Morgen!

"Morgen!" ("Tomorrow!") is the last in a set of four songs composed in 1894 by the German composer Richard Strauss. It is designated Opus 27, Number 4.

The German love poem "Morgen!" which is the text of the song was written by Strauss's contemporary, John Henry Mackay, who was of partly Scottish descent but brought up in Germany.

History

Strauss had met Mackay in Berlin, and set Morgen! to music on 21 May 1894. It was one of his four Lieder Opus 27, a wedding present to his wife Pauline. Initially, he set the accompaniment for piano alone, and for piano with violin. In 1897 he arranged the piece for orchestra with violin solo.

"Morgen!" remains one of Strauss's best-known and most widely recorded works. Strauss himself recorded it in 1919 accompanying the tenor Robert Hutt on the piano, and again in 1941 conducting the orchestral version with tenor Julius Patzak and the Bavarian State Orchestra.

Instrumentation of accompaniment

Strauss wrote the song originally to be accompanied by piano. In 1897 he orchestrated the accompaniment for orchestral strings plus a solo violin, a harp, and three horns. The orchestral strings are muted, and the dynamic throughout is pianissimo or softer. The harp, playing arpeggios, and the solo violin accompany continuously, and the horns do not play until the last few bars when the violin pauses before ending with an ascending phrase. The last chord is joined by a solo horn.

Morgen

A morgen was a unit of measurement of land area in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and the Dutch colonies, including South Africa and Taiwan. The size of a morgen varies from ¹⁄₂ to 2 ¹⁄₂ acres, which equals approximately 0.2 to 1 hectare. It was also used in old Prussia, in the Balkans, Norway and Denmark, where it was equal to about two-thirds of an acre (0.27 ha).

The word is usually taken to be the same as the German and Dutch word for "morning". Similarly to the Imperial acre, it was approximately the amount of land tillable by one man behind an ox in the morning hours of a day. The morgen was commonly set at about 60–70% of the tagwerk (literally "day work") referring to a full day of ploughing. In 1869, the North German Confederation fixed the morgen at a quarter hectare (i.e. 2500 square meters) but in modern times most farmland work is measured in full hectares. The next lower measurement unit was the German "rute" or Imperial rod but the metric rod length of 5 metres never became popular. The morgen is still used in Taiwan today, called "kah"; 1 kah is roughly 2 acres or 9,000 m².

Morgen (band)

Morgen was an American psychedelic rock band formed in Long Island. Their only album, "Morgen", is considered one of the best (though obscure) heavy American psychedelic rock albums of the 1960s.

Morgen was founded in 1968 by Steve Morgen, Bobby Rizzo, Murray Schiffrin, Mike Ratti, and Barry Stock. Originally, the band was named "Morgen’s Dreame Spectrum" but was later changed to simply "Morgen".