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.
II
Gustav Mahler (1860-1910) has received little recognition as a song-writer outside of Germany. The great effort of his life was expended on his symphonies, which are planned on a scale larger than man had ever thought of before. In many ways Mahler was a very great master. As an artist he was unimpeachable. As a writer for the orchestra he was original and forceful. As a developer of the new radical technique he holds a high place in the history of German music. It may be doubted whether his musical ideas and his power of musical architecture were equal to the execution of his stupendous plans. But these faults, if they exist, do not enter greatly into his songs—at least into the most typical of them. For Mahler had one quality which always stood by him when others failed. This was his intimate feeling for the folk-song. A peasant by birth, he retained a certain simplicity of soul in his attitude toward music which seems contradicted by his great technical complexity. He can reproduce not only the simple form of the folk-song, but also its spirit, its naïve literal quality, which takes joy in what a sophisticated person would find common. This quality we find very frequently in his songs. The greatest of these is the group entitled Kindertotenlieder, which are loved in Germany (and especially in Vienna) almost beyond any other. These dirges for children have hardly any parallel in music. They combine an intense pathos with something of the naïve simplicity of the child. They are not mere dirges. They are dirges for those ‘the doubly dead in that they died so young.’ The congenital faults of Mahler are not to be found here. The songs are almost above criticism from the musical standpoint. But Mahler the peasant is to be seen especially in the songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, that wonderful collection of German folk-poetry which has been such a storehouse for the nation in the last century. While these have not the spiritual elevation or the consistently high musicianship of the Kindertotenlieder, they preserve an unconventional freshness of spirit which is hardly less remarkable.
Richard Strauss is generally regarded as the great continuer of the German song tradition. That he is a true continuer is perfectly correct. Whether his music, absolutely considered, is as ‘great’ as people once thought is still undecided by the public. Some profess to discover liberal injections of the charlatan in Strauss’s work. Whether he sometimes gets his effects by cheap means which the artist in him would despise is a question to be argued elsewhere. We must, however, grant him two great faculties—the faculty of beautiful melody and that of musical ability. In sheer beauty of theme (and this is especially true in some of his songs) he is worthy to be regarded as of the line of Schubert and Brahms. In musical learning there are probably not half a dozen men in the world to-day to equal him and there was a time, ten or more years ago, when he seemed to stand almost alone. While for some years past his symphonic poems and operas have overshadowed his smaller work, he has been known from the beginning as a brilliant writer of songs, and has not ceased to give some of his best energies to song composition. The result is a truly brilliant list of lyrics. We can no more deny the able musicianship of the later ones than we can deny the impressive beauty of the earlier. They are far from being repetitions of each other. This great variety, both in mood and in technical style, proves what a rich fund of ideas and artistic power the composer had to draw from. The technique of the later ones is about that familiar to us in the Strauss operas, a brilliant use of dissonance and rapid modulation combined with an extremely bold polyphony. At the basis of this style is always a theme or a group of themes as simple, as conventional in conception as anything in Schubert. It is as though Strauss were afraid of losing utterly the interest of the average man and gave him every now and then a simple tune that he would be sure to enjoy. But it is more than this. For Strauss is a German of the Germans. His whole musical culture is truly built on the great German tradition of Bach-Beethoven-Brahms. His complexity is only a development of the noble simplicity of all fine German music. It is right and proper that his themes should be simple and understandable. But it is possible, and probably perfectly just, to argue that he has failed to make the one part of his music seem a development of the other. We feel here that the new style and the old are both present, that they are juxtaposed, that they have not been fused or synthesized. And this duality, which we feel in some of the operas and in the later orchestral works, also appears in his songs. It makes these later songs less admirable, from the technical standpoint, than those of Ravel, who has organized his materials into an almost homogeneous technique.
However the case may stand in this matter Strauss’s early songs will remain as worthy of a place in the great German hierarchy. Opus 10 contains a number of masterpieces. Zueignung is, in sheer beauty, almost equal to Schumann at his best. ‘The Night’ is a simple song of great loveliness and ‘Patience’ is a superbly eloquent piece of emotional writing based on an accompaniment of simple repeated chords. It is in work like this that a great composer tests himself out. This power to achieve great beauty within narrow limitations is, as we have so often pointed out in the course of this book, the proof that genuine creative power is there. These songs which we have just mentioned are among the very best in the Strauss list. Others of the first rank are: ‘I Love Thee,’ opus 37, a powerful example of emotional lyricism; Ich trage meine Minne, opus 32, a simple piece of marvellous beauty and grace; and ‘With Thy Blue Eyes,’ opus 56, a song of unusually tender and appealing quality. Among the earlier songs we should mention the charming Morgen; Wozu, Mädchen, soll es frommen, opus 19; Nachtgang, opus 29; and Traum durch die Dämmerung, the last one of the most admired. ‘Rest My Soul’ and the ‘Nuptial Song’—the former very simple and the latter highly organized—are stimulating examples of Strauss’s art. Of the later songs (which seem to show a falling off in artistic sincerity) we may mention ‘The Three Holy Kings,’ opus 56, which is a sort of miniature opera, with an abundance of incidental music in the form of a stately march. ‘The Lonely One’ of opus 51 contains a bass part very effectively used and ‘The Valley’ is musical description of a high order.