Les nuits d’été – Hector Berlioz

There is an obvious problem with lyrics in the modern music – not only anyone searching for deep observations and irony in context of philosophical topics won't likely find those in it, but overall it isn't particularly diverse, mostly dealing with cobwebs of romantic love or other random empty gibberish. A common workaround to avoid that was setting someone's poem to music - poets deal with words on a regular basis and quite obviously their texts are of higher quality.

These days we don't have a whole lot of poets hence the problem. However, in times when classical music was composed it was simpler: take for example Berlioz's Les nuits d'été – it is a setting of poems by Théophile Gautier. Written in French, they indeed sound very beautiful and are anything but meaningless. I sincerely recommend L'île inconnue included in this song cycle – download it here: Les nuits d’été, Op.7 H 81 No.6.