As I do every year during Easter, I bring you a short text to present a song with a religious theme. This year is a song that is little-known, in every way: it is little performed and little documented. Musicologists have been bringing together the few available pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to reconstruct its history, with many doubts remaining.

We lied lovers are used to accompanying wanderers who one day leave home, and while on their way they reflect on their past or future. We know the wanderer in Winterreise, the harpist of the songs of Wilhelm Meister, those who talk to the moon, those who look for adventures... Even though we are accustomed to their often sad, sometimes desolate reflections, from [...]

I was unable to prepare an article for this week due to lack of time. Fortunately, I had a couple more songs written from Richard Dehmel's poem Die stille Stadt, and this allowed me to publish what will probably be the shortest entry to Liederabend.

The poem we return to today is Richard Dehmel's Die stille Stadt, included in the collection Aber die Liebe [But love, 1896]. It tells us about a silent city, while the night falls and fog also falls from the mountains.

Alban Berg did not begin to study music formally until he was eighteen years old, when Arnold Schönberg saw some of his Lieder and accepted him as a pupil. Although such an important figure saw something interesting in them, Berg always considered that the around eighty Lieder he had composed until then did not deserve to be published; after his death, Helene [...]