From 1941 to 1945 he worked as a commercial clerk, auxiliary storekeeper and transport worker in the iron wholesale trade in the Industriestadt [de] Chemnitz.
In December 1944 he was called up for military service; until June 1946 he spent time in British war captivity in Munsterlager.
From 1946 to 1951 he studied piano and clarinette (Staatsexamen) at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig; in 1951 he passed the matriculation examination there.
From 1953 to 1957 he was a guest auditor with Ernst Hermann Meyer and Georg Knepler at the Musicological Institute of the Humboldt University of Berlin.
In 1966 he became a research assistant at the Institute for Musicology and Music Education at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig.
In the year 1978 the Promotion B [de] followed on the topic Beiträge zur Darstellung der geistigen und künstlerischen Entwicklung Richard Wagners nach 1848 (Contributions to the Representation of Richard Wagner's Spiritual and Artistic Development after 1848), the expertises were taken over by Walther Siegmund-Schultze, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Udo Klement and Gustav Seeber [de].
He gave special lectures on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, Sergei Prokofiev, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Dmitri Shostakovich and Hans Werner Henze.
He also designed programs for theaters in Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden and wrote introductions to the Reclams Universal-Bibliothek [de] for operas and record cassettes.
The basis for this was a contract between the initiator Winifred Wagner and the VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik in Leipzig, where the chronologically ordered edition appeared.
Wolf, who was responsible for the introduction, the comments and the index, contributed to five volumes (1967, 1969, 1975, 1979 and 1993), the fifth of which was completed by Hans-Joachim Bauer and Eva Gerlach.
from 15 countries took part in the colloquium among others Gerd Rienäcker, Dénes Zoltai, Martin Gregor-Dellin and Peter Wapnewski [de].