Walter Braunfels’s career took flight, almost literally, with the composition of his 1920 opera The Birds, based on Aristophanes’s comedy. In the two years that followed, Munich alone hosted 50 performances of the piece and Einstein was one of many who approved. ‘There’s an imperative at work here,’ he wrote, ‘which calls for comparison with Wagner’s Meistersinger and Pfitzner’s Palestrina.’

Einstein soon left Germany, and if Braunfels was able to keep to his house on Lake Constance, professionally his career was terminated by the Nazis (his father was born Jewish). Like many composers of a tuneful Straussian bent – but without Strauss’s clout – Braunfels then lived to see his music dismissed a second time, dwindling to obscurity during the post-war rush to Darmstadt.

This virtually complete collection of Braunfels’s Lieder is perhaps not the place to start if the composer is new to you. As a mature artist he barely touched Lieder, so these songs are nearly all early works. The scholarly collection also includes two versions of the same suite, a Federspiel (‘game with feathers’) drawn from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and itself a sort of run-up to The Birds. As delivered by Marlis Petersen, with sparkly tone but unbirdlike intelligence, these are affectionate studies of avian life, from the obvious Lieder staples (nightingale, turtle dove) to more exotic species (hoopoe, siskin, wagtail), but you will need a large German dictionary to tell your bullfinch from your great tit, as there are no translated texts with the CD. Here the piano line (Eric Schneider, crisp and forthright) pecks around the voice with skilful charm.

Sterner tasks are handed to the baritone Konrad Jarnot. You could slot Braunfels into a little charted zone between Richard Strauss and Karl Amadeus Hartmann for these angular yet lyrical settings, and Jarnot finds longing and intensity in the Op 1 song ‘Die stillen Kähne’ and a lovely setting of Hölderlin (‘Abbitte’) in the Sechs Gesänge, Op 4. Elsewhere, you wish Braunfels upgraded more of his appetising fragments into more satisfying main courses. The exceptions prove the rule, including the Straussian ‘Herbstgefühl’, silkily served up by Petersen, and Jarnot’s grizzled ‘An die Parzen’, where the brooding dissonance recalls Wagner’s Klingsor. These two form a better epilogue to the album than the wispy miniatures of the Zwei Lieder, Braunfels’s 1932 farewell to the genre. Perhaps he saw that soon there wouldn’t be much to sing about.