WOLF, Hugo (1860-1903). Austrian composer.
Good Autograph Letter Signed to his friend and staunch advocate the pianist Heinrich Potpeschnigg, on a correspondence-card, 7 October 1895. Concerning his first (and only) opera [Der Corregidor, 1895]. With a transcript and translation.

'I have received your package. I shall send you the missing material from the second act shortly. I am working just now on the instrumentation of the intermezzo, i.e. on the transition to the transformation. - The Association has sent me an agreement form and their Rules. Having read them only with difficulty because of their clumsy style, and having finally worked out that you have to pay all sorts of percentages and commissions to these people and constantly take on obligations that are out of all proportion to what the Association has to offer, I have decided that I will not be joining that club. Are you familiar with the Rules? If not I can send them to you. I still have not heard anything from Much. That is typical of him! - I have frightfully little time, because the work is demanding so much of me. I had terrible difficulties in the second act. The Lipperheides are coming today or tomorrow.

Grove Music Online has the following to say of the opera:
'The day before his 35th birthday he began the work of composition, the long, arid period of blocked creativity finally over. In April 1895 he moved to Perchtoldsdorf and threw himself 'like a madman' into the composition of his first and only completed opera, moving to the Lipperheide château in Brixlegg in May when the Werners returned to their summer home. In nine months of feverish work he composed and orchestrated the entire opera, which he designated as an 'Oper' rather than a comic opera. The sufferings caused by adulterous passion were not, as he knew to his cost, comic at the core. Wolf had quarrelled with Schott and therefore the score was printed by Karl Heckel in Mannheim, where the opera was first performed on 7 June 1896 under the baton of Hugo Röhr (Wolf had offered it to Vienna, Berlin and Prague, with no success). After fraught rehearsals, exacerbated by Wolf's nerves and his customary outspoken criticism of the performers, the opera was a resounding initial success, but the second performance was a failure and the Intendant dropped it. ...'
[No: 23460]