Wolf Songs

Composer-in-residence Stefan Heucke had already made a successful arrangement for voice and string quartet of several lieder by Gustav Mahler when he turned his attention to Hugo Wolf in 2007. Heucke selected seven songs in total, from which we will hear four this evening. This performance marks the U. S. premiere of these Wolf settings; and Heucke is currently completing a similar treatment of Richard Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder.
Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) worked in and around Vienna. Wolf’s short compositional career unfolded between severe bouts of depression and spurts of emotional outpouring. Wolf’s concentrated technique focuses on minutiae and poetry for its expressive power. The four songs performed this evening come from a collection of 53 settings of Eduard Mörike’s poems, which Wolf completed in just over eight weeks in 1888. During the next year he wrote more than 100 additional songs. Sadly, only a few works were written in the 1890s, and after 1897 syphilitic insanity gradually took control of Wolf’s creative mind.

(c) Jason Stell