Wolf Italian Songbook

[Barbirollians]

I knew of Wolf but had very little of his music but bought the 2CD set of this,Eichendorff and Michelangelo Lieder with DFD but largely for Christa Ludwig’s contribution as I have so little of her singing without orchestra .

What delightful music and sung by both which such feeling for the words and with a young Barenboim singing equally at the piano.

DFD certainly eagles much less in barking than in some of the Schubert with Moore I have from the late 1960s I think. Then again there seems to me much less declamatory stuff in the Italian Songbook. I shall be interested to listen the other Lieder to see if that is the same.
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[Keraulophone]

One of Fischer-Dieskau’s three final London recitals in April 1990 was devoted entirely to the lieder of Hugo Wolf. Seated in the very back row of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, I felt as though he was singing to me personally, such were his powers of communication. Being unacquainted at the time with the music of Wolf, I probably would have chosen to go to either of the other sold-out evenings, but the experience of hearing these songs for the first time from such a master had me on the edge of my seat. The Mörike selection and Michelangelo-Lieder made a particularly deep and lasting impression. The accompanist Hartmut Höll made the most of the piano postludes that grace many of these lieder.

[gurnemanz]

One of Fischer-Dieskau’s three final London recitals in April 1990 was devoted entirely to the lieder of Hugo Wolf. Seated in the very back row of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, I felt as though he was singing to me personally, such were his powers of communication. Being unacquainted at the time with the music of Wolf, I probably would have chosen to go to either of the other sold-out evenings, but the experience of hearing these songs for the first time from such a master had me on the edge of my seat. The Mörike selection and Michelangelo-Lieder made a particularly deep and lasting impression. The accompanist Hartmut Höll made the most of the piano postludes that grace many of these lieder.

I first got to know Wolf's songs as a student 50 years ago via a double LP with F-D and Gerald Moore which I borrowed from the public library. They really grabbed me as witty and imaginative interpretations of the texts. I eventually got the Walter Legge-inspired Wolf Society LPs which have many classic renditions, eg the hair-raising Helge Rosvaenge Feuerreiter - allegedly Moore found the first run-through not exciting enough and warmed the singer up with the offer of a tot of whisky. I have been a big fan ever since with loads of recordings.

I have only heard the Italian Songbook live once and that quite recently in 2018 in a packed Barbican Hall with Diana Damrau, Jonas Kaufmann accompanied by Helmut Deutsch. Many fine recordings.

[Serial_Apologist]

I first got to know Wolf's songs as a student 50 years ago via a double LP with F-D and Gerald Moore which I borrowed from the public library. They really grabbed me as witty and imaginative interpretations of the texts. I eventually got the Walter Legge-inspired Wolf Society LPs which have many classic renditions, eg the hair-raising Helge Rosvaenge Feuerreiter - allegedly Moore found the first run-through not exciting enough and warmed the singer up with the offer of a tot of whisky. I have been a big fan ever since with loads of recordings.

I have only heard the Italian Songbook live once and that quite recently in 2018 in a packed Barbican Hall with Diana Damrau, Jonas Kaufmann accompanied by Helmut Deutsch. Many fine recordings.

An important link between Schubert and the early Schoenberg.

[gurnemanz]

An important link between Schubert and the early Schoenberg.

... and Berg. Just downloaded the new(ish) and reasonably-priced first complete recording of Alban's early songs from Presto. Very appealing.

[Richard Barrett]

... although let's not demote Wolf to the status of "transitional figure" in the way we were discussing in relation to CPE Bach. Actually Wolf's music doesn't really sound like anything else really. Some time I need to get to know it better. I've had a 6 CD set with DFD and Barenboim for some years and I'm sure I haven't listened to it all, nor have I spent very much time with the DFD/Schwarzkopf Italienisches Liederbuch. That all needs to be put right some time.

[HighlandDougie]

... although let's not demote Wolf to the status of "transitional figure" in the way we were discussing in relation to CPE Bach. Actually Wolf's music doesn't really sound like anything else really. Some time I need to get to know it better. I've had a 6 CD set with DFD and Barenboim for some years and I'm sure I haven't listened to it all, nor have I spent very much time with the DFD/Schwarzkopf Italienisches Liederbuch. That all needs to be put right some time.

If you can access it, the Irmgard Seefried/DFD recordings with Erik Werba (for Seefried) and Jörg Demus (for DFD) are worth a listen. These rather wonderful songs stand as a memorial to someone who had a short and latterly troubled life.

[gurnemanz]

... although let's not demote Wolf to the status of "transitional figure" in the way we were discussing in relation to CPE Bach. Actually Wolf's music doesn't really sound like anything else really.

Agree completely. From the first moment I heard his songs he seemed to have something individual and special.

[Serial_Apologist]

... although let's not demote Wolf to the status of "transitional figure" in the way we were discussing in relation to CPE Bach. Actually Wolf's music doesn't really sound like anything else really. Some time I need to get to know it better. I've had a 6 CD set with DFD and Barenboim for some years and I'm sure I haven't listened to it all, nor have I spent very much time with the DFD/Schwarzkopf Italienisches Liederbuch. That all needs to be put right some time.

Wolf is usually mentioned in connection with his songs, but I have an affection bordering on obsession with two string quartet pieces, which lengthwise might be described as miniatures were it not for their wealth of structural inventiveness - particularly the earlier, the Intermezzo in E flat. In it I am hearing what Alexander Goehr wrote in his chapter for European Music in the Twentieth Century (Arnold Schönberg's Development towards the Twelve-Note System, Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1957, PP 92-93) in relation to the Chamber Symphony Op 9, though this could equally have been said to apply to Ops 7 and 8:

Schönberg went very far in the emphasis on counterpoint. His music was impelled more and more by purely contrapuntal means, rather than by a fusion of harmony and counterpoint, so that in certain passages he factually endangered the primarily harmonic validity apparent in the post-Wagnerian musical language. In this, he went farther than Mahler, who had also been working in this direction. Thus, comparing the Adagio of the tenth symphony, sketches of which were published after Mahler's death, with the first and last movements of his Ninth Symphony, which in its finished state it would have no doubt resembled, we see that Mahler still conceived his work in the first instance vertically and later dissolved it into polyphonic texture. But even in a work as early as [the] Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, although it is still to a great extent conditioned by functional harmonic construction, many passages are no longer harmonically conceived, to such an extent are they primarily contrapuntal. The introduction of this rigid contrapuntal practice not only realized vertical combinations which were to become Schönberg's normal in later times, but also tended towards even further liquidation and invalidity of other traditional formal principles. In the final works of this period the whole texture becomes so detailed, so attenuated and fragmentary, that harmonic development as it had been understood ever since the time of Bach virtually disappeared.

Goehr goes on to detail rhythmic and metrical practices within the Austro-German tradition, in particular varied bar and phrase lengths, characteristic in Haydn and Mozart, as distinguishing in Schoenberg approaches in juxtaposition with harmonic tensions and releases reinforced by contrapuntal procedures. One could add the disruptive contribution of modified, extended, harmonic delay and therefore dislocation resulting from suspension and appoggiatura: a note "foreign" at any point to the prevailing key arising from strict contrapuntal observance can equally be treated as a passing note, appoggiatura or suspension. This is already apparent in Op 7, and could well have been given a carte blanche by the example of Reger's Fourth String Quartet, composed the year previous, 1904, in which the fabric of thematic material was subject to a process of shredding as motivic shapes sub-thematically derived pull away from anticipated resolution incipient in other part movements, and in a manner which might well have disconcerted contemporary audiences, though to our accustomed ears they come over as sly hints of where the composer might have taken the musical development, and musical evolution as a whole. Reger - and Schoenberg and Webern at this juncture - were demonstrating what Brahms might have made out of his own flexibility in treating contraputal developmental procedure harmonically, but for what might have been psychological reasons chose not to explore this potential avenue. My reason for citing these as examples is that Wolf had already been more than hinting at such harmonic/contrapuntal expansions in the direction of tonal dislocation in the Intermezzo, but that he was doing this sixteen or seventeen years before the Regers and Schoenbergs referred to above - in 1886! Where Richard might well be right in saying we should consider Wolf as more than a transitional figure should be considered in this light. Here is the Wolf Intermezzo: you might feel cheated that it is not longer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOcU9yzwLAc

Two examples of resolution suspension through contrapuntal means anticipative of Schoenberg will suffice though there are others: 1.07-1.45 and 3.42-4.08. What is striking, and in some ways anticipative of Expressionism, is their occurrence within an aesthetically unsuspecting context in which much of the language and vernacular is innocuous and almost Mozartian.

[Roslynmuse]

He's absolutely unique. In some ways the best comparison would be with a composer like Chopin - mostly writing short pieces for a single medium.

Each of the big song collections has its own flavour - the Italian Songbook lyrical and cheeky, the Spanish rather more quirky; the Morike songs covering as bewilderingly wide a range as the poetry of that irreverent reverend gentleman (borderline obscene at times; that wonderful wedding song in the style of a funeral march; and the final dismissal of the critic with a well-aimed kick in the pants), the Goethe settings often on a much bigger scale (the fabulous Kennst du das Land and the Lisztian - from the pianist's point of view - Prometheus).