The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Schubert” by H.L. Mencken

Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

Mencken refers to Franz Schubert as “one of the great glories of the human race”. In this essay, he discusses the diversity of Schubert’s work, as well as the sad fact that much of what he wrote (at least at that time) was not well-known, and rarely played by orchestras. Mencken starts off by saying that Schubert, unlike, say Mendelssohn, with his Wedding March, did not “suffer” from too much popularity. Schubert’s works are well-known but not so well-known that they are sapped of vitality.

Mencken, as should be clear by now if you have been following along, did not particularly care for Mob Wisdom. If 99% of the public declared that something was good, then Mencken would naturally greet that thing with a jaundiced eye. I know it’s upsetting in our ‘we are all equal’ age (which has its own issues because, no, we are NOT all equal. We are equal under the law, thank God, but we are not all equal in ability), but Mencken thought the majority of people were imbeciles, and their taste didn’t amount to much. This was part and parcel of his suspicion of fads. He was very much of his moment, of his time. He made guesses about which fad would withstand the test of time, and which would subside. He was often dead wrong. What is so great about Mencken’s stuff is that you feel the rip-roaring chaotic and interesting 1920s in all of his work (this Schubert essay was written in 1928): the culture swirling around him, Modernism spreading into every nook and cranny, technology exploding, our ways and means of communicating with one another proliferating … the changes were extraordinary in that post-war decade. Mencken was trying to make sense of it all. He dismissed some things which would become truly important, and he cherished others which would vanish. And yet, of course, sometimes he was bang on the money. But it’s the feel of the prose that I cherish – whatever the topic. The feel of a man truly engaged with his own culture. (Criticism is also engagement, and don’t let anyone tell you different. Speaking of which: this piece is magnificent. I wish I had written it. I know I have thought it.)

So back to Schubert.

Mencken discusses the critical reception of Schubert, as well as the man’s natural talents, which were abundant. Also, he repeatedly references the “Tragic” symphony (a favorite of mine. The chords!).

Mencken also addresses one of my pet topics: how biographers tend to look to the life story to explain the work. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine. It’s so reductive and really seems, as its goal, to discount genius. Genius makes people nervous. They don’t like it. It makes them feel bad about themselves. Biographers are not immune to that, in fact they may suffer more than others since they spend the majority of their time in the (imaginary) presence of geniuses. So they scour through the childhood, the romances, looking for “clues” as to how on earth so-and-so created such a beautiful symphony, or novel, or whatever. When genius, for the most part, cannot – refuses to be – explained away. No matter what you uncover, it still cannot explain the mystery of talent and vision. Sorry, biographers. You’re stuck with it!

There is a lot to digest here, and I have only a cursory knowledge of classical music. I can’t express how excited I am to have you all talking about this stuff in the Beethoven post. I am learning a lot.

Here is an excerpt from the much larger essay.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Schubert,” by H.L. Mencken

Great stretches of Schubert’s music, indeed, remain almost unknown, even to musicians. Perhaps a hundred of his songs are heard regularly in the concert-hall; the rest get upon programs only rarely. Of his chamber music little is heard at all, not even the two superb piano trios, the octet, and the quintet with the two ‘cellos. Of his symphonies the orchestras play the Unfinished incessantly – but never too often! – and the huge C major now and then, but the Tragic only once in a blue moon. Yet the Tragic remains one of Schubert’s masterworks, and in its slow movement, at least, it rises to the full height of the Unfinished. There are not six such slow movements in the whole range of music. It has an eloquence that has never been surpassed, not even by Beethoven, but there is no rhetoric in it, no heroics, no exhibitionism. It begins quietly and simply and it passes out in a whisper, but its beauty remains overwhelming. I defy anyone with ears to listen to it without being moved profoundly, as by the spectacle of great grief.

Schubert paid the price that all artists pay for trying to improve upon the world made by the gods. “My compositions,” he once wrote in his diary, “spring from my sorrow.” Biographers, finding that sorrow in the lives of their victims, search for its sources in objective experience. They hunt, commonly, for the woman. Thus such a colossus as Beethoven is explained in terms of the trashy Giulietta Guicciardi. It is not necessary to resort to these puerilities. The life of an artists is a life of frustrations and disasters. Storms rage endlessly within his own soul. His quest is for the perfect beauty that is always elusive, always just beyond the sky-rim. He tries to contrive what the gods themselves have failed to contrive. When, in some moment of great illumination, he comes within reach of his heart’s desire, his happiness is of a kind never experienced by ordinary men, nor even suspected, but that happens only seldom. More often he falls short, and in his falling short there is agony almost beyond endurance.

We know little directly about what Schubert thought of his compositions. He was, for a musician, strangely reserved. But indirectly there is the legend that, in his last days, he thought of taking lessons in counterpoint from Simon Sechter. The story has always appealed pleasantly to the musical biographers; mainly ninth-rate men, they delight in discovering imbecilities in artists. My guess is that Schubert, if he actually proposed to seek the den of Sechter, did it in a sportive spirit. Going to school to a pedant would have appealed charmingly to his sardonic hour. What Sechter had to teach him was precisely what a Hugh Walpole might have taught Joseph Conrad, no less and no more.

It is astonishing how voluptuously criticism cherishes nonsense. This notion that Schubert lacked skill at counterpoint seems determined to go on afflicting his fame forever, despite the plain evidence to the contrary in his most familiar works. How can anyone believe it who has so much as glanced at the score of the Unfinished? That score is quite as remarkable for its adroit and lovely combinations of melodies as it is for its magnificent modulations. It is seldom that one is heard alone. They come in two by two, and they are woven into a fabric that is at once simple and complicated, and always beautiful. Here is contrapuntal writing at its very best, for the means are concealed by a perfect effect. Here is the complete antithesis of the sort of counterpoint that is taught by the Sechters.

No doubt the superstition that Schubert had no skill at polyphony gets some support from the plain fact that he seldom wrote a formal fugue. There is one at the end of his cantata, “Miriams Siegesgesang,” and in his last years he wrote another for piano duet. The strict form, however, was out of accord with the natural bent of his invention: he did not think of terse, epigrammatic subjects, as Bach did and Beethoven afterward; he thought of complete melodies, the most ravishing ever heard in this world. It would be hard to imagine his making anything of the four austere notes which Beethoven turned into the first movement of the C minor symphony. He would have gone on to develop them melodically before ever he set himself to manipulating them contrapuntally. But that was not a sign of his inferiority to Beethoven; it was, in its way, a sign of his superiority. He was infinitely below old Ludwig as a technician; he lacked the sheer brain-power that went into such masterpieces as the first movement of the Eroica and the allegretto of the Seventh. Such dizzy feats of pure craftsmanship were beyond him. But where he fell short as an artisan he was unsurpassed as an artist. He invented more beautiful musical ideas in his thirty-one years than even Mozart or Haydn, and he proclaimed them with an instinctive skill that was certainly not inferior to any mere virtuosity, however dazzling and however profound.