1860–1903 · Austria · Romantic
Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) was an Austrian composer known for songs for voice and piano set to poems by Mörike, Goethe, Eichendorff and other poets. He called his works "poems for voice and piano" rather than songs, and paid close attention to the poetic word. The site holds his songs to poems by Eichendorff and Goethe, from upper intermediate to advanced level.
Hugo Wolf was born on 13 March 1860 in Windischgrätz (now Slovenj Gradec). From the age of four his father taught him piano and violin, and in primary school Sebastian Weixler taught him piano and music theory. Other subjects held little interest for the boy: he was dismissed from one school as failing to meet its requirements, left another himself over difficulties with Latin, and quit a third after a falling-out with a teacher who mentioned his "damned music".
Wolf's father had hoped his son would choose a different path, but in 1875 Wolf enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory anyway. In 1877 he left the conservatory. From the age of seventeen he had no formal musical training, getting by in Vienna on his father's irregular support and on income from piano lessons.
After eight months in his parents' house, Wolf returned to Vienna and began earning his living from music lessons. He was not the easiest of teachers, hampered by a fiery temper, but his talent and charm won him patrons willing to support him financially. One of their daughters, Vally (Valentine) Franck, was his first love for three years, and it was in the songs of this period that traces of his future mature style first appeared. The break with Vally came just before Wolf's 21st birthday and left him despondent; he moved back in with his parents, though his father remained convinced his son would come to nothing.
His father's opinion only hardened after Wolf's brief spell as second Kapellmeister in Salzburg in 1881: he had neither the temperament nor the conducting skill the post required. Within the year he was back in Vienna, giving the same music lessons as before. News of Wagner's death in February 1883 struck the young composer hard: in the years that followed he repeatedly despaired at the thought of a future in a world without his idol. Meanwhile his songs drew the notice of Franz Liszt, whom Wolf admired; like his earlier mentors, Liszt urged him toward larger forms — and this time Wolf heeded the advice, composing the symphonic poem Penthesilea.
From 1884 to 1887 Wolf wrote music criticism for the newspaper Wiener Salonblatt, sparing no harsh words for works that struck him as weak — Anton Rubinstein bore the brunt of it. He was just as ready to praise Liszt, Schubert and Chopin. His sharp pen earned him the nickname "Wild Wolf" and no shortage of ill-wishers. He himself composed little in these years, and what he did write — a D minor quartet among it — found no performers.
After leaving the newspaper in 1887, Wolf devoted himself to composing again. That same year his works included the Italian Serenade for string quartet — regarded as among the high points of his mature writing for instruments. A week after finishing it, Wolf learned of his father's death, which plunged him into deep depression.
1888–1889 proved productive years for Wolf. At the vacation home of his childhood friends the Werners in Perchtoldsdorf he wrote a cycle of songs to poems by Mörike, then at the home of other friends, the Ecksteins, a cycle to poems by Eichendorff, followed by 51 songs to poems by Goethe. In October 1889 he began the Spanisches Liederbuch. Wolf himself considered these cycles his best work to date.
Around this time, word of Wolf spread beyond Vienna as well. Tenor Ferdinand Jäger, who had heard one of the first performances of the Mörike cycle, began putting Wolf's songs on his programmes. The press did not write about him kindly. Brahms's followers had not forgotten his sharp criticism and paid him back when they could: his biographer Max Kalbeck faulted Wolf's writing as immature, while the Wagnerian singer Amalie Materna pulled a concert of his works, fearing she would land on the critics' blacklist.
Wolf first rejected the libretto for Der Corregidor, drawn from Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's novella The Three-Cornered Hat, with contempt in 1890, but later set his mind firmly on writing an opera and stopped seeing the text's weaknesses. The love-triangle plot struck close to home: he himself had spent years involved with Melanie Köchert, the wife of his friend Heinrich Köchert. Their relationship is thought to have begun in 1884, during a holiday the Wolf and Köchert families took together; Heinrich found out in 1893 but went on being both Wolf's patron and Melanie's husband. The opera took nine months to write and was greeted with interest at first, though Wolf's music could not outweigh the weakness of its libretto.
Having finished the first half of the Italienisches Liederbuch at the end of 1891, Wolf again ran up against a decline in his physical and mental strength: fatigue from several intense years, combined with what syphilis had done to him and with his depressive nature, made him give up composing for a few years. Even so, his works kept being performed in Austria and Germany and reached ever more listeners — even the critics who had once attacked Wolf began speaking approvingly of him.
Wolf's creative energy returned in 1896–1897: in the spring of 1896, in March and April, he put the finishing touches on the Italienisches Liederbuch; three songs to poems by Michelangelo followed in March of the next year, 1897, when he also took up the opera Manuel Venegas.
The concert with Jäger in February 1897 turned out to be Wolf's last: a mental disorder linked to syphilis followed, with relief coming only rarely. He tried desperately to finish Manuel Venegas but failed. From the second half of 1899 the composer could no longer compose at all; after one attempt to drown himself, he insisted himself on being placed in a psychiatric hospital in Vienna.
Melanie Köchert visited Wolf faithfully until the end. He died on 22 February 1903 in Vienna. Tormented by her betrayal of her husband, Melanie died by suicide in 1906.
Within nineteenth-century music history, Wolf holds a place among the most notable authors of song for voice and piano. He was particular in his choice of poets, turning most often to Mörike, Goethe, Eichendorff, Lenau and Keller, as well as to German translations of Italian and Spanish verse. For the sake of a line's meaning and syntax he frequently set aside conventional musical symmetry, and in some of his songs the main thematic material is carried by the piano while the voice declaims the text.
Beginning with the Mörike cycle, it became characteristic of Wolf to bring together songs of contrasting character within a single collection, linked by their poet and by recurring musical themes. Many of his songs show an interest in musical theatre: they draw the listener quickly into the action and convey the speech intonations of their characters.
In all, Wolf wrote hundreds of songs for voice and piano, three operas, incidental music for the stage, choral works, and a handful of orchestral, chamber and piano pieces — but he is known above all as a song composer.
Wolf used key to underline the meaning of a text. When a poem was full of unease and found no resolution, his music would drift between two tonal centres and withhold a return to the home key until the sense of the line called for it; deceptive cadences, chromaticism and unstable harmonies put off the moment when the music's direction became clear. The shape of a Wolf song answered to its text as well: he wrote almost none of the simple strophic form his contemporaries favoured, building the form anew around each particular poem.
The site holds 21 of Wolf's songs for voice and piano: twenty are settings of poems by Eichendorff — the whole cycle of that name — and one, "Hoch beglückt in deiner Liebe", sets a poem by Goethe from the West-Eastern Divan. Five pieces are at upper intermediate level: "Verschwiegene Liebe", "Der Soldat I", "Der Soldat II", "Lieber Alles" and "Der Scholar". The remaining sixteen are at advanced level, including "Der Musikant", one of the pieces offered as a starting point for Wolf's songs.