Two things preëminently Schumann brought to his songs beyond what any composer had brought previously. First there was an accurate regard for the text. It is not to belittle Schubert to say that he did not show Schumann’s accurate regard for the words. Schubert’s regard for the text was conscientious and faithful; his melodies are marvellously faithful to the spirit and his musical prosody never does violence to the metre and accent. But Schubert was working under a somewhat different tradition from Schumann. He is more the melodist, pure and simple. His attitude toward musical prosody was somewhat negative; he demanded of his melody only that it should not do violence to the metre; beyond that it could follow its own musical course. Hence, we not infrequently in his songs have such passages as this, from _Die Allmacht_: [Illustration: Music score] verkünden seine Macht This, of course, is in no way reprehensible or violent to the canons of art. But it differs from Schumann’s method in that it puts a higher value on pure song--on the mere joyous exercise of the vocal organs. Schumann’s attitude toward musical prosody was more positive; he demanded of his melody not only that it should do no obvious violence to the metre, but that it should take pains accurately to fit the minor accents and quantities. He tried to make the text as sung not very different from the text as declaimed. True, he sometimes wrote mere lyric passages of melody on an open vowel, like that in the above example from Schubert. But such passages in Schumann are far more rare. And the whole body of his songs shows that he took the text more as his collaborator in matters of detail. His songs are not valuable primarily because of their melody. He has written many lovely melodies, but a large proportion of his songs would be of comparatively little musical value (at least in the voice part) without the words. And his melodic invention, taking his songs as a whole, is far below the exalted work of Schubert. Besides, Schubert’s texts, though not generally chosen without discrimination, do not show the same careful selection as those of Schumann. The poems of the latter are carefully selected for the purpose of specific musical treatment, and in consequence seem to have a higher literary value, whether they have or not. Finally, Schumann had the immense advantage of possessing nearly all of Heine’s wonderful lyrics to choose from, a fact that in many an instance gave him the opportunity of writing immortal music ‘married to immortal verse.’