After Irmgard Seefried's death in 1988, her contemporary Elisabeth Schwarzkopf - never one to dish out compliments lightly - commented: "All of us envied her, because what we had to achieve laboriously worked for her so naturally and as a matter of course, because she knew how to sing from the heart".

Freshness, spontaneity, natural warmth of feeling, allied to a voice of gleaming beauty and a delightful stage presence: these were the hallmarks of a much-loved soprano who for three decades charmed and moved audiences in the theatre and concert hall, her face as expressive as her voice. As John Steane memorably put it in Gramophone, "it was as though she wore her own spotlight".

Born in the Swabian town of Köngetried in 1919, Seefried was 'discovered', aged twenty, by Herbert von Karajan in Aachen, where she made her operatic debut as the Priestess in Aida. In 1943 she sang Eva in Die Meistersinger for the Wiener Staatsoper, initiating an association that lasted until 1976. It was in Strauss and Mozart that Seefried was most admired.

Issued over eleven single-disc volumes, Deutsche Grammophon / Eloquence pays tribute to Irmgard Seefried, bringing back to circulation several recordings that have never previously been issued on CD. The music ranges through opera and oratorio, with an especially generous offering of art song from a range of composers, including Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Hindemith and Egk. The notes for the series have been written by that leading connoisseur of the voice, Richard Wigmore.

‘If I were condemned to hear only one voice for the remainder of my life I think it might well be hers. If I wanted to be charmed, to laugh or cry I would find her the perfect companion. In her singing … we hear someone whose every utterance bespeaks natural sincerity and truthful feeling’ - Alan Blyth on Irmgard Seefried (Gramophone)

Irmgard Seefried teamed up with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau for a recording of the Italienisches Liederbuch that quickly became something of a classic and it is from this recording that the numbers she performs are taken for this issue.

Seefried's tone was no longer quite as crystalline as it had been a few years earlier, yet she compensates with her trademark directness and immediacy of response, bringing each of these pungent vignettes to vivid life.

Ever-adventurous in her repertoire, Seefried made the first commercial recording, in 1952, of Paul Hindemith's Latin motets for soprano and piano of 1941 and 1944 – the beginning of a projected motet cycle spanning Christ's life that Hindemith would continue in the late 1950s. The disc concludes with one of her frequent encore pieces - the Reger Lullaby.

‘interpreted with such natural accomplishment […] Nothing in terms of elation, joy, anger and irony escapes [the artist]’ - Gramophone (Wolf ‘Italianisches Liederbuch’)