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Its literary counterpart was the artist’s novel: books such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,” Honoré de Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece,” and, later, Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus,” which, in a way not unlike Vasari’s “Lives,” presented the life of the artist as the inevitable unfolding of innate genius.

It was originally sung by a strange little character, Mignon, in Goethe’s 1795 novel, “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.”

She appeals to Wilhelm Meister to rescue her.

But Oropesa’s open lyric lightness seems to come at the expense of full-bodied warmth and intimacy, and these were missed in the yearning of Schubert’s three “Wilhelm Meister” songs and, to a lesser degree, in the lighter Mendelssohn set.

“Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship,” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, describes a well-to-do young man who leaves home and falls in with a troupe of actors, undergoes adventures, and finally realizes that his destiny lies with a society of the well-to-do that is intimately connected to his origins.