He is best known by his lieder, his temperament and inclination leading him to more intimate, subjective and terse musical utterances. Although he initially believed that mastering the larger forms was the hallmark of a great composer (a belief his early mentors reinforced), the smaller scale of the art song proved to provide an ideal creative outlet for his musical expression and came to be regarded as the genre best suited to his peculiar genius. Wolf's lieder are noted for compressing expansive musical ideas and depth of feeling, fed by his skill at finding the just right musical setting for the poetry that inspired him. Though Wolf himself was obsessed with the idea that to compose only short forms was to be second-rate, his organization of lyrics of particular poets (Goethe; Mörike; Eichendorff; Heyse and Geibel in the Spanish and Italian Songbooks) into semicyclical anthologies, finding connections between texts not explicitly intended by the poets he set and his conceptions of individual songs as dramatic works in miniature, mark him as a talented dramatist despite having written only one not particularly successful opera, Der Corregidor.
He is best known by his lieder, his temperament and inclination leading him to more intimate, subjective and terse musical utterances. Although he initially believed that mastering the larger forms was the hallmark of a great composer (a belief his early mentors reinforced), the smaller scale of the art song proved to provide an ideal creative outlet for his musical expression and came to be regarded as the genre best suited to his peculiar genius Wolf's lieder are noted for compressing expansive musical ideas and depth of feeling, fed by his skill at finding the just right musical setting for the poetry that inspired him. Though Wolf himself was obsessed with the idea that to compose only short forms was to be second-rate, his organization of lyrics of particular poets (Goethe; Mörike; Eichendorff; Heyse and Geibel in the Spanish and Italian Songbooks) into semicyclical anthologies, finding connections between texts not explicitly intended by th.e poets he set and his conceptions of individual songs as dramatic works in miniature, mark him as a talented dramatist despite having written only one not particularly successful opera, Der Corregidor.