Song cycle
A connected sequence of songs.
What it means
A song cycle is a sequence of several independent but interrelated songs that are performed together and conceived as a unit. Their cohesion comes from a shared textual source, a continuous poetic narrative, a running theme, or recurring musical motifs and keys.
Unlike a mere collection of songs, where individual pieces stand independently of one another, the order of songs in a cycle is usually fixed and matters for the overall effect.
Musical use
The genre flourished in the nineteenth century, for instance in Franz Schubert's cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise on poems by Wilhelm Müller, and in Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe on texts by Heinrich Heine, where musical recurrence and poetic narrative are closely intertwined.
A song cycle should be distinguished from a plain song collection lacking internal coherence, and from the term Liederkreis, used in German partly as a synonym for the same genre. Larger vocal recital programs can also include cycles without being cycles themselves.
Performance practice
When preparing a song cycle, first study the underlying poetic cycle as a whole to understand its dramatic arc, before working on individual songs. Pay attention to musical motifs that recur across song boundaries, so you can recognise and deliberately shape them in performance.