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 always their own individuality.  You cannot take anything away from his Lieder without spoiling the whole; and it is especially so with his instrumental passages, which give us the beginning and end of his emotion, and which circle round it and sum it up.  The musical form, following closely the poetic form, is extremely varied.  It may sometimes express a fugitive thought, a brief record of a poetic impression or some little action, or it may be a great epic or dramatic picture.  Mueller remarks that Wolf put more into a poem than the poet himself—­as in the Italienisches-Liederbuch.  It is the worst reproach they can make about him, and it is not an ordinary one.  Wolf excelled especially in setting poems which accorded with his own tragic fate, as if he had some presentiment of it.  No one has better expressed the anguish of a troubled and despairing soul, such as we find in the old harp-player in Wilhelm Meister, or the splendid nihility of certain poems of Michelangelo.

Of all his collections of Lieder, the 53 Gedichte von Eduard Moerike, komponiert fuer eine Singstimme und Klavier (1888), the first published, is the most popular.  It gained many friends for Wolf, not so much among artists (who are always in the minority) as among those critics who are the best and most disinterested of all—­the homely, honest people who do not make a profession of art, but enjoy it as their spiritual daily bread.  There are a number of these people in Germany, whose hard lives are beautified by their love of music.  Wolf found these friends in all parts, but he found most of them in Swabia.  At Stuttgart, at Mannheim, at Darmstadt, and in the country round about these towns he became very popular—­the only popular musician since Schubert and Schumann.