"To the Nightingale" tells of one in whom the mournful song of the nightingale arouses sad memories. 'Pour not out so the strains of love’ he pleads.
"Death that is the cool night", one of the loveliest of Brahms's songs, is a setting of Heine's well-known lyric.
"In the churchyard" tells of one who wandered on a day of wind and rain through a neglected churchyard and seemed to see on all the forgotten tombstones the sad word Gewesen (which means simply 'been'), but at the end he knows, with a blessed hope, that the word should be Genesen (which means 'recovered from sickness', and is here used in the sense of 'arisen').
"Ever fainter grows my slumber" is one of the favourites among Brahms's songs. Its mood of drowsiness and restrained passion gives beauty to the lament of one who is dying heart-broken.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the son of one of the foremost music critics of our time, made his first appearance as a composer at the precocious age of only eleven, with a Pantomime, "The Snow Man". It was produced at the Royal Opera, Vienna, in 1897. Other operatic and chamber music followed closely on its heels, and he had won an important place for himself while he was still in his 'teens. More than one of these works was immediately successful, and his operas, "Violanta" and "Die tote Stadt" ("The Dead Town") are regularly included in the repertoire of most German opera houses.
"Peace My Soul" is a love song. Strauss had to use what lyrics offered themselves in his country's literature, and most German lyrists are stricken either with love or with grief. In this case the wound is to be stanched.
"Autumn Crocus" is a tiny song which extols the pretty flower that is shaped like a lily and is coloured like a rose, but whose poison concealed in its petals makes this autumn flower like a last fond love, sweet but faded.
"Droop o'er my Head" is a lover asking that he may rest in the shade of the raven locks of his beloved, in the soft light of her eyes.
In "Cecily" Strauss indulges to the full his habit of heroic, exultant melody with a rushing turbulent accompaniment and plunging modulation.
