Schubert's "Erlkonig" was written a few months before Beethoven's "Liederkreis"; "Gretchen am Spinnrade," about a year before the "Erlkonig." He was i8 when he composed the latter, in 1815. Lyrical song, divorced from all hindering elements and associations, whether of salon or theatre, was here at the threshold of his short career in almost full maturity and plenitude of power. It is sufficiently remarkable that a lad with so little education should have composed such music ; it is more astonish ing still that he should have penetrated with unerring insight into the innermost secrets of the best poetry. Two of the necessary qualifications for a great song composer were thus at last united.
Schubert possessed the third—a knowledge of the human voice, partly intuitive, partly the result of his experience as a chorister boy. The beauty of his melodies is scarcely more striking than the gratefulness of their purely vocal qualities. The technique of singing had, indeed, been understood for nearly two centuries; but Schubert was the first to divine fully its emotional range, and to dissociate it in lyrical work from the traditions of the schools. From the beginning to the end of his career he never penned a note or a phrase merely because it was vocally effective. What he wrote for the voice to sing was there because for him the poetry could not have it otherwise. This was inherent in his method of working, in which he relied implicitly upon his musical inspiration for a response, usually instantaneous, to the inordinate receptivity of his mind to the impressions of poetry. To read through a poem was for him not only to seize its innermost significance and the salient points of its language and its form, but also to visualize the scheme by which both the whole and the parts could be translated and glorified through the medium of music. As the singer Vogl, the first of his profession to appreciate him, remarked, "He com posed in a state of clairvoyance." Hence the impossibility of sum marizing in a short space the innovations he introduced: for new poems immediately suggested new types of song. His settings to Goethe's lyrics, that is, the best of them, differ as essentially from his settings to those of W. Muller in the cycles "Die schone MUllerin" and "Die Winterreise," as these, again, from the set tings of the six poems of Heine.
Hardly a single development in subsequent phases of the art (except those which eliminate the melodious element) is not fore shadowed in one or other of his songs (about 656 in number).
Brahms, the greatest of his successors, said that there was some thing to be learned from every one of Schubert's songs. He was as perfectly at home in the durchcomponiertes Lied as in the simple strophic type, or the purely declamatory. "Der Wegweiser,"
"Haidenroslein," "Der Doppelganger" are familiar but supreme examples of each. Certain features may be selected for emphasis : first, his use of modulation as a means of emotional expression. "Du liebst mich nicht" traverses, in two pages, more keys than would serve most composers for a whole symphony—while the discords on the words "Die Sonne vermissen" and "Was bliThen die Narcissen" give a piercingly thrilling effect which is quite modern.
The modulations in "Wehmuth" illustrate the subtle atmospheric effects which he loved to produce by sudden contrasts between major and minor harmonies. More familiar instances occur in "Gute Nacht," "Die Rose," and "Rosamunde." Secondly, his inex haustible fertility in devising forms of accompaniment which serve to illustrate the pictorial or emotional background of a poem; we have the galloping horses and the horn in "Die Post," the spinning wheel in "Gretchen," murmuring brooks in many songs from "Die schone Miillerin" and "Liebesbotschaft," the indications of an emotional mood in "Die Stack" or "Litanei." Occasionally, it is true, the persistence of a particular figure or rhythm induces monotony, as in "Ave Maria" or "Normans Gesang," but generally Schubert had plenty of means at his com mand to prevent it, such as the presence of an appropriate subsidi ary figure making its appearance at intervals, as in "Halt," "Der Einsame," or some enchanting ritornello, by which a phrase of the vocal melody is echoed in the accompaniment, as in "Liebesbot schaft," "An Sylvia," "Standchen" and "Fischerweise," or varia tions in the accompaniment to the different stanzas, as in "Der Friihling." Thirdly, the sudden entrance of declamatory passages, as in "Der Neugierige," "Am Feierabend," in "Gretchen" at the famous "Ach, sein Kuss." Fourthly, the realistic touches, by which suggestions in a poem are incorporated into the accompani ment, such as the cock crowing in "Friihlingstraum," the convent bell in "Die junge Nonne," the nightingale's song in "Ganymed," or the falling tears in "Ihr Bild." Finally should be noted the rarity of slips in the matter of the just accentuation of syllables; and this is specially remarkable in a song writer who relies so much upon pure melody as Schubert; for to find and preserve a melodic outline which is felt as a true expression of a poem and yet does no violence to its text is far more difficult than to compose in the declamatory style. But nothing is difficult to Schubert. He is as successful in "Liebesbotschaft" as in "Prometheus." For further details the reader is referred to the brilliant essay on song, with which Sir Henry Hadow concludes vol. v. of the Oxford History of Music. It must suffice here to point out in a general way that in wideness of scope and aim, in intensity of expression, Schubert produced the same transformation in the lyrical field that Beethoven had produced in the larger forms of sonata, string quartette and symphony. Beethoven's work was necessary before Schubert could arise, but Schubert's concep tions and methods were the fruit of his own genius.