Jenner versus Wolf: The Critical Reception of Brahms's Songs

Abstract

By the end of the nineteenth century there were two distinct evaluations of Brahms's songs. While many of Brahms's friends praised his ability to interpret texts, Hugo Wolf, and his followers, decried the songs' declamation and asserted that the music did not reflect the meaning of the texts. Such opinions have been repeated throughout this century, and still today most critiques of Brahms's songs stem directly from Wolf or are influenced by his text-setting principles. Even when writers marginalize Wolf's criticisms, their techniques for analyzing text-music relationships are often guided by his ideals, and particularly by his style of declamation. Moreover, since Wolf was a contemporary of Brahms and his techniques were also used by other contemporary composers, this type of analysis has a special status as it seems to have historical validity. But what of the other point of view: surely Brahms's admirers should be taken into account. Reviews of Brahms's published songs and their performances appeared in the music press regularly throughout Brahms's career, and many were quite positive. Similarly, the first biographies of the composer favorably described the expressive character of many of these works. The authors of these volumes, including Hermann Deiters and Max Kalbeck, were often friends of Brahms, and many of his other friends discussed these songs in letters to each other and to the composer.' Most of these people were talented amateur or professional musicians, including Clara Schumann, Elizabet von Herzogenberg, Georg Henschel, and Theodor Billroth.2 These sources