The period from the death of Schubert in 1828 to the annus mirabilis of 1840 when well over 100 songs poured forth from the pen of Robert Schumann is often thought of as the decade that 19th-century song forgot. The third volume of Malcolm Martineau’s ear-opening ‘Decades’ series is therefore especially welcome, disproving such easy judgments, particularly for those prepared to look outside of the German-speaking world.

Not that some very fine Germans weren’t at work – Felix Mendelssohn and his increasingly respected sister Fanny to name but two – but in France Berlioz was actively exploring the genre, while there were the first stirrings of a Russian school in the form of the occasionally heard Alexander Dargomyzhsky and his forgotten compatriots Alexander Alyabyev and Alexander Varlamov. The other composers here are the always underrated Meyerbeer, the still neglected Carl Loewe, father of the Romantic...