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.
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