The Naxos complete edition of Schubert songs continues to wend its deliberate way with this, the 22nd release of the series and the fifth devoted to what are here called "poets of sensibility." The German word is "Empfindsamkeit," which is closer to sensitivity than mere sensibility, but the idea of organizing Schubert's songs according to their texts is sound; Schubert is linked in the minds of general listeners with Goethe and a few other famous poets, but most of his songs were to texts by poets who are unknown today, ...
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The Naxos complete edition of Schubert songs continues to wend its deliberate way with this, the 22nd release of the series and the fifth devoted to what are here called "poets of sensibility." The German word is "Empfindsamkeit," which is closer to sensitivity than mere sensibility, but the idea of organizing Schubert's songs according to their texts is sound; Schubert is linked in the minds of general listeners with Goethe and a few other famous poets, but most of his songs were to texts by poets who are unknown today, many even in Germany, and it is worth asking how Schubert approached them. This disc is entirely devoted to texts of poet (and theologian) Ludwig Kosegarten, who lived in far northern Germany but was widely enough diffused to reach Schubert in Vienna. Schubert liked him enough to set seven of his poems in the course of one single day in 1815, and many of these songs date from the period in the mid-1810s when songs were flooding out of Schubert's pen as fast as he could write them down....
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