Hugo Wolf and His Morike Songs.(Review)

By Susan Youens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [xii, 203 p. ISBN 0-521-65159-X. $64.95.]

In declaring that song "is a compound art, and its words and music often have their own large tales to tell" (p. 140), Susan Youens launches her readers on an odyssey that involves far more than the relationship of Hugo Wolf to Eduard Morike, of composer to poet. The immediate thesis of her book is quite simple: Wolf the musician and Morike the poet created with different artistic instincts arising out of different biographical circumstances and zeitgeists. Their association was far from being the love match supposed by the critics who were carried away with enthusiasm for Wolf's Morike songs; the two are presented by Youens as an "odd couple" who would have disliked each other had they met, as Wolf indeed admitted. Youens carefully etches the details of their differing tastes and experiences--whether concerning Richard Wagner, religion, or women. Such arguments allow her to display her vivid skills of biographical portraiture, taking the reader directly into the world of Morike in all its turmoil and uncert ainty. Her charting of the poet's unfortunate relationship with Maria Meyer is particularly powerful, and from this Youens is able to suggest why the Peregrine lyrics from Morike's novel Maler Nolten held such strong associations for the poet--ones that Wolf did not share. According to Youens's reading, Morike used the series of five poems to purge his sense of guilt at having deserted Maria and cast her out as an adulteress, whereas Wolf kept his distance from them, setting only the first and fourth of the cycle. Youens links this artistic decision of Wolf's to his fear over what might happen to his mistress Melanie Kochert if her adultery became known and to his wish to avoid dwelling on her possible fate.

The second chapter of Youens's book is full of such links between the Peregrine poems, the characters in Maler Nolten, and the people in Morike's life. Indeed like Morike himself, Youens serves up a "bouillabaisse of ingredients, designed to leave the reader in a whirl" (p. 109), as more and more details about Maria Meyer are brought into play. One doubts whether all of these details, taken by themselves, can be made directly relevant to an understanding of the Peregrine poems, but as a manifestation of how images can proliferate from a supposed connection between life and art, Youens has created a potent mixture worthy of her subject matter. She introduces chapter 2 as a "laboratory experiment designed to make a point to excess' (p. 18), and the reader's powers of reception are tested greatly by the number of layers in her poetic interpretation. One looks to her analysis of Wolf's "Peregrina" songs to help order the "whirl" of impressions, but here her account lacks clarity. This stems partly from practical issues like her confusing switches back and forth between the two "Peregrina" songs, and partly from the rather dense nature of the songs themselves. But far more interesting is the notion that Youens actually intends this loss of footing at the first point of connection between music and poetry--not so that aesthetic ordering is abandoned altogether, but so that the ...