The present album brings together a collection of transcriptions that open an unusual chapter in music history: fin‑de‑siècle songs reimagined for unaccompanied choir. With these works, Clytus Gottwald turns to a repertoire that scarcely existed in the late Romantic period. His transcriptions offer these songs a new musical setting without altering their structure or harmonic language.

The widely spaced vocal textures present the music of Wolf, Schreker, Strauss, and Alma and Gustav Mahler from a different angle. The traditional division between solo voice and piano recedes; instead, a unified vocal fabric emerges, allowing the harmonic nuances of the originals to come into focus in a new way. Familiar works are not reinvented but transferred into a medium that gathers their colours and lines into a different kind of coherence.

The selection ranges from folk‑inflected miniatures to late‑Romantic soundscapes and includes several rarely heard pieces. As a whole, the CD offers a concentrated view of a repertoire situated between tradition and modernity, while also highlighting a historical gap in the choral literature of the turn of the century.