While a Lied’s music primarily emphasizes the emotional and thematic content of the text, the music itself can also contain references, conventions, and meanings that a listener may recognize, either consciously or unconsciously. Hugo Wolf’s Anakreons Grab is one such Lied that contains a multitude of borrowings that evoke different associations. More broadly, the siciliano rhythms, horn calls, and drone fifths recall the pastoral musical topics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But Wolf’s song also contains striking parallels with past compositions that have similar subject matter or settings. Anakreons Grab opens with themes that recall Schumann’s Hochländisches Wiegenlied from Myrthen and Brünnhilde’s sleep music from Die Walküre, which help convey a mood of rest and repose. Additionally, several harmonic progressions, accompaniment figures, and melodic contours clearly invoke Schubert’s Wandrers Nachtlied II, D.768 and Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98. These borrowings from Schubert and Beethoven, however, are greatly modified to achieve different expressive ends from the source material.

Works: Hugo Wolf: Anakreons Grab (“Wo die Rose hier blüht”).

Sources: Wagner: Die Walküre (421-22); Robert Schumann: Myrthen, Op. 25 (421-22); Schubert: Wandrers Nachtlied II, D.768 (424-31); Beethoven: An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98 (431-35).

Index Classifications: 1800s

Contributed by: Matthew G. Leone