Hugo Wolf

Viennese composer Hugo Wolf produced one of the most important song collections of the nineteenth century when he set to music fifty-three poems by the great German poet Eduard Mörike. Susan Youens reappraises this singular collaboration, examining selected Mörike songs in detail to shed new light on the sophisticated interplay between poetry and music. Although Wolf is known as "the Poet's Composer," someone who revered poetry and served it faithfully in his music, Youens reveals how his Mörike songs were also influenced by his own life, psychology and experiences.

Focusing on the music of the great song composers--Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss--Poetry Into Song offers a systematic introduction to the performance and analysis of Lieder. Part I, "The Language of Poetry," provides chapters on the themes and imagery of German Romanticism and the methods of analysis for German Romantic poetry. Part II, "The Language of the Performer," deals with issues of concern to performers: texture, temporality, articulation, and interpretation of notation and unusual rhythm accents and stresses. Part III provides clearly defined analytical procedures for each of four main chapters on harmony and tonality, melody and motive, rhythm and meter, and form. The concluding chapter compares different settings of the same text, and the volume ends with several appendices that offer text translations, over 40 pages of less accessible song scores, a glossary of technical terms, and a substantial bibliography. Directing the book towards students in both voice and theory, and toward all singers, the authors establish a framework for the analysis of song based on a process of performing, listening, analyzing, and performing again, designed to give the reader a new understanding of the reciprocal interaction between performance and analysis. Emphasizing the masterworks, the volume features numerous poetic texts, as well as a core repertory of songs. Examples throughout the text demonstrate points, while end-of-chapter questions reinforce concepts and provide opportunities for directed analysis. While there are a variety of books on Lieder and on German Romantic poetry, none combines performance, musical analysis, textual analysis, and the interrelation between poetry and music in the systematic, thorough way of Poetry Into Song.

Romanticism--a concept more easily recognized than defined--dominated the artistic landscape of music from 1830-1890. Like the other volumes in the New Oxford History of Music series, this final volume to be published provides a detailed, scholarly critical survey of the music and composers of its period. Divided among different forms of music, the chapters, written by eminent scholars under the editorship of one of the most respected experts on nineteenth-century music, detail the work of Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Brahms, Berlioz, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Gounod, Bizet, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak, Smetana, Faure, Wolf, Puccini, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss, Cesar Franck, and Debussy.