Who's afraid of Hugo Wolf?

Hugo Wolf, who died 100 years ago on 22 February, was the last great composer of Lieder, or German art-songs. He was not only the equal, as a song-writer, of Schubert and Schumann, for he achieved the unthinkable by compressing Wagner's dramatic power into a miniature form.

Wolf lived his short life of not quite 43 years with corresponding intensity. In many ways he was the typical Romantic artist, only able to work when the mood was right, and when it was, rapidly productive, sometimes completing as many as three songs in a day. "Nothing can be extorted from art by force", Wolf said. The time he spent composing was brief in terms of hours, though you could argue that life itself, and certainly reading literature, were part of his work. He was briefly assistant Kapellmeister in Salzburg, and from 1884 to 1887, the only period during which he had a reliable source of income, he was the famously savage music critic of the fashionable Vienna Salonblatt. Otherwise, he depended on the generosity of friends or patrons, and rarely lived in one place for long.

All his songs, and even his two operas, one of which he never completed, were composed out of artistic compulsion. The only commission Wolf ever received was for incidental music to Ibsen's The Feast at Solhaug, which, characteristically, he scored for a larger orchestra than the theatre had at its disposal.

Wolf was notoriously intractable. He entered the Vienna Conservatory at the same time as Gustav Mahler and left without completing his studies because he was bored. The Conservatory claimed it had expelled him after one of Wolf's fellow students sent the director a threatening letter forging Wolf's signature, which said, in effect, "Your days are numbered". Wolf and Mahler briefly shared a room, though familiarity doesn't seem to have bred mutual respect as far as composition went, for while Mahler disliked Wolf's songs, Wolf barely acknowledged Mahler as a composer at all. Years later, when he had become insane, he imagined he had supplanted Mahler as director of the Vienna Opera.

The cause of Wolf's insanity and early death was syphilis, probably contracted on a visit to a brothel when he was 17 – a customary Viennese initiation. The love of his life was Melanie Köchert, married to Wolf's benefactor, the Viennese court jeweller. The love was mutual and lasted roughly 20 years, though Melanie remained with her husband and children until, after Wolf's death, she committed suicide. As Wolf's biographer Frank Walker put it, Melanie's husband seems to have recognised that genius is not to be judged by the standards of normality and tolerated the situation. Wolf was frequently the couple's house guest.

Like so many, perhaps most, composers of the late 19th century, Wolf was overwhelmed by the impact of Wagner. Instead of trying to do something like Wagner, or reacting sharply against him, Wolf made Wagner's language his own and applied it to concise forms. Sometimes his dissonant harmony went beyond Wagner's. What liberated his flow of creativity was his extraordinary sensitivity to German poetry, and at his own recitals, playing the demanding piano parts as he sang, he would read the poems first. He was extremely critical of professional singers, rarely giving praise or thanks, and when he accompanied them, he often castigated them in public.

Wolf's first major collection was his 53 Mörike Songs, which he significantly called "Gedichte", or Poems. Some of Mörike's poems had been set many times before, but Wolf was the first composer really to get to grips with a poet now considered one of the greatest in the German language; the collection has an enormous range of subjects and character. Mörike was a Lutheran pastor, Wolf a free-thinking lapsed Roman Catholic, but in "Auf ein altes Bild" and "Schlafendes Jesuskind" Mörike inspired in Wolf a spirit of meditation that is deep and strong. Wolf's religious songs are rare in 19th century music for their conviction and lack of sentimentality. There were to be more in a later collection.

The Mörike Songs were finished in an amazing nine months. Wolf's next major collection was 20 settings of Eichendorff, slighter in character. In general, he deliberately avoided poems he thought had been successfully set by earlier composers, so Wolf chose different poems from those which Schumann had set in his Eichendorff cycle. But in Wolf's third major collection, the 51 settings of Goethe he composed in the winter of 1888-89 (another astonishingly concentrated burst of work), he had no qualms in taking on lyrics which had been set both by Schubert and Schumann, because he was confident that he would at least equal and in some cases surpass them.

Like Goethe, Wolf was drawn to the warm south – this was partly a deliberate attempt to get away from the crushing weight of Wagner – and his next collection was the Spanish Songbook of 44 settings which he completed in the spring of 1890. The poems, some by famous writers like Cervantes, others from anonymous folk sources, all in German translation, are divided between and secular.

Eric Sams, the current British expert on Wolf's songs, views the Spanish Songs as a transition from the high art of Goethe to the folk-verse of Wolf's last major collection, the two volumes of 22 and 24 Italian Songs, completed in 1891 and 1896. (A long period of depression intervened.) Wolf himself described the Italian Songs as something quite new; the songs of the second book he considered almost "absolute" music, suitable as short movements for string quartet, though many of Wolf's songs in general might be described as tone poems for the piano with the voice as an extra, but essential, instrument.

Most of the poems in the Italian Songbook are love lyrics of only eight lines and are more verbally ingenious than profound. Wolf may not have known the originals, and set the German translations of Paul Heyse, a Nobel prize-winner in 1910, who, incid-entally, did not appreciate Wolf's music. The first time anyone heard the songs was from Wolf's own lips and fingers, but today, if the whole collection is performed in one recital, they are usually sung by a male and female singer as seems appropriate, suggesting a dramatic dialogue.

The year Wolf finished the Italian Songbook, a doctor diagnosed the early stages of general paralysis. Wolf completed three Michelangelo Songs the following year before being admitted to an asylum, where he seems to have been kindly treated. Wolf's funeral, on Shrove Tuesday, 1903, was attended by most of musical Vienna while the carnival revellers carried on their fun in the streets. He was eventually buried beside Schubert and Beethoven.

Wolf's 'Mörike Songs' are performed at the Wigmore Hall, London W1 (020-7935 2141; www.wigmore-hall.org.uk) on 2 & 10 Feb; the 'Italian Songbook' on 6 Feb; 15 'Eichendorff Songs' on 14 Feb; the 'Spanish Songbook on 22 Feb; and a mixed programme on 24 Feb. Radio 3 will broadcast three Wolf concerts on 18, 25 Feb & 11 Mar: www.bbc.co.uk/radio3