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".

Morgen (Ronnie Tober song)

"Morgen" ("Tomorrow") was the Dutch entry in the Eurovision Song Contest 1968, performed in Dutch by Ronnie Tober.

The song is a ballad, with Tober telling his "far-away wife" how he feels to be separated from her. He expresses his desire for "tomorrow" to arrive as soon as possible, enabling them to be reunited. Tober also recorded the song in English, as "Someday".

The song was performed second on the night, following Portugal's Carlos Mendes with "Verão" and preceding Belgium's Claude Lombard with "Quand tu reviendras". At the close of voting, it had received 1 point, placing 16th (equal last) in a field of 17.

It was succeeded as Dutch representative at the 1969 Contest by Lenny Kuhr with "De troubadour".

References and external links

Morgen (disambiguation)

Morgen is an old Dutch and German unit of measurement. In German, "Morgen" and in Dutch "morgen" means "morning" or "tomorrow".

Morgen may also refer to:

Publications

Mythology

Film

Music

People

See also

Morgen (film)

Morgen is a 2010 Romanian drama film written and directed by Marian Crișan, "a low-key satire that takes a droll approach to the serious subject of illegal immigration".

Plot

Nelu, a man in his forties, works as a security guard in a local supermarket in the Romanian border town of Salonta. His life is uneventful: fishing at dawn, work during the day, and home with his wife in the evening. They live alone in the outskirts of the town and their main problem is repairing the old roof of their farmhouse. One morning, while fishing, Nelu meets a Turkish man trying to evade capture by the border guards. Nelu takes the stranger, desperate for help, to the farmhouse, gives him some dry clothes, food and shelter, although he doesn’t really know how to help him cross the border. When his wife discovers the foreigner living in the cellar she insists he get rid of him, but he does not report the stranger to the authorities and puts him to work on his dilapidated farm. The Turkish man keeps insisting Nelu take all his money and help him reach Germany. Eventually, Nelu takes the money and promises he will help him cross the border the next day, reassuring him with the one word he knows in German: "morgen" ("tomorrow").