If music and poetry are the sister arts, so says tradition, they are also the odd couple. They do different things in fundamentally different languages; even where they seem to come together, they have different large tales to tell. It is symptomatic of their dissimilarities that actual collaboration – a poet and composer working together – is a rarity in the history of song. Even those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets who desired musical settings of their verse were seldom asked for their assent or consulted about their wishes in the matter; the usual practice was a composer's appropriation of a poem without even the poet's knowledge, much less his or her consent. Music's conventional obeisances to poets and poetry are thus in some measure a guilty façade to conceal a form of theft in which an existing work of art is not only robbed but used and sometimes abused for purposes unimagined by the original creator. No longer poetry per se, it undergoes a sea-change – whether for better or worse is out of the helpless (often dead) wordmonger's hands.

One of the oddest of odd couples is the pairing of Eduard Mörike (1804–75) and Hugo Wolf, despite the fact that they are often cited as “the perfect marriage” of poetry and music. But even a skeletal outline of their lives makes it apparent that their arts issued from very different experiences and perspectives – two more unlike creatures would be difficult to imagine.