Classical Music
The first generally accepted example of a song cycle is Ludwig van Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte (op. 98, 1816), along with the song cycle Die Temperamente beim Verluste der Geliebten (J. 200-3, op. 46, 1816) by Carl Maria von Weber.
The genre was firmly established by the cycles of Franz Schubert: his Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827), based on poems by Wilhelm Müller, are among his most greatly admired works. Schubert's Schwanengesang (1828), though collected posthumously, is also frequently performed as a cycle.
Robert Schumann's great cycles were all composed in 1840. They comprise Dichterliebe, Frauenliebe und -leben, two collections entitled Liederkreis (op. 24 & 39 on texts by Heinrich Heine and Eichendorf respectively) - a German word meaning a song cycle - and the Kerner Lieder (op.35), a Liederreihe (literally "song row") on poems by Justinus Kerner. Johannes Brahms composed settings (op.33) of verses from Ludwig Tieck's novel "Magelone", and modern performances usually include some sort of connecting narration. He also wrote Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), Op. 121 (1896). Gustav Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, and Das Lied von der Erde expand the accompaniment from piano to orchestra.
Hugo Wolf made the composition of song collections by a single poet something of a speciality although only the shorter Italian and Spanish Songbooks are performed at a single sitting, and Hanns Eisler's "Hollywood Liederbuch" also falls into the category of anthology.
Das Buch der hängenden Gärten by Arnold Schoenberg and Ernst Krenek's Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen are important 20th century examples, and the tradition is carried on by Wolfgang Rihm, with so far a dozen works.
Hector Berlioz's Les nuits d'été (1841) pioneered the use of the orchestra, and the French cycle reached a pinnacle in Gabriel Fauré's La bonne chanson, La chanson d'Ève and L'horizon chimérique and later in the works of Poulenc. Recent masterpieces such as Poèmes pour Mi, Chants de terre et de ciel and Harawi by Olivier Messiaen, and Paroles tissées and Chantefleurs et Chantefables by Witold Lutosławski should also be mentioned.
Perhaps the first English song cycle was Arthur Sullivan's The Window; or, The Song of the Wrens (1871), to a text of eleven poems by Tennyson. The composer and renowned Lieder accompanist Benjamin Britten also wrote cycles that are among the glories of the literature, including The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, 7 Sonnets of Michelangelo, Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente, and Winter Words, all with piano accompaniment, and the orchestral Les Illuminations, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, and Nocturne. Other examples include Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel, Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs (1953) and Despite and Still, and Songfest by Leonard Bernstein, Hammarskjöld Portrait (1974), Les Olympiques (1976), Tribute to a Hero (1981), Next Year in Jerusalem (1985), and A Year of Birds (1995) by Malcolm Williamson, Honey and Rue by André Previn (composed for the American soprano Kathleen Battle) and Raising Sparks by James MacMillan (1997).
Modest Mussorgsky wrote Sunless (1874), The Nursery and Songs and Dances of Death, and Dmitri Shostakovich wrote cycles on English and Yiddish poets, as well as Michelangelo and Pushkin.
The orchestral song cycle “Sing, Poetry” on the 2011 album Troika consists of settings of Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian and English-language poetry by three Russian and three American composers.
Cycles in other languages have been written by Granados, Mohammed Fairouz, Manuel de Falla, Juan María Solare, Edvard Grieg, Lorenzo Ferrero, Dvořák and Janáček, Bartók and Kodály, Sibelius and Rautavaara, Federico Mompou and Xavier Montsalvatge, Nevit Kodalı and A. Saygun etc.
Read more about this topic: Song Cycle
Famous quotes related to classical music:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. ‘Material Differences,’ Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)