How Schubert’s Gretchen Changed Music

October 23, 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

In October 1814, 17-year-old Franz Schubert (1797-1828) wrote a lied (an art song with text from a German poem). It might not seem remarkable at first glance, but this composition – called Gretchen am spinnrade – helped change the course of music. History One of the first pieces of Romantic-era program music (a piece of music that tells a story […]

Copland’s Poems of Emily Dickinson

April 7, 2017.Reading time 9 minutes.

This week I’m listening to 12 poems of Emily Dickinson by Aaron Copland, an American composer, teacher, and conductor who lived from 1900-1990. You can read more about him here. Have you ever read a poem that spoke to you in a way nothing else has? That’s what happened to Copland. He wanted to set some poetry […]

3 Lieder nach Trakl by Paweł Szymański, Three Dreams

March 31, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

The other day I was introduced to this piece – 3 Lieder nach Trakl, No. 1, Ein Traum I (Three Songs to Words by Trakl, No. 1, Three Dreams) by Polish composer Paweł Szymański (b. 1954). That’s a mouthful, I know. The first version I heard was this one, for soprano and piano: The first thing that struck […]

Mozart’s Violet

October 14, 2016.Reading time 7 minutes.

I recently came across a little Mozartian gem called Das Veilchen (“The Violet”), K. 476. It’s a song for voice and piano he wrote in 1785 set to the words of a poem by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The poem was written in the early 1770s as a metaphor for a young man’s broken heart, and […]