"What use is all this joy and pain?" asks Goethe in the first Wanderer's Nightsong, before concluding with a cry for "sweet peace". It's a rhetorical question in one sense: joy and pain were very useful to Goethe, who made his living by expressing them, but the dichotomy the poem outlines, between the striving and longing of the human heart and the placid equilibrium in which it seeks redemption, is central both to Goethe and generations of composers who set his verse.
One of them, Franz Liszt, translates the wanderer's question into a gently nagging musical figure that at last subsides into an undulation of enveloping calm. The vocal part demands incredible subtlety from the singer, who must trace, in the simplest of melodies, the aching gap between anguish and equilibrium.
Few living singers can navigate this territory better than Dorothea Röschmann, and in this beautifully structured recital such miraculously calibrated shifts of colour came again and again, often within a single breath. Beginning with Fauré and four of Liszt's early French settings, the two Wanderer's Nightsong settings sandwiched Freudvoll und leidvoll (whose last line, "happy alone is the soul that loves"‚ flutters like a falling leaf). The Nightsong settings were themselves couched between the two songs Ich möchte hingehn and Loreley, which figure the progression later immortalised by Wagner's Tristan, perhaps Romantic irony's ultimate expression.
After the interval came four ravishingly coloured Strauss songs, with Morgen's "speechless silence of bliss" exquisitely rendered by Malcolm Martineau in the postlude. Then came Hugo Wolf's Mignon lieder, the waves emanating from Martineau's piano alternately battering and lapping gently against the melody's dolorous contours in Kennst du das Land.
Röschmann's gorgeously tempered soprano can fill the Wigmore Hall with ease. Nor did she hold back, her accompanist's Steinway seeming feeble by comparison. But it was the consummate artistry of both singer and pianist that made this recital such joy, and pain, to behold.
• On BBC iPlayer until 15 June.
