"It is not known exactly when Liszt began to compose songs," writes
Henry T. Finck in his volume on Songs and Song Writers. "The best of
them belong to the Weimar period, when he was in the full maturity of
his creative power. There are stories of songs inspired by love while he
lived in Paris; and he certainly did write six settings of French songs,
chiefly by Victor Hugo. These he prepared for the press in 1842. While
less original in melody and modulation than the best of his German
songs, they have a distinct French esprit and elegance which attest his
power of assimilation and his cosmopolitanism. These French songs,
fortunately for his German admirers, were translated by Cornelius.
Italian leanings are betrayed by his choice of poems by Petrarca and
Bocella; but, as already intimated his favourite poets are Germans:
Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Uhland, Rueckert and
others. Goethe--who could not even understand Schubert, and to whom
Liszt's music would have been pure Chinese--is favoured by settings of
Mignon's Lied (Kennst du das Land), Es war ein Koenig in Thule, Der du
von dem Himmel bist, Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, Wer nie sein Brod mit
Thraenen aess, Freudvoll und Leidvoll (two versions).
"Mignon was the second of his German songs, and it is the most deeply
emotional of all the settings of that famous poem. Longing is its
keynote; longing for blue-skyed Italy, with its orange groves, marble
treasures and other delights. One of the things which Wagner admired in
Liszt's music was 'the inspired definiteness of musical conception'
which enabled him to concentrate his thought and feeling in so pregnant
a way that one felt inclined to exclaim after a few bars: 'Enough, I
have it all.' The opening bar of Mignon's Lied thus seems to condense
the longing of the whole song; yet, as the music proceeds, we find it is
only a prelude to a wealth of musical detail which colours and
intensifies every word and wish of the poem.
"All of the six settings of Goethe poems are gems, and Dr. Hueffer quite
properly gave each of them a place in his collection of Twenty Liszt
Songs. Concerning the Wanderer's Night Song (Ueber allen Gipfeln ist
Ruh), Dr. Hueffer has well said that Liszt has rendered the heavenly
calm of the poem by his wonderful harmonies in a manner which alone
would secure him a place among the great masters of German song.
'Particularly the modulation from G major back into the original E major
at the close of the piece is of surprising beauty.'
"For composers of musical lyrics Schiller wrote much fewer available
poems than Goethe. But Schubert owed to him one of his finest songs, The
Maiden's Lament, and next to him as an illustrator of Schiller I feel
inclined to place Liszt, who is at his best in his settings of three
poems from William Tell, The Fisher Boy, The Shepherd and The Alpine
Hunter. Liszt, like Schubert, favours poems which bring a scene or a
story vividly before the mind's eye, and he loves to write music which
mirrors these pictorial features. Schubert's Mullerlieder seemed to have
exhausted the possible ways of depicting in music the movements of the
waters--but listen to the rippling arpeggios in Liszt's Fisher Boy,
embodying the acquisitions of modern pianistic technic. The shepherd's
song brings before our eyes and ears the flower meadows and the brooks
of the peaceful Alpine world in summer, while the song of the hunter
gives us dissolving views of destructive avalanches and appalling
precipices, with sudden glimpses, through cloud rifts, of meadows and
hamlets at dizzy depths below. Wagner himself, in the grandest mountain
and cloud scenes of the Walkuere and Siegfried, has not written more
superbly dissonant and appropriate dramatic music than has Liszt in this
exciting song."
The King of Thule and Lorely are masterpieces and contain in essence all
the dramatic lyricism of modern writers, Strauss included.