Strauss' first published group of songs, the Gilm Lieder of Op. 10, were written when the composer was 21. His second published group, the Op. 15 settings of Michelangelo and Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack, were composed both before and after the Op. 19 set, the Michelangelo before and the von Schack after. Von Schack was a well-known figure in Strauss' hometown of Munich, a scholar, art collector, and writer whose poems inspired Strauss not only in the last four of the Op. 15 songs, but in all 12 songs of Opp. 17 and 19. Von Schack's cozy, sentimental but heartfelt poems brought out the sentimentalist in the young Strauss. Heimkehr (Homecoming), the fifth and final Op. 15 song, is a sweet and gentle song as charming as anything the young Strauss wrote. Setting von Schack's three-verse poem in modified strophic form, Strauss gave the outer verses a tender-hearted, major-keyed melody above a simple, arpggiated accompaniment ringed by chains of major thirds and the central verse a passionate minor-keyed melody over a more rhythmic accompaniment that quietly modulates back to the tonic major for the return of the opening verse transformed by the chains of thirds into something subtler and more sublime.

© James Leonard, Rovi