It wouldn’t be difficult to construct a history of 19th-century Germanic music that left out the name of Hugo Wolf entirely. Part of the reason is the mixed reputation of Lieder, or solo song. Accounts of Beethoven afford a central place to his symphonies, concertos, string quartets and sonatas, but the status of his songs, with the possible exception of the cycle An die ferne...
The Complete Songs of Hugo Wolf: Life, Letters, Lieder by Richard Stokes. Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works, the most significant being the Italienische Serenade (1892), several worthy choral works, and the opera Der Corregidor (1895). The musicologist Lawrence Kramer has compared him to Chopin, whose output was similarly dominated by a single medium. But Chopin’s piano music is a staple of the repertoire whereas Wolf’s songs, as Kramer points out, ‘are more often praised than sung’.
