If the certain chivalric romanticism of Weber’s music is hard to analyze, the special charm of Schubert’s is wholly elusive. We have to do with an utterly different nature. Weber was an aristocrat, a rover among wild companions, a hanger-on at the theatre for a while, if you will, but none the less of distinguished birth, of polished manners and of fine wit. Schubert was more than any other of the composers, even more than Haydn, a man of the people. He was happy to mingle with the peasants, happy to play hours at a time for their dancing. Beethoven is said to have modelled the music of the country people’s dance in the ‘Pastoral Symphony’ upon the music he heard played in a certain country tavern to which at one time he delighted to go. Brahms in his impoverished boyhood used to earn a few pence by playing for the sailors’ dancing in the taverns along the waterfront of Hamburg. But Beethoven regarded himself, as we have said, as the high priest of an exalted art; and Brahms was hardly less imperious. Yet Schubert, for all his ideals which rose ever and ever higher, for all the fact that he numbered acquaintances in the same aristocratic families which had seen Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven come and go, remained a man of the people, a singer in the sway of his art, a loveable, reckless, sentimental and affectionate boy. All his music is lyrical. The song is never absent from his pianoforte works, no matter how instrumental parts of them may be. He is essentially a melodist. His rhythms have the lilt of a dance. These two elements are not disguised. They undergo no intellectual transformations. They are as obvious as in the folk-songs and dances of the country people with whom he loved to associate. Hence the almost complete lack of sophistication in his music, the naturalness which distinguishes it from all other music. His harmonies are strange and warm. They lack the subtlety of Mozart on the one hand, the frankness of Weber on the other. They have not the expressive significance of Beethoven. They seem rather to go beside his music than to go under it. One listens through them, so to speak, as one might look upon a procession through a colored mist that now conceals, now discloses, that always plays magic tricks with the sight. Two harmonic procedures appear more or less regularly in his music. One is the interchange of major and minor, the other the bodily shifting of the harmonic fabric up and down the scale. The latter are changes rather than modulations. By reason of these unexpected, unaccountable harmonies, his music sounds now near, now far. One moment it is with us and familiar, the next it is aloof and strange.