SCHUBERT'S IMPROMPTUS
Played by VICTOR HELY-HUTCHINSON
(Pianoforte)
Impromptu I
Impromptu IV
SCHUBERT was a master of the miniature.
Nobody has known better than he how to paint vividly on a small canvas. Perhaps, indeed, he paints best on such a canvas, for when he gives himself larger spaces to fill, he sometimes loses his sense of balance and proportion and provides what is in its every phrase lovely, but in places ill-contrived in its form and redundant in its expression.
Or is it, perchance, not Schubort who is in fault, but we ? Are our minds too easily wearied, and should wo with more patient observation come to see that Schubert is as great an athlete of the long-distance run as of tho hundred yards ? Anyhow, at the latter ho cannot bo excelled. We must all admit that !
In a little group of his pieces the element of momentariness is expressed in the very title' Musical Moments '-what an unambitious title, yet how much it has come to mean to us ! Did Schubert invent that title ? Perhaps not: the first publisher of these pieces was one Loidesdorf, himself a composer of sorts, and himself responsible for some pieces called Moments of Melancholy.
Wo find in the Momenta and Impromptus a variety of moods, conveyed and contrasted in mostly simple forms. Very happy, we know, is Schubert's use of Variations, and of that form we have an example in the third Impromptu, to be played to-morrow.