Phone

Tablet - Portrait

Tablet - Landscape

Desktop

Franz Liszt

In 1840, the year Robert Schumann married Clara Wieck, he wrote an enormous number of songs, almost half of his total production of lieder. One of the collections of that year, Myrthen Op.25, includes probably the best song he ever wrote, "Widmung" (Dedication). The text is by Friederich Rückert, whose words the composer clearly felt as his own:

You are my soul, my heart, my ecstasy and my pain

You are my world in which I live,

my heaven into which I am suspended,

my good spirit, my better self.

Liszt made a solo piano arrangement of the work soon after, and a more elaborated one in 1848. The song is, naturally, in lied form, but the main motive from A turns out also in section B. Liszt's second version adds a postlude to section A, as well as an alternative version for A'.