On the 20th of September 1897 Hugo Wolf was taken to Dr. Svetlin's sanatorium in Vienna, and on Carnival Sunday, the 22nd of February 1903, he died there, insane. The diagnoses of the time all pointed to paralysis, the result of an infection contracted during his early years.
Wolf's last lieder (songs), like the fragment of his opera "Manuel Venegas", date from 1897. Following a lengthy "incubation period" such as often preceded his bursts of creativity, he produced in March of 1897 the very last of his lieder, his three Michelangelo Songs. He destroyed the draft of a fourth song, "Irdische und himmlische Liebe".
These settings to German translations by Robert Tornow were written for a low voice. "It goes without saying that a sculptor must sing bass," Wolf said of Michelangelo. These are verses of retrospection, old age, resignation, and a touch of pessimism. "The music to (thefirst song) which begins with a heavy-hearted introduction and whose nature remains unaltered until the last lines, unexpectedly takes on a vigorous character (evolved from the previous motif) and concludes festively with triumphal fanfares, as though these were being sounded for him by his admiring contemporaries, with g minor giving place to G major." The second poem, which was particularly close to Wolf's heart, is a fragment of a ballad - a song of the dead, an impassioned utterance. Wolf intended to use the title "Vanitas vanitatum" for this composition which strides along "slowly and steadily", and whose tonality is omnipresent. Only a brief contrast to a related key illuminates the harmony. The third song creates the effect of a farewell and a kind of personal confession. It is to remain Wolf's last completed composition.
-- Kendall Durelle Briggs
