In a letter to Dr. Heinrich Werner, he says: 

“It is now seven o’clock in the evening, and I am so happy—­oh, happier than the happiest of kings.  Another new Lied!  If you could hear what is going on in my heart!... the devil would carry you away with pleasure!...

“Another two new Lieder!  There is one that sounds so horribly strange that it frightens me.  There is nothing like it in existence.  Heaven help the unfortunate people who will one day hear it!...

     “If you could only hear the last Lied I have just composed you
     would only have one desire left—­to die....  Your happy, happy
     Wolf.”

He had hardly finished the Moerike-Lieder when he began a series of Lieder on poems of Goethe.  In three months (December, 1888, to February, 1889) he had written all the Goethe-Liederbuch—­fifty-one Lieder, some of which are, like Prometheus, big dramatic scenes.

The same year, while still at Perchtoldsdorf, after having published a volume of Eichendorff Lieder, he became absorbed in a new cycle—­the Spanisches-Liederbuch, on Spanish poems translated by Heyse.  He wrote these forty-four songs in the same ecstasy of gladness: 

     “What I write now, I write for the future....  Since Schubert and
     Schumann there has been nothing like it!”

In 1890, two months after he had finished the Spanisches-Liederbuch, he composed another cycle of Lieder on poems called Alten Weisen, by the great Swiss writer Gottfried Keller.  And lastly, in the same year, he began his Italienisches-Liederbuch, on Italian poems, translated by Geibel and Heyse.

And then—­then there was silence.

* * * * *

The history of Wolf is one of the most extraordinary in the history of art, and gives one a better glimpse of the mysteries of genius than most histories do.

Let us make a little resume.  Wolf at twenty-eight years old had written practically nothing.  From 1888 to 1890 he wrote, one after another, in a kind of fever, fifty-three Moerike Lieder, fifty-one Goethe Lieder, forty-four Spanish Lieder, seventeen Eichendorff Lieder, a dozen Keller Lieder, and the first Italian Lieder—­that is about two hundred Lieder, each one having its own admirable individuality.

And then the music stops.  The spring has dried up.  Wolf in great anguish wrote despairing letters to his friends.  To Oskar Grohe, on 2 May, 1891, he wrote: 

     “I have given up all idea of composing.  Heaven knows how things
     will finish.  Pray for my poor soul.”

And to Wette, on 13 August, 1891, he says: