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chapter 6 Hugo Wolf: Subjectivity in the Fin-de-Siècle Lied [1996/2009] Hugo Wolf occupies an anomalous position in the canon of “classical” music. He is the only standard composer whose reputation rests entirely on his songs, and he enjoys enough critical esteem to suggest that he parallels Chopin as a genre specialist. Unlike Chopin, however, Wolf is not a popular composer; his songs are more often praised than sung. Concomitantly, although his repu- tation is high, he has attracted only a modicum of critical attention. And al- though his music is expressively and sometimes structurally elusive, reflecting his notorious penchant for setting complex texts, Wolf’s small cadre of critics has until recently found only one story to tell about him. This is what might be called the Wolf legend: the tale of the moody, sensitive, but aesthetically disciplined artist who submerged himself in first-rate literary texts, understood them preternaturally well, and “expressed” them to perfection by repeating their sound and meaning in the form of music.1 Since the original publication of this chapter, studies by Susan Youens, Amanda Glauert, and others have taken a more nuanced view of Wolf’s aes- thetic, with emphasis on the sometimes conflictual interplay of music and poetry and on the structural and stylistic problems faced by a composer in 1 The Anglophone critics responsible for the Wolf legend include Ernest Newman, Eric Sams, Mosco Carner, Frank Walker, and Philip Radcliffe. Analysts such as Deborah Stein, in Hugo’s Wolf’s Lieder and Extensions of Tonality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), tend to depart from the legend only by bracketing the interplay of text and music in order to take up questions of extended tonality; see also Mark Anson-Cartwright, “Chasing Rain- bows: Wolf’s ‘Phänomen’ and Ideas of Coherence,” Journal of Music Theory 45 (2001): 233–61, and John Gordon Williamson, “Wolf’s Dissonant Prolongations,” in The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, ed. William Kinderman and Harald Krebs (Lincoln, ne: Uni- versity of Nebraska Press, 1996), 215–36. For a counter-example, see Matt Baileyshea, “‘The Heaviest Weight’: Circularity and Repetition in a Song by Hugo Wolf.” Music Analysis 25 (2006): 289–314. Susan Youens’s first book on Wolf, Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press), appears less to depart from the legend than to refine and histo- ricize it. Her more recent work goes much further; see, e.g., Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and “Tradition and Innovation: The Lieder of Hugo Wolf,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Lied, ed. James Parsons (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2000), 204–22. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/978900434��3�_007 <UN> Subjectivity in the Fin-de-Siècle Lied 147 Wolf’s historical position. But the Wolf legend has hardly gone away. To con- firm the point one has only to note the strange combination formed by two entries in the online edition of the New Grove, one by Youens explicitly stating that Wolf’s aesthetic is more complicated than the legend allows, the other by Eric Sams and Graham Johnson reiterating the legend without qualification, as follows: [Wolf] had to create his own models … to express the deep emotive con- tent of verse…. [H]is descriptions of the word-music relation instinc- tively drew on metaphors of organic unity and symbiosis: music absorbs and thrives on the essence of poetry like a child on milk, or a vampire on blood. From the first he battened on poetry and language, absorbing their rhythms, overtones, and cadences.2 Wolf’s metaphors actually evoke neither organic unity nor symbiosis; one is infantile, the other predatory, and the image of the breast hovers over both. But the specificity of the images pales before the rhetorical formula about express- ing “deep emotive content,” even as the statement of the formula reenacts the metaphors with the figure of Wolf “battening,” like a parasite, on poetry and language. It would be foolish to deny that the Wolf legend contains a measure of truth. Wolf was indeed more intent on perfect declamation than most lied compos- ers, and he did make a point of demanding high-quality poetry. He seemed to assume that an important poem could—or should—have a single definitive setting and he thus avoided setting texts for which he felt other composers, es- pecially Schubert and Schumann, had fully accounted. As a recitalist, he liked to point up the interrelationship of music and poetry by prefacing the perfor- mance of each of his lieder with a recitation of its text. In passing from recita- tion to song and from a silent background to an accompaniment notable for its individuality and independence from the voice, Wolf would in effect stage the lied as a reproduction of meaning and figuratively re-enact its composition. Nonetheless, the Wolf legend contains less truth than truism. Its initial weak point is the somewhat heavy-handed narrative structure that posits, in the style of nineteenth-century evolutionism, a teleology in the history of the lied of which Wolf is the fulfillment. (Wolf might have agreed, but that only makes him the first partisan of his own legend.) The central organizing truism of the Wolf legend, however, is something less obviously questionable. It is the core 2 Graham Johnson, with Eric Sams, “The Romantic Lied: Wolf,” in Grove Music Online, ed. Laura Macy (accessed 12 December 2007), http://www.grovemusic.com. <UN>.

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