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Imagine there was the Art Song Awards, a kind of Academy Awards (I wonder... how would it be known? The Schuberts? Would the statuette be a linden branch?). Anyway, if the awards existed, Johann Wolfgang Goethe would clearly be nominated to two categories: "The most musicalized poet" and "The most adapted poem ever". So far, I've published about ninety posts on the blog's Catalan version; twelve of the songs have already been Goethe's poems, the only poet that could put him in the shade would be Rückert, but just because I have weakness for him (to be honest, though, they are far from being comparable...)
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If I tell you that our week’s guest composed about five hundred songs, plus three symphonies, ten operas, ballets, incidental and chamber music, you might think of a Romantic composer. Nevertheless this composer wrote most of those works during the second half of the 20th century and his last opera was premiered in 2005. Today, then, we are talking about Ned Rorem, born in the USA on October 23, 1923 who is about to be 90 this year.- Details
When someone dies at 35 it's always a tragedy for his family and his friends. If the person has a public presence and is as talented as Wunderlich was, we all wonder (probably with a bit of egoism) what he could have done if he would have had more time. I wonder if Wunderlich had reached perfection, as Giesen suggests. Where would his career have headed? It's difficult to say; his operatic career was impressive, he played many, many roles during the ten years it lasted, but he still had a long way to go in Lied.
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Some weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me to listen to a recording he had just bought, with lieder by Strauss sung by Konrad Jarnot. Jarnot had been a delightful discovery for him but his enthusiasm about the recording was due to... the Vier letzte Lieder! A baritone singing the four last songs by Strauss! I must admit, I was as surprised as my friend.
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We are beginning the 2013-2014 season. If you have just returned from holiday, welcome back! What about opening September with one of our ten happiest Art Songs?
Emanuel Geibel is a poet known by Art Song lovers as one of the editors, together with Paul Heyse, of the Spanisches Liederbuch (Book of Spanish Songs), a compilation of Spanish poetry published on 1852 that inspired many songs to several composers, the most important of which was Hugo Wolf. Also, Robert Schumann selected ten poems to his Spanisches Liederspiel (Spanish Songs Spiel) and we already listened to Geistliches Wiegenlied by Brahms on this blog some months ago, which is a Geibel's translation of a poem by Lope de Vega.
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