Category: Art song

  • Go Down, Moses

    The first published version of the spiritual “Go Down, Moses,” in 1862, attributed its authorship to “The Contrabands” — escaped slaves who joined the Union Army — who probably sang it as a rallying cry, rather than as a hymn. The song had been known for at least 15 to 20 years prior to its…

  • Clair de lune

    Nuit du carnaval (Henri Rousseau, 1886). In an art song, there are many layers of meaning. There is the meaning of the sounds of the music. There is the meaning of the words of the text. There is also the meaning of the sounds of the words themselves. Listen to the sounds of the text read in French.…

  • Pierrot

    Pierrot and Harlequin (Pablo Picasso, 1920). Pierrot is one of the stock characters of commedia dell’arte, an improvised form of theater that was performed by traveling players throughout Italy and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is a sad clown, in love with the stock heroine of commedia, Colombina (Columbine), who in turn is…

  • The Waiting is the Hardest Part

    The legend of Dr. Faust — a scholar dissatisfied with his life, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for renewed youth, strength, and vigor — is an ancient one. The first literary adaptations of the Faust legend began to appear in the sixteenth century, and every age since has reinterpreted the story…