The brief period between 1888 and 1897, between the great cycles devoted to single poets and the songs on sonnets of Michelangelo, saw Wolf at the zenith of his creativity. That period saw the genesis of the songs later published in anthologies after Mörike, Eichendorff and Goethe. Although even the early songs before 1888 reveal no arbitrariness in the choice of texts, it is this concentration on individual literary figures that characterises the highpoint of Wolf’s output. Their names resound in the ears of all who love German Romantic literature and are familiar with its transposition into the world of the Lied. While Schubert often mined an unexpected vein of poetry in lesser authors, his distant successor Hugo Wolf drank at the source of these giants. Wolf was undoubtedly a virtuoso in the art of making audible the huge dimension of what remains unsaid, though implied. Perhaps he had only one true peer: his former Viennese fellow student Gustav Mahler.

Belgian soprano Sophie Karthäuser studied with Noelle Barker at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She is now in great demand, especially as a Mozart singer. She sang her first Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) under René Jacobs and her first Susanna (Le nozze di Figaro) under William Christie. Since winning the Audience Prize at the Wigmore Hall Song Contest she has developed an acclaimed career as a recitalist, enjoying a particularly close artistic partnership with the distinguished American pianist Eugene Asti.