Herbert F. Peyser

“ Together with Haydn and Schubert he was, perhaps, the most completely lovable of the great masters. It is hard, moreover, to think of a composer more strategically placed in his epoch or more perfectly timed in his coming. Tone poet, fantast, critic, visionary, prophet—he was all of these! And he passed through every phase, it seemed, of romantic experience. The great and even the semi-great of a fabulous period of music were his intimates—personages like Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Moscheles, Ferdinand David, Hiller, Joachim, Brahms. ”

“ A sense of helplessness and futility overcomes the writer who, in the limits of a volume as unpretending as the present one, endeavors to give the casual radio listener a slight idea of Schubert’s inundating fecundity and inspiration. Like Bach, like Haydn, like Mozart, Schubert’s capacity for creative labor staggers the imagination and, like them, he conferred upon an unworthy—or, rather, an indifferent—generation treasures beyond price and almost beyond counting. Outwardly, his life was far less spectacular than Beethoven’s or Mozart’s. ”

“ The true center of gravity of a Handel opera lies in the performance of the singers and their command of declamation, florid utterance, sustained song and artifices at that epoch accepted as supremely expressive. Only in grasping these facts can we put ourselves in the frame of mind needed to understand the essential principles of these baroque masterpieces and to appreciate what—apart from their sheer melodic beauties—lifts them to a higher level than curios lacking any further validity, difficult as it may be for many of us to force our imagination and our feelings into such a mold. ”

“ Matthew Passion, which is Bach at his most tender, intimate, lacerating and compassionate, stands, like the B minor Mass, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wagner’s Tristan, as one of the epochal feats of music, a lonely and incomparable achievement of the human spirit. ”

“ The opinion is probably as true today as in 1787. For there is literally nothing like Don Giovanni, either among its composer’s creations or elsewhere. One can only share the emotion of Rossini when, being shown the manuscript score, he said to its owner, the singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia: “I want to bow the knee before this sacred relic!” And echo the words of Richard Wagner: “What is more perfect than every number in ‘Don Giovanni’? Where else has music won so infinitely rich an individuality, been able to characterize so surely, so definitely and in such exuberant plentitude as here?” ”

“ He created much of the world’s greatest piano music, many of its loveliest songs, four great symphonies, superb chamber compositions and a good deal else which, even today, is insufficiently known or valued. A poetic critic, if ever there was one, he proclaimed to a world, still indifferent or uncertain, the greatness of a Chopin and a Brahms. His physical and mental decline was a tragedy even more poignant than Beethoven’s deafness or the madness of Hugo Wolf. ”

“ Leah Mendelssohn, delighted with the letters Felix was writing from Weimar, proudly forwarded them to Aunt Jette, in Paris. “If God spare him”, replied that worthy person, “his letters will in long years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a holy relic; indeed, they are already sacred as the effusion of so pure and child-like a mind. You are a happy mother and you must thank Providence for giving you such a son. He is an artist in the highest sense, rare talents combined with the noblest, tenderest heart....” ”

“ It took decades to reveal the incalculable richness of this “treasure” and even now the world is not finally aware of its fullness. Another deathless master, Robert Schumann, gave the world Schubert’s C major Symphony, redeeming it from Ferdinand’s heaped but silent hoard of unprinted, nay, unsuspected scores. “Who can do anything after Beethoven?” the half-starved Konvikt student had wistfully asked. Here was at least one triumphant answer, made by Schubert himself, at a distance of only eight months from his early tomb! ”

“ In spite of an everlasting monument like “Messiah,” the most popular choral masterpiece ever written, we may, however, ask ourselves if the body of Handel’s music is as widely known and as intimately studied as it deserves to be. How many today can boast of a real acquaintance with Handel’s operas (there are more than forty of them alone) apart from a few airs sung in concert; how many can truly claim to know by experience any of the great oratorios apart from “Messiah” and, possibly, “Judas Maccabaeus” and “Israel in Egypt?” ”

“ Even if Bach’s scores—most of them unpublished—had been accessible, it is questionable whether the epoch we call [62] “classical” would have been able to see him in a just perspective.
In due course the wheel was to turn full-circle and surely none would have been more amazed than Philipp Emanuel, Wilhelm Friedemann, and Johann Christian could they have known that one day their own works would be looked upon as museum pieces, while the creations of the “learned old perruque” had become the fountain of musical youth, the perpetual source of strength and of illimitable, self-renewing wonder. ”

“ Newman had found the texture of the whole is “less interesting than in any other of Strauss’s works; the short and snappy thematic fragments out of which the composer builds contrasting badly with the great sweeping themes of the earlier symphonic poems ... the realistic effects in the score are at once so atrociously ugly and so pitiably foolish that one listens to them with regret that a composer of genius should ever have fallen so low.” ”

“ For the posthumous glory of Berlioz is by no means unchallenged. Almost alone among the masters he does not command anything like universal admiration, let alone affection. He has his redoubtable champions and they include many of the greatest musicians, living and dead. But where Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner need no defense Berlioz incontestably does. ”

“ What should concern us now is the courtship of Clara by Robert which, though it ended happily, was actually a long martyrdom for both and in the best traditions of romantic melodrama. To be sure it left a deep imprint on Schumann’s creative fancy and for this, if for no other reason, the soul struggle was a cloud lined with shining silver. Almost all the piano works of the composer’s early period—in some ways the most yeasty and influential music he gave the world—are in one way or another the fruits of his love. ”

“ It was on a visit of Leopold Mozart’s to Vienna that Haydn made to him the oft-quoted remark: “I tell you before God and as an honest man that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by reputation!” And later, when someone questioned a detail in Don Giovanni and asked Haydn’s opinion, he replied: “I cannot settle this dispute, but this I know: Mozart is the greatest composer that the world now possesses.... It enrages me to think that the unparalleled Mozart has not yet been engaged by some imperial or royal court! ”

“ Luigia was nineteen, lively, graceful—an adorable type of Italian beauty. The Prince soon decided that the imported couple represented a needless expense, though the two were pathetically underpaid. But this time Haydn was resolute. The Polzellis must stay in Eszterháza under any conditions! Eszterházy, being a man of the world, realized that in certain things an irreplaceable orchestral conductor must be allowed his way, whatever the conventions.
Luigia was attracted to Haydn as were numerous other women whose path he crossed. He himself often admitted it could not have been for his beauty. ”

“ One way or another, the “Fantastique” is a formidable, if overdimensioned monument of its period, and a landmark of history. With all its flamboyant and parodistic monstrosities this fresco of psychopathic experience remains the first great and influential specimen of program music created in France; and it is no less amazing to reflect that the epochal score came into being when its composer was but 27 and only at the time he was adjudged worthy of the Prix de Rome.
Berlioz subsequently sent tickets for a performance of the symphony to Henrietta Smithson. ”

“ And Christian Daniel Schubart wrote in the Teutsche Chronik: “I heard an opera buffa by the marvelous Mozart. The fires of genius lurk and dart in it. Yet this is still not the sacred fire which rises to the gods in clouds of incense. If Mozart does not become a hot-house plant he should be the greatest composer who ever lived.” ”

“ Easily accessible were several sources of musical and cultural inspiration. In Lüneburg itself the Church of St. John had as its organist none less than Georg Böhm, one of the outstanding personalities in German music of the era preceding the full unfoldment of Bach’s grandeur. Thirty miles off lay Hamburg, which harbored the venerable master of the organ, Adam Reinken; and the operatic life of that city had burst into bloom under the leadership of Reinhard Keiser. Up in the direction of the Danish frontier the town of Lübeck sheltered still another giant, the organist Dietrich Buxtehude. ”

“ If Abraham Mendelssohn was not, like Father Mozart, a practising musician, he had an artistic insight which nobody valued higher than Felix himself. “I am often unable to understand”, he wrote his father when he was already a world celebrity, “how it is possible to have so accurate a judgment about music without being a technical musician and if I could only say what I feel in the same clear and intelligent manner that you always do, I should certainly never make another confused speech as long as I live”. ”

“ When it came to paying Haydn for his work the Spanish ecclesiast presented the composer with a large sum of money concealed in an enormous chocolate cake! The “Seven Last Words” were, in the course of years, done by a string quartet, by 34 an orchestra, as an oratorio. Today the work is hard to listen to with patience, impressive as it once seemed. A series of adagios, one much like the other, it has precisely the effect that the composer at first feared: the various movements as they succeed one another end by sorely “fatiguing the hearers”. ”

“ But there was plenty of music and the school orchestra, in which Schubert occupied the second desk among the violins, delighted him.
Every evening this orchestra played an entire symphony and ended up with “the noisiest possible overture.” The windows were left open in summer and crowds used to collect outside, till the police dispersed them because they obstructed traffic. The concerts were conducted by a singularly lovable old Bohemian organist, viola player and teacher, Wenzel Ruziczka, who at an early date defended and explained some of the boldest “modernisms” in Schubert’s compositions. ”

“ Two days afterwards Schumann was laid to rest in the lovely Old Cemetery at Bonn. Members of the Düsseldorf “Concordia”, which had serenaded the Schumanns on their arrival from Dresden six years earlier, were the pallbearers. Hiller, Joachim and Brahms walked in front, Clara, alone and unobserved, far behind—“certainly as he would have wished”. Forty years later, on Whit-Sunday, 1896, she was reunited with him in the same tomb, in the presence of her surviving children and a few friends, chief of these the faithful Brahms, himself barely a year from his end. ”

“ Then he turned his thoughts towards the inventive side of the art; he showed him how to give his musical ideas the most perfect form, and he refined his taste. He possessed a remarkable library of Italian and German music, and he explained to Handel the various methods of writing and composing adopted by different nationalities, whilst pointing out the good qualities and the faults of each composer and in order that his education might be at the same time theoretical and practical, he frequently gave him exercises to work in such and such a style.... ”

“ The creator of “Tristan” appreciated that the jealous Marie Recio stood in the way of any lasting rapprochement. And he confided to Liszt that “a malicious wife can ruin a brilliant man ... and bring out the worst aspects of his character; indeed, I have sometimes to wonder if God would not have done better to have left women out of the scheme of creation”. In 1861, at the “Tannhäuser” fiasco at the Paris Opéra, Berlioz played a part that reflects eternal discredit on his memory, even if the shabby treatment he so often endured at the hands of his countrymen could account for his spitefulness. ”

“ Posthumously, Mendelssohn’s fate seemed like a strange reversal of his supreme idol’s, Bach. Bach passed into long eclipse, then, largely through Mendelssohn’s heroic efforts, underwent a miracle of resurrection which has grown more overpowering clear down to our own time. Mendelssohn, almost preposterously famous at his death, was before very long pronounced outmoded, overrated, virtually negligible. The whole history of music scarcely shows a more violent backswing of the pendulum. ”