Heinrich Heine, the unromantic Romantic - the greatest success of the century.

"A young man loved a girl who loved another man; this other man loved yet another girl and married her. The first girl, out of spite, then married the next good man who came along."

So runs the beginning of a sorrowful love poem written by the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) in 1822. It is his own story. "Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen" is one of many poems that was inspired by his unrequited love for his cousin Amalie. As we begin to read his poetry, we are struck by the way he describes events: he tells the story as a matter-of-fact account without using Romantic metaphors. Heine reveals with much irony how he dealt with the situation, as he never indulged in excessive pathos in his poetry. His style was very different: he wished to puncture the Romantic illusion, so at times he exaggerated and at others he wrote down the opposite of what he meant. Heine was very much aware that it was precisely this that made his poems so attractive for composers searching for song texts; it was for this reason that he described his Buch der Lieder, his most important collection of poems written between 1817 to 1827, as "Humorous songs in folk style".

The contents of the Buch der Lieder, however, are anything but humorous. Indeed, the collection's Prologue describes love as a dream, whilst reality itself is much bleaker. Although the majority of the poems in the Buch der Lieder are about Heine's love for Amalie, the emphasis on love itself gradually shifts to feelings of fear and pain as can be seen in "Die Lotosblume ängstigt sich vor der Sonne Pracht" (The Lotus Flower Fears the Sun's Splendour).

Werner Van Mechelen studied at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven with Roland Bufkens and attended master classes with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Robert Holl, Mitsuko Shirai, Hartmut Höll and Malcolm King. He won several international prizes in major competitions including the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, the IVC in 's-Hertogenbosch and the Concours international du chant in Toulouse, the Concurso Internacional de Canto Francisco Viñas in Barcelona and the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition.