Two striking images – one visual, the other verbal – frame this startling recording of “forgotten works” from the Uppsala University Library’s historic Düben Collection. One is the haunting cover photograph of the Romanesque campanile rising from the waters of Lake Resia in Italy: the only reminder of the drowned town below. The other is conjured up by these words, by Johann Frank, of Christian Geist’s Selig, Ja Selig, Wer Willig Erträget (Blessed is he who willingly beareth):

ACRONYM album artwork

These worldly plagues are mild afflictions,
Compared with the tortures of hell.
These worldly plagues though they gnaw us and chase us
Push us toward joys of heavenly realms.

Geist and the rest of his family would later fall victim to the bubonic plague. But to our secular minds at...