The final concert of our 2027 Heritage Series is an homage to the power of song. In a bit of counter-intuitiveness, the first selection on the program is Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. But even without words, these gems for solo piano, written for playability by all pianists but mastered by few, express an extraordinary array of emotions. The sensuous poetry of Paul Verlaine, combined with the intoxicating atmosphere of Venice—“La Serenissima”—inspired Fauré’s Cinq Mélodies “de Venise.” Charles Hubert Parry, father of modern English song, spent decades culling poetry from the English literary canon and deliberately texts in the English language—promoting it as a language to be sung in professional performances. George Whitefield Chadwick, just beginning his career as a composer and musician, went to Germany to further his studies and get that European “stamp of approval.” In his String Quartet No. 1—which projects a definite “American” ambiance—his teachers saw “an extraordinary talent.”