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A little while afterwards Strauss married the singer who played Freihild, Pauline de Ahna, who had also created Elizabeth in Tannhäuser at Bayreuth, and who has since devoted herself to the interpretation of her husband's Lieder.
"What can she mean to tell me?" he thought; but he did as he was told. Half hidden by the curtain, he waited, but as she did not come, every minute the bitterness of his soul increased. He remembered his beautiful speeches about the peat-culture and Heine's "Buch der Lieder," and shrugged his shoulders contemptuously over his own stupidity.
Barnard's collection in general inclined to the severely classical, but we disinterred from the heap a few lighter works of an old-fashioned kind, including a volume of Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte, and with one of these Miss Bellingham made trial of her skill, playing it with excellent taste and quite adequate execution.
Bower smiled pleasantly, and gesticulated with hands and shoulders in a way that was foreign to his studiously cultivated English habit of repose. Indeed, with his climber's garb he seemed to have acquired a new manner. There was a perplexing change in him since the morning. "Yes," he said. "I understand perfectly. You and I might sing lieder ohne worte, Miss Wynton.
"If I am to be no musician in order to please you," said Christophe dryly, "I am sorry, but I'm not that." Hecht, still looking aside, went on, as indifferently as ever. "You have written music? What have you written? Lieder, I suppose?" "Lieder, two symphonies, symphonic poems, quartets, piano suites, theater music," said Christophe, boiling.
He made her practise it, and would give her old German lieder or his own music to sing: it gave her pleasure, and she made such progress as to surprise herself as much as him. She was marvelously gifted. The fire of music had miraculously descended upon this daughter of Parisian middle-class parents who were utterly devoid of any artistic feeling.
Caroline Wiseneder, of Brunswick, deserves notice for her aid to the blind, for whom she started a successful music school. Her two operas and several melodramas were published after her death. Auguste Goetze, born at Weimar in 1840, grew up to success as a singer of German Lieder, and founded an opera school at Dresden.
What strikes one also in the Lieder is the importance of the pianoforte accompaniment and its independence of the voice.
If I had begun by listening to the comparatively mellifluous D-minor string quartet, played by the Flonzaley Quartet, as did my New York colleagues, instead of undergoing the terrifying aural tortures of Lieder des Pierrot Lunaire, I might have been as amiable as the critics. The string sextet has been received here with critical cordiality. Its beauties were exposed by the Kneisel Quartet.
Mendelssohn wrote to an author who composed verses for his Lieder: "Music is more definite than speech, and to want to explain it by means of words is to make the meaning obscure. I do not think that words suffice for that end, and were I persuaded to the contrary, I would not compose music.
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