• Voices: SA + piano
  
• Genre: Romantic (c.1840)
• Composer: KINKEL, Johanna (1810 - 1858)
• 979070-8209-26-3

These three lovely songs by a female composer for a duet pair or for a girls choir are tuneful with parts that interact and move in beautiful harmony, making them easy to learn and rewarding to sing. Suitable for adults or girls.

This is our new 2025 edition, which has an improved layout and revamped translations by Rosalind Trübger, so that the songs can be performed with the original German text or sung in English, as the translations closely follow the original meter, meaning and rhyming pattern.

Johanna Kinkel composed these Three Duets for two of her pupils, the sisters Adele & Emily Thormann, when she was living in Bonn, Germany. It has been suggested that the watery subject of the first duet was inspired by her own 'watery' experience in that year when Gottfried Kinkel [her husband from 1843] rescued her from a boating accident on the river Rhine! Sing them with the original German words (C.W. Mueller & J.W. Goethe) or in the faithful English translations by Roz Trubger.

Audio SAMPLE:

Longer samples available here [opens in Soundcloud]

Johanna Kinkel (also Mathieux, Mockel) made her mark in the worlds of both music and literature and her life makes a fascinating story, holding a strong resonance with the women of today. She was a working mother who, in her short life, was effected by sexual inequality, domestic abuse and an undemocratic regime. She wrote books and composed music, and earned a living as a piano and singing teacher. Her writings reveal that she faced all the same problems as music teachers of today ! Born in Bonn (Germany) she studied music there with Beethoven’s early teacher. As an adult, she spent time in Berlin, where she was a friend of Fanny Mendelssohn, before returning to Bonn and getting caught up in the revolutionary events of 1849, eventually helping her husband, Gottfried Kinkel, to escape from Spandau prison, before emigrating with him and their four children to London. There her short life ended tragically when she fell (or was pushed?) from her bedroom window in near Paddington station.