The composer Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) was active in many different aspects of French musical life: he was a singer and a director, a conductor and a critic, and last, but not least, a composer and an artist. He entered the

Hakushū Kitahara (1885-1942) is widely regarded as one of the most popular and important poets in modern Japanese literature. Active during the Taishō and Shōwa periods, and founder of his own literary group that included painters, musicians and actors, he

We generally don’t think of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) as a source for song texts but rather as the man for tales of the realism and drama of the Victorian English countryside. Yet, when the 20th century hit, nearly all Hardy

Hector Berlioz ((1803-1869) is known for his monumental orchestral works, for his utter command of orchestration, and for his gothic horror in the Symphonie fantastique. We often forget, however, that he was also known for his songs. In a rare

If Gurre-Lieder was a cantata and The Book of the Hanging Gardens a song cycle, then we must separate out one more large cycle for examination. It’s not song as we might recognize it from Schubert and Schumann, but rather

The two big song cycles the Gurre-Lieder and the Book of the Hanging Gardens are actually even larger than normal. Gurre-Lieder is actually a cantata. The title means “Songs of Gurre,” referring to Gurre Castle in Denmark and the songs

We don’t generally think of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) as a song composer but he wrote them from his earliest days as a composer in the early 1890s until the early 1930s. The poets that he set were some of the

In his delicately titled, Ariettes oubliées (Forgotten Little Songs), Claude Debussy (1862-1918) took the poetry of Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) and created a song cycle to match the stylistic subtleties of his poems. Debussy met the older poet via his mother-in-law.