Although Sommernacht, the glorious Violin Concerto and operas such as Penthesilea and Massimila Doni are great achievements, it is his 300 or so songs including the Notturno for voice and string quartet and the terrifying Lebendig Begraben that enshrine the essential Schoeck. It is good news that the Swiss label Jecklin plan to issue them all. The present discs are Nos. 3 and 7 in this Complete Edition.
The first disc offers his Goethe setting, Der Gott und dis Bajadere (''The god and the dancing girl''), his longest single song for voice and piano, Sommerabend (''Summer evening'') composed in 1921 and discovered only as recently as 1988, and Die Entschwundene (''The lost one''), all of them the fruit of his somewhat turbulent relationship with the pianist Mary de Senger in the early 1920s. The main work on the disc is the set of 12 Hafis-Lieder, settings of Daumer's translations of the Persian mystic and poet. (Szymanowski had based his slightly earlier Love songs of Hafiz on Bethge's texts.) There is also his somewhat later Lenau setting of 1930, Wanderung im Gebirge, his only durchkomponiert cycle for voice and piano.
The second disc brings us Das Wandsbecker Liederbuch from the late 1930s, planned along the lines of the Wolf songbooks, and which, as the helpful notes by Chris Walton point out, attempts in its 18 settings a portrait of the poet, Matthias Claudius (1740-1815). The Wiegenlied (1947) and Im Nebel (1952) are from his later years while the Sechs Lieder, Op. 51 are settings of Eichendorff and Morike. They are all short, as are most of the songs on this disc; indeed ''Spruch'', the last of the Op. 51 set is only six bars (37 seconds) long.
Niklaus Tuller is completely inside the Schoeck idiom: keen collectors will recall his 1982 recording of Das stille Leuchten on Accord (nla) with pleasure. But he is not well served here: the balance tends to favour the pianist and the voice itself has lost some of its freshness and bloom and much of its tonal beauty. On the second disc things look up: both singers characterize these vignettes well and make out a strong case for these songs. Kurt von Fischer calls Das Wandsbecker Liederbuch ''a synthesis of the features of his lyric art'', and much of their subtlety and mastery is conveyed here.
I hope that DG will one day reissue Fischer-Dieskau's recital with Margrit Weber, which originally marked Schoeck's seventieth birthday in 1956, and his later 1977 recording with Karl Engel of Hesse settings, the ten Op. 44 Liederzyklus and a group of nine other songs including Im Nebel. In the meantime, this Jecklin cycle is a valuable enterprise and the second disc with Das Wandsbecker Liederbuch is well worth investigation even if its companion is a lesser pleasure.'