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Talking dirty

Hugo Wolf and his Mörike songs by Susan Youens

Reviewed by John Steane
Cambridge UP (Cambridge, 2000); xii, 203pp; £40. ISBN 0 521 65159 X

Like Amanda Glauert’s Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian inheritance, reviewed in MT Autumn 1999, this (from the same publisher and of comparable length and style of presentation) has a case to argue but makes its major contribution through the process rather than the conclusion. In the earlier book there were indeed value and interest to be found in the thesis, which was, broadly, that Wolf’s great admiration for Wagner did not preclude, in himself, both an independent development and a critical response. Similarly here the common acceptance that Mörike’s poetry and Wolf’s music matched as in ‘the perfect marriage’ is valuably tested and found wanting. Yet in both instances the correctives would appear in themselves to justify an essay rather than a whole book, while the books are justified essentially as essays in criticism. The thesis (in both cases Wolf’s independence) nominally constitutes the broader, deeper matter that coordinates the individual exercises; in effect, it is the process of sensitive, careful study of texts that brings the real deepening, and with it an enabling skill that can be carried over into a wider repertoire.

Of the fifty-three settings of Mörike written by Wolf in 1888, Professor Youens selects twelve. Other poems are discussed and reference is made to other settings, but this above all is an intensive, selective study rather than an inclusive survey. As far as the thesis is concerned, the limited coverage is a weakness, leaving the reader to infer that if the remaining songs provided further support of a significant disparity between poet and composer they too would have been incorporated. Critically, however, the concentration is a strength. It can be transferred to the songs not ‘done’, for the reader will have learnt a method along with a way of listening; a mind that has followed what is demonstrated here will be far more alert to Wolf’s purposes and the precision of his musical language.

An example, both of the critical process and of its place in the thesis, is provided by the pages devoted in the last chapter of the book to ‘Gebet’, one of the most nearly popular of Wolf’s songs in his own time and correspondingly uncongenial to the critical taste of ours. Slow in its motion (marked ‘getragen’), slithery in its harmonic progressions, it seems to ask for a singer with a plummy voice and for a piano that does duty for a harmonium. Commentators usually tell of its ‘chorale-like simplicity’ and ‘heart-easing close’. Youens has something more interesting to say. For instance, she points out that the second verse of Mörike’s poem virtually contradicts the first. The first prays that God will send good or ill according to His purposes, whereas the second asks that good or ill (‘joys and sorrows’) will not be sent, but rather the ‘gracious moderation’ of a middle course. Youens examines the language and the theology, relates it to Mörike’s unhappy position within the Church and to the poem’s place in his novel Maler Nolten (where it is spoken by the deranged Agnes shortly before her suicide), and notes, incidentally, that when the poet inscribed it in his sister’s prayerbook he quoted only the first (orthodox) stanza. Wolf, says Youens, begins by invoking conventions of religious music just as Mörike ‘parrots’ conventional formulae for prayer, and then (verse 2) allows disquiet to gather force, eroding and warping the chorale. But this is not all, for then occurs the divergence between the two men. Wolf introduces, in the piano, ‘Chopinesque elegance’, something quite unexpected and with no counterpart in Mörike. The discrepancy, she holds, ‘is as much a source of the song’s success as Wolf’s evident grasp of the complexities other composers missed in this deceptively simple prayer’.

‘Chopinesque elegance’ is a notable phrase, unexpected in such a context. The kind of thing that sometimes suffers the belittlement of praise in terms of ‘fine writing’, it is simply the accurate expression of an important point acutely observed. As Wolf ‘breaks from the chorale strains of orthodoxy’, he celebrates the moment by ‘clothing it in quasi-Chopinesque strains distant indeed from hymnody’, a slow, tender, solo dance in C^# major. The observation and the words found to express it are typical in kind. ‘Wo find ich Trost?’, ‘Seufzer’ and ‘Der Gärtner’ are other songs that gain in appreciation through the specificity of critical comment – which should, of course, be read score in hand, for though the printed passages of musical text are eagerly consulted, they are (I suppose) necessarily incomplete. Certainly enough is there for a reader without further resources to check the validity of a critical mind which otherwise, like a latter-day musical Empson, might come under suspicion of ‘reading too much into it’.

As it is (but this may do nothing more than attest to my own innocence or naivety), the perceived sexual connotations are sometimes, so to speak, hard work. ‘The vaginal garden, clitoral beehive, and honey of sexual secretions’ may indeed, as the author claims, be ‘not difficult to decode’, but I’m not sure I can respond with appropriate sensibility to the ‘intertwining and parting, slithering and leaping’ that are said to be ‘so physical as to be shocking even in this day and age’. That refers to ‘Erstes Liebeslied einer Mädchens’, the reading of which is so very imaginatively sexual that one is almost propelled into the role of the class thicko who in a marvellous story by Lionel Trilling concludes that art and intellect are ‘always talking dirty’. Yet again the musical text is there for validating, as is the acute (and, at first reaction, far-fetched) sighting of Tristan in the fast waltz-time opening bars of that song. Indeed, once that has been verified it is but a small step to the perception of orgasm in the final A major sforzando chord – with due room for speculation as to whether it is male, female or simultaneous, ‘Wolf spoofing a pornographic convention’.

Volume 3 of John Steane’s Singers of the Century has just been published.