to his interesting and in many places beautiful pianoforte
sonatas has no definite ground except the brilliance of his pianoforte
technique and the helplessness in matters of design (and
occasionally even of harmony) that drives him to violent and
operatic outbreaks.
Schubert also lends some colour to the opposition between romantic and classical by his weakness in large instrumental designs, but his sense of form was too vital for his defective training to warp his mind from the true classical spirit; and the new elements he introduced into instrumental music, though not ratified by concentration and unity of design, were almost always the fruits of true inspiration and never mere struggles to escape from a difficulty. His talent for purely instrumental music was incomparably higher than Weber’s, while that for stage-drama, as shown in the most ambitious of his numerous operas, Fierrabras, was almost nil. But he is the first and perhaps the greatest classical song writer. It was Beethoven’s work on a larger scale that so increased the possibilities of handling remote harmonic sequences and rich instrumental and rhythmic effects as to prepare for Schubert a world in which music, no less than literature, was full of suggestions for that concentrated expression of a single emotion which distinguishes true lyric art. And, whatever the defects of Schubert’s treatment of larger forms, his construction of small forms which can be compassed by a single melody or group of melodies is unsurpassable and is truly classical in spirit and result.
Schumann had neither Schubert’s native talent for larger form nor the irresponsible spirit which allowed Schubert to handle it uncritically. Nor had he the astounding lightness of touch and perfect balance of style with which Chopin controlled the most wayward imagination that has ever found expression in the pianoforte lyric. But he had a deep sense of melodic beauty, a mastery of polyphonic expression which for all its unorthodox tendency was second only to that of the greatest classics, and an epigrammatic fancy which enabled him to devise highly artistic forms of music never since imitated with success though often unintelligently copied. In his songs and pianoforte lyrics his romantic ideas found perfectly mature expression. Throughout his life he was inspired by a deep reverence which, while it prevented him from attempting to handle classical forms with a technique which he felt to be inadequate, at the same time impelled him as he grew older to devise forms on a large scale externally resembling them. The German lyric poetry, which he so perfectly set to music, strengthened him in his tendency to present his materials in an epigrammatic and antithetic manner; and, when he took to writing orchestral and chamber music, the extension of the principles of this style to the designing of large spaces in rigid sequence furnished him with a means of attaining great dignity and weight of climax in a form which, though neither classical nor strictly natural, was at all events more true in its relationship to his matter than that of the pseudo-classics such as Hummel or even Spohr. Towards the end of his short life, before darkness settled upon his mind, he rose perhaps to his greatest height as regards solemnity of inspiration, though none of his later works can compare with his early lyrics for artistic perfection. Be this as it may, his last choral works, especially the latter parts of Faust (which, unlike the first part, was written before his powers failed), show that the sense of beauty and polyphonic life with which he began his career was always increasing; and if he was led to substitute an artificial and ascetic for a natural and classical solution of the difficulties of the larger art-forms it was only because of his insight into artistic ideals which he felt to be beyond his attainment. He shared with Mendelssohn the inevitable misunderstanding of those contemporaries who grouped all music under one or other of the two heads, Classical and Romantic.
There is good reason to believe that Mendelssohn died before he had more than begun to show his power, though this may be denied by critics who have not thought of comparing Handel’s career up to the age at which Mendelssohn’s ceased. And his mastery, resting, like Handel’s, on the experience of a boyhood comparable only to Mozart’s, was far too easy to induce him as a critic to reconcile the idea of high talent with distressing intellectual and technical failure. This same mastery also tended to discredit his own work, both as performer and composer, in the estimation of those whose experience encouraged them to hope that imperfection and over-excitement were infallible signs of genius. And as his facility actually did co-operate with the tendencies of the times to deflect much of his work into pseudo-classical channels, while nevertheless his independence of form and style kept him at all times at a higher level of interest and variety than any mere pseudo-classic, it is not to be wondered that his reputation became a formidable object of jealousy to those apostles of new ideas who felt that their own works were not likely to make way against academic opposition unless they called journalism to their aid.
Nothing has more confused, hindered and embittered the careers of Wagner and Liszt and their disciples than the paper warfare which they did everything in their power to encourage. No doubt it had a useful purpose, and, as nothing affords a greater field for intrigue than the production of operas, it is at least possible that the gigantic and unprecedentedly expensive works of Wagner might not even at the present day have obtained a hearing if Wagner himself had been a tactful and reticent man and his partisans had all been discreet lovers and practisers of art. As to Wagner’s achievement there is now no important difference of opinion. It has survived all attacks as the most monumental result music has achieved with the aid of other arts. Its antecedents must be sought in many very remote regions. The rediscovery, by Mendelssohn, of the choral works of Bach, after a century of oblivion, revealed the possibilities of polyphonic expression in a grandeur which even Handel rarely suggested; and inspired Mendelssohn with important ideas in the designing of oratorios as wholes. The complete fusion of polyphonic method with external and harmonic design had, under the same stimulus, been carried a step further than Beethoven by means of Schumann’s more concentrated harmonic and lyric expression. That wildest of all romanticists, Berlioz, though he had less polyphonic sense than any composer who ever before or since attained distinction, nevertheless revealed important new possibilities in his unique imagination in orchestral colour. The breaking down of the barriers that check continuity in classical opera was already indicated by Weber, in whose Euryanthe the movements frequently run one into the other, while at least twenty different themes are discoverable in the opera, recurring, like the Wagnerian leit-motif, in apt transformation and logical association with definite incidents and persons.
But many things undreamed of by Weber were necessary to complete the breakdown of the classical barriers; for the whole pace of musical motion had to be emancipated from the influence of instrumental ideas. This was the most colossal reformation ever attempted by a man of real artistic balance; and even the undoubted, though unpolished, dramatic genius shown in Wagner’s libretti (the first in which a great composer and dramatist are one) is but a small thing in comparison with the musical problems which Wagner overcomes with a success immeasurably outweighing any defects his less perfect literary mastery allowed to remain in his dramatic structure and poetic diction. Apart from the squabbles of Wagnerian and anti-Wagnerian journalism, the chief difficulty of his supporters and antagonists really lay in this question of the pace of the music and the consequent breadth of harmony and design. The opening of the Walküre, in which, before the curtain rises, the sound of driving rain is reproduced by very simple sequences that take sixteen long bars to move a single step, does not, as instrumental music, compare favourably for terseness and variety with the first twenty bars of the thunderstorm in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, where at least four different incidents faithfully portray not only the first drops of rain and the distant thunder, but all the feelings of depression and apprehension which they inspire, besides carrying the listener rapidly through three different keys in chromatic sequence. But Beethoven’s storm
