Selected Songs of the Munich School 1870–1920

The Munich School of composers, active from the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, embraced Wagner's harmonic language but eschewed the compositional devices associated with modernism. Their compositional approach produced a unique form of late romanticism that is highly sophisticated and yet appealing and accessible to a sizable public. This anthology presents fifty-two songs in eleven collections by seven composers from the cultural and music-educational milieu of Munich. While each composer developed his own “personal style,” there is also much that binds the songs together with respect to both the compositional techniques and literary tastes of their authors—much beyond the usual shared features of turn-of-the-century music in general. NB: Permissions to reprint copyrighted material included in this edition do not extend to electronic formats. Please refer to the print version of this title for the translations by Norman R. Shapiro and C. F. McIntyre (pp. lii–lx), Walter Braunfels' Sechs Gesänge (pp. 142–60), and Richard Trunk's Zwölf Gesänge mit Klavier nach Gedichten von Paul Verlaine (pp. 162–204).