Siegmund von Hausegger belongs to the rare guild of creative artists who work exclusively on the basis of inspiration and have a very fine sense of what is happening in the world around them. As soon as the particular zeitgeist opposes them, they fall silent – as did this son of the highly regarded philosopher of music Friedrich von Hausegger. After an early creative wave that produced some symphonic and vocal works above all during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, Hausegger mainly worked as a conductor and only very rarely wrote music of his own. The songs brought together on this CD represent a significant portion of his multifarious and multifaceted vocal oeuvre and show the whole great breadth of this composer whom his contemporaries described as an »extremely upright character« of the highest artistic seriousness but who occasionally – as his songs to texts by Robert Burns reveal – drew on his humorous vein far removed from any sort of cynicism. This production is an ideal complement to the CDs featuring Hausegger’s symphonic works released by CPO during the course of recent years.