Walzer einer neue Liebe

Program Note:

When Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote his two volumes of Liebesliederwalzer, he selected his texts from Georg Friedrich Daumer’s Polydora, a 600-page tome containing German translations of poetry from all over the world. The central message of Daumer’s hefty volume is that basic human emotions – love, joy, sorrow, and pain, to name four – transcend language and culture. And Brahms’s Liebesliederwalzer are notable for their embrace of love-songs from all around the world.
Three years after Brahms died, the German poet Elisar von Kupffer was working on his own compilation of poetry from around the world. But his goal was a different one: to find as many examples as he could of a new kind of love-song, about forbidden love between two people of the same gender. The revolutionary result was his Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (1900). This is the tome from which I have chosen to write a series of new love-waltzes, entitled Walzer einer neuen Liebe (“Waltzes of a new love”). These love songs sometimes speak in codes, jokes, and obfuscations, but the central message is clear: love is love, and we intend to sing about it.

(c) Jason Stell