From the introduction
"Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words were enormously popular from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, when the music that was everywhere was the music that people played on the piano. By the time I was beginning to study music, they were beginning to fall from grace. Young conservatory students were not playing them, and theory teachers had found more interesting pieces to use for study. Listeners had so many choices that the underrated Songs could not compete.
Therefore, I was familiar with the concept of these songs, but not with the songs themselves. I wondered why such famous works by a first-rate composer should fall so fast from the repertory. As I examined a few of them, I realized that these pieces would not appeal to many pianists. Despite their difficulty, they do not specifically take advantage of the piano’s strengths. It takes a highly skilled pianist to play many of them, and a brilliant one to play them correctly. They have been damned with faint praise over the years as evidence of Mendelssohn’s skill at writing charming, melancholy, perfectly balanced tunes that lack profundity but are eminently crafted.
Many famous composers have taken poems both great and unknown and set them to music. To my knowledge, very few poets had ever taken a piece of music and written words for it. This is understandable. A good instrumental melody does not need words. In some cases, melodies written for instruments are unsingable. They do not exist within reasonable ranges for a singer, do not provide opportunities to breathe, nor are they lacking in intrinsic meaning.
Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, however, do have melodies that stay within a (very talented) singer’s range. They do provide breathing spaces. The melodies are always clearly heard in the piano and creatively accompanied.
I decided to write words to these songs."
