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Hugo Wolf

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Performers and composers

   Photograph of Hugo Wolf
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   Photograph of Hugo Wolf

   Hugo Wolf ( March 13, 1860 – February 22, 1903) was an Austrian
   composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or
   Lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity
   which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of
   the Second Viennese School in concision but utterly unrelated in
   technique.

   Though he had several bursts of extraordinary productivity,
   particularly in 1888 and 1889, depression frequently interrupted his
   creative periods, and his last composition was written in 1898, before
   he died of syphilis.

Biography

Early life (1860 – 1887)

   Wolf was born in Windischgraz (now Slovenj Gradec), then a part of the
   Austrian Empire. Both parents (Katherina Orehovnik and Philipp Wolf)
   had Slovenian ancestors. Along with the expansion of the leather craft
   and climb on the social scale the family underwent the process of
   Germanisation. The Vouks, as they were named until they arrived to
   Slovenj Gradec, found it easier to establish themselves in the
   Germanized town with the Germanized family name of Wolf. Hugo Wolf
   spent most of his life in Vienna, becoming a representative of "New
   German" trend in Lieder, a trend which followed from the expressive,
   chromatic, and dramatic musical innovations of Richard Wagner.

   A child prodigy, Wolf was taught piano and violin by his father
   beginning at the age of four, and once in primary school studied piano
   and music theory with Sebastian Weixler. However, subjects other than
   music failed to hold his interest; he was dismissed from the first
   secondary school he attended as being "wholly inadequate", left another
   over his difficulties in the compulsory Latin studies, and after a
   falling-out with a professor who commented on his "damned music", quit
   the last. From there, he went to the Vienna Conservatory to the
   disappointment of his father, who had hoped Wolf would not try to make
   his living from music; again, however, he was dismissed for "breach of
   discipline", though the often-rebellious Wolf would claim he quit in
   frustration over the school's conservatism.

   After eight months with his family, he returned to Vienna to teach
   music. Though his fiery temperament was not ideally suited to teaching,
   Wolf's musical gifts—as well as his personal charm—earned him attention
   and patronage. This support of his benefactors allowed him to make a
   living as a composer, and a family member of one of his greatest
   benefactors inspired him to write: Vally Franck was Wolf's first love,
   with whom he was involved for three years. During their relationship,
   hints of his mature style would become evident in his Lieder. Wolf was
   prone to depression and wide mood swings, which would affect him all
   through his life. When Franck left him just before his 21st birthday,
   he was despondent; he returned home, though his family relationships
   were also strained; his father remained convinced that Wolf was a
   ne'er-do-well. His brief and undistinguished tenure as second
   Kapellmeister at Salzburg only reinforced this opinion—Wolf had neither
   the temperament, the conducting technique, nor the affinity for the
   decidedly non-Wagnerian repertoire to be successful, and within a year
   had again returned to Vienna to teach in much the same circumstances as
   before.

   Wagner's death was another tragic event in the life of the young
   composer. The song "Zur Ruh, zur Ruh" was composed shortly afterward
   and is considered to be the best of his early works; it is speculated
   that it was intended as an elegy for Wagner. Wolf often despaired of
   his own future in the years following, in a world from which his idol
   had gone, leaving tremendous footsteps to follow and no guidance on how
   to do so. This left him often extremely temperamental, alienating
   friends and patrons, though his charm helped him retain them more than
   his actions merited. His songs meanwhile had caught the attention of
   Franz Liszt, whom he respected greatly, and who like Wolf's previous
   mentors advised him to pursue larger forms; advice he this time
   followed with the symphonic tone poem on Penthesilea. Wolf's activities
   as a critic began to pick up; he was merciless in his criticism of the
   inferior works he saw taking over the musical atmosphere of the time (
   Anton Rubinstein in particular he considered odious) and fervent in his
   support of the genius of Liszt, Schubert, and Chopin. Known as "Wild
   Wolf" for the intensity and expressive strength of his convictions, his
   vitriol made him some enemies. Though he composed little during this
   time, what he did write he could not get performed: the Rosé Quartet
   would not even look at his work after being picked apart in a column,
   and the premiere of Penthesilea was met by the orchestra with nothing
   but derision for the man who had dared to criticize Brahms.

   He abandoned his activities as a critic in 1887 as he began composing
   once more; perhaps not unexpectedly, the first songs following his
   compositional hiatus are settings of texts by Goethe, Eichendorff, and
   von Scheffel on the subject of strength and resolution when faced with
   adversity. Shortly thereafter Wolf completed the Italienische Serenade,
   which is regarded as one of the first works of his mature style as a
   composer. Only a week later his father died, leaving Wolf devastated,
   and he did not compose for the remainder of the year.

Maturity (1888 – 1896)

   1888 and 1889 proved to be amazingly productive years for Wolf, and a
   turning point in his career. After the publication of a dozen of his
   songs late the preceding year, Wolf once again desired to return to
   composing, and travelled to the vacation home of the Werners—family
   friends whom Wolf had known since childhood—in Perchtoldsdorf (a short
   train ride from Vienna), in order to escape and compose in solitude.
   Here he composed the Mörike-Lieder at a frenzied pace. A short break,
   and a change of house, this time to the vacation home of more longtime
   friends, the Ecksteins, and the Eichendorff-lieder followed, then the
   51 Goethe-lieder, spilling into 1889. After a summer holiday, the
   Spanisches Liederbuch was begun in October 1889; though
   Spanish-flavoured compositions were in fashion in the day, Wolf sought
   out poems that had been neglected by other composers.

   Wolf himself saw the merit of these compositions immediately, raving to
   friends that they were the best things he had yet composed (it was with
   the aid and urging of several of the more influential of them that the
   works were initially published). It was now that the world outside
   Vienna would recognize Wolf as well. Tenor Ferdinand Jäger, whom Wolf
   had heard in Parsifal during his brief summer break from composing, was
   present at one of the first concerts of the Mörike works and quickly
   became a champion of his music, performing a recital of only Wolf and
   Beethoven in December 1888. His works were praised in reviews,
   including one in the Münchener allgemeine Zeitung, a widely-read German
   newspaper. (Of course the recognition was not always positive; Brahms's
   adherents, still smarting from Wolf's merciless reviews, returned the
   favour—when they would have anything to do with him at all. Brahms's
   biographer Max Kalbeck ridiculed Wolf for his immature writing and odd
   tonalities; another composer refused to share a program with him, while
   Amalie Materna, a Wagnerian singer, had to cancel her Wolf recital when
   allegedly faced with the threat of being on the critics' blacklist if
   she went on.)

   Only a few more settings were completed in 1891 before Wolf's mental
   and physical health once again took a downturn at the end of the year;
   exhaustion from his prolific past few years combined with the effects
   of syphilis and his depressive temperament caused him to stop composing
   for the next several years. Continuing concerts of his works in Austria
   and Germany spread his growing fame; even Brahms and the critics who
   had previously reviled Wolf gave favorable reviews. Wolf, however, was
   consumed with depression, which stopped him from writing—which only
   left him more depressed. He completed orchestrations of previous works,
   but new compositions were not forthcoming, and certainly not the opera
   which he was now fixated on composing, still convinced that success in
   the larger forms was the mark of compositional greatness.

   Wolf had scornfully rejected the libretto to Der Corregidor when it was
   first presented to him in 1890, but his determination to compose an
   opera blinded him to its faults upon second glance. Based on El
   sombrero de tres picos, by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the darkly
   humorous story about an adulterous love triangle is one that Wolf could
   identify with: he had been in love with Melanie Köchert, married to his
   friend Heinrich Köchert, for several years. (It is speculated that
   their romance began in earnest in 1884, when Wolf accompanied the
   Köcherts on holiday; though Heinrich discovered the affair in 1893 he
   remained Wolf's patron and Melanie's husband.) The opera was completed
   in nine months and was met initially with success, but Wolf's musical
   setting could not compensate for the weakness of the text, and it was
   doomed to failure; it has not yet been successfully revived.

Final years (1897 – 1903)

   Wolf's last concert appearance, which included his early champion
   Jäger, was in February 1897. Shortly thereafter Wolf slipped into
   syphilitic insanity, with only occasional spells of wellbeing. He left
   sixty pages of an unfinished opera, Manuel Venegas, in 1897, in a
   desperate attempt to finish before he lost his mind completely; after
   mid-1899 he could make no music at all, and once tried to drown
   himself, after which he was placed in a Vienna asylum at his own
   insistence. Melanie visited him faithfully during his decline until his
   death on February 22, 1903; her lack of faith to her husband, however,
   tortured her, and she killed herself in 1906.

   Wolf is buried in the Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) in Vienna,
   along with many other notable composers.

Music

   Wolf's greatest musical influence was Richard Wagner, who, in an
   encounter after Wolf first came to the Vienna Conservatory, encouraged
   the young composer to persist in composing and to attempt larger-scale
   works, cementing Wolf's desire to emulate his musical idol. Wolf went
   so far as to emulate Wagner's vegetarianism as well, but this lasted
   only 18 months. His antipathy to Johannes Brahms was fueled partly by
   his devotion to Wagner, and partially by misunderstanding and clash of
   personality, rather than any ill-will on Brahms' part.

   His true fame is his lieder; Wolf's temperament and abilities led him
   to more private and personal forms. Though he initially believed that
   mastering the larger forms was the hallmark of a great composer (a
   belief that his early mentors reinforced), the smaller scale of the art
   song provided an excellent basis upon which to develop basic
   compositional skills and later came to be his greatest strength. Wolf's
   lieder are noted for compressing expansive musical ideas and depth of
   feeling; his skill at interpreting and depicting texts musically is
   suited to the form. Though Wolf himself was obsessed with the idea that
   to compose only short forms was to be second-rate, his organization of
   poem settings into complete dramatic cycles, finding connections
   between texts not explicitly intended by the poet, as well as his
   conceptions of individual songs as dramatic works in miniature, mark
   him as a talented dramatist despite having written only one not
   particularly successful opera.

   Early in his career Wolf modelled his Lieder after those of Franz
   Schubert and Robert Schumann, particularly in the period around his
   relationship with Franck; in fact, they were good enough imitations to
   pass off as the real thing, which he once attempted, though his cover
   was blown too soon. It is speculated that his choice of lieder texts in
   the earlier years, largely dealing with sin and anguish, were partly
   influenced by his contraction of syphilis. His love for Franck, not
   fully requited, bore the intellectual children of the Wesendonck
   lieder: impassioned settings of works by Nikolaus Lenau. The others
   were as distant from those in mood as possible; lighthearted and
   humorous. Penthesilea, too, is tempestuous and highly colored; though
   Wolf admired Liszt, who has encouraged him to complete the work, he
   felt Liszt's music too dry and academic, and strove for colour and
   passion.

   1888 marked a turning point in his style as well as his career, with
   the Mörike, Eichendorff, and Goethe sets drawing him away from
   Schubertiana and into "Wölferl's own howl". Mörike in particular drew
   out and complemented Wolf's musical gifts, the variety of subjects
   suiting Wolf's tailoring of music to text, his dark sense of humor
   matching Wolf's own, his insight and imagery demanding a wider variety
   of compositional techniques and command of text painting to portray. In
   his later works he relied less on the text to give him his musical
   framework and more on his pure musical ideas themselves; the later
   Spanish and Italian songs reflect this move toward "absolute music".

   Wolf wrote hundreds of Lieder, three operas, incidental music, choral
   music, as well as some rarely-heard orchestral, chamber and piano
   music. His most famous instrumental piece is the Italian Serenade
   (1887), originally for string quartet and later transcribed for
   orchestra, which marked the beginning of his mature style.

   Wolf was famous for his use of tonality to reinforce meaning.
   Concentrating on two tonal areas to musically depict ambiguity and
   conflict in the text became a hallmark of his style, resolving only
   when appropriate to the meaning of the song. His chosen texts were
   often full of anguish and inability to find resolve, and thus so too
   was the tonality wandering, unable to return to the home key. Use of
   deceptive cadences, chromaticism, dissonance, and chromatic mediants
   obscure the harmonic destination for as long as the psychological
   tension is sustained. His formal structure as well reflected the texts
   being set, and he wrote almost none of the straightforward strophic
   songs favoured by his contemporaries, instead building the form around
   the nature of the work.

Notable works

Opera

     * Der Corregidor (1895)

Lieder

     * Mörike-Lieder (1888)
     * Eichendorff-Lieder (1889)
     * Goethe-Lieder (1890)
     * Spanisches Liederbuch (1891)
     * Italienisches Liederbuch (1892, 1896)
     * Michelangelo Lieder (1897)

Instrumental

     * String Quartet in D minor (1878-84)
     * Penthesilea (1883-85)
     * Italian Serenade (1887)

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