Synopses & Reviews
More than any other poet, Heinrich Heine has provided composers for almost two hundred years with texts for music: 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 Tr ne' were set to music over and over again. In this 2007 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.
Synopsis
In Heine and the Lied Susan Youens asks why the poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) had such an impact on the history of nineteenth-century song. There are thousands of settings of Heine's youthful poetry, most of them composed before World War I. From the 1820s until the mid-century mark, Heine was the poet of choice for modernists who found in this new poetic language the stuff of cutting-edge tonal experiments. Schubert found Heine's early verse in his last years and set six poems to futuristic music before, so Youens proposes, turning away in revulsion. Heine's most famous poem, 'Die Loreley', was the proving ground for numerous novelties in the lied, in particular, Clara Schumann's and Liszt's. Heine's political ballads and Robert Schumann's settings are examined in the fourth chapter. There is cultural work afoot in such interpretations--a ripe subject for discussion.
Synopsis
A study into the poet Heinrich Heine's impact on nineteenth-century song.