Many of the song cycles written by Schumann have been studied over the years and it is well known that his most prolific time of song production was the year 1840. Myrthen, Op. 25, has been studied less than some of his other cycles because it calls into question the modern view of the song cycle and for this reason is difficult to classify. What is most difficult about the classification of Op. 25 is that there is no immediately apparent narrative. In addition, the musical relationships which exist are usually considered to be of little consequence. What scholars are left with is a group of songs that in Schumann's mind constituted a song cycle but to the modern eye seems to be anything but. The most prevalent view concerning the organization of Op. 25 is that it is a collection of songs. Given his view of Lieder and his compositional process, in addition to the fact that it was presented to Clara as a wedding gift, I believe that Schumann had a specific organization in mind for this work. In this thesis I argue that due to the way in which Schumann conceived of and composed song cycles, the musical relationships are not what bind Op. 25 together although these relationships do exist. Instead, the organization hinges mainly on the text which represents a narrative of the relationship between Robert and Clara, which differs from the modern view of what classifies a group of songs as a cycle.

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abstract: The purpose of this study was to: (1) record and describe a brief history of the life and career of Bolivian composer Dr. Nicolás Suárez Eyzaguirre, and (2) write an analysis from a vocal performer's perspective of Suárez's song cycle for soprano and piano, Monólogos del Desierto, with texts by Dr. Guillermo Mariaca Iturri. In August of 2013, I traveled to La Paz, Cochabamba, and Coroico, Bolivia, with translator Dr. Marie Cooper Hoffman for thirteen days in order to conduct interviews with Suárez, his family, his colleagues, his composition professors, and other professional musicians. In addition to both in-person and e-mail interviews, I reviewed television productions, videos, and newspaper/magazine articles that featured interviews with Suárez and/or reviews of his works. Also, I familiarized myself with Suárez's compositional style by performing a leading role in the 2011 world premiere of his opera El Compadre; collecting and listening to as many recordings of his works as I could find; and reading the transcript of Suárez's Doctor of Musical Arts Lecture Recital. For this study, I focused specifically on the compositional style of his three-song cycle Monólogos del Desierto. A performance of the work will be part of my defense of this paper. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music 2015

In recent years scholars have begun to re-evaluate the works, writings, and life of Robert Schumann (1810-1856). One of the primary issues in this ongoing re-evaluation is a reassessment of the composer's late works (roughly defined as those written after 1845). Until recently, the last eight years of Schumann's creative life and the works he composed at that time either have been ignored or critiqued under an image of an illness that had caused periodic breakdowns. Schumann's late works show how his culture and the artists communicating within that culture were transformed from the beginning to the middle of the nineteenth century. These late works, therefore, should be viewed in the context of Schumann's output as a whole and in regard to their contributions to nineteenth-century society. Schumann's contributions, specifically to the genre of the song cycle from 1849 to 1852, are among his late compositional works that still await full reconsideration. A topical study, focusing on three themes of selections from his twenty-three late cycles, will provide a critical evaluation of Schumann's compositional output in the genre of the song cycle. First, Schumann's political voice will be examined. The political events that led to the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions inspired crucial changes in European life and the art produced at that time. Schumann took an active role through his artistic contributions in which he exercised his political voice in responding to these changing events. Second, Schumann's storytelling voice will be explored. In the nineteenth century, storytellers remembered past events in order to comment on social and political issues of their own day. Schumann's storytelling voice allowed him to embrace a change in his own musical style and message in several late cycles.ird, Schumann's (relational) feminist voice will be considered. In two late cycles Schumann featured historical women: Elisabeth Kulmann (1808-1825), a Russian poet, and Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587). In both of these cycles, Schumann closely associated these women's lives with their work and appreciated their strength and their abilities to transcend their earthly burdens. These late song cycles not only allow us to fully appreciate a large part of Schumann's late-compositional oeuvre, but they also provide us a better understanding of the mid-century German culture from this artist's perspective. The method by which Schumann communicated with his audiencesone so different from that of the 1840-songsis as significant as the messages he hoped to communicate. Schumann's experiences leading up to 1848 had changed him as a man and as a musician. Through his late song cycles, Schumann communicated his ideas about the transformation that happened within himself, his audiences, and the German culture and proposed ways to resolve the many conflicts that existed.

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