The songs in volume 2 of Hyperion’s series of the complete songs of Franz Liszt span more than thirty years of the composer’s life, from the mid-1840s when Liszt was still in his ‘Glanzzeit’ (‘time of brilliance’, or his younger years as a virtuoso performer) to an old age saddened by losses and difficulties. From start to finish, however, Liszt’s songs display certain consistent concerns, including his trademark harmonic and tonal experimentation; his was an ongoing quest to imagine the future of music. He seems never to have regarded any setting of a poem as final and was more given to revision and re-composition than any other nineteenth-century song composer except Schubert. Dramatically different versions of a Goethe-Liszt song bracket this recording and make apparent the Pilgrim’s Progress from extroverted, lengthy and rich musical tendencies in earlier years to greater economy, austerity and inwardness in later life. Born in a German-speaking area of Hungary in 1811, he and his family departed for Paris in 1823, and he adopted French, German, Hungarian and Italian identities at different times in his life and to varying degrees. That extraordinary cosmopolitanism is reflected in his choices of song texts in six languages (three are represented here: French, German and Italian), ranging from the occasional amateur poem by those in his exalted aristocratic circles to the ‘greats’ of European poetry. These songs, in their subtlety and complexity, widen our understanding of a composer who can never again be pigeonholed or dismissed as ‘half gypsy, half priest’.