Juliane Banse offered Goethe settings with great spirituality.

In between came another Goethe setting, Brahms's Alto Rhapsody.

Mr. Prey's potent selection of Goethe settings reveals a Schubert utterly at odds with entrenched perceptions of a gentle lieder genius more innocent than knowing.

Impressionistic is not a word you often associate with Beethoven, as the program notes did in relation to the first of the two Goethe settings, "Calm Sea."

His first Goethe settings were produced around 1790.

I missed, for instance, the move from anxiety to joy in Schubert's "Rastlose Liebe," or a real sense of stylistic difference between Schubert's Goethe settings and Poulenc's Apollinaire.

The Goethe settings, three "Harfenspieler" songs, go in the other direction: the melodic turns and harmonic shifts more radical and at the same time more assured.

Next come four Goethe settings and, with them, the first of many quite different shocks of recognition.

These same qualities characterized a group of Goethe settings by Hugo Wolf, mostly from the "West-Östlicher Divan."