Before abandoning his career as a critic in 1887, Hugo Wolf was active as one of the most voluble proponents of New German Music in Vienna’s notoriously partisan concert press. Eduard Mörike’s poem Abschied, set by Wolf in 1888, reflects on this culture of polemic through the absurdist tale of a critic who falls victim to comic violence. Examining Wolf’s own critical career and his appeals to the authority of music theory in his personal correspondence, this paper invokes Weitzmann’s radical 1853 treatise on the augmented triad not only as a model for Abschied’s musical satire of aesthetic conservatism, but also as a source of insight into the role played by major third relations in Wolf’s broader harmonic practice.
The afterlife of Weitzmann’s ideas concerning the augmented triad in neo-Riemannian theory is further considered through application of contrasting visual models of the hexatonic system to modulations in Wolf’s songs. In particular, the extent to which neo-Riemannianism captures Weitzmann’s conceptualization of the augmented triad as a mediator between major-third-related keys is called into question. Arguing towards a synthesis of historicist and presentist approaches to historical theories, a concluding analysis of Wolf’s modulatory procedure in Das Ständchen outlines points of tension and potential hybridity between Weitzmann’s treatise and modern harmonic analysis