Reawakened sleeper.

"Strictly speaking, every man, seen from outside, is a comic figure, and inside is a tragic one...." Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, a mild man not much given to public confession, was offering a rare glimpse into his own conflicted character when he wrote those words in 1927. That was a key year for the composer, who had become productive again after a long silence during and after World War I, an event that shook him to the core. After all, Wolf-Ferrari's father was German and his mother Italian; all his life his loyalties were divided, aesthetically as well as politically. "No one with a chromatic or indeed enharmonic soul can imagine my divided self," he despairingly wrote to ...