III: ELGAR to HAYDN

The fond loves expressed by Elgar and Paul Éluard come from entirely different worlds. Different dances – fast, furious, elegantly sedate and wistful – are heard from Falla, Fauré and Finzi. Gershwin, Gounod and Grainger find themselves in high-summer mood; Thomas Hardy and Haydn look in different mirrors, but both bemoan old age.

IV: HEINE to PORTER

Portraits of the Madonna and the Crucifixion are evoked by Heine, Hindemith and Housman. Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn praise the arrival of spring, but Fanny Mendelssohn, Mörike and Mozart are haunted by intimations of mortality, as are Novalis and Wilfred Owen. Night and Day songs by Pfitzner and Cole Porter truly are as different as night and day.

V: POULENC to SCHUBERT

The roses described by Purcell, Pushkin and Quilter all bloom in their different ways. A sequence of scenes from childhood follows from Rachmaninov, Christina Rossetti and Roussel to Satie, Friedrich Schlegel and Schoeck. Aspects of childhood are also evoked in the culminating Schubert sequence.