MUSIC
How is it possible to write about Schubert's music ? Words—the right words, if they exist—have failed even the most eloquent writers. We have mostly technical analyses of his harmonic schemes (Zwischendominatzten and Mediantenriickung are key and typical words in these treatises), which bear the same relation to Schubert's music as an anatomical treatise to the human body ; or flowery word-pictures, which correspond to fussy and inferior nudes. About some music it is possible to say at least some interesting things.
Music which has close affinities to, or is even combined with, literature, such as opera, cantata, oratorio, songs (even Schubert's) gives the writer as it were a hold or at least a springboard from which to start. Technical analysis really illuminates music in which the intellectual element is predominant, Bach's Art of Fugue for instance ; and if you get a Baudelaire to transliterate pictorial music into prose, even word-pictures can be justified. But Schubert, neither intellectual nor pictorial, defeats the would-be writer ; and it is significant that the best single book devoted to him is Dr. Deutsch's " documentary biography," which gives in detail but without comment the background from which this music arose— facts, letters, papers, which reveal something of the man—but no discussion of the music.
These reflections of frustration were prompted by the concert of Schubert's chamber music at the Festival Hall on April 1st, where the Amadeus Quartet and a distinguished team of " extras " played the C major quintet and the octet. I had heard the Amadeus Quartet play Mozart two days before at the Victoria and Albert Museum; in a comparatively small hall, admired the finish and refinement of its playing but regretted even there the thinness and poverty of its tone (especially that of its leader) and the excessive discretion of its interpretation. In the Festival Hall, when it was playing Schubert not Mozart, these deficiencies were far more serious. In the quintet, where William Pleeth joined it, the playing was top-heavy and the long sinuous melodies entrusted to the three " inner " instruments were delivered with so little warmth, such an absence of cantabile, that they were hardly audible ; so that in the slow movement, for instance, the first violin seemed to. be embroi- dering a melody which was divined rather than heard, in the distant background., It is not that the Festival Hall is unsuited to chamber music ; the Vegh Quartet produced ample volume, as well as quality, of tone. BLit oft this occasion it was the wind-players in the octet who alone gave us the genuine Schubertian frisson—for that, prolated over whole pages of the score, is what Schubert should communicate by his inexhaustible flow of melody and those modulations which, however often they recur, never fail to take the listener's breath away. I have never before seen the " archaic smile " of Greek statues reproduced so perfectly as on the faces of the large audience during Frederick Thurston's clartnet solos in the second movement. This was the singing tone for which we listened in vain in the quintet, though a violin, a viola and 'cello should surely be able to sing as sweetly, and more powerfully, than a single clarinet. Dennis Brain's horn-playing has the inimitable smoothness, sweetness and equability which make him the perfect player of this (and honestly of all other) horn music.
The Peter Gibbs String Quartet, which gave its first concert in central London at the Wigmore Hall on March 30th, promises excellently. These four very young players already show signs of achieving that almost uncanny single personality which is an essential of the best quartet playing. They are all manifestly musicians, and the quartet has no " sleeping partner." Their tone will grow in volume and' refinement, and their interpretation of three Beethoven quartets showed that they completely justify the high hopes that they
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