December Songs is a song cycle

Song cycle

A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's...

 by Maury Yeston

Maury Yeston

Maury Yeston is an American composer, lyricist, educator and musicologist.He is known for writing the music and lyrics to Broadway musicals, including Nine in 1982, and Titanic in 1997, both of which won Tony Awards for best musical and best score. He also won a Drama Desk Award for Nine...

, best known as a musical theatre

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

 songwriter responsible for the music and lyrics for Nine

Nine (musical)

Nine is a musical with a book by Arthur Kopit, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. The story is based on Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical film 8½...

, Titanic

Titanic (musical)

Titanic is a musical with music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and a book by Peter Stone that opened on Broadway in 1997. It won five Tony Awards including the award for Best Musical...

and part of Grand Hotel

Grand Hotel (musical)

Grand Hotel is a musical with a book by Luther Davis and music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, with additional lyrics and music by Maury Yeston....

. The work is a 'retelling' of Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer.Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies , liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music...

's Winterreise

Winterreise

Winterreise is a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert , a setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the second of Schubert's two great song cycles on Müller's poems, the earlier being Die schöne Müllerin...

, (a song cycle of art songs), with a cabaret

Cabaret

Cabaret is a form, or place, of entertainment featuring comedy, song, dance, and theatre, distinguished mainly by the performance venue: a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables watching the performance, as introduced by a master of ceremonies or...

 sensibility. The songs in both December Songs and Winterreise are linked as a sequence of reflections by the singer taking a lonely walk in winter, thinking back on his or her lost love. The piece crosses over the line from classical music to Broadway to cabaret.

The work was written as a commissioned piece for the 1991 centennial celebration of New York's Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....

, where it was performed by cabaret singer Andrea Marcovicci

Andrea Marcovicci

Andrea Louisa Marcovicci is an American actress and singer.- Biography :Marcovicci was born in Manhattan, New York City, the daughter of Helen , a singer, and Eugen Marcovicci, a physician and internist of Romanian descent. In her teens, she decided that she wanted to be a singer, but instead...

  It was then performed for three months in 2004 at the Theatre du Renard in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, where it was sung by Isabelle Georges. It has been recorded in English by Marcovicci and Georges, in German by Pia Douwes

Pia Douwes

Pia Douwes is a Dutch musical theatre actress who is extremly successful in Europe.- Biography :Douwes was born in Amsterdam, North Holland as Petronella Irene Allegonda Douwes, to an arts dealer and a social worker and the grandniece of Doris Day...

and in French by Georges.