Throughout his lifetime, Gustav Mahler's musical imagination got sparked by the Wunderhorn anthology of folk poetry compiled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Whether autonomous lieder or conscripted into symphonic service, Mahler’s Wunderhorn settings represent some of his most exotic, exhilarating, but also visionary music. The Wunderhorn songs evoke and celebrate a lost era but they also prefigure its demise. Mahler captures this ambiguity in uncompromisingly melodious and idyllic, but also satiric, relentless and cruel music.

As a famous music authority and critic once wrote, the life story of the Austrian composer Franz Schreker and the reception history of his oeuvre would have offered fine material for a magnificent novel with a musician as its protagonist – if not for the fact that everything had actually occurred in real life: his childhood spent in poverty; the difficult initial path to local prominence in Vienna; the breakthrough to superstar status in German-language opera houses; his appointment as director of the Berlin College of Music; his failure to resist the seductive powers of flatterers; the gradual loss of favor among audiences and critics that many seeming friends followed with malicious spite; and then the final blow, when the new »master race« turned the world upside down – all of this was fact, not fiction.