Hugo Wolf 1860 – 1903
Hugo Philipp Jakob Wolf was a very interesting Austrian composer. A true picture of how detrimental it can be for a composer to get a venereal disease. Yet, due to his genius, he was able to truly give a lot to the world in an incredibly short time.
Having been taught violin and piano by his father since the age of 4, at the age of 8, he was taken to see his first opera, Belisaro by Donizetti. He was so taken back by the work, that he went home and started trying to play pieces of it on the piano. To everyone’s amazement, he was able to play large portions of the opera by heart after having only heard it for the first time. He was sent to an array of different schools to support his musical education, but on account of his stubbornness, he proved to be an incredibly difficult student. - So difficult, that he was not able to keep from getting expelled from the various schools he attended.
It was not until the age of 15 that he was enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory, where he had the chance to meet and make friends with the great composer and director Gustav Mahler, a person for whom he had a great deal of admiration. During this time, he regularly visited the opera house and developed quite a passion for the works of Wagner, which undoubtedly had an influence upon his music. Unfortunately, this stability did not last very long, for only two years after, he was expelled from the conservatory due to his rebellious and unpredictable temper and went back home a disgrace.
That same year he returned to Vienna with the intention of teaching. Shortly after his arrival in Vienna, he got involved with a ring of friends who had been very well educated as well as intelligent. Although these friends had certainly been a good influence, it was during this time that it is believed that he had visited a brothel with them that will have changed and ended his life. By 1880, he had already started suffering from intense depression which only intensified his temperament. He had always been able to find various sorts of opportunities though. From everything I’ve read, I have understood that he suffered from serious depressions and had a bad temper, yet at the same time he was incredibly talented and charming, which enabled him to find a great deal of employment, even though not always suited for it. He took the job as second Kapellmeister(music director) in Salzburg in 1881, a position he was only able to hold for a few months after which returning to Vienna.
In 1884, he started working as a music critic for a newspaper, the ‘Wiener Salonblatt’, writing a lot of very controversial articles, to the point of even being offensive. During his years as a critic, it was noted that he was especially keen on writing horrible things about Brahms. It was only a few years after, in 1887, that he wrote one of his most popular pieces, Italian Serenade for string quartet. After this, he quit his job as a critic and started composing pieces at an immense rate… several a day!!! Among these pieces were:
the Mörike-Lieder- a set of songs based upon the poems of Eduard Mörike, the Goethe-Lieder, Eichendorff-Lieder, Der Corregidor (the Magistrate)- an opera he finished after only 14 weeks, Spanishes Liederbuch (Spanish Songbook), Penthesilea – a symphonic poem based on a play by the German author Heinrich von Kleist, and the Italienisches Liederbuch (Italian Songbook).
All of these great works were composed within an amazing time span of a little over 9 years!!! A note to the reader, should it not have already been noticed by the list above: He was especially noted for writing in the German Song form known as Lied. This term is used to describe a German art song of the 19th century written for voice and piano known for its expressiveness. After Franz Schubert, Wolf was one of the most significant composers of this musical form, known to have not only placed great importance upon the spoken word using lyrical expression, but also a lot of psychological insight in his pieces.
Unfortunately, the sickness (syphilis) he had acquired 20 years beforehand finally took hold of him completely and he was committed to an insane asylum in 1897 where he spent 6 long years before his death in 1903. Manuel Venegas, an opera, was the last of the works he left unfinished in 1887, right before his sickness took complete hold of him.
