Moon River Opera Spring Recital Series: Beyond Writer’s Block: A Look at 19th Century Literature in Music

This performance will focus on a sampling of American, English, Scottish, French, and German literature. Literary writers include: Walt Whitman, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Henry Mackay, Heinrich Hart, Thekla Lingen, Paul Heyse, Gustav Mahler, Fiona MacLeod, Richard Wagner, George Crabbe, and Victor Hugo. Richard Strauss, Joseph Marx, Gustav Mahler, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Griffes, and Kurt Weill composed some of these works as arts songs and lieder (German art songs). Richard Wagner and Benjamin Britten have taken their chosen literature and turned them into full operatic works, of which one aria from each will be performed.