Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (1735-1792)
Four Symphonies
Ernst Wilhelm Wolf spent thirty years as Court
Kapellmeister in the German artistic centre of Weimar
in Thuringia. Until today his importance has seemed to
lie in his rôle of Court Kapellmeister rather than in his
creative work. With his compositions for piano and
Singspiel his orchestral works have had little mention, a
fact that it is hoped to remedy with the present
recording.
Ernst Wilhelm Wolf was baptized on 25th February
1735 at Grossen Behringen near Gotha and had early
experience as a keyboard-player. His brother Ernst
Friedrich, city organist at Kahla on the Saale, influenced
and taught his younger brother. Wolf took his first
independent step at school in Eisenach, where he
quickly rose to the position of choir prefect. At this time
we know that he was already active as a composer, with
several arias and motets. Yet it was his period at school
in Gotha that proved musically formative for him. Here
he heard the very competent ducal musical
establishment in concerts and here he heard Carl Phlipp
Emanuel Bach play the organ in 1752. The young Ernst
Wilhelm was also busy with the arias of Johann Adolf
Hasse, then in the service of the Dresden Court Kapelle.
There were also the compositions of the Prussian
Kapellmeisters Carl Heinrih Graun and Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach, which were to have a lasting influence
on Wolf’s whole work. There were also the
compositions of the Prussian Kapellmeisters Carl
Heinrich Graun and Carl Phlipp Emanuel Bach, which
were to have a lasting influence on Wolf’s work. These
left a particular mark on Wolf’s church music (Graun)
and his keyboard music (Bach), while the decisive
influence for his symphonies came later in Weimar.
Student life then took Wolf to the Thuringian
University of Jena, in which he was more involved with
music than with his studies. As director of the university
Collegium Musicum he found his first enduring place in
Thuringian music history.
How exactly he came to the nearby city of Weimar
is not known. Wolf himself left only a somewhat
incredible anecdote of a Herr von Ponikau, who took
him there in the course of a journey. Yet, however it
happened, Weimar was, for the rest of his life, the
centre of his musical activities.
It was in 1761 that Wolf came to Weimar, then
ruled by the young Duchess Anna Amalia. It was her
endeavour to make her country residence a centre for
literature and the arts. Wolf’s first duties were as a
keyboard teacher. He was initially the teacher of the two
sons of Anna Amalia, who before long established a
relationship with him that continued for many years.
After his arrival in Weimar, Wolf was soon serving as
conductor at the regular concerts every Saturday at the
Schloss Belvedere near Weimar. When the Weimar
Court Organist Vogler died, two years after Wolf’s
arrival in Weimar, Anna Amalia appointed him
Vogler’s successor in 1763. After his marriage in 1770
to the singer Karoline Benda, daughter of the famous
Franz Benda, Kapellmeister to King Friedrich II, he
became not only a member of the most important
musical family of the time but on 31st July 1772 he was
also appointed Weimar Court Kapellmeister.
Ernst Wihelm Wolf’s Weimar career and his
appointment as Court Kapellmeister, a position he held
until his death, went along with the musical and cultural
development of the Weimar court. He found, when he
was first appointed, a pitiful court musical
establishment, and demanded, responding to the
growing enthusiasm of the Weimar public for opera and
Singspiel, a properly constituted court musical
establishment competent to accompany these
performances. This enthusiasm for the theatre involved
too the existence of troupes or companies of actors, who
spent some time, often as long as a year, at a court and
there demanded the necessary changes.
In the mid-1770s amateur theatre first formed the
centre of court interest. In 1775 Duchess Anna Amalia
handed over the regency to her son, so as to devote
herself, among other things, to the famous Round Table.
Preference was given to smaller musical ensembles and
there was no need for a larger Court Kapelle. Johann
Wolfgang Goethe also came to Weimar in 1775 and
gave the small Grand Duchy the literary brilliance of a
cultural capital that it still enjoys. He was an important
participant in the Round Table and made no secret of
the fact that he could not put up with the Court
Kapellmeister Wolf and wanted musical collaboration
with another composer.
In the 1780s the Bellomosche Troupe came to
Weimar and there was a loud call for a proper court
Kapelle to be able to play the stage repertoire. For Wolf
this brought a final period of creativity (he also wrote a
large number of Singspiel) before he withdrew more
and more into private life.
After a stroke Wolf became frailer. Towards the
end of 1792 he became seriously ill and was buried in
Weimar on 1st December 1792.
That Wolf was one of the more interesting
observers of the contemporary musical scene is
witnessed by his Kleine Musikalische Reise (Little
Musical Journey) that took him less to the great capitals
of the time in Europe than to the smaller courts. Here he
recounted the daily musical life of circles of German
townspeople and nobility, committing this, with his
comprehensive works on musical theory, to paper for
his contemporaries and for posterity.
Constanze Dahlet
Wolf’s Symphonies
In his time as Court Kapellmeister at Weimar, from
1772 to 1791, Wolf composed about 35 symphonies of
which at least 26 survive. These were probably mostly
written for the Weimar court and were played there in
concerts and in entr’actes at theatrical performances.
The association with the theatre is also to be noted in
that some of these works, among them the present
Symphony in C major, served as Singspiel overtures as
well as independent symphonies. The copies still in
existence today of Wolf symphonies, other than those at
Weimar, indicate that they were widely heard, for
example the frequent performances between 1781 and
1790 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, still one of the most
important establishments in contemporary musical life
in Germany. What contemporaries of Wolf particularly
valued in these symphonies is shown in a short passage
from the article Ueber die Mode in Musik (On Fashions
in Music) that appeared in June 1793 in the Weimar
Journal des Luxus und der Moden: ‘His instrumental
pieces … can, in their effect and proper understanding
of wind instruments, serve as an example very worthy of
imitation’.
Examples of this great importance of wind
instruments can also be found in the symphonies
recorded here. In the Symphony in E flat major the
chamber-music-like entry of the wind in the second
subject of the exposition at first recalls the symphonies
of the late Mannheim school and of Johann Christian
Bach. In the last movement there are unusual virtuoso
passages for the flute and for the bassoon, at the time
generally used only to play the bass line. His treatment
of the specific tone colours of individual instruments is
shown further in the varying instrumentation of the
slow movement, and not only, as was general practice,
through a reduction in the forces employed, but often
through a change of instruments (for example flutes
instead of oboes in the Symphony in F major) or an
expansion of the instrumentation, as in the Symphony in
C major.
In the complete symphonic work of Wolf there is,
in spite of the relatively short time-span of just twenty
years, a development that shows important parallels
with the development of the form of the ‘symphony’.
This can be seen in the present symphonies, among
others, in the varied patterns of sonata-form in the
principal movement. There is in the undated Symphony
in D major, classified as an early work, a clear thematic
duality; the five-bar central section has, however, only a
transitional character, so that there is no sign of a
development section. There are extensive developments
in the also undated Symphony in E flat major, as in the
Symphony in C major (1786). It is striking, however,
that in these early symphonies there is a particular
feature that is seized on and explored more fully in
nearly all those that followed. This concerns small
variations in the recapitulation, of which the Symphony
in C major provides a full example. Here the
recapitulation, through the integration of sections,
sequences and modulations, takes on almost the
character of a second development.
The first movement of the Symphony in F major has
a particular place among Wolf’s first movements. He
starts with a long introduction, that does not, in the
general manner of the time, have the character of a
fanfare opening, but rather sounds seeking and
questioning, finally finding its goal in the motivically
varied principal theme of the movement. Highly
unusual are the formally important reminiscences of the
slow introduction in the course of the movement.
Characteristic of the present slow movements is the
carefully directed introduction of varied tone colours, in
which Wolf not only uses the wind instruments, but
sometimes different ways of playing (pizzicato, con
sordino) and high positions. This is particularly evident
in the Symphony in E flat major. Harmonically he
succeeds to some extent in passages of great charm, as
in the slow movement of the Symphony in F major, in
which, over a sequential viola motif, he makes full use
of the range of a second in the flutes and violins.
A general feature of Wolf’s final movements is the
attempt always to surprise the listener. In this way, for
example, the Symphony in E flat major, in its last
movement combines the character of a moderate dance
movement in the style of the old Viennese symphony
with virtuoso concertante elements and sonata-form.
While in the finale of the Symphony in C major a
Minuet leads off, Wolf finishes the symphony with the
further contrast of a particularly rapid Allegro, in which,
among other features, the rocket-like ascending scales
demonstrate an affinity with music theatre.
Altogether Wolf’s symphonies offer a variety of
features. On the one hand the present works exemplify a
basic knowledge of the different forms of the
contemporary symphony. With the principle of the
greatest possible variation in the use of resources Wolf
aimed at contemporary Weimar musical taste. To this
end he includes different wind passages and
experiments with varied tone colours. There can be
heard also the effectiveness of this music, of which
Wolf himself was fully aware, and that he always
skilfully controls. In the first movement of the
Symphony in F major he finally realises his original
experiments in the form of the ‘Symphony’.
Cornelia Brockmann