We have seen in a previous chapter how Schubert, having created one supremely great ballad, failed ever to write another. So the task of creating the art-ballad fell not upon his shoulders but upon those of another, Johann Carl Gottfried Löwe, who was born in North Germany in 1796, almost at the same time as Schubert, and long outlived the gentle Viennese composer. Löwe wrote a quantity of choral and church music, but he is chiefly known for his numerous ballads, which he made known throughout Europe in his own concert tours and which have pretty well held their own to this day, in spite of serious drawbacks. Löwe’s songs were almost solely in the ballad form. To this he gave his best talents, which were marked though uneven. Undoubtedly he was an artist, working with sincerity and reserve in a form which, more than most forms, would tempt a composer to artistic excess. Add to this the fact that Löwe was not endowed with a rich fund of musical ideas (at least from the standpoint of pure beauty) and we must pay considerable respect to the man who stuck to his guns as he did and produced such a sincere and admirable body of work as he did. Löwe’s ballads are descriptive in the highest degree. Every resource that the composer has at his command he calls upon to make the scene pictorial and vivid. In his search for effects he stumbled upon many musical devices which must have proved valuable to later composers. His harmony, considering the time in which he worked, is free and daring. His modulation goes by direct chromatic progression to the most remote keys. Dissonance he uses freely for poignant effect. But the great fault is that he was not a melodist. Melody is, of course, not needed in the ballad as it is in the lyric, but none the less the composer who cannot call forth a beautiful melody when he needs it must jog along as a second-rate artist. It is the lack of melody which we miss most in Löwe’s ballads. Melody is obviously absent because the composer could not command it, not because he chose not to use it. Time and again he writes what is meant to be, and perhaps was believed to be, a pleasing tune. But too often it is only empty and angular. It was in developing the form and technique of the art-ballad that Löwe performed his chief service to music.