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Welcome to the latest Melancholy Mixtape, a Shades of Blue series that weaves together moments of melancholy classical music to help you cultivate calm, connection, and healing throughout the month. (If you’re a new subscriber — Welcome! 👋🏼 — head over here to check out previous installments.)

Watercolor painting depicting a bouquet of flowers in soft shades of red, pink, and yellow, along with overflowing greenery — Charles Demuth (American, 1883–1935). *Zinnias and Scarlet Sage*, 1928. Watercolor and pencil on paper. Private collection, on loan to the Demuth Museum of Art

If planting a garden is an act of hope and faith in our collective future, my southwest Minneapolis neighbors are a merry band of hopepunks indeed.

Every walk I take these days offers feasts of floral beauty. In just one block, you’ll encounter choirs of coneflowers, window boxes overflowing with petunias, and bushes of peonies whose hardy petals shimmer in the sun like Carrara marble. A kaleidoscope of painterly color, these gardens bring to mind the lonely butterfly from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, who reminds us:

“It’s not enough merely to exist. One must have freedom, sunshine, and a little flower for a companion.”

So for the latest Melancholy Mixtape, I’ve assembled a musical bouquet to serve as your companion this month. From a scene of orchids gently illuminated by moonlight to a nightingale’s tender declaration of affection for a blossoming rose, these melancholy songs express not only a fascination with the ephemeral beauty of flowers, but also the ways they reflect our longing for solace, connection, and renewal.

I hope you enjoy this month’s selections.

Sharing music is an act of love. 💙 Send this mixtape to someone who could use a dose of beauty and calm today.

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Erin Morley, soprano
Gerald Martin Moore, piano
(Follow along with the Russian text and English translation.)

A nightingale offers its song of devotion to a single rose, echoing the serenade delivered by a nearby troubadour to his young maiden. And like the rose, who receives the bird’s enchanting song in silence, “the tender maiden does not know for whom he sings, and why his songs should be so sad …”

Restless motion in the piano mirrors the singer’s circuitous thoughts of love and fear at the impending loss of his beloved. But even within that valley of shadow and despair, reminders of nature’s renewal appear on the sun-streaked horizon. “The lilacs that had flowered last year shall flower again in melancholy beds,” he sings. “Already the slender peach has strewn the blue sky with its pinks, like a child at Corpus Christi.”

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Jakub Józef Orliński, countertenor
Il Pomo d’Oro
(Follow along with the Italian text and English translation.)

Deeply in love with the shepherd Alteus, Amaryllis pierces her breast with a golden arrow, and in communion with the fertile earth, her blood transforms into the bell-shaped flower that today bears her name. Only then does Alteus realize his desire for her, singing to the crimson petals: “Look deep inside me, what is written on my soul: Amaryllis, my only true love.”

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Susan Graham, mezzo-soprano
Malcolm Martineau, piano
(Follow along with the English text.)

Theodore Roethke conjures a poetic still life of orchids as the hazy heat of day gives way to luminescent night, the scene’s nocturnal stillness imparted by spare piano chords. “They lean over the path, adder-mouthed … limp and damp, delicate as a young bird’s tongue; their fluttery fledgling lips move slowly, drawing in the warm air.”

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Georg Poplutz, tenor
Tatjana Dravenau, piano
(Follow along with the German text and English translation.)

Not all flowers thrive in daylight, as Heinrich Heine’s poem reminds us. Here the lotus-flower, weary of the midsummer sun’s power, chooses the moon as the lover worthy of her innocent, blossoming beauty. “She blooms and glows and gleams, and gazes silently aloft — fragrant and weeping and trembling with love.”

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Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
John Wilson, conductor

In his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, Delius brings to life a pair of star-crossed lovers in the Swiss countryside. Tormented by an all-consuming feud between their families, Sali and Vreneli find escape and solace only in a remote meadow teeming with wildflowers — a private, sacred realm far removed from the world’s turmoil.

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Want to share your experience with one of the works in this month’s mixtape? I’d love to hear about it! Leave a comment below or reply to this email.

Melancholy Mixtape / July 2026

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