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Hugo Wolf
March 13, 1860 - February 22, 1903
born in Windischgraz, Austria, composed during the Romantic period
Biography
Hugo Wolf, a native of Windischgraz (now Slovenjgradec, Slovenia), in the Austro-Hungarian province of Styria, was born on March 13, 1860 and died on February 22, 1903, three weeks before his 43rd birthday -- like Schubert, German music's first great lieder composer, of tertiary syphilis. Like Schumann, the other great lieder composer (also syphilitic), Wolf died in an insane asylum after trying to drown himself in October 1898. (He had committed himself a year earlier, but was discharged after four months.) Also like Schumann, he composed in manic bursts between periods of depression, once the disease entered its second stage, and like two predecessors, was an unsuccessful composer of stage music.

Wolf completed only one opera, Der Corregidor (1895-1896), based on the same Spanish comedy Falla later used in The Three-Cornered Hat. Indifferently and with difficulty he also composed incidental music for two plays long forgotten. As a teenager, he began but never finished a violin concerto and two symphonies (in 1879 he lost the manuscript of a third symphony while traveling). His orchestral repertory amounts to Penthesilea (after Kleist; 1883-1885), a turbidly scored, Liszt-Wagnerian symphonic poem; Christnacht, a choral work both naive and sublime (1886-1889), and the Italian Serenade (a 1892 arrangement of his charming 1887 Serenade in G for String Quartet).