In June 1853, Clara Schumann set to music six inset-poems from the novella Jucunde, hot off the press earlier that year, by the minor poet Hermann Rollett. Schumann and Rollett actually met in Vienna in July 1856, shortly after her husband’s death, and she gave him a presentation copy of her Op. 23 songs. The young Rollett was a political firebrand; he wrote differently after the revolution ended in failure, but he included some of his earlier poems in Jucunde, and covert hints of continued adherence to former doomed ideals are still apparent. So too with Robert and Clara Schumann: both harboured republican sympathies, and both would signal their disillusionment and unchanged political views in several of their songs from the 1850s. If these works seem harmless at first hearing, semi-hidden hints of underlying politics emerge on closer examination. From Robert Schumann’s ‘Des Sennen Abschied’, Op. 79 No. 22; ‘Heimliches Verschwinden’, Op. 89 No. 2; and ‘Warnung’, Op. 119 No. 2, we arrive at Clara Schumann’s ‘Geheimes Flüstern’, Op. 23 No. 3, whose harmonic, tonal and motivic elements hint to the cognoscenti of sadness over political failure and of unconquerable hope for the future.

Introduction

‘Man is a social being – that is why he has built cities, why he goes out in the streets with others of his kind, and why the salon was created.’ So wrote Adalbert Stifter (1805–68) in the early 1840s, in his part-affectionate, part-satirical study of Vienna’s salon scene. By that time, he could survey the diverse types of salons proliferating all around him – political, aesthetic, literary, etc. – in order to praise those who remained true to the original goal of the salon: merriment (Heiterkeit) in cultivated company. Those who excoriate salon life, he concludes, have not experienced it: ‘Why, the entire world is itself a salon.’

One of Vienna’s earlier salons was just such a case study. ‘People are born to be sociable. Only in association and traffic with other people can one attain that degree of development … that raises us above the animal kingdom’, wrote Caroline Pichler (1769–1843), whose life revolved around cultivated sociability and writing. Between solitude at her writing desk and evening repartee with the gifted and powerful, she carved out a distinctive identity for herself in literary and political realms largely dominated by men. Her salon, the Swedish poet Per Atterbom famously said, was equalled as a tourist attraction only by St Stephen’s Cathedral; if there is a hint of sarcasm in his words, there is also recognition of achievement. Some of the anecdotes in which figures from the Schubertian realm appear in her salons are captivating: for example, it was the poet of ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’, Friedrich von Stolberg, who whispered to Pichler the news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba as one of her Abendgesellschaften was just getting underway. A prolific writer, she was famous in her day, with several of her most popular novels translated into French, English, Danish, Czech, Italian and Romanian, and published as far away as America. But later literary trends resulted in her consignment to the remaindered shelf by 1900, with the exception of her lively memoirs, entitled Denkwürdigkeiten aus meinem Leben (Memorable Moments from My Life), published in 1844, the year after her death.

Whenever something is published, it has the possibility of becoming the proverbial stone thrown into a pond, with ripples traveling farther and farther away from the original object. If we emend the fluid analogy so that the ripples themselves become publications, we have a rough analogy for the intricate “back story” of certain nineteenth-century songs, in which scholarly, political, and historical prose publications become sources of ideas for a poem that is subsequently set to music, in a process that might extend over years or decades. With each new ripple, the context changes, the audience is different, the currents shift in response to altered circumstances. What follows is a case history of this sort of “ripple effect” in which a late-eighteenth-century scholarly journal lurks behind a poem from the 1820s, and the poem in turn engenders an extraordinary song with resonances in the political climate of the 1840s.

Schumann and ethnography are not categories one ordinarily encounters cheek-by-jowl. But in one of his most unusual songs, “Abends am Strand” (Evenings on the beach), op. 45, no. 3, this composer chose a poem by Heinrich Heine, “Wir saßen am Fischerhause” (We sat by the fisherman's house), in which that supreme ironist compounds romantic Wanderlust, Bildung via travel literature, and confrontations of German “Kulturmensch” with the “Other” in a potent lyrical package. Among the panoply of sources to which Heine's words respond was a journal founded by the prolific ethnographer Christoph Meiners, whose outpourings the young Heine read in the ducal library in Düsseldorf before he went to university in Göttingen in 1820.

If lyric poetry is language made memorable by ordered patterning and rhythmic disposition, what happens when music is brought forcibly to bear on poetic words? What does music add, what does it subtract, how is the experience of language altered by musical tones and rhythms? Questions multiply in mid-air as one ponders the matter: what constitutes an invitation to musical setting in a poem? What makes some poems/poetic repertories attractive to composers, and what seems to exclude music? If music's linear progress through time destroys those experiences elicited by the sight of a formal structure on the printed page, the understandings born when we recognize enjambment and formal structure and line length, etc., can it compensate for such losses by means of harmonies, key relationships and the stuff of music? What happens when the singing voice semi-obliterates words with music's overtones and echoing resonance? What in a poem does the composer emphasize and what does he or she suppress and for what speculative reasons? What are the various factors in a composer's decisions about the metamorphosis of a poem into a song? Why are some superb composers so unsuccessful at song composition while others find in this genre their heart's métier? In the former category, Bruckner comes to mind, with his imposing symphonies and piffling songs, few in number for reasons that soon become obvious; happily, the latter category has numerous denizens. And on and on ….

If readers should perhaps take Strauss's statement to the great singer Hans Hotter with a barrel of salt, given the composer's primary dedication to opera, it is nevertheless true that, from beginning to end, he wrote songs. He lived around singers his entire life, after all; in his boyhood, he heard his aunt Johanna Pschorr – a gifted amateur mezzo-soprano – sing, and his father Franz Strauss played the horn in orchestral performances with some of the best singers of the day. Later, Richard's wife Pauline de Ahna was an accomplished professional soprano at the time of their marriage. In fact, Strauss began composing songs when he was a mere six-and-a-half years old: the earliest of thirty-two youthful songs without opus numbers, “Weihnachtslied” (“Christmas Song”) on a poem by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (the poet of Schubert's “Die Forelle”), was composed in 1870. There are gems to be found in this repertory composed before Strauss deemed his songs publishable; we discover, for example, that his love of Ludwig Uhland's poetry began early with such sensitive songs as “Die Drossel” (“The Thrush”), while “Der müde Wanderer” (“The Weary Wanderer”) on a poem by August Hoffmann von Fallersleben is another worthwhile creation.

Mendelssohn began composing songs as a child – his setting of “Raste Krieger, Krieg ist aus” of 1820 anticipates Schubert's setting of the same text from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake by five years – and continued to engage the genre throughout his life. One scholar has observed that in the span of twenty-eight years from 1819 to 1847, there was scarcely a single month in which he was not occupied with song composition. He published fifty-four songs with opus numbers (opp. 8, 9, 19[a], 34, 47, 57, and 71) and thirteen without opus numbers during his lifetime; after his death, thirty-one additional songs have been published, with approximately thirty-five either unpublished or available only in facsimile. But the 135 or so songs have often received less than their due, in part because many are apt for performance by amateurs, because they reflect salon culture in Vormärz Berlin, and because their composer does not probe Romantic subjectivity after the fashion of Schubert or Schumann. Reappraisal of Mendelssohn's lieder, however, reveals greater variety and depth than some have supposed. There are songs which make few concessions to an amateur musician's limitations, such as “Andres Maienlied” (Another May Song), op. 8, no. 8, or the “Reiselied” (Journeying Song), op. 34, no. 6; there are songs which acknowledge complex poetry in complex ways; there are poetic tastes to be accounted for and an aesthetic of song composition to be defined. This repertory holds riches still to be mined.

By the time that the fiery, fifteen-year-old Wolf (1860–1903) from the town of Windischgraz in what was then Lower Styria (now Slovenjgradec in Slovenia) arrived in Vienna in 1875 to study at the Conservatory, the Lied had a rich history and an immense repertory, with more songs rolling off the presses each year. The question of how to compose Lieder in an original manner – and originality was a constant desideratum of late Romanticism – when so much German lyric poetry had been colonized many times over was complicated in this instance by a young composer's Wagner-mania. Comparing his predicament to that of a seedling tree trying to grow in the shadow of a mighty oak, the young Wolf struggled to assimilate the music of Schumann and Schubert, Wagner and Liszt, in the formation of “Wölfer's own howl,” as he dubbed his unique compositional voice.

The successful outcome of those struggles was a Lied aesthetic whose true originality we are only beginning to appreciate. In his brief compositional maturity, Wolf made complicated use of Lied traditions in order to forge a style in which late Romanticism's extensions of tonality were applied to nuanced, multivalent interpretations of older poetry. Not for him the poetic avant-garde: there is a revealing anecdote about Wolf reading rhapsodic effusions hot off the press and hopping up and down in rage at the pretentiousness of the poems. Instead, he gravitated to earlier generations of nineteenth-century poets, including three of the century's greatest masters of German lyric poetry: Goethe, Eichendorff, Mörike. Wolf once stated defiantly – he was challenging Schubert with this assertion – that certain poems had to await the creation of a post-Wagnerian tonal language before they could find full realization in music

Few generalisations are safe, but the following one is perhaps more defensible than many others: the coming together of words and music is a Hydra-headed phenomenon, changeable from composer to composer, era to era, place to place, and it is always fraught with difficulties. Song is both natural, that is, an innate impulse (to heighten words by singing them precedes recorded history) and unnatural (words and music are two different sign-systems), and its agonistic tensions were the source of continuing debate in the later nineteenth century, especially given the commercial viability of the genre. Songs abounded: by the later decades of the century, the composer Peter Cornelius could rightly speak of an endless stream of Three Songs issuing from German music firms, while the immense girth of Ernst Challier’s Grosser Lieder-Katalog (Great Song Catalogue) of 1885 testifies to the proliferation which prompted Cornelius’s half-exasperated, half-rueful comment. He was, after all, a contributor to the floodtide, composing both song cycles (including Vater unser, Op. 2; Trauer und Trost, Op. 3; Rheinische Lieder, Op. 7; and the popular Weihnachtslieder, Op. 8) and individual songs. Whatever the assertions of singing ‘as the birds sing’ – so proclaims Goethe’s Harper in ‘Der Sänger’ (The Minstrel), a ballad replete with ironies – or of folklike naïveté, the nineteenth-century lied was never unselfconscious, and by this point it had its own history to contend with as well.

The fictive insane, male and female, are stock characters in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings across the literary spectrum from highbrow to lowbrow. Goethe's depictions of insanity in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Torquato Tasso join forces with less exalted (but still notable) works such as Christian Heinrich Spiess's Biographien der Wahnsinnigen (Biographies of the Insane) and downright trashy (but influential) “Gothick” novels populated by Bedlamites galore, many of them inspired by Matthew Gregory (“Monk”) Lewis's spine-tingler Ambrosio, or, The Monk. History was cooperating mightily with the trend, since the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars gave Europeans ample opportunity to survey madness writ large over the landscape, and so too was science, which generated an outpouring of hysteria theory and re-conceptualizations of madness during the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. Novelists and poets, opera librettists and playwrights, all took note, among them Mörike, whose character Agnes in Maler Nolten represents certain early nineteenth-century notions of female hysteria leading to madness. That Mörike both subscribed to certain misogynistic characterizations of women and yet understood that women were trapped by the ignorance imposed on them, with terrible consequences for everyone, adds to the novel's complexity.

En route to her death, Agnes sings, and she does so in part because Goethe had made doomed young women sing before her.

Looking at a portrait of the twenty-nine-year-old Mörike, one sees what could be the archetypal image of a shy, refined poet (Illus. 1). But twenty-nine-year-olds have usually, then and now, learned the difference between roseate love in literature and the grittier stuff of sex in real life, fraught with contingencies of pain, power, disease, pregnancy, exploitation, and the ephemerality of attraction. If they were writers, they could, and often did, speak of sexuality in their works along a gamut which runs from pornography (its purposes prurient and commercial rather than aesthetic) to high poetic art, the latter inevitably more rare than the former, and what they wrote is a mirror of their own erotic psychology and of the society that shaped them. The balance between frankness and euphemism, fantasy and fact, society's stereotypes and individuality, varies from one work to another – and there are many works which partake of erotica, even where they are not defined as such. The best writers traffic in what truly matters, and the coupling (or not) of sex with love in heart and mind appears on anyone's short list of life's larger concerns.

They were certainly fodder for poetry in Mörike's world because he conceived of a problematic link between eroticism and the making of art, and he wrote of that vexed pairing in multiple literary guises.

In the summer of 1890, when Hugo Wolf was attempting to explain his philosophy of art to his new friend, the Stuttgart composer Emil Kauffmann (1836–1909), he cited works by Eduard Mörike as a perfect example of the kind of artistic truth he too sought to create:

The context for this impassioned passage is distressing – Wolf was trying to prove that Wagner was superior to Brahms (Wolf dubbed his detestation of his older contemporary “my anti-Brahmimentum”) – but the letter is still crucial for what it tells of Wolf's attraction to this poetic repertoire. Wolf even mimics Mörike's Baroque-influenced trafficking in oxymoron, among the devices this poet used to evoke the intensity, complexity, ambiguity, and suffering of life.

If music and poetry are the sister arts, so says tradition, they are also the odd couple. They do different things in fundamentally different languages; even where they seem to come together, they have different large tales to tell. It is symptomatic of their dissimilarities that actual collaboration – a poet and composer working together – is a rarity in the history of song. Even those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets who desired musical settings of their verse were seldom asked for their assent or consulted about their wishes in the matter; the usual practice was a composer's appropriation of a poem without even the poet's knowledge, much less his or her consent. Music's conventional obeisances to poets and poetry are thus in some measure a guilty façade to conceal a form of theft in which an existing work of art is not only robbed but used and sometimes abused for purposes unimagined by the original creator. No longer poetry per se, it undergoes a sea-change – whether for better or worse is out of the helpless (often dead) wordmonger's hands.

One of the oddest of odd couples is the pairing of Eduard Mörike (1804–75) and Hugo Wolf, despite the fact that they are often cited as “the perfect marriage” of poetry and music. But even a skeletal outline of their lives makes it apparent that their arts issued from very different experiences and perspectives – two more unlike creatures would be difficult to imagine.