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Image:Hugo wolf.jpg|right|132px|Photograph of Hugo
Wolf
Hugo Wolf (March 13, 1860 – February 22,
1903) was a Austria|Austrian composer of
Slovenes|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 conciseness
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 dying of syphilis.

== Biography ==

=== Early life (1860 – 1887) ===
Wolf was born in Windischgraz (now Slovenj
Gradec), part of a German-speaking enclave within
Slovenia, to a Slovene mother (Katherina
Orehovnik) and a Germanic father (Philipp Wolf).
His family was originally named 'Vouks', but they
changed the surname to the German form 'Wolf'. 
Hugo Wolf is regarded as an Austria|Austrian
composer since he rejected his provincial or
peasant origins and spent most of his life in
Vienna, becoming a representative of "New German"
trend in Lieder, a trend which followed from the
expressive, chromaticism|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 with 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 this is intended to be an elegy
for Wagner. Wolf often despaired of his own future
in the years following, in a world where his idol
had gone, leaving tremendous footsteps to follow
and no guidance on how to do so. This left him
even more temperamental that he usually was,
alienating friends and patrons, though his noted
charm kept him more than his actions likely
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 is one composer 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 a few 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 he 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
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe, Eichendorff,
and von Scheffel on the subject of strength and
resolve faced with adversity. Shortly thereafter
Wolf would complete 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 Eduard Mörike|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 Joseph von
Eichendorff|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
adherents, still smarting from Wolf's merciless
reviews, returned the favor—when they would
have anything to do with him at all. Brahms'
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 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 one 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
had 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 fixation on the idea of composing an
opera blinded him to its faults upon second look.
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 with
success at the outset, 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 wellness.
He left sixty pages for 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.

==Music==
Wolf's greatest musical influence was Richard
Wagner, with whom in an encounter after Wolf first
came to the Vienna Conservatory encouraged the
young composer to persist at composing and 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 partially by his devotion to
Wagner — the two couldn't stand each other
— 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 the more private and
personal form. 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 form 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 into one of the shortest forms; 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 color 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 music|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 form|strophic songs favoured by his
contemporaries, instead building the form around
the nature of the work.

==Notable works==

===Opera===
*Der Corregidor (1895)

===Lieder===
*Eduard Mörike|Mörike-Lieder (1889)
*Joseph von Eichendorff|Eichendorff-Lieder (1889) 
*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe-Lieder (1890)
*Spanisches Liederbuch (1891)
*Italienisches Liederbuch (1892, 1896)

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

==References==
Sams, Eric and Susan Youens: 'Hugo Wolf', Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians|Grove Music
Online ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com
(subscription access)

==External links==
*
http://www.slovenj-gradec.si/default.asp?MenuID=13
2 Hugo Wolf's birthplace (in English)
*
http://www.slovenj-gradec.si/default.asp?MenuID=14
5 Komponist Hugo Wolf (in German)
*
http://www.slovenj-gradec.si/default.asp?MenuID=57
Rojstna hiša skladatelja Hugo Wolfa (in
Slovene)