umperdinck in 1890, "that poetry is the true source of my music."

When a man is both a poet and a musician, like Wagner, it is natural
that his poetry and music should harmonise perfectly. But when it is a
matter of translating the soul of other poets into music, special gifts
of mental subtlety and an abounding sympathy are needed. These gifts
were possessed by Wolf in a very high degree. No musician has more
keenly savoured and appreciated the poets. "He was," said one of his
critics, G. Kuehl, "Germany's greatest psychologist in music since
Mozart." There was nothing laboured about his psychology. Wolf was
incapable of setting to music poetry that he did not really love. He
used to have the poetry he wished to translate read over to him several
times, or in the evening he would read it aloud to himself. If he felt
very stirred by it he lived apart with it, and thought about it, and
soaked himself in its atmosphere; then he went to sleep, and the next
morning he was able to write the _Lied_ straight away. But some poems
seemed to sleep in him for years, and then would suddenly awake in him
in a musical form. On these occasions he would cry out with happiness.
"Do you know?" he wrote to Mueller, "I simply shouted with joy." Mueller
said he was like an old hen after it had laid an egg.

Wolf never chose commonplace poems for his music--which is more than can
be said of Schubert or Schumann. He did not use anything written by
contemporary poets, although he was in sympathy with some of them, such
as Liliencron, who hoped very much to be translated into music by him.
But he could not do it; he could not use anything in the work of a great
poet unless he became so intimate with it that it seemed to be a part of
him.

What strikes one also in the _Lieder_ is the importance of the
pianoforte accompaniment and its independence of the voice. Sometimes
the voice and the pianoforte express the contrast that so often exists
between the words and the thought of the poem; at other times they
express two personalities, as in his setting of Goethe's _Prometheus_,
where the accompaniment represents Zeus sending out his thunderbolts,
and the voice interprets Titan; or again, he may depict, as in the
setting of Eichendorff's _Serenade_, a student in love in the
accompaniment, while the song is the voice of an old man who is
listening to it and thinking of his youth. But in whatever he is
describing, the pianoforte and the voice have