Wolf on the Ringstrasse by Michaela Jeffery

In Austria, 1895, the caustic composer Hugo Wolf pens his famous opera, Der Corregidor. It is a new dawn. The fin du siècle is breaking over Europe with the chilly clarity of a wet spring morning. Plagued by the spectre of his adolescent rivalry with school fellow Gustav Mahler, and manically consumed by a need to generate a work equal to those of the dead master Wagner, Wolf retreats, penniless and wretched, to the mountains and the childhood home of the wife of his most devoted patron, Herr Heinrich Köchert. But Melanie Köchert has no time for ghosts. She would rather bury the remnants of the relationship she’d kindled so long ago with Hugo Wolf - scorch the earth - than permit that life to engulf her again.

Wolf on the Ringstrasse is a ferocious, evocative exhumation of artistic life that challenges the romance of the singular, egoist ‘auteur,’ and the enduring music of monstrous men.

Keywords: history, art, music, composer, biography, period drama, ego, muse, tragedy, feminist, strong female character