We’ve looked at Schubert’s song cycles, but that was only a small part of the enormous number of lieder he wrote. There were many other poets he set than just the majors we are so familiar with (Goethe, Schiller, and

We mentioned the collection Schwanengesang in our last Schubert article. The collection was put together posthumously by Schubert’s publisher without regard to Schubert’s usual practice or Schubert’s probable wishes. Schubert never mixed his poets and also had a firm regard

After the simple joys and fatal ending of Die schöne Müllerin, the feeling of Winterreise comes as an interesting change. This time, Schubert set all 24 of the verses written by Wilhelm Müller. The cycle was first published in 1823

A Look at Schubert Vocal Works When we look at Franz Schubert’s song output, it is a truly amazing number. In just a few years, 11 to be exact, Schubert (1797-1828) wrote over 600 songs. The poets he set varied

Reading American literature during my student days in Europe was a rather thankless and boring task. I simply had no connection to the naïve optimism of the American frontier mentality or the preachy virtues of the Puritan legacy. For me,

In 1894, the French writer and poet Stéphane Mallarmé gave a lecture in Oxford and Cambridge, England, about the relationship between music and literature, in which he alluded to the origin of the artistic creation — the ‘trace’ — whether

A recent concert by the magnificent Emerson Quartet featured Alban Berg’s ‘Lyric Suite for String Quartet’ (1925). An annotated copy of Berg’s composition which he had given to his mistress, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin was discovered by the Berg scholar George Perle

After finally achieving success with his opera ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ in 1902, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) wrote ‘L’Isle Joyeuse’ (‘The Joyous Island’), while working hard on his new composition, ‘La Mer’. His very successful artistic achievements were in stark opposition to