Though he composed in a variety of genres—choral and orchestral works and an opera among them—Erich Zeisl was a consummate Lieder composer whose songs are richly melodic, inventive, and cast in a late Romantic idiom. In his settings, he responded to a range of ideas; the subjects of the night and light were potent ones, and he mined a vein of irony and humour. Forced from Austria in 1938, he did not write any Lieder after settling in America but arranged some Spirituals, drawing on the music of a people similarly oppressed as his own.