The «Musical Pumpkins Hut»: poetical-musical interactions in Heinrich Albert’s monodic output

Speaking about poetry for music generally means dealing with a composer’s work on a pre-existing text or, as in the case of some of the major operatic composers, the close collaboration between composer and librettist. The case of Heinrich Albert, one of the very first composers of monodic Lieder in German language, could be seen as a different relationship between poet and composer given by the context in which they lived and worked. The experience of the Musikalische Kürbishütte concretely shows this relationships: the texts were specifically written to be set in music as strophic Lieder, in a fashion that – in the most successful examples – allowed the music to set meaningfully the different stanzas.