Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x24gv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-20T07:33:16.063Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt’: Reflections on Nature and Genre in Wolf's Setting of Goethe's Der Sänger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Amanda Glauert
Amanda Glauert*
Affiliation:
Royal Academy of Music, London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Lawrence Kramer has highlighted some of the myths that surround early writing on Wolf — in particular the myth that he was able to realize a poem's ‘natural breath’ by submitting his identity entirely to the poet's. Kramer prefers to link Wolf with the figure of the harper from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, casting him as a musician who is compelled to reflect his own inadequacy. Yet such a picture still underestimates the complexity of the Lieder composer's role, as suggested by Goethe and confirmed by Wolf. In the ballad Der Sänger Goethe disturbed early Romantic conceptions of the lyric by implying the harper was aware of how his ‘song’ both failed and succeeded in the hoped-for communication with his listeners. Wolf's own layered interpretation of Der Sänger takes the challenge to our understanding of the lyric one stage further; it thus offers a crucial clarification of the potential of the musical Lied as the composer's vehicle for active and effective criticism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 125 , Issue 2 , 2000 , pp. 271 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Kramer, Lawrence, ‘Hugo Wolf: Subjectivity in the Fin-de-Siècle Lied’, German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Rufus Hallmark (New York, 1996), 186–217 (p. 186).Google Scholar

2 Bahr, Hermann, Preface, Gesammelte Aufsätze über Hugo Wolf, i (Berlin, 1898), ix-xii (pp. ix-x).Google Scholar

3 Ibid., xii.Google Scholar

4 Schalk, Joseph, ‘Neue Lieder, neues Leben’, Gesammelte Aufsätze über Hugo Wolf, i, 1–17 (p. 4).Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 1–3.Google Scholar

6 See Clara Schumann – Johannes Brahms: Briefe axis den Jahren 1853–1896, ed. Berthold Litzmann (Leipzig, 1927), 294.Google Scholar

7 Jenner, Gustav, ‘Johannes Brahms as Man, Teacher and Artist’, trans. Susan Gillespie, Brahms and his World, ed. Walter Frisch (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 185–204 (p. 198).Google Scholar

8 See Wagner, Richard, Oper und Drama, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 3 (Leipzig, 1887–8), 308, trans. in Richard Wagner's Prose Works, ed. William Ashton Ellis, ii (London, 1893), 39.Google Scholar

9 See Wagner, Richard, ‘Wilhelm Baumgartners Lieder’, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, xii (Leipzig, 1911–16), 285–8 (pp. 285–6).Google Scholar

10 See Glauert, Amanda, Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance (Cambridge, 1999), 39–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Kretzschmar, Hermann, ‘Das deutsche Lied seit dem Tode Richard Wagners’, Gesammelte Aufsätze über Musik und Anderes aus den Grenzboten [Leipzig, 1910], 284–300 (p. 285).Google Scholar

12 Schalk, , ‘Neue Lieder, neues Leben’, 15.Google Scholar

13 See Glauert, , Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance.Google Scholar

14 Kramer, Lawrence, ‘Decadence and Desire: The Wilhelm Ateister Songs of Wolf and Schubert’, Music at the Turn of Century, ed. Joseph Herman (Berkeley, 1990), 115–28 (pp. 127–8).Google Scholar

15 See Arnim, Achim von, ‘On Folk Songs’, trans. Linda Siegel, Music in German Romantic Literature (Novato, CA, 1983), 193–204 (p. 202).Google Scholar

16 See Tieck, Ludwig, ‘Musical Sorrows and Joys’, trans. Siegel, Music in German Romantic Literature, 77–137 (p. 131).Google Scholar

17 Herder, Seejohann Gottfried, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago, 1986), 146.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 142, 128.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 98–9.Google Scholar

20 As quoted in Wiora, Walter, ‘Herders und Heinses Beiträge zum Thema: “Was ist Musik?”’, Die Musikforschung, 13 (1960), 385–95 (p. 390, my translation).Google Scholar

21 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, i, trans. Herbert Morgan Waidson (London, 1977), 112. The novel also appears, translated by Eric Blackall, as Goethe's Collected Works, ix (Princeton, NJ, 1989).Google Scholar

22 Ibid., trans. Waidson, 113.Google Scholar

23 See Fairley, Barker, Goethe: Selected Poems (London, 1954), 208.Google Scholar

24 Goethe, , Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, i, trans. Waidson, 112.Google Scholar

25 Ibid., 119–20.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., 120.Google Scholar

27 Sams, Eric, The Songs of Hugo Wolf (London, 1961), 126.Google Scholar