“For the last four months I have been suffering from a sort of mental consumption, which makes me very seriously think of quitting this world for ever....  Only those who truly live should live at all.  I have been for some time like one who is dead.  I only wish it were an apparent death; but I am really dead and buried; though the power to control my body gives me a seeming life.  It is my inmost, my only desire, that the flesh may quickly follow the spirit that has already passed.  For the last fifteen days I have been living at Traunkirchen, the pearl of Traunsee....  All the comforts that a man could wish for are here to make my life happy—­peace, solitude, beautiful scenery, invigorating air, and everything that could suit the tastes of a hermit like myself.[187] And yet—­and yet, my friend, I am the most miserable creature on earth.  Everything around me breathes peace and happiness, everything throbs with life and fulfils its functions....  I alone, oh God!...  I alone live like a beast that is deaf and senseless.  Even reading hardly serves to distract me now, though I bury myself in books in my despair.  As for composition, that is finished; I can no longer bring to mind the meaning of a harmony or a melody, and I almost begin to doubt if the compositions that bear my name are really mine.  Good God! what is the use of all this fame?  What is the good of these great aims if misery is all that lies at the end of it?...

     “Heaven gives a man complete genius or no genius at all.  Hell has
     given me everything by halves.

     “O unhappy man, how true, how true it is!  In the flower of your
     life you went to hell; into the evil jaws of destiny you threw the
     delusive present and yourself with it.  O Kleist!”

[Footnote 187:  Wolf was living there with a friend.  He had not a lodging of his own until 1896, and that was due to the generosity of his friends.]

Suddenly, at Doebling, on 29 November, 1891, the stream of Wolf’s genius flowed again, and he wrote fifteen Italian Lieder, sometimes several in one day.  In December it stopped again; and this time for five years.  These Italian melodies show, however, no trace of any effort, nor a greater tension of mind than is shown in his preceding works.  On the contrary, they have the air of being the simplest and most natural work that Wolf ever did.  But the matter is of no real consequence, for when Wolf’s genius was not stirring within him he was useless.  He wished to write thirty-three Italian Lieder, but he had to stop after the twenty-second, and in 1891 he published one volume only of the Italienisches-Liederbuch.  The second volume was completed in a month, five years later, in 1896.

One may imagine the tortures that this solitary man suffered.  His only happiness was in creation, and he saw his life cease, without any apparent cause, for years together, and his genius come and go, and return for an instant, and then go again.  Each time he must have anxiously wondered if it had gone for ever, or how long it would be before it came back again.  In letters to Kaufmann on 6 August, 1891, and 26 April, 1893, he says: