Hugo Wolf
Genius and madman
| The genius of Hugo Wolf, a passionate composer throughout his life, went unrecognised for a long time. His skills were not acknowledged until shortly before his physical and mental condition had deteriorated to the point where he had himself committed to a lunatic asylum.
1860 Hugo Wolf is born in Windischgrätz, then part of Lower Styria.
1875 Having learned the violin and the piano at home from his father, he goes to the Vienna Conservatory.
1875-1878 The young man composes 50 songs in quick succession. In the meantime, he leaves the Vienna Conservatory. He would like to study with a great master, but Johannes Brahms is not the only such maestro to rebuff him.
1878-1887 Wolf becomes a music critic and heaps scorn on all those who rejected him.
1888-1898 At last the artist’s own compositions begin to attract attention. Motivated by his success, he devotes himself to music with increasing dedication. For example, he sets poems by Goethe to music and writes the opera „Der Corregidor“ in 1895. However, Wolf’s work is repeatedly interrupted by phases of mental lethargy.
1898-1903 Wolf’s poor mental and physical health leads him to commit himself to Vienna’s lunatic asylum in 1898.
1903 Hugo Wolf dies at the age of 43 in Vienna’s mental hospital.
Hugo Wolf (*1860 +1903)
| Hugo Wolf was born in March 1869 in Windischgrätz (today the Slovenian town of Slovenj Gradec) in what was then Lower Styria. His father taught him the piano and the violin at an early age, and he was accepted at the Vienna Conservatory at the young age of 15. However, he only remained there for a year, preferring to pursue his studies independently later.
Rejection
He wrote 50 songs in the next three years. The young composer’s dearest wish was to be able to study with a master such as Johannes Brahms. However, he encountered only rejection. These rebuffs wounded him deeply, and his admiration for the great artists – especially for Johannes Brahms – turned to hostility. By now the young man was working as a music critic for the „Wiener Salonblatt“, and he made no attempt to conceal this hostility in his reviews. He ridiculed Brahms mercilessly in his articles while heaping praise upon Wagner, Liszt and Bruckner.
Success
| Despite his initial difficulties, Hugo Wolf succeeded in drawing public attention to his compositions at the age of 28, when a Viennese publisher printed the first of his song collections. In the years that followed, he devoted himself with increasing intensity to his own music, setting poems by Goethe, Heine, Keller and Mörike, but suffered intermittent lethargic phases in which he would vegetate in inactivity.
Illness
Towards the mid-1890s, Wolf’s mental disorientation progressed while his physical health deteriorated. After a suicide attempt in 1898, the Styrian-born composer was admitted at his own request to Vienna’s lunatic asylum. There he died on 22 February 1903 at the young age of 43.