Songs
Tchaikovsky wrote 103 songs. While he may not be remembered as a composer of lieder, he produced a larger number of superior works than their comparative neglect would suggest, often concentrating into a few pages a musical image that would seem to ideally match the substance of the text. The songs are extremely varied and encompass a wide range of genres—pure lyric and stark drama; solemn hymns and short songs of everyday life; folk tunes and waltzes. Tchaikovsky is most successful when writing on the subject of love and its loss or frustration
Technically, the songs are marked by several features: artistic simplicity, artlessness of musical language, variety and originality of melody and richness of accompaniment. The songs helped cross-pollinate the composer's work in other genres, with many of his operatic arias closely related to them. While "None but the Lonely Heart" may be the one of his finest songs, as well as perhaps the best-known in the West, the Six Romances, Op. 65 and the Six Romances, Op. 73 are especially recommendable.
Read more about this topic: Music Of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Famous quotes containing the word songs:
“When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires,
Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness
With a note or two to indicate it isn’t lost,
On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world
And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)