Composer. He is considered one of the outstanding creators of German lieder (art songs). His lyrical works are prized for their profound expressiveness, perfect fusion of music and text, freedom of form, and advanced, often ambiguous tonalities. Wolf wrote about 250 songs, most of them collected in the cycles "Morike Songs" (1889), "Eichendorff Songs" (1889), "Goethe Songs" (1890), "The Spanish Songbook" (1891), and "The Italian Songbook" (two volumes, 1892 and 1896). His larger-scale compositions include a String Quartet (1884), the symphonic poem "Penthesilea" (1885), the "Italian Serenade" (1887), and an opera, "Der Corregidor" (1895). Apart from the "Italian Serenade," critics do not rank these highly. Wolf was born in Windischgraz (now Slovenj Gradec), Slovenia, though he considered himself Austrian because he spent most of his life in Vienna. He entered the Vienna Conservatory in 1875, where he shared a dorm room with Gustav Mahler, but was expelled two years later for unruly behavior. As a music critic in the 1880s he was known as "Wild Wolf" for his vicious reviews; this made him many enemies within the Viennese musical establishment, as did his hero worship of Richard Wagner and his loathing of Johannes Brahms. Wolf's manic-depressive personality, later exacerbated by syphilis, severely restricted his output as a composer; short, frenzied bursts of creativity, in which he would sometimes write three or four songs a day, would be followed by long periods in which he could not bear even to listen to music. By the late 1890s he was showing signs of syphilitic insanity. He lost his ability to compose and began suffering from the delusion that he was director of the Vienna State Opera (a post held by his former roomate, Mahler). In 1899 Wolf tried to drown himself and was voluntarily admitted to an asylum, where he died.