For me, one of the great mysteries in the world of music is why the songs of Hugo Wolf should be so out of fashion. I’ve addressed this question to several of my musicianly friends without getting any kind of satisfying answer.
Three quarters of a century ago, Gustav Mahler’s music was hardly played at all and Wolf’s was programmed regularly. (They were both born in 1860 and lived together as students in Vienna.) Now it’s the opposite way round.
In fact, when Fred Gaisberg and Walter Legge made a great sequence of recordings of Wolf’s songs in the 1930s, they left out his extraordinary setting of Goethe’s “Mignon”, deeming it to be too hackneyed.
You’re lucky to hear it sung once in a lifetime these days.
Here it is, sung live at Salzburg in 1958 by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf with Gerald Moore at the piano:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMe22tHvG4c
Do you have a sense as to why he’s so neglected?
Three quarters of a century ago, Gustav Mahler’s music was hardly played at all and Wolf’s was programmed regularly. (They were both born in 1860 and lived together as students in Vienna.) Now it’s the opposite way round.
In fact, when Fred Gaisberg and Walter Legge made a great sequence of recordings of Wolf’s songs in the 1930s, they left out his extraordinary setting of Goethe’s “Mignon”, deeming it to be too hackneyed.
You’re lucky to hear it sung once in a lifetime these days.
Here it is, sung live at Salzburg in 1958 by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf with Gerald Moore at the piano:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMe22tHvG4c
Do you have a sense as to why he’s so neglected?
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