フーゴー・ヴォルフ
作曲
Hugo Wolf, who was born in the same year as Gustav Mahler, is today considered, alongside Franz Schubert, one of the most important lieder composers of the 19th century. And like Schubert, it took a long time for Wolf’s instrumental works to be “discovered” – including the symphonic poem Penthesilea based on Heinrich von Kleist and his light-hearted and optimistic Italian Serenade.
Hugo Wolf, born in Windischgrätz (now Slovenj Gradec, Slovenia) in 1860, played the violin as a child in a private ensemble that his father had put together from family members and friends. At the age of 15, he went to the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied briefly with Gustav Mahler in Robert Fuchs’s composition class and then in Franz Krenn’s. Unimpressed by the conservative teaching methods, the Wagnerian Wolf told the director of the conservatory before the end of his second year of study that he had “forgotten more than he had learned” so far, whereupon he was expelled from the institution in 1877 for “lack of discipline”. Wolf continued studying on his own, while supporting himself financially by giving piano lessons, among other things. He found support among the members of the Vienna Academic Wagner Society, and from January 1884 onwards, Wolf also spent three years writing reviews for the Wiener Salonblatt, in which he vehemently championed the “New German School” of Wagner, Liszt and Bruckner. He produced his most important lieder collections from 1888 onwards. His comic opera Der Corregidor was a success at its premiere in Mannheim in 1896, but failed to establish itself in the repertoire: a further performance under Mahler’s direction in Vienna did not take place, whereupon Wolf suffered a mental breakdown. The cause of this was the syphilitic infection he had contracted at the age of 18. When his health deteriorated, his long-time friend Michael Haberlandt, who had supported Wolf by founding the Hugo Wolf Association, among other things, took him to a private sanatorium in Vienna. After a failed suicide attempt, Wolf died as a result of his illness on 22 February 1903.
