German Rhymes

When he wrote the cycle that was to change the musical course of the twentieth century, Arnold Schönberg wanted the 21 melodramas based on Albert Giraud's famous collection of poems to be 'spoken and sung' in the language of the country in which they were set, in keeping with the fledgling Berlin cabaret tradition… In doing so, he may not have appreciated the problems that the exercise would pose. The fate of Albert Giraud's verses is inextricably linked to Otto Erich Hartleben's free translation of them. It was in this version that they were most frequently set to music. Stripped of their rhymes and original metre, they are in fact another poetic work. When Darius Milhaud presented Schönberg with a French version recited by Marya Freund in 1922, the composer was disappointed and went so far as to say that he did not recognise his own work!

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