The Mentor: Famous Composers, Vol. 1, Num. 41, Serial No. 41

MENDELSSOHN’S SONGS AND CHORAL WORKS

While the songs of Mendelssohn enjoyed for a generation as wide popular favor as his “Songs without Words,” it is not likely that they will ever recover their lost ground,—ground which they lost because, though tuneful, most of them are superficial. There is no doubt a good deal of “small talk” in many of Mendelssohn’s works, and small talk has no enduring value. But while the songs of this master are now neglected, his choral works, “St. Paul” and “Elijah,” still awe and thrill modern audiences, because in them, as in the oratorios of Handel and Bach, religious fervor is expressed in terms of noble music.

It is a curious and somewhat paradoxical fact that, while Mendelssohn’s personal sympathies were on the whole rather with the conservative classicists in the matter of form than with the modern progressives, by far the greatest of his works, particularly for orchestra, are those in which he heeds the modern craving for realism and program music, as illustrated in his “Fingal’s Cave” overture, the “Scotch” symphony, and the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” music. The overture to this is one of the marvels of music; for it is amazingly original from every point of view, though written by him when he was only seventeen years old.

It is commonly assumed that Italy is the land of melody; but Theodore Thomas used to maintain, and rightly, that the prince of melodists was the Austrian, Franz Schubert. Tunes flowed from his brain as spontaneously as water flows from a gushing well. He slept with his spectacles on, so as to lose no time when he jumped out of bed to jot down the melodies that came to him like inspirations from above. While he read a poem, the music suitable for it often sprang from his brain, Minerva-like.

SCHUBERT, GREATEST OF MELODISTS

It is this spontaneity of Schubert’s melodies that explains their vogue, their universal popularity. Strange to say, during his life (which, to be sure, was pathetically short) his wonderful songs were, with a few exceptions, neglected, partly because with his melodies there were associated harmonies and modulations which to us are ravishing, but which to his contemporaries were “music of the future.” The shrill dissonance of the child’s cry when he thinks the Erlking is seizing him in the death-grip was as revolutionary and as far ahead of the times as anything Wagner or Liszt ever wrote. It was Liszt, by the way, who directed the world’s attention to the marvels of Schubert’s songs by playing them in his matchless way on the piano. Seeing how they moved audiences, the singers then took them up, and more and more convinced the world that among song writers Schubert was indeed king.

It is one of the strangest facts in musical history that the great masters who came before Schubert—while some of them (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) wrote a considerable number of songs—reserved their best inspirations for their operas, symphonies, and sonatas. Schubert was the first who was willing to put his best into a “mere song,” and that helps to explain his appeal to all music lovers.

SCHUBERT’S INSTRUMENTAL PIECES

While he put of his best into his songs, there was plenty of it left for his instrumental pieces. Rubinstein considered his short pieces for piano even more marvelous than his songs, and among his symphonies there are two (the “Unfinished,” in two movements, and the ninth) that are as popular with high-class audiences as the best of Beethoven’s, which they even surpass in richness and novelty of orchestral coloring and in variety and novelty of modulation, while their melodic charm is as great as that of his songs.

SCHUMANN, CHIEF OF ROMANTICISTS

While Schubert belongs to the romantic school, he did not follow all of its principal methods. In so far as he wrote chiefly short pieces and allowed them to crystallize into forms of their own (the variety of form in his songs is astonishing), he is a romanticist; but in writing instrumental pieces he did not associate poetic titles or stories with them. In this respect Schumann went far beyond him in the direction of realism and program music, and for this reason he is considered the most thoroughly romantic of the German masters.

In his early period, in particular, he seldom wrote a piece without suggesting in the title a poetic basis for it. It was his custom to issue his pieces in groups, with a general title for the group, like “Papillons” (Butterflies), “Kinderscenen,” “Faschingsschwank,” “Kreisleriana,” and a special title for each piece in the group, suggesting its message.

To many lovers of Schumann these early pieces are still the dearest. He was more thoroughly romantic when he wrote them than he was in later years, when he came too much under the influence of Mendelssohn and the classical masters, and at the same time grew less original and spontaneous.

It is not difficult for those who have read the romantic and pathetic story of his life to connect the waning of his originality with the gradual coming on of the mental disease to which he finally succumbed. Fortunately the bulk of his works, including four admirable symphonies and some excellent chamber music,¹ notably the glorious quintet for piano and strings, was written before his creative power was weakened.

It has been said that Mendelssohn would have made five pieces with the material Schumann used for one. This highly concentrated quality of his music makes it more difficult to understand, and explains why his contemporaries did not appreciate him as they did Mendelssohn. It also helps to explain the better “keeping qualities” of Schumann’s music.

While Mendelssohn’s songs, for instance, have, as just stated, virtually disappeared from recital programs, Schumann’s are more popular than ever, and seldom today is a program printed without one or a group of them. The best, by far, of his songs are among the hundred he wrote during the year when he married Clara Wieck, after a long contest with her father for the possession of her heart, though it had belonged to him for years. The popularity of Schumann’s songs is due largely to their being the expression of this ardent love. Women have not yet written immortal songs; but they have inspired many of them.