Eric Sams

Hugo Wolf: Life

Wolf, Hugo (in Grove, 1980), © The Estate of Eric Sams

Wolf, Hugo (Filipp Jakob) (b Windischgraz, Styria [now Slovenj Gradec, Yugoslavia], 13 March 1860; d Vienna, 22 Feb 1903). Austrian composer. He inten­sified the expressive vocabulary of the lied to a pitch never since surpassed. By his musical sensitivity to poetic values and meanings, which he embodied in each separate aspect of song – vocal declamation, keyboard technique, harmonic nuance etc – he was able, like Schubert before him, to condense the dramatic intensity of opera into the song form.

1. Formative years (1860-83). 2. Years of uncertainty (1883-7). 3. Mastery and fame (1888-97). 4. Breakdown and terminal illness (1897­1903).

Works

Work-list

1. FORMATIVE YEARS (1860-83). Wolf was born in a German-speaking enclave of a Slovene region. His mother Katharina (1824-1903) was of Slovene yeoman stock (her paternal grandfather's name was Orehovnik, which he changed to its German equivalent Nussbaumer; her maternal grandfather's name was Stank or Stanko). According to a family tradition, she also had some Italian antecedents. She was strong-willed and energetic, four years older than her husband Philipp Wolf, whom she married in 1852. His family was German in origin; he inherited the leather business established in Windischgraz in the 18th century by his grandfather Maximilian. Philipp Wolf (1828-87) was a gifted musician who taught himself the piano, violin, flute, harp and guitar. His trenchant and colourful letters reveal him as the thwarted artist, moody and intro­spective. These gifts and temperament seem to have been inherited by Hugo, the fourth of six children (two others died in infancy). As he later recorded appreciatively, he was given piano and violin lessons by his father at a very early age. At the village primary school from 1865 to 1869 he was taught the piano and theory by Sebastian Weixler, who also played the viola in the Wolf house­hold orchestra (Philipp first violin, Hugo second, brother Max cello, an uncle as horn player).

   In 1868 Hugo saw his first opera (Donizetti's Belisario), which made an overwhelming impression. In September 1870 he was sent to the regional secondary school in Graz (where he was remembered as speaking German with a Slovene accent) but left after only one term with the general report 'wholly unsatisfactory', though with some praise for his musical gifts. In September 1871 he began two years as a boarder at the Benedictine abbey of St Paul, where he excelled as a musician, playing the violin and organ for school ser­vices and the piano in a trio (with a repertory including Italian and French opera arrangements). But he lagged at the compulsory Latin; and in the autumn of 1873 he was transferred to the secondary school at Marburg (now Maribor, Yugoslavia). There he absorbed the clas­sical repertory in score or performance, including Beethoven and Haydn symphonies in piano duet arrange­ment. But again he left after only two years. His wilful and passionate nature spurned compromise; he had time and energy only for music. His father received two placatory dedications, that of op.1, a piano sonata begun in April 1875, and that of the Variations op.2. It was decided that Wolf should go and live with an aunt in Vienna that September and study at the Vienna Conservatory.

   At first all went well. He studied the piano with Wilhelm Schenner and harmony and composition first with Robert Fuchs and then with the strict and pedantic Franz Krenn. He made many friends, including the young Gustav Mahler. The first fruits were an unfin­ished 'violin concerto' (in piano score) and more piano sonatas, as well as songs and choruses. Now Wolf began regular opera-going: Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots was a special favourite. But his deepest devotion was reserved for Wagner, then (November 1875) in Vienna for per­formances of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. Wolf attended both, and became (as he told his dismayed parents) a dedicated Wagnerian – a term then synonymous with avant-garde turbulence. In December he visited Wagner, bringing his piano pieces, which he explained were in the style of Mozart. Wagner was indulgent and affable; he gravely agreed that it was best to model oneself on the classics, and counselled patience and practice. When he next went to Vienna, he said, he would look forward to being shown larger-scale works.

   This encounter inspired Wolf, always a passionate hero-worshipper and famished for encouragement. He duly attempted larger-scale works, notably a Lenau set­ting for accompanied male-voice chorus, Die Stimme des Kindes. But the part-writing went awry, a blemish pointed out by Hans Richter, then director of the Vienna Opera, whom Wolf had also buttonholed and blandished. Technical shortcomings recur in further choruses written in 1876; but in one Goethe setting, Mailied, the contours of coming mastery are discernible in rhythmic verve and harmonic vitality. Also from this period date orchestral essays (an arrangement of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata), various chamber music fragments and sketches and a piano Rondo capriccioso which later became a symphonic finale. No doubt many of these were set as academic exercises, but their style testifies to a growing independence. Soon Wolf was again in con­flict with authority. In later life he would explain that he resigned from the conservatory in protest at its entren­ched conservatism. But he was also officially dismissed for 'breach of discipline'; and his cause was not helped by the prank of a fellow student who sent the director a threatening letter, signed 'Hugo Wolf. By March 1877 Wolf was home again in disgrace.

   There he worked on a symphony and composed the earliest song that he thought worthy of publication, Morgentau. He was allowed back to Vienna in November to earn his own living as a music teacher. On the journey he lost the score of his symphony. That start was symptomatic. Wolf never had the teacher's gift or temperament. His talents needed (and his charm secured) the patronage of generous households, such as those of the actor Ludwig Gabillon and Freud's early collaborator Josef Breuer.

   Wolf was already known in other cultured circles, notably that of the composer Adalbert von Goldschmidt (which included the critics Gustav Sch8naich and Hans Paumgartner, and the conductor Felix Mottl). They adopted the young Wolf, took him to concerts and operas, lent him books, music and money. But this fostering may also have proved fatal. For it was Goldschmidt who (according to Alma Mahler) took Wolf to a brothel; and there is no doubt that Wolf's insanity in 1897 and death in 1903 were among the sequelae of a syphilitic infection assignable with fair certainty to 1878. It was then, as members of the Gabillon and Breuer families later recalled, that he began to avoid their dinner tables and their company (eating only such food as could be conveyed direct to the mouth, and refusing to travel in the same railway carriage as his hosts). Such conduct then seemed merely eccentric or boorish; but Dr Breuer later came to be­lieve that it was founded on medical advice and consider­ation for others.

   The phase of sexual initiation and stimulus was also a time of spontaneous songwriting, the first signs of an intuitive mode of creativity that would later characterize Wolf's greatest work. Early in 1878 he was in love with Vally Franck, a relative of the Lang family, who were among his most generous benefactors. He later said that in that year he had written 'at least one good song every day'. This seems exaggerated (unless the works were atypically destroyed); but it testifies to a wealth of feel­ing in that year. Romantic love and `Weltschmerz' are explicit in the choice of 1877-8 song texts from such sources as Heine, Lenau, Chamisso, Riickert, Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Goethe's Faust.

   After the Schumannesque Heine settings of May and June 1878 a new and agonized note is sounded in the Faust setting of Gretchen vor dem Andachtsbild der Mater Dolorosa, begun on 22 August. The confession of sin and prayer for forgiveness, novel and uncharacteris­tic themes in Wolf, are expressed in anguished chromatics. He next wrote settings of gloomy and life-abnegating texts (also perhaps related to the inevitable if temporary separation from Vally Franck), closely fol­lowed by the first movement of the D minor String Quartet with its outbursts of impassioned declamation. The Grave introduction is prefixed by the words ‘Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren’ (You must renounce, renounce'), spoken by Faust when sealing his pact with the Devil and renouncing human life and love. Both this movement and the Scherzo (Resolut) bear the date January 1879.

   It was no doubt in a dejected mood that Wolf had called on Brahms early in that year. He was kindly received and given the same advice as Wagner's, namely to extend his musical horizons. From the blunt Brahms this seemed an affront, especially when coupled with the suggestion of counterpoint lessons from Nottebohm. The fee was well beyond Wolf's means; and the idea was dismissed as 'north German pedantry'. This note of antipathy soon swelled to an enduring diapason. As in Shaw's contemporary London, the younger musicians tended to brand Brahms as reactionary and hail Wagner as progressive. Wolf's immediate circle, a Bohemian fraternity comparable to the first Schubertians, were all fanatical Wagnerites, following their master to the point of becoming vegetarians – as Wolf did for a year or two, partly also perhaps because that diet was cheaper. His meagre earnings were eked out by parcels of food and clothes sent from home. He was constantly changing lodgings (on occasion sharing with Mahler, with whom he had remained on affable terms) in search of seclusion or economy. Life was hard, but intellectually and socially formative. Goldschmidt and Schönaich in par­ticular continued to be generous with help and introduc­tions: the circle of Wolf's friends and admirers gradually widened. In April 1879 he first met Melanie Köchert (née Lang), who later became his mistress and protectress. Her sister Henriette and her brother Edmund Lang also became close friends. Meanwhile Wolf's love for their quasi-cousin Vally Franck was rekindled; but the two were separated most of that year by her absence on holiday. Wolf's letters and music are alike passionate, as three Lenau songs testify. But his penury and misfortune kept the lovers parted if not estranged. His patterns of cyclic mood swing and unpredictably sporadic creativity were already clearly delineated. By 1880 his depression and illness were both apparently abating. Sweetness and serenity return to the song music, especially in Erwartung and Die Nacht, two Eichendorff settings inscribed to Vally and thought worthy of publication in the later songbook. The slow movement of the D minor Quartet, begun in July. has overtones of healing (recalling Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang) and redemption that suggest a mood of regeneration and thanksgiving, enhanced by an idyllic summer holiday in Mayerling. There Wolf's mature songwriting style continued its slow burgeoning, nur­tured by studies and transcriptions of Wagner. Two paraphrases (of Die Meistersinger and Die Walküre), probably made at this time, were presented to the lawyer Joseph Heitzes, another of Wolf's benefactors. His Mayerling home was rented to the Preyss family, who willingly agreed to look after Wolf and give him the tranquillity and independence he needed. By now he was sufficiently recovered to take his meals en famille. His high spirits and manifest genius captivated not only the Preyss family but their own summer visitors, including the Werners, expecially the seven-year-old Heinrich, who became wholly devoted to Wolf and later served his cause well as editor, critic and biographer.

   Summertime in Mayerling, then and later, brought out the radiant side of Wolf's nature, including his love of children and of the countryside. His small stocky figure, fair hair, and dark brown eyes fitfully lit by hilarity, were well described by a later friend, Edmund Hellmer, who added that to know him really well one had to hear him laugh and see him in the open air. But the sunshine regularly faded, and a darker side super­vened; then the Wolfian moods turned first to a daunt­ing wildness of speech and mien and thence sometimes to snapping and snarling, even at his devoted bene­factors.

Before Wolf's 21st birthday Vally Franck had broken off their attachment and returned to her native France. Despair resounded in the Sechs geistliche Lieder, chor­uses to words by Eichendorff; again secular human feeling was presented in the guise of spiritual agony. As ever when wounded Wolf sought refuge in Windisch­graz, composing a further Eichendorff song of soulful separation, In der Fremde I. Once again he was helped –by the devoted Goldschmidt, who in November 1881 found him a post as second conductor at Salzburg. As before Wolf's musicianship was applauded but there were jarring personal notes. He resented the trivial tedium of operetta rehearsal and quarrelled violently with the director. Again he left under a cloud; early in 1882 he was back in Vienna. His unhappy father compared himself, with some justice, to a Sisyphus forever doomed to push the same heavy stone uphill and behold it rolling ineluctably back, this time perhaps with crushing and fatal effect. For a time father and son were estranged. Wolf, though contrite, was helpless to govern the forces that determined his life and fate. It was apparently early in this year that he was conscripted for a short time into military service, then compulsory at 20. For unknown reasons, whether the influence of friends, or his own ill-health, or unstable temperament, or small stature (5' 11"), he was neither called up in 1880 nor long retained in 1882. His diary records this as the year of a 'terrible moral hangover'. But as usual the arid tracts were diversified by occasional oases, including the Mdrike setting of Mausfallensprüchlein, the fruit of another summer spent with the Preyss and Werner families in Mayerling. There was a further remission in late 1882 and early 1883 with a group of generally serene and sunny Reinick and Eichendorff songs. This time, when the darker mood returned, composition continued. It was as if two strands (bright and dark, lyric and dramatic, simple and complex, Schumannian and Wagnerian) were beginning to interweave in a new and essentially Wolfian pattern. His tense and dramatic Kerner setting Zur Ruh, zur Ruh of June 1883 may have been his threnody on the death of Wagner four months earlier. In August he saw Parsifal in Bayreuth; then again he was at a standstill.

2. YEARS OF UNCERTAINTY (1883-7). What trail Wolf should now follow was in no way clear to him or his family or friends. Hanslick had admired his songs, and thought them worth publishing. But first Schott and then Breitkopf rejected them, though in affable terms. Per­haps he was not destined to be a songwriter after all? At this impasse came his third encounter with a great com­poser, this time Liszt, at a meeting (again engineered by the faithful Goldschmidt) in April 1883. Although im­pressed with the songs Wolf showed him, which included Die Spinnerin, Liszt (like Wagner and Brahms) counselled further composition in the larger forms. This again chimed with Wolf's own mood. That winter he had drafted the libretto of a Spanish opera. Now he instantly began work on a symphonic poem based on Heinrich von Kleist's Penthesilea, a drama which (like Faust, and perhaps for the same reason) had long been an obsession of his; its theme is the injuries inflicted by women on men through sexual passion. In Lisztian style it seeks to develop and integrate small-scale motifs into the orchestral tone poem frame. Wolf went again to Bayreuth for Parsifal; he spent an agreeable holiday in Rinnbach visiting the Köcherts. But then the tides of inspiration again receded, leaving a barren and featureless shore. He found a new friend and admirer, the writer Hermann Bahr. But by the end of 1883 another depressive phase had set in. There are more sad stories of recrimination and parting, offence given and taken. Wolf quarrelled with his friends the Breuers because of his immoderate language about women. He stormed out of the hospitable house of the industrialist Fritz Flesch because his host passed him a pear on a toothpick not a trifling matter to a sensitive and fastidious syphilitic who had scrupulously spent his infectious phase in enforced isolation.

   The outbursts and estrangements of these and later years have to be viewed in the perspective of Wolf's artistic frustration, his mental and physical case history and the enduring love and solicitude shown by faithful friends. Supreme among them was Melanie Köchert, whom Wolf had been teaching and adoring since 1881. Her husband Heinrich KOchert was the Vienna court jeweller, and had influential friends. Under his aegis Wolf was appointed music critic of the fashionable Sunday Wiener Salonblatt. But there was nothing merely modish in Wolf's writing or in his readership, the new and growing public for music criticism fostered by Hanslick yet left dissatisfied by the latter's intran­sigent anti-Wagnerism. Into this vacuum Wolf rushed headlong. Notoriously, he did Wagner more than jus­tice, and Brahms less. But it would be wrong to see his outspoken critiques as merely partisan or their anti­Brahmsian thrust as merely retaliatory. They are not only a literate and lively mirror of the age; they have a special interest for the Wagner scholar, for there can hardly have been anyone at the time who was more articulately knowledgeable about the operas. Above all, they afford significant insights into Wolf's own creative mind.

   The three-year spell of criticism was useful as a voca­tion and a discipline, but it inhibited composition. Although Wolf took a long summer holiday in each of the three years 1884 to 1886, his comparative quietude was not matched by comparable peace of mind. The sardonic turbulence of his prose is well matched in his only song of this period, the Mörike setting Die Tochter der Heide, written during a sojourn with the Köcherts at Rinnbach in July 1884. It was probably at this time that he and Melanie Köchert avowed their mutual love. The last movement of the D minor Quartet was also sketched in the same summer. Some fragmentary sketches for another Kleist play, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, about the conflicts between love and duty, convention and temperament, date from August, when Wolf was visiting his sister Modesta and her husband Josef Strasser at Oblarn; this time love is a saving grace, not the destructive force of Penthesilea. On an outing with Strasser Wolf met the folk poet and singer Johann Kain, and was entranced by his songs. By October 1884 Wolf was back in Vienna writing reviews and vainly striving to arrange performances or publication of his own works. He resolved to devote the coming summer to completing, for submission to the Philharmonic Orchestra, his Penthesilea and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg music. The latter remained fragmentary, but in September he called on Richter with the score of Penthesilea and was promised a trial later that year. Wolf felt that he was at last gaining a foothold, and indeed he had been making a name for himself as a critic. Sadly, it was a hated name. Among those Wolf had mauled was Sigismund Bachrich, whose pretensions as an opera composer had been pointedly deflated. But Bachrich was the viola player of the famed Rose Quartet; so Wolf was naive in submitting his D minor Quartet to them for a hearing. It was returned with a woundingly worded note signed by Bachrich on behalf of his colleagues. Worse still, Penthesilea was put on trial in every sense. Its rehearsal on 15 October 1885 was (whether or not with Richter's connivance) a fiasco. Bachrich was in the orchestra, and Richter made some disparaging remarks (which Wolf overheard) about people who dared to criticize so great a master as Brahms. Such comments were wholly predictable and unsurprising. It was Wolf's turn to be lacerated. His critiques continued with unabated vigour; but his own music was aborted or stillborn. It was not until October 1886 while on holiday with the Strassers (now living at Murau) after some embarrassing contretemps, including a grave eye injury sustained while playing with the children's toys, that he completed his next viable work, the Intermezzo in Eb, for string quartet. At the turn of the year he began work on Christnacht, a setting of Platen for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Wolf himself described it as uniting two aspects of the Christ child: naive and childlike, yet conquering and redemptive. Again the impulse seems intuitively self-expressive. Similarly all three songs of 1886 (Der König bei der Krönung, Der Soldat Biterolf) and the first three of 1887 (Wächterlied auf der Wartburg, Wanderers Nachtlied, Beherzigung) have texts relating to various aspects of staunchness and resolution in the face of adversity. At last the music affirms a confident sense of purpose and vocation. Finally in 1887 Wolf attained a new plateau near the summit of mastery. The impetus was provided by a change of route from subjectivity towards the sonorous re-creation of imaginative literature, a concept frequently cited by Wolf the critic as a touchstone of excellence. So it proved for Wolf the composer. From March to May 1887 he was inspired by the vitality of Eichendorff's poetry about lightness in love (Der Soldat I) or the bewitching power of women (Die Kleine, Die Zigeunerin, Waldmädchen) and of nature (Nachtzauber). Between these last two songs he composed the highly original Italienische Serenade for string quartet (2-4 May). Its relaxed and amused irony may also have owed its conception to Eichendorff. whose novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts offers many a textual correspondence with Wolf's life and music and includes an Italian serenade.

   There could now be no further doubt in Wolf's mind about the fact of his gift, though its actual nature remained unclear to him. He had written his first mas­terpiece, and his last critique. At that moment his father was suddenly taken ill, and died on 9 May, thus being denied his son's later triumphs but spared the final tragedy. Hugo, summoned by telegram, was a solace at the end, but then became himself inconsolable. Hardly another word was written or another note composed in that year. He needed affectionate support and encour­agement; a mainstay had gone. Help came from Friedrich Eckstein, whose library and conversation had enriched and influenced the young Wolf in his earlier Vienna days and who now performed the further signal service of persuading a publisher (perhaps with some financial inducement) to bring out two volumes of Wolf's songs. From among his manuscripts of many years Wolf selected six women's songs and six for male voice, to be inscribed respectively to his mother and to his father's memory. The project induced a tumultuous creative euphoria.

3. MASTERY AND FAME (1888-97). Wolf instinctively sought solitude. His friends the Werners offered him ale use of their summer holiday home in Perchtoldsdorf, near Vienna. He took with him the poems of his favour­ite Mörike, whose lyrics had no doubt been germinating in his musical mind for many years. Now came a sudden spontaneous flowering of song music that in its profusion and variety matched the Schubert of 1814-15 and the Schumann of 1840-41. The biographical paral­lels with the latter are especially clear. Wolf too had just emerged from some years of activity as a critic and was celebrating a long-lasting love affair (by 1888 Wolf and Melanie Köchert were lovers, though they could meet only with difficulty and by stealth). Wolf too found himself moving in the song medium with a new and surprising assurance (with characteristic irony he com­pared the process to the final undoing of a frequently and frustratingly fumbled button). Finally, he too was disconcerted by the violence of his musical creativity, though overjoyed by its profusion. On 22 February for example he wrote to Edmund Lang, 'I have just put a new song on to paper [Der Knabe und das Immlein]. A sone for the gods, let me tell you! ... My cheeks are glowing with excitement like molten iron; and this state of inspiration is more a delicious torment to me than an unalloyed pleasure'. But that was only a beginning. Far finer songs grew and proliferated, at the rate of two or even three a day. Again to Edmund Lang, on the same day, 'Hardly was my letter despatched than I took up my M5rike and wrote another song [Jägerlied]. PS ... I have succeeded in a third song, and how! [Ein Stündlein wohl vor Tag]. This is an eventful day'.

   A month later he was still composing at the same pitch and writing in the same strain. To Joseph Strasser, March 23: 'I'm working at 1000 horsepower from early morning until late at night, without respite. What I am now putting on to paper, dear friend, is also being written for posterity. They are masterpieces.... When I tell you that [despite several unavoidable visits to Vienna] I have, since 22 February, written 25 songs, each better than the last, about which connoisseurs agree that there has been nothing like them since Schubert, Schumann, etc, you'll readily gather what kind of songs they are'. Earlier Wolf had written modestly to Edmund Lang, 'I wonder what the future may hold in store for me? This question torments me, perturbs and preoccupies me waking or sleeping. Am I called? or perhaps even chosen?'. By March he knew. By mid-May (after 43 songs) he needed rest. He took a holiday with the Strassers; he visited Bayreuth. In September the spate of song resumed. This time Wolf sought sanctuary with the Eckstein family at Unterach, where he wrote (again perhaps using some earlier ideas) 13 Eichendorff settings. Then Mörike settings resumed with another nine in the first fortnight of October, in­cluding some with a deep spiritual content (Wolf had again been much moved by Parsifal). Then came a return to Vienna, and an outburst even more sustained than ever. By 13 February 1889 Wolf had finished the 51 songs of the Goethe songbook, except for one incomplete sketch (Die Spröde) which dissatisfied him and was later recomposed.

   Again the connoisseurs could recognize masterpieces, this time directly challenging comparison with the Goethe settings of Schubert and Schumann. The word soon spread from old friends to new converts. It was only on 2 March 1888 that any Wolf song had been  publicly performed (by Rosa Papier, Hans Paumgartner's wife). By 23 March Wolf was playing and singing his latest Mörike settings to the Wagner-Verein.

   Among its more influential members Joseph Schalk and Ferdinand Lowe, both professors at the conservatory, were powerfully impressed. So was the tenor Ferdinand Jäger (who had sung Parsifal at Bayreuth) when, on 8 November, he heard three of the Mörike songs from a soprano of the Vienna Opera accompanied by Schalk. Jager was soon to Wolf as Vogl was to Schubert, a lifelong devotee and partner. Their Wolf concert on 15 December was the composer's first public appearance as an accompanist. This and subsequent recitals were received with acclaim.

   In May 1889 Wolf returned to Perchtoldsdorf with his mind still ringing with plaudits. The prospect of public success again focussed his attention on large-scale forms, both operatic and orchestral. (Two settings from A Midsummer Night's Dream date from this month as well as two orchestrations of songs from the Mörike volume, which had meanwhile been published.) After summer holiday visits to Bayreuth and to his mother in Windischgraz, Wolf returned to Perchtoldsdorf at the end of October 1889 and instantly began work on his Spanish songbook. Thoughts of opera often suggested Spain or Italy to his mind (from this summer also dates the draft of a few dreamy bars of string quartet music intended as a slow movement for the Italienische Serenade). This impulse, together with his established penchant for characterization and description, his strong sense of national feeling and local colour, and a mood of mysticism perhaps induced or fostered by the Bayreuth visits, led to a choice of translations from the Spanish by Heyse and Geibel (a source earlier used by both Schumann and Brahms). By April 1890 the 44 Spanish songs (including translations from Camoens, Cervantes, Lope de Vega and others, as well as anonymous lyrics) were completed. Meanwhile the thrust towards stage music continued: a sketched theme of December 1889 is headed 'Introduction to Hamlet'. Two more Reinick settings (one with orchestra on a patriotic theme) and six Keller songs in June 1890 (again including characterization and mysticism) bring to an end this great creative period, in which 174 songs, including many acknowledged masterpieces, had been composed within two and a half years.

   Meanwhile the reverberations of Wolf's fame were spreading outside Austria. The first critical article was by Heinrich Rauchberg, an early friend; his 'Neue Lieder und Gesange' (about the Mörike and Eichendorff songbooks) appeared in the November—December issue of the Osterreichisch-ungarische Revue. Far more influential, however, was Joseph Schalk's ‘Neue Lieder, neues Leben' in the Münchener allgemeine Zeitung for 22 January 1890. This gave rise to widespread interest and correspondence. Wolf heard from the Tubingen music director Emil Kauffmann (whose father had been a friend of Mörike's) and the Mannheim judge Oskar Grohe. Both became close friends. Gustave Schur of the Wagner-Verein was able to negotiate with the well-established firm of Schott in Mainz to supplement or replace the small Viennese publishers Wetzler (already on the point of bankruptcy) and Lacom.

   Within Austria Jäger had given another very success­ful Wolf recital to the Graz Wagner-Verein on 12 April. It was heard by Heinrich Potpeschnigg, a dentist and amateur pianist, who soon became a close friend and helper. In Vienna Wolf's name was steadily gaining ground, but also meeting some resistance. Richard Heuberger recalled a talk with Brahms and Richter in November 1890, about 'the Wagnerians and in par­ticular Hugo Wolf, whom they now praised as a great songwriter, the inventor of the "symphonic song", whereas Schubert, Schumann and Brahms are said to have written songs as if with guitar accompaniment'. The partisan note is clear; and there was some resent­ment even within the Wagner societies. But the general reaction was favourable; and this wave of recognition carried Wolf to a further crest of enthusiasm for opera. In 1890, with his mind very much on Spanish themes, he had been offered a libretto on Alarcon's El sombrero de tres picos, by the feminist and journalist Rosa Mayreder. This was rejected, together with other sug­gestions such as The Tempest and the story of Pocahontas (proposal and counter-proposal between Wolf and the poet Detlev von Liliencron, whose atten­tion had been drawn to Wolf by Joseph Schalk, and who composed a verse-eulogy of the songs). Among other topics mooted, the life of Buddha and the Golden Ass of Apuleius might be said to typify Wolf's contrasting spiritual and secular aspects. But when he received a commission from the Burgtheater to compose incidental music for a production of Ibsen's The Feast at Solhaug, Wolf's zest sharply diminished. He found the assigned task irksome and uncongenial; he was dilatory and unin­spired; he scored for too large an orchestra; and his procrastination delayed the opening night until 21 November 1891, when the reception was lukewarm. His recalcitrance was enhanced by some fresh song inspira­tion from Heyse's polished translations of anonymous Italian poems in a courtly style and tradition dating from the 16th century or earlier (hardly folk poems, as is sometimes claimed). Seven such settings were com­pleted in October and November 1890 despite the distraction of another visit to Germany to complete the negotiations with Schott. On his itinerary Wolf met the conductor Hermann Levi and the singer Eugen.Gura in Munich and called on his new friends Kauffmann and Grohe.

   But now bodily and mental exhaustion supervened, with some ominous signs. Apart from the Ibsen com­mission and the orchestration of a Mörike song Wolf was barren for most of 1891. The tedium of inactivity was alleviated by a further visit to Germany to hear Christnacht under Weingartner at Mannheim. There he met Humperdinck, who as Schott's reader had recom­mended Wolf's songs; but they did not take up the option on Christnacht, in which Wolf could recognize defective scoring. A depressive phase ensued. He suf­fered from insomnia and malaise; he despaired of writ­ing another note. But at the end of December he com­posed (or perhaps completed) another 15 Italian songs, again full of masterly invention. Then darkness fell again, more impenetrable than ever. The long fallow period was again put to good use in tours and concerts in Germany.

   The first Wolf recital in Berlin on 3 March 1892, with the local tenor Grahl (replacing the indisposed Jager) and the mezzo-soprano Friedrike Mayer, was enthusias­tically received, though it was not a financial success. Wolf made many new friends including his patron Baron Lipperheide, the chorus master Siegfried Ochs, the critic Richard Sternfeld (who wrote his laudatory article Tin neuer Liedesfraling' on 12 March), the opera singer Emilie Herzog-Welti (who gave a success­ful Wolf recital on 12 April) and the librettist Richard Genee. As a suitable opera text for Wolf he recom­mended Alarcon's Il niño de la bola, translated into German as Manuel Venegas. This project preoccupied Wolf to the last.

   On his return from Berlin Wolf again fell victim to the feverish throat inflammation (no doubt a symptom of secondary syphilis) to which he had been prone since 1891. He was cared for, as so often, by the Köcherts. Perhaps it was the presence of Melanie, his shy and reticent mistress (who was never seen among the social circle of Wolf's musical friends), that prompted him to orchestrate his great song on the theme of covert and illicit love, Geh, Geliebter, geh jetzt, from the Spanish songbook. He scored the Italienische Serenade for small orchestra, with some slight but perplexing thematic changes; he sporadically sketched or planned some additional movements. Otherwise he was barren and listless. In the three years 1892 to 1894 he wrote not a single note of viable original music. As before, he sought distraction in continued travel and concert tours. Thus in January 1894 he attended a very successful performance of his Shakespeare Elfenlied and the choral version of his Mörike song Der Feuerreiter under the direction of Siegfried Ochs in Berlin. On the same programme was the Te Deum of Bruckner, also present in person; he and Wolf were on affable terms. In Mannheim Wolf met another disciple and benefactor, the barrister and amateur tenor Hugo Faisst of Stuttgart. In Darmstadt he became infatuated with the soprano Frieda Zerny of the Mainz opera, and formed wild plans of emigrating with her to the USA. This brief liaison somehow became known to Melanie KOchert, to her distress and Wolf's embarrassment. He renewed his allegiance to her; and the summer months of 1894 were spent first at her country home in Traunkirchen, and later with the Lipperheides near Brixlegg in the Tyrol.

   With the success of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel in December Wolf's opera fever reached a new crisis. The Alarcon story of the three-cornered hat began to dominate his mind. He rejected a version pre­pared by Franz Schaumann, chairman of the Wagner­-Verein and enthused instead over the previously de­spised libretto of Rosa Mayreder, entitled Der Corregidor. Its merits are disputable; but this text in­dubitably now began to fertilize Wolf's long-dormant creative genius. As before, there was a period of winter gestation followed by springtime labour. Early in April 1895 Wolf again sought solitude in Perchtoldsdorf. There the Mörike drama was re-enacted: he began to compose daily from dawn to dusk. In May he left for the more comfortable Lipperheide château in Brixlegg. By 9 July the whole four-act opera was complete in piano score; the orchestration occupied the rest of the year. The opera was offered, unsuccessfully, to Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was eventually accepted (with some help from Grohe) for performance at Mannheim. The re­hearsals were prolonged and tense because of inaccuracies in the copied parts and fluctuations in Wolf's own mental state; he continued to be plagued by insomnia. The first performance (7 June 1896) under Hugo Rohr was a great success, with curtain calls for the composer, but the enthusiasm abated in later performances, with the gradual departure of Wolf's friends and admirers; the opera has still not reached the general repertory or the wider public.

   Meanwhile Wolf in a further access of creative fer­vour returned to Perchtoldsdorf and composed (or com­pleted) the final section of the Italian songbook, with 24 songs in the five weeks between 25 March and 30 April. He then returned to Vienna to occupy – for the first time in his life – his own home. Ever since his arrival there he had been living either in penury or else as a guest. The Köcherts had always been generous; the Lipperheides and Grohe had provided a stipend; now Faisst and other friends found and furnished a flat in the Schwindgasse. There, for most of 1896 and the beginning of 1897, he revised (with the devoted help of Potpeschnigg) the score and parts of Der Corregidor, influenced inter alia by Johann Fuchs, Kapellmeister of the Vienna Opera, ho advised that revisions (notably a cut in the last act) were mandatory. In autumn 1896 he wrote two settings of Byron and one of Reinick.

4. BREAKDOWN AND TERMINAL ILLNESS (1897-1903). In March 1897 Wolf composed his last songs, to son­nets by Michelangelo in German translation – the Christmas gift of Paul Müller, the founder of the Berlin Hugo Wolf-Verein. In April 1897 a Vienna Wolf-Verein was inaugurated by the university professor Michael Haberlandt, a staunch support in Wolf's declining years. Meanwhile Wolf had pursued his plans for a second Alarcon opera on the story of Manuel Venegas.

   The theme is sexual jealousy and revenge, as in Der Corregidor, but with dark overtones of violence and tragedy. Perhaps Wolf's mind in its depressive phase was reverting to a febrile subjectivism. The Michelangelo songs, fine though they are, have evident personal application. By 1897 Wolf was clearly a very sick man, whose always unpredictable behaviour was now causing distress and alarm. A medical examination in the previous year had disclosed (though the know­ledge was withheld from Wolf himself) a characteristic loss of pupillary reflex, symptomatic of the incipient general paralysis of tertiary syphilis. Nevertheless he was again ready to compose at fever-heat. A Manuel Venegas libretto prepared by Rosa Mayreder was sum­marily rejected. Moritz Hoernes (a colleague of Michael Haberlandt) produced an alternative version which seemed to the sick Wolf to have a truly Shakespearean quality. In September 1897 he was again sequestered in his apartment working from dawn to dusk on the new opera. He completed some 60 pages of piano score in three weeks; then his mind gave way. He claimed to have been appointed director of the Vienna Opera; thenceforth only his own works (mostly unfinished or unwritten) would he performed. No doubt his madness took this turn because of a recent visit from his old friend Mahler, who had just been appointed opera Kapellmeister and who according to Wolf had promised to do his utmost to stage Der Corregidor in the coming season. The stress of the ensuing excitement, or perhaps the disappointment of a later change of plan, finally unhinged Wolf's already wrenched reason. He called a meeting of his sympathizers, played them his Venegas fragments, told them of his new appointment and his plans for dismissing Mahler and taking over. He was removed under restraint to the asylum of Dr Wilhelm Svetlin. His letters announce grandiose plans for world tours of his own operas with the support of the Weimar theatre. His overheated brain boiled over with insipid music. Some remission ensued and he was discharged on 24 January 1898. He paid inconsequential and disconsolate visits to various resorts and centres (including Semmcring, Graz, Cilli and Trieste) accompanied by his sister and the devoted Melanie Köchert. On 6 March he returned to Vienna, to a new home in the Muhlgasse. That summer he stayed with the KOcherts at Traunkirchen. In October he was seized by another gust of madness and tried to drown himself in the Traunsee. He entered the Lower Austrian provincial asylum in Vienna on 4 October 1898. There his sufferings were alleviated by the love and loyalty of Melanie, whose frequent and regular visits continued unflinchingly until the day of his death on 22 February 1903. Then she gave way to remorse and a slow melancholy. On 21 March 1906 she fell to her death from the fourth-floor window of her Vienna home.

   Wolf inscribed all his song manuscripts to her, as the one who understood him and his music best of all. She lies in the family grave at Hietzing. He is buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery beside Schubert and Beethoven.