Brahms was opposed to the Lied cultivated by the ‘New German’ circle of composers around Franz Liszt who developed it into a highly artifical art form. In the books of the 49 Deutsche Volkslieder Brahms discovered a repository of dialogue songs, narrative ballads, laments, and songs of disputation and love, some tragic, others comic, that appealed to his need for authencity. The book from which he sourced the songs had a printed text and melody, so Brahms’ artistic contribution lay in his richly varied piano accompaniments which subtly comment, heighten, inflect or expand on the texts. The first volume in this series is on Naxos 8.574268.