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

nd to that of no other composer. His short piano pieces known as “Songs without Words” in particular enjoyed unbounded popularity, thanks to their tunefulness, which all could appreciate. The thing was overdone, and as in all such cases the inevitable reaction came, these pieces being looked on now as mere sentimental trifles. Paderewski, however, has shown that if played in the modern way they appeal as much as ever to music lovers. He has the audacity to use the _tempo rubato_, which Mendelssohn would have none of; but there is reason to think he would like it as used by Paderewski.

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,[A] notably the glorious quintet for piano and strings, was written before his creative power was weakened.

[A] Chamber music is the term used for pieces played by a group (“ensemble”) of instrumentalists too small to be called an orchestra. Most frequently these pieces are for a few players of string instruments (quartets, quintets, etc.), with or without piano. Program music is music that seeks to depict or suggest a thunderstorm, the babbling of a brook, or any incident, scene, or poetic fancy associated with it by the composer.

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.

LISZT, THE MANY-SIDED

Richard Wagner called Liszt “the greatest musician of all the ages.” He certainly was the greatest pianist of them all, unequaled to this day; but he was very much more than that. In all departments of music, except the opera and chamber music, he created a new epoch or opened new and glorious vistas; and his influence on the musicians of his time and those who came after him was as great as Wagner’s.

The strangest thing in Liszt’s extraordinary career is that when he was at the height of his fame as a pianist, and fabulous sums were offered him for recitals, he renounced his instrument, so far as concerts were concerned. For charity he would play occasionally, and for his friends and his pupils; but not for the paying public. This happened thirty-nine years before he died.

Various motives prompted this action, one of them being that he preferred creative work. Thus it came about that the loss of his contemporaries in not hearing him play was our gain in enabling us to hear his songs, his piano pieces, his choral and orchestral compositions. Many of these are still “music of the future”; but their day is dawning.

At piano recitals, in America as in Europe, no composer’s pieces are now more favored than Liszt’s. Pianists usually place them at the end of the program; not only because they make a brilliant close, but because they prevent the audience from leaving before the end, as few or none want to miss these pieces.

THE DYNAMIC EFFECTS OF LISZT

The reasons why the public is so enamoured of Liszt are not far to seek. While Chopin is, as Rubinstein called him, “the soul of the pianoforte,” because he makes it speak its own language as no one had made it speak before, Liszt’s piano music is no less idiomatic, and at the same time it is even richer in color and more varied in tonal power, or what musicians call “dynamic effects.” Not satisfied with the piano as such, Liszt converted it into a miniature orchestra, enabling the pianist to thunder or to whisper in tones not previously heard from that instrument.

Much of Liszt’s music, for both piano and orchestra, is program music: it tells its story in tones. In “St. Francis Walking on the Waves” one actually hears the waters, as in the orchestral “Mazeppa” one hears the galloping of the wild steed and the groans of the man tied on its back. The public likes music with such pictorial associations; but it would never have taken to Liszt’s program music as it has were it not at the same time good as music pure and simple,--interesting melodically, rhythmically, and harmonically.

Musicians, as well as the public, admire in Liszt’s orchestral works the same variety of new colors that enrich his piano music. They honor him for having created new forms of music in his symphonic poems, differing from symphonies as Wagner’s music-dramas differ from opera.

What the public likes best of all in Liszt’s works, however, is his Hungarian rhapsodies, in which the gipsy songs of love and war and every phase of life are “pianized” with marvelous art, one of the greatest charms of which is that it is absolutely unfettered and unconventional,--a real improvisation, like the playing of gipsies themselves.

BRAHMS, THE CONSERVATIVE

Admirers of Liszt, and full-blooded Wagnerites, rarely care much for Brahms; while, conversely, the Brahmites look somewhat haughtily on those two composers, and all the other “progressives,” except Schumann, who is exempted, not only because there is a certain affinity between his music and that of their idol, but because he discovered Brahms, proclaiming him the “musical Messiah.” Brahms himself once signed a “protest” aimed against the Wagner-Liszt school; yet his bark was worse than his bite, for his works here and there show the influence of Wagner, and he liked some of Wagner’s operas.

Johannes Brahms is the god of the conservatives. He aimed, half-consciously, to carry on the traditions of Beethoven, and he had no use for modern realism and program music. His symphonies--the most delightful of which is the second--are marked simply numbers one, two, three, and four; and for his piano pieces he has no poetic titles after the manner of Schumann: they make their appeal by their own beauty, unadorned--and they have won a large audience of admirers.

Some of his songs everybody likes. They are on most programs, and are often redemanded. The music goes well with the words, and they are usually written most effectively for the voice, which makes the singers favor them too. But it is in his chamber music--trios, quartets, or sextets, for strings, with or without piano--that Brahms’ genius is most convincing. In this department he has composed many masterworks.

In general, it may be said that, while Brahms is melodically less spontaneous than some of the other masters, he excels most of them in the variety and originality of his rhythms.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING--“Chopin: The Man and His Music,” James Huneker; “The Life of Chopin,” Frederick Niecks; Article in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, “Mendelssohn,” S. S. Stratton; “Romantic Composers,” S. G. Mason; “Songs and Song Writers,” H. T. Finck; “Life of Schumann Told in His Letters,” May Herbert; “Franz Liszt,” James Huneker; “Life of Johannes Brahms,” Florence May; Articles on the Composers in Grove’s Dictionary.

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Monograph Number One in The Mentor Reading Course

In Franz Liszt the lamp of genius burned brightly, and it lighted many halls in the Temple of Music. He was the most versatile of great musicians. He was the supreme pianoforte virtuoso. He was a conductor and champion of Wagner’s “music of the future,” teacher of great pianists, writer on music and musicians, and a composer of pianoforte pieces, songs, symphonic orchestral pieces, cantatas, masses, psalms, and oratorios.

He was born in Raiding, Hungary, October 22, 1811. At an early age, through the financial aid of a Hungarian magnate, he began a life of study. He first played in public at the age of eleven, and at thirteen made a tour through Switzerland, Paris, and the French provinces. He also went to England. At fifteen he was teaching and spending much of his time reading the religious, political, and literary works of his time. He was especially interested in the Saint Simonists and the romantic mysticism of Enfantin and the teachings of Abbe Lamennais. Defying public censure, he played compositions of Beethoven and Weber, a daring thing in those days.

His development as a virtuoso began in 1831, when Paganini, the famous violinist, first went to Paris. The success of Chopin, together with Paganini’s art, inspired him to practise. He transcribed many pieces, with a view to getting the effect of Paganini’s violin caprices on the piano, and perfect his own technic. He transcribed Berlioz’s “Symphonic Fantastique,” which ultimately led to the composition of his Symphonic Poems.

A few years later (1835) he met Comtesse d’Agoult, whose pen name was Daniel Stern, a friend and would-be rival to George Sand. Their friendship was world famous, and it exerted a great influence on the life and art of Liszt.

A patent of nobility was conferred upon him by the Emperor of Austria, and a sword of honor, from the magnates of Hungary, was presented to him in the name of the nation in 1840.

He then made a concert tour of all the leading cities in Europe, and made a great deal of money, much of which he gave to charity. In 1845 he completed the Beethoven Statue at Bonn, at his own expense, as the funds for this memorial had been accumulating very slowly.

Immediately following this period he began an active writing career, during which he wrote articles of permanent value on the early operas of Wagner and the work of Berlioz. He was one of the earliest supporters of Wagner, and remained loyal to him through life. He wanted to found a school of composers as well as pianists, and started a movement at Weimar which resulted in a private production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” and “Tannhäuser,” as well as many pieces of Schumann, Weber, Schubert, Berlioz, and others.

Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein was collaborating with him at this time on many works. She was desirous of marrying the musician, who did not care to be joined to her, and to escape the match he retired to Rome, where he was ordained in 1865 by Cardinal Hohenlohe, and joined the Franciscan order. He received pupils gratis, and taught for several months of each year at the Hungarian Conservatory, Budapest. The last ten years of his life were spent at Bayreuth, where he died July 31, 1886.

PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION ILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 1, No. 41, SERIAL No. 41 COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY

Monograph Number Two in The Mentor Reading Course