Goethe in Song

Few figures exerted such a strong influence on the German song tradition as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe saw his reflective and probing poetry as incomplete without music, and if his own efforts to write such music proved fruitless, nearly every great Romantic composer was willing to step into the breach.

Grace Rossiter conducts the BBC Singers in this concert of resonant Goethe song settings transcribed for choral voices, from Beethoven’s sublimely understated Wonne der Wehmut to Richard Strauss’s love gift to his wife, Gefunden – messages from a time when music and literature were inseparable.