"Paul Celan, who has long been recognized as the most important poet of the German language after World War II, repeatedly referred to music and song in his poetic oeuvre, and few writers of the post-war era have inspired as large a body of musical settings by contemporary composers. Englund addresses music both as a thematic and structural presence in the poems themselves and as their sounding interlocutor in musical works by Harrison Birtwistle, Gyèorgy Kurtâag, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka, and many others" --