Sams The Songs of Hugo Wolf

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28092-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

With a foreword by the legendary accompanist, Gerald Moore, Eric Sams' study (Faber 1961, revised 1983) is a notable landmark in the establishment of Wolf as one of the supreme masters of German song. Comprehensively revised and enlarged in 1983, the main subject matter remains the 242 published songs that Wolf wrote for voice and piano, though the Ibsen songs for voice and orchestra are also discussed. English translations are provided and the backgrounds to the original poems by Morike, Eichendorff and Goethe, as well as the Italian and Spanish sources from which the songbooks were drawn, are fully explored. Each song is dated, its keys identified and vocal range determined. 'This is the most important book in the English language on the songs of Hugo Wolf since Ernest Newman proclaimed the composer's genius in 1907 . . . To the English-speaking student this work is a treasure to which he will find himself returning again and again: it is indispensable to those of us anxious to gain a deeper knowledge of Wolf.' Gerald Moore

Eric Sams (1926-2004) was exceptional both as a musicologist, specialising in German lieder, and as a Shakespeare scholar. His fascination with lieder was first inspired by hearing recordings of Hugo Wolf songs in the collection of one of his schoolmasters. He had an exceptional gift for quoting at length the texts of almost of any verse, including the complete works of Shakespeare. He studied modern languages at Cambridge and then joined the Civil Service. He became a highly respected music critic, with a witty and allusive style, reviewing regularly for, among others, the Times Literary Supplement. He wrote several books, and specialized in the relationship between music and language, particularly the text settings of the Romantic song composers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sams, Eric

Leseproben

I. The first published songs

At the beginning of 1887 Wolf’s life was at crisis-point. He had promised much as a composer, and achieved little. He had shown temperamental incapacity to profit from academic training, or to make a living as a teacher of music. He had worked for three years as a critic on the fashionable weekly Wiener Salonblatt; and this function, though useful as a vocation and a discipline, had somewhat inhibited his creativity. But in May 1887 he composed his most original and successful work of this first period, the Italian Serenade for string quartet. At least he was then aware of his genius, though its actual nature remained unclear to him. Wolf’s first masterpiece closely followed his last critique; no doubt he sensed the development of new musical skills and powers. But then his father was suddenly taken ill, and died on 9 May. Hugo was inconsolable; his cyclic disposition reverted to depression and inertia. From these doldrums he was rescued by Friedrich Eckstein, whose library and conversation had enriched and influenced the young Wolf in his earlier student days in Vienna and who now performed the further signal service of persuading a publisher (perhaps with some financial inducement) to bring out some of Wolf’s songs. From his manuscripts of many years the composer selected the following twelve. They contain a few favourites, and much fine music, but no masterpieces. Yet this timely publication, by inducing a glow of creative euphoria and focusing it firmly on song-writing, must have helped to set off the blaze of achievement that followed throughout 1888.

Six songs for a woman’s voice

1 Morgentau (Morning dew)

6–19 June 1877

D major e'–e"

Morning breezes have fanned away the sultry night, and the meadows laugh blissfully in their spring array; from the dark tree a bird sings its sweet dawn-song softly, as if in a dream. The rosebud lifts her head uneasily, for the sweet song has thrilled her through; her profusion of petals unfolds more and more, and from them a drop of dew flows like a secret and silent tear.

The poem is described as being taken ‘from an old song-book’. It has no great merit or originality, and we need not regret its anonymity. But the seventeen-year-old Wolf was evidently much pleased with it, and our first introduction to his work is a charming one. The young composer, though evidently writing under the influence of his great predecessors, especially Schumann, shows in this unpretentious song an original and authentic talent of a high order.

The melody is beguiling, and the ostensible simplicity of the accompaniment conceals much deft art. Towards the end, for example, at ‘mehr und mehr enthüllet’ (more and more unfolds) there appears a new melody, extended by a new unfolding harmonic progression. These lead gracefully into the final word ‘still’ (silent), which is lovingly prolonged for two whole bars while under it the right-hand piano part recalls the opening vocal melody to round out the picture and round off the song. This delightful passage, and indeed the whole work, evoke the unaffected freshness of youth as well as dawn; the song is well named.

NOTES 1. On Wolf’s manuscript the text is ascribed to ‘Albert Reinhold’; in the first edition this is amended to ‘aus einem alten Liederbuch’. Frank Walker suggests that the source may well have been a book of handwritten poems copied out by Wolf’s father for his mother in their courting days.* One such collection dated 1849 (two years before the marriage) was preserved by Wolf among his own books.

2. The Schumann influence is manifest both in the general piano-song technique (melodic line doubled in voice and keyboard) and in the specific echoes of Dein Angesicht, op. 127 no. 2, in the semiquaver movement of the accompaniment. Despite the surface disparity of the two poetic themes, life in Wolf and death in Schumann, there is sufficient congruence in their underlying sadness of mood and especially in their identity of vocabulary (‘Traum’ and ‘mild’ juxtaposed in both texts) to account for the musical links.

3. But there are more interesting affinities between this song and Wolf’s own incomparably greater Fussreise (22) written eleven years later. The basic mood is similar – enjoyment of the freshness of the morning. Fussreise too is in D major, ends with the same rising scale passage to the keynote, and has as a special feature the progression from a dominant to a tonic on the mediant of the keynote to the dominant and tonic of the keynote itself (i.e. C#, F#, A, D). In Morgentau this progression occurs briefly at the word ‘Lenzespracht’ (spring array); in Fussreise it forms the essence of the piano interlude that reintroduces the main theme on the last page, in each case leading back into the original melody. None of these points is common in Wolf’s music and the last two are rather rare. This may be just coincidence, or at most an involuntary reminiscence, as in note 2 above. But there is another and not unpersuasive explanation, namely that the idea of morning freshness suggested to Wolf a musical expression of the kind described.

4. The sustained ‘still’ is motif 39.

2 Das Vöglein (The little bird)

2 May 1878

E major c#'–f#"

The bird flutters down from the branch, and then in the same instant flies gaily back again.

Now it is near to you, now hiding; now it comes close again, playing and teasing.

Try to touch it, and you’ll be tricked; off it flies, in a flash, mockingly away. But just be quiet and wait. Soon it will come hopping round your hand again; and then if you’re quick it really can’t escape you.

And is it really so hard just to await that moment? Look around you; see the flower-filled garden.

Never despair; let the bird have its own way. You can manage without it until you catch it.

Even then it won’t bring you very much; but how very sweetly it can sing.

Hebbel was a dramatic poet of some importance. His lyrics are for the most part well-turned and original in form and imagery, and sometimes (as in the much-anthologized Abendgefühl) beautifully singable; but their allegorical content can tend towards the ponderous. The intended significance of this early lyric about the elusive nature of happiness is rather heavily obtrusive; yet the neatly-rhymed short lines with their atypically lively rhythm invite a correspondingly light and deft musical setting. The words thus present a mild technical problem which the young composer solves with some distinction. The vocal melody has an engaging lilt; the music combines graphic allusions to flight and song with a youthful wistfulness that still appeals. The accompaniment flutters and trills, swoops and soars, or alights and hops (at ‘hüpfen’) and generally suits the musical action to the word with an engaging felicity that lends wings to the poet’s metaphor. It is perhaps not irrelevant that Wolf himself at this time had just met the first love of his life, Vally Franck.

NOTES 1. The lyric was entitled Das Glück (Happiness) in the earliest editions of Hebbel’s poems. No doubt the bird’s symbolic connotations included love, for both poet and composer; and the theme proposed in the very first bar of the piano prelude is a fledgling form of Wolf’s main musical equivalent for the idea of love (motif 13), from which he was later to fashion so many phrases of exquisite refinement.

2. Similarly the staccato hopping is a forerunner of the more subtle and more integral treatment of the same image in Jägerlied (16). Note too how the vocal line is made to hop, skip and jump at ‘hüpfen’, Versteckend’ etc, by means of a quaver rest inserted between the syllables – the kind of operatic effect to which Wolf very rarely resorted.

3. A particularly neat piece of musical equivalence, this time not merely rare but unparalleled in the Wolfian repertory, occurs at the word ‘still!’ (be silent); this injunction to be quiet and wait evokes three quaver rests and an extra bar deftly...