Moonlight, Midnight, Spring Chamber Music by Wolf, Berg, and Schubert
Gavin Plumley
Although he was both a prolific and well-known lied composer, Hugo Wolf profoundly wanted to be an operatic force. Sadly, he was not helped in those ambitions by his old student friend Gustav Mahler, whose refusal to produce Der Corregidor at the Hofoper in Vienna was arguably one of the deciding factors in Wolf ’s final breakdown, before he died in an asylum in 1903. Eleven months later, further evidence of Wolf ’s operatic projects came to light, with the first performance of the composer’s single-movement Serenade in G major. Penned in just three days in May 1887, this work for string quartet (subsequently arranged for string orchestra with the title Italienische Serenade) was a vessel for ideas for a comic opera, as Wolf explained to his friend Oskar Grohe: “Wagner has, by and through his art, accomplished such a mighty work of liberation that we may rejoice to think that it is quite useless for us to storm the skies since he has conquered them for us. It is much wiser to seek out a pleasant nook in this lovely heaven. I want to find a little place there for myself, not in a desert with water and locusts and wild honey but in a merry company of primitive beings, among the tinkling of guitars, the sighs of love, the moonlight—in short, in a quite ordinary opéra comique without any rescuing spectre of Schopenhauerian philosophy.” The abortive opera, and the Serenade that was its instrumental pendant, were likely inspired by Joseph von Eichendorff ’s 1826 novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, which Wolf had recently read. He may well have seen himself in its protagonist, a young musician who leaves home to seek his fortune. The eponymous “good for nothing” ends up not 13
