Franz Liszt wrote about 80 German lieder, most of them ignored in comparison both with the rest of his output and with the productions of Schubert and Schumann. The songs recorded here by German soprano Ruth Ziesak are bound to be compared with those, for many are settings of famous German poems (famous enough that the booklet editors decided that non-Germans don't need any translations). The judgment of the collective mind is easy enough to understand: the limpid yet archetypal verses of Goethe, for example, found ...
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Franz Liszt wrote about 80 German lieder, most of them ignored in comparison both with the rest of his output and with the productions of Schubert and Schumann. The songs recorded here by German soprano Ruth Ziesak are bound to be compared with those, for many are settings of famous German poems (famous enough that the booklet editors decided that non-Germans don't need any translations). The judgment of the collective mind is easy enough to understand: the limpid yet archetypal verses of Goethe, for example, found seemingly inevitable counterparts in Schubert's settings, but the listener may react to Liszt's rather tortured Mignon (track 15) by saying "OK, forget the trip, it's not that important." But the fine German soprano Ruth Ziesak understands the virtues of these songs and the important part they played in Liszt's career. They come from the middle of that career; the songs date from the 1840s through the 1870s (the notes for the most part don't specify exactly when each individual song was...
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