Oskar Posa is one of music's greatest mysteries. He was an Austrian-Jewish composer of the post-romantic period, a famous conductor and a central figure in Vienna at the turn of the century... but his name has been completely forgotten. in 1904, together with Arnold Schönberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky, he founded the Vienna Composers' Association, the musical counterpart to Gustav Klimt's Secession. The three friends shared the podium at an extraordinary concert at the Musikverein in 1905, at which Posa's Soldatenlieder, Zemlinsky's Die kleine Meerjungfrau and Schönberg's Pelléas et Mélisande were premiered. In the midst of a unique artistic upswing, he invented an extremely original, colorful work in his very first work published by Simrock, a fusion of Brahms and Wagner in which harmony becomes the bearer of restlessness and sensuality. His 80 or so songs - some of them orchestrated - made him famous throughout Europe and the United States. The rush of love in Du Hast Mich, the melodramatic delusions of jealousy in Die Gelbe Blume and the urban rut in In einer großen Stadt are bewildering. In the huge waves of appeasement, another, almost Straussian, operatic grandeur emerges. Posa multiplies the counter-voices and repeatedly upsets the balance between voice and piano.

One might even go so far as to describe his songs as "compositions for piano with vocal accompaniment". The premiere of his Sonata for Violin and Piano at the Heidelberg Festival in 1901 was a shipwreck: the superhuman difficulty of the work, its obsessive motifs and its strained lyricism brought him into disrepute with international critics. The work was successful in the Netherlands thanks to the friendship of the pianist Julius Röntgen, but Posa remained permanently affected and his creative impulses stifled. As director of the Graz Opera between 1911 and 1932, he pushed through bold works and opened up the city to the symphonic repertoire before accepting a position at the renowned Vienna Conservatory. But everything came to a standstill in 1938: a few days after the Anschluss, Posa was summoned and removed from his post because he was Jewish. As a direct target of the Nazi regime, he was expelled and disappeared from musical life for good.

On the eve of his death, he composed his only string quartet, a last homage to the vanished Vienna around 1900: its poisonous scents, its ghostly waltzes and its past shadows. This double album is the world premiere of a selection of 24 unpublished songs, his sonata for violin and piano and his string quartet.

+Violinsonate op. 7; Albumblatt für Klavier; Andante d-moll für Horn & Klavier; 4 Lieder op. 1 nach Gedichten von Ricarda Huch; Das Blatt im Buch op. 2 Nr. 2; Irmelin Rose op. 2 Nr. 4; 5 Lieder op. 3 nach Gedichten von Detlev von Liliencron; 4 Lieder op. 4 nach Gedichten von Richard Dehmel; Und ich war fern op. 6 Nr. 3; Die gelbe Blume Eifersucht op. 6 Nr. 5; Soldatenlieder op. 8 Nr. 1-5; Unwetter op. 10 Nr. 3; Schließe mir die Augen beide op. 11 Nr. 2; Mondlicht op. 12 Nr. 1