Score on special sale from the Hire Library

This work did not start as a song cycle, but with a single poem, 'Immer und Überall', which I set in 2002 as a 60th birthday present for the soprano Jill Gomez. This song, like several others in Lebensregeln, pays stylistic homage to the nineteenth-century Lied. Over the next nine years I added seven more songs to words by Goethe, all but one as birthday presents. Except for the famous love poem 'Nähe des Geliebten', the poems are from the second half of Goethe's life and are epigrammatic philosophical statements dispensing the mature poet's wisdom about life.

© David Matthews