Now this facility is not to be confounded with superficiality. Schubert, taking an inspiration from the poems he read, went straight for the heart of the emotion. No amount of painstaking could have made _Am Meer_ more profound in sentiment. His course was simply that of Nature, producing in great quantity in the expectation that the inferior will die off and the best will perpetuate themselves. The range of his emotional expression is very great. It is safe to say that there is no type of sentiment or mood in any song of the last hundred years which cannot find its prototype in Schubert. His songs include ballads with a touch of the archaic, like ‘The Erlking’; lyrics with the most delicate wisp of symbolism, like _Das Heidenröslein_ (‘Heather Rose’); with the purest lyricism, like the famous ‘Serenade’ or the ‘Praise of Tears’; lyrics of the deepest tragedy, like ‘The Inn,’ or pathos, like ‘Death and the Maiden’; of the most intense emotional energy, like _Aufenthalt_; of the merriest light-heartedness, like ‘Hark, Hark, the Lark’ or the _Wanderlied_; and of the most exalted grandeur, like _Die Allmacht_.
It would be out of place here to estimate these songs in any detail. For they have a personal quality which makes the estimating of them for another person a ridiculous thing. Like all truly personal things, they have, to the individual who values them, a value quite incommensurable. Each of the best songs is unique, and is not to be compared with any other. They are irreplaceable and their value seems infinite. Hence the praise of one who loves these songs would sound foolishly extravagant to another. We can here only review and point out the general qualities and characteristics of Schubert’s output.
With one of his earliest songs--‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’--composed when he was seventeen, Schubert establishes the principle of detailed delineation in the accompaniment, developed so richly in the succeeding decades. The whole of the melody is bound together by the whirring of the wheel in the accompaniment. But when Gretchen comes to her exclamation, ‘And ah, his kiss!’ she stops spinning for a moment and the harmonies in the piano become intense and colorful. This principle of delineative detail, even more than the _durchkomponierte_ form, constitutes the difference between the ‘art’ song and its prototype, the folk-song. The details become more and more frequent in Schubert’s songs as his artistic development continues. They are rarely realistic, as in Liszt, but they always catch the mood or the emotional nuance with eloquent suggestiveness. A free song, like _Die Allmacht_, follows the varying moods of the text line for line. But Schubert did not follow his text word for word as later song-writers did. He felt what the folk-singer feels, the formal musical unity of his song as apart from the unity in the meaning of the words. He was never willing to admit a delineative detail that involved a harsh break in the flow of beautiful melody. It was his choice of melody, much more than his choice of delineative detail, that gave eloquence to his songs.