And
what led him to do this was not abstract reflection but artistic
instinct and experience. He does not even claim the honor of having
originated the true vocal style, but confesses with pride that it was
a _woman_, Frau Schroeder-Devrient, who first revealed to him the
highest possibilities of dramatic singing, and he boasts that he was
the only one that learned this lesson of the great German singer, and
developed the hints regarding the correct vocal style unconsciously
given by her.
It must not be forgotten, however, that side by side with the
music-drama and partly preceding it, another form of vocal music grew
up in Germany, which in a very similar manner restored the voice to
its true sphere as the wedded wife of poetry. I refer, of course, to
the _Lied_, or parlor song, to which, indeed, I might have devoted
this whole essay, quite as well as to the music-drama, if there were
anything in Italian music that might have been compared to the songs
of Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Brahms, Liszt, Rubinstein, etc.
As Sir George Grove poetically puts it, in Schubert's songs "the music
changes with the words as a landscape does when the sun and clouds
pass over it.
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