Peter Cornelius Grim death, it is the cooling night

Peter Cornelius, born in Mainz in 1824, died there in 1874. Son of an actors' couple. Initially also took up this profession, but then studied counterpoint with S. Dehn in Berlin from 1844 to 1846. His church music dates mainly from this period and from the years after 1852, when he went to Liszt in Weimar, who encouraged his work as a church composer. Cornelius became one of the most important pioneers of the New German School. He followed Wagner to Munich in 1865, where he worked as a composition teacher at the newly founded Royal School of Music from 1867 on. Today, his opera ‘Der Babier von Bagdad’ (1858) and his ‘Weihnachtslieder’ op. 8 are particularly well known.  Personal details

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) is regarded as one of the most important German poets of the 19th century. He was born in Düsseldorf and is best known for his lyric poetry, which combines Romanticism with sharp social criticism. Many of his works deal with love, nature and freedom. Because of his political views, Heine lived in exile in Paris for many years.

He also occupies a prominent place in the history of music. His lyrical texts were set to music by numerous composers and had a particularly profound influence on the Romantic art song. Robert Schumann, Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Hugo Wolf, in particular, created musical works of enduring significance based on Heine’s poems. The poetic combination of linguistic simplicity, emotional depth and often ironic ambiguity offered composers a wide range of possibilities for musical interpretation. As a result, Heine’s poetry became a central part of the Romantic art-song repertoire and continues to influence vocal music to this day.

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