Though he composed in a variety of genres – choral and orchestral works and an opera among them – Erich Zeisl was a consummate Lieder composer whose songs are richly melodic, inventive, and cast in a late Romantic idiom. In his settings he responded to a range of ideas – the subjects of the night and light were potent ones, and he mined a vein of irony and humour. Forced from Austria in 1938 he did not write any Lieder after settling in America but arranged some Spirituals, drawing on the music of a people similarly oppressed as his own.