BRAHMS'S SONGS PRESENT a provocative front to the scholar-performer. While the academic community does not dispute Brahms's significance as a song-writer, this esteem is not reflected by the performance community, which restricts itself to the same handful of songs for which Brahms became famous during his lifetime. How can this contradiction be resolved? Certainly, Brahms himself gives no clues. Although the legacy of Brahms's teasingly cryptic comments about song composition has been thoroughly documented, there is no single successful and specific study of song interpretation. The occasional ungrateful vocal line and virtuosic accompaniment could perhaps be responsible for pushing the performer into more immediately rewarding directions, but a principal deterrent is Brahms's bewilderingly variable choice of poetry, which resists all attempts to be pummeled into the neat categories so beloved of both scholar and diligent concert programmer. However, this should by no means render individual songs inaccessible or difficult to characterize (often the obstacle to successful performance). Brahms's criteria for potential settings echo those of many poetry-based Lieder scholars; as one writer challengingly asserts: