Hugo Wolf: Letters to Melanie Kochert

This is a love story. It tells of an extraordinary relationship between Hugo Wolf, one of the greatest masters of the German art song, and Melanie Kochert, the wife of a prominent Viennese jeweler with whom Wolf shared a lifelong emotional, spiritual, and artistic bond. Wolf's letters to K6chert reveal Wolf at his most optimistic, celebrating his concert successes. They follow Wolf through times of overwhelming despair, when his musical failures left him profoundly alienated, overcome, as he revealed to K6chert, "by a feeling of unspeakable emptiness and desolation." And they follow Wolf as he struggled to compose the 250 astounding art songs that are his creative legacy as he descended almost simultaneously into madness.

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) composed an amazing quantity of exceptional music during his short and turbulent life, including three famous songbooks and an opera. He died in an asylum in Vienna after succumbing to severe dementia caused by a syphilitic infection Louise McClelland Urban is professor emerita of voice at the University of Maryland. She is recipient of the prestigious Hugo Wolf Medallion and a Creative and Performing Arts Award for Hugo Wolf Research