PROGRAM - Mondavi Center

Moldenhauer, in their biography of Webern, called “pure and exalted
love music.”
—Dr. Richard E. Rodda
Italian Serenade for String Quartet (1887)
Hugo Wolf
(Born March 13, 1860, in Windischgraz, Styria, Austria [now Slovenj
Gradec, Slovenia]; died February 22, 1903, in Vienna)
The inspiration for the Italian Serenade seems to have come to Wolf
from the novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (From the Life of a
Ne’er-Do-Well) by the German Romantic writer Joseph Eichendorff. The
Serenade was composed for string quartet in the space of only three
days (May 2-4, 1887), during a time when Wolf was immersed in setting
a number of Eichendorff’s verses for voice and piano and bears a
thematic resemblance to the first of the songs, “Der Soldat I,” about
the love of a soldier for a lady who lives in a castle. “The Eichendorff
novella has that same theme,” explained Eric Sams in his study of the
composer. “Central to its plot is an Italian serenade played by a small
orchestra ... Its hero is a young musician, a violinist, who leaves his
country home and his grumbling father to seek his fortune. He soon
charms everyone with his gifts, or antagonizes them with his inconsequence.
Wolf could hardly have found a more congenial or compelling
self-portrait in all German literature.”
Wolf originally called his work simply Serenade in G Major, but around
1890, he began referring to it as his “Italian Serenade.” In 1893, he
made sketches for a slow movement in G minor, but, already suffering
from the emotional turmoil brought on by his impulsive personality
and by the syphilis that would send him to an asylum in 1897, could
not bring it to completion. If two of his letters from 1894 are to be
taken at face value, he did finish another movement early that year, but
that score has never been recovered and only 45 measures of it survive
in sketches. The last notations he made for this ultimately unrealized
project were a few pages of a Tarantella he jotted down in 1897, shortly
before he was committed. Though thoughts of the suite based on the
Italian Serenade were in his mind for the last decade of his life, he died
in 1903 having finished no more of this proposed work than the first
movement, written some 15 years before.
The work’s several sections, joined in a loose rondo structure, allow for
the depiction of various moods and characters—the gossamer strains
of the lilting serenade serve as the background and foil for the ardent
entreaties of the suitor (in instrumental recitative) and the coquettish
replies of the lady. The joining together of these contrasts representing
the two stylistic poles of Wolf’s musical speech within a single
piece marks the pinnacle of his success as an instrumental composer,
and it is much to be regretted that his short life and his sad last years
deprived him of the chance to provide the musical world with further
such works as this masterful miniature.
Selected Songs for Baritone and String Quartet
Hugo Wolf
Hugo Wolf was the greatest German composer of songs after Schubert.
A seething emotional turmoil dominated his life—from his inability to
subject himself to the rigors of formal training, through his vehemently
zealous support of Wagner and his bouts of near-manic compositional
frenzy, to his suicide attempts and his death in an insane asylum. His
life and his music blaze with a white-hot inflammability that speaks of
the deepest feelings of an age that was just beginning to sense the end
of the artistic, social, political and ideological era that culminated in the
catastrophe of World War I.
Wolf’s career was marked by periods of intense creativity separated by
bouts of despondency. His work as a music critic and his often debilitating
depression limited his output for many years, but the publication
of a few of his songs in early 1888 was the catalyst for the most fecund
years of his life: between February and September 1888, he set 53
verses by Eduard Mörike; a book of 20 songs to Joseph Eichendorff’s
poems followed before the end of October; and Goethe’s writings provided
the texts for 50 more songs by February, 1889. Wolf was then
deserted by his creative muse (“Polyhymnia,” as he referred to his
inspiration) for eight months, but in October 1889, he began setting
16th- and 17th-century Spanish poems that had been translated into
German by Emmanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse; by April, he had completed
the 44 songs of his Spanisches Liederbuch (“Spanish Songbook”).
In September 1890, he took up Heyse’s translations of Italian poems
and had wrapped 22 of them in music by early the next year. The
remaining 24 numbers of the Italienisches Liederbuch date from 1896,
after Wolf had completed his comic opera Der Corregidor, based on the
1874 novel by Pedro de Alarcon (which also served as the basis for
Falla’s ballet The Three-Cornered Hat). Wolf managed a handful of songs
the following year—three settings of poems by Michelangelo were the
last music that he wrote—but by autumn 1897, he had lost his reason,
largely as a result of an untreated case of syphilis contracted 20 years
before. He had periods of lucidity during the following year, but in
October 1898, after he had tried to drown himself, he was permanently
confined to an asylum in Vienna, where he died on February 22, 1903,
three weeks before his 43rd birthday.
The 6th-century B.C.E. Greek poet Anacreon wrote on a variety of subjects,
but he was especially prized for his verses in praise of love, wine
and revelry. (“The Star-Spangled Banner” uses the melody of an 18thcentury
English drinking song titled “To Anacreon in Heaven,” whose
original text suggests the contemporary lubricious view of the ancient
poet: “And long may the sons of Anacreon entwine/The myrtle of Venus
with Bacchus’ vine”). Anacreon inspired an almost cult-like following
among 19th-century poets, many of whom sought to incorporate into
their verses the exalted as well as the very human aspects he embodied.
In Anakreon’s Grab (“Anacreon’s Grave”), Goethe erected his own
memorial to the poet, and Wolf captured its serenity and timelessness
in the setting he made for it on November 4, 1888. Despite Goethe’s
enthusiasm for the poet, the site of Anacreon’s grave is unknown, and
he could not have visited it in any case, since he never traveled the
Mediterranean coast beyond Italy.
The legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin was said to have been hired by
that Saxon town in 1284 to rid it of an infestation of rats. A mysterious
piper in multi-colored (i.e., “pied”) clothing appeared in town, offered
his services and lured the rats into the Weser River, where all but one
drowned. When the mayor refused to pay him the agreed fee, however,
the piper used the same method to lead the local children away from
their homes. In some versions they are lost forever; in others, they are
returned when the piper receives several times his original due. In his
1803 poem, Goethe turned the piper into a singing lutenist who makes
rodents disappear, children behave and young ladies swoon. Wolf made
a mini-opera around Goethe’s verse in his virtuoso Der Rattenfänger
(“The Rat-Catcher”) of November 1888.
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8 | Mondavi Center Presents Program Issue 9: APR–may 2013