In his book Poem and Music in the German Lied, Jack Stein attempts to assess the fidelity of Schumann's music in Dichterliebe to the poems he appropriated from Lyrisches Intermezzo by Heine. Stein asserts that, although he certainly grasped some of the nuances of Heine's work, Schumann often ignored the "caustic" and "ironic" components of the text, resulting in a "watering down and sentimentalizing of the sharp, pointed verses of Heine”. Stein progresses chronologically through the song cycle, highlighting the many songs he believes to be unfaithful while noting a few examples he finds faithful to Heine's text. Throughout his argument, Stein focuses on the "word-tone relationship" of the score—on whether the form (strophic or compound) and tone of each song, and even each stanza, reflects Heine's poetry. When discussing song number 6, Stein asserts that "the ridiculous rhymes... should have warned Schumann against his impassive, pompous, patriotic and religious treatment." Stein seems to criticize Schumann for ignoring what he considers to be an obvious sign in the text and thus failing to grasp the essence of this poem. Midway through the chapter, Stein points out two other weaknesses in Schumann's composition: his ignoring the importance of the form of Heine's poetry and his omitting and rearranging poems, breaking up closely related pairs of poems. . Most of Stein's analyzes seemed valid to me. and well accompanied. Much of the charm of Heine's poetry from Lyrisches Intermezzo comes from its elements of irony and wit; Although the cycle begins with a beautifully simple love poem, the text becomes, as Stein puts it, "bizarre and weirder" as it unfolds. And after hearing Dichterliebe for the first time with a middle of paper......I had a desire for his music to achieve some sort of success. We often forget that composers write music as a career and that they write it for the audiences of their time. They have a deep passion for music that stimulates their artistic talent, but, after all, they need to sell copies or get their music played in order to put food on the table. In the early Romantic period in particular, a sharp, witty, ironic song cycle may not have appealed to an audience expecting beautiful, sentimental melodies. Schumann may have known that he was simplifying Heine's complex text into something less extreme, but he was also composing music in a style that he and his audience were familiar with. Fortunately for the listener, this style is beautiful, and despite Jack Stein's criticism, I'm sure he agrees that Dichterliebe is a song cycle that will be loved for centuries..