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

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In Category - Composers

Authors: Finck, Henry T., 1854-1926 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2015 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Composers Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

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Words 9,980

Reading time 44 min

Text sections 7

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #49921

Henry T. Finck profiles six composers—Chopin, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms—in a 1913 Mentor issue, emphasizing Polish influence on piano music, Mendelssohn's precocious output, and Schubert's minimal formal training.

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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

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The Mentor issue on famous composers opens with a striking claim: Poland, not Italy or Germany, revolutionized piano music. Henry T. Finck immediately foregrounds Chopin as the embodiment of this revolution, describing him as “the soul of the piano” and tracing the Polish roots of his polonaises and mazurkas. The text blends national identity with musical form, arguing that Chopin’s pieces unite “the raciness of the soil with the qualities of his own creative genius.”

Finck’s method is to pair biographical anecdote with evaluative commentary. In the Mendelssohn monograph, he highlights the composer’s astonishing productivity at age eleven—sixty pieces in one year—and the famous recovery of a lost score from memory. The Schubert section, by contrast, stresses the composer’s lack of formal instruction, framing his career as a story of “gloom and sorrow.” These contrasts in origin, training, and temperament shape the issue’s underlying argument about genius and national character.

Nationality as a Musical Argument

Finck repeatedly uses national origin to explain compositional style. In the Chopin section, he insists that despite French accents in the composer’s name, Chopin was “as thoroughly Polish in all his sympathies as his mother.” The polonaises and mazurkas are presented as hybrids of aristocratic ceremony and folk dance, “artistically blended” to create a new kind of piano music. Finck even compares this fusion to Luther Burbank’s hybrid fruits, a period-specific analogy that underscores his view of Chopin as a cultivator of musical forms.

The Mendelssohn monograph takes a different tack: here, nationality is less about folk roots than about institutional prestige. Mendelssohn’s appointment at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig is called “the highest honor in the German music world.” His career is mapped through a series of European capitals—Berlin, Paris, London—and his ten trips to England are noted as a mark of international success. Finck does not claim that Mendelssohn’s music is German in the same way Chopin’s is Polish; instead, he presents the composer as a cosmopolitan figure whose wealth and connections enabled a remarkably active life.

Productivity and Its Costs

Finck’s biographies are structured around output and its physical toll. Mendelssohn’s early feats—sixty pieces in his first year of composition, a three-act opera by age fifteen, and the completion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at seventeen—are recounted without critical analysis of the works themselves. The narrative then shifts to overwork: “The worry of his Berlin duties… began to wear on his health.” The final paragraphs describe a collapse upon hearing of his sister Fanny’s death, followed by a brief recovery and sudden death at forty-eight.

Schubert’s trajectory is even starker. Finck notes that he “had the least instruction of any” great master and that his life was “full of the gloom and sorrow.” The contrast with Mendelssohn’s privileged upbringing is implicit but sharp. Where Mendelssohn’s activity is framed as remarkable, Schubert’s is framed as a struggle against circumstance. Finck does not dwell on specific compositions in either case; the focus remains on the arc of the career and the price of creative labor.

The Mentor’s Editorial Voice

The issue is part of a series called The Mentor, and its editorial apparatus shapes how the biographies are read. Each composer section is labeled a “Monograph Number…” in “The Mentor Reading Course,” suggesting that the text was designed for self-education. The language is declarative and often superlative: Paderewski is “the greatest pianist of our time,” Chopin is “greatest of all the Poles.” These judgments are presented as fact, not opinion.

Finck also uses analogies that date the text. Chopin’s blend of folk and aristocratic elements is likened to “Luther Burbank’s wonderful new fruits,” a reference that would have been current in 1913 but now signals the issue’s historical distance. The prose is efficient, moving from birth to death in a few paragraphs per composer, with little attention to musical technique or reception. The result is a set of portraits that prioritize narrative clarity over depth, reflecting the Mentor Association’s goal of accessible cultural education.

Readers should approach this issue as a historical document of early twentieth-century music appreciation. Finck’s judgments—on Polish piano supremacy, on Mendelssohn’s genius, on Schubert’s pathos—reflect the tastes and assumptions of 1913. The biographies are compressed and evaluative, not analytical. To understand the music itself, one must look beyond the text to the works mentioned. But as a record of how these composers were presented to a general audience, the issue offers a clear, period-specific lens on canon formation.

I keep thinking about that old Mentor volume, how Finck lingered on Schubert's untutored genius, as if formal training could never touch what he had. It made me wonder about the other composers we never got to meet there. There's a quiet companion, Famous composers and their works, Vol. 1 — Reading Companion, that feels like a continuation of that same gentle conversation, filling in some of the silences.