Here's a wonderful recording of Mozart songs, most of which were virtually ignored until the 1990s but now seem to reveal new riches wherever you look. The claim on the back cover that the songs presented here "accompanied the events of his life like illustrations in a picture-book" is really true only for the Lied zur Gesellenreise, K. 468 (Song on the Road to Becoming a Fellow Craft, track 6), which Mozart wrote for his Masonic lodge. The rest of the texts are by poets, great and small, of the late eighteenth century, ...
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Here's a wonderful recording of Mozart songs, most of which were virtually ignored until the 1990s but now seem to reveal new riches wherever you look. The claim on the back cover that the songs presented here "accompanied the events of his life like illustrations in a picture-book" is really true only for the Lied zur Gesellenreise, K. 468 (Song on the Road to Becoming a Fellow Craft, track 6), which Mozart wrote for his Masonic lodge. The rest of the texts are by poets, great and small, of the late eighteenth century, including Goethe ("Das Veilchen"). Part of the reason for the neglect of the songs in an oeuvre otherwise exhaustively performed is that a few of the best-known ones, specifically "Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge," K. 596 (Longing for Spring, track 9), are in a hypersimple, folk-like vein; that song lent its tune to the finale of the Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major, K. 595. The songs got cursed with one of the worst labels in the male music critic's arsenal of invective: they were...
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