“The Fine” and “The Expressive” in Hugo Wolf’s Songs

Abstract

The purpose of this research paper is the characterize the creative heritage of Hugo Wolf from the position of “the fine” and “the expressive” in hic chamber and vocal compositions. There are more than three hundred of the composer’s songs which comprises the vocal cycles on the poems of H. Heine, E. Mörike, J. Eichendorff, J. Goethe, G. Keller, M. Buonarroti and the samples of author’s and folk poetry of Spain and Italy in the translation of E. Geibel and P. Heyse that were set to music. All these compositions rightfully belong to the gold fund of the Austro-German Lied. The paper presents the fact that Wolf strove for the maximum convergence of verbal and musical components and chose the word intonation sphere or poetic phase as an original unit to show the full literary centrist tendencies of that time. The scientific novelty lies in the determination of the main features of Wolf’s chamber and vocal compositions such as fine art origin; landscape sketches where the nature plays the role of the main character; picturesqueness which is given even at the level of transmission of external properties of objects; active usage of the ability of musical intonation for imitating sounds; movement factor presented in metrorhythmic, tempo, dynamic parameters of tonal structures; expressiveness of musical portraits. It is grounded that Wolf sought to show the truthful and multilateral artistic reality embodied in a poetic original source.