Musicians of To-Day Part 14

"For the last four months I have been suffering from a sort of mental consumption, which makes me very seriously think of quitting this world for ever.... Only those who truly live should live at all. I have been for some time like one who is dead. I only wish it were an apparent death; but I am really dead and buried; though the power to control my body gives me a seeming life. It is my inmost, my only desire, that the flesh may quickly follow the spirit that has already pa.s.sed. For the last fifteen days I have been living at Traunkirchen, the pearl of Traunsee.... All the comforts that a man could wish for are here to make my life happy--peace, solitude, beautiful scenery, invigorating air, and everything that could suit the tastes of a hermit like myself.[187] And yet--and yet, my friend, I am the most miserable creature on earth. Everything around me breathes peace and happiness, everything throbs with life and fulfils its functions.... I alone, oh G.o.d!... I alone live like a beast that is deaf and senseless. Even reading hardly serves to distract me now, though I bury myself in books in my despair. As for composition, that is finished; I can no longer bring to mind the meaning of a harmony or a melody, and I almost begin to doubt if the compositions that bear my name are really mine. Good G.o.d!

what is the use of all this fame? What is the good of these great aims if misery is all that lies at the end of it?...

"_Heaven gives a man complete genius or no genius at all. h.e.l.l has given me everything by halves_.

"O unhappy man, how true, how true it is! In the flower of your life you went to h.e.l.l; into the evil jaws of destiny you threw the delusive present and yourself with it. O Kleist!"

[Footnote 187: Wolf was living there with a friend. He had not a lodging of his own until 1896, and that was due to the generosity of his friends.]

Suddenly, at Dobling, on 29 November, 1891, the stream of Wolf's genius flowed again, and he wrote fifteen Italian _Lieder_, sometimes several in one day. In December it stopped again; and this time for five years.

These Italian melodies show, however, no trace of any effort, nor a greater tension of mind than is shown in his preceding works. On the contrary, they have the air of being the simplest and most natural work that Wolf ever did. But the matter is of no real consequence, for when Wolf's genius was not stirring within him he was useless. He wished to write thirty-three Italian _Lieder_, but he had to stop after the twenty-second, and in 1891 he published one volume only of the _Italienisches-Liederbuch_. The second volume was completed in a month, five years later, in 1896.

One may imagine the tortures that this solitary man suffered. His only happiness was in creation, and he saw his life cease, without any apparent cause, for years together, and his genius come and go, and return for an instant, and then go again. Each time he must have anxiously wondered if it had gone for ever, or how long it would be before it came back again. In letters to Kaufmann on 6 August, 1891, and 26 April, 1893, he says:

"You ask me for news of my opera.[188] Good Heavens! I should be content if I could write the tiniest little _Liedchen_. And an opera, now?... I firmly believe that it is all over with me.... I could as well speak Chinese as compose anything. It is horrible....

What I suffer from this inaction I cannot tell you. I should like to hang myself."

To Hugo Faisst he wrote on 21 June, 1894:

"You ask me the cause of my great depression of spirit, and would pour balm on my wounds. Ah yes, if you only could! But no herb grows that could cure my sickness; only a G.o.d could help me. If you can give me back my inspirations, and wake up the familiar spirit that is asleep in me, and let him possess me anew, I will call you a G.o.d and raise altars to your name. My cry is to G.o.ds and not to men; the G.o.ds alone are fit to p.r.o.nounce my fate. But however it may end, even if the worst comes, I will bear it--yes, even if no ray of sunshine lightens my life again.... And with that we will, once for all, turn the page and have done with this dark chapter of my life."

[Footnote 188: The writing of an opera was Wolf's great dream and intention for many years.]

This letter--and it is not the only one--recalls the melancholy stoicism of Beethoven's letters, and shows us sorrows that even the unhappy Beethoven did not know. And yet how can we tell? Perhaps Beethoven, too, suffered similar anguish in the sad days that followed 1815, before the last sonatas, the _Missa Solemnis_, and the Ninth Symphony had awaked to life in him.

In March, 1895, Wolf lived once more, and in three months had written the piano score of _Corregidor_. For many years he had been attracted towards the stage, and especially towards light opera. Enthusiast though he was for Wagner's work, he had declared openly that it was time for musicians to free themselves from the Wagnerian _Musik-Drama_. He knew his own gifts, and did not aspire to take Wagner's place. When one of his friends offered him a subject for an opera, taken from a legend about Buddha, he declined it, saying that the world did not yet understand the meaning of Buddha's doctrines, and that he had no wish to give humanity a fresh headache. In a letter to Grohe, on 28 June, 1890, he says:

"Wagner has, by and through his art, accomplished such a mighty work of liberation that we may rejoice to think that it is quite useless for us to storm the skies, since he has conquered them for us. It is much wiser to seek out a pleasant nook in this lovely heaven. I want to find a little place there for myself, not in a desert with water and locusts and wild honey, but in a merry company of primitive beings, among the tinkling of guitars, the sighs of love, the moonlight, and such-like--in short, in a quite ordinary _opera-comique_, without any rescuing spectre of Schopenhauerian philosophy in the background."

After having sought the libretto of an opera from the whole world, from poets ancient and modern,[189] and after having tried to write one himself, he finally took that of Madame Rosa Mayreder, an adaptation of a Spanish novelette of Don Pedro de Alarcon. This was _Corregidor_, which, after having been refused by other theatres, was played in June, 1896, at Mannheim. The work was not a success in spite of its musical qualities, and the poorness of the libretto helped on its failure.

[Footnote 189: Detlev von Liliencron offered him an American subject.

"But in spite of my admiration for Buffalo Bill and his unwashed crew,"

said Wolf sarcastically, "I prefer my native soil and people who appreciate the advantages of soap."]

But the main thing was that Wolf's creative genius had returned. In April, 1896, he wrote straight away the twenty-two songs of the second volume of the _Italienisches-Liederbuch_. At Christmas his friend Muller sent him some of Michelangelo's poems, translated into German by Walter Robert-Tornow; and Wolf, deeply moved by their beauty, decided at once to devote a whole volume of _Lieder_ to them. In 1897 he composed the first three melodies. At the same time he was also working at a new opera, _Manuel Venegas_, a poem by Moritz h.o.e.rnes, written after the style of Alarcon. He seemed full of strength and happiness and confidence in his renewed health. Muller was speaking to him of the premature death of Schubert, and Wolf replied, "A man is not taken away before he has said all he has to say."

He worked furiously, "like a steam-engine," as he said, and was so absorbed in the composition of _Manuel Venegas_ (September, 1897) that he went without rest, and had hardly time to take necessary food. In a fortnight he had written fifty pages of the pianoforte score, as well as the _motifs_ for the whole work, and the music of half the first act.

Then madness came. On 20 September he was seized while he was working at the great recitative of Manuel Venegas in the first act.

He was taken to Dr. Svetlin's private hospital in Vienna, and remained there until January, 1898. Happily he had devoted friends who took care of him and made up for the indifference of the public; for what he had earned himself would not have enabled him even to die in peace. When Schott, the publisher, sent him in October, 1895, his royalties for the editions of his _Lieder_ of Morike, Goethe, Eichendorff, Keller, Spanish poetry, and the first volume of Italian poetry, their total for five years came to eighty-six marks and thirty-five pfennigs! And Schott calmly added that he had not expected so good a result. So it was Wolf's friends, and especially Hugo Faisst, who not only saved him from misery by their un.o.btrusive and often secret generosity, but spared him the horror of dest.i.tution in his last misfortunes.

He recovered his reason, and was sent in February, 1898, for a voyage to Trieste and Venetia to complete his cure and prevent him from thinking of work. The precaution was unnecessary; for he says in a letter to Hugo Faisst, written in the same month:

"There is no need for you to trouble yourself or fear that I shall overdo things. A real distaste for work has taken possession of me, and I believe I shall never write another note. My unfinished opera has no more interest for me, and music altogether is hateful. You see what my kind friends have done for me! I cannot think how I shall be able to exist in this state.... Ah, happy Swabians! one may well envy you. Greet your beautiful country for me, and be warmly greeted yourself by your unhappy and worn-out friend, Hugo Wolf."

When he returned to Vienna, however, he seemed to be a little better, and had apparently regained his health and cheerfulness. But to his own astonishment he had become, as he says in a letter to Faisst, a quiet, sedate, and silent man, who wished more and more to be alone. He did not compose anything fresh, but revised his Michelangelo _Lieder_, and had them published. He made plans for the winter, and rejoiced in the thought of pa.s.sing it in the country near Gmunden, "in perfect quiet, undisturbed, and living only for art." In his last letter to Faisst, 17 September, 1898, he says:

"I am quite well again now, and have no more need of any cures. You would need them more than I."

Then came a fresh seizure of madness, and this time all was finished.

In the autumn of 1898 Wolf was taken to an asylum at Vienna. At first he was able to receive a few visits and to enjoy a little music by playing duets with the director of the establishment, who was himself a musician and a great admirer of Wolf's works. He was even able in the spring to take a few walks out of doors with his friends and an attendant. But he was beginning not to recognise things or people or even himself. "Yes,"

he would say, sighing, "if only I were Hugo Wolf!" From the middle of 1899 his malady grew rapidly worse, and general paralysis followed. At the beginning of 1900 his speech was affected, and, finally, in August, 1901, all his body. At the beginning of 1902 all hope was given up by the doctors; but his heart was still sound, and the unhappy man dragged out his life for another year. He died on 16 February, 1903, of peripneumonia.

He was given a magnificent funeral, which was attended by all the people who had done nothing for him while he was alive. The Austrian State, the town of Vienna, his native town Windischgratz, the Conservatoire that had expelled him, the _Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde_ who had been so long unfriendly to his works, the Opera that had been closed to him, the singers that had scorned him, the critics that had scoffed at him--they were all there. They sang one of his saddest melodies, _Resignation_, a setting of a poem of Eichendorff's, and a chorale by his old friend Bruckner, who had died several years before him. His faithful friends, Faisst at the head of them, took care to have a monument erected to his memory near those of Beethoven and Schubert.

Such was his life, cut short at thirty-seven years of age--for one cannot count the five years of complete madness. There are not many examples in the art world of so terrible a fate. Nietzsche's misfortune is nowhere beside this, for Nietzsche's madness was, to a certain extent, productive, and caused his genius to flash out in a way that it never would have done if his mind had been balanced and his health perfect. Wolf's madness meant prostration. But one may see how, even in the s.p.a.ce of thirty-seven years, his life was strangely parcelled out.

For he did not really begin his creative work until he was twenty-seven years old; and as from 1890 to 1895 he was condemned to five years'

silence, the sum total of his real life, his productive life, is only four or five years. But in those few years he got more out of life than the greater part of artists do in a long career, and in his work he left the imprint of a personality that no one could forget after once having known it.

Wolf's work consists chiefly, as we have already seen, of _Lieder_, and these _Lieder_ are characterised by the application to lyrical music of principles established by Wagner in the domain of drama. That does not mean he imitated Wagner. One finds here and there in Wolf's music Wagnerian forms, just as elsewhere there are evident reminiscences of Berlioz. It is the inevitable mark of his time, and each great artist in his turn contributes his share to the enrichment of the language that belongs to us all. But the real Wagnerism of Wolf is not made up of these unconscious resemblances; it lies in his determination to make poetry the inspiration of music. "To show, above all," he wrote to Humperdinck in 1890, "that poetry is the true source of my music."

When a man is both a poet and a musician, like Wagner, it is natural that his poetry and music should harmonise perfectly. But when it is a matter of translating the soul of other poets into music, special gifts of mental subtlety and an abounding sympathy are needed. These gifts were possessed by Wolf in a very high degree. No musician has more keenly savoured and appreciated the poets. "He was," said one of his critics, G. Kuhl, "Germany's greatest psychologist in music since Mozart." There was nothing laboured about his psychology. Wolf was incapable of setting to music poetry that he did not really love. He used to have the poetry he wished to translate read over to him several times, or in the evening he would read it aloud to himself. If he felt very stirred by it he lived apart with it, and thought about it, and soaked himself in its atmosphere; then he went to sleep, and the next morning he was able to write the _Lied_ straight away. But some poems seemed to sleep in him for years, and then would suddenly awake in him in a musical form. On these occasions he would cry out with happiness.

"Do you know?" he wrote to Muller, "I simply shouted with joy." Muller said he was like an old hen after it had laid an egg.

Wolf never chose commonplace poems for his music--which is more than can be said of Schubert or Schumann. He did not use anything written by contemporary poets, although he was in sympathy with some of them, such as Liliencron, who hoped very much to be translated into music by him.

But he could not do it; he could not use anything in the work of a great poet unless he became so intimate with it that it seemed to be a part of him.

What strikes one also in the _Lieder_ is the importance of the pianoforte accompaniment and its independence of the voice. Sometimes the voice and the pianoforte express the contrast that so often exists between the words and the thought of the poem; at other times they express two personalities, as in his setting of Goethe's _Prometheus_, where the accompaniment represents Zeus sending out his thunderbolts, and the voice interprets t.i.tan; or again, he may depict, as in the setting of Eichendorff's _Serenade_, a student in love in the accompaniment, while the song is the voice of an old man who is listening to it and thinking of his youth. But in whatever he is describing, the pianoforte and the voice have always their own individuality. You cannot take anything away from his _Lieder_ without spoiling the whole; and it is especially so with his instrumental pa.s.sages, which give us the beginning and end of his emotion, and which circle round it and sum it up. The musical form, following closely the poetic form, is extremely varied. It may sometimes express a fugitive thought, a brief record of a poetic impression or some little action, or it may be a great epic or dramatic picture. Muller remarks that Wolf put more into a poem than the poet himself--as in the _Italienisches-Liederbuch_. It is the worst reproach they can make about him, and it is not an ordinary one. Wolf excelled especially in setting poems which accorded with his own tragic fate, as if he had some presentiment of it. No one has better expressed the anguish of a troubled and despairing soul, such as we find in the old harp-player in _Wilhelm Meister_, or the splendid nihility of certain poems of Michelangelo.

Of all his collections of _Lieder_, the 53 _Gedichte von Eduard Morike, komponiert fur eine Singstimme und Klavier_ (1888), the first published, is the most popular. It gained many friends for Wolf, not so much among artists (who are always in the minority) as among those critics who are the best and most disinterested of all--the homely, honest people who do not make a profession of art, but enjoy it as their spiritual daily bread. There are a number of these people in Germany, whose hard lives are beautified by their love of music. Wolf found these friends in all parts, but he found most of them in Swabia. At Stuttgart, at Mannheim, at Darmstadt, and in the country round about these towns he became very popular--the only popular musician since Schubert and Schumann. All cla.s.ses of society unite in loving him. "His _Lieder_," says Herr Decsey, "are on the pianos of even the poorest houses, by the side of Schubert's _Lieder_." Stuttgart became for Wolf, as he said himself, a second home. He owes this popularity, which is without parallel in Swabia, to the people's pa.s.sionate love of _Lieder_ and, above all, of the poetry of Morike, the Swabian pastor, who lives again in Wolf's songs. Wolf has set to music a quarter of Morike's poems, he has brought Morike into his own, and given him one of the first places among German poets. Such was really his intention, and he said so when he had a portrait of Morike put on the t.i.tle-page of the songs. Whether the reading of his poetry acted as a balm to Wolf's unquiet spirit, or whether he became conscious of his genius for the first time when he expressed this poetry in music, I do not know; but he felt deep grat.i.tude towards it, and wished to show it by beginning the first volume with that fine and rather Beethoven-like song, _Der Genesende an die Hoffnung_ ("The Convalescent's Ode to Hope").

The fifty-one _Lieder_ of the _Goethe-Liederbuch_ (1888-89) were composed in groups of _Lieder_: the _Wilhelm Meister Lieder_, the _Divan (Suleika) Lieder_, etc. Wolf even tried to identify himself with the poet's line of thought; and in this we often find him in rivalry with Schubert. He avoided using the poems in which he thought Schubert had exactly conveyed the poet's meaning, as in _Geheimes_ and _An Schwager Kronos_; but he told Muller that there were times when Schubert did not understand Goethe at all, because he concerned himself with translating their general lyrical thought rather than with showing the real nature of Goethe's characters. The peculiar interest of Wolf's _Lieder_ is that he gives each poetic figure its individual character.

The Harpist and Mignon are traced with marvellous insight and restraint; and in some pa.s.sages Wolf shows that he has re-discovered Goethe's art of presenting a whole world of sadness in a single word. The serenity of a great soul soars over the chaos of pa.s.sions.

The _Spanisches-Liederbuch nach Heyse und Geibel_ (1889-90) had already inspired Schumann, Brahms, Cornelius, and others. But none had tried to give it its rough and sensual character. Muller shows how Schumann, especially, robbed the poems of their true nature. Not only did he invest them with his own sentimentalism, but he calmly arranged poems of the most marked individual character to be sung by four voices, which makes them quite absurd; and, worse than this, he changed the words and their sense when they stood in his way. Wolf, on the contrary, steeped himself in this melancholy and voluptuous world, and would not let anything draw him from it; and out of it he produced, as he himself said proudly, some masterpieces. The ten religious songs that come at the beginning of the collection suggest the delusions of mysticism, and weep tears of blood; they are distressing to the ear and mind alike, for they are the pa.s.sionate expression of a faith that puts itself on the rack. By the side of them one finds smiling visions of the Holy Family, which recall Murillo. The thirty-four folk-songs are brilliant, restless, whimsical, and wonderfully varied in form. Each represents a different subject, a personality drawn with incisive strokes, and the whole collection overflows with life. It is said that the _Spanisches-Liederbuch_ is to Wolf's work what _Tristan_ is to Wagner's work.

The _Italienisches-Liederbuch_ (1890-96) is quite different. The character of the songs is very restrained, and Wolf's genius here approached a cla.s.sic clearness of form. He was always seeking to simplify his musical language, and said that if he wrote anything more, he wished it to be like Mozart's writings. These _Lieder_ contain nothing that is not absolutely essential to their subject; so the melodies are very short, and are dramatic rather than lyrical. Wolf gave them an important place in his work: "I consider them," he wrote to Kaufmann, "the most original and perfect of my compositions."

As for the _Michelangelo Gedichten_ (1897), they were interrupted by the outbreak of his malady, and he had only time to write four, of which he suppressed one. Their a.s.sociations are pathetic when one remembers the tragic time at which they were composed; and, by a sort of prophetic instinct, they exhale heaviness of spirit and mournful pride. The second melody is perhaps more beautiful than anything else Wolf wrote; it is truly his death-song:

_Alles endet, was entstehet.

Alles, alles rings vergehet_.[190]

And it is a dead man that sings:

_Menschen waren wir ja auch, Froh und traurig, so wie Ihr.

Und nun sind wir leblos hier, Sind nur Erde, wie Ihr sehet_.[191]

At the moment he was writing this song, in the short respite he had from his illness, he himself was nearly a dead man.

[Footnote 190: