Perhaps the editor of this volume expects a different article from me than the one that I have written. (Some years ago, an English professor of music informed me that asking performers to contribute to books such as this always resulted in headaches.) But one can read elsewhere about the history of Lied reception, and how important singers – Schubert's friends Johann Michael Vogl and Karl Freiherr von Schönstein (1797–1876), Brahms's Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906), Adolphe Nourrit (1802–39) in France – carried forward the torch of an art form that began as a domestic phenomenon and went on to conquer the world. A glance at Ernst Challier's 1885 Großer Lieder-Katalog is enough to show that the Lied was big business at the end of the nineteenth century. Names now long forgotten rub shoulders with the immortals in astonishingly lengthy lists of settings that have vanished without a trace. In consulting Challier we are, after all, scanning a catalogue where great Lieder and pop songs of the time jostle with each other for attention. At this stage the Lied was still all-encompassing, still nominally something for everyone. Once popular music achieved its own momentum and was hived off to its own discographies and discotheques, we are left with the songs that really matter, the songs that survived. But to whom do these songs matter, and how much? In my case, the question is not merely rhetorical: my living as a concert accompanist depends on that continuing interest.