Professor Michelle DeYoung (mezzo-soprano) and IU Jacobs School of Music alumnus Jeremy Reger (piano) have recorded Erich Zeisl Lieder, Volume 2, an album of Zeisl songs that were recently discovered in UCLA's archives.
Though he composed in a variety of genres—choral and orchestral works and an opera among them—Erich Zeisl was a consummate lieder composer whose songs are richly melodic, inventive, and cast in a late Romantic idiom. In his settings, Zeisl responded to a range of ideas—the subjects of the night and light were potent ones—and he mined a vein of irony and humor. Forced from Austria in 1938, Zeisl did not write any lieder after settling in America but arranged some Spirituals, drawing on the music of a people similarly oppressed as his own.