To the Music

The joined forces of music and literature can lift up both arts beyond themselves. It is this promise that impelled many composers throughout the centuries to transcend their talents in the own musical discipline to create a higher reality – whether in the intimate atmosphere of the Lied or in the exhilarating publicity of the opera. A late seventeenth-century testimony of this is the semi-opera King Arthur (1691) by Henry Purcell: In What Power art thou, who from below… chills run down the spine when the allegorical figure Cold Genius shakes off the snow from his cloak at the request of Cupid, who wants to incite a new spring with his love.