LISZT'S SONGS
Sung by OLGA HALEY (Contralto)
0 come to me in dreams
Thou, who from Heaven art sent A pino-trco stands forsaken
0 where is there a sward so green ?
APART from bigger vocal works, in which solo voices arc used along with chorus and orchestra, Liszt left over sixty songs for one voice with pianoforte accompaniment. They are but seldom sung now, although many of them are of so lino a quality that, had ho written nothing else, they would of themselves have earned him a high place in the annals of music.
Poetry-not merely written verse, but in the wider sense of the rhythm which breathes in every living thing-was an open book to him in a way that it has not always been to musicians, and that was no doubt in his mind as he composed the Symphonic Poems which had so large an influence on tho later course of orchestral music. It certainly gave him a very real insight into the poetic side of literature, and his settings of words to music are all marked by a very intimate realization of the full meaning of tho words. Not only do the melodies seem to grow happily from the texts, as though the one really inspired the other, but the very essence of the poem seems to be the germ from which the music sprang. Some of his settings of poems which have often been composed-for instance, Mignon's ' Knowest thou the land,' the ' Lorelei,' and Heine's ' Even as a lovely flower,' aro universally accepted as the best of the many songs to these texts in existence, and it would indeed bo difficult to imagine any music which should have quite t!)3 same feeling of belonging to the words.