Bohemian composer Václav Jan Tomásek, also known as Wenzel Johann Tomásek, has been reduced to a footnote in music history: he is given as an example of how poets are often not good judges of musical settings of their own poetry. Tomásek set the poetry of Goethe dozens of times, and Goethe not only liked the music, but talked it up among friends. He compared Tomásek favorably to Beethoven, and apparently all but ignored Schubert. This release by Czech mezzo Renata Pokupic and esteemed accompanist Roger Vignoles puts ...
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Bohemian composer Václav Jan Tomásek, also known as Wenzel Johann Tomásek, has been reduced to a footnote in music history: he is given as an example of how poets are often not good judges of musical settings of their own poetry. Tomásek set the poetry of Goethe dozens of times, and Goethe not only liked the music, but talked it up among friends. He compared Tomásek favorably to Beethoven, and apparently all but ignored Schubert. This release by Czech mezzo Renata Pokupic and esteemed accompanist Roger Vignoles puts listeners right back in the early 19th century. Tomásek's model was Mozart, who wrote lieder that were more often heard then than now, and in the Goethe settings, composed in the late 1810s and early 1820s, it's hard to detect any sign that he knew Schubert at all (which is not surprising, as few other people did, either). The setting of Erlkönig (track 8) is indubitably inferior to Schubert's, but the album is worth the time of Schubert fans for several reasons. First there are the notes...
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