The Romantic Composers Author:Daniel Gregory Mason Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II FRANZ SCHUBERT FRANZ SCHUBERT From an original water color by W. A. Rieder chapter{Section 4II . FRANZ SCHUBERT S the earliest full-fledged rep... more »resentative of the romantic school of composers which succeeded Beethoven, Schubert occupies a peculiar position in the history of music. His work forms the link between the classical music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven and the romantic music of Schu- martn, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, having certain qualities in common with each. Traditions, training, and environment allied him with the older order; but instinct led him into new paths. Scattered plentifully through the thousands of pages covered by his racing pen, many of which might be the work of some humdrum eighteenth-century kapellmeister, are features of surprising novelty, pointing unmistakably to the future rather than to the past — gleams of the true gold in a vast heap of sand. Nine- tenths of the time he is content to imitate, with amiable, unthinking garrulity, the quartets and sonatas he grew up with; the other tenth he breaks forth incontinently, an inspired pioneer. This mingling of the matter-of-course and the unexpected, of the sand and the gold, makes his music a curious study. Born in Vienna, January 31, 1797, Schubert began the study of music when still a child, under the direction of his father, a schoolteacher by profession, and his two brothers. While in his teens the boy began playing the viola parts in the family string quartet. His brothers took the violin parts, and his father played the 'cello: not always impeccably, it is to be feared, for we read how little Franz, looking doubtless very solemn and gnomelike in the spectacles he already wore, would from time to time, without stopping to look at the score, comment on the wrong notes the pa...« less