Eric Sams

Hugo Wolf: Works

Wolf, Hugo (in Grove, 1980), © The Estate of Eric Sams

5. Early vocal works. 6. Instrumental works. 7. Mature songs. 8. Stage music. 9. Critical writings.

Life

Work-list

5. EARLY VOCAL WORKS. At first, Wolf had little inkling of his goal. He was even misdirected by his own refrac­tory temperament and a preoccupation with large-scale forms. As compensation, his extremes of mood commanded an analogously wide range of expression, while his obsession with opera concentrated his mind on musical techniques of characterization and atmosphere. Further, his self-willed and poetic nature constrained him to voice and keyboard rather than to such social or academic disciplines as chamber music or orchestration. So his strengths were early if unwittingly bent towards the compression of large-scale forms and ideas into the lyric frame. The essences of grand opera, tone poem and expressive symphony – as exemplified by Wagner, Liszt and Bruckner, Wolf's three most admired masters – were to be distilled and concentrated into song.

   Not surprisingly, Wolf's early attempts to cultivate what he later called 'the infertile ground of absolute music' (Musikalische Kritiken, p.50) proved fruitless or 'abortive. Even his native ground of musico-poetic ex­pression had to be prepared by deep reading. Goethe and Heine lyrics led him to their settings in Schubert and Schumann and thence to a study of expressive tech­niques in piano music as well as songwriting. Wolf ex­perimented by crossing all these strains into new hyb­rids. Thus his Heine setting Wenn ich in deine Augen seh (1876) has a piano part derived from a Schubert impromptu, while Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen (1878) uses the Brahmsian device of a vocal line related to the piano theme by augmentation or diminution. But the main influence was Schumann. Wolf's early works for piano (sonatas and variations) soon yielded place to Schumannesque genre pieces (Humoreske, 1877). At the same time he was composing equally Schumannesque piano songs, that is, a lyric piano solo the melody of which serves as vocal line. This style proved quickly viable, as in Morgentau (1877), the earliest song Wolf adjudged worthy of publication. Yet the influence was sometimes inhibiting. Thus a marginal note on the un­finished manuscript of Was soll ich sagen? (1878; a Chamisso text also set by Schumann) reads ‘Zu viel Schumannisch; deshalb nicht vollendet’. The essential lesson was soon learnt, by Wolf as by Schumann: the addition of a declamatory vocal line to an independent piano part yields a new stock of expressive device. For example the piano can depict a convivial scene, the protagonist's isolation from which is expressed in the voice part (Sie haben heut Abend Gesellschaft, 1878; cf  Schumann's Das ist ein Flöten and Geigen). The vocal

lines themselves are keenly expressive of poetic stress, cadence and significance. From the first Wolf's word-setting has recitative inflections with touches of cad­ential pointing and plainsong repetition perhaps not un­influenced by his background of church school and choir. This thrust towards verbal expressiveness led him to explore choral writing for mixed- or male-voice chorus, accompanied or a cappella, at the same time as the earliest songs. Linear independence and significance are sometimes taken to the point of ungrammatical over­lapping (e.g. in Die Stimme des Kindes, 1876). There are also deliberate contrasts of texture, for example, of solo with half-chorus (Grablied, 1876) or full chorus (Letzte Bitte from the Sechs geistliche Lieder, 1881, the culmination of Wolf's work in this genre). Here too the basic idea is a quasi-dramatic presentation; voices in three and four parts are used as accompanimental back­ground for a solo voice, again with effects of isolation and contrast. One corollary is that the piano part of a song can be quasi-vocal; and this is another highly origi­nal and fertile source of expressive effect. Even the ear­liest songs (e.g. Du bist wie eine Blume, 1876) can show traces of the four-part (almost four-voice) texture that later became a staple style – as acknowledged by Wolf himself; a letter to Melanie Köchert of 7 July 1897 announces the discovery that the piano part of Führ mich, Kind, nach Bethlehem is in effect a four-part chorus. This texture too may reflect the early environ­ment of the boy organist; it appears electively in songs of devotion, whether sacred (as in that example) or secular. Another possible influence was Robert Franz, who acknowledged his own indebtedness to the Protestant chorale. Any early imprinting would have been strongly reinforced by the strict grounding in four-part harmony that Wolf received at the Vienna Conservatory, and then by the simultaneous impact of Wagner's operas. Even without Wagner, Wolf's own bold linear independence of melody would have led him to poignant discords, striking modulations and fluctuating tonalities, as well as to effects of counterpoint and canon and other such melodic interplay whether between voice and accompaniment or within the four-part keyboard texture.

   At first all these devices tended to be used for their own sake, or for self-expressive purposes. But gradually they served to illustrate and enact a poetic mood. For example in In der Fremde I (1881) the contrasting melodic lines in voice and piano enhance the poet's theme of separation, as in some forms of operatic duet. The task of distilling an operatic essence into voice and keyboard was dramatically eased by the techniques of piano reduction used by Karl Klindworth and others, in their vocal scores of Wagner operas. Wolf's own Wagner paraphrases (c1880) presage the piano parts of his later songs, both in their part-writing and in their transcription of orchestral effects such as string runs or tremolandos. He could also call upon the melodic and harmonic vocabulary of French or Italian opera, or the popular styles of folksong or student song, all familiar to him from his own early music-making. Further, even the early songs already show abundant evidence of an innate and developing capacity for inventing vivid motivic equivalents for poetic ideas and using them constructionally, in the Schubertian lied tradition, as the building-blocks of the song form.

   But these apprenticeship years were far richer in promise and potential than in actual achievement. By Wolf's own stringent but not unjust criteria only a dozen of the 100-odd songs he wrote before 1887 were worth publishing. There is of course much to admire, as in the Reinick and Eichendorff songs of 1882-3; but the early works tend to be fallible both in form (e.g. the overemphatic postlude of Andenken) and in content (sometimes obviously derivative). Such flaws can be traced to a failure of objective concern for the poem as such. The outpouring of personal emotion often fails to fit easily into the miniature form. Wolf was more likely to succeed in larger-scale instrumental music, where the link with words, though still vital, was not a criterion of excellence. In this respect too he had much to learn which would later be of service to him as a song­writer.

6. INSTRUMENTAL WORKS. These are brilliant concep­tions rather than finished works of art, and hence present difficulties of appreciation, evaluation and per­formance. The first was the D minor Quartet, begun in 1878. Wolf had recently contracted syphilis; his score bears the Faustian epigraph ‘Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren’, which the opening motifs seem to declaim. The Beethoven influence is so manifest (e.g. Grosse Fuge in the powerful leaps and dissonance of the histrionic Grave introduction, and the Allegro assai vivace ma serioso of the F minor Quartet op.95 in the Scherzo, marked `Resolut') and so unusual (it recurs only in the 1888 Mörike song Der Genesene an die Hoffnung, sig­nificantly about recovery from mortal sickness) as to suggest that this too is a consciously expressive device. It is as if Beethoven were being deliberately invoked, as another Faustian archetype of the suffering hero. (The claim, now largely discounted, that Beethoven was syph­ilitic would have been a recent talking-point among musicians in Vienna.) Wolf's lyrical slow movement (dated 1880) begins with a Wagnerian symbol of re­demption, an overt homage to the 'pardon' motif in Tannhäuser, as if the work were further designed as a Pilgrimage through despair by way of faith and fortitude to final recuperation. On that assumption the much lighter last movement of 1884 with its touches of ironic in­souciance is musically anticlimactic yet humanly convincing. The music was written as the experience was lived. By that time Wolf was 24 and had regained his composure and (as he thought) his health. On this auto­biographical interpretation the right order of move­ments in performance would be the logical time-sequence: Grave – Leidenschaftlich bewegt; Resolut; Adagio; and Sehr lebhaft (not, as in earlier editions, with the second and third movements transposed). Thus con­sidered, this extended and complex work has the unity and novelty which, as absolute music, it might be held to lack. On any analysis the genuine (if sporadic) power and expressiveness of its thematic details are undeni­able.

   The composition of this quartet overlapped with the even more ambitious orchestral work Penthesilea, begun in 1883, which also displays, though in differing proportions, the same admixture of derivation, self-expression, originality and poetic inspiration. This time the last of those qualities is paramount, and the music verges on greatness. There is ample testimony to Wolf's obsession with Heinrich von Kleist's drama of the Amazon queen who leads her warrior-maidens to Troy, becomes enamoured yet jealous of Achilles, and finally avenges her subjection to him, in both love and war, by inciting her war-hounds to tear him to shreds. Under the smooth classical surface of Kleist's blank verse rages an erotic turbulence. The appeal to subconscious motive anticipates Freud. Wolf at the time still had reason to be preoccupied with the idea of male vulnerability to the traumata of love. His scoring, including four horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tuba and harp as well as a full complement of wind, strings and percussion, aims to re-create the epic scale of the conflict as well as the heroic stature of protagonist and antagonist. The music creates panorama (extremes of orchestral pitch and dynamics, with antiphonal trumpets on each side of the orchestra, like battle signals) as well as character, situa­tion and emotion (motifs for the passionate Penthesilea, the noble Achilles, war marches, love-feasts and snarl­ing hounds, interspersed with pleading recitative).

Wolf had given much thought to the structural prob­lems of the tone poem. He ardently admired the sym­phonic poems of Liszt, who had inspired this work both by personal suggestion and by example. Wolf felt (Kritiken, p.52) that unity in this new genre was to be attained by deriving form as well as content from the poetic source. It is not immediately clear how this end is best subserved by Wolf's chosen structure. The two short preludes (‘Departure of the Amazons for Troy’; ‘Penthesilea's Dream of the Love-festival’) presumably depict the dual nature of the heroine, ferocious yet tender; their contrasting motifs derive from the same basic theme. There follows a long final development section (‘Conflicts, Passions, Madness and Destruction’) in which all the themes are freely metamorphosed, de­veloped and confronted so as to present the elements of the drama both collectively as mood-painting and con­secutively as narrative. The work may thus be con­sidered as an opera without words, condensed into an overture. Against the background of Kleist's drama re­enacted in Wolf's imagination the music can appear not only powerful but profound. Otherwise its construction may seem diffuse and even obscure (for example the main theme of the last movement is not heard in its entirety until bar 832), and its instrumentation (as Wolf himself came to acknowledge) not wholly secure. These factors could account for its rejection in both rehearsal and repertory and also help to explain, if not extenuate, the prodigious and unauthorized cuts imposed by its first editors.

   Much the same characteristics might have been predicted of Wolf's projected incidental music to Kleist's better-known drama Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, where the conflict lies among love, duty and individual self-fulfilment, which again were questions much in Wolf's mind at the time. This music remained fragmentary; but the Penthesilea patterns are again discernible in the completed work Christnacht for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Here Wolf (as he wrote to Oskar Grohe, 26 February 1891) aimed to symbolize the duality of the Incarnation – innocent child, trium­phant hero. Again there may be some element of sub­conscious self-portraiture; little enough of such search­ing themes can be inferred from Platen's poem about the night of the Nativity, with its chorus of angels and shepherds. Wolf adds a chorus of believers, for good measure. The handling of such large choral and orches­tral forces (the latter much the same as for Penthesilea, but with the percussion scaled down to timpani only) is rather beyond Wolf's technical competence (again, as he later conceded), despite his natural flair for orchestra­tion; the published score contains revisions by Reger and Foll. The formal structure, however, is clearer than in Penthesilea because the words provide the necessary frame of reference. The music is again highly original in conception; and this time the Lisztian or Wagnerian influences are better assimilated. The work is Wolfian in its colourful interweaving of solemnity and simplicity. The latter is effectively symbolized by a traditional carol melody, recalled from a provincial boyhood, which is scored and presented with a lightness of touch that suggests a corresponding lightness of mood. By 1886, when the main thematic material of Christnacht was conceived, the sombre canvasses of Wolf's creative imagination were being replaced by bright miniatures, beginning with the Intermezzo in Eh for string quartet. Its main theme had been sketched in 1882 and left to germinate in a sunnier climate of mood. In summer 1886 it grew into a rondo with episodes and varied restatements all so cunningly derived from the main theme as to suggest different aspects of the same charac­ters linked by dialogue or colloquy with a hint of dance-measure. Nothing is known of any literary background, though a verbal source would seem prima facie plaus­ible. The effect is of expressive music written to an unknown programme; one clue is Wolf's later reference to his 'Humoristisches Intermezzo'. A comparison with his contemporary songwriting suggests Mörike as a possible source for this slight but spirited and engaging piece.

   The next instrumental work, also for string quartet, was the Serenade in G (later called by Wolf 'an Italian Serenade'; letter to Kauffmann of 2 April 1892). With this work Wolf at last attained expressive if not formal mastery. As with the Intermezzo, there is no avowed literary source. But the Italienische Serenade (2-4 May 1887) was composed during a phase of Eichendorff settings (7 March-24 May). It is thematically related to the first of them, Der Soldat I, about love for a lady who lives in a castle. The Eichendorff novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts has that same theme; central to its plot is an Italian serenade. The novella contains a lyric (Heimweh) which Wolf had certainly set by the following year, and perhaps sketched at this time. Its hero is a young musician, a violinist, who leaves his country home and his grumbling father, to seek his fortune. He soon charms everyone with his gifts, or antagonizes them with his inconsequence. Wolf could hardly have found a more congenial or compelling self-portrait in all German literature. The novella also con­tains a serenade played by a small orchestra, for which Wolf later arranged his work. The original string quar­tet however is preferable in the transparent lightness and delicacy of its texture; and though it is not without technical problems (e.g. of ensemble at the required tempo) the string writing is far more relaxed and as­sured than in the early D minor Quartet. The Serenade too, like the other instrumental works, is novel in both content and form. Its rather diffusely episodic rondo structure with ironic quasi-recitative passages gently parodying romantic love, again in conformity with the Eichendorff style, suggests an unspecified programme. Again there is a strong sense of motivic writing deliber­ately presented and developed so as to suggest character (the dominance of the solo violin), speech (the recitative passages), colloquy (the duetting melodies), scene-painting (the conspiratorial assembling and tuning in the prelude), gesture (the sweeping fiddle flourishes) and instrumentation (the thrumming guitar imitations). It may not be coincidence that Wolf's own description (to Oskar Grohe, 28 June 1890) of the kind of opera he would one day wish to write (the strumming of guitars, sighs of love, moonlit nights, champagne banquets) is closely paralleled in Eichendorff's Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (chap.8). This in turn may account for Wolf's ten-year preoccupation with the arrangement and development of his Italienische Serenade music, in close parallel to his preoccupation with opera.

   In 1887 this dramatic lyricism brings Wolf's music in the Serenade and the Eichendorff settings on to a new and high plateau close to the summit of songwriting. The upward thrust may have two sources of impetus. First, the music seems to derive directly from words and ideas without any serious subjective intervention. Second (and perhaps the point is related), Wolf's two basic creative moods merge into a balanced integration. They may be described as gravity and levity or (as in Christnacht) sublimity and naivety; their tutelary deities are Wagner and Schumann. The early songs had tended to one extreme or the other, sombre or sparkling (com­pare Ein Grab with Mädchen mit dem roten Mündchen, both 1876, or Zur Ruh, zur Ruh!, 1883, with Mausfallensprüchlein, 1882). A similar dichotomy is discernible in the instrumental music where the con­trasts of mood are linked by monothematic techniques which later appear in the songs. The polarities are separ­ately exemplified in Wo wird einst and Gesellenlied, both written on 24 January 1888. Thus these two strong currents converge only three weeks before the Mörike song outburst.

7. MATURE SONGS. Wolf's Mörike songs were above all original. All the contemporary critiques had the word `new' in their titles – new springtime, new life, new songs. Wolf himself wrote of the novel aspects of his musical language. Yet he did not define them; and the evidence suggests that their essential originality was not wholly grasped, perhaps not even by their creator, much of whose songwriting is manifestly in the main lied tradition. He and his audiences felt that he was contin­uing the line of Schubert and Schumann, without radical departure. Wolf himself thought it worth pointing out (letter to Emil Kauffmann, 21 May 1890) that even his boldest harmonies were justifiable by reference to ac­cepted theory. Much of his mature work uses folk or popular song. His well-known solicitude for the choice and treatment of words is by no means invariable and in any event represents a difference of degree rather than kind from the practice of his predecessors. Well over half his texts have no pretension to poetic greatness or even excellence. Even the rest can be treated cavalierly: thus the accentuation can go astray (e.g. 'Leibrösslein' in Der Gärtner) and the subtler declamatory effects are quite often second thoughts inserted at proof stage. Er ist's has repeated phrases and Das verlassene Mägdlein uses an unauthentic text, no doubt under the influence of Schumann in both instances. On occasion Wolf could repeat a whole strophe without textual justification (Benedeit die sel'ge Mutter) or tacitly omit one (Geh, Geliebter, geh jetzt). He could embellish his texts with his own insertions or inventions (Die Zigeunerin) or simply mistranscribe them (there are several textual errors in the manuscripts or even in the first editions). He could deliberately add a new meaning unintended by the poet ( Wer rief dich denn). Even his practice of calling his songbooks 'Gedichte von' Eichendorff, Mörike or Goethe was anticipated and perhaps prompted by Schumann. The same applies to his choice of transla­tions, for example, from the Spanish. Finally Wolf's notable spontaneity of composition was hardly different in kind from that of, say, Schubert in 1815 and Schumann in 1840. All three composers no doubt planned and sketched beforehand and revised after­wards.

   Nevertheless Wolf was original, and in four main ways. First, he seems to have planned in advance the contents of each volume (e.g. the Spanish songbook: letter of 12-November 1889 to his sister Käthe), rather as if the artistic unity is not the poem as such but the songbook considered as representative of the poet or source. Secondly, it was his practice to preface a perform­ance of each song by a recital of the text: the words were separately acknowledged as a vital part of the artwork's content as well as its form. Thirdly, Wolf was reluctant to set a poem which he considered had already been successfully composed – a view which presupposes that a musical setting is more like a translation or objective critique than a personal commentary. His songbooks are thus perhaps designed as anthologies, as homage, and also as critiques or translations. They make no sense, have no being, apart from the text which has breathed its life and essence into the music. Fourthly, this essence is dramatic.

   It follows that Wolf's art is a means of framing, embodying, presenting, enacting, the life of words. As a corollary, the piano has a more important role than with previous songwriters; and melody does not necessarily predominate. It is in this sense that Wolf compressed Wagnerian music drama, leitmotif, orchestra and de­clamation into voice and keyboard. Perhaps it was this feeling of historical mission that led to his lifelong obsession with large-scale composition even though the appropriate forms and techniques were among his own acknowledged weaknesses. He even felt himself stifled y Wagner – with whom he was never in serious conten­tion. He began to resent the title of songwriter. At the very moment when his true genius was first revealed to himself and the world he could still write (letter to Strasser, 28 March 1888): For the moment they are admittedly only songs'. On the very day when that inspiration had at last begun, he could still be preoc­cupied (to Lang, 22 February 1888) with extemporizing a comic opera at the keyboard. Even with three great songbooks completed he could still lament (to Grohe, I June 1891) 'I'm beginning to think that I have reached the end of my life. I can't go on writing songs for another 30 years'. Next (again to Grohe, 12 October 1891) comes the astoundingly anguished cry 'I really and truly shudder at the thought of my songs. The flattering recognition as "songwriter" disturbs me down to the very depths of my soul. What does it signify but the reproach that songs are all I ever write, that I am master of what is only a small-scale genre?'. Finally Wolf's eventual madness took the form of, and was probably provoked by, a megalomaniac obsession with operatic composition and performance.

   There are perhaps three main reasons for this fixation. Songs were still generally held to be an inferior art form; Wolf as an expressive composer craved the maximal audiences attainable only through opera and symphony; his genius was in fact for dramatic music, though in a condensed form. No wonder he aggregated his songs into composite volumes comprehensive enough to yield extended recitals and programmes of planned contrasts, with at least a potential appeal to a mass audience. Further, each major songbook contains linking motifs designed to relate the single songs to a larger conceptual scheme, as with Eichendorff songs 9­10, MOrike songs 2-3, Goethe songs 39-40, Spanish sacred songs 8-10, Italian songs 42-3.

   The songbook is thus itself the large-scale dramatic form. With the 20 Eichendorff songs (mentioned first because nearly half of them were written before 1888) Wolf lifted the curtain on his singing theatre of the imagination. There everything is made of music – con­struction, action, character, plot and sub-plot, narrative, gesture, mime, dance and song, costume, scenery, and even stage properties and effects, including lighting. Piano preludes set the scene or delineate character. The songs are conceived as tableaux vivants viewed through the proscenium arch of the song form. As Wolf told Emil Kauffmann, he always imagined a background to each of his songs, and the examples he gave (the goddess sitting on a reef in the moonlight, playing her harp, in Gesang Weylas; a chorus of wise men joining in the refrain of Cophtisches Lied I) go well beyond anything described in the text. So his submission to poetry was far from slavish. Yet the verse does in fact give each song a formal framework which the instrumental music is sometimes felt to lack. In a sense therefore Wolf's structural sense has certain defects which the poetry is called upon to redress. On the other hand the musical response is so varied and flexible that Wolf might as justly be hailed as a master of form. The poems are more often strophic than their settings, which strive towards free evolution and development. Even in stro­phic song, unchanged repetition is rare; more typically the melody, for example, is varied to highlight a par­ticular word, such as ‘süsser’ in Um Mitternacht. Unity is usually attained by the main factor common to music and poetry, namely rhythm. This may reflect either the metre or the theme of the poem: thus in Jägerlied the rare trochaic pentameter appears as 5/4 time, while in Fussreise the piano maintains a steady walking rhythm.

   A repeated rhythmic figure may suggest an obsessive character or gesture (Rat einer Alten; Mühvoll komm ich und beladen) while changes of basic rhythm serve to imply (as it were by modulation) a change of mood or meaning (Agnes; Grenzen der Menschheit). A piano melody or figuration may suggest words by its rhythmic shape (postlude to Komm, Liebchen, komm!). Regular piano rhythms can provide a patterned lattice for vocal melodies to curve and stray around, anticipating certain words or syllables, lingering over others, with the effect of a written-out rubato (e.g. ‘stumm’ or ‘heilig’ in An die Geliebte), whether, as there, to enhance the poetic mean­ing or, as often in the Italian songs, to create a new one. Occasionally too Wolf would prolong a word that es­pecially pleased him (e.g. ‘geflügelt’ in Die ihr schwebet). Such devices are to be distinguished from their operatic or Wagnerian counterparts. The Wolfian vocal line con­veys a current of poetic feeling, deriving character from verbal inflection and not vice versa. His melodies vary from complex nuance to straightforward singability in folk or popular style, as the context requires. The coun­terpoints of voice against piano, already noted in the earlier songs, are greatly developed from 1888 onwards. A typical example is Lied eines Verliebten, where the isolated left-hand melody is a symbol of separation. This image is further intensified in such songs as Mein Liebster singt am Haus, where the independence of the piano part embodies the excluded lover. Thus Wolf could create not only decor (by distinguishing fore­ground from background) but also dramatic irony (by presenting two different levels of involvement simultan­eously, as in Bei einer Trauung). Autonomy in the piano part also permits a quasi-symphonic motivic develop­ment reflecting the changing moods of a poem (Auf einer Wanderung; Im Frühling). Piano interludes can link con­trasting sections of a song and so suggest continuous action, whether in narrative or ballad forms (Ritter Kurts Brautfahrt) or, more rarely, in lyric modes (e.g. in Fussreise, where a modulating piano interlude leads back to the original theme).

   Similarly Wolf's harmonic usages are attuned to his texts, whether as single words or whole poems. An example of the former is at ‘froh und traurig’ in Alles endet, was entstehet, where a major and a minor inflec­tion speak respectively of joy and sorrow. Again, aug­mented 5ths mean increasing intensity (Das verlassene Magdlein) even to the point of parody (Nimmersatte Liebe), while second inversions at cadence points give an impression of peroration (‘da bin’ in Wohl denk ich oft). But such short-range or local effects are comparatively rare. More generally, Wolf's harmonic procedures provide a framework isomorphic with that of the poem, within which particular aspects can be highlighted; for example, successive mediant modulations convey the idea of increasing lightness, as in In der Frühe and Morgenstimmung. This is the sense in which it was important for Wolf that his harmonic language should remain, as he said, traditional. He needed chromaticism and dissonance in order to create new expressive intensity. At the same time the constraints of his song form require such effects to be readily relatable (whether in terms of affinity or contrast) to some recognizable tonal centre. Thus the modal harmony of Auf ein altes Bild sets that song apart from the rest of the Mörike volume and from contemporary music generally; the music is as it were seen, like the poem, through a haze of time. Within that song, the single acute dissonance at ‘Kreuzes Stamm’ throws that phrase into high relief, again in parallel with the poetry. Conversely, chromatics or dissonance can be relieved by touches of diatonic harmony (as in Mir ward gesagt, among many examples) yielding effects of relaxation from tension, or simplicity within complexity. More specifically, the introduction or recurrence of the tonic major can be delayed, so that its eventual arrival brings a sensation of repose and fulfilment (Wir haben beide lange Zeit geschwiegen); or the major form of a minor tonic can restate an idea in a brighter mode (Ob der Koran von Ewigkeit sei?). Such contrasts and juxtapositions are the essence of Wolf's songwriting, as of his mentor Schumann's. Among the corollaries are personal verbal associations with certain keys. Thus in Wolf extreme flat or sharp keys express nervous tension, in contrast with the bluff plainness of C major (Gesellenlied); A major suggests springtime (Frühling übers Jahr), and so on. Of course there are exceptions; but such associa­tions, usual in all songwriting, are especially manifest and significant in Wolf, and a study of them is relevant to interpretation and performance (e.g. the desirability of transposition).

   Such effects shade into overt musical depiction, at which Wolf was also adept. Examples abound, ranging from imaginative embroidery to frank onomatopoeia. Widely spaced chords suggest hollowness and reverber­ation (Der Feuerreiter); upward chromatic runs and bare 5ths convey disappearance into thin air (Der Rattenfanger); glissandos and other flourishes depict extravagant gesture (Der Schreckenberger); acciac­caturas mean laughter (Rat einer Alten). There is a lute in Nachruf, a harp in Gesang Weylas, a violin in Wie lange schon, a guitar in the Spanish and serenading songs. One hears a spinning-wheel in Die Spinnerin, gunfire in Unfall or Der Jäger, a carillon in Zum neuen Jahre or St Nepomuks Vorabend, whips in Gesellenlied and Selbstgeständnis, a donkey's bray in Lied des trans­ferierten Zettel, birdsong in Das Vöglein, bees in Der Knabe und das Immlein, horses' hooves in Der Gärtner and perhaps Auf einer Wanderung, and so on.

   In all this a major share of expression inevitably falls to the pianist, not only in the ballad tradition of pictorial interludes, in which Wolf was no doubt influenced by Loewe, but also in the newer vein of grandiloquent quasi-orchestral device found in Wagner transcriptions. The piano equivalents of string tremolandos express a pulsating intensity or a rapport with the moods of Nature (the thunder in Prometheus or Der Jäger). In general the upper reaches of the piano symbolize lofty thoughts, spiritual aspirations, the starry sky (An die Geliebte), while the low notes of the left hand sound out the depths of darkness or despair (Neue Liebe). Such symbolism is in the lied tradition of Schubert. Wolf's allusions are further enriched by directly Wagnerian resonances, sometimes deliberate (the affectionate al­lusions to Die Meistersinger in Gesellenlied), sometimes perhaps less so. An example of the latter is Die Geister am Mummelsee, where the poem speaks of a funeral procession (‘Totengeleit’); and the piano part is evocative of the cortege of Titurel (‘Geleiten wir’) in Parsifal. But far more characteristic and ubiquitous is the new-minted motif, again usually entrusted to the piano part, which serves both to express a poetic idea (e.g. sadness, love, isolation, mystery, freedom, sleep, among many others) and to create musical structure.

   Examples are manifold; none is wholly typical; each belongs inseparably to its context. The following illus­tration exemplifies not only the Wolfian motif but also perhaps a connection between his creative inspiration and his personal experience. For many years he suffered from insomnia; and poetry about solitary wakefulness and movement at night evoked a definable though varied musical response. A repeated figuration in the piano right hand is underlined by a left-hand theme in single notes. This motif first appears in the Körner Ständchen of 1877. The opening words describe the silence of the night; lovers' thoughts alone are awake. At the following idea of being surrounded by nocturnal phantoms (‘mich umschleichen ... nächtliche Gespenster’) the left-hand single notes surround the repeated right-hand chords, on both sides. In the 1888 song Auf eine Christblume I, Mörike's description of deer grazing at twilight evokes the analogue shown in ex.1.

The same music, decorated and transposed an octave higher, later depicts the activi­ties of an elf at midnight. In Gutmann und Gutweib this motivic idea recurs at the words 'Im Bette liegen beide nun'. The old folk are lying in bed, deliberately keeping awake. In Lied eines Verliebten the whole song is about staying awake at night; the entire piano part assumes the basic shape described. The same is true of Alle gingen, Herz, zur Ruh. The association persists in Act 2 of Der Corregidor (1895) as Frasquita keeps her nocturnal vigil (scene iii) or as Manuela gropes her way in the dark (scene x). The same Gestalt underlies each example. By such means (characteristic of the lied) Wolf could ex­press a wide-ranging diversity of mood, scene and char­acter. Human feeling is symbolized either directly or through images of external nature (the so-called 'pathetic fallacy').

   This is also the essence of Wolf's first source of inspiration, Eichendorff, whose works contain all the necessary elements of scenes and characters (soldiers, sailors, students, musicians) with their good or bad humour or fortune and their happy or unhappy loves, whether for God, man, nature or fatherland. Wolf's selection from these texts is, perhaps intentionally, more broadly representative than the nature- or love-poems already set by Schumann. A further constraint was Wolf's determination not to use poems which had already, in his view, been definitively set to music. Mörike's complex quasi-symbolic style and imagery needed a correspondingly advanced musical language; so Wolf's settings had few precedents and no rivals. His choice was accordingly unfettered; but again it con­centrated on themes of people and places conceived as actors and scenes. The difference is one of degree: Mörike's characters and landscapes are drawn with far more depth and definition than Eichendorff's (whose art Wolf later came to regard as somewhat superficial; cf his letter to Kauffmann of 7 March 1894). In particular the themes of humour, both broad and sophisticated, and the supernatural, whether in the context of orthodox religion or of fairy tale and folklore, are far more fully developed in the Mörike songs. The music is correspondingly more intense and diversified, for example with evocations of folksong (Das verlassene Mägdlein) and other popular strains (student song in Nimmersatte Liebe; Viennese waltz in Abschied). Styles and forms are more ambitious and panoramic, with Wagnerian as well as Schumannesque components, especially in religious songs (Karwoche; Wo find ich Trost). Some of the piano accompaniments seem orchestral in range and scope (Neue Liebe; Der Feuerreiter). Elsewhere, themes and structures are designed to convey a sense of movement through vistas both spatial (Auf einer Wanderung) and temporal (In der Frühe).

   This sense of extended musical frontiers and horizons is even more manifest in the Goethe settings. The lyric style is just as intense (Blumengruss; Gleich and Gleich); but the ballad style has become more diffuse (Ritter Kurts Brautfahrt) and the piano writing even grander in conception (Prometheus; Mignon: 'Kennst du das Land'). Further, Goethe's poem offers a new rich source of quasi-dramatic background and effect. Both Eichendorff and Mörike had incorporated their lyrics into their novels; Wolf set several such examples. But these poems are separable entities, whereas the inter­spersed lyrics in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are integ­rally related to plot and character, so that Wolf's music designedly sets context as well as text. Much the same is true of the Westöstlicher Divan poems. The characters of Hatem and Suleika are not merely costume parts assumed by the poet and his mistress; they also inhabit a whole secondary world, a notional orient peopled with other characters from cupbearers to sultans. From that world it is no great journey to the Spanish songbook, which not only contains fine poetry (e.g. by Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Camoens) in skilled translation (by Heyse and Geibel) but also offers the elements of national character and local colour that Wolf increas­ingly needed for his musico-dramatic projections.

   In consequence his own musical style is again in transition. Wolf had now exhausted German poetry of the necessary quality and quantity, and the translations to which he turned were no longer, despite their tech­nical excellence, the source of direct verbal inspiration. With the Spanish songbook, therefore, it is not the lyric as such but its substructure of ideas and concepts that serves as the foundation for musical setting. The result (already foreshadowed by some of the Westöstlicher Divan songs, such as Was in der Schenke waren heute) was a new autonomy for the composer, who now became less dependent on an intuitive response to poetry. Wolf the partial poet was gradually supplanted by Wolf the complete musician. Rhythmical motifs, dance patterns, accompaniment figures, recurrent refrains, formal structures, begin to dominate the musical expression. Folk music, nature studies, humorous songs, ballads, all disappear. The themes and styles that persist in the Spanish volume are the religious (the first ten songs) and the erotic (almost all the rest); and these become more personal and more intense.

   The six Keller songs of 1890 revert to the earlier themes of character study and psychology, with oc­casional symbolic allusions to nature (as in Wandl ich in dem Morgentau): here, as before, poetry is the main source of inspiration. But in these songs Wolf was work­ing against the grain of his own development, which may account for the sometimes perceptible effort entailed in their composition. With the Italian songbook, begun at the end of the same year, the established trend was resumed with increasing momentum. All the lyrics are anonymous; all have the same translator, Paul Heyse (as compared with only about two thirds of the Spanish songbook, in each respect). Wolf was now con­fronted with a polished and uniform poetic style with no creative personality of its own; the lyrics were thus a blank page on which to inscribe his own know­ledge of human feeling. There are no religious themes as such; all the poems are in some sense love-songs. In consequence the style becomes totally unified and inte­gral. Previous songbooks had contained the separately identifiable strains described above as Wagnerian and Schumannesque. This still applies in part to the Spanish volume (thus Bedeckt mich mit Blumen is Tristanesque, while the lighter songs, as well as the textual source as a whole, recall Schumann's Spanish vein). In the Italian songs all such sources merge into Wolf's basic four-part style. The forms are further concentrated by the brevity and metrical pattern of the lyrics. Here Wolf finally succeeded in compressing the universal picture into the miniature frame; so these songs are the epitome of his art.

   Wolf may well have sketched in 1890 many more of them than he then completed. The Italian settings of 1896 maintain the same style; perhaps not all were newly composed in that year. The 'manuscripts of two of them, Gesegnet sei das Grün and O wär dein Haus durchsichtig, bear the marginal annotations ‘Phönix no.1’ and ‘Phönix no.2’ respectively, suggesting that these at least were new inspirations. Other late songs however seem lacking in fresh invention. Thus the Michelangelo songs of 1897, though they contain much fine music, are in part palpably indebted to earlier songs (compare for example the postlude of Fühlt meine Seele with those of Peregrina I and II); texts and treatment alike suggest that despite the ostensible character-drawing Wolf was reverting to the self-expressive subjectivism of his early songs. His mental breakdown and terminal illness (1897-1903) were only six months away.

   Wolf completed some 20 separate song orchestra­tions as well as two for incorporation in Der Corregidor. The form is intermediate between what might be called the compressed opera of his songbooks and the expanded songbooks of his operas. The hybrid has not proved fertile: the works are rarely performed. Yet Wolf himself thought tflem important; and most of them date from 1890, one of his most prolific songwrit­ing years. Their purpose was not only to reach a wider public but also to deploy even greater expressive power and device, whether to broaden the scene-painting (e.g. the thunder and lightning effects in Prometheus) or to brighten the sound-painting (e.g. the chromatic runs in Der Rattenfänger). But Wolf also invoked the orchestra for depth of feeling. Thus even the tiny but intense lyric by Lenau, Scheideblick (?1876-7), was sketched in an orchestral version. Similarly Gesang Weylas remains lyrical in conception even when scored: its added horn counterpoints aim at enhanced intensity. But in general Wolf's aim was to convert his miniatures into oil paint­ings suitable for wider exhibition, whether in the concert hall or (in his own works) the opera house. The trans­ition is perhaps most convincing in static tableaux such as Prometheus or Auf ein alter Bild. Where motion is to be depicted, the heavier textures tend to slow down the action: thus in Der Feuerreiter the articulation of added voices both choral and orchestral, at the required speed, presents grave problems of ensemble. Similarly the grace and fire of the Italienische Serenade are harder to achieve in the orchestral version.

8. STAGE MUSIC. Analogous difficulties inhere in Wolf s stage music. The brilliant pictorial writing of his first completed work of incidental music, the Elfenlied (a setting of 'You spotted snakes' from A Midsummer Night's Dream in German translation), aroused acclaim at its first performance, about which Wolf wrote (to Kauffmann, 11 January 1894) that the orchestration `so glittered and glowed in moonbeams that you could for­get to hear for sheer seeing'. The Ibsen play The Feast at Solhaug (again in German translation, as Das Fest auf Solhaug) presented fewer opportunities for quasi-visual effects, and the music was commissioned in an otherwise fallow phase; but the processional entrances and choruses are typically evocative. Whatever the quality of Wolf s invention, his stage music, like his song orchestrations, suggests the deliberate extension or enlargement of a smaller-scale original inspiration.

   The operas are no different. As Wolf told Potpeschnigg (9 July 1895) the piano score as it stood served as the orchestral sketch for Der Corregidor. Further, the Wagnerian texture and scoring (Wolf's orchestra is larger than that of Die Meistersinger, with­out which, as he wrote to Rosa Mayreder on 1 June 1895, his Corregidor music could not have been writ­ten) are possibly too inspissated for the sunny mood and milieu of the well-known story El sombrero de tres picos. Wolf told Ferdinand Lowe that Bizet's task in Carmen was far easier because of the comparative lack of orchestral polyphony; and perhaps a lighter texture would have worn better. In Wolf's treatment, the three-cornered hat is not only a symbol of universal authority but also has overtones of the eternal triangle (for instance when the power of the Corregidor's motif is heard dominating that of the supposedly cuckolded Tio Lukas). Wows well-documented obsession with themes of sexual jealousy and tension, which darken to stark tragedy in Manuel Venegas, may well have been highly personal in origin. The motivic techniques of Der Corregidor seem to reflect that obsession in their insis­tent repetition. The Wolfian lied motif inevitably becomes obtrusive when used as a Wagnerian leitmotif, serving narrative and dramatic ends as well as the lyric purposes for which it was designed. Thus the five-note Tio Lukas theme is heard nearly 100 times in Act 1, serving variously as character study, stage direction, cross-reference or general background. It is relevant that Wolf himself in rehearsal took little interest in stagecraft or decor: even in the operas, his musical world remains that of inward imagination rather than visual presenta­tion. It is thus not surprising that the dramatic structure of Der Corregidor has been much criticized, and with some plausibility: for example most of Act 4 is recapitulation of themes and events already familiar. Nor is the musical material always of the finest, perhaps partly by design (e.g. the Alcalde's banal motif may be intended as character-drawing), partly because not all the libretto was equally inspiring, and partly because of Wolf's deteriorating health.

   Such objections have far more force when levelled at the 600-bar fragment of Manuel Venegas than at the completed Der Corregidor. But the latter is rarely per­formed, and has never belonged to the standard opera repertory. It has been excluded because of disparity rather than inferiority; and it might more rationally be regarded as a success in a new genre than as a failure in an old one. Thus the often striking discrepancy (to which Frank Walker has drawn attention) between the characters as embodied in the music and as observed on the stage becomes both meaningful and effective when considered as a Wolfian equivalent for dramatic irony. The musical style too is novel. As always it derives from the German text, and is hence less complex and intense than the generality of Wolf's songwriting. The prototypes are the two songs orchestrated specially for inclusion (In dem Schatten meiner Locken; Herz, ver­zage nicht geschwind) in a sweetened but refreshing dilution of the lighter Spanish songbook essence. Whatever the defects of dramatic structure, each separ­ate scene has a songlike vividness of invention.

   There are thus grounds for supposing that Wolf, had he lived, might have evolved new forms intermediate between song and opera. Both his operas are based on short stories; he could profitably have continued his exploration of Eichendorff, Morike and Goethe by quasi-dramatic presentations of their novellas for voices with piano solo or duet or with chamber orchestra; Der Corregidor too might prove viable in such a guise. Conversely, Wolf might have extended his Span­ish or Italian songs on similar lines, benefiting from the example already set by Schumann (e.g. in his op.138). Alternatively Wolf might have returned to songbooks inspired by the dramatic or plastic qualities of original German poetry (by Rilke for example), although in the light of Wolf's known views and traceable development this seems less plausible.

9. CRITICAL WRITINGS. Wolf as a critic shared with his contemporary Bernard Shaw the deliberately provo­cative and partisan stance of the standard-bearer. Both were notoriously fervent advocates of Wagner and browbeaters of Brahms; both have lasting value as the spokesmen and interpreters of their own musical times and trends. Prose was not a creative medium for Wolf, and he resisted republication of his reviews on the ground of their stylistic shortcomings. But his writing has enough of the trenchancy and immediacy of his music to render it readable and often memorable, affording further insights, both for him and his readers, into the nature of his art. First, regular reviewing and concert-going gave him much-needed discipline and ex­perience, as well as a new understanding of the nature of language and its relation to music, including his own. His critiques reveal inter alia his own attitudes and criteria. Style and content alike are indebted to Schumann, whose conception of music as mood- or scene-painting (‘Seelengemälde’ or ‘Tongemälde’) Wolf wholeheartedly endorsed and adopted. Wolf envisaged music as essentially a transitive mode of expression using symbolic equivalents for human thought and feeling, whether directly or as. reflected in external nature. Both these latter aspects unite in Wolf's intuitive depiction of music in terms of organic life and growth. For him, absolute music was a waste ground choked with academic works like weeds. He hated any hint of the cerebral or the contrived (as in fugues and pedal points). Bodily malfunction or discomfort are recurrent metaphors for musical unacceptability. The following (on Brahms's First Piano Concerto) is typical – 'The air that blows through this composition is so icy, dank and foggy that it could easily freeze your heart up and snatch your breath away; you could catch a cold from it. Unhealthy stuff!'. Good music, however (including some by Brahms, such as the G major Sextet), is as regularly compared with nature, springtime, fresh founts of healing and many another such symbol of wholesome emotive life.

   Further detailed criteria are inferable from other obiter dicta. Wolf had a deep sense of commitment to his own time and place, his own society, class and nationhood (German rather than Austrian). He man­ifested a passionate concern for human values, as vested not only in individuals but in the whole nexus of social function and interrelation. The musical equivalent is opera, especially Wagner and Mozart. Wolf's criticism fastens on all aspects of stage spectacle and presentation considered as parts of the total musical artwork –action, costume, gesture, speech and stage-effects. Every page testifies to the visualizing and dramatizing mind at work in his own songwriting, in a ceaseless quest for vividness and immediacy of effect. His ancillary absorp­tion in language is evidenced by his unselfconscious recourse to metaphor and quotation from modern and classical literature. Finally Wolf's critical insight into his own expressive mode of music is predictably penetrative; thus he noted (Kritiken, p.52) that the forms and contents of the greatest symphonic poems (those of Liszt, in this context) are, no less than their thematic material, derived from the literary works that inspired them.

   That aperçu defines Wolf's own achievement. It was his mission as he saw it to compose in a new musical language expressing the closest imaginable relation to words and their gamut of visual, auditory or other symbolism. In this endeavour his declared aim was truth to life; as he wrote to Emil Kauffmann (5 June 1890) ‘For me the sovereign principle in art is rigorous, harsh and inexorable truth, truth to the point of cruelty’. Here is the link between his four years as a critic and his lifetime as an artist. He expressed the truth about the human condition as he apprehended it, as keenly and as stringently as he could. It was his assigned task (letter to Schmid, 14 June 1891) to cultivate that gift to the furthest limit of his powers. When he could no longer compose, as he told Rosa Mayreder, he was fit only for the dung-heap.

   His sense of purpose and mission gave Wolf's life and art their fierce concentration, their characteristic burning intensity of expression. His vision was limited by its close focus on those points where words and music intersect or coincide. But within that specialized lyric field he has claims not only to greatness but to supremacy.