Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Music of the future’? The nature of the Wagnerian inheritance
- 2 ‘Wagner of the Lied’? Wolf as critic of Wagner and Wagnerism
- 3 Small things can also enchant us – Wolf's challenge to nineteenth-century views of song
- 4 ‘Poetry the man, music the woman’? Wolf's reworking in his Mörike songs of Wagner's aesthetics of words and music
- 5 The integrity of musical language – questions of form and meaning in Wolf's Goethe songs
- 6 The Wolfian perspective – comparisons with the songs of Strauss and Mahler
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - ‘Music of the future’? The nature of the Wagnerian inheritance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Music of the future’? The nature of the Wagnerian inheritance
- 2 ‘Wagner of the Lied’? Wolf as critic of Wagner and Wagnerism
- 3 Small things can also enchant us – Wolf's challenge to nineteenth-century views of song
- 4 ‘Poetry the man, music the woman’? Wolf's reworking in his Mörike songs of Wagner's aesthetics of words and music
- 5 The integrity of musical language – questions of form and meaning in Wolf's Goethe songs
- 6 The Wolfian perspective – comparisons with the songs of Strauss and Mahler
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
When in 1900 the famous Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick labelled Mahler, Strauss and Wolf together as the ‘Musical Secession’, he could hardly have found a less congenial group of bedfellows. Wolf thought Strauss's music affected madness, Mahler hated Wolf's songs for their emphasis on ‘de-cla-ma-tion’, while Strauss and Mahler respected each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. One might say that Hanslick was revealing his ignorance of the complexity of post-Wagnerian movements and relying on the simplest of cultural distinctions. For it is true that Mahler, Strauss and Wolf can be quickly identified as those who believed in the artist as revolutionary hero – as against artists who placed emphasis on respect for the past. If Hanslick still defined artistic ‘secession’ in 1900 as leaving behind any commonly agreed criteria of beauty, demanding the freedom to establish one's own standards of truth and value, then all three would be ‘secessionists’ without question. But then so would be almost every other well-known Austro-German composer of the late nineteenth century, except perhaps for the notable case of Brahms. Brahms's music certainly continued to focus on the power of Classical forms and technique; but as Schoenberg pointed out in his essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’ this direct continuity with the past was a complex and individual achievement. In Austria or Germany in the late nineteenth century any norms of musical expectation were more easily filtered through Wagner than Brahms, but with confusing consequences, for Wagner's example tended to set all notions of tradition, belonging and secession on their heads.
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- Information
- Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance , pp. 4 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999