"Mignon was the second of his German songs, and it is the most deeply emotional of all the settings of that famous poem. Longing is its keynote; longing for blue-skyed Italy, with its orange groves, marble treasures and other delights. One of the things which Wagner admired in Liszt's music was 'the inspired definiteness of musical conception' which enabled him to concentrate his thought and feeling in so pregnant a way that one felt inclined to exclaim after a few bars: 'Enough, I have it all.' The opening bar of Mignon's Lied thus seems to condense the longing of the whole song; yet, as the music proceeds, we find it is only a prelude to a wealth of musical detail which colours and intensifies every word and wish of the poem.
"All of the six settings of Goethe poems are gems, and Dr. Hueffer quite properly gave each of them a place in his collection of Twenty Liszt Songs. Concerning the Wanderer's Night Song (Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh), Dr. Hueffer has well said that Liszt has rendered the heavenly calm of the poem by his wonderful harmonies in a manner which alone would secure him a place among the great masters of German song. 'Particularly the modulation from G major back into the original E major at the close of the piece is of surprising beauty.'
"For composers of musical lyrics Schiller wrote much fewer available poems than Goethe. But Schubert owed to him one of his finest songs, The Maiden's Lament, and next to him as an illustrator of Schiller I feel inclined to place Liszt, who is at his best in his settings of three poems from William Tell, The Fisher Boy, The Shepherd and The Alpine Hunter. Liszt, like Schubert, favours poems which bring a scene or a story vividly before the mind's eye, and he loves to write music which mirrors these pictorial features. Schubert's Mullerlieder seemed to have exhausted the possible ways of depicting in music the movements of the waters--but listen to the rippling arpeggios in Liszt's Fisher Boy, embodying the acquisitions of modern pianistic technic. The shepherd's song brings before our eyes and ears the flower meadows and the brooks of the peaceful Alpine world in summer, while the song of the hunter gives us dissolving views of destructive avalanches and appalling precipices, with sudden glimpses, through cloud rifts, of meadows and hamlets at dizzy depths below. Wagner himself, in the grandest mountain and cloud scenes of the Walküre and Siegfried, has not written more superbly dissonant and appropriate dramatic music than has Liszt in this exciting song."