In a year when there are, rightly, many musical festivities to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Berlioz, it seems fitting to take the opportunity of also marking the centenary of the death of Hugo Wolf, one of the great composers of the German Lied.
Born in the Austrian province of Steiermark in March 1860, Wolf was an exact contemporary of Gustav Mahler - indeed, the two not only arrived at the Vienna Conservatory in the same year but also shared a flat until Wolf was expelled from the Conservatory for, allegedly, threatening the life of the Director. Wolf's career was, however, to prove much less illustrious than that of Mahler. It was also tragically short, his period of compositional maturity lasting for a mere nine years from 1888 until 1897 when the onset of syphilitic insanity led to his being confined to an asylum. During these nine years, however, Wolf composed some two hundred and forty songs - often, in a frenzy of creativity, writing several songs in a day - that rank amongst the masterpieces of the genre.
Of all Lieder composers, Wolf is arguably the most perceptive, the most sensitive to poetic values and the most finely attuned to the allusive nature of his texts. No composer has been so able to set a poem within the confines of a close lyric structure in such a way as to reflect its overall meaning while at the same time mirroring the emotional nuance of each word with such subtlety. In this respect, Wolf's ability to manipulate his musical motifs so as to reflect the tiniest transient emotional shift is matched only by Janacek.
Wolf is often regarded as a 'Wagnerian' composer, and it is true that he took full advantage of the possibilities opened up by the extended chromatic language of Tristan und Isolde. But to regard him as a small-scale Wagner - with the piano acting as a substitute for the orchestra - is to ignore the sheer range of his output in terms of both its musical language and expressive capabilities. No set of songs shows this more than the Italian Songbook, in which the brief songs (few of which are more than one or two pages long in the manuscript) range from the rumbustious ('Ich hab in Penna') to the tragic, from the raptly beautiful ('Sterb' ich' or 'Benedit die sel'ge Mutter') to the slyly mischievous ('Wie lange schon') and each of which presents a perfect miniature masterpiece.
Unlike many composers, Wolf had little interest in setting minor poems and invariably confined himself to poetry which he regarded as great in its own right: "Today it is no longer possible to set music to a bad text," he told his friend Henrich Werner. "Schubert could still do it - he could make something beautiful out of a cheese label. However trivial it was, Schubert made something important out of it. But today one must stick to the poet." The importance which Wolf attached to the poem is indicated by the fact that he habitually placed the name of the poet before his own name at the head of the manuscript.
Nor, unlike Brahms or the Mahler of the Knaben Wunderhorn settings, was he usually interested in folk texts or folk songs. The Italian Songbook and the earlier Spanish Songbook are, therefore, unusual in that here, for the only time in his life, he turned to collections that consisted in the main of anonymous folk texts, albeit folk texts that had been translated - or, more accurately, paraphrased - in such a way as to remove all the 'rough edges'. Based on Paul Heyse's 1860 translations of Italian folk poems, the Italian Songbook was written in two bursts between 1890 and 1896, the setting of twenty two of the poems in 1890-91 being followed by a long period during which Wolf suffered from a three-year creative silence , and then worked on his one completed opera Der Corregidor. The remaining twenty-four poems were set in 1896 and are amongst the last songs he composed - only six settings of Gottfried Keller and the three Michelangelo Songs followed - before the onset of the disease that would lead to his death at the age of forty two.
© Douglas Jarman