Book Description

Book Description
This is the definitive biography of the composer Hugo Wolf (1860-1903), who was among the greatest Romantic song composers. Frank Walker spent nearly fifteen years researching and writing this authoritative work, drawing on inter views with dozens of Wolf's friends, relatives, and fellow musicians and on the letters, diaries, and documents he uncovered to create a portrait of this head strong and fascinating man. Wolf was a passionate advocate of Wagner, whom he first met by befriending a chambermaid in a Vienna hotel to gain an introduction to his idol. Like Wagner, Wolf was a combative personality, and he would become almost as notorious for his outbursts of temper and scathing critiques as he was for his over two hundred masterful settings of poetry by Goethe, Mrike, and others. His songs were composed during periods of intense inspiration that were followed by lengthy fallow periods. Walker vividly portrays the extremes to which the composer was prone and interweaves an account of Wolf's creative triumphs with the tale of his life. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
In spite of growing interest in the songs of Hugo Wolf, there is still a lack of serious critical discussion of the nature of his achievements. This book offers an in-depth study of his music, including detailed analyses of selected songs. Perspectives from musical analysis and history are brought together to show how this composer and late-nineteenth-century song have a far more significant role in helping us to understand Wagner's musical and aesthetic influence than has yet been realized. ... Read more

Book Description
Viennese composer Hugo Wolf produced one of the most important song collections of the nineteenth century when he set to music fifty-three poems by the great German poet Eduard Mörike. Susan Youens reappraises this singular collaboration, examining selected Mörike songs in detail to shed new light on the sophisticated interplay between poetry and music. Although Wolf is known as "the Poet's Composer," someone who revered poetry and served it faithfully in his music, Youens reveals how his Mörike songs were also influenced by his own life, psychology and experiences.Download Description
Viennese composer Hugo Wolf produced one of the most important song collections of the nineteenth century when he set to music fifty-three poems by the great German poet Eduard M ... Read more

Book Description
This is a love story. It tells of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Hugo Wolf, one of the greatest masters of the German art song, whose dedication to the poetic spirit of his music was equaled only by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, and Melanie Köchert, the wife of a prominent Viennese jeweler with whom Wolf shared a lifelong emotional, spiritual, and artistic bond.

Wolf's letters to Köchert-he wrote 245 between 1887 and 1899-were composed during a period of almost unprecedented cultural upheaval in Europe, in the shadow of Vienna during the era of Freud, Mahler, and Klimt. They reveal Wolf at his most optimistic, celebrating his concert successes and the solitude he believed was so precious to his ability to compose. They follow Wolf through times of overwhelming despair, when his musical failures left him profoundly alienated, overcome, as he revealed to Köchert, "by a feeling of unspeakable emptiness and desolation." And they follow Wolf as he struggled to compose the 250 astounding art songs that are his creative legacy, and his almost simultaneous descent into madness.

Hugo Wolf: Letters to Melanie Köchert, sensitively translated by Wolf scholar and interpreter Louise McClelland Urban, is a literary and musical even of the highest order. ... Read more

Book Description
Perform timeless Lieder for Soprano with accompaniment from John Wustman, pianist for Pavarotti!

Hugo Wolf, the tormented artist whose great songs have left a lasting impression on the vocal arts, is here represented by a beautiful collection of Lieder for high voice. Superb music and a rewarding set of songs for any vocalist.

Includes a high-quality printed vocal score and a compact disc with stereo accompaniments to each piece minus you, the soloist.Perfect for practice, rehearsal, auditions, performances and more! ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Notes, published by Music Library Association, Inc. on March 1, 1994. The length of the article is 1337 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music.
Author: Amanda Glauert
Publication: Notes (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 1994
Publisher: Music Library Association, Inc.
Volume: v50Issue: n3Page: p973(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
In the virtual cottage industry of recent works on fin-de-sicle 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. Wolf's youthful imitations of Schumann (a common phenomenon at the time), 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--in her investigation of these subjects, Youens discusses the poetic texts as closely 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 from other sources of the period. For lieder enthusiasts, this book has much that is new or little known to offer. ... Read more