We also find many by his colleagues, Felix Weingartner (1863), Hans Pfitzner (1869), Mahler and others, whose songs, though beautiful, showed their skill less than their operas, symphonies, and choral works.
Hugo Wolf—Song Genius
Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) will be regarded, as time goes on, as one of the greatest composers of the 19th century. This, notwithstanding the fact that he published 260 songs and nothing at all for orchestra, and in chamber music, he wrote only one very interesting quartet introduced in this country nearly twenty years ago by the Flonzaley Quartet. Such a master would no doubt have left more than songs, would have been one of the musical beacon-lights of the world, had his life not been one of tragedy.
His story, indeed, exceeds in unhappiness that of Schumann or even of Beethoven. Early in the best days of his life, his mind began to give way, and during periods of sanity he wrote with unbelievable fluency only to be suddenly cut off from the power. He was fully aware of his condition and his fate, and his letters expressing his emotions and describing his agony are too sad to write about.
Hugo Wolf, born at Windischgratz in Styria (1860) was the fourth son of a leather-currier who was also a musician. The home was the scene of much chamber music in which Hugo played the second violin. The people of Styria loved the old Italian operas, and Wolf frequently expressed the belief that he had some Latin blood in his veins. This seemed to show in his music for he wrote songs in Italian and Spanish style and he was particularly attracted to French music and musicians. One wonders could greater songs have been written than his (Spanisches Liederbuch) Spanish Song Book which includes not only thirty-four brilliant folk-melodies, but also ten noble religious songs.
Romain Rolland, the great French writer on musical subjects wrote: “It has been said that the Spanisches Liederbuch is to Wolf’s work what Tristan is to Wagner’s.”
Indeed many who write of Wolf have said that his vivid power of expression, and inspiration could only be compared to Wagner’s. The poems he selected proved what a high literary taste he had. For a time he was a musical critic and made the bitterest enemies because of the abuse he hurled at Brahms.
His story may be quickly told for he got most of his education from the libraries and from reading the scores of the great masters. Having no piano he could be found daily sitting on a bench in the park studying the Beethoven sonatas. But he loved Wagner best of all, and held his meeting with that master his life’s greatest joy. Wolf had composed little until after he was twenty-eight, then his writing was feverish, interrupted only by his lapses of mind. He died in one of these spells, of pneumonia, at 37. All his work was done in four or five years, for of the last nine years during five of them (1890–95) he was prostrated and often unable to speak.
Bruckner
Among the composers around this time and later, there are but few who have left more than a ripple on the musical ocean. Some created a stir in their own day and even now there is hot discussion about them among the critics, while some people are pleased and others are not.