German love poetry selected and translated by Keith Bosley

German literature is well known for its rich love poetry of all varieties and moods. More than any other, it has inspired settings by the most famous composers. For this reason, some of the great love poetry by Goethe, Mörike, Heine and others is familiar to music lovers throughout the world. However, it is hardly known outside the concert hall. This selection sets out to repair this gap for the English-speaking world. It contains a choice of German (also some Austrian and Swiss) love poetry from the Minnesänger of the Middle Ages, through the little-known but abundant period of German Baroque and the Romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, down to the modern voices of the twentieth century. The mood of the poetry inevitably changes over the nearly thousand-year span of this collection, but what is often more striking is the variety of mood found within each period – satire among the Minnesänger, humour and even burlesque among the Romantics, and romanticism among the modernists.

Published by Libris in 1997