Hugo Wolf

The Vocal Music

Susan Youens

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780691091457
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691265018
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

A groundbreaking look at one of the great song composers of the late Romantic period

In the virtual cottage industry of works on fin de siècle Vienna, Hugo Wolf (1860–1903) has been somewhat neglected, perhaps because he was the master of a small genre—the late Romantic lied—and never truly made his mark in the larger forms that command greater public attention. But in the realm of song, he is among the greatest inheritors of Schubert and Schumann, one who was both a traditionalist and a modernist. When the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick disapprovingly dubbed Wolf “the Richard Wagner of the lied,” he was paying oblique homage to Wolf’s genius as a song composer in the most modern manner.

In this book, Susan Youens examines five aspects of Wolf’s compositional art, each exemplifying a different synthesis of traditionalism and modernity and spanning his entire, tragically brief creative life, from his first efforts to his lapse into insanity in 1897. She discusses Wolf’s youthful imitations of Schumann, his genius for comic songs of a kind unlike any of his predecessors, his part in the ballad revival of the late nineteenth century, Wolf in relation to his contemporaries, and his pursuit of operatic fame. Youens looks as closely at the poetic texts as she does the music and includes numerous previously unpublished sketches and fragments, examples from songs now long out of print and difficult to obtain, and citations from Wolf’s vivid letters and other sources of the period.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Examples and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: “Too Much Like Schumann”: The Apprenticeship of a Lieder Composer
• Chapter 2: Of Wolf, Freud, and Humor in Music
• Chapter 3: Influence without Anxiety: Wolf and the Ballad Tradition
• Chapter 4: A Spanish Tale: Wolf and the Lied after 1850
• Chapter 5: Wolf and the Dream of Opera
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index