Deryk Barker wrote:

>To get back to music: I'm amazed that people think that a great poem is
>a necessity for a musical setting.  If the poem is that great, will music
>*add* anything to it? (I recall reading once that 2nd-rate novels made the
>best movies....)

Henry-Louis de La Grange makes the very same point, noting that Mahler set
the poems of Rueckert, who is now considered a minor German poet.  BTW, the
appendices in de La Grange's volume 2 should be read by those who think
that Mahler was not a great poet.  I suppose it depends on the difference
between poet and composer, but some of the wholesale changes that Mahler
made to Rueckert and later Bethge show that Mahler was much more than a
mere wordsmith.

"If Mahler deliberately avoided setting literary masterpieces," de La
Grange writes, "it is because he could alter the words without being
accused of sacrilege." De La Grange adds the following note:  "It always
seemed to [Mahler] to be an act of barbarism, when composers set to music
poems whose beauty was (already) perfect." De La Grange also opines that
Mahler's only setting of an actual literary masterpiece to music -- Faust,
part II -- is arguably less than a total success.

Mitch Friedfeld