Readers of this blog know that I am not shy about expressing opinions and evaluations. Indeed, I think that is my job as a blogger! I have had readers email me complaining that I have been too even-handed and saying they relied on my judgement. Very flattering! But I think that one's views must be earned. In other words, just throwing out scattered, subjective impressions with no reasoning behind them is not valuable. In fact, that is what I see an awful lot of 'critics' doing, especially those in popular culture. One of the ways that you earn your way to an evaluation is by listening objectively and by being prepared to change your opinion when necessary.
That being said, I confess that in recent years I have been unresponsive to a lot of chamber music by Schubert. Those interminable quartets and quintets just seemed to me to meander on aimlessly. An early course I took on romantic music disposed me a bit to this view because one of the points made in the course was that the weak genre in the Romantic Period was chamber music, which usually fell far short of their extraordinary achievements in orchestral music, piano music and opera. I still think this is true. But on stumbling on a post on Jessica Duchen's blog, I am re-thinking Schubert's chamber music a bit. This is a lovely movement:
But I remain unrepentantly unsympathetic to Schumann's chamber music. Well, actually, to most of his attempts to write longer movements. The absolute genius that he shows in the shorter forms, in the lieder and piano music, seems to desert him when he tries to write a quartet or symphony. I talk at length about Schumann in this post and this post.
But I'm going to listen a lot more to Schubert's chamber music from now on.
Yesterday I put up a post about aesthetic virtues and sins in composition. In ordinary music criticism we get detailed accounts of specific performances. In music philosophy we get arguments about the ontological status of a composition or perhaps the relationship between aesthetics and morality. In music theory we get descriptions of technical devices and how they are used. What we don't seem to get anywhere is a set of simple aesthetic principles. That's what I was trying to do in that post. I suppose for proper parallelism I should have said virtues and vices, but I took as my model the long tradition of the four cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins of the Catholic tradition.
That post was rather wordy and so today I would like to pick a couple of examples to show what I am talking about. The first virtue, parsimony, is pretty easy. Here is an example:
This is the Prelude and Fugue in D minor from Bk 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier played by Friedrich Gulda. My example is just the prelude. You could choose just about any prelude from either book as most of them are very tightly written, meaning that a minimum of music material is used for maximum effect. This prelude gets by with little more than a scale and an arpeggio. The first prelude from Bk 1 is just one arpeggio put through a lot of harmonies. Other similar preludes are the one to the E major violin partita, again a scale and an arpeggio and the prelude to the first cello suite, just an arpeggio. Chopin provides us with another example:
And so does Shostakovich:
Preludes are a good place to look for basic compositional principles because there is no fixed form, no boxes to fill up. Now how about one of those aesthetic sins? I mentioned a Schumann quartet finale. Here it is:
This brings us face to face with one of those fascinating paradoxes of aesthetics: this movement has a lot of repetition. The preludes I put up above, as examples of the virtue of parsimony, also have a lot of repetition. So why was it good there and bad here? I trust that you got as tired as I did of that dotted-note figure? Perhaps you loved it? While acknowledging that these are tricky matters, let me see if I can sort it out. The problem with the Schumann finale is that the material is both too little and too much. The dotted note theme keeps returning too many times and it is too much the same each time. The contrasting passages in between are also too similar. There is also a real clunkiness to the dotted note theme, a rhythmic stiffness that doesn't get better on repetition. The dotted-note theme and the contrasting passages also don't seem to have much relation to one another, it is as if they are pasted together from different pieces. Now let me put up another string quartet finale that shows how this kind of thing should be done:
The finale is preceded by a short adagio. Some similarities in the two movements; both have themes that keep coming back, with contrasting passages. But how Beethoven handles the material is completely different. His themes are constantly transforming, never returning quite the same. And they seem to affect one another as they blend and separate. The themes are taken apart and reassembled in ways that we can never quite anticipate. In short, he is doing everything that Schumann doesn't do. You have to work with the material according to how much musical time is involved. The preludes above are all very short and allow little room for development. A seven to nine minute string quartet movement is a different thing. You may need more material, or you may need to do extensive transformations of that material. The Beethoven, in my view, succeeds in this, while the Schumann fails. Unfair comparison? Well, possibly, but I wanted to make my point as clearly as possible.
Last night I attended the last concert in our chamber music festival, the Henschel Quartet playing Beethoven and Schumann. The Beethoven was, as always, extraordinary. As my companion commented, full of drama and real intensity. I would add, with a rhythmic inventiveness so coordinated with the harmonic structure that it is really unmatched by anyone. The second half was Schumann's Quartet in A major, op 41, no 3. I confess that sometimes I leave a concert after the first half if the second half has music I am less interested in. Romantic chamber music usually falls into that category because it has been my experience that chamber music was not where Romanticism in music had much success. But, because I haven't heard much Schumann chamber music live, and because I had invited a friend to the concert, we stayed till the end. The Henschel Quartet were very fine, by the way. The first violin did not always make the best sound and they had some moments of ragged ensemble in the Beethoven. But they played with real understanding of the music which is much more important than mere technical perfection.
Robert Schumann is one of the key figures in the development of Romanticism in music. We can't talk about him, or about many of the artists of the early 19th century, without talking about madness. As Charles Rosen says in his remarkable book on the period (The Romantic Generation):
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, madness--for writers, painters and musicians--was not simply a withdrawal from the distress of everyday life, a protest against intolerable social conditions or against a debilitating philosophy. It had gained a new ideological charge: madness was a source of creative energy.
As Charles Lamb wrote to his young friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Dream not Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad." Schumann was both drawn to and terrified by madness. It was for him an immense creative resource. A lot of what Schumann accomplished, in extraordinary music like the third song from his cycle Liederkreis on poems by Heine, is by subverting or suspending traditional musical logic:
This works extremely well in the context of small forms like lieder or sets of short piano pieces like the Davidsbündlertänze:
But as Rosen points out, Schumann's great weakness was transitions: in his longer works he either obsessively keeps harping on the same rhythm for page after page, or is always interrupting the music to begin a new section. In his later life, he attempted to revise the brilliant quirkiness of the early music, but the result was usually merely pedestrian. Schumann's reputation is because of those striking and revolutionary shorter works, the lieder, the piano pieces, that come mostly from his earlier life. The ability to write in the longer forms developed in the Classical Era, such as string quartet or symphony, had largely disappeared in the early decades of the 19th century. This is not to say that composers didn't attempt these forms, just that they were not very successful, overwhelmed as they were by the new creative--and yes, slightly mad--energy of Romanticism. Later on in the century Brahms would make a very serious effort to reclaim the ground lost.
