Unhampered by the Hungarian language, composers such as Bartók, Ligeti and Kurtág reached large international audiences.
The only other English-language composer whom Fischer-Dieskau had a similar relationship with seems to have been … Samuel Barber.
The other German-language composers of opera active during this period were less important.
Much better than the previous model that assumed that any audience not only knew the opera well but was also fluent in whatever language the composer was writing in, Russian, French, Czech, Hungarian, Chinese, German, Spanish, English.
It says a lot for Stephen Hartke's "Night Songs for a Desert Flower" (2009) that when the Brentano String Quartet performed the work alongside quartets by Haydn and Beethoven at Zankel Hall on Wednesday evening, it seemed fully a part of the continuum: a modern extension of the musical language those composers spoke and as eloquent in its way as the music of its celebrated predecessors.
In addition to making movies, Mr. Van Peebles, who was born in Chicago in 1932, has been an Air Force navigator, a San Francisco cable car operator, a novelist in two languages, a composer and recording artist, a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange and an occasional television commentator.
Peter Cornelius's brief "Seele, Vergiss Sie Nicht" for chorus and winds was a surprisingly sophisticated work with a wandering Lisztian harmonic language, by a composer known almost only for his comic opera "Der Barbier von Bagdad".
And once you've mastered the fact that 'ł' is pronounced 'w' then you will be chatting over a plate of pierogi with your new Polish neighbours in their native language about the composer Lutosławski – whose centenary is currently being celebrated at the Festival Hall and on BBC Radio 3. 6.
The afternoon culminated with a piece as powerful and weighty as the Stravinsky: Glass's "Four Movements for Two Pianos". Glass has as distinctive a language as any composer who has ever lived, but those who hear in it no more than repetition would be challenged by the massive intensity, scope and variety and emotional power and sheer motion of these four contrasting miniature works.
The difficulty was trying to figure out and to be comfortable and master a new language of a composer who is new to me - finding voices and textures that are new to everyone.
A compositional language that many composers can share encourages us to communicate with and learn from one another.
