Dichterliebe, "A Poet's Love" (composed 1840), is the best-known song cycle by Robert Schumann (Op. 48). The texts for the 16 songs come from the Lyrisches Intermezzo by Heinrich Heine, written in 1822–23 and published as part of Heine's Das Buch der Lieder. After the song cycles of Franz Schubert (Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise), Schumann's are part of the core of the genre in musical literature. Source: Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo Author of the sarcastic Die Romantische Schule, Heine was a vocal critic of German romanticism, though he is often described as a quintessentially Romantic writer. In some of his poetry, and notably in Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (1844), romantic lyrical conventions are used as vessels to deploy biting, satirical nature. Dichterliebe was composed before Heine's Deutschland and does not appear to portray this ironic dimension: scholarship is divided as to what extent Schumann intended to express it. Heine's Lyrisches Intermezzo consists of a verse Prologue and 65 poems. The Prologue (Es war 'mal ein Ritter trübselig und stumm – There once was a Knight, woeful and silent) tells of the sorrowful knight who sits gloomily in his house all day, but by night is visited by his fairy (nixie) bride, and dances with her until daylight returns him to his little poet's room (Poeten-stübchen). The 65 poems follow, of which the 16 of the Dichterliebe are a selection. The conclusion of it is that he is going to put the old bad songs and dreams, all his sorrowful love and suffering, into a huge coffin that 12 giants will throw into the sea. This catastrophe is slightly reminiscent of Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, in which the hero ends by drowning himself in the brook he has followed through the cycle. Song cycle Das Buch der Lieder was given its second edition, with preface from Paris, in 1837, the songs were composed in 1840, and the first edition of Dichterliebe was published in two volumes by Peters, in Leipzig, in 1844. Though Schumann originally set 20 songs to Heine's poems, only 16 of the 20 were included in the first edition. Dein Angesicht (Heine no. 5) is one of the omitted items. Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, On Wings of Song (Heine no 9), is best known from a setting by Felix Mendelssohn. The poems' very natural, almost hypersensitive affections are mirrored in Schumann's settings, with their miniaturist chromaticism and suspensions. The