Here one more letter in my Liederabend's alphabet, H is for humour. Yes, you’ve read that right, humour, sense of humour. I know, most of the songs we usually hear here are sad, or very sad, or rapturous, or solemn; Romantics didn't have much of a sense of humour, and poets were engaged in serious, deep thoughts. But even they couldn't occasionally help laughing! Also, we’ve often listened to an English or French song, and they usually make us laugh more than a German song. So today we're stopping to go over those fun songs that cheered us up among so much darkness.

By 1933, Erich Korngold had spent several years mainly working on operettas; making some adaptations in collaboration with the theatre director Max Reinhardt. He was a bit fed up with that because so many trips and rehearsals prevented him from writing his own music. However, on the other hand, it was financially worthwhile; thank to that money, he could get married and, that year, he bought a house in the Alps which became his refuge. That summer, taking advantage of a break between operettas, the composer wrote a song cycle, Unvergänglichkeit, op. 27, with poems of Eleonore van der Straten, which was premiered in Vienna in 1937.