[2] The LP and cassette versions of the album share the same cover, designed by Allen Weinberg, featuring a photograph of von Stade taken by Valerie Clement.

B. Steane reviewed the album on LP in Gramophone in November 1979, comparing it with recordings of some of Mahler's Lieder sung by Janet Baker,[3] Marilyn Horne,[4] Christa Ludwig[5] and Yvonne Minton.

Horne and von Stade both began with "Ich atmet' einen linden Duft", depriving themselves of the opportunity to put the song in a place where it would have "the delicious effect of a window opened to let in air, light and fragrance".

Horne jammed it up against "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen", maladroitly linking the collection's two deepest songs and so putting the balance of the work as a whole out of kilter.

She put "Liebst du um Schönheit" second, the sunnier "Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder" third and the Arcadian "Ich atmet' einen linden Duft" fourth.

Herbert von Karajan's "solo instruments interleave against a still background, oboe, horn, flute each raising its voice in turn with the utmost beauty of sound and feeling for the shape of the phrase".

Von Stade, by contrast, got off to a bad start with her "Ich atmet' einen linden Duft", "not rising ... to the 'linden' very gracefully, and indulging too much in the habit of opening out individual notes in succession, 'squeezing' rather than 'binding'."

There were points at which she sang well: "in 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen', the phrase 'ich sei gestorben' is most beautifully floated", and in "Liebst du um Schönheit", she brought more impulsiveness to "o ja, mich liebe!"

Her "Liebst du um Schönheit" had some fondness, and there was a "velvety gentleness" in the way in which she expressed the comfort of "und ruh in einem stillen Gebiet" in "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen".

[7] The album was favorably reviewed by Peter G. Davis in the New York Times: "Miss von Stade ... sounds utterly absorbed in Mahler's aching world of nostalgia and regret, while the burnished beauty and fragile vulnerability of her voice communicates with every note.

Frederica von Stade, he wrote, was a perfect choice to sing Massenet, Mozart or Rossini, and was just as suited to the tormented music of Gustav Mahler, with its idiosyncratic mixture of simplicity and artifice.

Not one of the fruity, contralto-like mezzo-sopranos usually assigned to Mahler's vocal output, von Stade performed his songs with a lightness of tone, downplaying the high emotions of Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and conveying the innocent naïveté of the ditties from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

[11][9] In 2012, Newton Classics issued the album on CD with a 16-page biographical booklet by David Patrick Stearns in their 4-CD collection Frederica von Stade: Duets, Arias, Scenes & Songs (catalogue number 8802125).