Landscape Lieder

The Lied and Art Song Texts Page is a fascinating archive of poetry that has been set to music. For example, look up John Clare and you can read the text for Ivor Gurney’s ‘Ploughman Singing’ (1920) or Benjamin Britten’s setting of ‘The Evening Primrose’ (one of Britten’s Five Flower songs from 1950, the others being Robert Herrick’s ‘To Daffodils’ and ‘The Succession of the Four Sweet Months’, George Crabbe’s ‘Marsh Flowers’ and the anonymous ‘Ballad of Green Broom’).

Here are a selection of ten more landscape lieder by famous composers:

• Sir Arthur Bliss’s ‘The Ballads of the Four Seasons’ based on the poems of Li Po
• John Cage’s ‘Solo for Voice 49 (relevant) - The Year Begins To Be Ripe’, which makes use of text by Henry David Thoreau.
• Goethe’s ‘Gefunden’ (‘I walked in the woods’), set by Richard Strauss
• Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’ set by Claude Debussy
• Ralph Vaughan Williams’ version of Housman’s ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble’, from A Shropshire Lad.
• The spring poem ‘When daisies pied and violets blue’ from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost set by, among others, Igor Stravinsky
• Milton Babbitt’s version of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’
• Josef von Eichendorff’s poem ‘Forest Maiden’, used by both Hugo Wolf and Robert Schumann.
• Elliott Carter’s setting of Walt Whitman's verse in ‘Warble for Lilac Time’
• ‘Nature, the gentlest mother’, one of Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.