The history of the German Lied represents a remarkable attempt to create an art-form that would be nothing less than a perfect marriage of poetry and music in which neither element is subsidiary to the other. This was never a one-sidedly musical development: already in the eighteenth century poets were both writing new words to old tunes and composing poems in the expectation that they would be set to music. Nor was it a miniaturist’s art: minor composers like Carl Loewe and Robert Franz made their reputations as specialists in the art of Lieder-composing, but major figures such as Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, and later on Mahler and Richard Strauss, also contributed to the Lied tradition and enriched it with works of genius.
In German-speaking countries late in the eighteenth century the presence in many middle-class homes of a clavichord or, increasingly, a fortepiano had led to the cultivation of an intimate, simple mode of song, capable of being sung by an individual alone at the keyboard or in the family circle. The commonest themes were domestic, amatory, patriotic or rural, and the poems, consciously catering for an increasingly confident middle class, were often published in annual anthologies which sometimes also offered a supplement with simple musical settings. In the early nineteenth century the Lied spread outside the domestic scene, first to the salon and then to the concert hall, but never entirely lost its intimate character. It always demanded of its audience a sympathetic and informed response to the poems set, and of its performers, both pianist and singer, a high degree of shared understanding and poetic and critical insight into the intentions of both poet and composer. Accordingly, to this day, many great singers – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is an outstanding example – have felt that the Lied is the greatest test of their artistry, and while gaining international fame as opera singers, have constantly reverted to Lieder. The careers of such virtuoso pianists as Gerald Moore who have specialized in the accompaniment of songs also illustrate the vitally important role of the pianist in this genre. From Schubert on, the increasing sophistication of the piano score means that it is no mere accompaniment to the voice but an interpretative medium on a par with it, capable of carrying on the emotional argument of the song when the singer is silent, and able to enrich, complexify, subvert or ironize the utterance of the singer.
This symbiosis of voice and piano reached a culmination with Wolf, above all in his Mörike and Goethe collections. Wolf brought to the Lied the new musical techniques he had learnt from Wagner: an enhanced range and complexity of harmony, the subtle and audacious use of dissonance, the creation of additional dimensions by the leitmotif. As Eric Sams remarks: ‘Just as Schubert had distilled the essence of classical opera and oratorio (Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn) into the first Romantic Lieder, thus creating a new genre, so Wolf in his turn condensed the dramatic intensity of modern (i.e. Wagnerian) music-drama into voice and keyboard, lending fresh life and force to the Lied form and enhancing its expressive vocabulary to a pitch never since surpassed.’* Corresponding to this new musical element was Wolf’s new sophistication and fastidiousness in his treatment of the poetic texts. To a degree unequalled by previous composers of Lieder, he gave primacy to the words. At recitals he would insist that each poem should be read out to the audience before each song was performed. Most of his settings are durchkomponiert, following the text right through instead of forcing it into a rhythmic or metrical strait-jacket, or constantly repeating words or lines where the poet has not done so. Wolf was able to sense the linguistic register of a poem precisely and to reflect its emotional coloration with perfect fidelity. In his choice of texts for composition, he also shows a wide inclusiveness of taste and a high degree of critical discrimination, and this is confirmed by many perceptive remarks about poetry in his letters to friends.
His collections of songs from Mörike and Goethe were intended specifically as musical homage to two great writers whose work he sought to interpret and reveal, offering a substantial and representative selection of settings from each of them. It was uncommon for a composer to devote a whole volume of about fifty songs to the work of one poet, even if the poet was an international celebrity of the stature of Goethe. It is true that Schubert had planned a collection of twenty-seven Goethe songs in two volumes; he had also written song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise, both based on sequences of poems by Wilhelm Müller; but Wolf’s large single-poet anthologies had little precedent. The Goethe volume, moreover, was a particularly bold publication, representing as it did the composer’s response to a daunting challenge. Goethe’s poetry had been familiar to educated people for more than a century, and had been set to music many times already by Schubert and others; but Wolf’s volume was a bid to outdo Schubert, not merely a modest offering of alternative interpretations. It was characteristic that he should place his new settings of some of the most important poems prominently at the beginning and end of his Goethe collection: it began with nine songs from the well-known novel Wilhelm Meister (including Mignon’s famous ‘Kennst du das Land’ and ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’) and ended with a group containing the ecstatic meditation Ganymed (though Schubert’s setting of this is equally beautiful), and above all the young Goethe’s defiant dramatic monologue Prometheus. In this last composition at least (for which he also wrote an orchestral version of the accompaniment) Wolf arguably far excels Schubert, achieving in Prometheus one of the great masterpieces in the repertoire of the Lied.
Wolf’s Goethe-Lieder as a whole represent an astonishingly wide spectrum of the vast work of this most catholic of poets; and even in the lesser case of Eichendorff, who is commonly associated only with relatively conventional, emotionalized landscape poems in the romantic manner, he made a point of including some of the more robust and light-hearted sailor’s and student songs which Schumann, for instance, had disregarded. But the most remarkable of the three collections was that of Mörike: it was as substantial and as varied as the Goethe volume and was largely composed before it. Goethe of course did not need to be ‘discovered’ by Wolf, but the now half-forgotten Swabian poet who had died in 1875 and fallen silent long before then, and who had enjoyed not much more than provincial fame, was a different, more personal matter; and it was with Mörike, too, that the great creative breakthrough had come for Wolf, in February 1888. Before that point he had composed only two Mörike poems, but now he suddenly came to them with a rush, receiving them like a revelation, with an enthusiasm amounting almost to obsession. For weeks on end he carried his pocket-size edition of the poems about with him continually, reading and re-reading them, absorbing them until they seemed to be part of himself. To set them to music became a compulsion: he did so almost somnambulistically, sometimes at the rate of two or three a day. ‘On Saturday’ (he wrote to a friend) ‘I composed Das verlassene Mägdlein, already beautifully set by Schumann, without having formed any intention to do so… It happened almost against my will. But perhaps it was just because I had surrendered to the spell of the poem that the music turned out so well, and I think my setting can stand comparison with Schumann’s…’* Between 16 February and 28 November 1888, all fifty-one of the new settings were composed, and the complete volume of fifty-three was published in the following year. Remarkably, again, Wolf stipulated that the title-page should give pride of place to the author of the words: it was to read ‘Poems of Eduard Mörike, for voice and piano, set to music by Hugo Wolf’, and the frontispiece was to bear a portrait not of himself but of the poet – a gesture which Wolf’s contemporary Detlev von Liliencron, in a poem addressed to him, particularly praised.
Between Mörike and Wolf there was clearly that special affinity of genius which German calls Kongenialität, almost as if they had been contemporary partners in one of the great collaborations that arise from time to time, such as that between Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. Wolf’s versatile response to Mörike’s own notable versatility is already evidence of this. Limits, of course, were imposed by his genre. Short ‘lyrical’ or ballad-like poems, of the kind that can n
ormally be turned into Lieder, are only one side of Mörike’s output: of equal importance are his often quite long narrative or reflective pieces, most of them in classical elegiacs or trimeters. These are obviously debarred, by their length and/or by the technical unsuitability of unrhymed but complex metres, from being set to music as songs. Wolf occasionally made Lieder out of short elegiac epigrams: to extremely beautiful effect as in his setting of Goethe’s Anakreons Grab, but there is only one Mörike example (An den Schlaf). The result has been that Mörike’s mainly youthful work in what can loosely be called the ‘romantic’ mode (song-like poems in rhymed verse), which in any case commends itself more readily to most readers, has been given still further prominence by the fame of Wolf’s settings. It could not have been otherwise; and we must admire all the more Wolf’s choice of a still representative number of Mörike texts and the sensitive diversity of his treatment of them.
The Lieder range from the tragic to the comic, from folk-style simplicity to ironic sophistication, from solitary contemplation to humorous sociability, from dramatic action to inward prayer. Within the scope of a relatively brief bilingual selection of Mörike’s poems it is not possible to illustrate all these aspects, and we therefore here discuss only a selection within a selection, though this includes some of Wolf’s best-known Mörike songs. One of the most beautiful is Verborgenheit, which explores the kind of confused emotional state often said to be especially characteristic of Mörike. Here, the conflicting opposites are wonderfully held together by the musical structure, and the positive feeling finally breaks through into an ecstatic climax in the tonic major key just before the reprise of the first stanza. In In der Frühe, the anguish of the sleepless night gives way to the reassuring sound of the early morning church bells. In the piano accompaniment a bell-like five-note motif is persistently repeated, mournful at first, then moving into major keys as the divine consolation is felt. Its last three notes seem to echo the simple mi-fa-sol melody of the internationally known folk-song about the sleepy monk (‘Frère Jacques’ or ‘Bruder Martin’) who is called upon to wake up and ring the bells for matins. This is arguably a conscious musical quotation, one that occurs also in Mahler’s first symphony, as Wolf probably knew (the symphony was written a few months before the song); it further reinforces or interprets the poem’s religious theme, already established by Mörike in his use of a verse-form reminiscent of the Lutheran hymnal, with corresponding linguistic archaisms (gehet, herfür, wühlet, etc.). In Im Frühling, the poet’s words undergo a remarkable musical elaboration which accommodates all their emotional complexity, his movement outwards into nature and love and back into troubled heart-searching. A less complicated pleasure is expressed in Er ists!, another poem about spring (the present edition uses its alternative title Frühlingsgefühl). This famous short poem (also composed by Schumann) alludes rather mysteriously (line 7) to the distant sound of harps as a sign that spring has arrived: this is not in fact some kind of mystic, synaesthetic perception, but a reference to the fact that itinerant musicians in early nineteenth-century Swabia, as winter ended, would come out of their town quarters to earn their bread again in the countryside. In Wolf’s setting, the suggestion of a harp becomes central: the rapid figurations on the piano are basically arpeggios of chords in bright major keys, and the same structure is repeatedly picked up by the exultant singing voice. Two other moments of comparable happiness, in which the poet for whatever reason seems touched by pre-lapsarian joy and can bless the world as he passes through it, are embodied in Fußreise and Auf einer Wanderung. It is interesting that the manic-depressive Wolf, an atheist and disciple of Nietzsche, could enter with such ease into these moods of humble contentment. In Fußreise a straightforward pervading andante motif suffices. In Auf einer Wanderung the music again exactly follows the movement of this more complex poem: a dancing 6:8 figure suggests the journey, the arrival in the little town at sunset, the sudden magical voice at the window; then up-and-down-rushing chromatic scales that herald the climax, a central rallentando in which the narrator pauses to savour his Faustian moment; then the resumption of the dancing motif in the postlude and a vanishing diminuendo as the traveller passes into the distance.
Wolf’s special empathy also embraced Mörike’s often childlike humour, and he turned into enchantingly appropriate music a number of examples of it, such as Mausfallensprüchlein (a child’s magic spell for enticing a mouse into a trap) or Elfenlied, in which a sleeping elf wakes up in alarm when the night-watchman calls eleven o’clock (‘Elfe!’). These have here been omitted as resistant to translation, but Storchenbotschaft is retained as a comic variant of a folklore motif; likewise the well-known Abschied, in which the poet imagines himself visited by a carping critic who bizarrely urges him to inspect the shadow of his own nose on the wall and admit that it is not a thing of beauty. The poet responds with a polite kick to help him on his way downstairs. The music exactly follows the visitor’s behaviour and words, the piano imitating his knock and the more complicated noise of his exit, after which a Viennese waltz motif triumphantly takes over. This poem was normally placed at the end of Mörike’s collection of poems, and Wolf’s highly comical setting is often sung as a final encore in recitals of the Mörike-Lieder.
At the other end of the comic-tragic spectrum is Wolf’s extraordinary composition of Mörike’s ballad about the abandoned maidservant, Das verlassene Mägdlein, a famous and moving lyric of deceptive simplicity; there are estimated to have been about fifty musical settings of it before Wolf, who himself acknowledged the equal beauty of Schumann’s version. The girl is lighting the kitchen fire before daybreak, and suddenly remembers as she does so that during the night she has been dreaming of her faithless lover. The emptiness and drudgery of her existence is vividly suggested by Wolf’s slow repetition of totally bare A minor fifths, and of an insistent dactylic figure modelled on the poem’s first line (a crotchet and two quavers, followed by a rising dotted-quaver phrase). This rhythm pervades the entire song; the final stanza echoes the first, and only in the two middle stanzas, as the girl watches the flames rising and her anguish breaks through into consciousness, are subtle harmonic and dynamic complications added to the music, with intensely dramatic effect. The poem has something of the character of a folk-ballad, the figure of the abandoned girl having been a folk-culture motif since long before the young Goethe so notably developed it in his early version of Faust. In another folk-style poem in which the speaker is a traditional or conventional figure, the young huntsman compares the imprint of a bird’s foot on the pure mountain snow to the handwriting on his sweetheart’s letters; Wolf turns this conceit into an exquisite miniature in 5:4 time, exactly crystallizing it in the delicate staccato of the opening piano motif which becomes the central melody. These are two examples of a number of poems in different styles dealing with various aspects of love: tragic loss, tender devotion, mystic adoration as in the formal and rather lush sonnet An die Geliebte, worldly-wise sensuality as in Nimmersatte Liebe. Wolf’s music perfectly matches this diversity. Noteworthy above all are the two enigmatic Peregrina songs, in which the tragic colouring of Das verlassene Mägdlein returns, but with much greater elaboration. Unlike the ballad, the ‘Peregrina’ poems reflect a deeply painful personal experience (Mörike’s involvement with Maria Meyer), and Wolf complicates the music accordingly with tortured harmonic progressions and pervading chromaticism. A particular figure of descending semitones persistently haunts both songs, binding them together: the voice introduces it in the first (‘Der Spiegel…’), where the childlike temptress is directly addressed, and the piano then takes it up in the postlude and carries it over into the second song (‘Warum, Geliebte…’) where it is obsessively repeated by the accompaniment as the words narrate the haunting of the poet by the lost beloved whom he cannot forget. This is probably the most developed and dramatic use of a leitmotif device in the Mörike-Lieder. In the closing lines the poet-narrator, sitting in a festive gathering of children and friends with th
e ghost of ‘Peregrina’ (seen by no one else) beside him, suddenly bursts into helpless tears and leaves with her, ‘hand in hand’: this ending is realized in music of great simplicity and unexampled pathos. It is very regrettable that Wolf for some reason did not also compose the fifth poem (‘Die Liebe, sagt man…’), the closing sonnet of the ‘Peregrina’ cycle.
Personal grief also plays a part in the remarkable poem An eine Äolsharfe. A nexus of associations linked, for Mörike, the wind harps in the Schloßpark at Ludwigsburg, the tragic early death (in Ludwigsburg) of his young brother August, and (in the poem’s epigraph) a consolatory Latin ode he had picked up from his reading of Horace. In Wolf’s setting, as the voice softly muses, the accompaniment subtly suggests the sounds of a wind harp with falling groups of high E major chords in the right hand and persistent rising arpeggio figurations in the left. Wolf had heard a similar effect in Brahms’s comparable setting of this poem, though he did not himself hear an Aeolian harp until the summer of 1888, a few months after writing his own version, when he came across one at Schloß Hoch-Osterwitz in Carinthia. A harp-like accompaniment is used again in the mysterious Gesang Weylas, the strange brief declamation of the guardian goddess of Mörike’s mythical kingdom of Orplid. Wolf, we are told, imagined her sitting on a reef in the moonlight playing a harp; there is nothing about this in Mörike’s text, but Wolf’s reiterated arpeggio chords add powerfully to the monumental and visionary effect.
Mozart's Journey to Prague and a Selection of Poems Page 24
