[1][2][3] Some Times of Day was commissioned through Stanford University for the mezzo-soprano Zheng Cao and the Harmida Piano Trio, comprising violinist Dawn Harms, cellist Emil Miland and pianist Laura Dahl.

It was premiered by soprano Michèle Bogdanowicz, mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford and pianist Vlad Iftinca in the John B. Harza Building's Bennett Gordon Hall on 8 August 2007.

When Heggie was studying music at the University of California at Los Angeles, Johana Harris (1912-1995), the elderly Canadian pianist who taught, mentored and married him, introduced him to the poetry of A. E. Housman and Vachel Lindsay.

Part of the cycle was adapted from songs that Heggie wrote at UCLA in 1987, and some from work that he did at Edenfred, an artistic residency and community centre, now closed, that the Terry family instituted in 2004 in Madison, Wisconsin.

[1][2] Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia was mostly composed for soprano Peggy Kriha-Dye, and was premiered by her in the James Schwabacher recital series in the Old First Church, San Francisco on 9 May 2009.

Sixteen years later, it occurred to him that the song might be a good prelude to a larger work about Ophelia, "an extraordinary young woman - pushed, pulled and used in a world dominated by men - seeking connection and agonizing over love".

[1][2] Final Monologue from Master Class was commissioned for mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato by Rusty Rolland in memory of James Schwabacher and to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the Merola Opera Program.

He had an innate grasp of the music latent in language, and he knew how to carry forward "the emotional memory of a moment, a connection, a feeling" through "that still much maligned enchantress", melody.

Like a Broadway tunesmith, Heggie knew how to "hook" listeners "in an isolated phrase or a long line", but he also had an intuitive understanding of how to craft a song's total architecture.

[5] In the duets of Facing Forward/Looking Back, for example, Heggie explored the relationships of mothers and their children "through the harmonic tensions and equivocations of two-part counterpoint where consonance is always a whisker away from dissonance or in one instance - the Armistead Maupin setting 'Mother in the mirror' - downright abrasiveness".

The extraordinary interplay of the vocal lines in "Facing forward" - superbly interpreted by Joyce DiDonato and Frederica von Stade - was painful in its emotional truth-telling, something that it was easier to understand when one learned that the text of the piece, written by the composer himself, reflected the ten-year-old Heggie's loss of his father to suicide.

[5] Eloquently performed by Paul Groves and Keith Phares, Here and Gone drew on poems by Vachel Lindsay and A. E. Housman on the theme of "love unrequited only to be acknowledged when it is too late".

DiDonato was effective, too, in the album's closing item, a setting of the monologue at the end of Master Class, Terrence McNally's drama about the opera diva Maria Callas.

In his new CD of exquisitely crafted art songs, he had produced an album which would probably be enjoyed by devotees of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, such was the "beauty and care" with which it addressed "love and loss".

"Mother in the mirror" was as side-splittingly funny as "Facing forward" was lovely - to not enjoy this setting of Heggie's own words would be impossible, particularly when it was performed by Frederica von Stade and Joyce DiDonato.

Some people might wonder whether this item qualified as a song at all, but Susan Graham and Frederica von Stade manifestly enjoyed singing it and made for a happy partnership.

The duet exemplified the wide spectrum of literature from which Heggie had chosen his texts, with Terrence McNally's play Master Class adding some prose to the album's poetry.

The CD's second cycle of duets, Here and Gone, composed for a tenor, a baritone and a piano quartet, was engagingly reminiscent of Ralph Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge.