The Michael Nyman Songbook
Directed by	Volker Schlöndorff
Produced by	Eberhard Junkersdorf
Starring	Ute Lemper Michael Nyman John Harle Nigel Barr
Music by	Michael Nyman
Cinematography	Igor Luther
Edited by	Gisela Grischow
Distributed by	London Records
Release date	May 30, 1992
Running time	55 minutes
Country	Germany
Language	German English French

The Michael Nyman Songbook is a collection of art songs by Michael Nyman based on texts by Paul Celan, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, William Shakespeare and Arthur Rimbaud. It was recorded as an album with Ute Lemper in 1991, and again as a concert film in 1992, under the direction of Volker Schlöndorff, again with Ute Lemper, though many of the musicians had changed. The songs have been recorded by others and as instrumentals, and are published by Chester Music. The album has been issued by both London Records and Argo Records, though the covers are the same except for the logo.

The texts are the poetry of Paul Celan in German, from the collections, Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952), Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (1955), and Sprachgitter (1959), two letters and a 1787 Carnival riddle by Mozart in English for the segment by Jeremy Newsom of Artifax/BBC's Not Mozart titled Letters, Riddles and Writs, Ariel songs from The Tempest composed for Prospero's Books, and L'Orgie Parisienne, ou Paris se Repeuple by Rimbaud. All save the Mozart are performed in their original language.

The songs are officially written for "low female voice". For Six Celan Songs, Nyman specifically wrote the pieces for Lemper. "Corona" and "Blume" "introduce an eight-bar chord sequence derived from Chopin's Mazurka in A minor, op. 17 no. 4 (the introduction to which was used by Gorecki in his Symphony No. 3)." It was composed between May and July 1990. Nyman's mother passed on 7 June, while he was writing "Blume", and he dedicated the cycle to her memory. "I Am an Unusual Thing" "is based entirely on extracts from two of Haydn quartets" and is from the opera, Letters, Riddles and Writs. L'Orgie parisienne is an extract from La Traversée de Paris.

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