always their own
individuality. You cannot take anything away from his _Lieder_ without
spoiling the whole; and it is especially so with his instrumental
passages, which give us the beginning and end of his emotion, and which
circle round it and sum it up. The musical form, following closely the
poetic form, is extremely varied. It may sometimes express a fugitive
thought, a brief record of a poetic impression or some little action, or
it may be a great epic or dramatic picture. Mueller remarks that Wolf put
more into a poem than the poet himself--as in the
_Italienisches-Liederbuch_. It is the worst reproach they can make about
him, and it is not an ordinary one. Wolf excelled especially in setting
poems which accorded with his own tragic fate, as if he had some
presentiment of it. No one has better expressed the anguish of a
troubled and despairing soul, such as we find in the old harp-player in
_Wilhelm Meister_, or the splendid nihility of certain poems of
Michelangelo.

Of all his collections of _Lieder_, the 53 _Gedichte von Eduard Moerike,
komponiert fuer eine Singstimme und Klavier_ (1888), the first published,
is the most popular. It gained many friends for Wolf, not so much among
artists (who are always in the minority) as among those critics who are
the best and most disinterested of all--the homely, honest people who
do not make a profession of art, but enjoy it as their spiritual daily
bread. There are a number of these people in Germany, whose hard lives
are beautified by their love of music. Wolf found these friends in all
parts, but he found most of them in Swabia. At Stuttgart, at Mannheim,
at Darmstadt, and in the country round about these towns he became very
popular--the only popular musician since Schubert and Schumann. All
classes of society unite in loving him. "His _Lieder_," says Herr
Decsey, "are on the pianos of even the poorest houses, by the side of
Schubert's _Lieder_." Stuttgart became for Wolf, as he said himself, a
second home. He owes this popularity, which is without parallel in
Swabia, to the people's passionate love of _Lieder_ and, above all, of
the poetry of Moerike, the Swabian pastor, who lives again in Wolf's
songs. Wolf has set to music a quarter of Moerike's poems, he has brought
Moerike into his own, and given him one of the first places among German
poets. Such was really his intention, and he said so when he had a
portrait of Moerike put on the title-page of the songs. Whet