The works of the composer Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (1839-1901) are mostly unknown today. In the later 19th century in mid-Europe he was quite well-known. Rheinberger’s compositional oeuvre is certainly not restricted to the realm of sacred music. He repeatedly occupied himself with the solo lied, publishing eleven lied collections containing altogether more than 100 songs between 1862 and 1890. In their musical language, Rheinberger’s lieder look for models not among his contemporaries, but in the early 19th century, in Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. Rheinberger’s predominant use of the strophic form hearkens back even further, to the “Second Berlin Lied School” around Carl Friedrich Zelter. But, where Schubert or Hugo Wolf would have emphasized the dark, despairing aspects of a poem, Rheinberger’s lieder display an almost Haydnesque clarity. Most of the songs recorded on the present CD Die Wasserfee (The Water Sprite) are first recordings.