Hugo Philipp Jacob Wolf (/vɔːlf/; German: [vɔlf]; 13 March 1860 – 22 February 1903)[1] was an Austrian composer, particularly noted for his art songs, or Lieder.

He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but diverging greatly in technique.

Though he had several bursts of extraordinary productivity, particularly in 1888 and 1889, depression frequently interrupted his creative periods, and his last composition was written in 1898, before he suffered a mental collapse caused by syphilis.

His brief and undistinguished tenure as second Kapellmeister at Salzburg only reinforced this opinion: Wolf had neither the temperament, the conducting technique nor the affinity for the decidedly non-Wagnerian repertoire to be successful, and within a year had again returned to Vienna to teach in much the same circumstances as before.

His songs had meanwhile caught the attention of Franz Liszt, whom he respected greatly, and who like Wolf's previous mentors advised him to pursue larger forms; advice he this time followed with the symphonic tone poem Penthesilea.

He composed little during this time, and what he did write he couldn't get performed; the Rosé Quartet (led by Vienna Philharmonic concertmaster Arnold Rosé) would not even look at his D minor Quartet after it was picked apart in a column, and the premiere of Penthesilea was met by the Vienna Philharmonic, when they tried it out under their celebrated conservative conductor Hans Richter, with nothing but derision for 'the man who had dared to criticize "Meister Brahms"', as Richter himself caustically put it.

Shortly thereafter, he completed the terse, witty one-movement Italian Serenade for string quartet which is regarded as one of the finest examples of his mature instrumental compositional style.

After a summer holiday, the Spanisches Liederbuch was begun in October 1889;[7] though Spanish-flavoured compositions were in fashion in the day, Wolf sought out poems that had been neglected by other composers.

Wolf himself saw the merit of these compositions immediately, raving to friends that they were the best things he had yet composed (it was with the aid and urging of several of the more influential of them that the works were initially published).

Continuing concerts of his works in Austria and Germany spread his growing fame; even Brahms and the critics who had previously reviled Wolf gave favorable reviews.

He left sixty pages of an unfinished opera, Manuel Venegas, in 1897, in a desperate attempt to finish before he lost his mind completely; after mid-1899 he could make no music at all and once even tried to drown himself, after which he was placed in a Vienna asylum at his own insistence.

Although he initially believed that mastering the larger forms was the hallmark of a great composer (a belief his early mentors reinforced), the smaller scale of the art song proved to provide an ideal creative outlet for his musical expression and came to be regarded as the genre best suited to his peculiar genius.

Though Wolf himself was obsessed with the idea that to compose only short forms was to be second-rate, his organization of lyrics of particular poets (Goethe; Mörike; Eichendorff; Heyse and Geibel in the Spanish and Italian Songbooks) into semicyclical anthologies, finding connections between texts not explicitly intended by the poets he set and his conceptions of individual songs as dramatic works in miniature, mark him as a talented dramatist despite having written only one not particularly successful opera, Der Corregidor.

Early in his career Wolf modelled his lieder after those of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, particularly in the period around his relationship with Vally Franck; in fact, they were good enough imitations to pass off as the real thing, which he once attempted, though his cover was blown too soon.

The year 1888 marked a turning point in his style as well as his career, with the Mörike, Eichendorff and Goethe sets drawing him away from Schubert's simpler, more diatonic lyricism and into "Wölferl's own howl".

His formal structure as well reflected the texts being set, and he wrote almost none of the straightforward strophic songs favoured by his contemporaries, instead building the form around the nature of the work.

In September 1931 the Hugo Wolf Society was formed under the aegis of the United Kingdom's His Master's Voice supervised by Walter Legge[14] for the recording of a substantial proportion of the song repertoire.

The accompanying volumes include essays by Hans Jancik, texts of the poems, and translations by Lionel Salter (English) and Jacques Fournier and others (French).

This series of live recordings, featuring a wide variety of singers and Oxford Lieder Festival's artistic director Sholto Kynoch at the piano, was completed in 2023 with the release of the 11th disc.

The series was intended to bring Lieder to a new audience and was held at the initiative of baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, who was joined by a team of Austrian singers and pianists.