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Such was his life, cut short at thirty-seven years of age—­for one cannot count the five years of complete madness.  There are not many examples in the art world of so terrible a fate.  Nietzsche’s misfortune is nowhere beside this, for Nietzsche’s madness was, to a certain extent, productive, and caused his genius to flash out in a way that it never would have done if his mind had been balanced and his health perfect.  Wolf’s madness meant prostration.  But one may see how, even in the space of thirty-seven years, his life was strangely parcelled out.  For he did not really begin his creative work until he was twenty-seven years old; and as from 1890 to 1895 he was condemned to five years’ silence, the sum total of his real life, his productive life, is only four or five years.  But in those few years he got more out of life than the greater part of artists do in a long career, and in his work he left the imprint of a personality that no one could forget after once having known it.

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Wolf’s work consists chiefly, as we have already seen, of Lieder, and these Lieder are characterised by the application to lyrical music of principles established by Wagner in the domain of drama.  That does not mean he imitated Wagner.  One finds here and there in Wolf’s music Wagnerian forms, just as elsewhere there are evident reminiscences of Berlioz.  It is the inevitable mark of his time, and each great artist in his turn contributes his share to the enrichment of the language that belongs to us all.  But the real Wagnerism of Wolf is not made up of these unconscious resemblances; it lies in his determination to make poetry the inspiration of music.  “To show, above all,” he wrote to Humperdinck in 1890, “that poetry is the true source of my music.”

When a man is both a poet and a musician, like Wagner, it is natural that his poetry and music should harmonise perfectly.  But when it is a matter of translating the soul of other poets into music, special gifts of mental subtlety and an abounding sympathy are needed.  These gifts were possessed by Wolf in a very high degree.  No musician has more keenly savoured and appreciated the poets.  “He was,” said one of his critics, G. Kuehl, “Germany’s greatest psychologist in music since Mozart.”  There was nothing laboured about his psychology.  Wolf was incapable of setting to music poetry that he did not really love.  He used to have the poetry he wished to translate read over to him several times, or in the evening he would read it aloud to himself.  If he felt very stirred by it he lived apart with it, and thought about it, and soaked himself in its atmosphere; then he went to sleep, and the next morning he was able to write the Lied straight away.  But some poems seemed to sleep in him for years, and then would suddenly awake in him in a musical form.  On these occasions he would cry out with happiness.  “Do you know?” he wrote to Mueller, “I simply shouted with joy.”  Mueller said he was like an old hen after it had laid an egg.