# Heroic Art Songs or Song Cycles



## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

Do these exist? I would like to hear them. Well, I've been listening to Schoenberg's _Gurrelieder_ lately, and it seems to me to fit this bill. Any other candidates?

With "heroic" I mean the mood of the music, the lyrics don't have to be about slaying dragons or rescuing princesses (although that would be a bonus).


----------



## User in F minor (Feb 5, 2014)

Here's one with pagan kings. Not the most powerful recording of it but the only decent one on the tube.


----------



## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Xaltotun said:


> Do these exist? I would like to hear them. Well, I've been listening to Schoenberg's _Gurrelieder_ lately, and it seems to me to fit this bill. Any other candidates?


A song cycle in the vein of "Nessun dorma" or something like that?


----------



## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

One that springs to mind is Brahms' 'Magelone' cycle - 15 songs with narration in between. This from wiki:

_The romance, which comprises eighteen poems with interlinking prose episodes, recounts the adventures of Count Peter of Provence and the beautiful Princess Magelone of Naples, who fall in love and elope. The lovers are separated by ill fortune and Peter becomes infatuated with the Muslim Sulima. Peter and Magelone are eventually reunited and live happily ever after.

Between 1861 and 1869 Johannes Brahms set fifteen of Tieck's poems to music for voice with piano accompaniment: Fünfzehn Romanzen, Magelone-Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier (Fifteen Romances from Magelone, Op. 33).
_


----------



## Bas (Jul 24, 2012)

I am really fond of Elgar's Sea Pictures (when Janet Baker sings), but I don't know if they qualify as heroic?
What do you think?


----------



## SiegendesLicht (Mar 4, 2012)

I don't know if these two will sound sufficiently heroic to you as concerns the music, but they deal with heroic subject matters: the one is a duet betwen Arminius (Hermann), the Germanic chief who defeated the Roman legions at Teutoburg forest, and his wife Thusnelda,






the other is a duet between the Hellenian hero Hector and his beloved.






For some reason, these Schubert's duets are not as well known as they deserve.


----------

