The composer of the late Romanticism unsurpassable in dramaticality and emotional richness, Hugo Wolf from Carinthia, was 15 years of age when he first met his chosen example Richard Wagner. “For the first time in my life, I approached the great master of sounds, considered the greatest opera composer of all artists in our time, with honest, sacred affection.” From the first moment, Wolf felt “insurmountable attraction” to Wagner, despite being totally unfamiliar with his music at the time. This attraction was later to grow, especially as regards Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, The Nuremberg Master Singers and the Ring. The musical taste and the pianist’s quality of the 15-year-old Wolf as well as his devotion to Wagner are represented by his various Wagner-opera-paraphrases. His songs written under the effect of Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann in the beginnings were also gradually adapted to the Wagnerian principles. The latter are also reflected by his works composed of a single musical phrase, modelled upon the Leitmotivs. The Wagner-oeuvre does not miss the genre predecessor of The Spanish Songbook, composed in 1890 (and the other songs by Wolf), either: the five-part song cycle for the piano and vocals, later instrumented by other composers, was written in 1857-58 to the poems of Wagner’s once muse Mathilde Wesendonck.

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