AS ANYONE WHO HAS PONDERED the German Lied can attest, the attempt to uncover what a composer has made of a poet's text is generally thought to be the first step toward understanding a song's mediation of words. Indeed, the first sentence of Richard Kramer's recent Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song asks: “What does Schubert want from poetry?” Susan Youens makes the point even more emphatically: “Lieder begin with words,” she insists. “They are born when a composer encounters poetry.” Pursuing the same question from a perspective now including the performer, listener, or critic, Kristina Muxfeldt warns “how profoundly our reading [of a Lied's poem] in fact affects the way we account for the musical events.”

Although each of these statements conveys a subtly varied viewpoint, they nevertheless are united by a common thread: the belief that if one can come to terms with a poet's verse one also will succeed in apperceiving the song composed in response to it. Doing so, I maintain, is not always as easy as it seems, especially if the poem possesses the enigmatic density of Friedrich Schlegel's “Der Wanderer” (The Wanderer/Wayfarer, 1802), set to music by Schubert in 1819 (D. 649). A Lied clearly comes into being when a composer encounters poetry, yet the way we read a poem influences our interpretation of the song in ways not altogether adequately acknowledged.