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Updated: June 5, 2025
While the same atmosphere of thought and feeling is felt in the spiritual life of Robert Franz which colored the artistic being of Schubert and Schumann, there is a certain repose and balance all his own.
But his teaching repertoire seems to have contained, with the exception of the waltzes, none of the works a deux mains, neither the sonatas, nor the impromptus, nor the "Moments musicals." This shows that if Schubert was a favourite of Chopin's, he was so only to a certain extent. Indeed, Chopin even found fault with the master where he is universally regarded as facile princeps. Liszt remarks:
She felt that the compositions of Schumann and Schubert were the language that had always been imprisoned in her heart, that could never reach her lips, but that she now heard, by a miracle, freed and in its perfection.
The greatest of his immediate successors, Schumann and Franz, cheerfully admitted that they could never have written such songs as they gave the world but for Schubert, and the same confession might be made by the latest of the great songwriters, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and our American MacDowell. Schubert's best songs have never been equalled.
If you had to choose a sire for a first-rate son, would you choose a consumptive Jew with the fires of eternity in his eyes, or an Iowa right-thinker with his hold full of Bibles and breakfast food? What humor could be wilder than that of life itself? Franz Schubert, on his deathbed, read the complete works of J. Fenimore Cooper.
In deriving his inspiration direct from the national heart, Chopin did what Schumann, Schubert, and Weber did in Germany, what Rossini did in Italy, and shares with them a freshness of melodic power to be derived from no other source. Rather tender and elegiac than vigorous, the deep sadness underlying the most sparkling forms of his work is most notable.
The lakes, the woods, the mountain heights, inspired him with eloquent reveries that burst into song; but he always saw Nature through the medium of human passion and sympathy, which transfigured it. He was the faithful interpreter of spiritual suffering, and the joy which is born thereof. The genius of Schubert seems to have been directly formed for the expression of subjective emotion in music.
I have elsewhere dwelt upon the precocity of Giorgione's talent, with its accompanying qualities of versatility, inequality, and productiveness, and I have pointed out the analogous phenomena in music and poetry. Giorgione, Schubert, and Keats are alike in temperament and quality of expression. They are curiously alike in the shortness of their lives, and the fever-heat of their production.
Familiarity with the traditions of different schools of composition and performance is necessary also in order not to sing the songs of Bach and Handel like those of Schubert and Schumann, or Brahms like the modern French composers; in order not to interpret with like effects indiscriminately songs of the oratorio and opera, of Italian, German, French, English and modern Russian schools.
Suppose the phonograph so perfected as to be able to give you an entire opera, singing, orchestration, and all; do you think you would get much pleasure out of it if you turned it on at your office during business hours? Do you really care for a serenade by Schubert when you hear it fiddled by an untimely Italian on a morning ferryboat? Are you always cocked and primed for enjoyment?
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