This volume tells of a relationship between Hugo Wolf, one of the greatest masters of the German art song, and Melanie Kochert, the wife of a prominent Viennese jeweller with whom Wolf shared a lifelong emotional, spiritual, and artistic bond. Wolf's letters to Kochert reveal Wolf at his most optimistic, celebrating his concert successes. They follow Wolf through times of overwhelming despair, when his musical failures left him profoundly alienated, overcome, as he revealed to Kochert, ""by a feeling of unspeakable emptiness and desolation"". And they follow Wolf as he struggled to compose the 250 art songs that are his creative legacy as he descended almost simultaneously into madness.