime, and survived the great master by 

 only a single year, was the musician par excellence 

 of that revival of the Volkslied in Germany which 

 took place towards the end of the last and the 

 beginning of the present centuries. He has writ- 

 ten numerous operas (many unfinished, few now 

 known), much delightful pianoforte and chamber 

 music, and several symphonies, as to which musi- 

 cians now seem willing to endorse even the most 

 enthusiastic verdict of Schumann ; but his greatest 

 works are his songs. It is owing to his genius 

 primarily that the song has taken its present posi- 

 tion as a work of art ; and the attainment of this 

 position by it ' marks an important step towards 

 the ultimate amalgamation of poetry and music.' * 

 Schubert was both bashful and indolent He was 

 neither remarkable as a performer on any instru- 

 ment, nor as a conductor, and all these things 

 combined to prevent his fame from spreading 

 during his lifetime beyond a very limited circle. 

 The music-publishers, too, evinced an unusually 

 great reluctance to take up his songs, even after 

 many of them were perfectly well known in Vienna 

 drawing-rooms. They would not even purchase 

 the Erlking itself, but left it to be published at 

 the expense of some of his friends. Schubert was 

 equally great in every form of song, whether he 

 arranged the music in verses like the poem, or 

 varied it throughout (as, for instance, in The 

 Wanderer), to suit the words ; or whether he 

 wrote what Hueffer calls the ' declamatory song,' 

 a highly poetic form, nearly approaching to that 

 constantly used by Wagner. He lived only to the 

 age of thirty-one, and was buried in Vienna, near 

 the grave of Beethoven, his tombstone bearing the 

 too true inscription (for his latest works were his 

 finest)' Rich in what he gave ; richer in what he 

 promised.' 



Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the idol for so 

 many years of Northern Europe, began to com- 

 pose when Spohr's popularity was at its height. 

 But the two could hardly exist together, and 

 Mendelssohn's fresh and vigorous harmonies ex- 

 tinguished those of Spohr as daylight extinguishes 

 a candle. He has left to us compositions in every 

 branch of music except the dramatic, but prob- 

 ably his fame will, ultimately rest in the main 

 upon his oratorios. Here, he was no unworthy 

 successor of Bach and Handel. He did not 

 slavishly imitate their forms, but adapted them 

 to the larger ideas of musical expression which 

 had grown up since their time. The alternating j 

 recitative, aria, chorus, and so on, are found in i 

 St Paul and Elijah, as before : they are not here 

 inconsistent with the highest development of the 

 subject, as in the opera, but penitential confes- 

 sions no longer are set to the principal subjects of 

 lively fugues, nor does religious emotion express 

 itself by a series of roulades. The composer's 

 object has been to make one whole of the words 

 and music together the object of all the later 

 German vocal and choral writers. Mendels- 

 sohn's orchestral works are familiar to all concert- 

 goers in this country. It has been not untruly 



718 



* Hueffer 



said of them that a certain lack of 'emotion, 

 pathos, and tragical grandeur' may probably 

 enough be due to the absence from the young 

 composer's life of the trials and strugglings through 

 which so many musicians have had to battle their 

 way in life. The ever popular pianoforte Songs 

 without Words, although not in themselves very 

 remarkable, have yet done very important and 

 useful work in familiarising the mass of people, 

 whose position debars them from hearing orchestral 

 music frequently, with poetic instrumental music, 

 and so preparing the way for the appreciation of 

 Schumann, and afterwards of the music-drama 

 ' of the future.' 



Before touching on this much-vexed question, 

 there is one more musician to be mentioned, a 

 man whose music has been most influential in 

 forming public opinion in this country, and yet 

 whose own position in reference to his art it 

 is very difficult to define Robert Schumann. 

 Schumann was intended to be a lawyer ; but after 

 much entreaty, and after he had spent two years 

 in pretending to study law at Leipsic and Heidel- 

 berg, his mother reluctantly consented to his 

 giving himself up wholly to music. He was then 

 twenty, and commenced studying the pianoforte 

 with extra vigour, to make up for lost time. Had 

 things gone on smoothly, he might have become 

 a great pianist and musical critic, and nothing 

 more ; but fortunately for the world, he so injured 

 the sinews of one of his fingers by the use of a 

 mechanical apparatus he had devised for increas- 

 ing the flexibility of his finger-joints, as to render 

 it almost useless. Compelled to give up all 

 thought of becoming a performer, he turned his 

 attention in earnest to the study of harmony and 

 composition, which until then he had disliked and 

 neglected. His earlier compositions were all for 

 the pianoforte. Some of them are now, happily, 

 too well known to need description, but the rise 

 of their popularity has been as recent as it has 

 been rapid. His songs, although comparatively 

 few in number, yet rival those of Schubert in 

 poetic beauty. They were mostly written in the 

 year of his marriage with Clara Wieck, 1840. His 

 later and larger compositions consist of sym- 

 phonies and chamber music ; two cantatas, Para- 

 dise and the Peri, and the Pilgrimage of the Rose; 

 one opera, Genevieve, a setting of Goethe's Faust 

 and Byron's Manfred, &c. His choral com- 

 positions obtained foot-hold in this country first 

 greatly through the exertions of Herr Manns of 

 the Crystal Palace, a gentleman to whom, for this 

 and other things, all lovers of music in England 

 are deeply indebted. His symphonies, especially 

 that in C, are wonderfully beautiful, both in sub- 

 ject-matter and in instrumentation. It is scarcely 

 possible to understand how anything can ever 

 have been said against them ; but like so many 

 other precious works, they had at first to with- 

 stand a shower of abusive adjectives from Philis- 

 tine critics, of whom the majority have now found 

 out the greatness of Schumann, and reserve their 

 adjectives for Wagner ; their capacity for giving 

 any opinion whatever being precisely the same in 

 both cases, and not easily discoverable in either. 

 Much of Schumann's music is destined to be long 

 and increasingly popular, yet when the history of 

 the development of musical art in the igth century 

 comes to be written, it will probably be found that 

 his great function has been the familiarising of 



