Walter Armitage Justice Ford

“ His place among the greatest song-writers is due to the essential truth and originality of his creations, and to the vivid intensity with which he has presented them. These results depend not merely on musical gifts that are exceptional, but also upon a critical grasp of poetry of the highest order. No other composer has exhibited so scrupulous a reverence for the poems which he set. To displace an accent was for him as heinous an act of sacrilege as to misinterpret a conception or to ignore an essential suggestion. Fineness of declamation has never reached a higher point than in Wolf's songs. ”

“ Among the song composers who have adopted the modern standpoint, according to which accepted canons of beauty and of form must yield if they interfere with a closer or more vivid realization of dramatic or emotional expression, Wolf holds a place in which he has no rival, not because of the daring originality of his methods and the remarkable idiosyncrasies of his style, but because these are the direct outcome of rare poetical insight and imaginative power. He has that gift of vision which makes the difference between genius and talent. ”

“ In reality the forms of Wolf's songs vary as widely as those of the poems which he set. No less remarkable is the immense range of style at his command. But with Wolf methods of form and style are so inseparably linked with the poetical conceptions which they embody, that they can hardly be considered apart. ”