ABSTRACT
One of the commonplaces of literary and musical history is that great poets have tended to be unhappy with great composers’ settings of their verse. Goethe’s sending back to Vienna, unheard, the two manuscript books of Schubert’s songs to his poems is merely the most famous example; 1 the sage of Weimar was happier with what we consider the dull, dutiful settings of his lyrics by Zelter and Reichardt. Heine seems to have been so well satisfied with the settings of his verse by Joseph Klein and Albert Methfessel that we can perhaps just begin to understand why he seems to have been so uncurious about the incomparable lieder written to his texts by Schubert and Schumann.
