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There are many hidden treasures in the history of music. While once composed with complete dedication, they appear to have been lost for eternity. Luckily, there are conductors like Hervé Niquet who search among the piles of forgotten scores for those treasures, dust them off and breathe new life into them…

Hugo Wolf, along with Gustav Mahler and Robert Schumann, is considered one of the great masters of the romantic Lied. Less well known but at least as dramatic and intense is Wolf’s only choral cycle, Sechs Geistliche Lieder. The poems of Joseph von Eichendorff, used by Wolf, tell the tale of a man who, in the dark of night, lost his faith in his religion and in life. Also forgotten – undeservedly! – is the vocal repertoire by Max Reger. The German romantic composer had the bad luck of living at the same time as his brilliant colleagues Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. Following in Brahms’s footsteps, Reger composed in 1915 – a year before his own death – a non-liturgical requiem Mass which he dedicated to the German soldiers killed in World War I.  He found the appropriate text for this tribute in the poet Friedrich Hebbel and a poem in which the speaker calls upon his own soul not to forget the dead. A moving Requiem Aeternam that commemorates the deceased loved ones for all eternity..