WOLF, Hugo, 1860-1903, COMPOSERS, HUGO Wolf (Book), WALKER, Frank, BIOGRAPHIES, PHOTOGRAPHS, and BOOKS reading
Abstract
The article presents the author's comments on Australian composer Hugo Wolf. Recently Frank Walker has written his biography titled "Hugo Wolf." The book nevertheless tells readers about Wolf's personality and behavior, his functioning as an artist, his terrible end and about the devotion and loyalty of some of the people he became involved with. The contents of the book are epitomized in three extraordinary photographs. One is the photograph of Frau Melanie Köchert, the woman who encouraged and consoled Wolf. The other two pictures show Wolf in 1889 when he was twenty-nine and at the point when Wolf produced his art works.
Hugo Wolf's song of Mignon, "Kennst du das Land," one of his good ones, is sung by Kerstin Thorborg with eloquence and beauty of voice, except for an occasional shrillness in a forced and constricted high note. The delightful art of Elsie Houston, with its delicate phrasing and little cries and glissandos, is to be heard in a volume of Brazilian songs--mostly enjoyable folk-songs, and one composed piece, Ovalle's "Berimbau," which the author find less interesting. Reiner's superb performance of Johann Strauss's "Wiener Blut" Waltz with the Pittsburgh Symphony is well recorded but hasn't the beauty of sound of the Ormandy-Philadelphia Orchestra performance on the recent Victor record.
MUSIC, SINGERS, PIANO, WOLF, Hugo, 1860-1903, SCHUMANN, Elisabeth, and MUSICIANS
Abstract
Hugo Wolf music records gain by the work of Paul Ulanofsky at the piano. One should listen to the mediocre playing on Lotte's Lehmanns' previous records, listen to the lifeless accompaniments, faintly recorded, on Elisabeth Schumann's records, and can realize that there is too little appreciation by singers and recording managers of the fact that the musical thought of a song of Schubert, of Schumann, of Hugo Wolf is carried by the piano as well as the voice, that the song, in other words, is an integration of the vocal and piano parts, that this integration must be achieved in the performance, and that it can be achieved only by two good musicians-in short, that the piano part must be well played and clearly heard.
COMPOSERS, WOLF, Hugo, 1860-1903, HUGO Wolf (Book), 50 Songs by Hugo Wolf (Book), BIBLIOGRAPHY (Documentation), and MUSIC in literature
Abstract
The article focuses on two books on composer Hugo Wolf. The books are "Hugo Wolf," by Ernest Newman and "Fifty Songs by Hugo Wolf," edited by Ernest Newman. When Hugo Wolf died, in 1907, a few of his 232 songs were sung by amateurs in Vienna and the cities of Germany, but to the world at large his name was unknown. The bibliography compiled by Newman for the volume of fifty songs edited by him includes twenty six books and essays in German. The real significance of Wolf's songs lies in this, that they illustrate the reaction in favor of poetry which set in with composer Richard Wagner's operatic reforms.
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