Eight Songs with Texts by Ernst Josephson

Abstract This chapter includes a discussion of the provenance and historical context of the songs in Sibelius’s Opus 57, their premiere performances and recordings, and the vocal range of each song. Opus 57 represents an important turning point for Sibelius, in which he turned to the expressionist poetry of Jewish-Swedish artist and poet Ernst Josephson. The period in which the composer created Opus 57 was a particularly difficult one for him, following a diagnosis of throat cancer. The author has created a phonetic transcription and a word-for-word English translation of each song. Suggestions are made for performance, based on historical recordings, writings by Sibelius scholars, and analysis of the score as presented in the JSW critical edition of Sibelius’s complete works.