In the 19th century, Germany produced some of the world’s greatest songwriters. One of the greatest of these was Hugo Wolf. He’s not as well-known as his peers in this domain like Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, mostly because he didn’t find success in composing larger-scale works. His exquisitely crafted pieces for voice and piano, though, have endured.
Early Life
Hugo Wolf was born in Windischgraz, Styria (now Slovenjgrade, Slovenia) to German parents in 1860. His father, Philipp, was an amateur musician who had reluctantly entered the family business in the leather trade. Philipp taught violin and piano to Hugo, who showed great talent from a young age.
Hugo he left his hometown at age 9 to pursue formal musical studies, transferring to three different schools before ending up at the Vienna Conservatory in 1875, where he befriended young Gustav Mahler. Wolf found the conservative atmosphere there stifling, though, and was dismissed for a breach of discipline after two years.
After leaving the Conservatory, Wolf endured a difficult period, struggling to make ends meet as a music teacher and critic. He wrote scathing reviews and made many enemies in the music world, including that of Johannes Brahms, whose traditional style of songwriting Wolf hated.
Wolf and Poetry
Wolf’s songs are now famous as being among the great collections of “lieder” (the German translation for setting poetry to classical music). He didn’t refer to them in this way, however, preferring to call them “Gedichte” (poems).These lieder are more dissonant than the songs of Schubert or Schumann and are considered more difficult to listen to for this reason. While Wolf built on these earlier songwriters and was skilled at writing memorable melodies, he went in a different direction, developing a harmonic fusion of voice and piano.
Unlike Schubert, who focused on a text’s musical potential first and considered words second, Wolf believed both should have equal weight. He insisted that his singers practice flawless declamation. He even recommended that the poems he set to music should be recited on stage before being sung so that listeners would attend to their meaning better.
According to musicologist Richard Stokes, Wolf “preferred singers who did not sing too beautifully” and focused on interpreting the emotional and dramatic qualities of the lyrics.
As Wolf explained in an 1897 letter to Karl Mayr, his focus was on the piano rather than the vocal line: “The melody in the piano binds the whole song together, while the singer weaves his way in and out of the accompaniment, stressing now this word now that, in a sort of heightened recitative.”
To achieve his vision of musical poetry, Wolf turned to the music of Richard Wagner for inspiration. By applying Wagner’s techniques of chromaticism and dissonance to explore the psychological nuances of lyrics, Wolf did for the song genre what Wagner had done for opera.
Eduard Mörike
Wolf set the work of 36 poets to song. Some, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine, were famous writers who had been given musical treatments before. Others were, and remain, less well-known outside of Germany. The most important of these was Eduard Friedrich Mörike, a Lutheran pastor who wrote novels and poetry in his spare time.In early 1888, Wolf began setting Mörike’s poems to song in a burst of creativity, writing two to three songs per day. In a letter to a friend, he said, “What I am putting on paper is being written for posterity. … They are masterpieces.”
What drew Wolf to Mörike’s verse? Well, according to Ernest Newman, Wolf’s first English-language biographer, Mörike “gives the musician the embodiment of an emotion that is itself almost musical in its nature, and is wrapped up in just as many words as are necessary to give form and substance to the elusive aerial thing, but without a word beyond these.”
By early 1889, Wolf had finished the first of his song collections on which his reputation depends. This grouping of 53 poems, now known as the “Mörike Lieder,” is one of the great syntheses of words and music—an unwitting collaboration on Mörike’s part, since he had been dead for 13 years.
‘Seclusion’
One of Wolf’s most popular songs during his lifetime was “Verborgenheit.” It’s recognition as one of his most significant works took place gradually over time, but it remains one of his most performed and recorded songs. It’s one of the first of Mörike’s poems that Wolf set to music.Let, O world, O let me be! Do not tempt with gifts of love, Let this heart keep to itself Its rapture, its pain!
I do not know why I grieve, It is unknown sorrow; Always through a veil of tears I see the sun’s beloved light.
Often, I am lost in thought, And bright joy flashes Through the oppressive gloom, Bringing rapture to my breast.
The final stanza is a repetition of the first. Wolf used his musical language to bring out the emotional subtleties of Mörike’s text. The opening lines are expressed through a slow, sad, lovely melody. The second stanza picks up the pace and introduces a dissonance that becomes more agitated in the third stanza, climaxing with “Wonniglich in meiner Brust” (“Bringing rupture to my breast”), before receding back into the slow melody of the closing stanza.Wolf came to dislike “Verborgenheit,” even at one point disowning it, thinking the song was too sentimental. Singers and audiences have disagreed, though, and it remains a favorite in performance.
