Liszt's Lieder have long been, in their original format, among the most neglected areas of his achievement, yet many attracted critical admiration from their first appearance, and several of the piano transcriptions derived from them are among his best-known pieces. After an overview of Liszt's more than eighty songs (over 120 if revisions are included), this chapter will briefly address this paradox, the most extreme example of which is the setting for voice and piano of Freiligrath's ‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst’, which is relatively unknown in the original, although the composer's own solo arrangement, incarnated for piano as the third of Liebesträume – Drei Notturnos – is almost tiresomely popular. This general trend in the reception of Liszt's songs and song transcriptions established itself during his lifetime and continued throughout the twentieth century. When Michael Saffle first came to compile his Garland Guide to Liszt Research in 1991, it was selfevident to him that ‘no comparable portion of Liszt's output has received less attention from scholars than his songs and recitations for solo voice’. This echoed at a distance of more than a hundred years Francis Hueffer's entry on Liszt for the first edition of Sir George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which appeared before the composer's death. Writing at a point when the Liebesträume piano transcriptions and to a slightly lesser extent those of the three Petrarch Sonnets were already well-known works, Hueffer deplored the fact that the songs had been ‘not hitherto sufficiently appreciated by Liszt's critics’.