This winter, as ever, we have been treated to yet more accounts of Schubert's Beckettian song-cycle Winterreise . And I have no doubt th...
Showing posts with label Lieder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lieder. Show all posts
In praise of Florian Boesch
Anyone interested in Lieder will not be surprised at this post. But anyone who has not yet bought Hyperion Records' new disc, Der Wander...
Day 24 — Morgen
And so the Richard Strauss Lieder Advent Calendar comes to a close, albeit an open-ended one. Behind the last window is the 1894 Lied 'M...
Day 23 — Weihnachtslied
Strauss was apparently around six years old when he wrote this setting of the 18th-century poet Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart's ...
Day 22 — Im Abendrot (from the Four Last Songs)
The last of the Four Last Songs sets ‘Im Abendrot’ by Eichendorff, a poet to whom Strauss had first turned in 1876 for the texts of his two...
Day 21 — Die Frauen sind oft fromm und still
This is the final song from Strauss's 1887–88 Schlichte Wiesen , comprising five settings of Felix Ludwig Julius Dahn's poetry. Whil...
Day 20 – Blauer Sommer
As well as writing songs to mark his own marriage – the renowned Op. 27 set comprising ' Ruhe, meine Seele ', ' Cäcilie ', ...
Day 19 — Winterliebe
Strauss wrote two 'winter' songs, published together in his 1900 Fünf Lieder Op. 48. Unlike 'Winterweihe' (the fourth in th...
Day 18 — Gesänge des Orients
Strauss was no stranger to Orientalism, not only within Salome (1905), of course, but also in the less celebrated Die ägyptische Helena (192...
Day 17 — Ruhe, meine Seele!
Strauss's 'Ruhe, meine Seele!' is set apart by its staggeringly ingenious simplicity. Nothing is so restful as the slow but cert...
Day 16 — Drei Lieder der Ophelia
By 1918, when Strauss wrote this triptych of Ophelia's songs from Hamlet (in a German translation by Karl Joseph Simrock), he was a high...
Day 15 — Beim Schlafengehen (from the Four Last Songs)
We now reach the third of the Four Last Songs , though 'Beim Schlafengehen' was actually the first of the Hesse poems Strauss set. T...
Day 14 — Freundliche Vision
Strauss begins this 1900 setting of Otto Julius Bierbaum's 'Freundliche Vision' in a distant key, setting up the illusion of a d...
+Giulia+Leonardi+1910.jpg "Day 13 — Cäcilie")
Day 13 — Cäcilie
Heinrich Hart’s poem ‘Cäcilie’ was written for his wife, so it proved a fitting inclusion in the Op. 27 songs, Strauss’s wedding present to ...
Day 12 — Zueignung
There is a great sense of purpose about Strauss's 1882–3 song 'Zueignung'. Fittingly it opened his first publication as a song c...
Day 11 — Malven
This setting of Betty Wehrli-Knobel's poem 'Malven' (Hollyhocks) was the last of Strauss's songs to be published. It was als...
Favouring the Brave
Fortune favours the brave. Although many musical radicals found it hard to make ends meet and often had to face the opprobrium of a cautious...
Day 10 — Für fünfzehn Pfennige
It's easy to frame Strauss as a progressive during the early part of his career. Think of the tone poet and the composer of Salome and ...
Day 9 — Waldseligkeit
We return to Richard Dehmel's poetry, following the eerie excursion into the dark with Dehmel's 'Notturno' on Day 3. 'Wa...
Day 8 — September (from the Four Last Songs)
Continuing the Strauss Advent series, which will feature one of the Four Last Songs each Sunday, we move on to 'September', second i...
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