Liederabend LXXVII: Paris Visions | Guillaume Apollinaire and Ned Rorem

The Liederabend—literally, "evening of song"—dates back to the 1800s, when musicians and lovers of music would gather at someone's home, and one or more singers and a pianist would perform the songs of composers of the day. In the field of classical music, these songs are referred to as "art songs," and the German art songs are called "Lieder." In Germany, the great age of song came in the 19th century. German and Austrian composers had written music for voice with keyboard before this time, but it was with the flowering of German literature in the Classical and Romantic eras that composers found high inspiration in great poetry, sparking the genre known as the "Lied."

The tradition of the art song composition continues today, with composers from all corners of the world setting poetry in many languages, scored for voice and piano. The NEC Liederabend series presents songs in a variety of languages—not only German—dating from the 19th century up to the present day.

This concert explores Paris’s influence on the creative lives of two of the twentieth century’s most dynamic artists. Although born a generation apart, composer Ned Rorem and poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s works reverberate with city life as they experienced it. A writer of relentless creativity and originality, Apollinaire allowed the city’s harshest and most seductive energies to be at play in poems that resonate with new freedoms and new systems of framing personal experience. Our program features twelve of Apollinaire’s most celebrated texts set to the music of Francis Poulenc, alongside the Paris songs of Ned Rorem. Composed while living in the 16th arrondissement in the late 1950s, Rorem’s vocal works speak to an artist’s coming of age against the backdrop of post-World War II Europe. For both composer and poet, Paris was a source of enchantment, a muse and inspiration point where love and devastation, memory and reverie, played out in an urban setting like no other.   

JJ Penna coached tonight's performers.

The live stream of this event is available to NEC Community members only. To watch the stream, please click the “Streaming Access” button at the top of the page and enter the NEC Community streaming password on the video window labeled “Performer Self-Stream” when prompted.