Hugo Wolf’s work is among the most extraordinary Habsburg products of the 1880s and ’90s, with songs such as ‘To an Aeolian harp’ (‘An eine Äolsharfe’) and ‘The Converted’ (‘Die Bekehrte’) beautiful in an almost alarming, too-bright way. But the way that we experience them today is crazily at odds with their original context. For example, I enjoy listening to them in our kitchen, with a bowl of nuts and some beer, generally with the background sound of large passenger planes roaring overhead every few minutes and our second son in the sitting room playing a computer game like Afghan
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