The second edition of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (first published in 1764) was subtitled “a Gothic novel”. Romanticism embraced this new genre with great enthusiasm and bookshelves began to fill up with freshly printed supernatural episodes, a trend that lasted until the Victorian era (I must admit that gothic novel is also well represented on my bookshelves).

Robert Schumann was a grown man at his thirty when he started composing lieder at a stretch, masterpiece after masterpiece; Today, when discounted tickets in concerts are for under-35-olds, it may seem he was a young man, but no doubt he was a grown man. However, everyone has a past, Schumann, too, and today we're listening to one of the songs he wrote when he was a young man, at his seventeen or eighteen; It is not a masterpiece, but who needs it?

Walt Whitman is one of the essential poets in American literature. This year marks the bicentenary of his birth, so we have a perfect excuse to listen to a third song with one of his poems, after listening to O you who I often and silently come by Ned Rorem and To what you said by Leonard Bernstein.

Johannes Brahms was passionate about folksongs and arranged many pieces, both for choir (a cappella or with piano) and for voice and piano. Today, we're listening to one of them, available in three versions: the first two, composed around 1864, are for mixed choir and female choir, in both cases a cappella (catalogued as WoO. 34/8 and WoO. 36/1 respectively); Today, we're listening to the third one, written for voice and piano about thirty years later and based on the previously existing: In stiller Nacht, WoO. 33/42 [In the quiet night]. It's one of the most celebrated Volkslieder by Brahms; If you don't know it, you'll understand why when you listen to it, it's really beautiful.

We have been listening to German songs for fourteen weeks; it's time to change! This week we're listening to a French song, a mélodie by Ernest Chausson, Chanson perpétuelle, the last work he finished: it was premiered on January 1899 and in June of that year the composer died in an accident at 44.

Chanson perpétuelle is deeply sad, as most of Chausson's mélodies; he used to choose elegiac poems, especially for his last songs (as, for example, Le temps des Lilas, composed a couple of years [...]