The German «Lied» after Hugo Wolf

Figures

CHAPTER 5:  Hans Pfitzner

CHAPTER 6:  Hanns Eisler

CHAPTER 7:  Paul Hindemith

CHAPTER 8:  Arnold Schönberg

CHAPTER 9:  Alban Berg

CHAPTER 9:  Anton Webern

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Preface

Research into the early twentieth-century German Lied has been greatly overshadowed by extensive critical and musicological investigation of the repertoire of the previous century, and the challenge of researching musical and literary changes beyond that fertile period and into the early years of the twentieth century has, so far, not been addressed in equivalent detail. Lieder recitals today still favour the established composers of the nineteenth century, and largely ignore German creativity beyond Hugo Wolf, which would seem to confirm the claim of musicologist Jack Stein:

The production of that extremely intimate chamber form known as the German Lied, which at its most exalted moments achieves so close a rapport between poem and music as to approach a union, came to an end when Hugo Wolf’s last songs were written.¹

While it is acknowledged that no historical period has a defined beginning and ending, and that any artistic genre waxes and wanes in its developmental stages, the implication is that Hugo Wolf’s final compositions in the form, written during the last decade of the nineteenth century, brought the Lied to a point where its unique partnership of poetry and music could develop no further. This investigation will bring to light that this was not the case, uncovering the years after Wolf’s death, in 1903, during which inspiring contributions to the Lieder repertoire came into being, culminating in the achievements of Anton Webern some twenty years later. These offered not only opportunities for enriching the future repertoire, but also examples of the extent to which the arts were reacting to the increasingly unsettled early years of the twentieth century. This does not merely signify that a definitive end to the genre was simply delayed for two decades, but it marks ← xi | xii → a significant point beyond which the Lied could be said to have diversified beyond close relationship with Stein’s characteristic identity of the genre as an ‘extremely intimate chamber form’.

The Lied thrived during the nineteenth century, during which the intimate ambience of the soiree and the salon concert provided ideal performance environments that were conducive to songs of reflection and romance. This is not a derogatory claim, but an expression of the importance of contextualising the Lied in order to assess the challenge it faced in moving from a relatively comfortable niche in the nineteenth century, into years of greater artistic turbulence. James Parsons poses the question, ‘Does the Lied truly figure in the history of twentieth-century music, or was this the age, as many have insisted, that saw the “death of song”?’² His subsequent admission that it is a difficult question to answer, possibly highlights both the vagueness of the enquiry and the evasiveness shown by so many writers who prefer to claim that there was no place for the Lied beyond the salons of nineteenth-century Germany. Yet the String Quartet and the Sonata are also self-contained, intimate and concentrated genres which have retained consistent presences in the output of contemporary composers and, perhaps more significantly, in recital programmes. This would seem to indicate that it is the presence of text which puts the Lied into a more complex and questionable category, in which contemporary relevance becomes a significant issue. This study therefore takes an essentially interdisciplinary approach, with the aim of giving equal focus to musical and textual components, avoiding irrelevant debate about the supremacy of either. The extremely specific character of the Lied gives the opportunity to look at changing perceptions in both literature and music, as well as the wider issues of artistic logistics concerning an art form in which so much content was concentrated into such a small structure. This investigation is, therefore, divided into two parts, in order to provide ← xii | xiii → a broad background from which to examine specific composers and their contribution to the genre.

The four chapters of Part One present a broad overview of the artistic environment and the genre identity of the early twentieth-century Lied, looking firstly at the artistic landscape in which the Lied was situated as the twentieth century began, the environment in which it was thriving and the composers who represented past, present and future directions. The ideas of literary Modernism and their implications for, and relevance to, the musical world are discussed in Chapter 2, which is followed by a chapter devoted to an examination of the roots from which the Lied grew and its subsequent evolution and diversification of identity, which culminated in the transformation brought about by the Lieder of Anton Webern. The fourth chapter reveals the powerful written musical discourse of the early twentieth century, through which the extreme polarity of ideas about tradition and innovation convey the turbulent situation in which the Lied had not only to survive, but also to flourish. Composers have been selected as representatives of specific works which illustrate different approaches to Lieder composition, and the possibilities these offered for the future development of German song.

Part Two comprises detailed case studies in which the work of six composers whose contribution to the Lieder repertoire during the first three decades of the twentieth century signpost very different approaches to literature, to music and to the function of song within the cultural and social environment of the time. Overcoming the restrictions imposed by the identification of the modernist years according to date boundaries, which create particular difficulty for an interdisciplinary study, these selected Lieder composers will act as timeline indicators of the journey forward, as well as providing an indication of the responses to the challenges that involved. Adherence to tradition and the work of Schumann and Brahms is exemplified by Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949), whose Lieder form the main part of his output and reflect strong roots in the past as well as tentative, but nonetheless potentially promising, elements of individuality. A broad spectrum of poetic texts arguably reflected more progressive thinking than is apparent in the music of his songs, which are rarely performed today. Baroque structures combined with modernising new ideas are represented ← xiii | xiv → by Hanns Eisler (1898–1962) and Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), both of whom, in their very different ways, addressed the need to overcome the exclusivity of music and allow it to become the rightful possession of the layman as much as the scholar. Although Hindemith was not primarily drawn to Lieder composition, he contributed one of the most substantial and interesting song cycles to the twentieth-century repertoire with his two settings of Rainer Maria Rilke’s group of poems depicting scenes from the life of Mary, Das Marienleben, written in 1923 and extensively revised for republication in 1948. Eisler’s Zeitungsauschnitte provides a unique example of the potential for merging ‘high’ and ‘low’ art song into a new genre of Cabaret-Lied, in which direct communication with the audience is achieved without the intrusion of the individual personality of the performer. By contrast, Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) and his pupils, Alban Berg (1885–1935) and Anton Webern (1883–1945), stand at the heart of musical Modernism and their Lieder, possibly of all their output, most clearly show the formative development of the new creativity of the early twentieth century. All three set the work of Stefan George (1868–1933), an iconic poet for the modernist break with nineteenth-century aesthetics, who held poetry to be an absolute of aesthetic statement in its own right. Schönberg and Webern were also strongly attracted to the work of controversial poet, Richard Dehmel (1863–1920), whose lyrical poetry was regarded as too explicitly sensual by many of his contemporaries, but who nevertheless enjoyed great popularity during his lifetime. Berg turned away from poetry in his setting of the prose of the eccentric Viennese writer Peter Altenberg (1859–1919), whose work encompassed sophisticated essays, semi-autobiographical prose sketches and aphorisms and who was also highly regarded by his contemporaries.