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.
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