RENÉE FLEMING / EVGENY KISSIN

The span of emotion and subject matter in Schubert’s 600-plus song settings ranges from the sunny simplicity of Die Vögel, von Schlegel’s depiction of a bird reveling in its carefree flight, to the tense, sombre longing of Mignon’s Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, a Goethe text Schubert returned to repeatedly. Schubert-admirer Liszt composed around 70 songs, his own Goethe settings including hymn-like Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, which transforms a perfect evening into a peaceful death, and Mignon’s Kennst du das Land. Equally imagery-rich are Sposalizio, his Années de pélerinage depiction of Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin, and his late-years Valses oubliées. Like the five evocative Morceaux de fantaisie, all Rachmaninoff’s songs are earlier-career works, penned in Russia. His self-critical older contemporary Henri Duparc kept only 16 of his own, but Debussy described them as "perfect."