Schumann's Selected Art Songs

Author: Qian Renkang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-03-01
Features: The 30 Schumann songs selected in this book are all carefully chosen from his works composed in 1840 ("The Year of Songs"). These songs were originally part of various "song cycles," but the songs in Schumann's cycles are loosely connected and do not need to be sung in sequence. Therefore, only the more distinctive songs from each cycle were selected. The exception is Dichterliebe, as it is one of Schumann's most important works, and all 16 songs have been included. The lyrics of the 30 songs are newly translated by the author. The translation aims to achieve: 1) Faithfulness to the original poems; 2) Sentence construction that follows the metrical structure of the original poems, with one syllable translating one character, while also adhering to the original's stress patterns; 3) Rhyme schemes that match the original poems' rhymes, such as AABB, ABAB, or ABBA, to maintain the same rhythmic structure in the translation; 4) Close coordination with the musical rhythm and stress patterns. At the end of the book, there are annotations for each song, explaining the composition date, background, lyric sources, musical form and structure, as well as the relationship between the lyrics and the music.