United States or United States Virgin Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I should like to hang myself." To Hugo Faisst he wrote on 21 June, 1894: "You ask me the cause of my great depression of spirit, and would pour balm on my wounds. Ah yes, if you only could! But no herb grows that could cure my sickness; only a god could help me.
They sang one of his saddest melodies, Resignation, a setting of a poem of Eichendorff's, and a chorale by his old friend Bruckner, who had died several years before him. His faithful friends, Faisst at the head of them, took care to have a monument erected to his memory near those of Beethoven and Schubert.
So it was Wolf's friends, and especially Hugo Faisst, who not only saved him from misery by their unobtrusive and often secret generosity, but spared him the horror of destitution in his last misfortunes. He recovered his reason, and was sent in February, 1898, for a voyage to Trieste and Venetia to complete his cure and prevent him from thinking of work.
But to his own astonishment he had become, as he says in a letter to Faisst, a quiet, sedate, and silent man, who wished more and more to be alone. He did not compose anything fresh, but revised his Michelangelo Lieder, and had them published.
He made plans for the winter, and rejoiced in the thought of passing it in the country near Gmunden, "in perfect quiet, undisturbed, and living only for art." In his last letter to Faisst, 17 September, 1898, he says: "I am quite well again now, and have no more need of any cures. You would need them more than I." Then came a fresh seizure of madness, and this time all was finished.
The precaution was unnecessary; for he says in a letter to Hugo Faisst, written in the same month: "There is no need for you to trouble yourself or fear that I shall overdo things. A real distaste for work has taken possession of me, and I believe I shall never write another note. My unfinished opera has no more interest for me, and music altogether is hateful.
Word Of The Day