A radio play
The play is based on Frank Walker’s “Hugo Wolf. Eine Biographie”. The author uses Wolf’s music and the letters to his family as the illustrative elements for the scenes. A mixed time perspective gives an engaging and interesting insight into Wolf’s passionate life. We see him struggling with professors, he is being expelled from the Conservatoire, and we witness his childhood, unsuccessful attempts of publishing his music and the bitter lonely years of unrecognized genius. Eventually, due to the benefactor’s help Wolf manages to release his compositions. The audiences of Munich, Mannheim and Berlin applaud his concerts. At the same time Wolf becomes more and more unstable. The premiere of his opera doesn’t bring him success; however, he becomes well known because of his scandalous behaviour. His promotion for a director of the Opera in Vienna is the last stage in his career. When he is locked up in a hospital, the doctors recognize the final stadium of syphilis.
Having known the composer’s biography, we come across many questions about the nature of his talent. Was Hugo Wolf really an underestimated genius, or maybe a second rate follower of Schubert, Schumann and Wagner? What we know for sure is Hugo’s unquestionable passion for music, his mania for grandiose, self-destructive actions and rapid changes of mood that finally lead him into a mental asylum.