This chapter is a demonstration-piece of sorts, a laboratory experiment designed to make a point to excess. Only two of Wolf's Mörike songs appear in these pages, a dyad-cycle or pair of songs entitled “Peregrina I & II,” but the background to both words and music could fill a book – in fact, the story behind the poetry has filled several. If those books are mostly historical fiction (the noun, as always, taking precedence over the adjective), that is because the documentary record of this incident in Mörike's life is incomplete; what was left for the curious to investigate later is so startling, despite the gaps in the chronicle, that it invites, and has received, imagination's embroidery in prose. The backdrop to Wolf's selection of only two poems from a cycle of five born of this episode and speculative reasons for certain compositional twists and turns in the songs have not been explored at all and are possibly bound up with the composer's erotic history, very different from Mörike's. Wolf periodically lamented that he was only a song composer – a guarantee of second-class citizenship in the nineteenth century – and desperately wanted to make a name for himself in the larger genres (opera first and foremost) which brought both greater public recognition and private sense of worth, but small things can and do contain worlds.