Sometimes, when setting a text to music, a composer will change a text to suit the vocal piece. This may involve everything from changing a few words or omitting some stanzas to rearranging stanzas and adding new textual material. On this website, over 10,000 texts have notes about these changes, both large and small. In the past, it has been necessary for visitors to read carefully through the footnotes and to apply the changes manually to obtain a sung text. But now the system will take care of this task for you, in many cases automatically.

When you see the label Sung Text for setting by ____ followed by the name of a composer, it indicates that what you are seeing below are the lyrics, or the text as found in the score of the specified composer. The original text may or may not differ.

To see how this feature works, please visit this page, which contains a poem by Victor Blüthgen called "Der Traum". It will open in a new tab or window.

As you can see, the text is littered with square brackets and numbers. Previously, if you wanted to obtain the sung text for a specific composer such as Leo Blech, you would have had to refer to five different footnotes and apply those five text changes to the text. Instead, you can look for "Available sung texts" (below the footnote area) and click on the appropriate link.

Now let's look at Blech's sung text, which will also open in a new tab or window. This version of the text is free of square brackets and numbers because the changes for Blech have all been applied. You can see this first in stanza 1, line 5, where "himmelauf" has changed to "zum Himmel hinauf".

If you access "Der Traum" by visiting Blech's composer index, you will be brought directly to this sung text. You will also see this sung text if you visit the page for the collection that contains it, Acht Liedchen großen und kleinen Kindern vorzusingen, Dritte Folge.

Accessing a text from an author index will always bring you to the non-sung-text version, or what might sometimes be referred to as the "original" (if we have checked it with an independent primary source) or "base" (if it has not yet been checked). So in this example, visiting Blüthgen's author index and finding this poem listed there, clicking on the link will bring you to the author's version of the text with all the footnotes we have gathered so far.

Moving on to another composer who set the same text, it appears that Zemlinsky's sung text matches the original text with no modifications, so if you visit Zemlinsky's composer index and click on "Der Traum" there, you will similarly see a clear text free of footnotes. Sung texts are also shown automatically when you view an entire opus together on one page, as you can see if you visit Zemlinsky's Dreizehn Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier , opus 2 page.