Wolf Spanisches Liederbuch

 Day 14

Wolf Spanisches Liederbuch

Anne Sofie von Otter

Olaf Bär

Geoffrey Parsons

My first memory of Hugo Wolf is watching a masterclass on TV where Elizabeth Schwarzkopf more or less terrified a young singer who was trying to start the last song in the Italian Songbook - Ich Hab’ in Penna - she wouldn’t let her get past the first few notes. I don’t think that Schwarzkopf could understand that young people didn’t have her level of perfection.  Other than that the only other early experience of Wolf was hearing the Italian Serenade. Since then I have got to know and love many of the songs from the Italian Song book - including that one that the young singer struggled so much with, but I’ve not explored Wolf more widely and didn’t know any of the songs from the Spanish Songbook.

It is a rather curious collection. There are 44 songs in total of which the first 10 are spiritual and the remainder secular. I have to say that I found those spiritual songs rather hard going. They are very much concerned with suffering and anguish rather than joy, The mood is pretty bleak. It is all very intense with little light and shade. At time is was as if Amfortas and Gurnemanz were taking in turns to tell us how difficult  life can be.

The secular songs had much more variety. There are still plenty of them which dwell on the anguish of love but there are also some much lighter songs with a sense of fun. 

Wolf is not an easy composer to listen to. The harmonic language is extremely complex. The spirit of Wagner lurks behind most of the songs. At times one can see Wolf as the heir to Schumann but elsewhere the music seems to look forward to early Schoenberg.  The piano writing is exceptionally demanding and in live performances there must be places where the pianist is in real danger of completely overwhelming the singer. 

This is not music that you can sit back and let wash over you - as you can sometimes even with the songs of Schubert and Schumann. Almost every bar demands close attention. There is almost two hours of music here and there is no way that I could have listened to it all in one sitting. I paced myself through the day, listening to a few songs at a time. 

Wolf’s fusion of words and music has no real equal anywhere in music. My German is rudimentary to say the least and my score had no English translation with the music - I had to follow a separate text. So I am sure that there were many subtleties that I missed. This is very much music which demands repeated listening before you can really appreciate what it is all about. It is the ultimate connoisseur’s music.   

I would certainly recommend the Italian songbook as the place to start an exploration of Wolf. The Spanish songbook is something to follow up with later.