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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Nebraska Press
Although Hugo Wolfs negative opinion of Brahms's Lieder is well known, his influence on the twentieth century's reception of these works has never been adequately investigated. Wolfs criticisms of Brahms, which appeared in both his reviews for the Wiener Salonblatt and his personal letters, have usually been marginalized and awkwardly attributed to the audacity of youth or to his affiliation with the Vienna Wagner cliques. And even those scholars who have argued that Wolfs criticisms were logically based in his very different conception of the Lied have failed to acknowledge the enormous impact that his aesthetics have had on the reception of Brahms's Lieder. Yet, as I shall argue, Wolfs ideas have permeated most studies of these works up to the present day, influencing even those writers sympathetic to Brahms.
In this essay I explore Wolfs aesthetics, trace the recurrence of his ideas through the nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature on Brahms's Lieder, and link this influence to issues in the reception history of Brahms's other works. My assessment will not be confined to writings that explicitly invoke Wolf but will include an examination of the methodologies implicit in all the most significant discussions of Brahms's Lieder (including publications aimed at general audiences as well as those written for the scholarly community). These sources all include valuable insights into Brahms's activities as a songwriter, but only their relation to Wolfs aesthetics will be considered here. Finally, I will suggest that Wolf's Lieder lend themselves more easily than those of Brahms to the analytical approaches that many twentieth-century musicologists have favored and that, as a result, the explanation for the unusually far-reaching and powerful control of his ideas in the reception history of Brahms's Lieder would seem to lie in the prejudices of our own methods of research.
I
Wolf served as music critic at the Wiener Salonblatt from 1884 to 1887, and his belligerent criticisms of Brahms's works are frequently attributed to his close association with the Wagner circle in Vienna.(1) The Wiener Akademische Wagner-Verein (henceforth referred to as the Wagner Society) had been officially formed in 1873, and its members included a large number of political activists and students from the University of Vienna, who were drawn to Wagner through both his music and his philosophical and political ideas.(2) Upon arriving in Vienna in 1875, Wolf, like many of his fellow students at the Vienna Conservatory, joined the Wagner Society. Through this society the budding musician not only met politically savvy students such as Hermann Bahr but, more importantly, also established contacts with influential Viennese musicians, some of whom, including Joseph Schalk, would later become important promoters of his own music. The Wagner Society also afforded Wolf the opportunity to make acquaintance with Vienna's most prominent anti-Brahms newspaper critics, including Hans Paumgartner, Gustav Schonaich, and Emerich Kastner. In his own columns, Wolf echoes these Wagnerian critics, complaining of the monotony and boredom of Brahms's works and satirizing Brahms's recourse to older compositional techniques.(3) By contrast, the Wagnerians thought of themselves as promoting spontaneity, passion, and innovation. For them, Brahms's music did not embody the powerful, unrestrained emotion that they heard in Wagner and therefore could not achieve the type of mass appeal that they valued.
Given all the points of contact between Wolf and his fellow Wagnerians, it is hardly surprising that most writers dealing with his attitude toward Brahms's Lieder see only the political nature of his wit. For instance, Craig A. Bell describes Wolf as being "blinded by his Wagner fetish and personal ambiguity to the point of being unable to see anything in Brahms."(4) While some commentators use Wolf's association with the Wagner cliques as an apology for his sharp tone, others suggest that the tension between the two composers had its roots in their differing cultural backgrounds, with Brahms coming from the Protestant north and Wolf the Catholic south. Still others- usually Brahms scholars -- tend to dismiss Wolf's criticisms altogether. Leaving off after only a few sentences on Wolf's relation to Brahms, Florence May, an acquaintance and early biographer of the older composer, concludes, "For ourselves, having done what was, perhaps, incumbent on us by referring to the matter, we shall adopt what we believe would have been Brahms's desire by allowing it, so far as these pages are concerned, to follow others of the kind to oblivion."(5) In the last few decades, however, a number of writers have attempted a more objective, bipartisan approach to this schism, and without denying the political influences on Wolf they stress the aesthetic motivations underlying his criticisms.(6) Wolf himself emphasized these aesthetic differences, as he did not want his criticisms to be misconstrued as a personal vendetta. Moreover, not all his reviews of Brahms were negative; one of his last notices (appearing in the Wiener Salonblatt on 11 April 1886) praises the Alto Rhapsody.(7)
The difference in the Lied aesthetics of Brahms and Wolf hinges on the status of the text. Influenced by Wagner and his followers, Wolf took a text-oriented approach to Lieder, as indicated in his remark to Engelbert Humperdinck that poetry "is the real source of my musical language." Moreover, he liked to have the poems read aloud before his songs were performed.(8) Brahms, too, placed great value on the texts and on their relationship to the music, but for him the Lied was first of all a musical genre and was closely related to folk song.(9) Wolf most clearly summed up his dislike for Brahms's songwriting, not in his newspaper columns (which, in fact, do not directly address the substance of Brahms's music), but in a letter of 20 August 1890 to Melanie Kochert. Here Wolf criticizes Brahms's "Salome," op.69, no.8, whose text he himself had only recently set:
What a master of the bagpipes and accordion Brahms is! "You can't top this!" No one writes more authentic foot stompers than he, and yet despite all the stompers, "let's be merry" ditties and doodles, no one can be as melancholy as he.... I can't resist citing one remarkable passage here because of its particularly original declamation.... And so in this familiar, noble, popular vein it yodels away to the end. Fortunately B[rahms] preserved only two Keller poems for posterity under the rifles "Therese" (Du milchjunger Knabe) and "Salome" (Singt mein Schatz). In the first one the final verse is even altered.... B[rahms] apparently used an old edition of K[eller] poems for his criminal needs.(10)
Even with the musical example that Wolf provided for Kochert, one needs an understanding of the styles of the two composers to appreciate the full implications of this description. Brahms, following Schubert, was influenced by the declamation, rhythmic patterns, and form of folk music. This style of Lied displeased Wolf, and much of his letter to Kochert mocks this folk heritage of Brahms's Lieder. At the same time, Wolf chastises Brahms for not even using the best edition of Keller's poems. Despite the unfairness of this last criticism -- the edition that Wolf used was not published until 1883 and was therefore unavailable when Brahms completed his setting in 1877 -- Wolf's comment illustrates his deep reverence for the original texts. Not only did he study the most authoritative editions of his favorite poems, but he was quite concerned that his settings preserve the original poems intact. Brahms, by contrast, at times introduced word repetitions that altered the poetic structure. The two composers also differ on matters of form and word painting; a comparison of their settings of "Salome" is indicative. At the beginning of Brahms's strophic-variation setting, a single figure, a Scotch snap, depicts a variety of different birds. Wolf's...
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