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I like these songs better than all the rest, and someday you
will too, Franz Schubert told the friends who were the first to
hear his song cycle, Winterreise. These lieder have always found
admiring audiences, but the poetry he chose to set them to has been
widely regarded as weak and trivial. In Retracing a Winter's
Journey, Susan Youens looks not only at Schubert's music but at the
poetry, drawn from the works of Wilhelm Muller, who once wrote in
his diary, "perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will
hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me "
Youens maintains that Muller, in depicting the wanderings of the
alienated lover, produced poetry that was simple but not
simple-minded, poetry that embraced simplicity as part of its
meaning. In her view, Muller used the ruder folk forms to give his
verse greater immediacy, to convey more powerfully the wanderer's
complex inner state. Youens addresses many different aspects of
Winterreise the cultural milieu to which it belonged, the genesis
of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of
poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work,
and its musical structure."
More than any other poet, Heinrich Heine has provided composers for
almost two hundred years with texts for music: more than eight
thousand compositions to date. Nineteenth-century composers were
drawn in particular to a limited selection of Heine's early lyrical
works from the Buch der Lieder and the Neue Gedichte for their
songs; poems such as 'Du bist wie eine Blume', 'The sea hath its
pearls' and 'Was will die einsame Trane' were set to music over and
over again. In this 2007 book, Youens examines some of the reasons
for Heine's popularity, especially the fact that composers in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century were drawn to him for
songs in radical styles, songs that redefined what Lied could be
and do. Specific topics of this book include Schubert's fusion of
reinvented song traditions with radical tonal procedures and the
political meanings of poetry and song in Schumann's time.
More than any other poet, Heinrich Heine has provided composers for
almost two hundred years with texts for music: more than eight
thousand compositions to date. Nineteenth-century composers were
drawn in particular to a limited selection of Heine's early lyrical
works from the Buch der Lieder and the Neue Gedichte for their
songs; poems such as 'Du bist wie eine Blume', 'The sea hath its
pearls' and 'Was will die einsame Trane' were set to music over and
over again. In this book, Youens examines some of the reasons for
Heine's popularity, especially the fact that composers in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century were drawn to him for
songs in radical styles, songs that redefined what Lied could be
and do. Specific topics of this book include Schubert's fusion of
reinvented song traditions with radical tonal procedures and the
political meanings of poetry and song in Schumann's time.
The collaboration of Schubert and the poet Wilhelm Muller produced
some of the best loved of nineteenth-century lieder - in particular
the song cycle Die schoene Mullerin. Professor Youens shows us how
this archetypal tale of love and rejection, which has its origins
in medieval romance, Minnesong and popular German legend, is
reflected in the poet's own experience, the realms of art and life
intertwining. Professor Youens considers other poets' explorations
of the theme of a miller maid and her suitors, and looks at other
musical settings of Muller's mill poems. But above all she examines
Muller's permutation of the literary legends as an exploration of
erotic obsession, delusion, frenzy, disillusionment and death and
the way in which Schubert crucially altered Muller's vision when
the poetic cycle became a musical text.
Schubert's Late Lieder is a study of selected songs for voice and
piano composed by Schubert between 1822 and his death on 19
November 1828. Circa late 1822, Schubert was diagnosed with
syphilis, and many of the songs discussed in this book were written
under the seal of impending death. It is possible to locate in
these songs a 'late song style', full of elegiac references to
Schubert's other death-haunted works and marked by distinctive
variation techniques. The songs on poems by Schubert's Austrian
contemporaries are less well known than they should be, and yet the
backdrop to these works is often fascinating. In this book, Susan
Youens introduces the poets Matthaus von Collin, Johann Ladislaus
Pyrker, Carl Gottfried Ritter von Leitner, Johann Anton Friedrich
Reil, Franz von Schlechta, and Johann Gabriel Seidl and discusses
Schubert's songs to their poetry, revealing much about the poet and
about Austrian history and culture.
Viennese composer Hugo Wolf produced one of the most important song
collections of the nineteenth century when he set to music
fifty-three poems by the great German poet Eduard Moerike. Susan
Youens reappraises this singular collaboration to shed new light on
the sophisticated interplay between poetry and music in the songs.
Wolf is customarily described as 'the Poet's Composer', someone who
revered poetry and served it faithfully in his music. Yet, as
Youens reveals, this cliche overlooks the rich terrain in which his
songs are often at cross purposes with his chosen poetry. Although
Wolf did much to draw the world's attention to the neglected
Swabian poet, his musical interpretation of the poetry was also
influenced by his own life, psychology and experiences. This book
examines selected Moerike songs in detail, demonstrating that the
poems and music each have their own distinctive stories which at
times intersect but also diverge.
This study includes selected songs for voice and piano composed by Schubert between 1822 and his death on November 19, 1828. Schubert was diagnosed with syphilis circa late 1822, and many of the songs discussed were written with his knowledge of impending death. It is possible to discover within them a late song style, full of elegiac references to Schubert's other death-haunted works and marked by distinctive variation techniques. Youens also introduces six of the poets whose texts were set to music by Schubert.
Viennese composer Hugo Wolf produced one of the most important song collections of the nineteenth century when he set to music fifty-three poems by the great German poet Eduard Mörike. Susan Youens reappraises this singular collaboration, examining selected Mörike songs in detail to shed new light on the sophisticated interplay between poetry and music. Although Wolf is known as "the Poet's Composer," someone who revered poetry and served it faithfully in his music, Youens reveals how his Mörike songs were also influenced by his own life, psychology and experiences.
Schubert's choice of poets has traditionally come under fire for the preponderance of mediocre talent, and yet many of these writers were highly esteemed in their day. The author has chosen four such poets--Gabriele von Baumberg, Theodor Körner, Johann Mayrhofer, and Ernst Schulze--in order to reexamine their lives, works, and Schubert's music to their verse. All four poets were vivid inhabitants of a vivid era, and their tribulations afford us added insight into the upheavals, the manners and mores, of their day.
The collaboration of Schubert and the poet Wilhelm Muller produced
some of the best loved of nineteenth-century lieder - in particular
the song cycle Die schoene Mullerin. Professor Youens shows us how
this archetypal tale of love and rejection, which has its origins
in medieval romance, Minnesong and popular German legend, is
reflected in the poet's own experience, the realms of art and life
intertwining. Professor Youens considers other poets' explorations
of the theme of a miller maid and her suitors, and looks at other
musical settings of Muller's mill poems. But above all she examines
Muller's permutation of the literary legends as an exploration of
erotic obsession, delusion, frenzy, disillusionment and death and
the way in which Schubert crucially altered Muller's vision when
the poetic cycle became a musical text.
This guide to Schubert's much-loved song cycle explores both the
music and the poetry from a variety of perspectives. It includes
biography and cultural history, literary interpretation, source
studies, and musical analysis. The genesis of both Wilhelm Muller's
poetry, which began as a literary salon game in 1816, and the
music, composed soon after Schubert discovered that he had
contracted syphilis, is discussed in the first two chapters, which
also include little-known information about the poet, the premier
of the cycle, and Eduard Hanslick's critiques later in the
nineteenth century. The chapters on the poetry discuss Muller's
uneasy relationship to the tenets of Romanticism; the influence of
Goethe, folk poems, and medieval poetry on Die schoene Mullerin;
and provide a reading of each of the poems, which are reproduced in
German and English translation. The last and lengthiest chapter
consists of brief analytical commentary on each of the twenty songs
in Schubert's masterpiece.
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