I
German song since Schubert has known nothing like a fallow period. In no single decade has the song product been markedly inferior to any other. After Schubert and Schumann there came Liszt, Franz, and Brahms; and after Brahms there came Wolf, Strauss, and Reger. The Germany of these latter men was, of course, a very different Germany from that which preceded the Franco-Prussian War. It was a united Germany, an increasingly centralized Germany, a more prosperous Germany. In many ways it seems to be a more Philistine Germany. But, though the political and social conditions changed after 1870, this change was not expressed in the national literature for a number of years. And in the lyric poetry it was chiefly the poets of the old régime who held sway toward the end of the century. These poets had come in on the reaction that followed the failure of the liberal political movement of 1848. When men found their political strivings frustrated they once more turned their attention to their souls. Chief representative of ‘art for art’s sake’ was Emmanuel Geibel (1815-1885), an extremely talented literary man who cultivated the pure lyric with great success. Geibel was not a man of great originality. He clung to the old poetic motives and to the old ideas concerning the relations of man. But his versification was very engaging, being gentler and smoother than is usual in German poetry, and his manipulation of ideas and images was extremely deft. Next to him in popular esteem was Eduard Möricke (1804-1875), a Swabian pastor who took to writing verse as an amusement. In addition to an insinuating use of image and word music he had that rare quality in a lyric poet—a sense of humor. His touches of fun are always wholesome and delightful. Paul Heyse (1830-1911) was best known as a novelist and short-story writer, but his lyric gift was marked and his translations from the Spanish and Italian attained great popularity. Detlev von Liliencron (1844-1909) was another of the foremost lyricists of the time. In a later generation Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865-1909) and Richard Dehmel (born 1863) were influential. They rank with Hugo von Hoffmannsthal (born 1874) as the foremost lyricists of present-day Germany. These men are not great. They by no means express Germany as Tennyson, for instance, expressed mid-Victorian England. But, taken together, they supply the growing demand for sensuous, subjective poetry and they execute their task with a fine command over the lyrical qualities of the German language.
We have not yet finished with the process of ‘placing’ Wolf (1860-1903) as a song writer, but there are competent critics who would rank him above Schubert (that is, as the greatest in musical history) and any number who would rank him just below. Certainly his work is free from any of the careless or conventional writing which disfigures so much of Schubert’s work. The standard which Wolf set for himself in his song-writing is perhaps more exacting than that set by any other composer. His songs measure up to more separate tests than do those of any other one man. It is evident, then, that his musicianship must have been of the highest order. He had the benefit of the great generation of musicians who had followed Schubert and brought to maturity the work which he had only begun. Schubert was too often content with a type accompaniment, a conventional turn of phrase which only serves to fill up a measure and (what is worse) with an indifferent bit of music when something first-rate didn’t enter his head. Moreover, his technique, from the point of view of accurate emotional expression, was necessarily limited, since his task was a comparatively new one. Wolf had this one immense external advantage—that he began his work after ‘Tristan’ had been written. He was able to write his songs with an accurate acquaintance with the most powerful emotional idiom the world has ever seen. Whether or not Wolf was the superior of Schubert in absolute genius is another matter. But undoubtedly, taken all in all, his songs must satisfy modern ears and modern demands better than those of Schubert.
When we mention Wolf’s debt to Wagner, when we mention the Wagnerian influence in his songs, we do not mean that he has been an imitator. The principles which Wagner exemplified in the opera could have but a slight application to the art of song writing. Further, Wolf was far too individual to carry over Wagner’s precise methods and mannerisms into his work. When we speak of the Wagnerian influence on Wolf we mean merely the influence which a supreme master in any art must exert on all who have studied his work. Wagner had opened the eyes of men to a musical world almost undreamed of before—a world of chromatic harmony and free modulation which had been no more than vaguely implied in the music preceding him. He had shown men, by one or two masterful examples, that the thing could be done; the others then set about to do it in their own ways. Among these others was Wolf, as a young man an adorer of Wagner and constant student of his scores, a finely balanced musical nature which could understand and synthesize the work of great men and recreate out of this understanding an art that was his own. Accordingly we find Wolf far more chromatic in his procedure than any song writer before him, far more concerned with his accompaniments, freer and more accurate in his treatment of the voice—yet not a whit less lyrical than any other song writer who had ever lived. Wolf’s songs are not Wagnerian operas. His great emphasis upon the accompaniment as an instrument of expression is not an imitation of the Wagnerian orchestra with its function as ‘soul of the drama.’ His use of the germ-motive is not an imitation of the Wagnerian leit-motif, standing for a single character or idea. Wolf could not have imitated Wagner without making his songs operatic and unlyrical. What he did was to write songs absolutely in the fine old German song tradition after he had fertilized his mind and invention with an accurate knowledge of the works of the greatest modern German musician.
Hugo Wolf
After a photograph from life.
Wolf’s two predominant technical qualities were truly in line with the development of German song, apart from any extraneous influence. These two influences were the significance given to the piano part and the closest accuracy in the treatment of the words. Wolf’s procedure with the words—his rigid adherence to the ‘one-syllable, one-note’ principle, his insistence that the voice part should agree with the special accents of meaning as well as with the ordinary accents of prosody—this might have been merely a meticulous fad with another composer. But with Wolf it truly represented his attitude toward the art-song, an attitude strongly contrasted with, say, that of Brahms. He carried it out not as a rule to be observed (he occasionally broke it himself), but as an expression of his artistic feeling. His melody, of course, is somewhat free, but its musical integrity is never disfigured to meet the demands of the text. It is genuinely lyrical, but so managed as to give more regard to details than in most composers’ songs. Wolf’s piano parts are an unending delight to the musical student. They are more ambitious, more complex, more exuberant than those of Franz, but no less perfect from the point of view of workmanship. Unlike Franz, again, they are very highly colored and filled with details which interpret particular nuances in the text. Especially are they interesting for doing in an emotional and dramatic way what Franz so often did in an intellectual way—developing his piano part from a simple musical germ. Franz’s accompaniments are charming in the highest degree, but rarely emotionally moving. Wolf’s speak with an emotional voice not surpassed in any songs of the nineteenth century.
Ernest Newman points out as Wolfs highest glory the immense variety and distinctness of the characters he has interpreted in his songs. Heroes, lovers, fools, warriors, drunkards—these and a host of others he has put into his music with almost unvarying success. Newman compares him in this respect with Shakespeare. Certainly, many of the greatest masters have shown marked limitations in this respect. Wolf’s interpretative ability seems almost unlimited. He felt his poems as few other composers have done. He worked much as Schubert worked—in a sort of trance, dreaming over his poems, living and sleeping with his characters, composing his music in a kind of hypnotic state and writing down his music with such inspired insight that the first draft was nearly always the last. As a result we feel that his interpretation is the ultimate and perfect interpretation. He seems to have had no technique, in the sense of a musical system which dictates notes of itself. Wolf’s notes were dictated by direct inspiration as with few other song-writers in musical history. The songs are as individual as the songs of Franz and far more dissimilar in the external plan and contour. There is such a thing as a Franz style. There is no such thing as a Wolf style; each song stands utterly by itself.
The numerous songs written by Wolf before 1888 are not to be counted in this general summary of his work. They are experimental and youthful, showing a progress toward the masterful maturity of his great period. But they comprise several which can rank with his best. Of these we may mention ‘The Mouse Trap,’ an exquisitely humorous thing, and ‘To Rest,’ which is very tender and moving. ‘Biterolf,’ composed in 1886, is a warrior’s song, striking the great vein of heroism. The ‘Serenade’ of 1888 is one of the best known of the Wolf songs, a piece in which the piano and voice sing together as if they were parts of one complex instrument. The fifty-three Möricke songs of the year 1888 include such a number of masterpieces that it may well be called the most remarkable single group of songs ever written. The variety and perfection of these songs would lead one to believe that they were the selected work of many years of labor. We cannot sufficiently praise the variety of expression—the human types of Das verlassene Mägdlein, Agnes, Der Jäger, Erstes Liebeslied, and the Lied eines Verliebten; the religious emotion of Auf ein altes Bild, Schlafendes Jesuskind, Zum neuen Jahr, and the Gebet; the poetry and fantasy of the Elfenlied, Um Mitternacht, Nixe Binsefuss, and others; the deep and varied emotion of Der Genesene and Die Hoffnung, Er ist’s, Nimmersatte Liebe, An eine Aeolsharfe, Verborgenheit, Lebewohl, and the Gesang Weylas, the lively humor of Der Tambour, Auftrag, and Abschied. Humor is also present in the group of thirteen Eichendorf songs, as in the delightful Der Scholar. The passionate note is finely struck in Liebesglück and Seemann’s Abschied; and the Nachtzauber and ‘Serenade’ show a masterful power of poetic suggestion.
The Goethe songs are generally regarded as, on the whole, a retrogression after the magnificent Mörike group. They are slightly less spontaneous, somewhat too loaded down with detail. But nothing could be finer as an expression of passion than Hochbeglückt in deiner Liebe and Komm Liebchen, komm. In the grand manner are Grenzen der Menschheit and Prometheus, the latter one of the most magnificent songs ever written. A certain inimitable dithyrambic humor sings in the Drinking Songs—So lang man nüchtern ist, Was in der Schencke waren heute, and Trunken müssen wir alle sein. Far removed from the Teutonic nobleness of Goethe are the Spanish and Italian songs, to words by Geibel and Heyse. Their average is very high and it is almost at random that we select the following for mention: Nun bin ich dein; Geh, geliebter; Ich führ über Meer; Komm, o Tod von Nacht umgeben, Tief im Herzen, In dem Schatten meiner Locken, Auf deinem grünen Balkon, Der Mond hat eine schwere Klag erhoben, Was für ein Lied, Und willst du deinen Liebsten sterben sehen, and Sterb’ ich, so hüllt in Blumen meine Glieder. Finally, we should mention the fine settings to three sonnets of Michael Angelo, the last things Wolf wrote before going to the madhouse, hopelessly insane. Wohl denk’ ich oft, Fühlt meine Seele, and Alles endet was entstehet are deeply sincere expressions of the pessimism which comes at times over the greatest of souls.