Youens addresses the different aspects of the Winterreise: its cultural milieu, 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.
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.
The collaboration of Schubert and the poet Wilhelm Müller produced some of the best loved of nineteenth-century lieder - in particular the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. 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 Müller's mill poems. But above all she examines Müller'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 Müller's vision when the poetic cycle became a musical text.
Lieder began with words, with the composer's discovery of a poet and a poetic work, but the scholarly study of lieder has tended to bypass those origins. 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. In this book, the author has chosen four such poets - Gabriele von Baumberg ("the Sappho of Vienna"), the young war-martyr Theodor Korner, Schubert's friend Johann Mayrhofer, and Ernst Schulze - in order to re-examine their live, works, and Schubert's music to their verse. Schubert gravitated to different poetic repertoires at different times in his life and for different musical purposes, such as the anticipation of Winterreise one hears in the Schulze songs or the radical tonal experimentation of the Mayrhofer songs. All four poets were vivid inhabitants of a vivid era, and their tribulations - from Gabriele von Baumberg's embroilment in Napoleonic politics to Schulze's mental illness - afford us added insight into the upheavals, the manners and mores, of their day.
This book explores the artistic relationship between composer Hugo Wolf and poet Eduard Morike, focusing on Wolf's musical interpretations of Morike's poetry during the nineteenth century. It delves into the themes and emotions conveyed through Wolf's settings, highlighting how the music enhances the lyrical qualities of Morike's work. The study provides insights into the cultural and historical context of their collaboration, offering a deeper understanding of both artists' contributions to the Romantic era.
More than any other poet, Heinrich Heine has provided composers for almost two hundred years with texts for 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 Träne' 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.
Study of nineteenth-century composer Hugo Wolf and his settings of Eduard Mörike's poems.