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Italienisches Liederbuch (English: Italian songbook) is a collection of 46 Lieder (songs for voice and piano) by Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). The first 22 (Book 1) were composed between September 1890 and December 1891, and published in 1892. The other 24 (Book 2) were composed between March and August 1896, and published the same year. The words are translations into German by Paul Heyse (1830–1914) of anonymous Italian poems, published in a collection of 1860 also called Italienisches Liederbuch. Wolf had previously set translations from the Spanish by the same poet in his Spanisches Liederbuch of 1891.
Contents
Description
Most of the poems are love songs of one sort or another. Wolf did not describe the set as a song cycle, though it has been performed as such; often with the songs shared between male and female voices, as they were in the recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone) and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (soprano) with Gerald Moore (accompanist) in the 1960s.
A complete performance takes about 1 hour 15 minutes.
The poems
The German texts and some translations are available online at The LiederNet Archive. The poems are listed below: