[30] See Musical Examples (Vol. XIII). [31] Vol. IV, chapters XII-XIV. CHAPTER XIII HUGO WOLF AND AFTER Wolf and the poets of his time; Hugo Wolf’s songs; Gustav Mahler; Richard Strauss as song-writer; Max Reger’s songs--Schönberg and the modern radicals. I German song since Schubert has known nothing like a fallow period. In no single decade has the song product been markedly inferior to any other. After Schubert and Schumann there came Liszt, Franz, and Brahms; and after Brahms there came Wolf, Strauss, and Reger. The Germany of these latter men was, of course, a very different Germany from that which preceded the Franco-Prussian War. It was a united Germany, an increasingly centralized Germany, a more prosperous Germany. In many ways it seems to be a more Philistine Germany. But, though the political and social conditions changed after 1870, this change was not expressed in the national literature for a number of years. And in the lyric poetry it was chiefly the poets of the old régime who held sway toward the end of the century. These poets had come in on the reaction that followed the failure of the liberal political movement of 1848. When men found their political strivings frustrated they once more turned their attention to their souls. Chief representative of ‘art for art’s sake’ was Emmanuel Geibel (1815-1885), an extremely talented literary man who cultivated the pure lyric with great success. Geibel was not a man of great originality. He clung to the old poetic motives and to the old ideas concerning the relations of man. But his versification was very engaging, being gentler and smoother than is usual in German poetry, and his manipulation of ideas and images was extremely deft. Next to him in popular esteem was Eduard Möricke (1804-1875), a Swabian pastor who took to writing verse as an amusement. In addition to an insinuating use of image and word music he had that rare quality in a lyric poet--a sense of humor. His touches of fun are always wholesome and delightful. Paul Heyse (1830-1911) was best known as a novelist and short-story writer, but his lyric gift was marked and his translations from the Spanish and Italian attained great popularity. Detlev von Liliencron (1844-1909) was another of the foremost lyricists of the time. In a later generation Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865-1909) and Richard Dehmel (born 1863) were influential. They rank with Hugo von Hoffmannsthal (born 1874) as the foremost lyricists of present-day Germany. These men are not great. They by no means express Germany as Tennyson, for instance, expressed mid-Victorian England. But, taken together, they supply the growing demand for sensuous, subjective poetry and they execute their task with a fine command over the lyrical qualities of the German language.