When Hugo Wolf decided in the late summer of 1888 to compose a volume of Eichendorff settings (interrupting the composition of the Moerike songs for a month), he knew his work would be compared to Schumann's Eichendorff songs, especially the Liederkreis, op. 39. Determined to set out on a course different from that of his predecessor (who had focused on Eichendorff's nature mysticism and symbolism nearly fifty years earlier in a handful of exquisite settings), Wolf, by and large, stayed away from the poems (or the type of poem) Schumann had used. He selected for his settings mainly Rollengedichte, poems of a dramatic nature in which the protagonists characterize themselves through what they say, and he drew from these poems inspiration for an entire gallery of finely chiseled musico-dramatic miniatures—often humorous, sometimes demonic. He thereby sharpened his skills as a portrait composer, which a few years later found another outlet in the composition of the Italian Songbook (fig. 16.1).

Looking back a few years later to his Eichendorff settings, Wolf stated—not without pride—in a letter to Engelbert Humperdinck in 1891 that in composing the Gedichte von Eichendorff, he discovered a rather unknown side of the poet (Wolf speaks of himself here in the third person, camouflaging the praise he bestows on himself):

Wolf's remarks, once published, have sent several generations of interpreters and critics to explicate his approach to the Lied as that of a musical dramatist, someone who was a miniature Wagner (writing three-minute music dramas) and who perhaps could even be considered a representative of verismo in the genre of the Lied.