had done nothing for him while he was alive. The Austrian State, the
town of Vienna, his native town Windischgratz, the Conservatoire that
had expelled him, the _Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde_ who had been so
long unfriendly to his works, the Opera that had been closed to him, the
singers that had scorned him, the critics that had scoffed at him--they
were all there. They sang one of his saddest melodies, _Resignation_, a
setting of a poem of Eichendorff's, and a chorale by his old friend
Bruckner, who had died several years before him. His faithful friends,
Faisst at the head of them, took care to have a monument erected to his
memory near those of Beethoven and Schubert.

* * * * *

Such was his life, cut short at thirty-seven years of age--for one
cannot count the five years of complete madness. There are not many
examples in the art world of so terrible a fate. Nietzsche's misfortune
is nowhere beside this, for Nietzsche's madness was, to a certain
extent, productive, and caused his genius to flash out in a way that it
never would have done if his mind had been balanced and his health
perfect. Wolf's madness meant prostration. But one may see how, even in
the space of thirty-seven years, his life was strangely parcelled out.
For he did not really begin his creative work until he was twenty-seven
years old; and as from 1890 to 1895 he was condemned to five years'
silence, the sum total of his real life, his productive life, is only
four or five years. But in those few years he got more out of life than
the greater part of artists do in a long career, and in his work he left
the imprint of a personality that no one could forget after once having
known it.

* * * * *

Wolf's work consists chiefly, as we have already seen, of _Lieder_, and
these _Lieder_ are characterised by the application to lyrical music of
principles established by Wagner in the domain of drama. That does not
mean he imitated Wagner. One finds here and there in Wolf's music
Wagnerian forms, just as elsewhere there are evident reminiscences of
Berlioz. It is the inevitable mark of his time, and each great artist in
his turn contributes his share to the enrichment of the language that
belongs to us all. But the real Wagnerism of Wolf is not made up of
these unconscious resemblances; it lies in his determination to make
poetry the inspiration of music. "To show, above all," he wrote to
H