One person sings him the gymnasium school song in Polish, another recites a Goethe poem in German; they are the echoing sounds of his London childhood.
Mr. Skovhus offered five of the composer's settings of Goethe poems and nine settings of Eichendorff.
Her works include the ballets Phantomgreen and Elizabeth, along with tone poems The Old Swedes Church and Erlkönig (based on the Goethe poem).
When he first read the Goethe poem in the 1970's, he says, he was attracted by its sheer scope.
Instead, it partakes of a chromatic Expressionism, underpinned by tonal references that burst to the surface only in the Straussian setting of a Goethe poem.
Sickly Beethoven sends some Goethe poems to Schubert to be set in music, as Beethoven regards Schubert to be the better song composer.
Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn composed a dramatic choral oratorio, Die erste Walpurgisnacht, in 1831, based on the Goethe poem.
In the second round, Quasthoff sang Schubert's "Erlkönig," set to the highly theatrical Goethe poem that describes a fatal encounter of the elf-king with a father and son on horseback.
The reasons "Johanna Sebus," a setting of a powerful Goethe poem, was never finished are easier to imagine.
For the Goethe poem (Mignon's song, "Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?")