Decadence and Desire: The "Wilhelm Meister" Songs of Wolf and Schubert

Abstract

The lyrics from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahren haunted more than one generation of German composers. What Friedrich Schlegel called their music and romantic enchantment prompted important settings from Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf, among others.' Hugo Wolf's Wilhelm Meister songs are among his finest, but they are exceptional among his fifty-odd Goethe Lieder in one respect. Wolf ordinarily avoided setting texts by Goethe that had already been set by Schubert. The only other exceptions of consequence are Prometheus, Ganymed, and Grenzen der Menschheit: the trilogy of songs about mortal limits that closes Wolf's Goethe collection, as the trilogy of harper songs from Wilhelm Meister opens it. The standard explanation for this state of affairs, established by Ernest Newman in the biography he published in 1907, three years after the composer's death, is that Wolf would not set a text if he felt that Schubert had set it effec-

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.