A tribute to the musician, who passed away aged 82.

He was 5ft 8in, released his first album when he was 32, and had a singing voice he himself described as “like the bottom of an ashtray.” Mr Leonard Cohen was the unlikeliest of pop stars, prophets and lotharios, yet, over a period of more than five decades, he created a song catalogue of unrivalled depth, wisdom and self-knowledge, informed by his adventures and misadventures in love, and the darkness he observed in the world around him. By the time of his death, Mr Cohen was a frail figure, his trademark three-piece suit clinging to his shrunken frame, his voice, on his remarkable new album You Want it Darker (released last month), reduced to a confiding whisper. But his mind, and his eagle eye for the tragedies and absurdities of life, were as sharp as ever. “If you are the dealer,” he sings on the album’s title track, “I’m out of the game.” It’s a classic Mr Cohen line, with its mix of metaphor, resignation, pragmatism and humour. Well, the game is up, the last card has been dealt. But the work, the genius, lives on.

In an attempt to make sense of his long and illustrious career, we have highlighted 10 of his most vital tracks. Read about our choices, and listen to the tracks below.

The opening track on Mr Cohen’s first album <Songs Of Leonard Cohen>, this created the template: a tender, bittersweet lyric about longing, fantasy and possibility, a lightly strummed acoustic guitar and a vocal like an extended sigh.

Nearly 50 years after it was first released, this song had a poignant coda when its subject, Ms Marianne Ihlen, Mr Cohen’s partner for much of the 1960s and his greatest muse, died after a short illness. Just days before her death, she received a letter from her former lover. “Know that I am so close behind you,” he wrote, “that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”

Another song inspired by Ms Marianne Ihlen, this epitomises Mr Cohen’s early work, the intimate lilt of the vocals and the wistfulness of the words conjuring up a candle-lit bedsit, with a poet dredging his soul for emotional truth.

From his second album, <Songs From A Room>, this is quintessential Mr Cohen, the lyrics laced with dry humour and unsentimental self-insight: “Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”

Containing one of his most beautiful and serpentine melodies, delivered in a voice so mournful, the old “merchant of gloom” tag begins to seem like an understatement, this account of a three-way love affair was a song Mr Cohen claimed never to have been satisfied with. His fans begged to differ.

Covered by more than 300 artists, and by some stretch his most famous song (thanks in part to Mr Jeff Buckley’s extraordinary recording of it), “Hallelujah” exemplifies Mr Cohen’s perfectionism and willingness to burn the midnight oil for his art. Up to 80 verses were written, teeming with biblical and sexual imagery, with their writer at one point lying in his underwear in his hotel room, banging his head against the floor in frustration.

Containing one of his best-known and most knowing lyrics (“I was born like this, I had no choice. I was born with the gift of a golden voice”), this closing track from Mr Cohen’s eighth studio album, <I’m Your Man>, finds him using humour to ease his realisation that he is enslaved to his art, and questioning whether it was all worth it.

No attempt to disguise the sleaze and jadedness that permeates the sex on offer here, on a song that reads like an inventory of lustful predilections and fatal self-awareness, to music that lopes like a particularly funereal waltz.

“I love to speak with Leonard. He’s a sportsman and a shepherd. He’s a lazy bastard. Living in a suit.” Four years before his death, Mr Cohen anticipates death so vividly, it is as if it’s breathing down his neck. Happily for us, the singer had other plans, and <Old Ideas>, the 2012 album from which this lovely, wistful song comes, began a remarkable three-record run that helped introduce the singer to a new generation of listeners.

It is next to impossible to listen to this parched, stripped-bare song, one of the very last Mr Cohen recorded, without divining in its lyrics a presentiment of death. “Hineni,” he sings (the Hebrew word for “Here I am”), before continuing: “I’m ready, my lord.”