Was gleist dort so hell (Siegmunds monologue from Valkyrie) - Score

The concerts at Vienna gave him plenty of material to reflect upon ; we find him begging Felix Mottl to get him some pupils, so that he may live decently and be able to stay in Vienna, instead of spending the winter in Windischgraz where he will hear no music. The two brothers Josef and Franz Schalk — the former died in , after having done good service in Wolfs cause, the latter is now the well-known Vienna conductor — befriended him and placed their musical possessions at his disposal.

He spent day after day in the big Vienna library, absorbed in music of every kind, but chiefly that of Beethoven and of Bach, dissecting it, committing it to memory. One day, in later years, his friend Paul Miiller called upon him and happened to see in his room a dilapidated copy of Beethoven's sonatas. I lived at that time in a garret, and had no piano ; so I used to take out the sonatas separately, and go and study them in the Prater.

Schumann's songs in particular he examined most carefully and minutely. All the time he was studying the technique of his art from every possible standpoint, and working assiduously at the piano. As has been already stated, he never became a concert virtuoso on this instrument. But abundant testimony exists as to the extraordinary charm and power of his playing when the spirit moved him, especially when performing his own songs to a circle of personal friends. There is a story, too, of his going one day to a wedding, and, after many solicitations, sitting down at the piano and breaking out with the " March to the Scaffold " movement from Berlioz's " Fantastic Symphony.

He represented the execution, suggested the scaffold and the blood, and made so demoniac an effect that the bride, who was standing by him in her wedding dress, fell down in a swoon. Wolf got up and left the house. Resolved as he was to stay in Vienna in order to work out his musical destiny in his own way, he was now practically thrown upon his own resources. Remittances did indeed come occasionally from his father, but they were small, — certainly insufficient to maintain the boy in comfort.

To keep the pot boiling he had to give piano and violin lessons. He had found some good friends in high places in Vienna musical society, notably Felix Mottl' the conductor and Adalbert von Goldschmidt the composer, who assisted him to get a few pupils. The struggle must have been a severe one. It helped to make the boy's character, but probably the mental strain and the physical privations he had to suffer at this time had something to do with the sad collapse of his nervous system in later years. That he gloried, after his sturdy fashion, in his artistic independence is undoubted ; but in his letters to his parents he preserves a tone almost of timidity, his object perhaps being, as his friend Hellmer suggests, not to wound, by too exuberant a display of joy, the father and mother who had so unwillingly given their consent to his residing in Vienna.

Boy as he was in years, his musical nature was matured enough to create a wide gulf between himself and his pupils. He was probably impatient beyond the average of teachers at having to spend valuable time in labouring with children at the rudiments of piano technique ; and it is not surpris- ing to learn that he put this side of his duties out of sight as far as was possible, and gave his energies to teaching his pupils the wearisome, but not quite so wearisome, elements of musical theory. We have a record of what his behaviour could be at its worst in the case of a certain Fraulein G.

She had apparently little musical talent, and Wolf found it hard to keep his temper with her. His language to her at times is said to have been more in keeping with the situation than with the conventions of polite society. He used to play duets with her, of a variety ranging from Beethoven symphonies to Lanner waltzes. When his patience was at an end he would angrily drive her from the piano, and play by himself long stretches of the music of his predilection, especially that of Berlioz. It ended with his refusing to teach her any longer, and telling her mother it would be the death of him to have anything more to do with so talentless a person.

Conduct of this kind, comprehensible as it is to us, would hardly help him either to get new pupils or to keep old ones. His life was undoubtedly a hard 1 8 HUGO WOLF one at this time ; while to his poverty he added a pride that made him resent and reject all offers of assistance in which the charitable intention was too obvious.

Only when in the greatest need does he ask his parents to send him money. The Iqss of even one lesson, we can see, must have been rather serious for him. In April he tells his father that he has been reading Kuh's " Life of Hebbel," and, desperate as his own situation is, he congratulates himself on not being quite so badly off as the poet. Miserable as things are, he is thankful they are no worse. Another pupil has left him, the family having gone away for five weeks.

He is living, he says, on one meal a day — soup, meat, and vegetables at one o'clock — and he has plans for saving the expense of eating at a restaurant by making his own coffee at home, adding to it a little home- made cake and a piece of ham or sausage. He begs his father to come to his support during May and June ; next year, he says, he hopes to be certain of being able to maintain himself.

In May there is the same pitiful story ; he is living on bread-and- butter, and complains bitterly of having no money in his pocket. The next year, , his affairs are still no better. Yet nothing could shake his determination to remain in Vienna, living in this way as best he could. From Windischgraz, whither he had gone on a short visit to his people, he wrote in terms of great urgency to Mottl. His father, he says, has had business misfortunes and is not in a position now to help him very materially ; Wolf therefore begs Mottl to get him some more pupils in Vienna.

A friend who was on his way to the States had made all arrangements, and it was actually settled that Wolf should sail from Bremen ; but at the last moment he changed his mind. He seems to have been making innumerable experiments in composi- tion all this time. The Hugo Wolf-Verein in Vienna possessed a " Friihlingsgriisse " — a song-setting of words by Lenau — and a few other works all dating from The following year was more prolific, the list including seven songs, among them three to words by Lenau of whom he seems to have been especially fond at this time , and two to words by Goethe ; six choruses, includ- ing the three for male voices already mentioned, set to poems by Goethe, apparently written for a male-voice choir in Windischgraz of which his father and his brother Max were members ; two pianoforte sonatas, a rondo and fantasia for pianoforte, a piano piece for four hands, three movements of a symphony in B flat, and a movement from a string quartet, — all left in an unfinished state, and apparently little more than studies in the technique of composition.

Of the same order was an arrangement for orchestra of most of Beethoven's " Moonlight " sonata, also made in Decsey notes the freedom and confidence of the instrumental style here ; Wolf re-thinks the sonata in terms of the orchestra, accompanying the chief theme at the beginning of the sonata, for example, by a counterpoint in the violins above.

In addition to this essay in orchestration he sketched out, but did not get very far with, a symphony in G minor. In there are more songs ; among the papers Wolf left at his death were eleven vocal pieces — including settings of two 20 HUGO WOLF songs and three odes of Lenau, one of Matthison, one of Korner, and the Morgentau, which last he thought good enough to be published later on as the first of the Seeks Lieder fiir eine Frauenstimme. Besides these the year's work comprises piano pieces, the already mentioned concerto in D minor for violin and piano, and some orchestral sketches.

In the boy seems to have come nearer realising his own powers and the best direc- tion in which to exert them. Songs now abound ; twenty of these were found after his death, among them six to Heine's words, three to Hebbel's, three to Lenau's, two to Chamisso's, two to Riickert's, and two to Hoffmann von Fallersleben's. These show more grip and concentration than the earlier works. Twelve of them have been published as Lieder aus derjugendzeit, and two more in the previously mentioned volume of Seeks Lieder fiir eine Frauenstimme ; these are Das Vbglein words by Hebbel , and Die Spinnerin words by Riickert.

The last-named in particular, which we shall refer to again, is an extra- ordinary achievement for a boy of seventeen or eighteen. The only orchestral composition belonging to this year is an unfinished setting of Kinkel's poem " Die Stunden verrauschen" for soli, chorus, and orchestra. In , , and he seems either to have had less time for composition, or to have destroyed most of what he wrote ; there survive from these years only three songs after Lenau, Eichendorff and Heine two of them mere frag- ments , and an " Albumblatt " for piano.

While not claiming much final importance for the bulk of the youthful pieces found among Wolfs papers after his death, Dr. It will be noticed that Eichendorff's name appears for the first time in among those of the poets whom Wolf had set to music. Later on a volume of seventeen settings of Eichendorff, mostly dating from , was to be published. The Ergebung was sung in the Vienna Votivkirche when Wolf was laid to rest on the 24th February In 1 88 1 he seems to have found his pinched and precarious financial condition no longer endurable, and to have sought a theatrical appointment that would at least give him a settled if meagre income.

Adalbert von Goldschmidt accordingly set to work, with the result that Wolf was offered the post of second Kapellmeister at the Salzburg Stadttheater. He left Vienna in November. On the day of his departure he called upon Goldschmidt to say good-bye. In one hand he had a small neat bundle; under the other arm was a large and heavy object carefully wrapped up in paper. When, later on, Goldschmidt went out with Wolf, he noticed Wolf pick up the big mysterious object, and asked him what it was.

Equipped in this style went the Kapellmeister to his first engagement. Wolf soon proved a disappointment to them both. His musical capacity was of course unquestion- able ; but so independent a musician, with his head full of ideas of his own, was not the best man to knock con- ventional operatic choruses into the heads of an ordinary theatre-troupe. Miiller himself, who later on became the director of the Carl Theatre in Vienna, told Dr. Decsey that while they all recognised Wolfs musical endowments, he clearly lacked the necessary keenness and energy for a Kapellmeister's post ; his self-absorbed, retiring ways were particularly ill-suited to the theatre.

At the same time he did not neglect the letter of his duties, which were to assist at the rehearsals of soloists and chorus. To fulfil the spirit of them was another matter. Once, we are told by Dr. Muck, Wolf came down in the morning to take the chorus through a Johann Strauss operetta.

They had not been long at it before he contemptuously put the work on one side and told them he would rather play them something out of " Tristan," — which he straightway proceeded to do. This was no doubt interesting and enjoyable, but hardly what he was engaged for. He appears to have stayed there only a couple of months, returning to Vienna in January Here, as might be expected, he found it doubly difficult to live.

So hard pressed was he indeed that for a while he took to vegetarianism as the cheapest way of living. He seems to have composed comparatively little in , with the exception of three songs which after- wards went with the Morgentau, Das Voglein and Die Spinnerin to make up the set of Sechs Lieder fur eine Frauenstimme. These were the delightful little Mausfallen- spriicfdein, written in June , to words by Mbrike, and the Wiegenlied imSommer and Wiegenliedim Winter, both written in December of the same year, to words by Robert Reinick. Though he apparently composed little music during this year, it is interesting to see his thoughts turning, for the first time, towards the stage.

It was not until thirteen years later that he was to write his first opera, Der Corregidor; but it was in , probably as the result of his practical experience of the stage at Salzburg, that he began to think he had a gift for dramatic writing. Among his papers was discovered part of a sketch of a comic opera, going as far as the half of the second Act.

In the light of his later partiality for southern subjects, as shown in Der Corregidor and Manuel Venegas, it is significant that his first libretto should also have been set in the same milieu. The manuscript frag- ment of it is now among the papers that came into the possession of the Vienna Hugo Wolf-Verein during the last illness of the composer. Donna Angela, and so on. In the summer of Wolf went with Felix Mottl and another friend to Bayreuth, where he heard " Parsifal.

In he made the acquaintance of Hermann Bahr, and went to live with him and another friend, a certain Dr. In the preface to the first volume of the Gesammelte Aufsatze iiber Hugo Wolf, published in , Bahr gives a lively picture of the composer as he was in those days. Few, he says, suspected what Wolf was afterwards to become ; most people looked upon him as a fool.

Bahr and his companions lived a merry student's life, incarnadined the town o' nights, and usually returned home towards five in the morning, heavy with beer and the remains of their youthful spirits, and anxious only to lie down and sleep. The door would open and Wolf would appear in a very long nightdress, a candle and a book in his hands, very pale, scarcely visible in the grey uncertain light, with mysterious gestures, half satirical, half solemn. Then he stepped into the middle of the room, swung the candle, and, while we undressed, began to read to us, generally something out of Penthesilea.

This however had such power that we were silenced, not daring to speak another word, so impressive was he when reading. Like immense black birds the words came rushing and roaring from his pale lips ; they seemed to grow till the room was full of their strong and terrible shadows. It is impossible to describe it.

I can only say this: He had as it were transubstantiated himself with all his body into the words of the poet. These stood before us, our friend had vanished. These struck into the very depths of me; and then I suddenly remembered. Yes, it was the same! The same man as in those nights. Just as that time he sank as it were his own existence in that of the words, so that the gleaming hands and the threatening eyes which we saw seemed to be no longer his, but the hands and eyes of the words, which otherwise we should not have noticed, so this music could not have been ' added ' by a man, but was 26 HUGO WOLF the natural music of the verses.

We had had only imperfect ears, or we should always have heard it ; since it is the essential music of these verses, it inheres in them and must always have been in them: His appreciation not only of the broad significance of a poem but of all its most delicate detail makes him unique among song writers ; none other has anything like his scrupulous regard for his poetic material, none other so frankly accepts the poet as his starting-point, or makes it so completely his ideal to fit his music with perfect flexibility to every convolution of the verse. At his recitals, as we shall see later, he would often begin by reading the poem to the audience before a note of the music was allowed to be heard.

This abnormally keen sense of poetic style, which was what made him Hugo Wolf indeed, came to him from no teacher; it was clearly congenital in him, and revealed itself markedly almost before he had attained to manhood. His taste in poetry was remarkably good. It showed itself incidentally about this time by his preoccupation with Kleist, one of the great gods of his Olympus.

The tragedy " Penthesilea " had seized upon him, and in the summer and autumn of he cast his impressions of it into the form of a symphonic poem. In the summer of he was still polishing parts of this, as well as working at the music to another of Kleist's works, "Der Prinz von Homburg.

He had the young composer's usual difficulties with the publishers. I will now try my luck with Breitkopf and Hartel, for I cannot make up my mind, in spite of Hanslick's recommendation, to offer my compositions to Simrock. Hanslick, how- ever, did really exhibit a temporary interest in young Wolf. It had come about through a sculptor named Tilgner, who at that time lived in the same house as Hanslick.

While admitting that Wolf was a little "untamed," he spoke highly of his artistic abilities to Hanslick, and told him of the young man's difficulty in finding a publisher. It was in response to this that the critic gave the recommendation to Brahms's publisher, Simrock. Wolf soon after met Hanslick, for the only time in their lives. We are not told, but we can guess, the impression each made on the other. The collision was not long in coming ; Wolfs critical work on the " Salonblatt," the story 28 HUGO WOLF of which is given in the next chapter, was for the most part an uncompromising declaration of war against the most cherished ideals of Hanslick and his circle.

The older man not unnaturally tried to have his revenge later on when Wolfs name or work came before him. A fashionable paper — the Vienna " Salonblatt " — had just lostits musical critic, Theodor Helm. Some friends of Wolf, anxious no doubt to provide him with an occupation that would bring him a regular income, however small, managed to get him installed in the vacant post.

His first article appeared in the issue of the 27th January 1 ; his connection with the paper lasted about four years. The journal is said to circulate chiefly among the fashionables and would-be fashionables of Vienna. Wolfs strong and acid writing must have seemed, among the generally " frivolous confectionery " of the rest of the paper, rather like the irruption of a fanatical dervish into a boudoir. He had very decided tastes and a not less decided way of giving expression to them; indeed he wrote singularly well, with thorough technical knowledge, and with ardent enthusiasm for whatever he thought was great and sincere art, and abundant irony and invective for whatever he was convinced was not.

As a rule the last person to be capable of being a good critic is an original composer ; the very strength of his own individu- ality is apt to render him only moderately receptive of 30 HUGO WOLF the contrasted art of other men. Wagner's constitutional bias towards seeing life through Wagner's eyes made him incapable of seeing it through those of Brahms. Tchaikovski again missed the meaning and the beauty of Brahms's music as completely as a being organised to perceive space in only two dimensions would misconceive the shapes of objects that exist in three ; while Brahms in his turn often had as little sense of the fragrance and colour of Tchaikovski's music as a scentless chemist has of the odour of a flower.

It must be recorded to Wolfs credit that, so far as one can judge now from the criticisms of his that have been republished, and assuming that those we cannot procure are of the same order, he showed on the whole, like Schumann, an admirable catholicity of taste in his dealings with the music of other men. He could have had no training as a critic, — no training even in the preliminary art of looking twice at every judgment, summoning up hypothetical witnesses against it, and then deciding as to its final reasonableness. When he was right he was so by instinct — the instinct of a finely organised nature willing to enjoy keenly whatever could appeal to it as being beautiful.

As to the tone and manner of his criticism, while it was natural that those who suffered under his whip should sometimes feel indignant, one must do him the justice to admit that there was often very good reason for his bitterness, his irony and his heat. So colourless an ideal of the duty of the critic can in the last resort only be held by men for whom the art-life consists merely in enjoying the better products and ignoring the worst, who are not keenly enough interested in progress to go out and fight for it, and who do not realise that bad art cannot safely be ignored, for the simple reason that it debauches the public taste and so makes it harder for better art to find eyes to look at it and ears to listen to it.

It is as unwise, in fact, to lay down merely one rule for newspaper criticism as it would be to lay down only one rule for war. Your strategy must be suited to the enemy and to the situation; you cannot fight every battle with the same technique. There is a time to sit down patiently outside a citadel, reduce it by a long and scientific siege, and then live on good terms with your quondam enemies ; there is also a time to take the position by assault, to sweep a dangerous and hopelessly irreconcilable enemy away in one charge.

Criticism of this kind — and this, apparently, is what the advocates of what they miscall "restraint" do not perceive — can be just as well reasoned, just as comprehensive in its survey, as any criticism that is written at half the mental temperature. It does not necessarily follow that because a man is warm he must be illogical ; he may glow with anger at something that seems to him to call for unsparing condemnation, and yet see the whole case with unclouded eyes and reason with pitiless logic, preserving a little core of intellectual ice at the centre of the emotional heat.

And that there are occasions in newspaper musical criticism when the critic must express himself with warmth will be denied only by those who have never been brought face to face with some of the problems that beset the critic day by day, — the dealing, 32 HUGO WOLF for example, with impudent incompetence, or the cynicism that looks upon the public only as a milch cow to be drained for personal profit, or the charlatanism that plays upon the half-educated instincts of the musically illiterate.

It were folly to treat things of this kind with the same courtesy, the same toleration as honest effort that may not quite reach the goal it aims at. In every town, no matter how active may be its musical life, there will always be a good deal in the state of the music to anger or sadden the idealist. Wolf was an idealist, — a very young one, too, who had yet to learn how hard it is to move the mass of men by sheer reason, — and he found plenty of things in the musical life of Vienna to keep him perpetually in the saddle with his lance always at full tilt.

No one now disputes that in the early eighties Vienna, as far as music was concerned, was a city of many prejudices and much ignorance, particularly with regard to Wagner and the modern school of poetic music. Part of it may have been due to a conservatism of the better kind, a real and instructed enthusiasm for the antique ; but besides this there was a great deal of sheer ignorance and unwillingness to learn. Wagner was not understood, nor Liszt, nor Berlioz, nor Bruckner ; and as these were Wolf's preferences among composers living or recently dead, it was inevitable that he should run counter to the prejudices of musical Vienna at almost every turn.

With the charming comprehensiveness of youth he took the whole artistic life of the city under his paternal care ; there was no department of it in which he was not willing to point out the need for improvement and to give gratuitous advice as to how the improvement could be effected. In one of his articles he pretends to have stood behind a man who was reading the poster announcing the concert of the week, and to have listened to his soliloquy — "Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, — good, good.

The public loves classical music. Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn are really everyday matters with it. Here he mimicked scornfully the ecstasy of the public. Everywhere profundity, originality, greatness, sublimity, genius! Then in a natural tone — in faith! I believe that the Philharmonic public would rather jump into the Pontine marshes than listen to a work of this belauded master. But what would not people do for the sake of fashion? Bach has become the fashion with the Philharmonic public. Next year it will be the other way about; a symphony by Volkmann, a serenade by Fuchs.

There must be variety, and the Philharmonic people are connoisseurs in that, in all conscience! A splendid subject for a musical setting ; but the talent of the composer is not equal to the weight of the theme. Only a Makart could have represented a Penthesilea in colour, only a Liszt or a Berlioz in music.

It is beyond anyone else. Can I believe my eyes? Impos- sible ; yet there it is, clear enough — ' Symphonie fantastique' by Hector Berlioz. Truly there is something positively Spartan in the courage of the Philharmonic people. They have the pluck to scare their subscribers. It had, he said, nothing to fear in the way of competition, and could therefore easily afford to give more works which the public did not know but ought to know — those of Liszt and Berlioz, for example.

The public might be ruffled at first, but would take to the new music in time. In one of his articles he addressed a sarcastic appeal to the conductor — " Gade, Dvofdk, Molique, and out of charity — what a gigantic effort! You exhibit taste, good intentions, in- dustry, devotion, zeal, perseverance, and a good supply of ambition. What is it all to lead to? Won't you climb to the dizzy height of producing the youthful symphonies of Haydn? Do you dread the labour it would take, the sleepless nights, the bloody sweat?

Go on making us happy with Dvofdk rhapsodies, Gade overtures, Molique 'cello concertos. Why have a Mozart symphony at the end? This work is too complicated, j,. You are ruining your system with rehearsals, and then the prospect of hearing you conduct Czerny's 'School of Velocity' the instrumentation of which Herr B. He means to reform everything: Then his troubles begin. He looks at himself in the glass after a little time.

But, as I soon had to recognise to my horror, this estimable physical appearance had its analogue in my spiritual condition. As I recollect, this singular physical and mental change in me happened a little while after that memorable address which was to indicate the programme of the great concert which I contemplated conducting after being appointed to the post. But what was the result of these beneficial projects? First of all a conspiracy, then a revolution.

The perspiration streamed from my forehead. I longed for death. In my despair I laid hands on myself, but, in the very act of strangling myself, my outrageously clumsy way of managing it brought me — Heaven be thanked — back into waking consciousness. He advocated a smaller theatre for comic opera, wherein the true proportions of that g-enre might be preserved, — Lortzing's " Waffenschmied," for example, being over- weighted in the large opera house like a trim little picture in a huge frame ; he declared that in spite of the poverty of the orchestra, the voices, and the appointments at the Salzburg theatre, the work used there to make an impres- sion on him more like the proper one than it did in the 36 HUGO WOLF Vienna opera house, where everything was as sumptuous as it could be.

In the same spirit he pleaded for a smaller concert room for chamber music. In the Vienna of that time there were two main parties — the Wagnerian, who regarded Bruckner as their standard-bearer, and the anti-Wagnerians, who of course found a leader, though not altogether a willing one, in Brahms. Against the latter Wolf directed some of his sharpest criticisms. Temperamental antipathy will account for some of them, but they contain a good deal that is keenly analytical and objectively true.

He always agreed with Nietzsche that Brahms's melancholy was the melan- choly of impotence. He is a clever musician, very skilled in counterpoint, to whom ideas of all kinds come — some- times good, now and then excellent, occasionally bad, here and there already familiar, — frequently no ideas at all. Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, Liszt, the leaders of the revolutionary movement in music after Beethoven in which period Schumann indeed expected a Messiah and thought he had found him in — Brahms have passed by our symphonist without leaving a trace on him ; he was, or pretended to be, blind when the eyes of astonished mankind were opened by the dazzling genius of Wagner, ' In some of his letters to Kauffinann in he discusses Brahms again ; he then held him to be deficient in the capacity for really deep feeling.

He is like a departed spirit that returns to its old house, totters up the rickety steps, turns the rusty key with much difficulty, and directs an absent-minded gaze on the cobwebs that are forming in the air and the ivy that is forcing its way through the gloomy windows. Wolf was on safer ground when he picked holes in some of the scansions in Brahms's songs, particularly in the " Vergebliches Standchen.

In the second movement the shades fall lower. Deep meditation and silence. An animated form goes chirping through the deep solitude. It is as if glow-worms were going through their dances, by the way it sparkles and flashes in the flying figures of the instruments. But the form vanishes. The earlier silence comes, once more to be broken in upon by a similar motive. The mysterious tone-picture dies away in curious harmonies, that modulate between dreaming and waking.

Everywhere a will, a colossal purpose, but no satisfaction, no artistic solution. The moderns brought out the bias of his own temperament. He did not like any music that savoured too strongly of narrow " nationalism," and so was not greatly drawn to Gade, Grieg, or the general crowd of Scandinavian, Bohemian, or Russian composers ; ' He frequently discusses Bruckner's works in his correspondence with Kauffmann.

See the letters of 15th December , 23rd December , and loth March He always admits Bruckner's lack of concentration, but admires the prodigality of his invention and the expressiveness of his ideas. For the modern Italian opera-writers he had little but contempt. He abhorred Boito's " Mefistofele " on account both of the weakness of the music and of the perversion that Goethe's poem had undergone in the text.

Ponchi- elli's " Gioconda " was another bHe noire to him ; the composer, he said, had no originality ; " he has a dozen physiognomies ; his imagination proceeds like a stubborn ass, that after every second step goes back upon the first. Of Saint-Saens he particularly liked the trumpet septet. He does not seem to have written much upon Bizet, but we know that he greatly admired " Carmen.

He spoke enthusiastically of Richter, and of the performances Billow gave with the Meiningen orchestra. He also liked Billow's rendering of Beethoven on the piano, placing him above Rubinstein in this respect. But the pedagogic element in Billow's playing, to which Weingartner has also drawn attention, gradually became distasteful to him ; Billow, he said, was like a man who wanted to be a painter but only succeeded in becoming a professor of anatomy, — he gave piano lectures instead of piano recitals.

Wolf also saw all that was good and all that was lacking in the styles of other pianists, such as Arthur Friedheim, D'Albert, and Rosenthal. Altogether he seems to have gone about the business of criticism with a clear head, and with eyes at least as unprejudiced as those of the average musical critic. Yet in many ways it can only be regretted that he should have had to spend four years of his life in this way.

As he himself once said, the creative artist should keep out of criticism. That he made so many enemies was not the worst pf the evil in his case ; the physical strain and the mental distraction must have retarded his own develop- ment as a composer, and probably deprived the world of a great deal of original work for which it would gladly have foregone his criticisms upon the works of others. His brother-in-law, Josef Strasser, an inspector of taxes, lived in Schloss Gstatt near Oblarn, in the department of Grobming ; there Wolf went to spend the summer.

His sister Modesta and her husband knew his habits, and for the most part left him quite free to live as he chose ; he even preferred to prepare his own strong black coffee in the afternoon in his own room. He spent his time between the piano, composition, long walks in the mountains, — generally with a volume of his beloved Kleist, — and short excursions to holiday resorts in the neigh- bourhood. On one of these he was immensely amused at a poet he met, whom he caught in the act of composing by the aid of a rhyming dictionary.

Kleist's " Penthesilea " kept its usual hold upon him ; but at this time he occupied himself more closely with another work of the poet, " Der Prinz von Homburg," which he meant to make the sub- ject of a large orchestral work. The Trauermusik was completed, but has not yet been published; the manu- script of it is now among the papers acquired by the Vienna Hugo Wolf-Verein.

Wolf was also very enthusiastic during his stay in Grobming over Kleist's fine comedy " Der zerbrochene Krug," and used to read it to Modesta with his usual dramatic power ; but there is no evidence that he thought of it in connection with music. His external life during the summer was quite uneventful. The most notable event in it seems to have been the recep- tion of a letter from Liszt, which he one day showed to Strasser in high glee.

Wolf had sent the old musician a composition, — apparently the string quartet in D minor, written in , — and the great Liszt, with his usual regal kindliness, had not only read it and marked on the margin what seemed to him a necessary correction, but had written an encouraging letter to the young composer. In the autumn he was back again in Vienna, in a new domicile on the fourth storeyof abuildinginthe Kumpfgasse, that pleased him very much, he wrote to his sister, because for the first time he had a room lying away from the stairs, and approached by a small anteroom.

In the same street was a piano shop, from which he could borrow an instru- ment. He intends to retain this residence all through the summer, he says, since rooms in the middle of the town at so reasonable a price — twenty-four florins per month with service included — were very hard to find. His living-room is a large one, — so large that when Strasser comes to see him a second bed can easily be placed in it.

Evidently his circumstances were still exceedingly poor, — Dr. Decsey thinks that a certain advertisement in the "Salonblatt" offering to teach piano, harmony, counterpoint, etc. He was too much absorbed in his work to care for much else ; he would probably have been con- tent to live with a frugality that would be deprivation to THE GROWTH TO MASTERY 43 most other men, even most other artists, if only it carried with it the privilege of being able to give himself up to his composition without disturbance and without anxiety.

Nowhere in his letters is there evidence of the smallest appetite for social luxury ; even when, in later years, he stayed in the houses of wealthy people like Baron Lipper- heide, he seems to have felt the constraint of life of this kind rather than the elegance and the comfort of it, and to have been comparatively unhappy until he found himself once more alone and free.

In the same letter in which he tells his brother-in-law of his new rooms, he encloses an article on Marschner's " Der Vampyr '' — a favourite opera of his — and gives a quaint account of how he wrote it. It was done after a banquet at Frau R. One publisher seems, from a letter of Wolf's to Strasser of 21st January , to have made him a definite promise and then broken it ; whereupon Wolf consoles himself with Berlioz's philosophical reflection — " Let us raise ourselves above the misery of life ; let us shake off from us all black thoughts, and sing in a bright voice the well-known lively refrain " — Di es i - rafi, di - es il - la cru - cis After the season of he again longed to revisit his native parts, but this time was unable to do so.

I must be able to make use of the instrument at any hour I choose, and that would hardly be possible at Grobming. To have one brought from Ischl would not suit my consumptive purse, and since in Vienna the house of a friend, with a piano in it, is at my disposal, my savings should just suffice to keep life going until the commencement of the season.

Still I will not be untrue to my resolution to visit you for a few days; only I cannot yet tell you definitely when I shall leave here. It would please me most to meet you in Aussee. Perhaps you will go there in the course of next month. We will make arrangements about this later on. If you need or wish for books, write me. If you have leisure for reading, I will introduce you to a wonderful novel of Thackeray. Meanwhile he had gone into his new quarters, — the house in the Mehlmarkt which his friend Kochert, who had already shown him many kind- nesses during the past six years, had placed at his disposal for the summer.

Tied to Vienna as he was, his mind went out all the more longingly to Grobming. On the 23rd July he ' What these " larger works" were cannot be discovered. Wolf seems to have done little composing that summer ; but Dr. Decsey thinks he may have intended to carry out his old plan of setting " Der Prinz von Homburg " to music. I long to hear from you again. Where are you fixed now? To-day I was rummaging about among my manuscripts, and found several that were scribbled at Schloss Gstatt. Schladming, with the date of 30th August, is immortalised!

The time I spent in Gstatt Was the most beautiful of all my life. I would give up my chance of salvation right away just to live with you, as I did then, a modest but soulful, contented life. This year I shall sadly miss you and Modesta and your youngsters. I am quite wild about it. How is your family? I hear nothing at all about them. Give me at any rate the address of Modesta, that I may write to her some time.

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My dear, dear friend, I must see you this year! By the Lord, I am a hard- boiled fellow, but when I think of you and the others I become as soft as butter. It is as a rule not in my line to be larmoyant, but you, with your boundless simplicity and goodness of heart, could make me sob like two thousand mill-wheels. Write me by return. I count the minutes until I have a letter from you in my hands. If I get my work finished, I will come next month to you. On the istjAugust Wolf writes to his brother- in-law at Murau, reproaching him for not having given him some previous inkling of this change of residence.

During the following autumn Wolf seems to have made heroic attempts to have some of his works performed. He was destined, as so many other young composers have been before and since, to meet with more promises than performances, and to experience all the extremes of hope and disappointment.

At Christmas he writes to Strasser to explain his long silence; he has, he says, been waiting till he could communicate some important news that would have given pleasure to his sympathetic brother-in-law. I have good prospects of my Penthesilea in Munich and. As for what became of my string quartet, the enclosed article of the 23rd October will throw light on that matter for you. For some unknown reason it had been declined, a fact of which Wolf was notified in October. He gave expression to his disappointment in an article in the " Salonblatt," entitled " Music?

It makes men fools, or drunkards, or misanthropes, or astrologers, or misers, or treasure-seekers, or debtors, or exorcists, or lyric poets, or loafers, or unfortunate lovers, even journalists like myself, for instance , and God only knows what other useful and delightful things. In truth, one should, in order to escape inconveniences of this kind, maintain as cool a relation as possible towards one's wishes and hopes,.

Do not bellow in unison when you condemn a work ; divide yourselves into particles, so far as you possibly can, but do not permit yourselves to send by letter to hopeful authors such blasphemous, preposterous stuff by way of unanimous decision against this or that of their works. Train your- selves in politeness and mildness. Fill your coat pockets with onions ; or — if you have imagination enough to set your fountains in play in this manner — you need only think of 'The antithesis is clearer in the German — "Wendungen" and "Windungen.

The manuscript of this string quartet came to a bad end ; Wolf left it in a tramcar and never recovered it. Many years afterwards, however, the Hugo Wolf-Verein came into possession — it is not said how — of a string quartet in D minor, which is supposed to be the one lost in This is the quartet now published, bearing the inscription from Goethe's " Faust," " Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren. The remainder of the letter to Strasser, of which the beginning has been quoted on a previous page, gives us a painful sense of the poverty in which Wolf was living at this time: In the meanwhile, however, you will be able to feel quite comfortable in the little world of ' Onkel Benjamin.

You will look the new year laughingly in the eyes, and if it should make a face at you you will laugh at it more than ever. The little world into which you are banished is also Benjamin's. This will especially endear the book to you. Certainly, my dear fellow, you will be well able to extract as much benefit from this book, as it will bring you comfort. Only read it very, very often, and write me how it pleases you, when you have been through it a few times. Look upon it as your grace at table, your morning and evening devotions. Learn it by heart, as I have done. It has not gone so badly with me for a long time.

Is Modesta with you, or still in Klagenfurt? I have not heard from her for five months. When you write to her, tell her that I think of her and her children innumerable times, and that I am very sad that I cannot contribute something to the Christmas tree. He must indeed have been pathetically poor. The symphonic poem Penthesilea had met with no better luck in Munich than Wolf's other works elsewhere.

In the meanwhile it ought to satisfy me that my string quartet is to be played before a private company at Goldschmidt's. The performance before an invited audience, numbering about sixty or eighty persons, takes place on Sunday week,. On the 1 2th May Wolf writes to Strasser that he intends to visit him next month, and asks for full details as to the presents he must bring for each of the family. He arrived at Murau on the I2th June. The visit, however, to which he had looked forward so delightedly was destined to be an unhappy one, The weather was cold, wet and gloomy, which in itself was enough to put Wolf slightly out of tune, so sensitive was he to atmo- spheric conditions.

Then, while he was unpacking his trunk, the clumsiness of someone or other in the house caused a dart from a toy that he had brought for the children to fly into his eye, causing him great pain. He had to spend most of his time in a darkened room, and Strasser his in reading to him. The Fates further willed it that the children should be ill, and that his sister should have brought a daughter into the world three days before his arrival. We can imagine how all this wrought upon his irritable nerves. The last straw was laid on him when he was asked to stand sponsor to the newly-born child at its baptism.

The horror of the situation seems to have worked to such an extent on Wolf that at midday he disappeared, presumably into the woods, and was seen no more that day or that night. The clouds passed away during the night, and in the morning Strasser found a note from him lying on the dining-room table — " I would like to fall weeping on your neck, and on yours, Modesta. I am thoroughly unhappy and at the same tinie furious with myself Pity me, for now I know for certain that it is my lot to grieVe everyone who loves me and who is dear to me.

It is unhappily not the first time that I find myself in such a state of mind ; that is the saddest part of it all. It has brought me the convic- tion that my disposition is and always will be a thoroughly morbid one. And believe me, in myself I was quite prepared to do so ; but then a devil I harbour legions of them inside me whispered in my ear that I should not do it, since that would distress you. I agreed at once, and when I saw how much it meant to you I hesitated more that ever.

And yet — at midday to-day I wanted to open my mouth and tell you that I am ready and happy to do anything ; then I saw your sulky faces, and they knocked it all out of me. Burn this letter and don't speak to me about the affair again. Au revoir till early to-morrow morning. His stay in Murau lasted some four months. For a great part of the time he read deeply in Morike. One day he came to Strasser with the news that he had set the " Gebet " to music, — first of all pre- tending in jest that the poem also was his own, and that he was going to be " a little Wagner.

Wolf sat unobserved in the hall. His anger at what he took to be a base travesty of his work found vent three days later in a letter to Strasser and his sister — " What I have been through in the last few days you cannot even imagine. I am loaded like a dynamite bomb, and woe to anyone who comes within reach of my wrath! I will do an article against. No; the Penthesilea of a madman, an idiot, a joker, or whatever else you will, but it was not MY Pentkesilea.

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I can't describe to you how the work was played. Decsey, is too strongly-worded and too personal in its references to be reproduced textually; but it is to the effect that the conductor, who had promised to recommend the work, made absolute nonsense of it, and the orchestral players burst into laughter. Then the conductor said to them: My first impulse after hearing these words was to send My friends who were there managed to convince me of the uselessness of such a step and to dissuade me from this design. I am now collecting data for a brochure that will throw such a light on the behaviour of.

Good-bye, and thank God for the quiet corner of earth into which he has blown you. Decsey omits the name of the conductor in question — Dr. Irritated by some recent remarks of Wolfs friend Karl Grunsky, Dr. Richter addressed an open letter to "Die Musik" on the matter, giving his own 54 HUGO WOLF Whether Wolf was right or wrong in his belief that personal malevolence was at the bottom of the bad display of the orchestra, it must be admitted that the orchestra- tion of the Penthesilea of those days was necessarily inexpert.

Some six years afterwards the work was tried over by Kahler, an admirer of Wolfs, with the idea of a performance in Mannheim ; but Kahler himself declared that the scoring of the work stood in the way of the hearer's appreciation of its ideas. In the form in which we now have the Penthesilea the orchestration has been touched-up by Hellmesberger. The only surviving compositions that can be atrributed to this year are the two songs Der Konig bei der Kronung words by Morike and Biterolf im Lager von Akkon words by Scheflfel.

A setting of Platen's Christnacht for soli, chorus, and orchestra was begun at Christmas, but not finished for some two or three years. In his compositions were not very numerous, but they indicate his growing powers, and were a prepara- tion for the tremendous outbreak of energy in the Morike songs of the following year.

This seems to have been all the creative work his critical occupation allowed him to produce during the year, except a Humoristisches Intermezzo and an Italienische Serenade, version of what happened at the rehearsal. This in turn drew a rejoinder from Karl Grunsky. One can only regret the controversy; it would have been much better to have let the episode be forgotten. The latter must not be confused with the Italienische Serenade for small orchestra that has been published and frequently performed during the last few years ; the orchestral work, written in the early nineties, is, however, founded on the thematic material of the earlier quartet.

The death of his father, which occurred in Windisqhgraz on the 9th May , was a heavy blow to him. No longer could he hope to prove to his father that he had been justified in disregarding his advice and insisting on being a musician. Hugo spent part of the summer with Strasser in Leibniz, near Graz, returning to Vienna in the autumn and taking up his abode in the house of Dr. He had had an injury to his foot that required attention, and the Langs fitted up a bed for him on a divan in the study.

To his hosts he entered one day with the news that he had been discussing the scarcity of sensible publishers with Friedrich Eckstein, whereupon the latter had undertaken to find one for him. He had been a private pupil of Bruckner, whose ' Wolfs mother survived him. She died on the 25th October , having seen his fame securely established, but having also had the pain of witnessing the tragedy of his last years.

He could carry on a chemical manufactory with "the coolness of an American," as Dr.

Decsey puts it, yet make the pilgrimage to Bayreuth a very real pilgrimage by going in sandals like Tannhauser. Partly through Eckstein's generosity, and partly through that of other friends, who undertook to subscribe for a number of copies, arrangements were made with the Vienna firm of E. It was the first time that anything of Wolf s had attained the dignity of print ; and, curious as it may seem, there is no doubt that the publication of these mostly youthful songs was the turning-point in Wolfs career.

It drew all his activities into one channel, and gave us in time the Wolf we now know as the greatest master of the modern song. Decsey has pointed out, had Wolf died in 1 he would have left a heap of miscellaneous work, but little that could be said to be characteristically and unmistakably Wolfian. Decsey gives the date in one place as , in another as It was the publication of these two small collections of songs that gave him full consciousness of where his real destiny lay. Three years later, in a letter to Oscar Grohe, he said that everything he had done before he came to this consciousness was nothing more than a long and painful attempt at suicide.

He now determined to devote himself mainly to song- writing, and that on a new plan, setting to music not a poem here and there by one poet or another, but a whole collection of poems by one man. Having cut himself loose from the " Salonblatt," he went to live in Perchtoldsdorf, a small village near Vienna, where the house of his friend Heinrich Werner was at his disposal for the winter. Here he settled in February Then the wonderful Morike songs poured from him like a flood that had long been dammed.

He wrote the first of the set, Der Tambour, on the i6th February. By November fifty-three of them had been written, the number of days actually devoted to their composition being apparently only forty-two. How far shall I yet go? For in December , when he wanted a portrait of Liszt, he said that 'so far I have only Beethoven on my wall, apart from the Nibelung sheet by Cornelius' SB, iv, p.

Since his teens, in fact, Wagner had been familiar with Beethoven's outward appearance: The composer's image accompanied Wagner throughout his life, symbolizing his persistent attempts to comprehend the spiritual phenomenon that was Beethoven, to capture his likeness as both man and artist. What, then, did Beethoven look like to Wagner? Wagner's mental image of Beethoven is an integral part of that myth of himself, or persona, at which he worked all his life and which he handed on to posterity as something binding and sacrosanct.

Both during his lifetime and later on, Wagner's staunch admirers took pains to conserve this 'self-portrait', including those Beethovenian features to which it owes a great deal. The dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerite has always tended to accept statements by Wagner without stopping to consider the background, the context in which they were made. One illustration of this is the way Curt von Westernhagen interprets Wagner's request for a true and not an ideal picture of Beethoven. Beethoven was to be depicted 'free from any affectation'.

But did Wagner actually see in the desired portrait simply the 'real man', i. Among the portraits painted of Beethoven, Waldmiiller's was one of the most suspect and heavily criticized. No doubt he also knew Schindler's account of the circumstances in which the portrait was produced, and knew how harshly he had judged Waldmiiller's labours. Interestingly enough, Wagner rejected this opinion in favour of one which would gain currency at a later period.

And Bruno Grimschitz remarks in his study of the painter that he was capable of memorizing individual characteristics exceptionally quickly. Waldmuller's portrait with the 'hearing eyes' is, he believes, 'one of the best portraits of the great tone-poet'. Wagner evidently saw in this picture of the 'real man' some quite specific features which he found important. They belong, says Joseph SchmidtGorg in MGG, to a composer already scarred by worry and illness, and above all one who was hard of hearing.

The 'hearing eyes' are a sign that his ears were attuned to the sounds within him. Thus in the 'true picture' he wanted, Wagner could see once again the features of the Beethoven he had described in his Beethoven essay. This was the composer with 'the vision of an innermost musical world to proclaim' GS, ix, p. The composer as a saint and a redeemer- that was Wagner's contribution to the Romantic image of Beethoven.

So behind his apparently straightforward request there lies a specific perception of Beethoven. And it affects Wagner's own myth, too, because his image of 'Beethoven the redeemer is simply an allegory of Wagner the redeemer' A. Previous research Although the literature on Wagner has swollen to vast proportions, it does not include many studies that deal in a critical way with the Wagner myth as it relates to the myth of Beethoven.

Moreover, the majority of such studies are concerned with individual topics. Only Karl Ipser's Beethoven Wagner - Bayreulh examines Wagner's reception of Beethoven comprehensively, and as a self-contained subject. Wyzewa's Beethoven et Wagner,firstpublished in , deals with other matters. It was Ipser's aim to present Wagner's life as 'a life with Beethoven' not just with the aid of facts and figures, but by postulating the existence of an 'innermost active force'. But his book falls short in this respect: Like the uncritical Wagnerite, Ipser treats his data as symbols with an obvious meaning and function that stand in no need of analysis or criticism.

What point is there in his saying, for instance, that Beethoven was born in the same year as Wagner's father?

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This, to Ipser, is a 'significant conjunction' and no coincidence. As to Wagner's Faust Overture, he finds it significant that Beethoven too had planned to set 'Faust' to music. A little farther on he quotes the enthusiastic conclusion to an essay about Wagner's overture, which hailed him as one of 'the few legitimate heirs and successors to Beethoven, the son of the god of music incarnate'. In addition to acknowledged quotations, the book includes whole chunks of unidentified 'literary extracts'.

Ipscr also uses his sources uncritically in various respects. In the first, volume of his Beethoven biography, Max Koch wrote that Wagner 'was able to hear' Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on three occasions; Ipscr presents this as an established fact. This leads Ipser into claiming that Wagner made 'a fresh copy of the score', which has since been lost.

There are many more such errors to illustrate the superficiality of Ipser's approach. The motto of the 'Wesendonck' Sonata, 'Wisst ihr wie das wird', is described as the Norns' question in Walkure. Lchrs, instead of Anders, is named as the person to whom Schindler-after an exchange in which Wagner took part - guaranteed to make amends for having criticized him. The significance of this episode is not explained, although a little earlier, Ipser mentions the Beethoven biography on which Wagner and Anders planned to collaborate.

He outlines the formation and development of the 'Romantic' Beethoven legend and looks at Wagner so thoroughly that this section of his book could be described as an internal monograph. Drawing on Wagner's performance of the Ninth Symphony as well as his writings, Boyer examines Wagner's view of Beethoven chronologically. He particularly stresses the fact that Wagner saw in Beethoven a forerunner of music drama. This idea, he says, was derived from E. Hoffmann, whose interpretation of Beethoven influenced Wagner's for a long time, until eventually Schopenhauer's influence made itself felt in the Beethoven essay.

But Boyer also discerns Romantic precursors, especially Novalis and Wackenroder, in major aspects of Schopenhauer's thought. Boyer's survey is broad and richly faceted, while at the same time containing points that call for criticism and debate. What is most open to question is the way he deals with Wagner's concept of music. It is a moot point whether, in A Happy Evening, Wagner already takes the view that Beethoven's conception of certain works began with a poetic idea, and that this determined his musical themes.

Equally debatable is the claim that in Beethoven, Wagner is conforming to Schopenhauer in representing the 'absolute' musician's standpoint. Besides examining what Wagner meant by 'absolute music', we need to explain how he visualized Beethoven's 'idea', and what actively inspired it. Boyer also makes us examine Wagner's interpretation of the Ninth Symphony in greater detail, since this is so closely bound up with the way he experienced Beethoven. Birtner uses the Ninth Symphony to trace the evolution of Wagner's interpretation of Beethoven.

He makes the important point that Wagner's experience of Weber's music prepared him for his responses to Beethoven, although it is debatable whether Beethoven was then just 'another object of "enthusiastic veneration" besides Weber and Mozart'. Another valuable comment he makes is that it was only slowly and gradually that Wagner put his personal image of Beethoven to creative, practical use.

Here we have some further starting-points for a more intensive study of Wagner's Beethoven experience and its function in his output. Arnold Schmitz has written a number of works that deal with Beethoven and Wagner. Each is an attempt to explore the interplay between the myths of Wagner and Beethoven respectively.

Schmitz renewed his efforts in Das Romantische Beethovenbild , which probably blazed a trail for Boyer's study. His essay Der Mythos der Kunst in den Schriften Richard Wagners concentrates on specific features of a development that is linked to the history of ideas. Schmitz offers some illuminating remarks on the 'myth-making technique'.

He traces Wagner's 'myth of art' through the composer's writings from the Zurich period to the last years. Schmitz shows how the Beethoven myth - the idea of a 'saint' who embodies man's natural goodness — comes into Wagner's 'art myth', by virtue of the claim that he was going to redeem religion with art's assistance. This amounts to a fusion, within Wagner's own myth of art, of the Wagner myth and the Beethoven myth. Schmitz's studies are an inducement to examine other myths and legends accruing from Wagner's reception of Beethoven, and to observe how they fit in with Wagner's self-portrait.

This we shall do in our next two chapters. Of the objective, critical studies that exist of Wagner and his relationship to Beethoven, Guido Adler's Wagner lectures from the start of the century are the earliest. What is the significance of these lectures? The answer is that they probably represent the first major attempt to grasp Wagner as one phenomenon among others - all of which have equal claims on our attention in an historical context. They challenged the thesis that Wagner's music drama formed the climax to an inevitable development, Beethoven's works constituting a preliminary step.

It was also Adler who noted the crucial difference between the invention and treatment of music drama's vocal motifs on the one hand, and purely instrumental motifs on the other. In so doing, Adler provided the basic tools for later research. Ernest Newman's writings are equally enlightening, especially Wagner as Man and Artist, although from the critical viewpoint there is less emphasis on Wagner's relationship to Beethoven.

Newman points out some major discrepancies between Wagner's theories and his practice. Such commentators as Walter Engelsmann and Theodor W. Adorno are diametrically opposed in their views on this subject, just as myth and anti-myth are poles apart. Like Engelsmann, Alfred Lorenz represents the orthodox school of Wagner commentators, except that he tries to demonstrate the music drama's absorption of the Becthovenian symphony by means of a special analytical device: At the end of his treatise Worauf beruhl die bekannte Wirkung der Durchjuhrung im I.

Eroicasatz , Lorenz writes as follows: The forms piled one upon the other which I have found in Wagner's music drama are rooted not in the type of opera that went before it but in the Beethoven symphony, thus confirming the truth of Wagner's claim that the symphony had poured into his drama. First, studies by Carl Dahlhaus and Rudolf Stephan have since undermined it by illustrating the inadequacy of the formal patterns Lorenz applied to Wagner's music drama: Secondly, even if we apply it to the development section of Beethoven's 'Eroica', the Bar form or rather the scheme of the Reprisenbar does not make sense.

In fact it contradicts something that Lorenz himself said. Unlike others, he regarded the close of the development not as 'signalling a victory' but as a 'period of exhaustion' which, he maintained, pointed beyond the development's confines. We may question the correctness of referring to a victory or defeat of the principal theme, but that is not now the point. What is evident is that, having perceived the development's forward impetus, Lorenz subsequently loses sight of it by imposing the Reprisenbar on the procedure.

For the concept of the Reprisenbar implies a 'return of the same thing' [ Wiederkehr des Gleictien], which is precisely what Beethoven avoids in his developments. To adapt Rudolf Stephan's remark on the schematic character of Lorenz's Wagner analyses, Lorenz does away with all that is best about Beethoven's music, 'its dynamic force, its ceaseless animation'. Lorenz's Beethoven analysis poses two inescapable questions.

One is the question of Wagner's own attitude to the dynamic element in Beethoven's music; and, closely connected with this, there is the question of how Wagner viewed the 'reprise'. What is the relationship between Wagner's music drama and the compositions of Beethoven? What sources can we consult on this subject? We shall return to these issues in Chapters 4 and 5. Otto Daube has tried to give some constructive answers to the above questions in Richard Wagner. In the NGW, however, John Deathridge points out not only that Weinlig evidently taught Wagner over a longer period of time, but also that these lessons may have included classical sonata form as well as studies in counterpoint.

Otto Daube's book may be said to hinge on the publication of Wagner's counterpoint studies under Weinlig, together with the previously unpublished Piano Sonata in A major. But on closer scrutiny it is difficult to grant Daube's work as a whole the status of a source-book, because large parts of it are littered with extremely subjective interpretations. Daube avowedly intended them as starting-points for a new and thorough account for the Wagnerian work of art's 'musical anatomy', but they should not go unchallenged. Thus he cites Nietzsche when discussing 'formal parallels' between the symphony and drama, although in the end he rejects Nietzsche - and Thomas Mann and Adorno as well - as an interpretative point of departure.

The parallel drawn between cyclical form in the symphony and the Ring cycle is arbitrary and totally unfounded: Daube never provides any 'sources'. The same goes for his demonstration of a formal correspondence between the Ninth Symphony and the 'formal miracle of Meistersinger and Parsifal', where he invokes Alfred Lorenz.

A question-mark even hangs over Daube's source-material with regard to the Sonata in A major. Wagner cut the fugato section that originally formed part of the finale, as can be seen from Carl Dahlhaus's edition of the piano music. Daube's edition reproduces the section in full, without comment. His thoughts on this interesting matter are limited to a footnote which dismisses vital details of the sources as negligible.

It is up to us to ask if speculation about the reasons for such cuts would truly lead nowhere. Max Fehr published the two volumes of his Richard Wagners Schweizer Zeil in and respectively. They have always been essential reading for students of Wagner's reception of Beethoven. The years Wagner spent as an exile in Zurich and Tribschen had an important bearing on his development and on the exact nature of his relationship to Beethoven.

Fehr records them from the viewpoint of his activities as a conductor of Beethoven's orchestral music, and as a 'coach' at rehearsals of his string quartets. Probably the most ambitious recent Wagner book with a close bearing on the present study was published by Egon Voss in , two years after the first German edition of Wagner and Beethoven.

Voss's book is titled Richard Wagner und die Instrumentalmusik. Voss has worked as an editor on the Wagner Gesamtausgabe, and his book draws extensively on that experience. That fact in itself would suffice to make it interesting. The book's special immediacy is however derived from its central critical point of departure, namely a revaluation and reinterpretation of Wagner as a composer, particularly of instrumental works. He attempts to show how Wagner directed his creative efforts - more or less covertly or knowingly - towards instrumental, i.

Thus Wagner's 'symphonic ambition' [Ekrgeiz] serves as a vantage-point from which to look down on a bare stage. The actors have all removed their masks, and the scenery swings to one side or becomes transparent, affording a glimpse of what lies behind it. This idea has a certain attractiveness, and it seems quite feasible for Wagner's few instrumental compositions to fit in with it. But when we examine this idea more closely, it proves to be fraught with problems. The very phrase 'symphonic ambition' invites contradiction, and here we can quote Thomas Mann: But in any case the insinuation of ambition in any normal worldly sense can be dismissed for the simple reason that Wagner was working initially without any hope or prospect of making an immediate impact, which actual circumstances and conditions would not allow - working in a vacuum of his own invention, towards an imaginary, ideal theatre that could not possibly be realized for the present.

There is certainly no hint of cool calculation or the ambitious exploitation of existing opportunities in words such as these, addressed to Otto Wesendonck: But if it is still insisted that Wagner had this ambition, then was it not from a false, improper motive that he turned to writing instrumental works from time to time? By a kind of'double strategy', it might be argued, Wagner- because he was very aware of his limitations as a purely instrumental composer ultimately 'slaked' his symphonic ambitions in his music dramas, the latter being 'symphonic dramas'.

But this is not the case. Either Wagner was an instrumental fanatic with some kind of secret compulsion to identify himself with the symphony, and was not at all averse to writing any more symphonies, or else his music dramas were the result of a genuine artistic decision, a logical departure as a composer from the instrumental medium of the symphony and from any ambition to write in a genuinely 'symphonic' manner, albeit in the form of'music dramas'.

These propositions cannot both be true. And it is possible to show that Wagner's instrumental works are glosses, experiments and leftovers, and that it is the music dramas which represent his real creative output. It was a musico-dramatic output, not a primarily instrumental one, not one that was the result of'symphonic ambition'.

Dahlhaus describes the instrumental works as mere parerga in The New Grove Wagner. If we want to characterize Wagner at all accurately, the only concept which seems tofitis 'intention'. But there is also an 'intention' in respect of the artistic objects. In both structure and 'content', or mythical subjectmatter, these supremely imaginative products have that 'intentional objectivity' which clearly distinguishes them from any of the products of 'ambition'.

Ingarden, in his Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt , writes that the 'activity of creating an intentional object' consists of actions 'which tend to make permanent, to "fix" in some way the purely intentional objects created therein, and this is achieved by giving these objects some existentially stronger ontological basis that will enable them to outlast the actions which produced them. Such 'permanence' necessarily entails a complete design for the 'intended work'. But the majority of Wagner's symphonic or purely instrumental works - including his late 'symphonic sketches' - lack this for the simple reason that he never completed them.

We find a major discrepancy between Wagner's avowed but temporary! There are, however, distinctions to be made here. It would surely be wrong to regard the purely instrumental side of Wagner's creative output as a single entity. Rather it reflects creative impulses arising from a given situation as man and artist: It seems fair to assume that at the start of Wagner's artistic development, the early instrumental works left him the option of being a purely instrumental composer, but that he very soon chose a different path. And via opera, this eventually led him to music drama. Thus viewed, Wagner's symphonic forays and excursions will come to represent transitory impulses arising out of the particular circumstances of his life and artistic career.

Pierre Boulez has summed up the composer's relationship to tradition in the words: This holds good for Wagner's relationship to purely instrumental music, and especially the symphony, as a traditional genre. According to Voss, Wagner's claim that the symphony had evolved into drama was not a true reflection of his views. Instead it reflected his desire to present music drama as a legitimate genre and for it to be acknowledged as such - which would eventually evoke one element in the notorious 'Bayreuth ideology'.

This judgment is far too sweeping. Granted, Wagner himself pointed to a whole series of differences central ones at that between the symphony and music drama. But looking at it through Wagner's eyes, there are certainly elements in the way he developed his motifs and melodies, for example, that indicate a connection between the symphony and drama. At bottom, however, it was Wagner's broad artistic intention which engendered music drama instead of instrumental works, even though it had had its beginnings in instrumental and operatic pieces, and had passed through several stages of opera composing.

Voss maintains that almost throughout his life, it was Wagner's ambition to become a great and significant symphonist, or at least to compose significant and universally recognized symphonic music. This now seems an exaggeration. Wagner's subsequent efforts in the symphonic realm were more extensive but did not last; after that, there were only sporadic excursions. He cherished no secret yet central, lifelong desire in that respect. Whatever the content and objective by which it is defined, his so-called symphonic ambition was altogether a by-product of his artistic development.

If Wagner had really nurtured far-reaching symphonic aims, he would not have cast aside the Faust Overture, which he originally conceived as a symphony in Paris in The thematic sketches and compositional fragments that Voss goes out of his way to enumerate would not have remained mere statements of intent.

And towards the end of his life, Wagner would have done more than just talk about future symphonies. He would have actually realized one or other of his initial themes rather than carry on with and complete his final stage-work, Parsifal. After arriving at music drama, Wagner was still driven to the brink of instrumental music time and again. This was for reasons which affected him deeply and were also a provocation.

These causes were, however, 'adjusted' very quickly within the music drama's ambit. They included Berlioz and Beethoven! Instrumental music not only survived in the shadow of music drama but even acquired a fresh impetus. This impressed Wagner considerably, and he felt it as a challenge; again and again, however, it was also of instant fascination, for all his woolly anti-Semitism and his fixed art-ideology. The fact is graphically illustrated by Cosima Wagner's diaries, which mention Mendelssohn as an orchestral composer surprisingly often, and not always negatively.

In the light of Mendelssohn's unerring skill as a purely instrumental composer, Wagner said such things as 'Mendelssohn would raise his hands in horror if he ever saw me composing' 23 June Statements like this may be tinged with irony, but the real feelings behind them are complex.

They explain why Wagner thought it so important to have at least one entire symphony to his credit in later life, even if it was only the early one in C major. We can now also understand why, in the end, Wagner wanted to have nothing more to do with the 'Wesendonck' Sonata. Contemporaries of his were casting their 'infinite symphonic shadow'. Do we really wish to embarrass Wagner by puffing up this sketch as a kind of magnum opus of his 'symphonic ambition'?

The piece is marginal to a very different order of music that was going through the forward-looking composer's mind. Gutman quite rightly calls it shallow. The 'Wesendonck' Sonata was produced in a specific set of circumstances relating to Wagner's life and career. It stands on the threshold of the composition of the Ring. But this is no pointer to music drama as the consummation of the symphony.

After all, it was Wagner's aim as a musical dramatist to transpose purely instrumental music into a new - and 'essential' [eigentlich] - musical dimension once and for all by giving it dramatic significance. Cosima records Wagner as saying 16 August that in him, the accent lay on the conjunction of the dramatic poet with the musician; he would not amount to much purely as a musician. Is the idea to unmask this too as a piece of self-ideologizing? The thesis of Wagner's 'symphonic ambition' appears to be a fresh attempt to solve the problem of how his creative work should really be understood and classified.

And it corresponds to the attempt to subsume Wagner's output under the 'idea of absolute music' Carl Dahlhaus. The notion of assigning Wagner to the realm of absolute music is crucial to numerous studies published by Dahlhaus. It also appears in his extensive contribution to The New Grove Wagner, and it undoubtedly has its attractions.

There may have indeed been an idea of absolute music lasting from early Romanticism to Wagner and beyond. But if so, we need to ask if, as the result of a change in the musical material, in formal, structural and expressive qualities during the nineteenth century, the content and concept of this idea did not undergo some changes as well.

Full text of "Hugo Wolf"

The problem clearly emerges where analysis, by using purely musical categories of form, only partially succeeds in grasping the structure of music drama. This leads on to the question of Wagner's concept of music. Was it really that of an instrumental music which fitted into a purely musical structural and expressive framework, and with which the symphonic drama also fell into line? Wagner's view of Beethoven can help to enlighten us on this very point. For his reception of the Beethoven symphonies, and also of the other instrumental works, represents a crossroads.

Not only does it give a fair picture of the way he summed up Beethoven's instrumental music; it also serves to bring out more clearly the structure of his own range as a composer of music dramas. The one left its mark on the other. Establishing the biographical truth is beset with problems. There can be no doubt that Wagner's autobiographical details contain inaccuracies ranging from the inadvertent error to deliberate fabrication. A number of Wagner scholars involved with the Gesamlausgabe have pursued this matter further. Their joint findings appear in the Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis published in For such a strategy, a flair for detective work is constantly needed.

There are times, however, when it also resorts to an overdose of scepticism and to distortions that are based on mere hypotheses. Important though this work is, we should always remember that with Wagner we are dealing de facto with two levels of biographical truth. Time and again, as an interpreter, Wagner reshaped his life and artistic development.

This fact, and the appropriate response to it, surely carries as much weight as the revelation of things 'as they really were' or could have been. One point is particularly significant. Wagner began to interpret events not after they were over, and from an autobiographical perspective, but so soon as to determine the biographical facts themselves, i.

This lends weight to what Dahlhaus writes at the end of the chapter in The New Grove Wagner headed 'Letters, diaries, autobiography': Understanding the paths along which Wagner's imagination set off is more important than correcting conscious or unconscious inaccuracies. Yet editorial meticulousness is not to be despised: It will be essential to take this attitude when it comes to Wagner's autobiographical account of his experience of Beethoven. And in reflecting on the lifelong spell which Beethoven's music exerted on him, and his reactions to it, Wagner was confirming and interpreting his own personality.

Objectives Any study of Wagner's reception of Beethoven must begin with the source-material. It follows from what has been stated above, however, that the sources should be seen in a wider context. Obviously what rates as a source is chiefly anything that Wagner wrote or said which is directly or indirectly connected with his view of Beethoven. But these statements need to be examined critically, as do the supporting documents that occasionally have to be consulted - press reports and the statements of friends and contemporaries. The use made so far of what Wagner said about his earliest encounter with Beethoven has been wholly uncritical; at best it includes a note on 'poetic licence'.

Autobiography, for Wagner, was a means of selfexamination throughout his life. Thus the question of his 'Beethoven experience' is bound up with the question of his autobiographical method. As a follow-up to Wagner's earliest experience of Beethoven, we must look into the profound later impressions that Beethoven's music made on him.

This has been considered by a number of previous writers. But have they covered every level and aspect of the experience, and have they comprehended its function? Here again the number of sources is appreciable, but we must also consider the particular situation in which Wagner received his impression and reacted to it. The same goes for his writings on artistic topics. Whom was he addressing, and what private and public circles did he have in mind at the time? Certainly any assessment of all Wagner's remarks on Beethoven must rest on a study of the material ranging from internal textual criticismto a careful exploration of possible 'influences'.

Attention must also be paid to Wagner's language. The meaning of individual words aside, insights can be gleaned from Wagner's habit of using a fixed terminology for some very specific musical matters, but not for others. Any study of extracts from Wagner's writings will confirm that Wagner poses problems as an author. From the viewpoint of his reception of Beethoven, however, it will especially point up the ticklish relationship between his theory and his poetic-dramatic compositions. Up to now Theodor Uhlig's writings have been completely overlooked in this context.

Although it was thought that they merely echoed Wagner's, they do in fact add significantly to what he said. There can be no doubt that Wagner's achievements as a composer far exceed what he achieved as an author. But in assessing the relationship between the two, there is a need to distinguish between the intrinsic merit of Wagner's writings and their interpretative role. Dahlhaus states that the works are the key to the writings, not vice versa.

Were this always the case, however, Wolzogen's leitmotif catalogue would still have the importance it used to, and Wolzogen completely fails to do justice to the structural function - i. Part III of Wagner's Opera and Drama is essential reading if we are not to misconstrue his leitmotif as being simply a motif of reminiscence and there are people who still do this. Opera and Drama helps us grasp the point that the leitmotif actualizes a reminiscence and a presentiment at one and the same time. Wagner's writings are in need of interpretation themselves, but they also assist interpretation, despite all the difficulties.

They are not wildly at odds with the compositions of Wagner. Rather they mediate between works and artistic domains, as Opera and Drama does. In the course of our researches, however, certain focal points emerged and began to form a whole in themselves. Starting with the autobiographical sources, it then became our objective to observe and describe the core of Wagner's Beethoven experience - its structure and interweaving with the biography - as much as its scope, its roots from the standpoint of reception history and grounding in the 'Romantic image of Beethoven'.

The obvious next step was to investigate Beethoven and his works as factors in Wagner's writings on art and in his dramas. Bearing in mind the awkward relationship between Wagner's theory and practice as a composer of music dramas, we made it our aim to explore and sift at any rate partially those traces of his understanding of Beethoven that were preserved in his musico-dramatic output.

His activities as a conductor and 'arranger' of Beethoven's music were considered only inasmuch as they form an intrinsic part of this cluster of focal points. Although this study deals with Wagner's reception of Beethoven, his diverse relations to other composers should not be dismissed as insignificant. After all, he himself often spoke of his links with others. Especially in his youth, he said, he owed much to Mozart but above all Weber and, later on, Marschner and Spontini, not to mention Liszt.

And even the acquaintance with Meyerbeer's grand opera and the example of Mendelssohn had some effect on him. The reasons for our particular choice of subject are, however, the experience of Beethoven that permeates Wagner's whole life, his almost constant thinking about Beethoven and, not least, his veneration of the composer as evidenced by his works. That goes not least for My Life. Nobody would disagree with Otto Strobel that the composer of the Ring, Tristan and Parsifal chose to view certain experiences in a different light from when they were recent and fresh in his mind.

Wagner's letters contradict or amend many details in My Life and as far as facts are concerned, the letters tend to be more reliable than Wagner's other writings. But research undertaken in connection with the Complete Edition has yielded some important new findings - although some of these, in their turn, have given rise to fresh problems. Recently a start was made on a new edition of Wagner's letters, containing all the available texts.

Wagner and Beethoven: Richard Wagner's Reception of Beethoven

Cosima's diaries, beginning in January and ending in January , are an important source which Wagner visualized as a sequel to My Life. The latter is directly followed by his Annals: Cosima's diaries were inaccessible to the public until under the terms of a will; since their publication they have proved to be very helpful to researchers.

Almost inevitably some things are repeated, and there are major difficulties in connection with a textual critique of the originals. But the significance of the diaries is immense. This applies to every aspect of Wagner's reception of Beethoven, including his earliest encounter with the composer. We shall now examine this experience, drawing on a number of statements by Wagner which do not always tally with each other.

At the same time we shall endeavour to throw more light on the function of the autobiographical writings and their value as sources, but also on the problems of interpreting them. Wagner recorded his earliest experience of Beethoven seven times in all. It appears in the following writings, listed in chronological order: In the earliest source, the Red Pocket-Book, Wagner was still particularly close in time and content to the events under review.

Significantly, he speaks of just 'Beethoven's symphonies' in general as inspiring a new passion for music in him. Apparently it was not one particular concert but several experiences, several visits to concerts, that fired the youngster's enthusiasm. We are pointing this out because in two more sources A Communication and The Work and Mission Wagner recalls the impression made by 'Beethoven's symphonies'.

And where he refers, even less specifically, to Beethoven's 'music' in the Sketch and 'Music of the Future' , we will at once think of several experiences. This raises the question of whether Wagner's references to just one symphony A Pilgrimage, My Life represent a stylization of the original experience, undertaken for a definite purpose, under the influence of certain surrounding factors or a fresh experience of Beethoven.

How does the above affect an assessment of A Pilgrimage? The most obvious answer would be that Wagner was offering a poetically motivated stylization of the truth, one closely linked to his fictional treatment of his material. But there is more to it than that. It is no accident that the element of stylization appears in that novella, which can be seen as the first expression of Wagner's Beethoven worship.

The story tells of a pilgrimage to music's holy of holies, and at its climax the master initiates his disciple into the secrets of his art. Arnold Schmitz sees in this a prefiguration of Wagner's later image of Beethoven, where the latter resembles a saint. Indeed with his Beethoven novella, Wagner took the first step towards consciously fashioning his own myth, his self-image.

Only now did Wagner's first experience of Beethoven achieve that moment of illumination which has always been a talking-point in discussions of Wagner. In all likelihood this was the immediate cause of the modifications he made to his own initial source. The original impression, now long past and already growing hazy, became transposed with the immediate experience provided by Beethoven's Ninth, which was the symphony. The old experience was returning on a new qualitative plane, so to speak: It already suggests something of that quest for the past which increasingly drove Wagner to look back on his life, explaining and revising it.

Out of this came new 'editions' of his life and experiences. In My Life Wagner is more specific as regards what he wrote in the Pocket-Book and names the work that made such an indelible impression on him. Ernest Newman has augmented Wagner's statement by saying that it was on 17 January that he must have heard Beethoven's Symphony in A major. What prompted Wagner to underline this biographical detail, the fact that he had heard the Seventh Symphony? No doubt his first concern was to make the biographical facts in My Life as complete as he could fuller than in anything previously published.

But there was also an inner reason. The Seventh Symphony forms part of a progressive experience. My Life sets out Wagner's experience of Beethoven in terms of an ascent: This work's ecstatic rhythmic progressions fascinated Wagner all his life; he had already called it the apotheosis of the dance Art-Work of the Future. In My Life he highlights it for the sake of a narrative that is not only detailed but above all vivid and striking.

The autobiography projects a new 'truth'. The early experience, which was based on Wagner's hearing of several symphonies, is modified to fit in with a particular pattern of responses. It is interesting to find that Berlioz wrote with similar emotion of his own Beethoven experience, and that the Seventh Symphony had been the cause of it.

In a letter of he was already writing as follows: I was very apprehensive about the superb meditation. The listeners who had never heard it before called for a repeat. Oh, it would have driven me crazy the second time if I hadn't wept tears. Produced by the most sombre and musing of geniuses, this astonishing work is poised between all the rapture, simplicity and tenderness that joy can offer.

Oh, unhappy Beethoven - he too cherished in his heart an ideal world of happiness which he was not allowed to enter. In Wagner's account, Beethoven's image 'melded with that of Shakespeare'. Berlioz writes in his memoirs: In an artist's life one thunderclap sometimes follows swiftly on another, as in those outsize storms in which the clouds, charged to bursting with electric energy, seem to be hurling the lightning back and forth and blowing the whirlwind.

I had just had the successive revelations of Shakespeare and Weber. Now at another point on the horizon I saw the giant form of Beethoven rear up. The shock was almost as great as that of Shakespeare had been. Beethoven opened before me a new world of music, as Shakespeare had revealed a new universe of poetry. Of course they form different patterns, the main difference being that Wagner experiences all at once what Berlioz expresses on two separate occasions.

We may wonder if Wagner was aware of Berlioz's descriptions when he dictated the relevant passages in My Life. Wagner might have learnt of Berlioz's memoirs through Richard Pohl. On the other hand Beethoven and Shakespeare had been linked by writers since E. Hoffmann and Amadeus Wendt. Different stages in Wagner's Beethoven experience are more or less evident in the Autobiographical Sketch and 'Music of the Future' as well as My Life.

Admittedly the Sketch is the only other account to show it as an escalation, stressing elements that came after the initial cause of it. After mentioning the 'all-powerful impression' which Beethoven's music made at the Gewandhaus concerts, Wagner refers to the music for Egmont. It was this which made him want to 'provide a similar music' SB 1, p.

Thus we find a strong emphasis on the Egmont music, at the expense of the initial Gewandhaus experience. All the same the two impressions are seen as forming one complex. In My Life p. The reason why he emphasizes it in the Sketch is probably that upon his return to Germany, Wagner wanted to present himself as a composer who had been already significantly influenced in his youth by Beethoven, not least in his opera composing.

As a note to SB 1, Gradations in the experience No. Thoroughbass 'a Beethoven symphony' — illness and recovery as musician 'Beethoven's music' 'Beethoven's music' — writes music for tragedy Leubald und Adelaide Communication to indefinite My Friends several works 'acquaintance with B.

I now got to know his [B. The repercussions of his new Beethoven experience Habeneck were, of course, closely connected with the aim of self-promotion: Beethoven's Ninth had inspired Wagner as a composer. So in the Sketch, Wagner's temporary situation again helped to modify the terms in which he described his original experience of Beethoven. The context of the experience We must remember that it was not one particular concert performance but several such experiences which made Wagner resolve to be a musician.

At the same time we should bear in mind that his recurring experience of Beethoven often happened within the context of the impression which other composers' music was making on him. As late as , Wagner refers to this combination of experiences. For on 9 March Cosima quotes him as saying, 'if I had not received my impressions from Weber and the symphonies of Beethoven, God knows what would have become of me'.

Those statements we have already quoted were nearer in time to the event concerned. But they patently match this brief reminiscence when seen in context. Wagner's earliest statement, the one about a 'newly fired passion for music', reflects a new fit of enthusiasm that was caused by Beethoven. It is, however, unthinkable without a remark which relates to the year of and similarly occurs in the Red Pocket-Book: And in , Beethoven's music evidently aroused Wagner's passion directly in conjunction with the music of another composer. The full entry in the Pocket-Book reads: Get to know Mozart; Beethoven's symphonies.

Newly fired passion for music' A year later, in , what triggered off a fresh bout of enthusiasm was apparently an enthusiasm for Mozart communicated to Wagner by Kienlen, the Magdeburg conductor. Discovery of my passion for music Kiihnlein [sic]. In this respect Beethoven's music was undoubtedly of great importance, especially certain of the symphonies. But there were other contributory factors deriving from the theatre, and hence from opera as well. According to Deathridge, Wagner's claim to have heard Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient as Fidelio must be untrue, because there is no record of a Leipzig performance of Beethoven's opera in Be that as it may, Auber's La Muette de Porlici made such an impact on Wagner that it can still be felt in the Recollections of Auberhe wrote in The long-term effect of Auber also finds expression in Cosima's diaries.

An entry for 9 December contains some reflections on Wagner's relationship to Beethoven and Auber. Recently, too, when it was suggested that R. The point is a crucial one. This is also what makes a performance by Schroder-Devrient important: At first, of course, Wagner would hardly have been fully aware of the basic significance of these earliest impressions. But his mind had registered them, and as he developed as an artist, they took on a clear form and thus significance with regard to his own artistic objectives.

So was instrumental music really the sole cause of Wagner's enthusiasm for music? What about those impressions of the musical stage he gained through his family and sisters, not least Rosalie? Did they not also play an extremely important role from very early on? Was it that Wagner began - and secretly continued - to write music as an.

Did the various criticisms of opera that Wagner voiced as a novice conductor amount to a 'basic critique'? Initially, was it not that he was criticizing the opera of his time and the institutional failings which were bound up with it? And is it legitimate to read Wagner's early work-list selectively, passing over anything, such as the Leubald draft, that does not appear to be related to or validated by a genuinely musical ambition?

Let us take as our starting-point Wagner's earliest experience of music as it relates to his other activities. Let us also begin with the premise that very often an artist's early attempts conceal or obscure gifts he will develop and display with panache, once he has realized his potential.

If we grant equal validity to all the early drafts and trial runs, and extend the young Wagner's work-list beyond , the list will look different to Voss's. Voss leaves out those titles up to the end of which are marked below with an asterisk, and he does not give the works written up to in this context.

Sonata in D minor WWVn, p. Sonata in F minor for piano WWV v, p. Orchestral work in E minor WWVxin, pp. Towards end , Leipzig: Overture in C major WWVxw, p. Beginning of , Leipzig: Sonata in B flat major, 4 hands WWVxvi, pp. Overture in E flat major WWVxvn, p. Piano reduction of J. Haydn, Symphony in E flat major, No. Overture in D minor Concert Ov. Sonata in B flat major for piano, op. End Beginning , Leipzig: Polonaises for piano WWVxxm, pp. Entr'actes tragiques WWVxxv, pp. Grand Sonata in A major for piano, op. Symphony in C major WWVxxix, pp. Beginning of Spring , Leipzig: December January , Magdeburg: But right from the start, Wagner absorbed these impressions within the context of the theatre, dramatic literature and musically heightened scene-painting and stage effects.

This is borne out by Cosima's late diary entry about Wagner's partial orientation to Auber; Wagner's remark was certainly not made for publicity purposes. It would be flying in the face of all the evidence to confine Wagner entirely to instrumental music and purely symphonic ambitions as far as his real intentions are concerned. Beethoven's death Probably the most difficult aspect of Wagner's accounts of his responses to Beethoven is his reaction to the composer's death.

And bound up with it is the question of when the reaction occurred. According to the other sources it must have been in , because of Wagner's visits to the Gewandhaus concerts after his return to Leipzig. In the two aforementioned accounts, however, Wagner locates his first enduring impression in the year He tells us in My Life p.

During —7 n c w a s living apart from his family, who had moved to Prague. But it is still possible that his relatives told him the news, for Beethoven died on 26 March , and Newman records Wagner as paying a second visit to Prague in the spring of that year. Hence the special importance of the sentence 'I asked my sisters about Beethoven and learned that news of his death had just been received. Did this reaction really take place at all? Even in the Red Pocket-Book, Wagner does not make the least mention of it.

Certainly it is a striking fact that his two references to Beethoven's death appear in accounts which are relatively close together in time but were written for different purposes. Beethoven's stated aim in 'Music of the Future' was to 'give my friends here some information, especially about the formal aspect of my artistic intentions'. All it would supply were some personal details that were of particular relevance in this connection. My Life, on the other hand, implied an autobiography which was to be as complete and thorough as possible. So we cannot just say that Wagner mentioned Beethoven's death in 'Music of the Future' for the sake of completeness.

He must have had a stronger reason. The fascination for Wagner of the idea of death as Schopenhauer presented it is well known. The ideas which Schopenhauer imparted to him admit of the following conjecture. Although Wagner never referred to this, it is likely that the idea of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, crucially affected the way he wrote about Beethoven's death. Such an explanation gains in cogency when we consider how familiar he was with this idea; it often figures in his writings. Feuerbach had already broached it in , in his aphorisms Der Schriftsteller und der Mensch.

On the Destiny of Opera illustrates another use of the idea. Here a transmigration forms the starting-point, but Wagner is using the term metaphorically. In practice it was impossible for Shakespeare to act out every one of his roles. The composer, however, achieves this extremely firmly by speaking to us through each of his performers. The soundest technique has infallible laws that govern a transmigration of the soul of the [musical] dramatist into the actor's own body.

By giving the beat for a technically accurate performance of his work, the composer becomes totally at one with the musician performing it. If the same could be said of anyone else's work, it could only be that of a visual artist working with colours or with stone, where one might speak of his soul's transmigration into his inanimate material.

And significantly, it is adumbrated within the context of his responses to Beethoven. The author who is identical with the narrator of the story A Pilgrimage to Beethoven states: I no longer partook of any pleasure other than that of immersing myself so deeply in this genius that Ifinallyimagined I had become a part of him; and as this minute particle I began to esteem myself, to hold loftier ideas and views - in short, to become what sensible people are apt to call a fool.

Wagner was aware that one of the religious sources of metempsychosis was Brahmanism, as is evident from My Life p.