Without being aware of the fact, American concertgoers have been introduced in a round-about way to Otto Julius Bierbaum. In the section of Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben (1899) called, rather grandiloquently, "Des Helden Friedenswerke" (The Hero's Works of Peace), where Strauss quotes from his own earlier works, the tenor tuba, bass clarinet, and violas play a broad and lovely melody; it is the theme of Strauss's setting, as a Lied, of Bierbaum's once-famous verses "Traum durch die Dämmerung" (Dream through the Dusk). Bierbaum was one of the most popular German lyricists of his time because of the musicality and directness of his poems; no one could accuse him of writing "in der dunklen Art, die jetzt so beliebt ist" (in the obscure fashion that's so popular just now). The words belong to the courtesan Wo-Fu-Ling in Bierbaum's Das schöne Mädchen von Pao (The...