Peter Cornelius once described himself as a "poet-composer", for he wrote the texts for many of his songs himself. This is the case with In Lust und Schmerzen, the first song of the three Liebeslieder which make up op. 4. Cornelius composed these songs in 1854 in Weimar, where he was living near Franz Liszt whom he greatly admired. Liszt’s influence can be discerned in the urgent piano accompaniment and the cumulative chromaticism which Cornelius chose as a means of expressing the emotional co...