All classes of society unite in loving him.  “His Lieder,” says Herr Decsey, “are on the pianos of even the poorest houses, by the side of Schubert’s Lieder.”  Stuttgart became for Wolf, as he said himself, a second home.  He owes this popularity, which is without parallel in Swabia, to the people’s passionate love of Lieder and, above all, of the poetry of Moerike, the Swabian pastor, who lives again in Wolf’s songs.  Wolf has set to music a quarter of Moerike’s poems, he has brought Moerike into his own, and given him one of the first places among German poets.  Such was really his intention, and he said so when he had a portrait of Moerike put on the title-page of the songs.  Whether the reading of his poetry acted as a balm to Wolf’s unquiet spirit, or whether he became conscious of his genius for the first time when he expressed this poetry in music, I do not know; but he felt deep gratitude towards it, and wished to show it by beginning the first volume with that fine and rather Beethoven-like song, Der Genesende an die Hoffnung ("The Convalescent’s Ode to Hope").

The fifty-one Lieder of the Goethe-Liederbuch (1888-89) were composed in groups of Lieder:  the Wilhelm Meister Lieder, the Divan (Suleika) Lieder, etc.  Wolf even tried to identify himself with the poet’s line of thought; and in this we often find him in rivalry with Schubert.  He avoided using the poems in which he thought Schubert had exactly conveyed the poet’s meaning, as in Geheimes and An Schwager Kronos; but he told Mueller that there were times when Schubert did not understand Goethe at all, because he concerned himself with translating their general lyrical thought rather than with showing the real nature of Goethe’s characters.  The peculiar interest of Wolf’s Lieder is that he gives each poetic figure its individual character.  The Harpist and Mignon are traced with marvellous insight and restraint; and in some passages Wolf shows that he has re-discovered Goethe’s art of presenting a whole world of sadness in a single word.  The serenity of a great soul soars over the chaos of passions.

The Spanisches-Liederbuch nach Heyse und Geibel (1889-90) had already inspired Schumann, Brahms, Cornelius, and others.  But none had tried to give it its rough and sensual character.  Mueller shows how Schumann, especially, robbed the poems of their true nature.  Not only did he invest them with his own sentimentalism, but he calmly arranged poems of the most marked individual character to be sung by four voices, which makes them quite absurd; and, worse than this, he changed the words and their sense when they stood in his way.  Wolf, on the contrary, steeped himself in this melancholy and voluptuous world, and would not let anything draw him from it; and out of it he produced, as he himself said proudly, some masterpieces.  The ten religious songs that come at the beginning of the collection suggest the