few days. Upon the same
morning from three to six songs might be written, if the poems chanced
to attract him. He scarcely ever altered or erased, and rarely
curtailed. All his music has the character of improvisation. The
melody, harmony, the thematic treatment, and the accompaniment with
the instrumental coloring, all seem to have occurred to him at the
same time. It is only a question of writing it down. Very little of
his music was performed during his lifetime--of the songs, first and
last, many of them in private circles, and the last two or three years
of his life, perhaps twenty or twenty-five in public. A few of his
smaller orchestral numbers were played by amateur players, where he
may have heard them himself, but his larger works he never heard. All
that schooling of ear which Beethoven had, as an orchestral director
in youth, Schubert lacked. His studies in counterpoint had never been
pursued beyond the rudiments, and the last engagement he made before
his death was for lessons with Sechter, the contrapuntal authority in
Vienna at that time.

In spontaneity of genius Schubert resembles Mozart more than any other
master who ever lived. His early education and training were different
from those of Mozart, and musical ideas take different form with him.
While Mozart was distinctly a melodist, counterpoint and fugue were at
his fingers' ends, and his thematic treatment had all the freedom
which comes from a thorough training in the use of musical material.
Schubert had not this kind of training. He never wrote a good fugue,
and his counterpoint was indifferent; but on the other hand he had
several qualities which Mozart had not, and in particular a very
curious and interesting mental phenomenon, which we might call
psychical resonance or clairvoyance. Whatever poem or story he read
immediately called up musical images in his mind. Under the excitement
of the sentiment of a poem, or of dramatic incidents narrated, strange
harmonies spontaneously suggested themselves, and melodies exquisitely
appropriate to the sentiment he desired to convey. He was a musical
painter, whose colors were not imitated from something without
himself, but were inspired from within.

Schubert was a great admirer of Beethoven, and upon one occasion
called upon him with a set of works which he had dedicated to the
great master. Beethoven had been prepared for the visit by some
admirer of Schubert's, and received him very kindly, but whe