Books by Susan (University of Notre Dame Youens

Susan Youens re-examines the life and work of four poets and Schubert's settings of their verse. All four were vivid inhabitants of a vivid era, and their tribulations afford us added insight into the upheavals, the manners and mores, of their day.

Schubert's Late Lieder is a study of selected songs for voice and piano composed by Schubert in the final six years of his life, songs in which themes of death, departure and life's summation are at issue. Youens also introduces six of the poets whose texts Schubert set to music.

Viennese composer Hugo Wolf produced one of the most important song collections of the nineteenth century when he set to music fifty-three poems by the great German poet Eduard Moerike. Susan Youens examines selected Moerike songs in detail to shed new light on the sophisticated interplay between poetry and music.

This book asks why the poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) had such an impact on the history of nineteenth-century song. From the 1820s until the mid-century mark, Heine was the poet of choice for composers who found in this new poetic language the means for cutting-edge tonal experiments.

The collaboration of Schubert and the poet Wilhelm Muller produced some of the best loved of nineteenth-century lieder - in particular Die schoene Mullerin. Professor Youens shows us how this archetypal tale of love and rejection is reflected in the poet's own experience, the realms of art and life intertwining.