Two boys are at the opera house, waiting for the show to begin. They are so excited that they can't stop moving, talking very fast, whistling... until someone silences them because the curtain rises. This is what the composer, Charles Ives, explains at the first part of his song Memories.

 

 

Richard Strauss wrote about 200 Lieder, and only around 50 of them are part of the repertoire; the rest is hardly ever performed. We could say that’s pretty common, a composer’s complete corpus is rare in the repertoire, with the exception of composers such as Mahler and Duparc, who wrote just few songs. Those fifty Lieder are mostly performed with orchestral accompaniment instead of piano accompaniment; that's also normal, Strauss and Mahler fathered orchestral lieder. Some of these famous Lieder were not orchestrated by Strauss but by other composers during his lifetime. I understand that he was aware of that and consented. One last thing: among the Lieder that Strauss composed originally for voice and orchestra, only four are performed on regular basis.

 

 

This blog has been hosted on the Blogger platform since that first post in February 2012. This week I'm posting here for the very last time; as the title says, we're moving. You'll see that, once we get over this fuss of moving, the new site is more friendly. With this post, I'm trying to make the moving easier for you; please keep reading up until the end, even though the text might be too much technical!