Introduction
This website houses an extensive, growing archive of texts to 206,373 settings of Lieder and other art songs (Kunstlieder, mélodies, canzoni, романсы, canciones, liederen, canções, sånger, laulua, písně, piosenki, etc.) and other vocal pieces such as choral works, madrigals, and part-songs, in 125 languages, with 43,871 translations to Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and many other languages. 34,280 of these translations come from our wonderful and devoted volunteers.
Here is a Small Tour.
At last count, 126,012 texts are associated with musical settings in this collection. Of these, 53,000 are empty because they have not yet been located, and are left as placeholders for cross-referencing ; and 4,725 exist in the database but are hidden due to copyright restrictions, leaving 68,927 visible to visitors. Whenever possible, first lines (incipits) are shown for texts that are hidden or missing.
Emily Ezust first opened the Archive on May 24, 1995 as a personal project hosted in a student account at McGill University (Canada), and titled it "The Lied and Song Text Page", which later expanded to "The Lied, Art Song, and Choral Texts Archive". It was generously hosted by the REC Music Foundation from 1996 until June, 2015.
New material is added almost every day. Please see the What's New page for details. Volunteer submissions are welcome, especially translations. Please let us know if you would like to become a guest editor.
About the Collection
- Scope and Goal of the Project.
The primary goal of this project is to collect and present the texts to art songs, partsongs, madrigals, and choral works that are based on stand-alone poems.
The secondary goal of this project is to provide visitors with high-quality translations of the texts into as many languages as possible, and in several styles.
- FAQ. Frequently Asked Questions
- Copyright Notice. Disclaimers, etc. This applies to the entire site and contains important information for people who wish to use the data here.
- Sung Texts. If you access a text page from a composer page, you may see something quite different from what the text author wrote or published. Read more about sung texts here.
- Alphabetization. Throughout these pages, alphabetization will follow North American English convention, even in transliterated indexes.
- Titles of song texts. Unless all the composers who set a given text use the title chosen by the author, the headline at the top of a text will be the first line, in italics. If you are viewing a sung text, its title will appear at the top instead.
- History. What did we look like in earlier years? Take a look with the Way Back Machine
at the Internet Archive!
- An important note about the texts. Some texts may contain offensive language or negative cultural or gender stereotypes. Such texts should be regarded in the context of the time period they were written as a reflection of common attitudes of the time or of characters within the text's narrative. Because these texts are part of the historical record, we include them on this website and reserve the right to redact them; however, vocal works that use such texts should not be performed without an explanation of their historical contexts.
About the Translations
- Language of translations. The language of a translation of
a text is identified by a three-letter language-code
like ENG,  FRE ,
or SPA. A list of these codes can be
found here.
- A rectangle like  ENG  indicates an English translation is available that is close-to-literal and uses the style commonly found in concert programmes or CD booklets.
- A rectangle like  FRE  indicates a French translation exists but is missing. This means that a composer set a specific translation to music, but we do not yet have the text in the database.
- A rectangle like  SPA  indicates a singable Spanish translation is available, or a translation that will fit the music when sung.
- Translation style. Many of the translations are close to literal and meant primarily as an aid for understanding the original language. Others attempt to capture some of the original's rhythm or rhyme; and still others are singable translations. Since different types of translations are useful in different situations and a second opinion is often quite useful, we are always happy to offer more than one translation to the same language.
- Translation copyrights. If you wish to reprint a copyright-protected translation for any reason, you must obtain permission first. Please read the instructions below the translation.
- Giving proper credit to authors. Once you have permission, you
must always give proper credit when copying and distributing copyright-protected material.
This means including the copyright symbol © beside the name of the author / translator. Here is an example:
Translation copyright © by Jane Doe, reprinted with permission from The LiederNet Archive