The polymath, naturalist and aesthetician Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) is an interesting figure of 18th-century German cultural history. Yet his most important work, his collection of aphorisms, only appeared posthumously. It embraces almost all the themes that concerned the thinkers of the era, often with a satirical tone. Kurtág selected texts from these volumes for his work, which in its original version (op. 37, 1996) was indeed a musical aphorism collection freely assembled by th...