Grasping Toward the Light: A Reassessment of Wolf’s Michelange lo-Lieder

In surveys of the Lied and of music history, Hugo Wolf is often mentioned, but seldom discussed. He is positioned, rather problematically, at one end of a continuum representing the Lied tradition, with Schubert at the other. The music he wrote is represented by a couple (at most) of his songs, usually presented comparatively next to Schubert’s and Schumann’s settings of poetry from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr. David Ossenkop published an invaluable bibliographic guide on the composer in 1988. One finds few essays or monographs published on the Michelangelo-Lieder, and among those few, the great majority date from around the turn of the century by late contemporaries of Wolf’s circle (such as Edmund Hellmer) or by his earliest biographers a generation later (notably Ernest Newman).1 In any case, the extant literature favours the second song, “Alles endet, was entstehet, ” to the near-total exclusion of the other two. Remarkably, John Daverio, in his 1 While one cannot dispute the importance of such a publication with respect to Wolf scholarship, I may cite two reservations about it. First, it has been twenty years since it was published, and several publications on Wolf, including those that deal with his Michelangelo-Lieder specifically, have come out since then. Sec-ond, by virtue of the fact that the biographies by Frank Walker and Ernst Decsey are not cited as treating the cycle even though they are both landmark studies on Wolf’s life and works, one may wonder about some of Ossenkop’s editorial decisions. He cites Walker’s study only in the prefatory remarks and cites Decsey elsewhere, and both of those are well-indexed