As in the case of most other musical genres, Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century seemed to have made the province of the song peculiarly its own. For well over a hundred years it has never been without a great lyrist. Schubert gave the German lyric wings. Schumann poured into it the full, rich flood of German romanticism in its sincerest days. Robert Franz cultivated a relatively simple song-form, the texture of which is not always as elastic as one could wish it to be; but he, too, was a man of pure and honest spirit, who sang of nothing that he had not deeply felt. Liszt first brought the song into some sort of relation with the new ideals of operatic and instrumental music associated with his name and that of Wagner; and in spite of his effusiveness of sentiment and his diffusiveness of style he produced some notable lyrics. In a song like Es war ein König in Thule, for example, a new principle of unification can be seen at work, one germinal theme being used for the construction of the whole song, which might almost be an excerpt from a later Wagnerian opera. But the lyrical history of the latter half of the nineteenth century is really summed up in the achievements of two men—Brahms and Hugo Wolf.[41]
Hugo Wolf, the foremost master of modern song, was born in Windischgrätz (Lower Styria), Austria, March 13, 1860, and died in an insane asylum in Vienna, February 22, 1903, the victim of a fatal brain disease, which afflicted him during the last six years of his tragic existence. Thus his effective life was practically reduced to thirty-seven years—not much longer a span than that other great lyricist, Franz Schubert. Little can be said of this brief career, impeded as it was by untoward circumstances and jealous opposition. To these conditions Wolf opposed a heroic fortitude and a passionate devotion to his art, which he practiced with uncompromising sincerity and religious assiduity. During long periods of work he remained in seclusion, maintaining a feverish activity and shutting himself off from outside influences. From 1875 on he lived almost continually in Vienna, where he studied for a short time in the conservatory. His only considerable absence he spent as conductor in Salzburg (1881). In Vienna he taught and for some years (till 1887) wrote criticisms for the Salonblatt. These articles have recently been collected and published. They reflect the writer's high idealism; his intolerance of all artistic inferiority and mediocrity show him to have been as valiant as an upholder of standards as he was discriminating in the judgment of æsthetic values, though his attack upon Brahms placed him into a somewhat ridiculous light with a large part of the musical public.
Thus he eked out an existence; any considerable recognition as a composer he did not achieve during his lifetime. None of his works was published till 1888, when his fifty-three Möricke songs (written within three months) appeared. The Eichendorff cycle (twenty songs) came next, and then the Spanisches Liederbuch (consisting of thirty-four secular and ten sacred songs), all written during 1889-90. Six songs for female voice after poems by Gottfried Keller, the Italienisches Liederbuch (forty-six poems by Paul Heyse, published in two parts) were composed during 1890-91 and in 1896 and the three poems by Michelangelo were set in 1897. Meantime there also came from his pen a hymn, Christnacht, for soli, chorus and orchestra (1891), incidental music for Ibsen's 'Festival of Solhaug' (1892), and in 1895 he wrote his Corregidor (already mentioned) within a few months. Other songs, some dating from his youth, were also published, as well as several choruses and chorus arrangements of songs. A string quartet in D minor (1879-80); a symphonic poem for full orchestra, Penthesilea (1883); and the charming 'Italian Serenade' for small orchestra (also arranged for string quartet by the composer) constitute his instrumental works—a small but choice aggregation.
Wolf was to the smaller field of the song what Wagner was to the larger field of opera. That characterization of him must not be misunderstood, as is often done, to mean that he simply took over the methods of Wagnerian musical drama—especially the principle of the leit-motif—and applied them to the song. He benefited by those methods, as virtually every modern composer has done; but he never applied them in the merely conscious and imitative way that the 'post-Wagnerians' did, for instance, in the opera. Wolf would have been a great lyrist had he been born in the eighteenth century, the sixteenth, or the twelfth; but it was his rare good fortune—the fortune that was denied to Schubert—to live in an epoch that could provide him with a lyrical instrument capable of responding to every impulse of his imagination. His was a truly exceptional brain, that could probably never have come to its full fruition in any age but the one he happened to be born into. He had not only the vision of new things to be done in music, as Liszt and Berlioz and others have had before and since, but the power, which Liszt and Berlioz had not, to make for himself a vocabulary that was copious enough, and a technique that was strong and elastic enough, to permit the easy expression of everything he felt. It is another of the many points in which he resembles Wagner; with the minimum of school training in his earliest days he made for himself a technical instrument that was purely his own—one that, when he had thoroughly mastered it, never failed him, and that was capable of steady growth and infinitely delicate adaptation to the work of the moment.
He draws, as Wagner did, a line of demarcation between an old world of feeling and a new one. As Wagner peopled the stage with more types than Weber, and saw more profoundly into the psychology of characters of every kind, so Wolf enlarged the world of previous and contemporary lyrists and intensified the whole mental and emotional life of the lyrical form. Too much stress need not be laid on the mere fact that he insisted on better 'declamation' than was generally regarded as sufficient in the song—on a shaping of the melody that would permit of the just accentuation of every word and syllable. This in itself could be done, and indeed has been done, by many composers who have not thereby succeeded in persuading the world that they are of the breed of Wolf. The extraordinary thing with him was that this respect for verbal values was consistent with the unimpeded flow of an expressive vocal line and an equally expressive pianoforte tissue. The basis of his manner is the utilizing of a quasi-symphonic form for the song. He marks the end of monody in the lyric as Wagner marks the end of monody in the opera. With Wagner the orchestra was not a mere accompanying instrument, a 'big guitar,' but a many-voiced protagonist in the drama itself. When the simple-minded hearer of half a century ago complained that there was no melody in Wagner, he only meant that the melody was not where he could distinguish it most easily—at the top. As a matter of fact, Wagner was giving him at least three times as much melody as the best of the Italian opera writers, for in the Meistersinger or Tristan it is not only the actors who are singing but the orchestra, and not only the orchestra as a whole but the separate instruments of it. When the average man complained that Wagner was starving him of melody, it was like a man drowning in a pond fifty feet deep crying out that there was not water enough in the neighborhood for him to wash in.
Wolf, too, fills the instrumental part of his songs with as rich a life as the vocal part. But he does even more amazing feats in the way of co-operation between the two factors than Wagner did. Independent as the piano part seemingly is, developing as if it had nothing to think of but its own symphonic course, it never distracts Wolf's attention from the vocal melody, which is handled with astonishing ease and freedom. Not only does each phase of the poem enter just where the most point can be given to it both poetically and declamatorily, without any regard for the mere four-square of the ordinary line or bar-divisions, but each significant word receives its appropriate accent, melodic rise or fall, or fleck of color. In the Die ihr schwebet um diese Palmen, for example, the expressive minor sixth of the voice part on the word Qual, seems to be there by a special dispensation of Providence. We know that the interval is one that is characteristic of the main accompaniment-figure of the song—it has appeared, indeed, as early as the second bar, and has been frequently repeated since—that it is almost inevitable that now and then it should occur in the voice, and, as a matter of fact, it has already occurred more than once there—at the schwebet and Palmen of the first line, for example, and later at the first syllable of Himmel in the line Der Himmelsknabe duldet Beschwerde. Yet we know very well that it is not a musical accident, but a stroke of psychological genius, that brings just this interval in on the word Qual in the lines Ach nur im Schlaf ihm leise gesänftigt die Qual zerrinnt, the interval indeed being in essence just what it has been all along, but receiving now a new and more poignant meaning by the way it is approached. We know very well that no other song-writer but Wolf would have had the instinct to perceive, in the midst of the flow of the accompaniment to what seems its own predestined goal, the expressive psychological possibilities of that particular note at that particular moment in that particular line. His songs teem with felicities of this kind; they represent the employment of one of Wagner's most characteristic instruments for uses more subtle even than he ever dreamt of.
Yet—and the point needs insisting upon, as it is still the subject of some misunderstanding—this quick and delicate adaptation of melodic and harmonic and rhythmic values to the necessities of the poem are not the result of a mere calculated policy of 'follow the words.' The song has not been shaped simply to permit of this coincidence of verbal and musical values, nor have these been consciously worked into the general tissue of the song after this has been developed on other lines. They represent the spontaneous utterance of a mind to which all the factors of the song were present in equal proportions from the first bar to the last. Wolf made no sketches for his songs; the great majority of them were written at a single sitting; the subject possessed him and made its own language.
His independence, his originality, his seminal force for the future of music, are all best shown by comparing him with Brahms. No one, of course, will question the greatness of Brahms as a lyrist. But a comparison with Wolf at once throws the former's limitations into a very strong light. Wolf was much more the man of the new time than his great contemporary. Brahms was the continuer and completer of Schumann, the last voice that the older romantic movement found for itself. By nature, training, and personal associations he was ill fitted to assimilate the new life that Wagner was pouring into the music of his day. Wolf from the first made a clean departure from both the matter and the manner of Brahms—a cleaner departure, indeed, than Wagner at first made from the romanticism of his contemporaries, for the kinship between the early Wagner and the Schumann of the songs is unmistakable. Wolf's thinking left the mental world of Brahms completely on one side; his music is free, for instance, from those touches of sugariness and of the larmoyant that can be so frequently detected even in the rugged Brahms, as in all the lyrists who took their stimulus from romanticism. Brahms' lyric types—his maidens, his students, his philosophers, his nature-lovers—are those of Germany in a particular historical phase of her art, literature, and life. With Wolf the lyric steps into a wider field. His psychological range is much broader than that of Brahms. He creates more types of character and sets them in a more varied milieu. With Brahms the same personages recur time after time in his songs, expressing themselves in much the same way. Even an unsympathetic student of Wolf would have to admit that no two of the personages he draws are the same. The characters of Brahms are mostly of the same household, with the same heredity, the same physical appearance, the same mental characteristics, even the same gait. The man who lies brooding in the summer fields in Feldeinsamkeit is brother of the man who loves the maiden of Wir wandelten, and first cousin of the girl who dies to the strains of Immer leise wird mein Schlummer. They all feel deeply but a little sentimentally; they are all extremely introspective; all speak with a certain slow seriousness and move about with a certain cumbersomeness. Wolf's men and women are infinitely varied, both in the mass and in detail; that is to say, not only is his crowd made up of many diverse types, but each type—the lovers, the thinkers, the penitents, and so on—is full of an inner diversity.
Wolf surpasses Brahms again in everything that pertains to the technical handling of the songs. Without wishing to make out that Brahms was anything but the great singer he undoubtedly was, it must be said frankly that he is too content to work within a frame that he has found to be of convenient size, shape, and color, instead of letting his picture determine the frame. The quaint accusation is sometimes brought against Wolf that he is more of an instrumental writer than a singer, the pianoforte parts of his songs being self-subsistent compositions. A devil's advocate might argue with much more force that it was Brahms who, in his songs, thought primarily in terms of instrumental phrases even for his voices. It is his intentness upon the beauty of an abstract melodic line that makes him pause illogically as he does after me Königin in the first line of Wie bist du, meine Königin, thus making a bad break in the poetical sense of the words, which is not really complete until the second line is heard, the Wie bist du not referring, as many thousands of people imagine, to the Königin, but to the durch sanfte Güte wonnevoll in the next line. In other songs, such as An die Nachtigall, Brahms yields at the very beginning to the fascination of what is unquestionably in itself a beautiful phrase, without regard to the fact that it will get him into difficulties both of psychology and of 'declamation' as the song goes on, owing to his applying the same kind of musical line-ending to poetical line-endings that vary in meaning each time. Wolf never makes a primitive blunder of this kind. He sees the poem as a whole before he begins to set it; if he adopts at the commencement a figure that is to run through the whole song, it is a figure that can readily be applied to each phase of it without doing psychological violence to any. If at any point its application involves a falsity, it would be temporarily discarded. Brahms, again, is almost as much addicted to clichés as Schubert, and with less excuse—the cliché of syncopation for syncopation's sake; for example, the cliché of a harmonic darkening of the second or third stanza of a poem, and so on. From limitations of this sort Wolf is free; his harmonic and rhythmic idioms are as varied as his melodic. The great variety of his songs makes it almost impossible to cite a few of them as representative of the whole.