Chapter VIII: German Opera After Wagner and Modern German Song (1)

The Wagnerian after-current: Cyrill Kistler; August Bungert,
Goldmark, etc.; Max Schillings, Eugen d'Albert--The successful
post-Wagnerians in the lighter genre: Götz, Cornelius, and
Wolf; Engelbert Humperdinck's fairy opera; Ludwig Thuille;
Hans Pfitzner; the _Volksoper_--Richard Strauss as musical
dramatist--Hugo Wolf and the modern song; other contemporary
German lyricists--The younger men: Klose, Hausegger, Schönberg,
Korngold.

I

It was only to be expected that the titanic personality of Wagner should drag a number of smaller men after it, both in his own day and later, by the sheer force of attraction of a great body for small ones. In one of his essays Matthew Arnold characterizes the test of the quality of a critic as the power 'to ascertain the master current in the literature of an epoch, and to distinguish this from all the minor currents.' This sensitiveness to master currents, however, that is so essential to criticism, is generally a source of danger to the secondary creative minds; it is apt to tempt them to follow blindly in the wake of the master spirit, instead of trying to find salvation on a road of their own. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century it was indubitably true that the master current in music was that set going by Wagner; but it was equally true that any other mariner who should venture upon that stream was pretty certain to be swamped by Wagner's backwash. So it has proved: with the sole exception of Humperdinck's _Hänsel und Gretel_, no operatic work of the late nineteenth century that openly claimed kinship with Wagner has exhibited any staying power, while the more durable success has been reserved for works like Cornelius' _Barbier von Bagdad_ and Götz's _Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung_, that frankly recognized the impossibility of any smaller man than Wagner continuing Wagner's work.

As was inevitable, the more self-conscious of the post-Wagnerians fastened for imitation upon what they thought to be the essential Wagner, but that a later day can see was the inessential. To them Wagner was the re-creator of the world of the German saga. Posterity has learned that with Wagner, as with all great creators, the matter is of much less account than his way of dealing with the matter. It is not the body of religious and cosmological beliefs underlying the Greek drama that makes the Greek dramatists what they are to us to-day. Their very conception of the governance of the universe is a thing that we find it hard to enter into even by an effort of the historical imagination; nevertheless these men are more vital to us than many of the problem-play writers of our own epoch, simply because the emotional stuff in which they deal is of the eternal kind, and they have dealt with it along lines that are independent of the mere thought of their own age. Similarly, what is most vital for us in Wagner now is not his myths, his problems of the will, his conception of love, of redemption, of renunciation, or the verse forms into which he threw his ideas, but the depth of his passion, the truth of his portraiture, the beauty and eloquence of his speech. The real Wagner, in truth, was the Wagner that no one could hope to imitate. But the generation that grew up in his mighty shadow imagined that all it had to do was to re-exploit the mere externalities of his work. Like him, it would delve into German myths or German folk-lore for its subjects; like him, it would adopt an alliterative mode of poetic diction; like him, it would treat the less intense moments of drama in a quasi-recitative that was supposed to be an intensification of the intervals and accents of ordinary speech. But all these things in themselves were merely the clothes without the man; and not one of Wagner's immediate successors showed himself big enough to wear his mantle. Many of these works written in a conspicuously Wagnerian spirit have still considerable interest for the student of musical history--the _Kunihild_ (1848), for example, of Cyrill Kistler (1848-1907)--but not enough vitality to preserve for them a permanent place in the theatre repertory. (The same composer's _Baldur's Tod_, written in the 'eighties, was not performed till 1905 in Düsseldorf.) The big Homeric tetralogy of August Bungert, _Odysseus Heimkehr_ (1896), _Kirke_ (1898), _Nausikaa_ (1900-01), and _Odysseus Tod_ (1903), is an attempt to do for the Greek myths what Wagner did for the Teutonic. (The composer is said to be engaged upon a second tetralogy of the same order, bearing the general title of 'Ilias.') How seriously one section of the German musical public took these colossal plans was shown by the proposal to erect a 'Festspielhaus' on the Rhine that should be to Bungert music-drama what Bayreuth is to the Wagnerian. After a fair amount of success in the years immediately following their production, however, Bungert's operas have fallen out of the repertory. His talent is indeed lyrical rather than dramatic. Bungert was born in Mülheim (Ruhr) in 1846 and studied at the Cologne Conservatory and in Paris. He became musical director in Kreuznach (1869) and has since lived chiefly in Karlsruhe and Berlin. Besides the 'tetralogy' he wrote a comic opera, _Die Studenten von Salamanka_ (1884), and some symphonic and chamber works. His songs (including Carmen Sylva's 'Songs of a Queen') have probably more permanent value than the rest of his work.

The opera has in fact tempted many of the German lyricists to try to exceed their powers. Hans Sommer (born 1837), who has produced a number of songs of fine feeling and perspicuous workmanship, attempted a Wagnerian flight in his opera _Loreley_ (1891), in which the treatment is a little too heavy for the subject. Like so many of his contemporaries, he frequently suffers for the sins of his librettists. Felix Draeseke (b. 1835) has hovered uncertainly between Schumannesque and Wagnerian ideals; his most successful opera is _Herrat_ (1892).[35] Adalbert von Goldschmidt (1848-1906) aimed, as others of his kind did, at continuing the Wagner tradition not only in the musical but in the poetic line. He was his own librettist in the opera _Helianthus_ (1884); but in the music of both this and the later opera _Gaea_ (1889) the Wagnerian influence is obvious. Carl Goldmark (1830-1915) brought the best musical qualities of a mind that was eclectic both by heredity and environment to bear upon the very successful operas _Die Königin von Saba_ (1875), _Merlin_ (1886), and _Das Heimchen am Herd_ (1896), founded on Dickens's 'Cricket on the Hearth.'

Though a native of Hungary (Keszthely, 1830), Goldmark received a thoroughly German training in Vienna, where he studied the violin with Jansa. He entered the conservatory in 1847 and, since that institution was closed the following year, he continued his studies by himself. In 1865 he aroused attention with his overture _Sakuntala_, which is still in the orchestral répertoire. Happily guided by an artistic instinct, he hit upon a vein which his talent especially fitted him to exploit, namely, the painting of vivid oriental color. His first opera, 'The Queen of Sheba,' produced in Vienna in 1875, following the same tendency with equal success, has preserved its popularity till to-day. The chronological order of his other operas is as follows:

_Merlin_ (Vienna, 1886, and revised for Frankfort, 1904); 'The Cricket on the Hearth' (1896); 'The Prisoner of War' (1899); _Götz von Berlichingen_ (1902); and 'A Winter's Tale' (1908). His symphonic works include, besides the _Sakuntala_ overture, an orchestral suite (symphony) 'The Rustic Wedding,' a symphony in E-flat, the overtures 'Penthesilea,' 'In Spring,' 'Prometheus Bound,' 'Sappho,' and 'In Italy'; a symphonic poem 'Zrínyi' (1903), two violin concertos, a piano quintet, a string quartet, a suite for piano and violin, pianoforte and choral works.

An apt criticism of Goldmark's style is given by Eugen Schmitz in the revision of Naumann's _Musikgeschichte_: 'In any case, we know of no second composer of the present time who can paint the exoticism and _fata morgana_ of the Orient and the tropics, the sultriness and the effects of a climate that arouses devouring passions, as well as the peculiarity and special nature of the inhabitants, in such characteristic and glowing tone-colors as Goldmark has succeeded in doing. Herein, however, lies not only his strength but also his weakness; for he is exclusively a musical colorist, a colorist _à la_ Makart, who sacrifices drawing and perspective for the sake of color. Which means, translated into musical terms: a composer whose melodic invention and thematic development does not stand in a proportionate relationship to the intoxicating magic of tone-color combinations that he employs. Moreover, his coloring is already beginning to fade beside the corresponding achievements of the most modern composers of to-day.'

A number of minor talents have from time to time obtained a momentary or a local success, without in the end doing anything to sustain the hope that something really vital might be expected of them; of works of this order we may mention the _Urvasi_ (1886), _Der Evangelimann_ (1894), _Don Quixote_ (1898), and _Kuhreigen_ (1911) of Wilhelm Kienzl (1857);[36] _Die Versunkene Glocke_ and _Faust_ of Heinrich Zöllner (1854); the _Ingwelde_ (1894), _Der Pfeifertag_ (1899), and _Moloch_ (1906) of Max Schillings (born 1868); the _Sakuntala_ (1884), _Malawika_ (1886), _Genesius_ (1893), and _Orestes_[37] (1902) of Felix Weingartner (born 1863). In these and some dozen or two of other modern Germans, composition is an act of the will rather than of the imagination. The generous eclecticism and superficial effectiveness of the _Tiefland_ (1903) of Eugen d'Albert (born 1864) have won for it exceptional popularity.

The classification of Schillings as a 'minor talent' would probably not meet with the approval of many critics and musicians in Germany, where his influence is considerable. Schillings is one of the ramparts of the progressive musical citadel of Munich, the centre from which the Reger, Pfitzner and Thuille strands radiate. If aristocracy and nobility are the outstanding characteristics of his highly individual muse, a corresponding exclusiveness, coldness and artificiality accompany them. His perfection is that of the marble, finely chiselled, hard and polished. His music is a personal expression, but his personality is one that never experienced the depths of human suffering. Schillings was born in the Rhineland (Düren) in 1868 and finished his studies in Munich. There he became 'royal professor' in 1903 and later he went to Stuttgart as general musical director in connection with the court theatre. Besides his operas he wrote the symphonic prologue 'Œdipus' (1900), music for the 'Orestes' of Æschylus (1900) and for Goethe's 'Faust' (Part I). Of non-dramatic works there are two 'fantasies,' _Meergruss_ and _Seemorgen_; _Ein Zwiegespräch_ for small orchestra, solo violin and solo 'cello, a hymn-rhapsody, _Dem Verklärten_ (after Schiller) for mixed chorus, baritone and orchestra (op. 21, 1905), _Glockenlieder_ for tenor and orchestra, some chamber music and about forty songs. Especially successful are his three 'melodramatic' works, i.e. music to accompany recitation, of which the setting of Wildenbruch's _Hexenlied_ is best known.

Weingartner and d'Albert, too, are considerable figures in contemporary German music, though their records as executive artists may outlive their reputations as composers, the first being a brilliant and authoritative conductor, the latter a pianist of extraordinary calibre. Besides the operas mentioned above Weingartner has written the symphonic poems 'King Lear' and 'The Regions of the Blest,' two symphonies, three string quartets and a piano sextet (op. 20), songs and piano pieces. He has also distinguished himself as a critic and author of valuable books of a practical and æsthetic nature. D'Albert's evolution from pianist to composer was accomplished in the usual manner, by way of the piano concerto. He wrote two of them (op. 2 and 12), then a 'cello concerto (op. 20), and promptly embarked upon a symphonic career with two overtures ('Esther' and 'Hyperion') and the symphony in F. Then came chamber music, songs and various other forms. His piano arrangements of Bach's organ works are justly popular. His first opera was _Der Rubin_ (1893), then came _Ghismonda_ (1895), _Gernot_ (1897), _Die Abreise_ (1898), all of good Wagnerian extraction; then _Kain_ and _Der Improvisator_ (1900), showing evidences of an individual style, and, finally, _Tiefland_ (1903), the one really successful opera of d'Albert, which seems to have become permanent in the German répertoire. _Flauto solo_ (1905) and _Tragaldabas_ (1907) have not made a great stir. D'Albert is of Scotch birth (Glasgow, 1864), though his father was a native of Germany.

II

On the whole, German opera of the more ambitious kind cannot be said to have produced much that is likely to be durable between Wagner and Strauss. The indubitable master works have been for the most part in the lighter genres--the delightful _Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung_ (1874) of Hermann Götz (1840-1876), the _Barbier von Bagdad_ (1858) of Peter Cornelius (1824-1874) (a gem of grace and humor), and the _Hänsel und Gretel_ (1893) of Engelbert Humperdinck, in which the Wagnerian polyphony is applied with the happiest effect to a style that is the purest distillation of the German folk-spirit. Of Cornelius's work we have spoken elsewhere (Vol. II, pp. 380f), of Humperdinck we shall have something to say presently. Here let us dwell for a moment on Götz. His one finished opera (a second, _Francesca da Rimini_, he did not live to finish) has been called a 'little _Meistersinger_.' Whether applied with justice or not, this epithet indicates the work's spiritual relationship. Yet, Wagnerian that he is, this classification must be made with reserve. A close friend of Brahms, he was certainly influenced by that master--in a measure he combines the rich and varied texture of Brahms' chamber music with the symphonic style of the _Meistersinger_. Niemann points out other influences. 'He takes Jensen by the left hand, Cornelius by the right; like both of these, he is lyrist and worker in detail without a real dramatic vein and a model of the idealistic German master of an older time.' _Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung_ was first heard in 1874 in Mannheim and achieved wide popularity. It is based on Shakespeare ('Taming of the Shrew'), and an English text was used in England. Götz was born in Königsberg and died near Zürich. He was a pupil of Köhler, Stern, Bülow and Ulrich, and was organist in Winterthur from 1867 to 1870, when failing health forced him into retirement.

Hugo Wolf's[38] _Der Corregidor_ (1896) is, in its endless flow of melody and its sustained vitality of characterization, perhaps the nearest approach in modern music to the _Meistersinger_; for some reason or other, however, a work that is a pure delight in the home does not seem able to maintain itself on the stage. A second opera of Wolf's, _Manuel Venegas_, in which we can trace the same extraordinary simplification and clarification of style that is evident in his latest songs, remained only a fragment at his death. The successes, not less than the failures, of these and other men showed clearly that the further they got from the main Wagnerian stream the safer they were. Cornelius, though living in Wagner's immediate environment and cherishing a passionate admiration for the great man, knew well that his own salvation lay in trying to write as if Wagner had never lived. The _Barbier von Bagdad_ was written some years before the composition of the _Meistersinger_ had begun; if Cornelius went anywhere for a model for his own work it was to the _Benvenuto Cellini_ of Berlioz. He knew the danger he was in during the composition of his second opera, _Der Cid_, and strove desperately to shut out Wagner from his mind at that time; he did not want, as he put it, simply to hatch Wagnerian eggs. If _Der Cid_ (1865) fails, it is not because of any Wagnerian influence, but because Cornelius's genius was of too light a tissue for so big a stage subject. Nevertheless, if he does not wholly fill the dramatic frame, he comes very near doing so; it is no small dramatic gift that is shown in such passages as the _Trauermarsch_ in the second scene of the first act and the subsequent monologue of Chimene, in Chimene's scena in the second scene of the second act, and in most of the choral writing. A third opera, _Gunlöd_, was orchestrated by Lassen and Hoffbauer and produced seventeen years after Cornelius's death.

Ludwig Thuille Hans Pfitzner
Engelbert Humperdinck Karl Goldmark

Humperdinck seems destined to go down to posterity as the composer of one work. His _Hänsel und Gretel_ owes its incomparable charm not to the Wagnerianisms of it, which lie only on the surface, but to its expressing once for all the very soul of a certain order of German folk-song and German _Kindlichkeit_. His later works--_Die sieben Geislein_ (1897), _Dornröschen_ (1902), and the comic opera _Die Heirat wider Willen_ (1905), though containing much beautiful music, have on the whole failed to convince the world that Humperdinck has any new chapter to add to German opera. For this his librettists must perhaps share the blame with him. _Die Königskinder_ (1898), which was originally a melodrama, was recast as an opera in 1908 and, at least in America, was more successful. Besides these Humperdinck wrote incidental music for Aristophanes' _Lysistrata_, Shakespeare's 'A Winter's Tale' and 'Tempest.' Two choral ballads preceded the operas and a 'Moorish Rhapsody' (1898) was composed for the Leeds Festival. Humperdinck was born in Siegburg (Rhineland), studied at the Cologne Conservatory, also in Munich and in Italy. He taught for a time in Barcelona (Spain) and in Frankfort (Hoch Conservatory), and in 1900 became head of a master school of composition in Berlin with the title of royal professor and member of the senate of the Academy of Arts.

A worthy companion to _Hänsel und Gretel_ is the _Lobetanz_ (1898) of Ludwig Thuille (1861-1907). Thuille's touch is lighter than Humperdinck's. Thuille was a highly esteemed artist, especially among the Munich circle of musicians. He is the only one of the group of important composers settled there since Rheinberger's demise that may be said to have founded a 'school.' He is the heir and successor of Rheinberger and by virtue of his pedagogic talent the master of all the younger South German moderns. Though _Lobetanz_ (which was preceded by _Theuerdank_, 1897, and _Gugeline_, 1901) is the best known of his works, the chamber music of his later period has probably the most permanent value.[39] Thuille was born in Bozen (Tyrol) and died in Munich, where he was professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

Some success has been won by the _Donna Anna_ (1895) of E. N. von Reznicek (born 1860), a showy work compact of many styles--grand opera, operetta, the early Verdi, _Tannhäuser_, and the Spanish 'national' idiom all jostling each other's elbows. There is little real differentiation of character; such differentiation as there is is only in musical externals--in costume rather than in psychology. In Germany a certain following is much devoted to Hans Pfitzner, whose opera _Der arme Heinrich_ was produced in 1895, and his _Die Rose vom Liebesgarten_ in 1901. Pfitzner is a musician of more earnestness than inspiration. He is technically well equipped, and all that he does indicates refinement and intelligence; but he lacks the imagination that fuses into new life whatever material it touches. (He has also written some fairly expressive songs and a small amount of chamber music.) Pfitzner, like Alex. Ritter, is of Russian birth, being born (of German parents) in Moscow in 1869. His father and the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt were the sources of his musical education. Since 1892 he has taught and conducted in various places (Coblentz, Mainz, Berlin, Munich). In 1908 he became municipal musical director and director of the conservatory at Strassburg. Besides the two operas he has written music for Ibsen's play, 'The Festival of Solhaug' (1889), also for Kleist's _Kätchen von Heilbronn_ (1908) and Ilse von Stach's _Christelflein_. An orchestral Scherzo (1888), several choral works and vocal works with orchestra complete the list of his works besides those mentioned above.

For the sake of completeness, brief mention must here be made of the German _Volksoper_, a comparatively unambitious genre in which much good work has been done. Among its best products in recent years are the quick-witted _Versiegelt_ (1908) of Leo Blech (born 1871), and the _Barbarina_ of Otto Neitzel (born 1852).

III

The biggest figure in modern German operatic music, as in instrumental music, is Richard Strauss. It was perhaps inevitable that this should be so. The more massive German opera after Wagner was almost bound to find what further development was possible to it in the Wagnerian semi-symphonic form; the difficulty was to find a composer capable of handling it. This form was simply the expression of a spirit that had come down to German music from Beethoven, and that had to work itself out to the full before the next great development--whatever that may prove to be--could be possible; it is the same spirit that is visible, in different but still related shapes, in the symphonic tissue of the Wagnerian orchestra, the symphonic poems of Liszt, the symphonies of Brahms, the pianoforte accompaniments of Wolf and Marx and their fellows, and the copious and vivid orchestral speech of Strauss. It is a method that is perhaps only thoroughly efficacious for composers whose heredity and environment make the further working out of the German tradition their most natural form of musical thinking. That it is not the form best suited to peoples to whom this tradition is not part of their blood and being is shown by the dramatic poignancy attained by such widely different dramatic methods as those of Moussorgsky, Puccini, and Debussy. But when a race has, in the course of generations, made for itself an instrument so magnificent in its power and scope, and one so peculiarly its own, as the German quasi-symphonic form, it is the most natural thing in the world that virtually all the best of its thinking should be done by its aid. It was therefore perhaps not an accident, but the logical outcome of the whole previous development of German music, that the mind that was to dominate the German opera of our own day should be the mind that had already proved itself to be the most fertile, original, and audacious in the field of instrumental music. But it was a law for Strauss, no less than for his smaller contemporaries, that if he was to be something more than a mere _nach-Wagnerianer_ he must do his work outside not only the ground Wagner had occupied, but outside the ground still covered by his gigantic shadow.

It was well within that shadow, however, that Strauss's first dramatic attempt was made. It is not so much that the musical style of _Guntram_ (1892-93) is now and then reminiscent of _Tannhäuser_, of _Lohengrin_ or of _Parsifal_, while one of the themes has actually stepped straight out of the pages of _Tristan_. A composer can often indicate unmistakably his musical paternity and yet give us the clear impression that he has a genuine personality and style of his own. As a matter of fact, the general style of _Guntram_ is unquestionably Strauss, and no one else. Where the Wagnerian influence is most evident is in the mental world in which the opera is set. The story, it is true--the text, by the way, is Strauss's own--is not drawn from the world of saga; but the general conception of an order of knights, the object of whose brotherhood is to bind all humanity in bonds of love, is obviously a last watering-down of that doctrine of redemption by love that played so large a part in the intellectual life of Wagner. It is possible that this peculiar mentality of _Guntram_ was the aftermath of a breakdown in Strauss's health in 1892. The work has a high-mindedness, a spiritual fervor, an ethos that has never been particularly prominent in Strauss's work as a whole, and that has become more and more infrequent in it as he has grown older. _Guntram_ is a convalescent's work, written in the mood of exalted idealism that convalescence so often brings with it in men of complex nature. But whatever be the physical or psychological explanation of the origin of _Guntram_, there is no doubt that the music lives in a finer, purer atmosphere than that of Strauss's work as a whole; and for this reason alone it will perhaps inspire respect even when its purely musical qualities may have become outmoded. The musical method of it contains in embryo all the later Strauss. The orchestral tissue has not, of course, the extraordinary exuberance of diction and of color of his subsequent operas, but the affiliation with Wagner is quite evident. There is a certain melodic angularity here and there, and a tendency to get harmonic point by mere audacious and self-conscious singularity--both defects being characteristic of a powerful and eager young brain possessed with ideals of expression that it is not yet capable of realizing. The general idiom is in the main that of _Tod und Verklärung_ and _Don Juan_. It is worth noting that already in Strauss's first opera we perceive that failure to vivify all the characters equally that is so pronounced in the later works. It is one of the signs that, great as he is, he is not of the same great breed as Wagner.

By the time he came to write his second opera, _Feuersnot_ (1900-01), Strauss had passed through all the main stages of his development as an orchestral composer; in _Till Eulenspiegel_, _Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote_, and _Ein Heldenleben_ he had come to thorough consciousness of himself, and attained an extraordinary facility of technique. Under these circumstances one would have expected _Feuersnot_ to be a rather better work than it actually is. One's early enthusiasm for it becomes dissipated somewhat in the course of years--no doubt because as we look back upon it each of its faults has to bear not only its own burden, but the burden of all the faults of the same kind that have been piled up by Strauss in his later works. The passion of the love music, for instance, has more than a touch of commonplace in it now--as of a Teutonic Leoncavallo--our eyes having been opened by _Elektra_ and 'The Legend of Joseph' to the pit of banality that always yawns at Strauss's elbow, and into which he finds it harder and harder to keep from slipping. We see Strauss experimenting here with the dance rhythms that he has so successfully exploited in _Der Rosenkavalier_; but to some of these also time has given a slightly vulgar air. But a great deal of the opera still retains its charm; some portions of it are a very happy distillation from the spirit of German popular music, and the music of the children will probably never lose its freshness. On the whole, the opera is the least significant of all Strauss's work of this class. It is clear that his long association with the concert room had made an instrumental rather than a vocal composer of him; much of the writing for the voice is awkward and inexpressive.

In the _Symphonia Domestica_ (1903) were to be distinguished the first unmistakable signs of a certain falling off in Strauss's inspiration, a certain coarsening of the thought and a tendency to be too easily satisfied with the first idea that came into his head. These symptoms have become more and more evident in all the operas that have followed this last of the big instrumental works, though it has to be admitted that Strauss shows an extraordinary dexterity in covering up his weak places. Wagner's enemies, adapting an old gibe to him, used to say that his music consisted of some fine moments and some bad quarters of an hour. That was not true of Wagner, but it is becoming increasingly true of the later Strauss. For a while the quality of the really inspired moments was so superb as to more than compensate us for the disappointment of the moments that were obviously less inspired; but as time has gone on the inspired moments have become extremely rare and the others regrettably plentiful. We are probably not yet in a position to estimate justly the ultimate place of Strauss in the history of the opera. No composer has ever presented us with a problem precisely like his. The magnificent things in his work are of a kind that make us at first believe they will succeed in saving the weaker portions from the shipwreck that, on the merits of these alone, would seem to be their fate. Then, as each new work deepens the conviction that Strauss is the most sadly-flawed genius in the history of music, as he passes from banality to banality, each of them worse than any of its predecessors, we find ourselves, when we turn back to the earlier works, less disposed than before to look tolerantly on what is weakest in them. What will be the final outcome of it all--whether the halo round his head will ultimately blind us to the mud about his feet, or whether the mud will end by submerging the halo, no one can at present say. The Richard Strauss of to-day is an insoluble mystery.

Something excessive or unruly appears to be inseparable from everything he does. A consistent development is impossible for him; he oscillates violently like some sensitive electrical instrument in a storm. But, while only partisanship could blind anyone to the too palpable evidences of degeneration that his genius shows at many points, it is beyond question that in the best of his later stage works he dwarfs every other composer of his day. We may like or dislike the subject of _Salome_, according to our temperament; how far the question of ethics ought to be allowed to determine our attitude to an art work is a point on which it is perhaps hopeless to expect agreement. For the present writer the point is one of no importance, because the whole discussion seems to him to arise out of a confusion of the distinctive spheres of life and art. A Salome in life would be a dangerous and objectionable person, but then so would an Iago; and, as no one calls Shakespeare a monster of iniquity because he has drawn Iago with zest, one can see no particular justice in calling Strauss's mind a morbid one because it has been interested in the psychology of a pervert like Salome. One is driven to the conclusion that the root of the whole outcry is to be found in the prejudice many people have against too close an analysis of the psychology of sex, especially in its more perverted manifestations. One can respect that prejudice without sharing it; but one is bound to say it unfits the victim of it for appreciation of _Salome_ as a work of art. The opera as a whole is not a masterpiece. It lives only in virtue of its great moments; and Strauss has not been more successful here than elsewhere in breathing life into every one of his characters. Herod and Herodias have no real musical physiognomy; we could not, that is to say, visualize them from their music alone as we can visualize a Hagen, a Mime, or even a David. But Salome is characterized with extraordinary subtlety. Music is here put to psychological uses undreamt of even by Wagner. The strange thing is that, in spite of himself, the artist in Strauss has risen above the subject. Wilde's Salome is a lifeless thing, a mere figure in some stiffly-woven tapestry. Strauss pours so full a flood of emotion over her that the music leaves us a final sensation, not of cold horror but of sadness and pity.

He similarly humanizes the central character of his next opera, _Elektra_ (1907), making of her one of the great tragic figures of the stage; and he throws an antique dignity round the gloomy figure of the fate-bearing Orestes. But, as with _Salome_, the opera as a whole is not a great work. It contains a good deal of merely sham music, such as that of the opening scene--music in which Strauss simply talks volubly and noisily to hide the fact that he has nothing to say; and there is much commonplace music, such as that of the outburst of Chrysothemis to Elektra, and most of that of the final duet of the pair. One is left in the end with a feeling of blank amazement that the mind that could produce such great music as that of the opening invocation of Agamemnon by Elektra, that of the entry of Orestes, and that of the recognition of brother and sister, could be so lacking in self-criticism as to place side by side with these such banalities as are to be met with elsewhere in the opera. The only conclusion the close student of Strauss could come to after _Elektra_ was that the commonplace that was not far from some of his finest conceptions from the first was now becoming fatally easy to him.

_Der Rosenkavalier_ (1913) confirmed this impression. Its waltzes have earned for it a world-wide popularity. They are charming enough, but there are no doubt a hundred men in Europe who could have written these. What no other living composer could have written is the music--so wise, so human--of the scene between Octavian and the Marschallin at the end of the first act, the music of the entry of the Rosenkavalier in the second act, and the great trio in the third, that can look the _Meistersinger_ quintet in the face and not be ashamed. But again and again in the _Rosenkavalier_ we meet with music that is the merest mechanical product of an energetic brain working without inspiration--the bulk of the music of the third act, for instance, as far as the trio. And once more Strauss shows, by his quite indefinite portraiture of Faninal and Sophia, that his powers of musical characterization are limited to the leading personages of his works. Since _Der Rosenkavalier_ the general quality of his thinking has obviously deteriorated. There are very few pages of _Ariadne auf Naxos_ that are above the level of the ordinary German kapellmeister, while that of the mimodrama, 'The Legend of Joseph,' is the most pretentiously commonplace that Strauss has ever produced. If his career were to end now, the best epitaph we could find for him would be Bülow's remark _à propos_ of Mendelssohn: 'He began as a genius and ended as a talent.' Strauss's ten years in the theatre have undoubtedly done him much harm; they have especially made him careless as to the quality of much of his music, knowing as he does that the excitement of the action and the general illusion of the theatre may be trusted to keep the spectator occupied. But one may perhaps venture to predict that unless he returns to the concert room for a while, and forgets there a great deal of what he has learned in the theatre, he will not easily recover the position he has latterly lost.

Less well-known names in contemporary German opera, some of which, however, are too important to be omitted, are Ignaz Brüll (1846-1907), a Viennese whose dialogue opera _Das goldene Kreuz_ (1875) is still in the German répertoire;[40] Edmund Kretschmer (b. 1830) with _Die Folkunger_ (1874), on a Scandinavian subject treated in the earlier Wagnerian style, and _Heinrich der Löwe_ (1877); and Franz von Holstein (b. 1826) with _Die Heideschacht_, etc. Karl Reinthaler (1822-96) and Karl Grammann (1842-97) also wrote operas successful in their time, as did also Hiller, Wüerst, Reinecke, Dietrich, Abert, Rheinberger, and H. Hofmann, who are mentioned elsewhere. Siegfried Wagner (b. 1869), son of the great master and a pupil of Humperdinck, should not be overlooked. His talent is unpretentious, with a decided bent for 'folkish' melody, and an excellent technical equipment. In _Der Bärenhäuter_ (1899) he follows the fashion for fairy-opera; his four other operas (from _Der Kobold_ to _Sternengebot_, 1904) lean toward the popular _Spieloper_, with a tinge of romanticism.

Klose's 'dramatic symphony' _Ilsebill_ (1903) really belongs to the genus fairy-opera. While Karl von Kaskel's (b. 1860) two charming works, _Die Bettlerin vom Pont des Arts_ and _Dusle und Babell_, are to be classified as _Spielopern_.

IV

As in the case of most other musical genres, Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century seemed to have made the province of the song peculiarly its own. For well over a hundred years it has never been without a great lyrist. Schubert gave the German lyric wings. Schumann poured into it the full, rich flood of German romanticism in its sincerest days. Robert Franz cultivated a relatively simple song-form, the texture of which is not always as elastic as one could wish it to be; but he, too, was a man of pure and honest spirit, who sang of nothing that he had not deeply felt. Liszt first brought the song into some sort of relation with the new ideals of operatic and instrumental music associated with his name and that of Wagner; and in spite of his effusiveness of sentiment and his diffusiveness of style he produced some notable lyrics. In a song like _Es war ein König in Thule_, for example, a new principle of unification can be seen at work, one germinal theme being used for the construction of the whole song, which might almost be an excerpt from a later Wagnerian opera. But the lyrical history of the latter half of the nineteenth century is really summed up in the achievements of two men--Brahms and Hugo Wolf.[41]

Hugo Wolf, the foremost master of modern song, was born in Windischgrätz (Lower Styria), Austria, March 13, 1860, and died in an insane asylum in Vienna, February 22, 1903, the victim of a fatal brain disease, which afflicted him during the last six years of his tragic existence. Thus his effective life was practically reduced to thirty-seven years--not much longer a span than that other great lyricist, Franz Schubert. Little can be said of this brief career, impeded as it was by untoward circumstances and jealous opposition. To these conditions Wolf opposed a heroic fortitude and a passionate devotion to his art, which he practiced with uncompromising sincerity and religious assiduity. During long periods of work he remained in seclusion, maintaining a feverish activity and shutting himself off from outside influences. From 1875 on he lived almost continually in Vienna, where he studied for a short time in the conservatory. His only considerable absence he spent as conductor in Salzburg (1881). In Vienna he taught and for some years (till 1887) wrote criticisms for the _Salonblatt_. These articles have recently been collected and published. They reflect the writer's high idealism; his intolerance of all artistic inferiority and mediocrity show him to have been as valiant as an upholder of standards as he was discriminating in the judgment of æsthetic values, though his attack upon Brahms placed him into a somewhat ridiculous light with a large part of the musical public.

Thus he eked out an existence; any considerable recognition as a composer he did not achieve during his lifetime. None of his works was published till 1888, when his fifty-three Möricke songs (written within three months) appeared. The Eichendorff cycle (twenty songs) came next, and then the _Spanisches Liederbuch_ (consisting of thirty-four secular and ten sacred songs), all written during 1889-90. Six songs for female voice after poems by Gottfried Keller, the _Italienisches Liederbuch_ (forty-six poems by Paul Heyse, published in two parts) were composed during 1890-91 and in 1896 and the three poems by Michelangelo were set in 1897. Meantime there also came from his pen a hymn, _Christnacht_, for soli, chorus and orchestra (1891), incidental music for Ibsen's 'Festival of Solhaug' (1892), and in 1895 he wrote his _Corregidor_ (already mentioned) within a few months. Other songs, some dating from his youth, were also published, as well as several choruses and chorus arrangements of songs. A string quartet in D minor (1879-80); a symphonic poem for full orchestra, _Penthesilea_ (1883); and the charming 'Italian Serenade' for small orchestra (also arranged for string quartet by the composer) constitute his instrumental works--a small but choice aggregation.

Wolf was to the smaller field of the song what Wagner was to the larger field of opera. That characterization of him must not be misunderstood, as is often done, to mean that he simply took over the methods of Wagnerian musical drama--especially the principle of the leit-motif--and applied them to the song. He benefited by those methods, as virtually every modern composer has done; but he never applied them in the merely conscious and imitative way that the 'post-Wagnerians' did, for instance, in the opera. Wolf would have been a great lyrist had he been born in the eighteenth century, the sixteenth, or the twelfth; but it was his rare good fortune--the fortune that was denied to Schubert--to live in an epoch that could provide him with a lyrical instrument capable of responding to every impulse of his imagination. His was a truly exceptional brain, that could probably never have come to its full fruition in any age but the one he happened to be born into. He had not only the vision of new things to be done in music, as Liszt and Berlioz and others have had before and since, but the power, which Liszt and Berlioz had not, to make for himself a vocabulary that was copious enough, and a technique that was strong and elastic enough, to permit the easy expression of everything he felt. It is another of the many points in which he resembles Wagner; with the minimum of school training in his earliest days he made for himself a technical instrument that was purely his own--one that, when he had thoroughly mastered it, never failed him, and that was capable of steady growth and infinitely delicate adaptation to the work of the moment.

He draws, as Wagner did, a line of demarcation between an old world of feeling and a new one. As Wagner peopled the stage with more types than Weber, and saw more profoundly into the psychology of characters of every kind, so Wolf enlarged the world of previous and contemporary lyrists and intensified the whole mental and emotional life of the lyrical form. Too much stress need not be laid on the mere fact that he insisted on better 'declamation' than was generally regarded as sufficient in the song--on a shaping of the melody that would permit of the just accentuation of every word and syllable. This in itself could be done, and indeed has been done, by many composers who have not thereby succeeded in persuading the world that they are of the breed of Wolf. The extraordinary thing with him was that this respect for verbal values was consistent with the unimpeded flow of an expressive vocal line and an equally expressive pianoforte tissue. The basis of his manner is the utilizing of a quasi-symphonic form for the song. He marks the end of monody in the lyric as Wagner marks the end of monody in the opera. With Wagner the orchestra was not a mere accompanying instrument, a 'big guitar,' but a many-voiced protagonist in the drama itself. When the simple-minded hearer of half a century ago complained that there was no melody in Wagner, he only meant that the melody was not where he could distinguish it most easily--at the top. As a matter of fact, Wagner was giving him at least three times as much melody as the best of the Italian opera writers, for in the _Meistersinger_ or _Tristan_ it is not only the actors who are singing but the orchestra, and not only the orchestra as a whole but the separate instruments of it. When the average man complained that Wagner was starving him of melody, it was like a man drowning in a pond fifty feet deep crying out that there was not water enough in the neighborhood for him to wash in.

Wolf, too, fills the instrumental part of his songs with as rich a life as the vocal part. But he does even more amazing feats in the way of co-operation between the two factors than Wagner did. Independent as the piano part seemingly is, developing as if it had nothing to think of but its own symphonic course, it never distracts Wolf's attention from the vocal melody, which is handled with astonishing ease and freedom. Not only does each phase of the poem enter just where the most point can be given to it both poetically and declamatorily, without any regard for the mere four-square of the ordinary line or bar-divisions, but each significant word receives its appropriate accent, melodic rise or fall, or fleck of color. In the _Die ihr schwebet um diese Palmen_, for example, the expressive minor sixth of the voice part on the word _Qual_, seems to be there by a special dispensation of Providence. We know that the interval is one that is characteristic of the main accompaniment-figure of the song--it has appeared, indeed, as early as the second bar, and has been frequently repeated since--that it is almost inevitable that now and then it should occur in the voice, and, as a matter of fact, it has already occurred more than once there--at the _schwebet_ and _Palmen_ of the first line, for example, and later at the first syllable of _Himmel_ in the line _Der Himmelsknabe duldet Beschwerde_. Yet we know very well that it is not a musical accident, but a stroke of psychological genius, that brings just this interval in on the word _Qual_ in the lines _Ach nur im Schlaf ihm leise gesänftigt die Qual zerrinnt_, the interval indeed being in essence just what it has been all along, but receiving now a new and more poignant meaning by the way it is approached. We know very well that no other song-writer but Wolf would have had the instinct to perceive, in the midst of the flow of the accompaniment to what seems its own predestined goal, the expressive psychological possibilities of that particular note at that particular moment in that particular line. His songs teem with felicities of this kind; they represent the employment of one of Wagner's most characteristic instruments for uses more subtle even than he ever dreamt of.

Yet--and the point needs insisting upon, as it is still the subject of some misunderstanding--this quick and delicate adaptation of melodic and harmonic and rhythmic values to the necessities of the poem are not the result of a mere calculated policy of 'follow the words.' The song has not been shaped simply to permit of this coincidence of verbal and musical values, nor have these been consciously worked into the general tissue of the song after this has been developed on other lines. They represent the spontaneous utterance of a mind to which all the factors of the song were present in equal proportions from the first bar to the last. Wolf made no sketches for his songs; the great majority of them were written at a single sitting; the subject possessed him and made its own language.

His independence, his originality, his seminal force for the future of music, are all best shown by comparing him with Brahms. No one, of course, will question the greatness of Brahms as a lyrist. But a comparison with Wolf at once throws the former's limitations into a very strong light. Wolf was much more the man of the new time than his great contemporary. Brahms was the continuer and completer of Schumann, the last voice that the older romantic movement found for itself. By nature, training, and personal associations he was ill fitted to assimilate the new life that Wagner was pouring into the music of his day. Wolf from the first made a clean departure from both the matter and the manner of Brahms--a cleaner departure, indeed, than Wagner at first made from the romanticism of his contemporaries, for the kinship between the early Wagner and the Schumann of the songs is unmistakable. Wolf's thinking left the mental world of Brahms completely on one side; his music is free, for instance, from those touches of sugariness and of the _larmoyant_ that can be so frequently detected even in the rugged Brahms, as in all the lyrists who took their stimulus from romanticism. Brahms' lyric types--his maidens, his students, his philosophers, his nature-lovers--are those of Germany in a particular historical phase of her art, literature, and life. With Wolf the lyric steps into a wider field. His psychological range is much broader than that of Brahms. He creates more types of character and sets them in a more varied _milieu_. With Brahms the same personages recur time after time in his songs, expressing themselves in much the same way. Even an unsympathetic student of Wolf would have to admit that no two of the personages he draws are the same. The characters of Brahms are mostly of the same household, with the same heredity, the same physical appearance, the same mental characteristics, even the same gait. The man who lies brooding in the summer fields in _Feldeinsamkeit_ is brother of the man who loves the maiden of _Wir wandelten_, and first cousin of the girl who dies to the strains of _Immer leise wird mein Schlummer_. They all feel deeply but a little sentimentally; they are all extremely introspective; all speak with a certain slow seriousness and move about with a certain cumbersomeness. Wolf's men and women are infinitely varied, both in the mass and in detail; that is to say, not only is his crowd made up of many diverse types, but each type--the lovers, the thinkers, the penitents, and so on--is full of an inner diversity.

Wolf surpasses Brahms again in everything that pertains to the technical handling of the songs. Without wishing to make out that Brahms was anything but the great singer he undoubtedly was, it must be said frankly that he is too content to work within a frame that he has found to be of convenient size, shape, and color, instead of letting his picture determine the frame. The quaint accusation is sometimes brought against Wolf that he is more of an instrumental writer than a singer, the pianoforte parts of his songs being self-subsistent compositions. A devil's advocate might argue with much more force that it was Brahms who, in his songs, thought primarily in terms of instrumental phrases even for his voices. It is his intentness upon the beauty of an abstract melodic line that makes him pause illogically as he does after me _Königin_ in the first line of _Wie bist du, meine Königin_, thus making a bad break in the poetical sense of the words, which is not really complete until the second line is heard, the _Wie bist du_ not referring, as many thousands of people imagine, to the _Königin_, but to the _durch sanfte Güte wonnevoll_ in the next line. In other songs, such as _An die Nachtigall_, Brahms yields at the very beginning to the fascination of what is unquestionably in itself a beautiful phrase, without regard to the fact that it will get him into difficulties both of psychology and of 'declamation' as the song goes on, owing to his applying the same kind of musical line-ending to poetical line-endings that vary in meaning each time. Wolf never makes a primitive blunder of this kind. He sees the poem as a whole before he begins to set it; if he adopts at the commencement a figure that is to run through the whole song, it is a figure that can readily be applied to each phase of it without doing psychological violence to any. If at any point its application involves a falsity, it would be temporarily discarded. Brahms, again, is almost as much addicted to _clichés_ as Schubert, and with less excuse--the _cliché_ of syncopation for syncopation's sake; for example, the _cliché_ of a harmonic darkening of the second or third stanza of a poem, and so on. From limitations of this sort Wolf is free; his harmonic and rhythmic idioms are as varied as his melodic. The great variety of his songs makes it almost impossible to cite a few of them as representative of the whole.

V

For Wolf the song was the supreme form of expression. In the case of Strauss the song is only an overflow from the concert and operatic works. In spite of the great beauty of some of his songs, such as the _Ständchen_ and _Seitdem dein Aug_, we are probably justified in saying that is not a lyrist _pur sang_. A large number of his songs have obviously been turned out for pot-boiling purposes. Certain undoubted successes in the smaller forms notwithstanding, it remains true that he is at his best when he has plenty of space to work in, and, above all, when he can rely on the backing of the orchestra, as in the splendid _Pilgers Morgenlied_, and the 'Hymnus.' As a rule, he fails to achieve Wolf's happy balance between the vocal part and the accompaniment; very often his songs are simply piano pieces with a voice part added as skillfully as may be, which means sometimes not skillfully at all.