Hugo Wolf

Wolf was born in 1860 in what was then the Styrian town of Windischgraz. (It is now in Slovenia and called Slovenj Gradec.) He studied in Vienna, where one of his fellow students was Gustav Mahler, but his studies were cut short in 1877 when he was dismissed from the Conservatory for an alleged breach of discipline. Apart from a brief appointment as conductor in Salzburg in 1881, he spent the rest of his life in Vienna, eking out a living by teaching and by writing music criticism. In 1897 his mind gave way as a result of the first stage of the general paralysis of tertiary syphilis contracted some two decades earlier, and he was committed to an asylum. For a time he seemed to recover, but in October 1898 tried to drown himself in the Traunsee and was once again immured in an institution, where he died in 1903 at the age of 42. The heir of Schubert and Schumann, Wolf wrote well over 300 lieder, all characterized by a keen solicitude for the choice and treatment of works and by autonomous piano parts that reveal a quasi-symphonic motivic development, allowing him to achieve an expressive intensity that justifies his reputation as the true master of the German Romantic song.