The love of his life was Melanie K?rt married to Wolf’s benefactor

The love of his life was Melanie K?rt, married to Wolf’s benefactor, the Viennese court jeweller. The love was mutual and lasted roughly 20 years, though Melanie remained with her husband and children until, after Wolf’s death, she committed suicide. As Wolf’s biographer Frank Walker put it, Melanie’s husband seems to have recognised that genius is not to be judged by the standards of normality and tolerated the situation. Wolf was frequently the couple’s house guest.Like so many, perhaps most, composers of the late 19th century, Wolf was overwhelmed by the impact of Wagner. Instead of trying to do something like Wagner, or reacting sharply against him, Wolf made Wagner’s language his own and applied it to concise forms Sometimes his dissonant harmony went beyond Wagner’s. What liberated his flow of creativity was his extraordinary sensitivity to German poetry, and at his own recitals, playing the demanding piano parts as he sang, he would read the poems first.

He was extremely critical of professional singers, rarely giving praise or thanks, and when he accompanied them, he often castigated them in public.Wolf’s first major collection was his 53 M?e Songs, which he significantly called “Gedichte”, or Poems. Some of M?e’s poems had been set many times before, but Wolf was the first composer really to get to grips with a poet now considered one of the greatest in the German language; the collection has an enormous range of subjects and character. M?e was a Lutheran pastor, Wolf a free-thinking lapsed Roman Catholic, but in “Auf ein altes Bild” and “Schlafendes Jesuskind” M?e inspired in Wolf a spirit of meditation that is deep and strong. Wolf’s religious songs are rare in 19th century music for their conviction and lack of sentimentality.

There were to be more in a later collection.The M?e Songs were finished in an amazing nine months. Wolf’s next major collection was 20 settings of Eichendorff, slighter in character. In general, he deliberately avoided poems he thought had been successfully set by earlier composers, so Wolf chose different poems from those which Schumann had set in his Eichendorff cycle. But in Wolf’s third major collection, the 51 settings of Goethe he composed in the winter of 1888-89 (another astonishingly concentrated burst of work), he had no qualms in taking on lyrics which had been set both by Schubert and Schumann, because he was confident that he would at least equal and in some cases surpass them.Like Goethe, Wolf was drawn to the warm south – this was partly a deliberate attempt to get away from the crushing weight of Wagner – and his next collection was the Spanish Songbook of 44 settings which he completed in the spring of 1890. The poems, some by famous writers like Cervantes, others from anonymous folk sources, all in German translation, are divided between and secular.Eric Sams, the current British expert on Wolf’s songs, views the Spanish Songs as a transition from the high art of Goethe to the folk-verse of Wolf’s last major collection, the two volumes of 22 and 24 Italian Songs, completed in 1891 and 1896. (A long period of depression intervened.) Wolf himself described the Italian Songs as something quite new; the songs of the second book he considered almost “absolute” music, suitable as short movements for string quartet, though many of Wolf’s songs in general might be described as tone poems for the piano with the voice as an extra, but essential, instrument.Most of the poems in the Italian Songbook are love lyrics of only eight lines and are more verbally ingenious than profound. Wolf may not have known the originals, and set the German translations of Paul Heyse, a Nobel prize-winner in 1910, who, incid-entally, did not appreciate Wolf’s music.