V
For Wolf the song was the supreme form of expression. In the case of Strauss the song is only an overflow from the concert and operatic works. In spite of the great beauty of some of his songs, such as the Ständchen and Seitdem dein Aug, we are probably justified in saying that is not a lyrist pur sang. A large number of his songs have obviously been turned out for pot-boiling purposes. Certain undoubted successes in the smaller forms notwithstanding, it remains true that he is at his best when he has plenty of space to work in, and, above all, when he can rely on the backing of the orchestra, as in the splendid Pilgers Morgenlied, and the 'Hymnus.' As a rule, he fails to achieve Wolf's happy balance between the vocal part and the accompaniment; very often his songs are simply piano pieces with a voice part added as skillfully as may be, which means sometimes not skillfully at all.
Among Max Reger's numerous songs are some of great beauty. He is sometimes rather too copious to be a thoroughly successful lyrist; both the piano and the vocal ideas are now and then in danger of being drowned in the flood of notes he pours about them. But when he has seen his picture clearly and expressed it simply and directly, his songs—the Wiegenlied and Allein, for example, to mention two of widely differing genres—are among the richest and most beautiful of our time. Mahler poured some of the very best, because the simplest and truest, of himself into such songs as the Kindertodtenlieder, the four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Ich atmet einen linden Duft, and Mitternacht (from the four Rückert lyrics), and certain of the settings of the songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. But the list of good, and even very good, song-composers in the Germany of the latter half of the nineteenth century is almost endless; it seems, indeed, as if there were at least one good song in the blood of every modern German, just as there was at least one good lyric or sonnet in the blood of every Elizabethan poet. From Cornelius to Erich Wolff the stream has never stopped.
In virtually all these men except Erich Wolff, however, the stream has been, as with Strauss, a side branch of their main activity. It was only to be expected that the next powerful impulse after Hugo Wolf would come from a composer who, like him, gave to the songs the best of his mental energies. Joseph Marx resembles Wolf superficially in just the way that Wolf superficially resembles Wagner—in the elaboration and expressiveness of what must still be called, for convenience sake, the accompaniment to his voice parts. But, while it would be premature as yet to see in Marx another Wolf, it is certain that we have in him a lyrist of considerable individuality. He has managed to utilize the Wolfian technique and the Wolfian heritage of emotion, as Wolf utilized those of Wagner, without copying them; they have become new things in his hands. He has also drawn, as Wolf did, upon quite a new range of poetic theme. He is not so keenly interested as Wolf in the outer world. Wolf, like Goethe, had the eye of a painter as well as the intuition of a poet, and his music is peculiarly rich not only in more or less avowed pictorialism, but in a sort of veiled pictorialism—a pictorialism at one remove, as it were—that conveys a subtle suggestion of the movement or color of some concrete thing without forcing the symbol for it too obtrusively upon our ear. (Excellent examples are the suggestion of gently drooping boughs and softly falling leaves in Anakreons Grab, and, in another style, the unbroken thirds from first to last of Nun wandre, Maria, so charmingly suggestive of the side-by-side journeying of Joseph and Mary.) Marx's music offers us hardly a recognizable example of this pictorialism; his most ambitious effort has been in the Regen (a German version of Verlaine's Il pleure dans mon cœur), which is one of the least successful of his lyrics. Like Wolf, he has called in a new harmonic idiom to express new poetic conceptions or new shades of old ones; but he is apt to become the slave of his own manner, which Wolf never did. His intellectual range, though not equal to that of his great predecessor, is still a fairly wide one—from the luxuriance of the splendid Barcarolle to the philosophical warmth of Der Rauch, from the bizarrerie of the Valse de Chopin to the humor of Warnung, from the earnest introspectiveness of Wie einst, Hat dich die Liebe berührt, the Japanesisches Regenlied and Ein junger Dichter to the sunny vigor of the Sommerlied.
Among the rest of the numerous composers—Humperdinck, Henning von Koss, Hans Sommer (a personality of much charm and some power), Eugen d'Albert, Weingartner, Bungert, Jean Louis Nicodé (b. 1853), and others—each of whom has enriched German music with some delightful songs—a special word may be said with regard to two of them—Theodor Streicher (born 1814) and Erich W. Wolff (died 1913). Streicher follows too faithfully at times in the footprints of the poet—which is only another way of saying that the musician in him is not always strong enough to assert his rights. His work varies greatly in quality. Some of it is finely imaginative and organically shaped; the rest of it is a rather formless and expressionless series of quasi-illustrations of a poetic idea line by line. He frequently aims at the humorous, the realistic or the sententious in a way that a composer with more of the real root of music in him would see to be a mere temptation to the art to overstrain itself. But, though he is perhaps not more than half a musician—the other half being poet, prosist, moralist, or what we will—that half has produced some good songs, such as the Fonte des Amores, Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam, the Lied des jungen Reiters, Maria sass am Wege, the Nachtlied des Zarathustra, and the Weinschröterlied. Erich Wolff was never more than a minor composer, but that he had the genuine lyrical gift is shown by such songs as Du bist so jung, Sieh, wo du bist ist Frühling, Einen Sommer lang, and others. He is particularly charming when, as in Fitzebue, Frisch vom Storch and Christkindleins Wiegenlied, he exploits the childlike vein that comes so easily to most Germans, and that has found its most delightful modern expression in Hänsel and Gretel.