E’en as a lovely flower is touchingly romantic, with haunting phrases and harmonies, and has remained one of the composer’s most popular songs. The poem is supposed to have been inspired by ‘a poor Jewish girl’ whom Heine found destitute on a Berlin street. There is no reason to doubt, as D H Lawrence and others have done, the sincerity of either poet or composer.

from notes by Michael Pilkington © 1997