For those working a lot with Lieder - the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Brahms, their contemporaries and followers - this issue of authenticity is particularly moot. The artifice of opera, which Tolstoy so hated, is more or less accepted by its audiences as a necessary feature of the art form, to be enjoyed and, occasionally, wonderfully transcended. Recitals of Lieder are much more naked: not just the lack of costume, set or make-up, but the dramatic conceit of a direct communication between one human being and another (you can usually see your audience) in music that does not, as far as the singer is concerned, make an issue of display or technique, though much vocal technique may actually be deployed.

It is crucial that while the outcome may seem spontaneous - and is indeed spontaneous in that it isn't choreographed in the way an opera is - it does nonetheless depend on artifice and on craft, not only the singerly craft of supporting the voice, managing its registers and so on, but the specifically Lieder singing craft so perfectly expressed by Tolstoy: working with a pianist to make sure that "the tune comes of itself ... that apart from the words there is no tune, which exists only to give measure to the words".

This doesn't mean that the words are more important, or that the pianist doesn't exist, but that the pianist and singer work together, in immense detail, with alertness to rhythmic fluctuation and harmonic accentuation, to produce a seamless whole and the illusion of true expression, which is, somehow, true.