Eichendorff

It’s typical of his approach that his excavation of brain science includes an extended riff about the translation of a brief poem by the 19th-century Prussian writer Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff.

Strauss set Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem to music at the end of his long life, and, lest anyone miss the fact that he was contemplating his own twilight, he inserted a quotation from his youthful tone poem “Death and Transfiguration.”

“Die Einsiedler,” a setting of Eichendorff, stands in for the whole: fastidious sensitivity; utter refinement; getting to the heart of every word and, through every word, to the heart of the song.

In the first-floor window is the birdcage and the canary recites an Eichendorff ode.

In 1847, the German Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff told Clara Schumann that the lieder settings by her husband, Robert Schumann, had “given life to his poems for the first time.”