[29] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).
[30] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII).
[31] Vol. IV, chapters XII-XIV.
CHAPTER XIII
HUGO WOLF AND AFTER
Wolf and the poets of his time; Hugo Wolf’s songs; Gustav Mahler; Richard Strauss as song-writer; Max Reger’s songs—Schönberg and the modern radicals.
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.
