Hugo Wolf (Dover Books on Music) by Ernest Newman

Author:Ernest Newman [Newman, Ernest]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2013-04-10T03:00:00+00:00

WOLF’S STUDY IN VIENNA

WOLF’S STUDY IN VIENNA

He began the orchestration on the 19th July,—a labour that occupied him until the 17th December. The Baron left Matzen at the end of July, so that Wolf found himself absolutely without hindrance in his work. He now worked in the castle, where there was a good Bechstein piano, feeling himself less constrained there than in the little huntsman’s house. About the middle of August, it appears from a letter to Faisst, the affair of the Stuttgart copyist came to a sad end. Wolf received his manuscript back and sent it to Dr. Potpeschnigg in Graz to have arrangements made there for its completion. Potpeschnigg found a veritable jewel of a copyist; he charged so little for his work that Potpeschnigg, who insisted on relieving Wolf of this expense, voluntarily increased the amount by fifty per cent.

When the Baron returned, in September, Wolf found his opportunities for work considerably curtailed. The castle was filled with guests, with most of whom Wolf’s reserved habits and sensitive disposition made it hard for him to be at ease. “I have done all that was humanly possible,” he wrote to Frau Mayreder, “to accommodate myself to this company; but it is no use; there is lacking all contact between these people and myself. My appetite at the general dinner often vanishes so completely that I scarcely touch a single dish, and have to make shift afterwards in my huntsman’s house with bread-and-butter so as not to die of hunger.” When he could be alone, he worked with his usual furious, exhausting concentration. “From early morning till late in the night,” he wrote to Frau Mayreder on the 5th October, “I sit continuously at my writing-table, and torment my brain at the difficult passages which pursue me, frequently even in my dreams. With my crazy fashion of always adding new counterpoints, the working-out in many cases takes the form of an impossibility, and yet—with the needful expenditure of industiy and patience even the impossible is done at last. But the victories are dearly bought. I must accustom myself to rather more modest intentions, or else I shall not finish the score this year.”

The scoring of Der Corregidor was completed on the 17th December, and a few days afterwards he returned to Vienna, to take up his abode in the house of Karl Mayreder, the husband of his librettist. He had, as we have seen, hoped that the opera would be first performed in Vienna, and to that end had sounded Wilhelm Jahn, the director of the Vienna opera, in the autumn of 1895. A production there, however, was found to be impossible just then; and negotiations with Berlin and Prague were no more successful. So Wolf yielded to the solicitations of some of his Swabian friends, and allowed the work to be secured for the Mannheim theatre. Heckel, of Mannheim, undertook to bring out the vocal score,1 and Wolf spent part of the three months in which he stayed at Mayreder’s house in the correction of the proofs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.