The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was one of the most famous international authors in the 1920s and 1930s, but the advent of National Socialism in Germany caused the author to flee to New York and from there to Brazil,

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) set a distinctive poem by Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) in 1895, but it didn’t appear in print until 1953, some 16 years after his death. Un grand sommeil noir from Verlaine’s collection Sagesse, is a remarkably morbid poem

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) was regarded in the early 20th century as France’s greatest living composer. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire but his time there ended badly. He entered as a piano student at age 14 but by age 18,

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) set relatively little vocal music and the most well-known of his vocal setting is of a set of 7 anonymous popular songs from different regions of Spain: Murcia, Aragon, the north of Spain, the Moorish south,

For the singing German 19th century, we tend to focus these days on Schubert and Schumann. But there were many many other lied composers and for an example we can look at Carl Loewe (1796-1869).

The composer Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) was active in many different aspects of French musical life: he was a singer and a director, a conductor and a critic, and last, but not least, a composer and an artist. He entered the

Hakushū Kitahara (1885-1942) is widely regarded as one of the most popular and important poets in modern Japanese literature. Active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods, and founder of his own literary group that included painters, musicians and actors, he

We generally don’t think of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) as a source for song texts but rather as the man for tales of the realism and drama of the Victorian English countryside. Yet, when the 20th century hit, nearly all Hardy