Instrumental music and the ‘Christnacht’ cantata

6. Instrumental music and the ‘Christnacht’ cantata.

When Wolf began this composition, he had recently contracted syphilis, and his score bears the Faustian motto ‘Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren’; one could almost declaim those words to the double-dotted fortissimo chords at the beginning of the Grave introduction. Nothing in his earlier teenage compositions had given reason to suspect him capable of such intensity at such length, and one can only speculate that the combination of immersion in late Beethoven and awareness of mortality produced such a work. The Grosse Fuge was the obvious model for the gigantic leaps, textual extremes, and treatment of dissonance in the introduction, and the spiky counterpoint of the first movement proper, which stretches the sonata principle close to breaking point. The extravagantly sweeping scalar gestures for the first violin in the introduction, the equally dramatic way in which the two violin parts cross paths when the Grave returns, the long crescendos (bars 314–49, for example), all convey a cataclysmic sense of turmoil. The Scherzo recalls the Allegro assai vivace ma serioso of Beethoven's F minor Quartet op.95, and is Beethovenian as well in the plethora of off-beat accents and the contrast between the ‘sehr ausdrucksvoll und sangbar’ middle section and the forceful dotted rhythms (the movement is marked ‘Resolut’) on either side of it. The slow movement begins with an obvious reference to Wagner, the hushed, high chords evocative of the beginning of the Lohengrin prelude or, perhaps more suggestively, the ‘pardon’ motif in Tannhäuser; for Wolf, to whom erotic transgression and suffering were a reality, the citation seems personal. What follows is not Wagnerian, however, but a continued transmutation of late Beethoven through youthful Wolf. Such overt Beethovenian influence recurs only in the Mörike song Der Genesene an die Hoffnung (in which Wagnerian influence is also apparent), likewise a work charting a spiritual progression through despair to faith and hence to recuperation. But even the expressive cello recitative and the long-breathed cantilena which emerges after the Wagnerian head-motif do not endure for long before extreme tension intrudes in the form of hammering figures which reappear near the end, although the movement ends peacefully. The energetic finale, combining aspects of both sonata and rondo forms, prefigures the manner of the later Italienische Serenade in several passages; by 1884 the 24-year-old Wolf was no longer the fraught youth who had begun this quartet, and the finale accurately registers the musical distance he had travelled in the interim.

In Hermann Bahr's reminiscences of Wolf one hears of Bahr and Edmund Lang returning at a disreputable hour to the Trattnerhof rooms they shared with Wolf in 1884, to be met with Wolf's dramatic readings from Kleist's plays; later, Wolf would insist upon prefacing each performance of his songs with a reading of the poem, the words thus separately acknowledged as a vital part of the content. Wolf was obsessed with Kleist, who lived in the age of Goethe but created denizens of a modern world in which identity and consciousness are dubious quantities, and ‘truth’ resides only in the unconscious. His principal characters are mysterious to themselves and to others; the excess of self wreaks havoc, and everything in the universe is simultaneously its opposite: love = hate and desire for domination, leading to murder. In Penthesilea (1807), the title character, the queen of the Amazons, leads her warrior maidens to Troy and wages war on both sides, on men of any nation or kind. Enamoured of Achilles, as he is of her, Penthesilea avenges her subjection to him in love and war when she incites her war-hounds to rip him to pieces and joins them in rending his flesh. Brought back from murderous madness to awareness of what she has done, she wills herself to die, slain from within by the erotic chaos which rages throughout the entire 24 scenes. For Wolf, an excessive personality fascinated with psychological workings, and much preoccupied at the time with the havoc inflicted by love, this was the perfect source for a symphonic tone poem, but if ever a work was a Schmerzenskind, this is it. The disaster with Richter was followed by sporadic attempts at revision, including the addition of english horn and percussion parts in 1897, after his confinement in the asylum, and a new eight-page section composed at the same time and depicting Penthesilea's memories of childhood (the pages were destroyed in an air-raid on Berlin). He never heard it again after the 1886 Vienna Philharmonic trial, although he briefly considered having his tone poem performed at a Wagner memorial concert in 1890. It is not surprising that he even thought in his insanity of turning it into the overture to a long-dreamt-of Kleist opera.

Disdainful of post-Beethovenian symphonies, Wolf sought to counter ‘the barren soil of absolute music’ with a more poetic music which he felt perforce had to break out of symphonic convention in order to create plastic form moulded to literary ideas. This was how Liszt, in Wolf's view, had created such works as Tasso, and this was the model he would follow; it was after his meeting with Liszt on 6 April 1883 that he began the initial compositional work on Penthesilea. Wolf's ambitions were not small: the characters are of epic scale, and so are their passions, while the play is filled with massive panoramas of ritual and conflict. Wolf sought a musical narration of similar heroic stature, incorporating the extremes of contrast in Kleist's universe. Perhaps in an attempt to outdo his revered model Liszt (despite his ardent praise of this composer he wrote of Liszt's music as ‘more intellectual than deeply felt’), he scored his tone poem for a giant and highly colouristic orchestra with, for example, antiphonal trumpets on either side to enclose the listener in sounds of war. The formal structure for the work is a mixture sui generis of characterization and quasi-narrative, beginning with two shorter sections entitled ‘Departure of the Amazons for Troy’ and ‘Penthesilea's Dream of the Rose Festival’ (a festival of love in which selected Amazons mate with chosen captured heroes). Availing himself of the sort of thematic symbolism evident in Liszt's Faust-Symphonie, Wolf fashions the principal themes presented at the start of the first two sections as different manifestations of the same material, the first section in a dark, stormy F minor, the second in the relative major with the rhythmic tensions of the theme's initial appearance as war music banished. One thinks inevitably of Berlioz (like Liszt, another of Wolf's most important early models) and Les Troyens upon hearing the march of the Amazons, with much ado for the four horns, four trumpets, three trombones and tuba, in addition to the full complement of wind, strings and percussion. The tone poem thus begins with successive sections depicting Penthesilea's duality before bringing the sides of her nature into musical conflict in the final, and by far the longest, section of the tone poem (‘Battles, Passions, Madness, Destruction’), a huge development section of all the themes previously presented, plus new thematic material which grows from the old.

As in the Intermezzo, Wolf resorts to rondo form, but rondo modified by a quasi-dramatic conception in which the instruments seem like dramatis personae in a comedy of love. The initial section can be heard fancifully as the lover several times readying himself for a declaration, the syncopations and trills of the preparatory gestures leading to more preparation until at last (bar 130) the change of metre to 6/8 ushers in a passionate outburst. The main theme returns, with new and florid countermelodies in the second violin, followed in turn by a dialogue between the cello in fiery recitative passages and the other instruments responding, at first mockingly and then, as if in acquiescence, with the cello's first figure. After further dancelike strains, the rondo recurs, and the work closes as it began, with the soft strumming and twanging of mock guitars. Everything about the music suggests characterization and scene-painting, including the clear sense of dialogue or colloquy between the instruments, the symbolic invocation of speech in the cello recitative, the gestural liveliness of the sweeping violin flourishes and the predominance of the first violin (the object of the cello's affections?); one thinks of the ‘Taugenichts’ in chapter 8 of Eichendorff's novella, with garden arias in the moonlight, to the accompaniment of guitars' light laughter. The scene, if such was Wolf's intent, is the instrumental concomitant to the kind of opera Wolf then wanted most to write, a comedy of love with amorous sighs, moonlit nights, guitars and champagne banquets (see the letter to Grohe, 28 June 1890), and the putative link to his operatic ambitions may explain Wolf's ten-year preoccupation with arrangements and developments of his Italienische Serenade. Virtually everyone, however, is in agreement regarding the superiority of the original string quartet version over the 1892 arrangement for string orchestra (he also thought of adding second and third movements to the work but never did so); the fleetness of foot that is so crucial to the work is muddied or lost in the transference to larger instrumental forces. Once again, the smaller-scale conception is the finer.