Emily Sierra, mezzo-soprano
Julius Drake, piano

The Piano in Song

Beethoven changed the course of music in so many ways but one of his lesser known achievements was writing in 1814/15 the first continuous ‘song cycle’. An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant Beloved) is a set of six songs to poems of Alois Jeitteles. Together they tell a story of yearning and hope and the songs, instead of being separate entities, are linked by the piano part into a musical whole.

After Beethoven’s cycle the flood gates were opened, most famously with Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin (1824) and Winterreise (1828), Schumann’s great cycles of 1840 (Dichterliebe, Liederkreis, Frauenliebe und Leben), Brahms’ Die Schöne Magelone (1865) and the great cycles of Mahler in the early 20th century.