In 1816 Goethe received a package from Vienna containing a volume of songs by the young Franz Schubert. The Weimar sage returned it without a word of acknowledgement. Schubert’s older Bohemian contemporary Václav Tomášek (1774-1850) was luckier. His Goethe songs found immediate favour when he sent some of them to the poet on spec. The two men corresponded and subsequently met at a Czech spa, where Tomášek touched the aged poet with songs including ‘Heidenröslein’.

Given Goethe’s attitude to word-setting – always prima le parole, dopo la musica – his enthusiasm is not surprising. While Tomášek had a gift for shapely, often plaintive melody, in an idiom somewhere between Mozart and Schubert, he never hijacks a poem to create a new musical-dramatic entity, as Schubert famously did in ‘Gretchen’ and ‘Erlkönig’. Alongside Schubert and Loewe, his jog-trotting ‘Erlkönig’ sounds almost laughably tame. With his roots in the 18th century, Tomášek is fond of decorative piano preludes and interludes. Otherwise his keyboard-writing tends to be modest to the point of self-effacement – Goethe’s ideal. That said, there is much to charm and delight here: say, in the musing, gently ornamental ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ (shades here of Mozart’s ‘Abendempfindung’), the vivid pair of pastoral cameos ‘Die Spröde’ and ‘Die Bekehrte’, and ‘Heidenröslein’, set as a sprightly polonaise.

Combining warmth and fullness of tone with the requisite grace of style, the Croatian mezzo Renata Pokupic´ is a persuasive Tomášek advocate. Her German vowels can be a shade plummy; and in captious mode I sometimes craved more variety of dynamics and inflection in the strophic songs. But Pokupic´ is always an engaging, responsive singer, conjuring a coquettish sparkle in good-time-girl Philine’s ‘Die Nacht’, and drawing on the velvet depths within her mezzo in Mignon’s elegiac ‘Das Geheimnis’. In theBohemian Songs (whose original Czech poems are more fake than folk) she sings with just the right unfussy directness – a flare of operatic passion, too, in ‘Rache’, with its half-echoes of Mozart’s ‘Als Luise die Briefe’, and in Burns’s ‘Mein Hochland’, where Tomášek holds his own against Schumann’s more inward setting. With relatively little to challenge him, Roger Vignoles is rhythmically alert, colours discreetly and seizes the spotlight in the elaborate, harp-like prelude to ‘Des Greises Trauerlied’. If Tomášek’s songs, like Mozart’s, are probably best enjoyed a handful at a time, the Pokupic´-Vignoles duo, and Susan Youens’s stimulating booklet essay, make an eloquent case for their revival.