February 12–14, 2016
Owing to his limited output and a life and career shortened by illness, Austrian composer Hugo Wolf is inevitably overshadowed in the annals of music history by such names as Wagner (whom he admired), Mahler (his old chum from their days at the Vienna Conservatory), and others. But alongside those towering figures, Wolf warrants attention as one of late Romanticism’s quintessential voices. In seeking an art “written with blood,” Wolf developed a distinct personal style, characterized by a piercingly expressive tonal and harmonic language.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Wolf had achieved considerable renown. But at the age of 37, he suffered a dramatic mental deterioration, stemming from the tertiary syphilis that would eventually claim him. His delusional behavior played out publicly: a well-documented incident of the demented composer playing for friends inspired a similar scene in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Wolf committed himself to an asylum in 1898 and died there five years later.
Beyond his catalog of songs, Wolf’s oeuvre is relatively modest. The small amount of orchestral music he produced is mostly lost or incomplete; his surviving chamber music comprises four string quartets. Of these, the Italienische Serenade has enjoyed the most lasting popularity.
Wolf sketched the delectable single-movement Serenade between May 2 and May 4, 1887. Contrary to the grave pathos and Sturm und Drang more immediately associated with the Romantic period, Wolf’s ebullient quartet illustrates another facet of Romanticism: the Italienische Serenade speaks to an ecstatic love of life, blind to any notion of despair. Known to be enamored with the vivid beauty of the Italian landscape, Wolf aimed to capture sonically the refreshing essence of (as he called it) “the South,” not only in this work but also in his Italienisches Liederbuch, a collection of forty-six songs. Fittingly, a spirited humor and animated joie de vivre charge the Italienische Serenade immediately from its opening measures. While the lower strings set the stage, the first violinist quietly taps the open strings of the instrument, as if tuning before the actual performance gets underway. The viola admonishes with a vulgar dissonance, and the Serenade begins.
The German composer Max Reger, one of Wolf’s most avid posthumous champions, prepared his colorful orchestration of the Italienische Serenade in 1903, the year of Wolf’s death.
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