Wolf: Lieder nach Heine und Lenau - Abeille Musique

HUGO WOLF The Heine and Lenau Songs
H
UGO WOLF WAS EXTREMELY FORTUNATE in his friends.
Always short of funds, for most of his life the diminutive,
hypersensitive young provincial was supported, directly
or indirectly, by a close-knit circle of wealthy Viennese. Between
them they provided lodgings, money, piano pupils, and nume -
rous entrées into the musical life of the capital, and eventually
they formed the core membership of the Hugo Wolf Verein.
Most influential among them was the young Adalbert von Gold -
schmidt, the son of a wealthy financier, and already the
composer of a successful oratorio, The Seven Deadly Sins.
Wolf was seventeen when they met, Goldschmidt twenty-nine.
Charming, pleasure-loving and unfailingly generous—when
off to the races he would always ‘put something on’ for
Wolf, slipping him his ‘winnings’ on his return—Goldschmidt
ensured Wolf a permanent welcome at the family home on the
Opernring. There were two other families living at the same
address, the Langs and the Gabillons (Ludwig Gabillon was
a distinguished actor). They too befriended the young Hugo,
pressing into service at one time or another most of the
younger members of the family as pupils for their impecunious
friend, who repaid their generosity with what must have been
considerable, if unpredictable, charm.
It was here, in the spring of 1878, that Wolf fell in love for
the first time. Vally (Valentine) Franck, raven-haired, strikingly
beautiful, was the niece of Anton Lang and his French wife,
and the intimate friend of Ludwig Gabillon’s daughter Helene.
Vally and Helene founded a society called ‘the Eulonia’, reading
poetry, singing and generally amusing themselves under the
sign of the Owl. Among their regular guests were Felix Mottl
(later to become a distinguished Wagner conductor and already
an initiate into the Wagner circle) and Wolf himself, who it
is said usually sat silent throughout. Rather like Arabella in
Strauss’s opera, Vally was used to having young men fall hope -
lessly in love with her, and made no secret of the flightiness of
her own heart. Surprisingly, she conceived a warm affection for
the little ‘Ulf’ (he was four years younger than she was) and in
spite of the difference in their temperaments the relationship
lasted for three years.
Ten years later, in the first flush of excitement at the Mörike
songs flowing from his pen, Wolf would look back on 1878 as
an intensely creative period: ‘In those days I composed every
day one good song and sometimes two.’ If nearly half the songs
were settings of Heinrich Heine, it was a natural choice for
a composer still modelling his work on that of Schumann
(although already under the spell of Wagner, Wolf had yet to
absorb his influence into his song-writing style). Even more so
for a young man of eighteen needing to express the tumultuous
impact of his own feelings. (These were clearly very strong:
when Vally finally ended the relationship, Wolf was so devas -
tated that even several months later he fled from a chance
meeting with her, rather than risk the re-opening of old wounds.)
By all accounts, Schumann, Heine and Wolf’s own music,
all were called upon to vent Wolf’s youthful frustration. Accor -
ding to Helene Gabillon, when things got too bad with Vally he
would sing Schumann’s Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen ‘with
peculiar intensity and bitterness’, hammering on the piano and
croaking with his hoarse voice. And when he sang his own Aus
meinen grossen Schmerzen, Helene wrote:
I knew whom his ‘grossen Schmerzen’ concerned, and
the expression of his passion and of his deeply wounded
feelings, that reflected itself in his features and quivered
in his toneless, veiled voice, had something about it so
affecting that the impression has remained unforgotten.
It is always dangerous to draw too obvious a parallel between
a composer’s personal life and his creations. But Wolf was
known to suffer violent swings of emotion, and it is perhaps
characteristic therefore that later in the year we find him
writing two sharply contrasted songs on successive days.
The tumul tuous Mit schwarzen Segeln (6 October) is full of
angry leaps, comparing her faithless heart to the wind that
wracks his storm-tossed ship. But next day (7 October) the
misty diminished sevenths of Spätherbstnebel (surely model -
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