Richard Strauss wrote most of his cycles of songs for voice and piano by the early 1900s. At least to some degree due to his passion for his wife Pauline, herself a professional singer, Strauss doubtless felt the need to find an outlet for his own love of the voice while he was continuing the series of orchestral tone poems that started in the 1880s and continued through the 1890s, the body of work by which Strauss first conquered and then maintained his early status as a composer. Strauss' song output increased in the mid-1890s after his marriage to the soprano Pauline de Ahna, who sang a role in his first opera, Guntram. In some sense, every soprano part written after his marriage is a love song to Pauline Strauss.

Strauss' song output diminished after the turn of the century when he began almost exclusively to concentrate on opera, with Feuersnot (1901), Salome (1903-05), Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier (1909-1910), Ariadne auf Naxos (1911-1912), and Die Frau ohne Schatten (1914-1918) coming in quick succession. In the late teens, Strauss quickly wrote several groups of songs, including the cycles Opp. 66-69, before once again concentrating primarily on opera.

The Opus 68 group of songs was written in 1918 and sets texts by the poet Clemens Brentano (1778-1842), who, with Ludwig Achim von Arnim (whose texts comprise many of Strauss' Opus 69 songs), compiled and wrote the collection of folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the source so valuable to Mahler's vocal work. Brentano's texts are careful in their use of pastoral imagery and balanced structure, perhaps as an extension of his experience with and interest in folk poetry. In these poems, straightforward imagery is used to illuminate somewhat more obscure themes. Perhaps the most important overriding musical characteristic of these songs is their constant forward motion and organic extension of the melodic lines.

The first of the Opus 68 songs is "To the Night" (An die Nacht). Strauss sets the three-stanza poem with a structure that nods in the direction of strophic form without being under its obligations. The poem is about the mysterious power of night. Although primarily syllabic, there are melismatic areas that foreshadow the highly ornate vocal lines of the rest of the Opus 68 songs. This approach, along with dramatic contours underpinned by a complex harmonic armature, may be seen as a carryover from the virtuosic vocal music of operas. A case in point is "I meant to make you a posy" (Ich wollt ein Sträußlein binden), in which the first syllable of the word "Sträußlein" is sung over several notes. The piano supports the voice and reiterates the song's basic melodic cell. In "Whisper, dear myrtle" (Säusle, liebe Myrtle), Strauss' extremely long lyric lines carry forward what is essentially a static interior landscape.

"As your song rang out" (Als mir dein Lied erklang) is the poet's reaction to his lover's song, which "soars to the moon" with the help of Strauss' modulating sequences (a Wagnerian gambit). "Cupid" (Amor) relies on gestures—scale passages and arpeggios on a single syllable—borrowed from Strauss' recent experience "rewriting" Mozartian opera in Der Rosenkavalier. This is followed in the cycle by the longest and most dramatically far-reaching song, "The Song of the Women" (Lied der Frauen). In the first verses we hear of women longing for and worrying for their distant husbands—a sailor, a shepherd, a miner, a soldier—far away as storms rage. The end of the song reminds us that "victory" is the end result of struggle.

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