Hugo Wolf

HUGO WOLF IN HIS THIRTY FIFTH YEAR

HUGO WOLF

by

Ernest Newman

With an Introduction by

WALTER LEGGE

and

a new Foreword by

ROELOF OOSTWOUD

Dover Publications, Inc.

Mineola, New York

To KATO

Copyright

Copyright © 1966 by Dover Publications, Inc.

Foreword Copyright © 2012 by Roelof Oostwoud.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition first published in 1966 and reissued in 2012, is an unabridged and corrected republication of the work first published by Methuen & co., London, in 1907 to which has been added a new Introduction and three illustrations. For the 2012 reissue, a new foreword by Roelof Oostwoud has been added.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-23973

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-21579-2

ISBN-10: 0-486-21579-2

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

21579241

www.doverpublications.com

FOREWORD TO

THE 2012 DOVER EDITION

This notable study on the life and works of Hugo Wolf was written and first published in 1907, just 4 years after Wolf’s death. Newman acknowledged that more data and new information would, in time, inevitably come to light. Nevertheless, he was convinced that more than enough information was at hand for a valid portrait of this erratic genius and supreme master of the Lied, or German song. Newman meticulously went through everything in print up to that time about or concerning Wolf, including newspaper and magazine articles and a four volume monograph on Wolf by Ernst Decsey. In addition, he was also given access to private correspondence (albeit with negative and unflattering remarks about colleagues expurgated) between Wolf and a number of important figures in his life. These include Hugo Faisst (1862–1914) amateur baritone and founder in Stuttgart in 1898 of the Hugo-Wolf-Verein, which later became the Internationale HugoWolf-Akademie, as well as composer, conductor and educator Emil Kauffmann (18361909) and Oskar Grohe (1859–1920), a district judge in Mannheim and influential patron of the arts.

Importantly, this present reissue of Newman’s monograph on Hugo Wolf contains valuable material on the composer that has come to light since the book was written, material that was either unavailable or not known to Newman. It is included in the form of a comprehensive and superlatively researched introduction by the legendary E.M.I. record producer Walter Legge (1906–1979), one of the most influential figures in the classical music industry from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. Legge was married to the celebrated German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and not only supervised her extensive recording legacy, he also astutely guided her career. He was, in addition, instrumental in furthering the careers of such important conductors and singers as Herbert von Karajan, Maria Callas, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Josef Krips, Hans Hotter, Otto Klemperer and many others. Walter Legge first supplied his extensive Introduction for an earlier Dover Publications reissue of Newman’s volume in 1966.

In addition to authoring a number of important music books, Ernest Newman was one of the foremost music critics of his time, along with Neville Cardus and George Bernard Shaw. He held the position of music critic of The Sunday Times from 1920 until his death in 1959, nearly forty years later. He is described by Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians as the most celebrated British music critic in the first half of the 20th century. Newman was born William Roberts in Liverpool in 1886, but adopted his nom de plume to specifically underline the new and fresh manner of his approach to his subjects. A distinctive characteristic of his critiques was intellectual objectivity and this so impressed Walter Legge that he went in search of books by Newman, thereby coming across the Hugo Wolf biography. This led to Legge becoming a passionate champion of the works of Hugo Wolf in Britain. He founded the Hugo Wolf Society, which, under his aegis in the 1930s and 40s, was responsible for a major production initiative that resulted in the recording of over two hundred of Wolf’s Lieder. Legge engaged important interpreters of Lieder such as Elena Gerhardt, Alexander Kipnis, Heinrich Schlusnus, Gerald Moore and Michael Raucheisen, to name just a few. It was, in fact, the wonderfully poignant recording by the great Irish tenor John McCormack of Schlafendes Jesus-kind that was my entry, as a young student, to the treasure trove of Lieder by Hugo Wolf. Walter Legge was a longtime head of the Hugo Wolf Society, lifelong promoter of the music of Wolf, and continued to collect comprehensive material on him throughout his life.

Arguably, the most important section (certainly for the students of today) of this Newman volume is his survey and individualistic but cogent and insightful analysis of Wolf’s Lieder. Newman is equally at home with the art form of poetry and that of music and has a fundamental and unique understanding of their interrelationships in songs or Lieder. This is borne out by the impressions of and perspicacious insights into Wolf’s Lieder as laid out in this volume. They reflect the initial impact the originality and brilliance of the songs had on Newman. This music evidently made an overwhelming impression on him and his enthusiasm for his subject is infective. Its spark will not only ignite the curiosity of the reader, but will give him or her an inspired basis on which to build his or her understanding and interpretation of the Lieder. Newman later expanded upon the analyses presented in these 60-some pages in the comprehensive notes he wrote for the Lieder recordings that were put out by the Hugo Wolf Society under Walter Legge. The serious student will therefore also want to acquaint him-or herself with this treasure trove of historical recordings.

Also of particular interest to the serious student will be the erudite chapter on Wolf’s two operas, Der Corregidor and the unfinished Manuel Venegas. These works represent Wolf’s only venture into the area of music drama and the thirty-nine page section on these works still provides one of the most valid explorations and studies of these operas.

This book on Hugo Wolf and his works was, for over 40 years, the only work in the English language on this important composer of the late Romantic period and is today still an important and valid starting point to the understanding of the man and composer Hugo Wolf and his music.

INTRODUCTION TO

THE 1966 DOVER EDITION

by Walter Legge

THE BOOK

This is the first American edition of the book with which Ernest Newman laid the foundations of Hugo Wolf’s great fame. For nearly half a century it was the only Wolf book in the English language and I doubt whether any other monograph has had so much influence on the spread of a composer’s fame.

Ernest Newman’s Hugo Wolf was first published in 1907 and went out of print soon after the First World War. The rights reverted to Newman in 1926. At about this time it became something of a collectors’ piece, and by 1929 dealers were asking as much as nine guineas for a copy. Between 1932 and 1950 Newman was asked at least four times to sanction new editions. He turned down all these offers because he planned to write a new study of Wolf, but, like his long-planned books on Beethoven’s posthumous quartets and on Berlioz, this was never written.

Hugo Wolf had been dead only four years when Newman’s book came out, and the biographical part of it is inevitably incomplete, but hardly ever inaccurate. Following Decsey, Newman remarks that Wolf made no sketches. The first draft was the last. Wolf did make sketches but apparently destroyed them when he had written his first fair copy. This does not alter the fact that Wolf sometimes composed, i.e. sketched and wrote out, in exquisitely clear manuscript, three songs in one day.

For many years after Wolf’s death his family and friends were stubbornly incommunicative on most details of his life. The friends seem to have cherished his memory as dearly as they had cared for the man in life. All Newman had to work on was Ernst Decsey’s four-volume biography (Leipzig, 1903–1906), Wolf’s letters to his friends Kauffmann, Faisst, and Grohe—all of which were given to the world shorn of some of their pungent allusions to his contemporaries—Haberlandt’s Erinnerungen und Gedanken, the Gesammelte Aufsätze über Hugo Wolf (collected and reprinted by the Vienna Hugo Wolf Verein), and some essays and guarded recollections of some of Wolf’s friends and acquaintances which had appeared in various Austrian and German newspapers and magazines. Such important sources of biographical information as his letters to his family, to Rosa Mayreder (the librettist of his only completed opera), to Henrietta Lang, and to Heinrich Potpeschnigg, the four books and numerous articles by Heinrich Werner, and Eckstein’s fascinating autobiography Alte unnennbare Tage had not yet been published.

Nearly thirty years were to pass before the three love affairs which played an important part in Wolf’s life were mentioned outside the inner circle of his friends and the families of the ladies concerned. I cannot remember hearing even the name Vally Franck until 1937, when Friedrich Eckstein (the generous friend who had arranged for, and probably financed, the first publication of songs by Hugo Wolf) gave me a photograph of the lovely girl of good family with whom Wolf was in love from 1878 until 1881. They both destroyed their letters. His short-lived affair in 1894 with Frieda Zerny (an attractive singer engaged at the opera in Mainz), with whom Wolf briefly but seriously contemplated emigrating to the United States, was a less closely guarded secret. His letters to her, copies of which were kindly given to me by Karl Hallwachs, whom she later married, have not been published.

The great attachment of Wolf’s life was undoubtedly that to Melanie Köchert, the wife of his generous and long-suffering friend Heinrich Köchert. It was generally stated and believed that Melanie, with whom Wolf was in love from 1884 until his mind collapsed, had destroyed his letters to her before she jumped to her death from the balcony of her house in the Neuer Markt, Vienna, on March 21, 1906, three years after his death. Fortunately many if not all these letters still exist. Frank Walker, whose biography of the composer was published in 1951, was allowed to read them and use some extracts, but until recently they were otherwise unknown except to her family. Walker described them as incomparably the most beautiful, interesting and revealing that he [Wolf] ever wrote, some of them in their way as consummate as his finest songs. Until we have seen these letters this praise must be taken with a grain of salt. I have yet to read a love letter as eloquent as Wolf’s Heut’ Nacht erhob ich mich, Was für ein Lied, Gesegnet sei durch den die Welt entstund, or An die Geliebte. Walker was not prone to exaggeration but in both his biographies he gives the impression of having fallen in love with his subjects’ mistresses; this is particularly noticeable in his Verdi book, where Strepponi emerges as the protagonista. Out of consideration for the wishes of persons still living Walker was compelled to publish his Wolf biography forty-eight years after the composer’s death without one of its most revealing chapters, the fruits of his tireless research into the strange relationship between the composer and Melanie Köchert.

Since writing the last paragraph I have acquired a book, Hugo Wolf: Briefe an Melanie Köchert, edited by Dr. Franz Grasberger and recently published by Hans Schneider, Tutzing. It contains 245 communications, nearly all of them letters, written between September 11, 1887, and May 13, 1899. The book is invaluable to every student of Wolf because it reveals part of the nature of the longest and most intimate friendship of the composer’s life and reflects more clearly than any other published letters innumerable facets of his character and personality. But the collection is evidently not complete. These letters are not the most beautiful ... [Wolf] ever wrote. There is hardly a sentence in them to be compared with the incandescent passion of his early letters to Frieda Zerny in the spring of 1894. We have still to await the publication of Wolf’s intimate letters to Melanie Köchert before the whole picture is clear.

If the ladies are indistinctly drawn, the biographical section of Newman’s book gives us a vivid pictureof the men around Wolf. Living in an age when public concerts were, by today’s standards, few, when neither cinema nor radio nor television overfilled the leisure hours, when there was no gramophone to enable the music lover to pack a lifetime’s listening into a year of evenings, even the richest amateurs depended upon their own and their friends’ abilities to play and sing. Nowhere today is there a society like that Wolf moved in. His Vienna circle was a mixture of up-and-coming conductors, writers, doctors, university professors, government officials, and fairly rich business people all interested in the arts—particularly music—and nearly all of them capable amateur performers. The richer ones had houses or large apartments in Vienna and a property on one of the lakes in the Salzkammergut or in the Wiener Wald where they spent their summers. In these out-of-town properties of his friends Wolf composed nearly all his best music: at Köchert’s houses in Rinnbach and Döbling, at Eckstein’s in Unterach (the house is now Villa Jeritza), at Werner’s in Perchtoldsdorf, or at Baron von Lipperheide’s in Brixlegg. These friends already had a common interest in their adoration of Wagner, and not only loved his music but swallowed his theories hook, line, and sinker.

PROGRAM OF THE CONCERT GIVEN IN STUTTGART ON JUNE 15, 1896, AT WHICH HUGO WOLF ACCOMPANIED AT THE PIANO

THE WOMEN IN HUGO WOLF’S LIFE

Some of Wolf’s friends had been his fellow students at the Vienna Conservatory and four of them—the brothers Franz and Josef Schalk, Felix Mottl, and Ferdinand Löwe—became famous conductors. Adalbert von Goldschmidt, the darling of Vienna society, was a rich and versatile playboy, a friend and protégé of Liszt, and a composer of operas, oratorios, and songs. The brothers Heinrich and Theodor Köchert were rich jewellers, tall and full-bearded; Wolf nicknamed them Fafner and Fasolt. Schur was a banking official; Dr. Haberlandt, curator of the National Historical Museum, an ethnologist and teacher of Sanskrit; and Hermann Bahr a famous playwright and oneof the most elegant essayists of theepoch. The most remarkable of these characters was Friedrich Eckstein, whose acquaintance Wolf made in a vegetarian restaurant in Vienna in 1882, as I did fifty-five years later in a second-hand bookshop there. Trained as a chemist, Eckstein was an excellent classical scholar; he studied composition with Bruckner and became his unpaid secretary. There was no limit to his interests or enthusiasms and his knowledge was encyclopedic At various times in his life he was friendly with such strangely assorted celebrities as Annie Besant, Freud, Massenet, Mark Twain, Madame Blavatsky, Edison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Even when he first met Wolf he had a large library which he put at Wolf’s disposal, and there is no doubt that the richly stored mind of this engaging eccentric—who took his first pilgrimage to Bayreuth so seriously that he walked there from Vienna—did much to broaden Wolf’s knowledge of literature and philosophy.

Newman knew, but did not print, that Wolf had contracted syphilis in his youth and that his terrible end was due to the resultant general paralysis of the insane. Alma Mahler stated in her not always reliable Memoirs of her husband that Hugo Wolf as a very young man was taken by Adalbert von Goldschmidt into the so-called Lehmgrube (a brothel), where Goldschmidt played dance-music for which he received each time a young woman without charge. He presented this honorarium once to his friend Wolf, and Wolf took away with him ‘the wound that will never heal.’ Since Eckstein gave me the same information in 1937 (before Alma Mahler’s book was published), dating the incident as 1877, there is little reason to doubt the accuracy of Alma Mahler’s account. Eckstein further volunteered the information that Wolf was treated that year both by Dr. Josef Breuer, whose children were taking piano lessons from Wolf at this time, and by Breuer’s friend and collaborator Sigmund Freud.

It has been generally assumed that the spasmodic nature of Wolf’s creative impulse and his abysmal depressions in the non-productive periods were due to the syphilis dormant within him. A more plausible theory was advanced in 1960 by Sir Russell Brain (now Lord Brain), the great British neurologist, who in his Some Reflections on Genius names Wolf among the many men of genius who suffered from cyclothymia, the manic-depressive state. Wolf’s chequered school career and his emotional instability throughout his life fit closely into a known pattern of manic-depressive cycles. He composed in a state of ecstatic clairvoyance, and the hastily written letters and postcards he dispatched to his friends announcing the completion of a new song—sometimes two, occasionally three in one day—when the fever of composing burnt within him are not those of a normal sane man. The incredible miracle is that these delirious messages came from the same brain on the same days as some of the most highly organized, exquisitely felt, and woundingly beautiful songs ever given to the world.

To write the chapter Musical Critic of the ‘Salonblatt’ Newman had only the extracts from Wolf’s criticisms published in Decsey’s book. Wolf was violently opposed to republishing them in book form, and they were not made available until 1912—and even then not quite complete. From the limited evidence at his disposal Newman assessed Wolf’s critical faculties as soundly and shrewdly as if he had had all Wolf’s criticisms before him. The first three paragraphs of this chapter are particularly interesting to students of Newman because they contain some of his first public thinking on the functions and strategy of musical criticism—a subject he was to return to time and time again.

The second part of this book, devoted to the discussion of Wolf’s works, is as valid today as when it was first written. Those of us who have spent the greater part of our lives with Wolf’s works may have personal favourites among the songs which do not always coincide with those to which Newman calls particular attention; but there is not a song he praises which has not stood up to the judgement of posterity.

The whole chapter headed The Songs is unique in musical literature. Here for the first and, I believe, the only time, the problems of song writing, the workings of the song writer’s conscious and subconscious mind, the relationship between poetry and music, have been analysed by a forensic mind equally at home in music and words, equally sensitive to both. All subsequent writing and thinking on the subject of the song have been influenced by this chapter. Newman’s declared and reasoned preferences for Wolf’s settings of many poems which had already been put to music by Schubert and Schumann raised a controversy the echoes of which reached Germany and the U.S.A. (Grove, 5th ed., under Newman); but in explaining the nature of Wolf’s instinct for and handling of poetry and his sense of musical form, Newman enriches our understanding of other great song writers. It is no exaggeration to say that the seeds sown by Newman in this book are bearing fruit even today in the understanding audiences who fill New York’s Carnegie Hall and London’s Festival Hall to hear Elisabeth Schwarzkopf or Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Wolf’s greatest living interpreters, give programmes devoted entirely to his songs. I hope that the affectionate chapter on Der Corregidor, Wolf’s only completed opera, will encourage some of America’s opera workshops to produce this work, which does not need great voices to do it justice, but much love and understanding from singers, conductor, and producer. To say that the orchestration needs some thinning out and adjustment by a most expert hand is not heresy. Wolf had little experience of how his instrumentation sounded in performance; even while he was scoring the opera he confessed to his crazy way of adding new counterpoints.

THE AUTHOR

Ernest Newman raised the writing of books about music and the writing of musical criticisms in newspapers —one the function of an author, the other that of a journalist—to great art. No previous or subsequent writer has understood music so musically, and no one has written about it so comprehensibly for the common man. He had no comparable predecessors in these fields, and it is unlikely that he will be equalled in the foreseeable future. He will have imitators and followers, but no successor.

I have separated the two mainstreams of Newman’s writing about music not because he did so himself but because his subconscious awareness of the readers for whom he was writing determined his manner of address. His books were written with immense care and fanatical passion for truth, to inform and stimulate the best minds of his time and of generations to come; his newspaper criticisms of performances, written, so to speak, with a lighter hand, were designed to help, by their wisdom and wit, a larger public of thinking men and women to understand and enjoy music with their minds as well as through their senses. Newman had no use for music as ear ointment.

His mental gifts were prodigious, and he tended and developed them to the end of his life. Learning came easily to him and sat lightly upon him. He had endless intellectual curiosity and a memory, even at ninety, which gave him, for the subjects close to his heart, almost total recall. Less than a week before he died he talked to me for fully half an hour about Nietzsche’s lack of moral integrity. The words came from him in sentences as lucid, well-formed, and fine-nerved as any prose he had ever written. He quoted letters and dates which I noted as he talked. The same night I checked the dates and quotations; they were as accurate as if they had been copied. I have never known a man so rich in knowledge, so wise, so well versed in such a wide range of subjects, so quick in perception, or so dispassionate and just in judgement.

As a musician he was entirely self-taught and the shrewd sense of self-preservation which kept him clear of the British schools and colleges of music (which he held in pitying contempt all his life) gave him an independent and international outlook unique among musicians of any nationality. He left Liverpool University intending to enter the Indian Civil Service, but his doctor advised him that the Indian climate would not suit his health. He became a bank clerk. It is strange to think that Ernest Newman’s Gluck and the Opera (1895)—still one of the most erudite books on the nature of Gluck’s reforms—and A Study of Wagner (1899) were written by a clerk working by day in the offices of a provincial bank! In later years he spoke with affection of his life in the bank, where his duties made a minimal call on his intelligence, leaving him free to think about music by day, the short working hours giving him long evenings to study and write.

Much of his early writing was on non-musical subjects: philosophy, religion, drama, literature, and even banking. Later he wrote occasionally about boxing, a sport he loved to watch and of which he had had practical experience and some expertise as an amateur. He never missed a big fight. Even in his late sixties he kept himself fit and active with daily spells at the punching ball, and at that time he would race me, a man less than half his age, up or down the large staircase of the National Liberal Club. At eighty he was still remarkably active, and one evening, demonstrating to my wife the judo art of self-defence, he pitched all hundred-and-ninety pounds of me over his shoulder!

His famous controversies with Bernard Shaw in The Nation in 1910 and 1914 on Strauss’s Elektra and fosephslegende had shown that with the rapier he was as swift, and with the broad-sword as hard-hitting, as the great Irishman, but it was not until 1919, when he was fifty and world-famous, that he settled in London as musical critic of the Observer. After a year he moved to the Sunday Times, where he stayed until he retired a couple of months before his ninetieth birthday. The effect of Newman’s regular columns in