Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance

This 1999 book offers an in-depth study of the music of Hugo Wolf.

This 1999 book offers an in-depth study of the music of Hugo Wolf, including detailed analyses of selected songs, as a means of answering biographical and critical questions about the nature of the composer's relationship to Richard Wagner.Wolf has been regarded as a composer who followed the style and aesthetics of Wagnerian music drama without question, while writing in a genre often seen as less challenging than the symphony or opera. This 1999 book re-examines the evidence concerning Wolf's responses to Wagner and Wagnerism and suggests ways in which he voiced his criticism through song, and his one completed opera Der Corregidor. This opens up insights into the kind of impact Wagner had on those following in his wake, and into the complexity and subtlety of the late nineteenth-century Lied. From this perspective, Wolf emerges as a persuasive and articulate figure of wide musical and artistic significance.