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 written), and they land in the middle of two axes of the composer's creative thinking. The first ran between the clear structure of the Viennese song and his own proto-Wagnerian ideas; the second ran between his earlier expansive, programmatic manner and the compact harmonic experimentation of his last years. The best of the
Goethe settings is not Mignons Lied, but Freudvoll und leidvoll (track 12), which grows in an entirely original way from a half step as a structural element. Some of the songs are longer and bear the imprint of the programmatic manner of
Liszt's tone poems, and indeed orchestral arrangements exist for many of them. The most famous may be Die drei Zigeuner (The Three Gypsies, track 1), which is also the only song on the disc to make much use of
Liszt's Hungarian manner. There are, as usual with
Liszt, plenty of fireworks, and some of the songs (Vergiftet sind meine Lieder ["My Songs are Poisoned"], track 4) seem to have roots in the composer's celebrated love life. Be that as it may, the accompanist's role in many of these songs is large and not precisely analogous to that in the works of any other song composer of the period. The sound, from a Cologne radio studio, is ideal for exposure of the warm colors of
Ziesak's voice. Female singers, especially, should own and get to know this disc of still-underappreciated lieder.