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CHAPTER VI.

PERIOD OF HIGHEST DEVELOPMENT.

CHUMANN'S time of highest development dates from that first period of his artistic creations already mentioned, when he wrote works in which his imagination, absorbed in romantic ideals, his deepest feelings stirred by the most varied influences, took outward shape in sonorous tone-forms peculiar to him alone. The new phase upon which that musical progress effected by the romantic school now entered was practically and completely founded upon these compositions. In the smaller piano forms he had already found apt methods of presenting that wondrous life of the imagination which is favoured by the romantic school, as he had also learned to describe the secret fabric of his powerful and redundant subjectivity. All further growth must tend towards a reconciliation of the new spirit and the old, objective forms, which should renew and rejuvenate the latter.

We have already described Schumann's attempt to gain this end in past years in his piano sonatas, but we also saw how slight was his success; the idea of form not having fully dawned upon him, he felt greatly cramped and hampered by that form. He was still so dazzled and fascinated by the glamour of his pictures that he could not frame them in any definite shape, or group them in any unity of perfect organic development. These sonatas, therefore, consist chiefly of those individual piano forms

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by which he had hitherto tempered and tested his power of expression; the original, universal idea of the other forms was first fully revealed to him through the medium of the song, from which all instrumental forms are derived. In this field he first learned to work under the influence of a distinct form as well as a distinct meaning. Songwriting first acquainted him with a form which bore the clear impress of a metrical construction which he was forced to repeat in music, and we have tried to give a detailed account of the way in which he did this.

He sought to find this process earlier still in the typical, imitative forms. The "Gigue," composed in 1838 in Vienna, and the "Fughetto," composed in 1839, and afterwards published with a Scherzo and Romanze as Op. 32, were inspired by the same desire. The "Gigue" is quite in the style of Sebastian Bach, whom Schumann reverenced and admired as the greatest of masters, and whom he studied with untiring interest. But that master of counterpoint is led rather by the melodic, and the younger master by the harmonic power of his materials. One of them combines the separate parts, which are always kept perfectly independent of each other, into a wondrous web of harmony; the other labours to work out a rich harmonic apparatus from his own polyphony, which is developed more within the chord itself. The peculiarity of Schumann's mode of thought is even more apparent in the Fughetto." Here again we have harmonic masses rather than real parts arrayed one against the other. The theme of the fugue opens in full harmony:

1 First published in February, 1839, in part V. of the "Collection of Old and New Works, a Supplement to the New Journal of Music."

2 First published in June, 1840, in part X. of the same collection.

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and the rest of the work is generally harmonic. In tracing the melodic feature, he is far more eager to produce a series of novel original harmonies, which will display it in a fresh aspect, than he is to throw light on it by a succession of new combinations.

Here, again, in this attempt to revive the older contrapuntal form derived from the melody, true to the tendency which he represents, he is governed more by the force and the rich colouring of the harmony than by the actual significance of that form. It undoubtedly was difficult to revive it by this method, which was far from being founded upon its original idea. He therefore abandoned it, and upon adopting later the form of scholastic counterpoint, he conceived the idea of polyphony more in its primitive sense. He composed the theme only in the spirit of the new school, and then tried to work it out in harmony with the laws and system of ancient counterpoint.

This whole conception was naturally more favourable to the development of instrumental forms, which, as we have elsewhere attempted to show, are derived directly from the harmonic process of formation. Schumann also made great use of the direct formative principle of instrumental music, effect by contrast, in his earlier works. We saw that he made this principle particularly prominent even in his sonatas, where the most marvellous pictures sprang into existence, although they were quite disconnected; the

counteraction of the separate parts, from which the concrete form first proceeded, being thus lost. We saw that this was caused by his imperfect appreciation of harmonic materials; the harmonic apparatus which he used being chiefly determined by the motive which he wished to elaborate. Song composition, as repeatedly affirmed, first made him thoroughly familiar with the organic construction of harmony, and he instantly grasped the regulating power of rhythm in all its significance, as we must hasten to add, and was thus for the first time armed with the proper tools to use the principles of the new school even in the highest form of instrumental composition.

The criticism of the Berlioz symphony, to which we have already alluded, throws some light upon this early standpoint of his. He judges it from its harmonic outlines, and decides "that it is no advance upon the ancients in harmony and variety." He does not seem at this time to have been clear that it scarcely corresponded to the accepted idea of the symphony, to have one theme in the tonic, the other in the dominant, and all the accessory parts in the keys nearest related. It was only later, and more especially when he came to study song-writing, that he gained the conviction that all themes for the larger instrumental forms should be derived from that harmonic action if they are to be developed in an organic manner and combined with any degree of unity. Song-writing first fully taught him that the third part must correspond to the first part, as the answer to the question, if the composition is to attain solid shape.

The first work in which this new conception took form, the Symphony in B FLAT MAJOR (Op. 38), was written in the year 1841. It was given at the Leipsic Gewandhaus, March 31, 1841, with another work, "Overture, Scherzo, and Finale," written in the same year, but revised

in 1845 (printed as Op. 52), at a concert given by his wife, under the direction of Mendelssohn, for the benefit of the orchestral pension fund.

Schumann's beautiful and truthful remarks in regard to Schubert's symphony: "Conscious of his own more modest powers, he avoids all imitation of grotesque forms and bold proportions such as we find in Beethoven's later works; he gives us a composition of most graceful form, which, in spite of its novel intricacies, never leads us too far away from the central point, but always returns to it. This fact must be apparent to all who consider the symphony often," are also true of this first symphony of his And yet it is more nearly allied to Beethoven's than to Schubert's symphony. Far less fanciful than the latter, it is undoubtedly based on more concrete events than the former, as is required by Schumann's nature and whole development; it does not show such a wealth of imagery as Schubert's work, but the separate images are far more plastic, and proceeding, as we have said, from the most natural of formative processes, they are grouped with greater inherent unity.

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"To dissect the separate movements," Schumann goes on to say of the Schubert symphony, "affords no pleasure to us or to others; we must transcribe the whole symphony to give any idea of the novel character that pervades it;" and we might say the same of his own. We will merely allude to the way in which he allows a bit of bright, romantic life, such as he had heretofore used for detached pictures of enchanting beauty, in new forms, to assume musical shape in a single sketch from nature, which he casts in the old conventional symphony form.

The symphony is divided into the usual four movements.

1 "Collected Writings," vol. iii., p. 202.