The Poet of Moods SCHUBERT

Radio Record, Volume V, Issue 22, 11 December 1931, Page 11

The Poet of Moods SCHUBERT

By

I. W. N.

SULLIVAN

. . . . « he is essentially to be regarded as a sensitive and transfiguring magic mirror. His function is to reflect life, not to understand it or. to justify it. Schubert will be the subject of a broadcast from 3YA, Wednesday, December 9.

CHUBERT is, above all musicians, the poet of moods. Of all.the really great musicians he is the most sensitive to impressions coming from without. He is for ever giving expression to something that has been aroused in his soul by an external stimulus. That is why he ‘is essentially a lyric poet, incapable of the prolonged and logical development of the epic. Beethoven gave expression to the development of the inner life. His work reveals a profound nature of extraordinary depth and integrity, capable of an organic growth uninfluenced by. what he called "the storms of circumstance." Mozart, although he was, later in his life, influenced by experience, was for the most part, as independent of the teachings of life as is a mathematician. The world he. created has its own laws and exists in its own right. It is not a copy of the world of experience, nor does it express the composer’s reactions to it. It is as ideal as, and even more beautiful than, the world of pure mathematics But Schubert was at the mercy of every wind that blew. A storm, the sudden vision of a field of flowers, a girl’s sigh, the solemn pulse of the ocean, were events that Schubert accepted. with a pure sensitivity almost unequalled, and were immediately transmuted, by his rich and delicate nature, into sound, Hence the fact that he was, from’ the beginning, primarily a song-writer, and that he wrote his songs in extraordinary. abundance and with extraordinary rapidity. A song expresses, for the most part, a mood. It seizes a transient emotion on the wing, as it were. A great song-writer must _ be, above all, rich in. responses. We may say, indeed, that his ‘emotions must be easy and fluent rather than profound. It is not his task to explore an emotion, as Beethoven did, to

grasp it in all its complexity, to make it ever more profound. This requires a degree of profundity, and a power of development, for which the song is an altogether inadequate medium, The function of a song-writer is to present an emotion in its immediacy, without pondering upon its significance. To this end the song-writer must have a most delicate and responsive nature. He is likely, indeed, to be comparatively lacking in depth and "balance." His inner life will be extraordinarily rich and varied, but it is not likely to show a steady development. ALLUCINATED and al--sorbed as he is by the lovely and distracting surfaces of things, he is not likely to develop a philosophy of life nc: to make his career as an artist a step by ste}. progress toward some distant goal. He : likely, in fact, to seem something of a dreamei

-even a drifter. The value of his worl will depend on the range and acuteness of his sensibilities, and on his power to convey his impressions. Essentially he is to be regarded as a sensitive and transfiguring magic mirror. His function is to reflect life, not to understand, it or to justify it. We find in Schubert all the characteristics, of the great song-writer. To his contem-, poraries he seemed to lack strength of character, ; to be incapable of a fixed purpose. His lack of material success they attributed to his! laziness, his shiftlessness. They regarded his: extreme sociability as almost a vice. Schubert knew nothing of loneliness. He was always surrounded by a group of friends, writers, painters, musicians. He spent much of his time in taverns, talking and hearing talk. He loved going to fresh places and meeting fresh people. He was eager, intensely alive, avidi of impressions. And, indeed, these changing; impressions, these varied emotions, were the; food on which Schubert the artist lived. y When life seemed flat he would go to aj} wine cellar and there spend the little money’ he had on drink. The drink excited him; it' enabled him to dream and see visions; it made life worth living again. These characteristics are what we should expect from his music. No artist ever lived whose sensibilities were so delicate and numerous. In the hundreds of songs that Schubert has written we find expressed a really amazing variety of impressions. It seems that he could seize and body forth any mood, however elusive, however transient. His emotional nature stirred to the slightest impulse; it was, as it were, adjusted with infinite delicacy. And his work suffers, of course, from the disadvantages that attend such facility. He was incapable of the logical expansion of an idea, of the profound and unflinching development of an emotion. He was incapable of the intensity of realisation, and also of the coherence, displayed in suck a work as the slow movement of Beethoven’s "Ninth Symphony," for example. It is for this reason that Schubert’s large scale compositions, although they contain some of his most wonderful music, do not exhibit the mastery we find in his songs. Schubert was incapable of a-really sustained flight. But although Schubert could not (Concluded on page 30.),

Schubert

_. (Continued from page 11.) develop a theme,. in the Beethoven inanner, he could always invent a fresh one. The wealth of melody to be found in his music is unequalled. It is characteristic of the Schubert type that such.artists are.great only in their art. They are passive rather than active, reflective rather than forceful. As a result, they lack. "personality,’ In ‘everything outside music Schubert’s ideas, like his character and appearance, were entirely undistintinguished. ' His ‘musings. on life, as exhibited in his diaries and letters, are sentimental, romantic, imitative. He was modest, but his modesty seems to have-been the result of shyness as much as of anything. It is inconceivable that a man of Sehubert’s genius should not have known who: and what he. was. But it suited his placid, passive temperament rather to. have his claims ignored than. to assert them. Nevertheless, there were limits to his indulgence. He would rise up in his wrath when he felt, that -the god in him was really being blasphemed, ~~ Bauernfield relates. that.on one occasion, when the members of a famous Viennese orchestra. in. the course of a dispute with Schubert, claimed that they were as; good. artists as he was. Schubert shouted: "Artists! Artists! You. call yourselves artists!.. One of you bites between his teeth a wooden tube, the other blows out his cheeks playing the bugle! Do you call that art? It’s just a piece of mechanical trickery that-brings in pence. Fiddlers, wind-blowers! That’s what you all are, Nothing else. But Iam an artist. I! I am Schubert-Franz Schubert, whom all the world knows, who has done things that are great, beautiful; things of which you have no conception; and I shall do more beautiful things. For I am not-just a mere bungling country composer, as the stupid newspapers think. Let the fools talk as they like." But. although Schubert ~ knew who and what he was, he realised his, shortcomings as an artist. He was a contemporary of. Beethoven, and all his life was overshadowed by that mighty genius. And Schubert was particularly fitted to appreciate Beethoven, It was in virtue. of his very weaknesses that Schubert, more. than most, could appreciate the profundity

of Beethoven’s conceptions and the masterliness of his grasp. Beethoven never. had.a more ardent worshipper thay. Schubert. At the very beginning, as 2 mere boy, When Schubert confided to, S§paun his ambition that jhe would one:day write music, he added, ‘But who; dare attempt anything. after Beethoyen?" When. he was.a. famous. composer his consciousness of the ‘gulf between himself and Beethoven remaineb roy AS he once explained to. the. author, K. J. Braun, "Beethoven can do everything, but we cannot understand everything, and much water will be carried away by the Danube before people arrive at a complete understanding of what this man has created. Not only is he the most sublime and prolific of all composers; but he is the most coursgeous; He is equally strong in dramatic as in, .epical music, in lyrical as in the prosaic; in short, there’s. nothing he cannot do." This feeling, admirable. as. it appears, was in some danger of. becoming ‘an’ obsession. It prevented Schubert from becoming intimate with Bee: thoven,, an’ intimacy which, when he ‘came to know Schubert’s. work, Bee‘thoven would have welcomed, and which would certainly have been to the adyantageé of both men, and it may have hindered Schubert in manifesting that self-assertion .so necessary to success. It-may have induced what is called in modern jargon; an "inferiority complex.’ It is significant, in this connection, that Schubert, on his deathbed, rejected his brother’s attempts to console him -with the remark, "No, it is not Beethoven who is lying here!" It is customary to say that Schubert led an unhappy life, but there is no evidence that he had‘ any. profound sorrows. He was. chronically hard up, for his music was sufficiently unconventional for. publishers ‘to be shy of it. He tried once or twice to get musical appointments, but had not — sufficient influence to succeed. He lacked the energy and _ practical sense ‘tO engineer public concerts of his works: He seemed, indeed, fairly well content with private performances in the houses of his friends. He was. the most unenvious of men, and almost wholly lacking in ambition of the worldly sort. But he was ambitious as an artist; he always wanted to 0 better. And he: worked extremely hard. His real life was-in his musical im-

agination. For the rest he was an ordinary person who led a pretty ordinary bohemian life. He was used to poverty. His father was a schoolmaster, and Schubert. himself was an issistant schoolmaster for a time. But he quite deliberately chose the chances and troubles of an insecure bohemian existence rather ‘than endure that slavery.: He was often hungry, and he was probably never free from anxiety about money. But it would be absurd to pretend that he was brought to an early death (he died at thirty-one) by the indifference or hostility of the world. He died, as a matter of. fact, from eating. bad fish. It is not possible to see Schubert in his life.’ His amours, his relations with his friends, his talk, his letters, are all quite unrevealing. The real Schubert, the Schubert who ranks among the few great musical geniuses of the world, was no more apparent in his life than in his appearance. Here. is a description of his appearance, that Kobald has guthered from accounts wf his contemporaries: "He was short, his face round, fat, and puffy-‘Schwan-merl,’ his friends nicknamed him. His forehead was low, his nose of the snub variety, his dark hair extremely curly. which gave him a somewhat nigger like appearance. He always wore eyeglasses even in the night, so as to be ready to compose directly he woke in the morning. His expression was, as 4 whole, neither intellectual, distinguished, nor genial, Only when he was composing did his face change and become interesting, almost demoniac. Then his eyes would flash with the fire of genius. ‘Those who knew Schubert intimately,’ writes his friend, Josef von Spaun, ‘saw how intensely his creations moved him, and how often they were born in pain. When one beheld him in the morning at work, with flashing eyes and glowing cheeks, another being altugether from his usual self, one received an impression not easily forgotten.’ " He was born in 1797 and died in 1828.

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