Wolf's fondness for the "liederbuch" (book of songs) betrayed his desire to broaden the scope of his output; he spent most of his career trying to shed his image as a mere "songwriter"—a miniaturist. His compilation of songs into large volumes, each with a sense of poetic and dramatic unity, yet enough variety to allow for the performance of the whole in recital without risk of monotony, was his only real success at large-scale composition.

Wolf composed his Gedichte von J. W. v. Goethe in a volcanic eruption of creativity (many days saw the completion of two songs) between October 27, 1888 and February 12, 1889 ("Die Spröde" would be recomposed on October 21, 1889). The book, containing 51 settings in all, was published in Vienna in 1890.

Wolf extends musical boundaries in his Goethe Gedichte even further than in his settings of Eichendorff and Mörike poems. The piano parts are exceptionally expansive in "Prometheus" and "Mignon II"; melodies are intensely lyrical in "Blumengrass" and "Gleich und Gleich."

Ten of the pieces, including the four "Mignon" songs, are from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. Of the Goethe settings these are by far the best known; they are of special interest because Wolf was at times confronted with the task of conveying the poem's context within a larger drama. In particular, he wished to bring into relief the pathological aspects of Mignon's character, as well as the borderline insanity of the Harpist (another character from the novel). It was bold for Wolf to set the Wilhelm Meister poems and to place them first in his collection; this was sure to invite comparison of his settings with those of numerous composers, including Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. Wolf noted that in some cases, particularly Schubert's, some of Goethe's poems had already been given their consummate settings, but in others his predecessors had not fully understood the poetic text.

The Harpist's "Wer nie sein Brot mit Thränen aß" (He who has never eaten his bread with tears) receives an especially emotional setting—alluding to the surrounding dramatic circumstances: the Harpist's incestuous love has produced Mignon, but he does not yet know this. Like his predecessor, Schubert, Wolf evokes the Harpist's plodding footsteps in "An die Türen will ich schleichen" (I want to creep to the doors); unlike his predecessors (Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann), all of whose settings were strophic, Wolf addresses the increasing intensity of the verses of Mignon's "Kennst du das Land?" (Do you know that place?) by changing the music from verse to verse; his setting of this poem is generally considered among his finest achievements. Similarly, Mignon's "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" (Only he who knows yearning) has been set many times, but Wolf's interpretation stands out because of its nervous, agitated atmosphere.

Among the poems not drawn from Wilhelm Meister, "Anakreons Grab" (Anacreon's Grave) is a gem; chromaticism pervades the piece (about standing at a poet's grave), which occasionally evokes Wagner's Tristan. Nos. 39 and 40, "Nicht Gelegenheit macht Diebe" and "Hochbeglückt in deiner Liebe," are musically linked; the key of the former (F major) is the dominant of the latter (B flat major).

The book closes with three of Wolf's most powerful songs. In "Prometheus," the hero mocks the gods, requiring a tumultuous, orchestrally conceived piano part; this is perhaps why it is one of the few of his songs that Wolf transcribed for orchestra. The pastoral, mythical "Ganymed" (also orchestrated by Wolf) stands in stark contrast with its fluid movement and calm atmosphere. In "Grenzen der Menschheit" (Boundaries of humanity) humankind's pointless reaching for the stars is conveyed in the restless, inconclusive setting.

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5.Mignon 1: Heiß mich nicht reden

Goethe's "Kennst du das Land?" from his Wilhelm Meister attracted the interest of many composers before Wolf attempted his setting. Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Liszt each wrote songs to the original German text and, in French translation, the poem formed the fulcrum for Ambroise Thomas' opera Mignon, heard there as "Connais-tu le pays?" That Wolf, so literate, so critical of each poem he considered, should turn to Goethe for the texts of some 50 songs seemed inevitable. "Mignon ('Kennst du das Land?')," as distinct from Goethe's "Mignon I," is a visionary poem, a story related by the child Mignon as she recalls her Italian homeland after having suffered forced removal to Germany by a group of ruffians. After enduring a life of abuse and being forced to sing, dance, and entertain, she tells her story to Wilhelm Meister, now her protector. Goethe noted how the verse was to be recited: gravely, solemnly, and with a clear sense of the importance the child attached to its telling. He asked that the line "knowest thou that land?" be voiced with a half-suffocated tone, while the child's entreaties to go there graduate from urging to ecstatic insistence. Goethe's strophic form is kept intact, although Wolf's complex harmonies and achingly beautiful and evocative melodies are exquisitely elaborate. While some critics have urged consideration of Schubert's setting as a worthy one, the mysterious intensity of Goethe's verse is nowhere to be found there. Though Mignon is a child, she is a child who has experienced much and it is with an adult's imagination and comprehension that she conjures the vision of her longed-for home. Moreover, as the text appears at the beginning of the first chapter of the novel's third book, it is Wilhelm Meister's retelling of the story sung to him by Mignon. Thus, the tale takes on an even more shrouded aspect. The singer must at all costs avoid sounding prosaic. A broad panoply of colors must be summoned and the singer and pianist must voice the music as if in a trance. The piano part, no less than the vocal line, is superbly conceived. The opening measures for piano, then for piano and voice, are portentous and calm through often-wide intervals. "Dahin," Mignon cries longingly. The second verse increases in urgency as the child recalls the pillared dwelling of her earlier life. The third verse begins in dark tones, conjuring mountains where waters plummet from sheer precipices. The music rises to a terrifying climax, tremolando chords thundering in the piano as the singer summons all available volume in the upper middle register. A final cry of "Dahin! Dahin" comes from Mignon's lips before she quietly pleads, "Let us go there." Having addressed Wilhelm Meister as "love" and "protector," she finally calls him "father." The question is begged: was this a recollection—or a dream?

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28.Frühling übers Jahr

While there is no denying the life-enriching quality of Franz Schubert's songs, and other wonderful Lieder by Schumann, Brahms, and Strauss, no composer other than Hugo Wolf brought to songwriting the full panoply of lyric variety, rich harmonization, psychic penetration, and expressive imagination. Frühling übers Jahr (Spring the Year Round) might serve as an example—a song of such perfection and enticing diversity that its ideas might seem too vast for a creation whose performance time is less than two minutes. Its springing rhythmic figure, a six-note upward-bounding cadence that is almost arpeggiated, finds its final two notes providing an irrepressible lift. This figure is heard from beginning to end, somewhat smoothed as the subject moves from the joys of spring's arrival to the singer's beloved. Goethe's poem is a masterpiece and, as such, prompted from Wolf his most-concentrated work. The vocal line is extremely mobile, rising in ecstatic joy then melting in delicious pleasure, exemplifying in sound and sense each flower named. The text chronicles the appearance of spring. The flower bed sends forth her blooms, tiny bells as white as the snow, the crocus unfolding in emerald green, the flirtatious primroses, the coquettish and secretive violets. Spring is here—fecund and alive—and the song crests on a resounding high A. After this bounding chorus praising the flowers of spring, the singer turns to the subject of the loved one whose sweet spirit outranks the flowers, whose shining eyes bring songs and encouraging words, an open heart, a flower heart (Blütenherz) reconciling opposites. When summer brings the rose and lily, they contend in vain with the beloved. Goethe's poem holds such luxuriant, radiant imagery that only a similarly lavish musical language could enrich. Wolf has provided that very thing. Each flower in the first stanza is embodied in sound with such specificity that they burst into the listener's imagination. The climax ending that first stanza carries the listener aloft with joyous abandon. As the second stanza turns to a description of the beloved, however, both voice and piano part become more thoughtful, the singer turning inward as the pianist softly and beseechingly proceeds. For the final four lines, the piano takes up its initial phrases, but under a vocal line that moves off with a new theme, illuminating the thought that nature cannot compete with the sweet attractions of the loved one. The piano repeats its fountain-like cadences several times before the song concludes.

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29.Anakreons Grab: Wo die Rose hier blüht

Unlike Schubert, who often set mediocre poetry to glorious music, Hugo Wolf could respond only to poetry of the finest quality. Some of it was from the pen of writers of less than front-ranking celebrity, but all of it was fine enough to catch the composer's fancy. When presenting his songs in recital, Wolf usually read the texts aloud to the audience before the performance of each song. Although not every Wolf song was a masterpiece (Wolf sometimes overreached himself, or failed to receive sufficient inspiration from his muse), the best (that is, the majority of them) achieve perfection because of, not in spite of, their faithfulness to their texts. The magical Anakreons Grab (Anakreon's Grave) sets a poem by a great writer whose reputation was established. Although Goethe himself lacked sound musical judgment, his verse inspired the finest composers. Others, however, could not match Wolf in forming a psychological bond with the poems. In Anakreons Grab, there is proof. In 21 measures and three minute's time, the antiquity is seen with the sensibilities of the present day. So tender, so devotional is this paean to Anakreon, poet of the Greeks, so evocative of nature's entwining herself in sweet adoration around the dead writer's grave, that the composer gave explicit instructions to the performers, especially the singer. Sehr Langsam und Ruhig (very slowly and softly) is the notation for the pianist's solo opening, beginning "piano" and growing softer, swelling ever so slightly, then diminishing to a still softer tone, all within the first two measures. The syncopations between the right and left hand must not seem rhythmic, but quietly various, like the falling of dew drops from the flowers the singer will soon describe. The singer, quietly (the marking here instructs Zart [tenderly]), tells the listener that here—where the rose blooms, the vine entwines itself around the laurel, the turtledove coos, and the cricket takes pleasure—rests Anakreon. He enjoyed spring, summer, and autumn and now the tomb protects him from winter. The voice rises to nothing more than a mezzo forte for the song's duration, while the pianist must play with the utmost attention, assuring that all the exquisite harmonies clearly sound at a very subdued dynamic level. There are brief, precisely indicated rests for the singer amidst flowing legato phrases, especially when describing the poet's resting place: the singer informs the listener "Es ist" (rest) Anakreon's Ruh." (It is [rest] Anakreon's grave.) Wolf infuses an unmistakable sense of quiet reverence. Likewise, at the end, the singer observes "from winter" (rest) "finally, the grave (rest) protected him." The singer and pianist—who respect Wolf's beautifully detailed notation, his quietly lofting melodies so well integrated with searching harmonies, and beyond that, the fragrant aura that suffuses this vignette—can make of it a thing of purest enchantment.

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49.Prometheus

An aspect of Wolf's art often noted is his comprehensive knowledge of the poets whose lyrics he set, his realization of the poems' merest suggestions, and his overall fidelity to the poets' intentions. His Goethe lieder, for instance, open with 10 songs from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre that not only bring characters and scenes from the novel to vivid life, but enter so far into Goethe's imagination that the Harper and Mignon acquire an intimate, uncanny psychological presence in which aching lyricism and harmonic subtlety are wedded to mimetic creation beside whose revelatory strokes Goethe's fulsome characterizations seem sketchy. But Wolf could depart from his poets' conceptions in surprising ways. While the use of Goethe's original version of Ganymed—the same set by Schubert—rather than its revision may or may not have been intentional, Wolf's forced interpretation of Prometheus as a scene of Wagnerian amplitude and grandeur was willful. Written in 1774, Goethe's first version of Prometheus was conceived as a dramatic monologue—though whether or not for a never-written play on Prometheus scholars disagree—depicting the titan freed from his torture of enchainment to a rock, where myth and the ancient tragedians say that his liver was daily devoured by vultures in punishment for giving fire to man. Instead, Goethe suggests Prometheus' workshop as the venue—"Here I sit, forming men In my image, A race to resemble me..."—where the snarling trills of Wolf's setting place him defiantly in the path of Zeus' lightning strikes. To what extent Prometheus' scorn—"I know of nothing more wretched Under the sun than you gods!"—was autobiographical is problematic, though Goethe feared it would be so interpreted, holding the poem back, revising it slightly, and growing alarmed when his publisher Jacobi issued it, albeit anonymously, without his permission in 1785. Thus, Wolf's setting recalls Blake's assertion in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." In a larger sense, however, Wolf was faithful to Goethe, for Prometheus' defiance is one current of a polarity whose other is represented by the total and mutedly erotic surrender of Ganymed, also written in 1774, exquisitely set by Wolf and placed beside Prometheus near the end of the Goethe lieder. Composed at Döbling on January 2, 1889, Prometheus' accompaniment struts orchestral ambitions that Wolf fulfilled over March and April 1890, though the overloaded scoring calls for a vocalist of heroic endowment.

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50.Ganymed

Wolf regarded Ganymed as a woman's song, yet male vocalists have not denied themselves the pleasure, notably, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who often included it in his recitals and recorded it several times. Indeed, Ganymed is indelibly associated with Count John McCormack, who made the first recording of it in 1932 for the pioneering Hugo Wolf Society, in much the same way that Friedrich Schorr and Alexander Kipnis spring to mind with Wolf's settings of, respectively, Prometheus and Grenzen der Menschheit. The question is not idle, for the poem's lofty pantheism nevertheless exudes homoerotic overtones. From Goethe's youth, it is rife with daring and freshness, making a vivid scene from suggestions in the Iliad, the second "Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite," the "Aeneid," and, a vignette—a mere eight lines—in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where it is told that Jove took the form of an eagle to carry off the Trojan boy Ganymede to replace Hebe as cupbearer of the gods. Chez Goethe, Ganymede is himself the speaker, speaking the words of a lover to springtime flowering as clouds descend to carry him "Upward, Embraced, embracing! Upwards to your breast, All-loving father!" Schubert's 1817 setting, considered one of the highpoints among his Goethe songs, is simple, charming in its melodic generosity, and brims with gemütlich naïveté where Wolf's simplicity weaves a complex and richly ambiguous aura, at once passionate and ethereal. The purity of a radiant spring morning, with its caressing breezes in the right hand's slowly arching treble melody against the steady erotic throb of left-hand chords, the vocalist's awed hush of palpable ecstasy, the swirling of additional voices, and heightening of harmonic tension in the accompaniment as the vocalist cries out in complete surrender. It has been suggested that Wolf's conception owes something to the third act of Siegfried, where the hero discovers the sleeping Brünnhilde, but if so—despite the epic sense of the infinite conjured from the song's opening—Wolf's work is the more subtle, concentrated, and finely inspired. In Wolf's purposeful arrangement of the Goethe songs, Ganymed follows Prometheus—the former's serene utter acquiescence contrasting with the latter's heroic defiance, resolved by the oracular final song Grenzen der Menschheit, where the divine and infinite disappear into inscrutability. The bulk of the Goethe lieder were composed during Wolf's solitary retreat at the suburban villa of his friend and patron, Heinrich Köchert, at Döbling; Ganymed was written on January 11, 1889. Wolf's orchestration of Ganymed was left on a tram and lost.

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51.Grenzen der Menscheit

The 53 songs of the Mörike Liederbuch set the pattern for the songbooks to come: moments of village life caught with startling intensity, vivid portrayals of local "characters," shading into the elemental world of folklore, and the poet's fantasy in such things as Gesang Weylas, Nixe Binsefuss, and Der Feuerreiter. The Eichendorff collection that followed essayed a broader—urban and national—spectrum. But with his approach to Goethe in late 1888, the colossus of German letters whose poetry inhabits a mythic, cosmic dimension, Wolf audibly strives for a commensurately exalted utterance. So often possessed by his genius, in confronting Goethe, Wolf attempts to possess his possessor, to raise an already preternaturally intuitive grasp of the poems to a transcendent divination. Throughout the Goethe Liederbuch there are songs in which, while the effect is undeniable, one feels something forced—the final strophe of Mignon ("Kennst du das Land"), for instance, manages to be inspired and contrived at once. But when Wolf, at the top of his bent, is at one with the poet, the upshot is an extended glimpse into an archetypal realm such as Wagner's Ring operas afford, but more splendid because it is unencumbered by the latter's tortuous dramaturgical apparatus. As Wolf's biographer Frank Walker noted, "Prometheus, Ganymed and Grenzen der Menschheit, the last three songs in Wolf's Goethe volume, are among the grandest, the most inspired things that he ever wrote. The poems illustrate three aspects of man's relationship to divinity. In the first...we have the rebel, Prometheus...." In Ganymed, Goethe "saw a figure through which to express his own pantheistic moods, his love and worship of nature......the clouds descend to carry him off, to the arms of the 'All-loving Father.' No greater contrast with the foregoing can possibly be imagined...Grenzen der Menschheit passes far beyond either love or revolt. Man recognizes his own littleness, in space and eternity, and has no more room in his heart for anything except awe and submission." Goethe conjures a terrifying vision of cosmic indifference upon whose waves man crests for a tiny moment, and Wolf matches him with a deepening, and at last inscrutable, aura of the oracular, composed at Döbling on January 9, 1889. Wolf's orchestration of Prometheus is extant, that of Ganymed is lost. It is to be regretted that he did not orchestrate Grenzen der Menschheit as its conception asks for orchestral realization. The song is closely identified with its first recording, in 1933, by bass Alexander Kipnis.

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