Collected Songs - Musical Settings from Song Cycles and Plays

This volume of Collected Songs by John Franceschina exhibits an assortment of musical settings, ranging from contemporary art songs to show business tunes, as diverse as the poetry provided by the seven authors represented. French libertine poet and novelist, Baron Jacques d'Adelswärd Fersen (1880-1923) begins the collection with four romantic poems from his L'Hymnaire d'Adonis (1902), a work he styled "in the manner of the Marquis de Sade." African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) from Dayton, Ohio, follows with three lyrical works rhapsodizing on love, remembrance, and loss. Bawdy poems by the rakish satirist and Restoration wit, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-1680) offer a more than subtle change of pace before a single lyric each from Dutch dramatist, poet, novelist, and critic, Willem Gerard van Nouhuys (1854-1914) and French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) return the collection to a more elegant civility. Songs composed for productions of The Emperor of the Moon, a 1687 farce by Restoration playwright and novelist Aphra Behn (1640-1689) and Love's Labour's Lost, an early romantic comedy by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) round out the collection.

John Franceschina, composer, has created scores for the National Shakespeare Company and the Provincetown Playhouse in New York City, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Baltimore's Center Stage, Washington's Ford's Theatre and the Arena Stage, the Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Cleveland Playhouse, Florida Studio Theatre, Geva Theatre, Syracuse Stage, Papermill Playhouse, Music Theatre Works, and the Moscow Art Theatre, in addition to the Asolo State Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, where he acted as composer-in-residence from 1976 to 1993. His Fanfare for the Fiftieth was commissioned by Philippe Entremont for the fiftieth anniversary of the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra in 1985; his secular oratorio, Houtebeen, for male chorus, string orchestra and accordion ensemble, toured the Netherlands in 2014, and his opera, Scenes from the Jungle toured the Netherlands in 2019.