THE THREADS that can be employed to bind together the well-made recital programme are many and various. But the first lesson to be learnt by anyone embarking on a career of singing, playing and planning recitals is that almost every song has two parents – a composer and a poet. The composer is inevitably the kingpin of the enterprise, the person whom the listener immediately identifies, but it is the poet who is the fascinating variable, the creative spirit who enriches (and sometimes muddies) the gene pool of purely musical invention, the wildcard who is the source of a song's character and mood, as well as of its meaning. However much lip-service is presently paid to the equal importance of words and music, the hegemony of the composer remains mostly unchallenged. On most concert programmes composers traditionally appear in majuscules, and the names of poets (sometimes deemed not important enough to appear at all) are printed in smaller letters, and often in brackets.

In this fascinating book, Natasha Loges turns this tradition skilfully and tactfully on its head – and in so doing provides a remarkable resource for singers, pianists and all those who love the music of Johannes Brahms. Here the poets come first, just as their poems had come first – texts that were already written, and mostly printed, before the composer discovered their existence and composed his music. Like all readers (including ourselves) Brahms was drawn to certain poems more than to others; his reactions to literature were entirely different from those of Franz Schubert, and even from those of Brahms's own mentor, Robert Schumann, whose poetry library was at the younger composer's disposal during the earlier years of his career. It is true that the young Brahms borrowed a few poems from Schumann by way of homage, but from the beginning he was his own man in terms of selecting his texts; his music was like no other, and the same could be said of his breadth of reading.

Brahms's response to poetry was sometimes calm and sometimes visceral. At the very least the musical potential of certain texts was immediately clear to his eagle eye – to find a poem ‘useful’ was not to demean its poet.