Green, the long-awaited follow-up to Opium, is a collection of song settings of the poems of Paul Verlaine, one of the most influential figures of the fin de siècle. Verlaine’s life was in turns full of love and loss, promise and disappointment, vitality and addiction, and his ground-breaking symbolist poetry inspired a generation of creative minds – the artists Courbet and Carrière (who counted amongst those who would paint portraits of Verlaine), the writer Boris Pasternak (who translated much of his verse into Russian), and of course the composers Debussy, Chausson, Faure and Hahn, just a handful of the many spurred on to set his poetry during a golden age of French music.