This is a love story. It tells of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Hugo Wolf, one of the greatest masters of the German art song, whose dedication to the poetic spirit of his music was equaled only by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, and Melanie Kochert, the wife of a prominent Viennese jeweler with whom Wolf shared a lifelong emotional, spiritual, and artistic bond.
Wolf's letters to Kochert-he wrote 245 between 1887 and 1899-were composed during a period of almost unprecedented cultural upheaval in Europe, in the shadow of Vienna during the era of Freud, Mahler, and...