Nobody could write songs like Hugo Wolf. Douglas Sealy looks back at the work that a new festival is preparing to celebrate
The songs of Hugo Wolf have been praised more often than they have been performed. Now, though, with this year marking the centenary of his death, the pianist Dearbhla Collins is mounting a festival devoted to the composer's complete songbooks.
Wolf was one of the three greatest exponents of the German art song, bringing the combination of voice and piano to even greater heights than those reached by his predecessors Schubert and Schumann. Together they spanned the 19th century: Schubert's formal Op 1, the unforgettable Erlkönig, was written in 1815; Wolf's last three songs, the equally unforgettable Michelangelo Lieder, in 1897.
Wolf never set a poem that had, in his opinion, been so well set by another composer that improvement was impossible. He believed, however, that several well-known songs fell outside this category, including Goethe's Kennst Du Das Land? (Do You Know The Land Where The Lemon Trees Are In Flower?). It was set by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Liszt, but none penetrated the heart of the poem the way Wolf did, as if words and music had sprung simultaneously from the one brain. This was Wolf's gift, to link the two forms of expression so one was inconceivable without the other.
His mastery was not easily obtained. His father, a leather worker in Windischgraz (now Slovenj Gradec in Slovenia), loved music, playing it at home with family and friends, but he was set against Hugo taking it up as a career. Hugo was headstrong, however, and went his own way, failing in many school subjects but making steady progress in his musical studies. Thanks to the intervention of an aunt, who put him up in Vienna, he travelled the 150 miles to the north-west and became a student at the conservatory.
It was in this year, 1875, at 15, that he fell under the spell of opera - The Marriage Of Figaro, Oberon, Fidelio and so on, but they were as nothing compared with the impression left by Tannhäuser. He applauded so vigorously that he attracted more attention than the composer, and afterwards he even managed to meet Wagner, who politely declined to pass judgment on Wolf's compositions.
It became his ambition to write an opera, and he spent much time searching for a libretto, although he was busy with many other musical projects, most of which were never finished, and as he was nearly always short of money he used to play dance music in a small inn until late at night. His studies suffered and he was expelled from the conservatory, as he had been from school. His friends came to his rescue, providing him with accommodation and finding pupils for him to teach. But often he could afford only one meagre meal a day, and the few songs he had written, though generally liked, were mostly unperformed and unpublished. In an effort to gain recognition he visited Brahms, who advised him to study counterpoint, a remark that did not go down well with the hot-tempered 19-year-old.
Around this time he fell in love with the pretty and coquettish Vally Franck, the first of several tormented relationships, but she broke off with him a couple of years later, and Wolf was visited by terrifying nightmares. His state of mind was not helped by a private performance of his String Quartet, which, he reported, was "murdered". In 1882, however, he was lucky enough to get a free ticket to Bayreuth for Parsifal, which he already knew from the piano reduction. He was overwhelmed. He went again the following year and started to compose a tone poem for large orchestra inspired by Penthesilea, Heinrich von Kleist's verse play.
His lack of means compelled him to seek new sources of income, and his friends got him a post as a music critic. He broke into this new world like, in Ernest Newman's words, a howling dervish into a lady's boudoir. He established a trinity - Gluck, Mozart and Wagner - and the three became one in Beethoven. But what most attracted attention was his insensate antagonism towards Brahms - "to listen to his Piano Concerto in B flat was like having to subsist on a diet of broken glass, mouldy corks and rusty rivets, a phenomenon of the greatest interest to a specialist in digestive disorders".
On the other hand he emerged as a champion of Bruckner, whom he declared the most important writer of symphonies since Beethoven.
The vitriolic nature of his attacks on composers, conductors and orchestras did not favour the performance of his own works. A rehearsal of Penthesilea in 1884 by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Hans Richter was, to the composer's fury, treated as a joke. In 1887 he abandoned music journalism for good.
By 1888 two small collections of songs had been published, and in the same year he was driven, to his astonishment, to write the 53 Mörike songs - often as many as two a day - and the Eichendorff songs. After a month's break he started on the 51 Goethe settings. Working as if possessed, he wrote the last but one on February 12th, 1889.
The next creative outburst came on October 21st. He wrote the last Goethe song and began the 34 Spanish songs, followed immediately by the six Keller songs and, after a three-month break, seven Italian songs. Exhausted, he composed nothing for a year. He wrote: "Composition is out of the question. I don't think I will ever write another note." Even a visit to Bayreuth failed to rouse him: he fell asleep during Parsifal. Suddenly, in the last month of 1890, he wrote the 15 songs that complete the first volume of the Italian songs. In three years he had written nearly all the songs on which his reputation rests.
Wolf's songs were now being performed and enthusiastically received, but not until 1895 did he manage to compose the first bars of his opera, Der Corregidor, which he finished nine months later. So sensitive to extraneous noise was he that he shot a finch that kept disturbing him. Suddenly he felt compelled to write, in a month, the 24 songs that form the second Italian volume. Obsessed by these he neglected the preparations for the production of his opera, which eventually took place in June 1896. Although it was acclaimed at the time it failed to establish a place in the repertoire.
In 1897 it became apparent to his friends that he was going mad, and he had to be taken to an asylum. Released the next year, he tried to drown himself and had to be taken back. He died there in 1903. Syphilis, contracted when he was 18, was responsible.
He never had the operatic success he dreamed of, never triumphed in larger forms, but it is hardly going too far to say that each of his songs is an opera in miniature and that he had a gift for compression denied to many. "I have become a Wagnerite," he declared after first hearing Tannhäuser, but he never became as diffuse as his idol. And the Viennese finally recognised his stature, for they buried him with honour, close to the graves of Beethoven and Schubert.
The Hugo Wolf Festival is at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, on most Sundays until the end of the year. This weekend's opening programme of Mörike and Eichendorff settings is given by Detlef Roth, baritone, and Dearbhla Collins, piano. All concerts are at noon, and admission is free
