The south possessed an almost mystical fascination for Wolf, representing directness, primal passion, and Nietzsche's call to "Mediterraneanize music." The largely anonymous folk verse of Spain and Italy, translated by Paul Heyse and Emanuel Geibel, served as a Mediterranean focus in the Spanish and Italian songbooks, whose composition occupied him from 1889 to 1891, and again in 1896 for the second half of the Italian Songbook. Given that so many of those songs are richly compact of character and situation, it was inevitable that Wolf—making slow headway with his lieder in winning recognition as a composer—would wish to leap to fame at once by exploring the world of the songs in the extended form of an opera. Finding a suitable libretto became a bedevilment, but the scenes Wolf wished to project seemed to him implicit in the works of Spanish writer Pedro de Alarcón (1833-1891). Wolf pressed a friend, the modestly talented amateur Rosa Mayreder, to adapt Alarcón's novel The Three-Cornered Hat and, overlooking her libretto's weaknesses, composed Der Corregidor at white heat in 1895. Its production in Mannheim the following year produced only a succès d'estime, but lured Wolf to attempt to surpass himself. With the Italienisches Liederbuch completed, he pressed Mayreder to adapt Alarcón's El Niño de la bola. Her attempts proving unsatisfactory, friends introduced Wolf to Moritz Hörnes, a history professor at Vienna University, whose quickly worked adaptation was surprisingly able. Wolf was ecstatic, declaring, "...Shakespeare himself could not have formed the subject matter more dramatically and at the same time poetically than Hörnes has done, and that's that!" On July 29, 1897, Wolf set to work feverishly composing Manuel Venegas. Despite interruptions, the opera's opening began to take shape as Wolf's swings from manic gaiety to irascibility became more pronounced. In mid-September his boast that he had been appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera, and had sacked the current director, Gustav Mahler, signaled the onset of madness. Inviting his friends to hear his new opera and congratulate him, on September 20 he played through the 50 completed pages of vocal score, blissful, raving, and wholly insane, as his friends clustered around him in stunned misery—a scene famously adapted by Thomas Mann in his novel Doktor Faustus (1947). Wolf's polished fragment introduces characters and motifs without reaching the great dramatic moments that had tempted him, though the opening Spring Chorus is one of the freshest, most evocative, and inspired in his entire oeuvre.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi