Day 4

Guten tag!

I'm sitting in the courtyard after a refreshing breakfast, and thought I would fill everyone in on the songs I have been assigned.

Frühlingsnacht by Schumann
Die Einsame by Pfitzner
Selige Nacht by Marx

I don't know any of these songs, so I'm very excited to learn them. We are studying the text first, in very great detail. Literally in our "work with words" class we are as a group studying everyone's poems...that's 30 poems. Tracy and Wölfgang said that by the end of the program, we will practically know 30 songs...and have the music for each! (Of course photo-copied music...but who's complaining?!)

We were required to purchase "The Fischer-Dieskau Book of Lieder" for the course...it has original German and English translations of texts for over 750 Lieder...and contains most of the text we are studying. We will only start to learn the music after we thoroughly understand what the poetry means and says. I'm very excited for this "backwards" way of learning the music. I hope this will help me learn to better connect the text with the music.

I'm keeping busy and bonding with the people here, as it helps keep my mind off of missing good ol' Kansas. Looking forward to the food today! Lunch is some kind of chicken with curry sauce concoction...and dinner said something about zucchini...a lot of us don't know what stuff is but hey! How many times are you in Austria?! Gotta try everything at least once haha.

Hope everyone is well!
Lauren