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.

VI

A survey of German music at the present day leads to the conclusion that, for the moment at any rate, it has come to the end of its resources. All the great traditions have exhausted themselves. Strauss has apparently said all he has to say of value (though, of course, he may yet recover himself). Of this he himself seems uneasily conscious. His later works exhibit both a tendency to revert to a Mozartian simplicity (as in the final stages of Ariadne auf Naxos, the duet Ist ein Traum, kann nicht wirklich sein in Der Rosenkavalier, and elsewhere), and here and there, as in 'The Legend of Joseph,' a desire to coquet with the exoticisms of France and the East. All these later works suggest that Strauss has partly lost faith in the German tradition, without having yet found a new faith to take its place. Max Reger is content to sit in the centre of his own web, spinning for ever the same music out of the depths of his Teutonic consciousness. In opera, in the song, in the symphony, in program music, in chamber music, Germany is apparently doing little more at present than mark time. Nevertheless there are undoubtedly germinating forces which will come to fruition before long. Perhaps the men now creating will be the instruments of the new voice, perhaps their pupils. One or two of the younger generation, at any rate, have done things that may justly claim our attention. One fact may be noticed in this connection: that the supremacy seems to have shifted definitely from the North to the South. Munich and Vienna are, indeed, the new centres, in place of Leipzig and Berlin.

Thuille's successor as teacher of composition in the Munich Academy of Tonal Art, Friedrich Klose (b. 1862), is, as a pupil of Bruckner, particularly qualified to represent the South-German branch of the New German school. His single dramatic work, Ilsebill, did not succeed in establishing him among the successful post-Wagnerians. Walter Niemann[42] speaks of it as showing that his real strength lies in the direction of symphonic composition and music for the Catholic Church, and continues: 'His three-movement symphonic poem Das Leben ein Traum (1899), with organ, women's chorus, declamation and wind instruments, and in a less degree his Elfenreigen, already proved this. Through him Hector Berlioz enters modern Munich by the hand of Liszt, Wagner, and Bruckner, and particularly Berlioz the forest romanticist of the "Dance of the Sylphs" and "Queen Mab." Again and again Klose returns to church music—with the D minor Mass, the prelude and double fugue for organ, lastly, with Die Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar. * * * If his striving after new forms, the searching in other directions after the dramatic element which was denied him in the ordinary sense, savors of a strongly experimental character, his music itself is all the less problematic. It is honest through and through, warm-blooded, felt and natural.' The quiet breadth of his themes, the deep glow of his color reveals the pupil of Bruckner. His manner of development in sequences, approaching the 'endless melody,' betrays the disciple of Wagner. A Festzug for orchestra, Vidi aquam for chorus, orchestra, and organ, and an 'Elegy' for violin and piano are also among his works.

Siegmund von Hausegger (b. 1872), son of the distinguished critic and conductor Friedrich von Hausegger, though he began his creative activity in the dramatic field (with Helfrid, performed in 1893 in Graz, and Zinnober, 1888, in Munich), has earned his chief distinction with the symphonic poems Barbarossa (1902) and Wieland der Schmied (1904). In these he remains true to the Wagnerian formula, while in his songs he upholds the gospel of Hugo Wolf. A youthful Dyonysische Phantasie (1899), which preceded these works, is characterized by Niemann as 'showing the line of development in the direction of a "kapellmeister music" in Strauss' style.' Since then there have come from his pen a number of fine choruses with orchestra, some for men's voices, others mixed. Hausegger was a pupil of his father, of Degner, and of Pohlig (in piano) and has achieved a high standing as conductor, first at the Graz opera, 1896-97, then of the Kaim concerts in Munich (from 1899) and the Museum concerts in Frankfort.

A new impulse may one day be given to German music by the remarkable boy, Erich Korngold (born 1897), who, while quite a child, showed an amazing mastery of harmonic expression and of general technique, and a not less amazing depth of thought. It remains to be seen whether, as he grows to manhood, he will develop a personality wholly his own (there are many signs of this already), or whether he will merely relapse into a skilled manipulator of the great traditions of his race. But it is vain to try to forecast the future of music in Germany or in any other country. Much music will continue to be written that owes whatever virtues it may possess merely to a competent exploitation of the racial heritage. Of this type a fair sample is the Deutsche Messe of Otto Taubmann (born 1859). On the other hand, something may come of the revolt against tradition that is now being led by Arnold Schönberg (b. 1874).

This composer seemed destined, in his earlier works, to carry still a stage further the great line of German music; the mind that could produce the beautiful sextet Verklärte Nacht and the splendid Gurrelieder at the age of twenty-five or so seemed certain of a harmonious development, bringing more and more of its own to build with upon the permanent German foundation.