(Ger.: ‘song’).
A song in the German vernacular.
II. The Generalbass lied, c1620–c1750
NORBERT BÖKER-HEIL/DAVID FALLOWS (I), JOHN H. BARON (II), JAMES PARSONS (III), ERIC SAMS/GRAHAM JOHNSON (IV), PAUL GRIFFITHS (V)
4. German choral song, 1630–1950.
The term ‘polyphonic lied’ is generally used in German to describe a polyphonic composition for any combination of forces, with or without the human voice, which is either songlike in character or derives its particular identity from the technical elaboration of a pre-existing lied melody, for instance as a cantus firmus. In the terminology of music history this wide definition in fact applies only to the heyday of the polyphonic lied in the 15th and 16th centuries. The earliest polyphonic songs with German text date from around 1400. From the mid-15th century a growing repertory made greater use of folk-like melodies and texts than did the dominating French song repertory of the time; this in its turn led to the major flourishing of an indigenous and distinctive tradition in the first half of the century, supported by the flourishing German music printers of those years. After about 1570, German song fell under foreign, especially Italian, influence, and from the mid-17th century it was found concealed within other forms of vocal and vocal-instrumental chamber music, so that the term ‘polyphonic lied’ ceased to have a defining function. Only towards 1800 did one kind of polyphonic lied – the choral song – achieve some degree of independent significance, particularly from a musico-sociological point of view.
Whoever the legendary Monk of Salzburg may have been, his six two-part German songs in the Mondsee-Wiener Liederhandschrift were presumably composed before 1400 and are the oldest written examples of the polyphonic lied. In both text and melody they are successors of the late Minnesang and apparently reflect the practices of polyphonic improvisation rather than following the brilliant technical achievements of the Ars Nova and the Italian Trecento. In the song Das Nachthorn the lower part consists almost entirely of tonic and dominant, to be blown on the ‘pumhart’ (pommer, or lower-register shawm). The Tagelied is more decisively developed: its lower part is sung by the ‘Wächter’ (watchman), while the upper part consists of a trumpet prelude followed by a love dialogue between ‘him’ and ‘her’.
The songs of Oswald von Wolkenstein, a knight from the Tyrol, surpass those of the monk in quantity and quality. Among his 120 or more songs (including love songs, sacred songs and songs with biographical and political texts) are 36 in two or three parts in which the diction of the later Minnesang mingles with popular themes. The widely travelled Oswald, who was both poet and composer, was not only familiar with the original practice of two-part organum (as witness his frequent use of parallel octaves and 5ths) but also with the melodically and rhythmically varied cantilena style of the western chanson. Nearly half of Oswald's polyphonic songs have been shown to have borrowed their music from elsewhere, mostly from the French song repertory of the years 1360–1420; his contribution is mainly in the new texts, often brilliant inventions that share nothing with the originals for their music. On the other hand, much of his polyphony – irrespective of whether it is his own – is resolutely German and fits well into the tradition stretching from the monk to the next surviving repertory, that of the Lochamer Liederbuch. The canon Gar wunniklaich is probably an original composition. Though eclectic in some respects, the works of this ‘edler und vester Ritter’ (‘noble and perfect knight’) do not lack warmth and sentiment. His best-known song, Wach auff, myn hort, was sung throughout the German-speaking world until the end of the 15th century. As in some of Oswald’s other works, its vocal line is set against a textless upper part (ex.1).
While Oswald left several personally supervised copies of his works, polyphonic songs from the second half of the 15th century have survived mainly anonymously in civic manuscript collections. The Lochamer Liederbuch (c1452–60), which probably originated in Nuremberg, contains 35 monophonic, two two-part and seven three-part compositions. Of the 128 works collected in the Schedelsches Liederbuch, mostly copied out personally in the 1460s by Hartmann Schedel (a Nuremberg doctor and historian), 69 are polyphonic lieder, 18 are textless and the rest are chansons and Latin or Italian pieces. The Glogauer Liederbuch (c1480) is even more varied, including 70 German songs along with 224 other compositions of every kind, though mainly of western origin. These collections demonstrate on the one hand how strongly the musical repertory of the cultured German middle classes had been penetrated by Franco-Flemish and Burgundian influence, and on the other the unmistakable identity of the specifically German song, now known as the Tenorlied. The characteristics of the Tenorlied first appear clearly in the three-part Der wallt hat sich entlawbet from the Lochamer Liederbuch. Its distinctive feature is that a pre-existing vocal line used as a cantus firmus (Liedweise or Tenor, often in the highest voice) forms the axis of the polyphonic construction. Clear musical caesurae mark the divisions between the lines of the text, and the melodic and rhythmic movement is usually well balanced, although declamation of the words is sometimes emphasized by a change from simple to compound time. Texturally these songs move between a simple three-part note-against-note or ‘contrapunctus simplex’ construction, and a two-part ‘framework’ form, with soprano and tenor contrapuntally independent and a countertenor filling in between them. In many cases the character of the Tenor and the text will have determined the choice of form; thus the elegant Easter hymn Du Lenze gut, to a text by Conrad von Queinfurt (d 1382), is notably more elaborate contrapuntally than the simple popular song Elslein, liebstes Elslein (both from the Glogauer Liederbuch). Unadulterated folksongs are rare in polyphonic collections, where most melodies have obviously been modified to fit polyphonic settings, or were originally composed. Purely instrumental performance is also a possibility, and the keyboard arrangements surviving in early tablatures such as the Buxheimer Orgelbuch may thus be included in the repertory of the polyphonic lied.
Soon after 1500 the polyphonic lied became an established genre through the printing of the first books by Erhard Oeglin (Augsburg, 1512), Peter Schoeffer (Mainz, 1513) and Arnt von Aich (Cologne, c1519). Although these do not give the composers’ names, later editions do mention famous musicians, among them Adam von Fulda, Erasmus Lapicida, Isaac, Heinrich Finck and Hofhaimer. A new stylistic standard evolved under the influence of these masters: four-part compositions became the norm, and while in the 15th century any borrowed material frequently lay in the highest sounding part it now appeared almost without exception in the tenor, while the soprano, alto and bass were distinguished from this melodic cantus firmus by their livelier rhythms and often more disjunct melodic lines. The so-called ‘Hofweisentenores’ (courtly tenors) in particular were set to polyphony in this style (ex.2; see also Hofweise). The lyrical texts, faintly reminiscent of the Minnesang, place them in a more sophisticated social context and their melodies, many of which were original, sometimes tend towards the formal style of the mastersingers. Hofweise settings represent the apogee of the Tenorlied and determined the style contained in the early printed editions.
The best-known example of the early German polyphonic lied, Isaac’s four-part Isbruck, ich muss dich lassen, is actually in no way typical of this style; with its soprano cantus firmus and chordal accompaniment, it tends more in the direction taken by Isaac’s pupil Ludwig Senfl in his popular songs. In this versatile composer’s output (nearly 250 songs), every type of poetic verse deemed appropriate in his day for musical setting is represented – coarse ditties and delicate love-lyrics, popular dance-songs and sophisticated morals, sacred songs and political diatribes. Senfl explored and developed the stylistic potential of the Tenorlied in every conceivable way, drawing on his thorough knowledge of Netherlandish polyphony. When he introduced the thematic material of the cantus firmus into all the contrapuntal parts in through-imitation (‘Durchimitation’) he had already reached the limits of traditional treatment of the Tenorlied, as when, in his five- and six-part compositions, he had doubled the Tenor canonically or combined two or three different borrowed melodies to be sung simultaneously. On the whole, however, Senfl’s compositions, like those of his contemporaries Thomas Stoltzer, Arnold von Bruck, Balthasar Resinarius, Sixt Dietrich and Benedictus Ducis, are firmly within the tradition of the Tenorlied.
The traditional Tenorlied style is also evident in the works of the younger composers attracted to Heidelberg around 1530 by the teacher Laurenz Lemlin – Othmayr, Jobst vom Brandt, Georg Forster and Stephan Zirler. Their assignment of texts to melodies and their cantabile accompaniment style were new, however, indicating the lied’s changing social function, a change outwardly shown by the large-scale publications of lieder after 1530. In contrast to the courtly repertory of earlier publications, the collections of Hans Ott (1534 and 1544), Christian Egenolff (1535), Peter Schoeffer and Mathias Apiarius (1536), Hieronymus Formschneider (1536), Georg Forster (1539–56) and others look towards the wider circles of the musical middle class and the student world with their Gesellschaftslieder or community songs. Everything points to an attempt to satisfy the needs of communal music-making in all possible situations: varying numbers of parts (from two to eight; the general instruction for performance by any combination of voices and instruments (‘zum Singen und auf allerlei Instrumenten dienlich’); and even the fact that from 1536 all the parts of a polyphonic composition were usually supplied with words (albeit clumsily) in reprints of older Tenorlieder which originally had textless accompaniments. Georg Forster gave the most comprehensive survey in his five-volume collection Ein Ausszug guter alter und neuer teutscher Liedlein, parts of which were reprinted several times, and which contains 380 songs by at least 50 different composers. The quodlibets collected by Wolfgang Schmeltzl in 1544 should be mentioned in this context as curiosities (see Quodlibet).
With Othmayr’s death in 1553 the heyday of the secular Tenorlied came to an end; the compositions of Paul Kugelmann (1558), Matthaeus Le Maistre (1566), Antonio Scandello (1568, 1570 and 1575) and Caspar Glanner (1578 and 1580) were only echoes. At the same time, however, the sacred cantus firmus song had found a lasting foothold in Protestant church music, as witnessed by outstanding works such as the Wittenberg songbooks of Johann Walter (i) (1524, with an introduction by Martin Luther) and Georg Rhau (1544). Divergent stylistic trends were already apparent in these collections: on the one hand the influence of florid counterpoint which led to the motivic through-imitation found in the song motet; on the other the development of simple, chordal hymn settings (‘Cantionalsatz’, ‘Cantionalstil’) with the melody in the highest part (e.g. those by Lucas Osiander, 1586). In Protestant church music the old cantus firmus principle has remained important, because, like plainchant, it is particularly well suited to preserving the sacred vocal line as an invulnerable liturgical basis. The Lutheran church was for a long time the mainstay of the sacred polyphonic lied, with important contributions by Rogier Michael, Johannes Eccard, Seth Calvisius, H.L. Hassler and Michael Praetorius, while Catholic and Calvinist composers such as Lassus, Aichinger and Mareschall used this form relatively little.
In about 1570 the secular polyphonic song received a decisive new impetus from Lassus who, although he did still occasionally set old texts to music, did so in a freer form, often like a motet or chanson and only rarely using the old cantus firmi. While Lassus was enriching his lieder with the elaborate modes of expression of the madrigal, Jacob Regnart, in 1576 and after, very successfully sowed the seeds in Germany of the popular villanella. Lassus’s pupils (Ivo de Vento, Johannes Eccard and Leonhard Lechner) also sought a stylistic synthesis of madrigal, villanella and canzonetta in their lieder, as did such minor German musicians as Christian Hollander, Alexander Utendal, Jacob Meiland, H.G. Lange, Thomas Mancinus and the Fleming Lambert de Sayve. The highpoint of this later period of polyphonic lied was indisputably reached in the works of Hans Leo Hassler of Nuremberg. He studied in Italy under Andrea Gabrieli, and wrote about 60 lieder to his own texts, beginning in 1596 with Neue teutsche Gesang nach Art der welschen Madrigalien und Canzonetten for four to eight voices. His perfect synthesis of Italian style (e.g. that of Gastoldi’s ballettos) with German lyricism influenced virtually all musicians who devoted themselves to the polyphonic lied in this period (J.C. Demantius, Melchior Franck, Valentin Haussmann, Johann Staden and Daniel Friderici).
On the threshold of the high Baroque period, polyphonic lieder in canzonetta style for a few performers quickly gave place to the solo lied over a figured bass accompaniment (the so-called Generalbass lied; see §II below). Meanwhile, the first experiments with other stylistic innovations of the seconda pratica occurred in the more heavily scored lied derived from the madrigal. Concertante vocal parts with obbligato instruments, interludes in recitative style and instrumental ritornellos gave this polyphonic vocal chamber music an almost unlimited stylistic potential, beside which the principle of the strophic lied relying entirely on its cantabile melody hardly survived. Throughout the secular works of Schein the true polyphonic lied figured only slightly (Venuskränzlein, 1609), and thereafter it appeared virtually only in company with cantatas or dramatic quodlibets, as, for example, in the works of Sebastian Knüpfer, Johann Theile, W.C. Briegel and Daniel Speer, and also in J.V. Rathgeber’s multi-volume Augsburgische Tafelkonfekt (1733–46). Almost the only exception is Heinrich Albert, whose ‘Arien’ (in collections published from 1638 to 1650) adhere to the strong Königsberg tradition of polyphonic lieder. Relatively untouched by current trends, however, the sacred polyphonic lied developed on the stylistic basis of simple chordal hymns in cantional style (Schein, 1627, Schütz, 1628, and later Johannes Crüger), and numerous ad hoc wedding and funeral songs were written by, for instance, Hammerschmidt, Rosenmüller and Adam Krieger. It reached its climax in the 400 or so chorale settings of Bach, received an additional impulse from C.F. Gellert’s Geistliche Oden und Lieder set polyphonically by C.P.E. Bach, J.F. Doles and J.A. Hiller, and finally died out in about 1800 in occasional works of the simplest hack variety. More demanding forms of vocal-instrumental cantus firmus technique survived in chorale concertos, cantatas and settings of the Passion.
Towards 1800 J.A.P. Schulz made one of the first attempts to revive the secular polyphonic song. Any hope of its sustained success, however, lay only in a new awakening of communal interest. Polyphonic songs for freemasons had already led the way, but in Austria the political situation left little scope for communal gatherings and Vienna’s contribution was confined to a few unimportant four-part choruses by the Haydns. The new choral song was, however, well nurtured in Berlin by the members of C.F. Zelter’s exclusive Liedertafel (1809) and in Zürich, where from 1810 H.G. Nägeli tried with his male-voice choir to improve popular musical education on a broad basis. The members of the Liedertafel were committed to artistic collaboration: Zelter himself wrote 100 choral songs, some to texts by Goethe; Nägeli, too, promoted his ideas by compiling eight collections of his own songs. Early attempts to form male-voice choirs, often with patriotic motives, were encouraged by compositions such as Weber’s settings of Theodor Körner’s poems. Schubert’s polyphonic songs, mostly with piano accompaniments, stand apart from this line of development; they were written largely as household music for solo voices, and rank with many of his classic solo lieder in their imaginative, expressive style. Their artistic quality excels not only that of the works of his contemporaries Konradin Kreutzer, Spohr and H.A. Marschner, but even that of Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s choruses. The male-voice choir movement spread fast, though no great 19th-century composer was closely connected with it; P.F. Silcher satisfied the growing demand for new repertory with his 144 successful Volkslieder (1826–60). In the hands of minor composers, German choral song sank into the abyss of kitsch. Brahms, however, wrote his a cappella choruses, mostly for mixed voices, with dedicated seriousness and discrimination, creating a synthesis of the old folksong and its more studied counterpart, on occasion even relying directly on medieval sonority. Liszt, Cornelius, Bruckner and in particular Wolf and Reger, who all worked with demanding late Romantic harmonies, partially blurred the line between the true partsong and large-scale choral composition. Reger was also responsible for reviving the sacred choral song. After the great masters came a long line of worthy composers of Volkslieder, such as Franz, Schreck and Jenner, while Arnold Mendelssohn began the renaissance of the choral madrigal.
Although the beginning of the 20th century saw a great stimulus to the male-voice choir tradition through the publication of the Kaiserliederbuch in 1907, it was the youth movement, begun in 1918 and led by Fritz Jöde and Walther Hensel with their song circles (the Finkensteiner Bund and the Musikantengilde), that guided the choral song into new channels. Enthusiastic reverence for the rediscovery of old folksongs and art songs gave composers the task of forging a new type of choral song, uniting the modern tendency away from tonality with a strongly historical stylistic pattern, while respecting as far as was possible the technical limitations of amateur music. In the Protestant church a similar problem was posed by the revival of evangelical church music, especially from Luther’s time. A large number of composers have made a significant contribution to 20th-century polyphonic song, both sacred and secular, including Schoenberg, Krenek, Hindemith, Pepping, J.N. David, Kurt Thomas, Distler, Günther Raphael, H.F. Micheelsen, E.L. von Knorr, Armin Knab, Hermann Grabner, Kurt Hessenberg, Hans Lang, Günther Bialas, Helmut Bornefeld, Hermann Reutter and Cesar Bresgen. Most of them worked within the framework of a very free tonality in a strongly contrapuntal style, and often with recourse to historical forms. Because the song – and especially the polyphonic song – is essentially a traditional genre, it has been unable to lend itelf to the post-1950 musical avant garde.
The German Generalbass or continuo lied of the 17th and early 18th centuries is a secular, strophic song for one or occasionally more voices, with an instrumental bass accompaniment and sometimes with additional instruments playing obbligatos or ritornellos. The musical style varies from simple, syllabic, homophonic dance-songs to relatively ornate, more melismatic, contrapuntal art songs, but in all cases there is a careful synchronization of musical and poetic prosody. The genre flourished especially from the mid-1630s to the 1670s, but there are a few earlier and numerous later examples; its locale was mostly Protestant Germany. While it was an outgrowth of traditional German 16th-century songs, there were clear influences of Dutch, French and Italian songs. The lieder survive almost exclusively in prints in score or choirbook format; there are only a few manuscripts.
The history of the continuo lied is inextricably linked with the history of its poetry. Many lieder collections were compiled by poets who determined the nature of the collection and invited minor composers to write music to fit the texts. When a composer compiled the collection, the music was usually more ornate, although from 1640 to 1670 nearly all lieder conformed to established patterns of simplicity. The collections were written for the amusement of literati, students, the cultivated middle classes of such cities as Hamburg and Leipzig, and a few noblemen; German continuo lieder thus were similar to Dutch solo songs, but simpler and often cruder than the solo songs of France, Italy and Spain, which were designed exclusively for aristocratic audiences.
The continuo lied before 1660 was dominated by Martin Opitz, whose Buch von der deutschen Poeterey (1624) established firm rules for High German poetry. Under the influence of French and Dutch poets (e.g. Ronsard and Heinsius), Opitz preached clarity and consistency in diction, metre and rhyme, and advocated moral or pastoral subject matter.
Contrast between the older, earthy German dialect texts and the reform texts can be seen in Johann Nauwach's Teutsche Villanellen (1627), the first collection of German continuo lieder. It contains both the old and new kinds of verse, both set syllabically. The long, gangling, asymmetrical, falsely-rhymed traditional verse had awkward musical rhythm which upsets both poetic and musical metre. Opitz's symmetrically structured concise, rhyming verses, on the other hand, have music with a strong metre that does not contradict the strict, heavily accented iambs of the poetic metre. This same contrast can be seen in the only two earlier isolated continuo lieder: Schein's wedding song Mirtillo hat ein Schäfelein (1622) foreshadows the Opitzian lied, while the anonymous Ein … Kipp [Wipp] und Münster Lied (1623) has poetically awkward metre with italianate music typical of songs of the decades immediately preceding Opitz.
Thomas Selle's two collections Deliciarum juvenilium decas (1634) and Mono-phonetica (1636), the next continuo lied publications, have little to do with the mainstream of the genre. Selle's lieder use long melismas, frequent word-painting, echoes and other expressive devices which link them more to Italian than German tradition. The absence of any reform verse denies them the historical importance achieved by the lieder included in Caspar Kittel's Cantade und Arien (1638), for Kittel, despite clearcut italianisms in the music, set exclusively Opitz's poems. He introduced Italian strophic variations (‘cantade’) to Germany, and here as well as in his simple homophonic strophic arias he followed Opitz's verse metre, rhyme and phraseology concisely and without contradiction.
The most important composer of the early continuo lied is Heinrich Albert, whose eight collections (1638–50) had more influence during the 1640s and 50s than any others. The collections include solo and polyphonic lieder, sacred and secular. Only a few texts are actually by Opitz; the rest are by a group of lesser-known but in many cases more gifted poets, all of whom were indebted to Opitz's reforms. A few texts are translations from French. The solo songs are strophic and syllabic, with strict adherence to correct poetic accent and only occasional Italian expressive devices such as word-painting or echoes. Ex.3 shows how the structure of Albert's music corresponds to Opitz's text: the alexandrine line has a regular caesura after the sixth syllable which is clearly stressed in the music, and the German iambs are strictly maintained within a regular musical metre.
During the 1640s many collections of continuo lieder were compiled and composed by different men in different places. (Kretzschmar has classified these works by locale, e.g. Hamburg, Saxony.) The most important collections besides Albert's are those by Andreas Hammerschmidt (Oden, 1642–9) and Johann Rist (Des edlen Daphnis aus Cimbrien Galathee, 16429). Hammerschmidt, who is also well known for his dances, is the more interesting musically. He included polyphonic madrigals in the third volume, and the more ornate style of his strophic continuo lieder shows both his skill as a composer and his independence from Albert. Occasionally Hammerschmidt included a violin obbligato and recast a solo song polyphonically. He generally followed the reform verse, though in a few instances he purposely used plattdeutsch phrases. A few lieder are dance-songs incorporating the musical rhythms of the saraband or the courante. Rist, on the other hand, was primarily a poet, and his texts are set very simply by minor composers living in or near Hamburg, such as Heinrich Pape and Johann Schop (i). There is no polyphony, no ornamentation of any kind, no use of obbligato instruments; he stood completely in the shadow of Opitz and Albert. Perhaps because of the simplicity of its text and music, Rist's collection was exceptionally popular.
Other collections of the 1640s continued the new tradition of continuo lied established by the above composers. J.E. Kindermann devoted his two-volume Opitianischer Orpheus (1642) exclusively to the poems of Opitz. Like Hammerschmidt he was a composer of dances and included dance-like lieder and some more ornate musical flourishes. In general, however, he followed the simple Albert-Rist pattern. There is one dialogue, which introduces an unusual recitative-like passage, and elsewhere Kindermann used some imitation between the continuo and the voice. Gabriel Voigtländer's large collection, Allerhand Oden (1642), also of the Albert-Rist type, contains 100 poems and 95 melodies with both old German verse and reform verse. There are other collections by Christoph Antonius, Göring and Johann Weichmann.
The influence of Albert and Opitz continued in the 1650s with collections by Grefflinger (1651), J.A. Glaser (1653), C.C. Dedekind (1657) and Rist. Rist published another collection, Des edlen Daphnis aus Cimbrien besungene Florabella (1651) and also school plays with continuo lieder. Similar lieder appeared in other plays, ballets, pastorals and romans, most notably those by Harsdörffer with music by S.T. Staden. The latter also published the isolated continuo lied Poetische Vorstellung (1658), which is rich in symbolism. J.J. Löwe and J.J. Weiland's Tugend- und Schertz-Lieder (1657) includes a strophic madrigal and use of echo, both of which demonstrate a superficial Italian influence on the basically Albert-Rist type. Georg Neumark's two lied collections (1652 and 1657) are probably the most significant of the decade. They include dialogues, dance-songs (some apparently of Polish origin) and violin obbligatos. Despite these and other interesting features the songs are still in the Albert-Rist style and do not approach Hammerschmidt's ornateness. Caspar von Stieler's Die geharnschte Venus (1660, published under the pseudonym Filidor) is another large collection following Rist's models; ex.4, Die ernstliche Strenge, shows how dance-songs fit a reform scheme. The typical courante rhythm in no way contradicts the poetic amphibrachic metre, with phrases and rhymes neatly coinciding.
Adam Krieger stands out as the greatest of all continuo lied composers. He himself published only one collection of Arien (1657), which is incomplete and survives only in a sacred contrafactum. The lieder were for one to three voices with violin obbligato and may have resembled Neumark's collections. Much more can be said about the later, posthumous collection of Arien (1667, enlarged 1676). The compiler, David Schirmer, was a distinguished poet who supplied Krieger with many texts. The songs, mostly solos with continuo and with ritornellos for five instruments, vary from pastoral love songs or tragedy songs to frivolous and lascivious dance-songs and drinking-songs for the entertainment of Krieger's student friends. The influence of Opitz and Neumark is offset by the introduction of expressive dramatic Italian vocal contours.
Perhaps the best poet of the continuo lieder was Philipp von Zesen, who expanded on Opitz's verse forms with dexterity and whose poetry shows greater aesthetic and human insight. His principal collections span several decades, the most important being Dichterische Jugendflammen (1651) and Dichterisches Rosen- und Lilientahl (1670). The music is often borrowed from Dutch lieder; Zesen had close ties with the Netherlands and even wrote some Dutch verse. Since the poet is far superior to the composer, Zesen's very simple melodies and accompaniment are too easily ignored by literary historians, but they clearly were popular and are fine examples of the continuo lied. The influence of Rist is especially pronounced in the music, though Zesen's style owes little or nothing else to Rist.
Just as the earlier continuo lied followed Opitz, so from the 1660s Caspar Ziegler's treatise Von den Madrigalen (1653, enlarged 2/1685) played an ever-increasing role. Ziegler introduced and adapted into German the concepts of Italian madrigal verse; poems were no longer strophic or in the set number of lines of sonnets and other types, but could be of any length, while the lengths of individual lines had to be either the shorter type, seven or eight syllables, or the longer, 11 or 12. From Opitz, Ziegler accepted the rules of High German spelling, accent and rhyme, the regularity of metre, and the lofty subject matter. Sebastian Knüpfer applied this theory in Lustige Madrigalien und Canzonetten (1663), and David Schirmer composed numerous madrigals in this fashion. Ziegler's madrigal ideas were still applied in the 18th century, most notably in the recitatives of cantata texts set by, among others, Bach.
By the 1670s two important new musical stimuli to the lied were changing it in a way that led to its virtual disappearance as a genre. The Italian cantata and German opera became much more popular, and when collections of German songs appeared they were full of either opera and cantata arias or imitations of such arias. No longer was the text of paramount importance, and the Albert-Rist tradition still maintained by Krieger and, to a lesser extent, even by Knüpfer gave way to an operatic style. Only Laurentius von Schnüffis's four more conservative collections (1682–95) and a few others had links with the earlier lied. After 1670 the music became more florid, more melismatic and more difficult, as can be seen, for example, in P.H. Erlebach's Harmonische Freude musicalischer Freunde (1697). Da capo form replaced the strophic forms and the vocal line was operatic. Similar arias were written by Jakob Kremberg in Musicalische Gemüths-Ergötzung (1689) alongside more traditional strophic types, and the songs in Musicalischer Ergetzigkeit (1684) contain echoes and other musical repetition which distort the order of the text. Such songs were in general too difficult for the amateur, who had relished the Generalbass lied before 1670, and as a result they did not have the popularity of the earlier lieder. Amateurs continued to sing the older songs, or turned to the new collections of sacred music in similar style. The professional singer concerned himself with opera and the cantata and, though capable of singing the more complicated arias in the new collections, would probably have had little use for them.
As a result, there was a drastic decline in the number of Generalbass lied collections during the last quarter of the century. At the beginning of the 18th century sacred collections of solo songs with continuo accompaniment were popular, beginning with J.A. Freylinghausen's Geistreiches Gesangbuch (1704), but these songs belong more to the history of chorales and church music than to that of the continuo lied. A few collections of secular continuo lieder appeared sporadically. Christian Schwartz's Musae teutonicae (ii, 1706), for example, contains strophic folklike love songs for tenor or bass and accompaniment. The rather mediocre poetry was set by J.A. Schope. In many cases the tunes were taken from other sources and words were fitted to them. Whereas in the mid-17th century borrowed melodies were adjusted to fit new poetry, in the first half of the 18th the new poetry was usually forced to fit the existing metre of the borrowed music, often resulting in serious conflict between the prosody of the text and the music. Albrecht Kammerer's manuscript book (1715) includes keyboard dances with added texts; the texts might be well-known folksongs or newly composed, but in any case they seem to be optional and arbitrary.
A new upsurge in the lied began in the 1730s, but at first the collections were primarily for keyboard with incidental texts. A collection of strophic dance-songs and drinking-songs by J.V. Rathgeber, Ohren-vergnügendes und Gemüth-ergötzendes Tafel-Confect (1733–46), includes solo songs and duets as well as polyphonic quodlibets or parodies of earlier instrumental works. The work has special importance for its folk melodies, but as lieder the pieces are crudely constructed. The same borrowing occurs in Sperontes' Singende Muse an der Pleisse (1736–45), where the author added words to dances and marches. This ornate printed collection was the most popular in the 18th century, and because of its longevity as household music it is an important milestone in the social history of German music. It contains about 250 songs for one voice and keyboard accompaniment. Although in later editions the accompaniment is fully written out and the text appears with the top part, in the first editions the accompaniment is still a basso continuo and the text appears only by itself, after the music, seemingly as an afterthought.
J.F. Gräfe's Samlung verschiedener und auserlesener Oden (1737–43), written in competition with Sperontes' collection, contains 144 old poems with new music by various composers (including C.P.E. Bach), all for solo voice and continuo. Telemann's collections, which seem not to have been as popular as his other works, and J.V. Görner's Sammlung neuer Oden und Lieder, consisting of 70 songs mostly on texts by Friedrich von Hagedorn, resemble the mid-17th-century lied in care of setting and in musical form. Görner's long preface, an aesthetic treatise on poetry, links the volume to the tradition of Opitz and his followers. Both represent a resurgence of the continuo lied in the 1740s which continued into the second half of the century.
If there is a meeting-ground for German musical thought starting around the fifth decade of the 18th century, it is a belief in the primacy of song. As Mattheson put it in 1739 in Der vollkommene Capellmeister, ‘All playing is merely an imitation and accompaniment of singing’. C.P.E. Bach elaborated the point when he revealed in his autobiographical sketch of 1773 that his chief effort in recent years had been ‘playing and composing as songfully as possible’, thereby rising to ‘the noble simplicity of song’. In his Clavierschule (1789) D.G. Türk reaffirmed the sentiment: the ‘instrumentalist plays best who comes closest to the singing voice or who knows how to bring out a beautiful singing tone. When it comes to true music, what are all of these motley passages against a melting, heart-lifting, genuine melody!’. Yet for critics today, accustomed to fixing the birth of German song to 19 October 1814 – the day on which Schubert composed Gretchen am Spinnrade – the temptation to ignore such comments has been strong. Indeed, few musical genres have been more misunderstood than the 18th-century lied. Whether measured against Schubert’s contributions or the rise to pre-eminence of purely instrumental music in the last quarter of the 18th century, the typical response has been to dismiss virtually all lieder from Johann André to Zumsteeg as little more than a succession of ‘tuneful trifles’, ‘blanched tunes’ eked out by ‘anemic chords and arpeggios’.
Such an attitude has worked to obscure vastly more than it has opened up for inquiry. Foremost has been the fact that, like the 19th-century lied, that of the 18th century was sparked by German poets embarking on a new path. The desire for ‘naturalness’ and simplicity stemmed not, as has been asserted, from ‘folksong’ and Herder in the 1770s, nor Krause in 1753 and the so-called First Berlin School, but rather the move from the Baroque to the neo-classicism advocated in the 1730s by Gottsched and, later, his disciple Scheibe, the Hamburg poet Friedrich von Hagedorn and the Ansbach poet Johann Peter Uz, both of whom set forth literally in their verse criteria for the fledgling art form. What is more, the traditionally poor press accorded German song in the age of Haydn and Mozart has concealed its didactic standing – one spanning from Telemann when in the preface to his Oden (1741) he spoke of his desire to inaugurate a ‘renewed golden age of notes’ worthy of Homer, to Beethoven in An die ferne Geliebte (1816), wherein, in keeping with the sentiments of the poetry, he created songs ‘without the adornments of art’.
The new direction sought by German poets effectively starts with J.C. Gottsched, professor of poetry at the University of Leipzig beginning in 1730 and self-appointed guardian of German classicism. As he declared in his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst (1730), the song composer must strive for ‘nothing more but an agreeable and clear reading of a verse, which consequently must match the nature and content of the words’. Those words ought to aspire to an ‘exact observation of nature’, thereby enabling the poet to avoid the artificiality associated with the Baroque and also making it possible to satisfy the maxim from Horace’s Ars poetica with which Gottsched’s treatise begins: ‘In short, everything you write must be modest and simple’. It was an aesthetic shared by Hagedorn, who, in the preface to his Oden und Lieder of 1742 (although his ideas were in circulation before that date), provided a thumbnail sketch of the lied as it would be cultivated for the next 70 years or so. Quoting from a 1713 essay by Ambrose Philips from the short-lived British literary journal The Guardian (Hagedorn had served as private secretary to the Danish ambassador to the court of St James), he made no bones as to the kind of poetry from which he sought to distance himself: that variety of verse whose authors ‘starve every Thought by endeavouring to nurse up more than one at a time’ and where ‘one Point of Wit flashes so fast upon another that the Reader’s Attention is dazled by the continual sparkling of their Imagination’. In such poetry ‘you find a new Design started almost in every Line, and you come to the end, without the Satisfaction of seeing any one of them executed’. Far better to imbue a poem with ‘great Regularity, and the utmost Nicety; an exact Purity of Stile, with the most easie and flowing Numbers; an elegant and unaffected Turn of Wit, with one uniform and simple Design’. The poet would be best advised to follow the example of Sappho, Anacreon or Horace, for ‘you will find them generally pursuing a single Thought in their Songs, which is driven to a Point, without … Interruptions and Deviations’. In his Abhandlungen von den Liedern der alten Greichen (c1744) Hagedorn affirmed his poetics in the name of classical antiquity, just as Uz would in the introduction of his Lyrische Gedichte (1749) in his encomium to ‘gentle feelings, the likeness of nature, the noble simplicity of unadorned expressions, or the beautiful essence of long ago antiquity’. (Uz thus anticipated by six uyears Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s famous 1755 formulation on the ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ of Greco-Roman sculpture.) Repeating the credo in the poem Die Dichtkunst from the same publication, Uz implores his muse: ‘O poetry, withhold from me your glossy demeanour! Strive not for overweening ornament, rather sound here your gentle song that it may inspire the enraptured shepherd to take up unadorned song’. Note well the invocation to nature, a trait common to Hagedorn as well. Deprecating (as the English poet Richard Payne Knight later would) ‘the giant of unwieldy size, / Piling up hills on hills to scale the skies’, Hagedorn set his verse within what he called the ‘middleground’ of ‘blessed nature’, for it is nature that leads to ‘happiness and enjoyment’. Such poetry therefore partakes of the Horatian golden mean, the ideal disposition that enables one to attain a harmony of mind and spirit, the same harmony seen by such writers as Kant and Schiller as forming the basis of Enlightenment.
Nature, too, provided the model for Gottsched’s pupil J.A. Scheibe, who, now in Hamburg (Hagedorn’s city), set forth guidelines as to how the composer might respond to such poetry, devoting an entire issue of his journal Critischer Musicus (no.64, 17 November 1739) to the matter. Citing the authority of the ancients, for whom ‘order and nature’ counted above all, he advised the would-be song composer to begin with a consideration of the poem’s overall form. Given the invariably strophic nature of contemporaneous poetry – what Hagedorn had meant by ‘one uniform and simple Design’ – the musician who would ‘give an ode or a lied an expressive, skilful and affecting tune or melody’ must take care that the music suit every strophe; also, the composer must observe ‘the type of verse and the metre’ of the poem and match them in music. (Gottsched in his Versuch had defined the ode as ‘the comprehensive name for all lieder’). The composer must not create a cadence, repeat a word nor extend a syllable in one strophe where to do so would be inappropriate in another. That done, the composer’s last step is the creation of a relatively short melody, one that stays close to the harmonic home base and adheres to ‘a moderate range’, is ‘free, flowing, pure and really natural’ in order that it may be sung ‘at once and without particular effort by someone inexperienced in music’. Lied composers at work in north Germany at this time include J.V. Görner and Telemann in Hamburg, J.F. Gräfe in Brunswick, and C.H. and J.G. Graun in Berlin. In keeping with the history of the genre well into the next century, it ought to be said that while composers adopted all of Scheibe’s suggestions when writing lieder, in other genres they favoured greater complexity. To be sure, one would not recognize the future composer of Montezuma from his contributions to the important lied collection Oden mit Melodien (Berlin, 1753–5), or, for that matter, the composer of the Missa solemnis in An die ferne Geliebte.
In positing the 18th-century lied’s inception in Hamburg rather than Berlin, it ought to be said immediately that the statement in no way diminishes the latter city’s role in the history of the genre. Nevertheless it is surely time to eschew the evolutionary march-of-progress approach so familiar from 19th-century music historiography with its schoolmasterly ‘periods’ and ‘schools’ (e.g. R.G. Kiesewetter, Geschichte der europäisch-abendländischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik, 1834). Hence, the origin of the lied as part of the aesthetic speculations of a younger generation of poets and musicians reacting against what today we would call the Baroque calls into question the continued use of such phrases as ‘First Berlin School’ or ‘Second Berlin School’ of lied composition. It is more exact to speak of the ‘north German lied’ given the locales of composers such as C.G. Neefe in Bonn and A.B.V. Herbing in Magdeburg and publication patterns both before 1770 (the traditional date for the start of the ‘Second Berlin School’) and thereafter. This caveat made, musicians at Frederick the Great’s court contributed greatly to the lied, particularly C.G. Krause who, with K.W. Ramler (librettist of Graun’s Der Tod Jesu), published the previously mentioned Oden mit Melodien; in 1755 a second volume was brought out, and in 1767–8 the four-volume Lieder der Deutschen containing 240 songs. Noteworthy too is Krause’s Von der musikalischen Poesie (1752), one of four major music treatises by authors at Frederick’s court (the three others are C.P.E. Bach’s on keyboard playing, Quantz’s on playing the flute, and J.F. Agricola’s Anleitung zur Singekunst, a translation, with additions, of Tosi’s Opinioni de’ cantori antichi e moderni). The significance of Krause’s study notwithstanding, it has been frequently misrepresented. In large measure he did little more than endorse Gottsched, Hagedorn and Scheibe’s neo-classical views on the lied within the context of a theoretical investigation concerned primarily with the kind of opera cultivated by Hasse and Graun; and, as a reading of the treatise reveals, nowhere within his circumscribed coverage of the lied did he state, as has been claimed, that it should aspire to the folklike (Volkstümlich). The terms he did use are either Natürlich or Einfältig (natural or artless). Along with the Graun brothers, other lied composers in Berlin before 1770 were Marpurg, Kirnberger and C.P.E. Bach, who composed both secular and sacred songs and whose collection of Gellert settings, Geistiche Oden und Lieder (1758), shos the genre at last throwing off its ties to the old Baroque continuo lied; as Bach noted in the preface: ‘I have added the necessary harmonies to my melodies. In this way I have not had to relinquish them to the whimsy of bumbling-fingered bass players’. Nevertheless keyboard parts, like the melodies themselves, were generally diatonic in the extreme and devoid of ornamentation, and frequently double the melodic line itself in the right hand (the voice part and right hand of the keyboard are often notated on the same staff) or else shadow it a 3rd below. Block homophonic accompaniments prevail, less often Alberti basses, with descending passing notes filling in the typically harmonic movement by root only at cadences. Harmonic rhythm as a rule is slow, sometimes for an entire bar or phrase, and the phrases themselves are invariably balanced. So simple were the accompaniments that – as the ubiquitous title Lieder am Clavier implies – they could be played simultaneously by the singer. With the rise of a growing middle class with leisure time for amateur music-making, such ‘artlessness’ was well appreciated by both consumers and music publishers.
The lied also provided the German lands with what might be termed a national musical identity. Starting with Leibniz in the 1680s writers increasingly expressed themselves on the ‘enforced blindness’ that characterized the German ‘mode of life, speech, writing, indeed even of thinking’ and the ‘Sklayerei’ to things French; as Christian Thomasius, a lecturer at the University of Leipzig, observed in 1687: ‘if our German forefathers were to rise from the dead … they might think they were in a foreign land’. Thus Telemann in his 1741 collection spoke of his desire not only for a ‘renewed golden age of notes’, but also to ‘show foreigners how more maturely we are able to think than do you!’ Similarly, Krause dedicated his 1753 collection not ‘to weighty erudition but to the science of joy and pleasure’ as a suitable antidote to the superfluities of Italian opera, an art form he saw as the province of the upper classes; in contrast, the simple tunes and accompaniments of lieder promote ‘the pleasure and happiness of all society’, a view upheld half a century later when Koch, in his Lexicon, described the lied as ‘the one product of music and poetry whose content today appeals to every class of people and every individual’.
In the last quarter of the century the lied continued much along the same lines, although keyboard parts were becoming more active. Formal designs, too, were becoming more adventurous, as the numerous modified strophic and through-composed songs by Reichardt and Zelter in Berlin and Zumsteeg in Stuttgart, not to mention those by Haydn and Mozart, attest. Yet even as the century was witnessing such landmark musical events as Haydn’s op.33 string quartets (written, as he declared, in ‘an entirely new and special way’) in 1781 or Mozart’s move from Salzburg to Vienna the same year, the lied retained its distinctive diatonic clarity and fondness for sparse textures, evident in such disparate works as Mozart’s masterly Abendempfindung k523 or Das Lied der Trennung k519. Although the former – Mozart’s only through-composed song – displays a wider-ranging tonal scheme than most lieder from the century, and the latter an inventive modified strophic design with a poignant move from tonic minor to relative major in the antepenultimate strophe, both nonetheless hark back to Hagedorn’s ‘elegant and unaffected Turn of Wit’. The same may be said of the first song cycle, Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, with its carefully worked-out and balanced key scheme and reprise of music from the first song in the concluding sixth. As Kerman has shown convincingly, the cycle is a ‘quiet herald’ of Beethoven’s final style period, one marked in part by simple song and directness of expression. Beethoven’s decision to embrace the lied’s ‘free, flowing, pure, and really natural’ style is even more interesting when placed against the perspective of the genre’s role within German musical thought throughout the greater part of the 18th century. Just as Uz had praised song devoted to ‘the noble simplicity of unadorned expressions’, so too did Christoph Martin Wieland in his widely read Geschichte des Agathon (1766–7) write of ‘music that soothed the passions and gently moved the soul’. Revealingly enough, such music, Wieland reflected, should be marked by the ‘tenderness of virtue and the touching joy of unadorned nature’. In 1781 Reichardt went so far as to claim that the lied is ‘truly that upon which the steadfast artist relies when he begins to suspect his art is on the wrong track’: the musician’s ‘polestar’. How fitting, then, that Beethoven, after a compositionally lean period immediately before An die ferne Geliebte, renewed his dedication to his art by setting to music the modest poem by Aloys Jeitteles, situated within Hagedorn’s ‘blessed nature’, where ‘at the sound of songs all time and space recede’. How fitting, indeed, for as is disclosed in the concluding sixth lied, such song, metaphorically accompanied by the ‘lute’s sweet sound’, springs from ‘a full heart, without the adornments of art’.
Given that it is nowadays unfashionable to view music or any aspect of history in terms of ‘great men’, the time is perhaps at hand to appreciate the 18th-century lied for what it was rather than what it was not, a state of affairs that requires as well a more realistic means of assessment. The creation of musicians who aspired neither to the plaudits of posterity nor to the permanence of a musical canon not then invented, the lied attracted composers who, by and large, were happy to satisfy the era’s appetite for ‘pleasing’ music; ‘pleasing’, a concept according to the Chronik von Berlin for May 1791, ‘which has gained citizenship throughout the realm of thinking beings’. Consequently it is not to the lieder of Mozart or Haydn that one ought necessarily to turn for a true indication of the genre, but rather to the little-known and frequently anonymous contributors of such publications as Angenehme und zärtliche Lieder (Dessau, 1760), the 25 Lieder in Musik gesetzt (1786) by Corona Schröter (which includes the first setting of Goethe’s Der Erlkönig), the Frohe und gesellige Lieder für das Clavier of Carl Gottlob Hausius (1796) or the literally countless collections of social strophic songs published expressly for German freemasons, such as the intriguingly titled Mildheimisches Lieder-Buch von acht hundert lustigen und ernsthaften Gesängen über alle Dinge in der Welt und alle Umstände des mencshlichen Lebens, die man besingen kann (Gotha, 1815), not to mention the work by such a peripatetic figure as J.F.H. Dalberg or the forgotten likes of F.W. Rust or J.F. Christmann. At a time when Mozart’s Don Giovanni could be described in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden of February 1791 as ‘very artificial and overloaded’, the songs in publications or by composers such as these arguably provide a more accurate barometer of musical taste in German-speaking lands during the second half of the 18th century than more ‘elevated’ fare, a point seemingly affirmed by the statement by Türk quoted above.
Pleasant and easy-going, well ordered and imbued with both ‘nature and facility’, it is tempting to view the lied before Schubert as the quintessential music of the age that Kant once referred to as ‘the century of Frederick’ the Great. The genre provided both a yardstick, even a paradigm, against which progress in the natural sciences could be measured and, if need be, the medium of escape from the cares of an increasingly all-too-modern, frenetic world. Here the unchanging simplicity of the music itself, founded on an aesthetic that sought to mirror the ‘touching joy of unadorned nature’, provides the most compelling evidence for this claim. And it explains in part why Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, editor of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, could ask in 1826 ‘has there even been an age more prolific in song than ours?’ It accounts, too, for the growth in the number of song collections published, from a mere 779 issued between 1736 and 1799 to more than 100 a month by the year of Fink’s musing – in other words, from a rate of one collection a month during those 64 years to a hundred times as many by 1826.
In the 19th century the German vernacular song developed into an art form in which musical ideas suggested by words were embodied in the setting of those words for voice and piano, both to provide formal unity and to enhance details; thus in Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade (19 October 1814 – a date usually taken to mark the birth of the German Romantic lied) the image of the spinning wheel in the title evokes the recurrent circling semiquavers of the accompaniment, while the text later suggests (by its exclamation and repetition) the cessation and resumption of the semiquaver figure at the climax of the song. The genre presupposes a renaissance of German lyric verse, the popularity of that verse with composers and public, a consensus that music can derive from words, and a plentiful supply of techniques and devices to express that interrelation.
1. Intellectual, social and musical sources.
5. Wagner, Liszt and Cornelius.
The lied thus defined essentially began with its greatest poet, Goethe. But minor poets like Hölty and Müller and gifted amateurs like Mayrhofer had their importance. The seminal quality of the new verse was not its literary merit but its emotional tone, which blended both higher and lower lyric styles. The former expressed mid-18th-century sentiment in classical metres, in such poems as Klopstock's Die Sommernacht (1776). At the same time Claudius and others of peasant stock were writing simple popular lyrics like Abendlied in rhymed folksong couplets or quatrains. Primitive, national or traditional verse of all kinds and from all lands was a growing influence strongly fostered by Herder (Volkslieder, 1778–9) and a source of resurgent interest in the Ballad. Classical and popular styles, metres and themes are found together in the verses of Hölty (d 1776), who wrote fluently in either style and could also combine the two, as in his anacreontic or elegiac verses. All these styles and forms were practised by Goethe and Schiller, who both added a further dramatic dimension to lyric verse by writing songs for plays (e.g. Faust and Wilhelm Tell).
This lyric renaissance, though multi-faceted, has a discernible central theme: personal, individual feeling is poignantly confronted with and affected by powerful external forces, whether of nature, history or society. The human being and the human condition are typically conceived as isolated yet significant (as in the landscape painting of Caspar David Friedrich). In the words of Charles Rosen (The Romantic Generation, 1996, p.236):
To ennoble both landscape poetry and painting, the late eighteenth century turned to the example of music, pre-eminent as the art of time, and this gave landscape literally a new dimension and allowed the revolutionary conceptions of Nature to be carried out in the arts of painting, prose and poetry. From the poems, the songs of Beethoven and Schubert inherited the new sense of time and found the most striking musical expression for it.
This new poetry, particularly when it pitted the individual against the great outdoors in the manner of Friedrich's landscapes, was both heroic and vulnerable, solitary as well as aspiring to the universal, grandiose at the same time as intimate. The tension generated by these contrasts accerlated the development of the lied, which was intially something small and homely but which gradually acquired a surprisingly protent expressive power disprportionate to its size. A musical form that had been temporal and peripheral became enduring and of central significance in the hands of the right composers; indeed, as Rosen (op. cit) has pointed out, it took on a timeless quality, seemingly to contain traces of both past and present, as well as pointed to the future. The abandoned fragment and the mysterious understatement, the very stuff of Romanitc poetry, could be ideally amplified and elucidated through musical means; as the 19th century progressed, German writers (Novalis, Hölderlin, the Schlegel brothers, Heine, Müller, Mörike, Kerner) ploughed the depths of neurotic intrspection in verse, and composers followed in their footstpes reaping a musical harvest of unprecedented riches. It was fortunate, and not entirely fortuitous, that German poetry found its natural counterpart in the increasingly sophisticated musical language available to contemporary German-speaking composers. (it is significant that such great poets as Keats and Byron were to find no comparable musical echo among their English contemporaries.) The Protean and far-reaching implications were clear: Romantic lyrics could be adapted to the expression of national and social aspirations as well as the traditional subjects of lyric verse, both religious and secular. It made a particular appeal to the rapidly expanding German-speaking educated classes, whose feelings it embodied, and to whom the cultural journals and almanaks of the time, where much of the new poetry was published, were specifically addressed. A middle class was well placed to appreciate not only the new personal and emotional content of this poetry but also its stylistic blend of elevated courtly style with popular lyric.
The Romantic lied directly mirrored these literary developments by combining the styles and themes of opera, cantata or oratorio with those of folk or traditional song, and reducing the result to terms of voice and keyboard. The poetry of individual feelings could thus ideally be expressed by one person who might, in theory at least, be poet, composer, singer and accompanist simultaneously. The piano (from about 1790 the titles of songbooks refer to ‘Fortepiano’ rather than ‘Klavier’) had so evolved that it could render orchestral sound-effects in addition to the homelier lilt or strumming of the fiddle or guitar. Thus string tremolandos were reproduced at the keyboard to symbolize the sights and sounds of nature, from thunder and lightning to brooks and zephyrs, symbols that could then be used as images of human feeling in the lyric mode. Recitative and arioso could be enriched by the simpler movement and structure of popular song melody and the directness of its syllabic word-setting, and these, too, could in turn be used as symbols of emotional immediacy.
Yet the new art lay dormant for some decades. The intellectual climate was unpropitious to further growth, which though fostered by the popularity of poetry was retarded by the denial of equal rights to music. Many 18th-century songs were entitled simply ‘Gedichte’ for voice and piano. Gluck's Oden und Lieder beim Klavier zu singen in Musik gesetzt exemplify his famous dictum (preface to Alceste, 1769) that music in mixed forms was ancillary to poetic expression. This doctrine, evidently unconducive to the development of the lied as an independent art form, was warmly espoused by the north German songwriters J.F. Reichardt, J.A.P. Schulz and C.F. Zelter, as well as the renowned Swabian ballad composer J.R. Zumsteeg, and Conradin Kreutzer who was active largely in Vienna.
They were all composers of opera or Singspiele, and imported the expressive devices of those forms into their songs. But as Gluckians they did so only sparingly and with restraint. Not surprisingly, this attitude was approved by Goethe, whose texts they often set. But he knew instinctively that a new art was about to be born, remarking in a letter to Zelter (21 December 1809) that no lyric poem was really complete until it had been set to music. ‘But then something unique happens. Only then is the poetic inspiration, whether nascent or fixed, sublimated (or rather fused) into the free and beautiful element of sensory experience. Then we think and feel at the same time, and are enraptured thereby.’
The process had been anticipated by Mozart in Das Veilchen k476 (Goethe) and Abendempfindung k523 (anon.). Each poem prefigured aspects of Romantic individualism; each setting is musically varied yet unified, in response to the poetic mood, by the use of vocal recitative and keyboard symbolism (light staccato for the tripping shepherdess, sighing 6ths for the evening winds). These and other Mozart songs were published in Vienna in 1789, and hence were readily available to Schubert, who used analogous motifs (staccato in the pastoral Erntelied, wind-effects in Abendbilder, Der Lindenbaum etc.).
Another precursor was Beethoven, who can plausibly be claimed to have created the lied. Although his songs remain in the 18th-century tradition of self-effacing enhancement of the words, his inventive genius often restored the balance, partly by the detail of his illustrative writing (for example, not just birdsong but nightingales, larks, doves and quails) but also by the variety and imagination of his more conceptual musical equivalents (from the welling of tears in Worre der Wehmut op.83 to the crushing of fleas in Aus Goethes Faust op.75). Each such motivic usage is integrated into a prevailing unity of musical mood, for example in the song cycle An die ferne Geliebte op.98, where such purely musical elements as folksong melody, harmony, variation form, and cyclic unity are themselves used as expressive devices. A typical example of the conceptual lied-motif would be the repeated chords which for Beethoven the songwriter signify ‘stars’ (Adelaide op.46, bar 33; Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur op.48, bars 19ff; Abendlied unterm gestirnten Himmel woo150, bars 10ff and 44f). This idea has a precursor in Haydn's Creation, at the moment when stars were created.
In these ways Beethoven (and to some extent Haydn, as in The Spirit's Song, a setting of English words) asserted the composer's right to independence, a right further implicit in Beethoven's familiar phrase ‘durchkomponiertes Lied’, that is, a continuous musical structure often superimposed on a strophic poem. In contrast, Weber favoured, both by precept (letter to F. Wieck, 1815) and by example, a consistently 18th-century attitude; form as well as declamation were to derive from the poem, and the music was to forgo autonomy.
It was Schubert who, by fusing the verbal and musical components of the lied, first synthesized in significant quantity the new element predicted by Goethe. His essential apparatus was a mind infinitely receptive to poetry, which he must have read voraciously from early boyhood on. His 660 or so settings (including duets, trios and quartets, as well as songs in Italian) demonstrate familiarity with hundreds of textual sources, including novels and plays as well as poems, and ranging from the complete works of acknowledged literary figures to the sometimes overabitious verses f his friends and, on one occasion at least (Abschied d578), his own heartfelt, if undeniably amateur, efforts. His passionate response to imaginative writing impelled him to bring the musical component of song to a level of expressiveness and unity never since surpassed.
It is arguable that Schubert made no innovation; even the continuous narrative unity of Die schöne Müller in and Winterreise was already inherent in Müller's verses. Even with such a pre-ordained structure, however, the hand of the master is to be discerned in what he chose to leave out or change. For example, in transposing the order of Müller's poems (in Die Nebensonnen and Mut) Schubert infused the closing minutes of Winterreise with a spellbinding intensity which owes almost as much to his literary sensibility as to his musical genius. All Schubert’s infinite variety of styles and forms, melodic lines, modulations and accompaniment figures are essentially the result of responsiveness to poetry. Equally notable is his evident sense of responsibility. His revisions confirm that he was actively seeking to re-create a poem, almost as a duty; he would rewrite, rethink, give up and start again, rather than fail a poem that had pleased him, and his aim was to find an apt expressive device that could also be used as a structural element. Each such device occurs, at least in embryo, in his predecessors, whether the quasi-operatic techniques and popular elements of the north German school or the inspired motivic ideas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. From the former he absorbed the ideas of simplified folklike melody, interpolated recitative, a range of forms from miniature strophic or modified strophic to extended cantatas, and expressive sound-effects. Thus the ‘typically Schubertian’ brooks and rivers that flow so effortlessly through his piano parts took their rise in north Germany. So did the musical metaphors of human motion and gesture: walking or running rhythms; tonic or dominant inflections for question and answer; the moods of storm or calm; the major–minor contrasts for laughter and tears, sunshine and shade; the convivial or melancholy melodies moulded to the shape and stress of the verse. All these abound in Schubert's precursors, notably Zumsteeg, on whose work his own is often closely and deliberately modelled.
Schubert's debt to the musical resources of Zumsteeg's generation is so evident in his earliest surviving song, Hagars Klage, as to suggest a set composition exercise. The music, though manifestly immature, rises fresh from deep springs of feeling about human fate, here a mother's concern for her dying child and a father's inexplicable cruelty to his youngest son, factors which seem to have some resonances in the psyche of the 14-year-old composer and his tempestuous relationship with his own father. (The early songs Der Vatermörder and Leichenfantasie, not to mention Erlkönig, also explore father-son relationships.) Like Schumann (particularly in 1840) and Brahms after him, but unlike the fastidious and secretive Hugo Wolf, there are often telling, if contentious, biographical conclusions to be drawn from Schubert's choice of texts at different points in his career. Although music cannot in itself be autobiographical, it is a unique feature of song that a composer is susceptible, when selecting a text, to poetry that happens to chime with current moods, feelings or predicaments, in the manner of any ordinary reader – indeed, some sort of personal identification may well be needed in order to kindle a musical response. In this context it is unsurprising that the pubescent composer, already fighting with a disapproving father for a measure of musical independence, should have alighted on Hagars Kalge as a first-time model in preference to Zumsteeg's many other ballads; what songs were about mattered to Schubert from the start, and that fact is at the heart of his subsequent greatness. The composer identifies with poet, character, scene and singer and strives to concentrate lyric, dramatic and graphic ideas into an integrated whole. It was this concentration that distilled the whole essence of the Schubertian lied, but the process was a gradual one and took time to master. Long, diffuse ballads or cantatas on Zumsteegian lines continued for some years, as in Die Bürgschaft and Die Erwartung. They seek with varying success to unify disparate elements such as melody, often inset for dramatic purposes to indicate a song within a song (as at ‘Ich singe wie der Vogel singt’ in Der Sänger), recitative, and interpolated descriptive or narrative music (the interludes in Der Taucher or Die Bürgschaft). It is no coincidence, however, that Schubert's earliest masterpieces are settings of shorter and more readily unifiable lyrics on his favourite theme of intense personal concern, whether of a girl for her absent lover (Gretchen am Spinnrade), a father for his doomed son (Erlkönig) or an awestruck observer for the immensities of nature (Meeres Stille). Each is imagined against a background of moods and scenes suitable for quasi-dramatic re-creation in sound. Further, all three poems are by Goethe, whose genius lay in making the universal singable, and these songs were selected by Schubert for earliest publication as reflecting the greatest poet and the most modern spirit of the new age.
They made an instant and intense appeal to an intellectual avant garde, the apostles of Romantic individualism. Thus 300 copies of Erlkönig were sold within 18 months; the correspondence of Schubert's own circle and its adherents (comprising lawyers and civil servants as well as musicians and artists) is full of excited references to new songs; the Schubertiads in his honour were staunchly supported by his numerically few but culturally influential devotees. This professional middle-class audience was the musical segment of the wider public for the poetic renaissance described earlier. The musical components of the songs corresponded to the new poetry of which they were the setting and hence the equivalent: a blend of classical and popular, dramatic and lyric, complex and simple. The music of the palace had united with the music of the people to produce the music of the drawing-room. In the process the focus of artistic attention had shifted from the larger scale to the smaller, and from the plot or scene to the individual. So the musical motive power of each of these songs, and of Schubertian lied in general, comes from a dramatic source condensed into lyric terms. It is opera with orchestra reduced to voice and keyboard, with scenery and costumes thriftily expressed in sound, transported from the theatre to the home, and economically entrusted to one or two artists rather than to a company. And one stylistic source of the keyboard accompaniment effects and motifs in Schubert's songs is the piano scores of opera and oratorio (which may help to explain why Schubert's keyboard writing is sometimes held to be unpianistic). Thus the ominous figure of the night ride in Erlkönig recalls the dungeon scene of Fidelio, while the becalmed semibreves of Meeres Stille have their counterparts in Haydn's Creation. Each such sonorous image is set vibrating by verbal ideas, and the increasing range and resonance of response from these early masterpieces, through Die schöne Müllerin and the Rückert songs (both 1823) to the final year of Winterreise and the Heine settings, is the history of Schubert's development as a songwriter. In addition to obvious onomatopoeic devices and other self-evident equivalences, there are hundreds of deeper, more personal and less readily explicable verbo-musical ideas, corresponding, for example, to springtime, sunlight, evening, starlight, sleep, love, grief, innocence and so on, and occurring in infinitely variable permutation. Songs in which such expressive motifs are embodied represent the apotheosis of Schubert's lieder, whether the linking force is rhythm (Geheimes), harmony (Dass sie hier gewesen), melody (all strophic songs), tonality (Nacht und Träume), variation form (Im Frühling), imitation (Der Leiermann), quasi-impressionism (Die Stadt), or incipient leitmotif used either for dramatic (Der Zwerg) or descriptive ends (the river music of Auf der Donau or the brook music of Die schöne Müllerin). The ‘star’ chords already noted in Beethoven, to take just one instance out of hundreds, can be observed in a wide range of illustrative or structural use, as in Adelaide, Die Gestirne, Der Jüngling auf dem Hügel, Todesmusik, Abendstern, Die Sterne, Der liebliche Stern, Totengräber-Weise, Im Freien and many other songs.
By comparison with those of Schubert, the approximately 375 songs of Carl Loewe lack the dimension of musical independence. Loewe maintained the 18th-century tradition of subordination to words designedly, because he was above all a musical raconteur without the emotional range needed to match the great German lyrics (although his 30 Goethe settings include many of the better-known poems). In search of the narrative ballads that best suited him, he used no fewer than 80 different poets, including many in translation. Loewe ran little risk of allowing over-concentrated dramatic and scenic invention to impede the action, nor, conversely, was he usually content with a strophic repetition that relied overmuch on the poem to provide variety and development. In both respects he improved on his mentor Zumsteeg. Comparison with Shubert shows a very different musical mind at work: Loewe's setting of Goethe's Erlkönig is thought be some enthusiasts to be superior to Schubert's, but it lacks the elemental and visceral power of the more famous song: Loewe eschews the thundeing intensity of horse's hooves in order to achieve his ingratiating depiction of the supernatural. On the other hand, Schubert's Eine altschottische Ballade, his 1828 setting of Herder's translation from Percy's Relinques, seems at first hearing to be undeveloped in comparison to Loewe's melodramatic and famous ballad. Schubert's work has its own terse power however, and greater familiarity with both works does not necessarily confirm a preference for Loewe's setting. Instead of condensed drama or formular narrative Loewe offered a storybook with pictures – expository melody with descriptive accompaniments. His harmony, though mainly monochrome, adds an occasional surprising splash of colour. The vocal line adopts the style appropriate to the reciter of the poem, ranging from monotone (as for the century-long sleep of the hero of Harald op.45) to a free cantilena (in songs about singing, such as Der Nöck op.129). The voice can further be put to illustrative use to suggest a harp (Der Nöck) or a bell (Des Glockentürmers Töchterlein op.112a), as well as by the skilful exploitation of other techniques and styles, including bel canto. Developed preludes and postludes are rare because the piano accompaniments tend to begin and end with the voice, as the narrative form requires. But there are often extended interludes, exploiting particularly the upper register, which are especially effective in illustrating narratives of the supernatural, such as the elves and sprites of Die Heinzelmännchen op.83 or Hochzeitlied op.20. So broad was Loewe's command of expressive vocabulary that any song is likely to offer a thesaurus of such devices; Die verfallene Mühle op.109 is a typical if rarely heard example. But his practice of stringing such effects on the narrative thread of the poem was not conducive to change and development. It is true to say that his earliest songs are his best-known, and probably his best, but there are many treasures to be discovered in the 17-volume complete edition including a surprisingly beautiful Frauenliebe which offers a refreshing alternative to Schumann's celebrated reading of Chamisso's poems. On the other hand, his abundant and continuous invention, and its clear relation to the texts, make Loewe an exemplary if neglected master of the lied, understandably admired by Wolf and Wagner and influential for both. His work still holds the platform, particularly in Germany (it is a brave native English speaker who essays Loewe, whose music often requires a death-defying speed for textual delivery). If at times he seems neglected, his posthumous standing need only be compared with that of the once-celebrated Marshcner, whose 400 songs have utterly disappeared from the repertory.
Mendelssohn is Loewe's antithesis. His approximately 90 songs include no true ballads; indeed, there is rarely any hint of drama, character or action. The music is autonomous in most, and one can readily imagine them arranged as ‘Lieder ohne Worte’ (which may have been the origin of that title). Although Mendelssohn was taught for many years by the doyen of the north German school, Carl Zelter, only the very earliest songs (such as Romanze op.8) show any influence of opera or Singspiel, or any hint of musical subordination to the words. On the contrary, the texts seem almost to have been chosen to be dominated by the music; thus the most frequent of Mendelssohn's 30 poets was his versifying friend Klingemann, with eight settings (as against five by Goethe). Songs and sketches alike suggest that the main aim was formal perfection, normally conceived as strophic with a varied last verse or coda. The piano offers unobtrusive accompaniment in arpeggios or four-part harmony; the tonality is diatonic with occasional altered chords, often diminished 7ths over a bass pedal. But none of these effects seems clearly related to the poems; and in general there are few overt equivalents for verbal ideas, as though the music had no deep roots in language. Yet Mendelssohn was both original and influential, especially on Brahms. His genius for expressive melody, well exemplified by Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (op.34 one of five Heine settings), was manifest from the first. Indeed, publication of his earliest songs in Paris in 1828 may have stimulated the development of the Mélodie there. His aim of formal perfection was both salutary and timely; and there are many German poems of the period for which melodic and formal beauty are in themselves close equivalents. In such settings, where the musical expression relies on vocal lilt and cadence, structural pattern and design – Lenau's An die Entfernte op.71 or Geibel's Der Mond op.86 – Mendelssohn excels. More than a mere footnote to the songwriting achievements of Mendelssohn are the lieder of his sister, whose roughly 300 songs show a considerable creative personality; indeed it is arguable that Fanny Mendelssohn was temperamentally better suited than her brother to explore the passionate and dramatic aspects of the medium.
Mendelssohn's praxis compared with Loewe's suggests that the Schubertian compound of words and music was still unstable and could readily split into its narrative and lyric components, losing some energy in the process. Schumann was well placed to reunite them. Like Mendelssohn he was a melodist; like Loewe he was literary. But he too began with the 18th-century notion that the music of a song should just express the poem, which implied not only that songwriting was an inferior art (as he at first believed, according to a letter of June 1839 to Hirschbach) but also that the composer had a secondary role – whereas Schumann was by temperament a dominant innovator and leader. Hence perhaps his own tentative début as a songwriter at 18. The following decade as a pianist and composer gave him the necessary foundation of independent musicianship; the emotional crisis of his betrothal to Clara Wieck heightened his receptivity to poetry. The mixture was explosive: his total of 140 songs written in the 12 months beginning February 1840 is unmatched even by Wolf or Schubert for quality and quantity of output in a single year, and it includes most of the best and best-known of his nearly 260 lieder.
These recombine the two basic elements of the lied, the verbal equivalence exploited by Loewe and the musical independence stressed by Mendelssohn, thus revealing Schumann as the true heir of Schubert, with whose quasi-verbal expressive style he had always felt the deepest affinity (according to passages in the Jugendbriefe and Tagebücher) and whose immense legacy of songs was increasingly available for study throughout the 1830s. Schumann had complete command of the musical metaphor exploited by Schubert. In particular, his introduction of contrasting sections in related keys (such as the mediant minor) without genuine modulation yielded new and subtle contrasts. But his personal innovation was a new independence, to the point of dominance, in the piano part. The paradigm of a Schumann song is a lyric piano piece, the melody of which is shared by a voice. As Mendelssohn played songs on the piano and called them Lieder ohne Worte, so Schumann sang piano pieces and turned them back into lieder. Thus the preludes and postludes to his songs tend to be self-expressive solos rather than merely illustrative as were Loewe's.
This piano style, together with Schumann's literary leanings and his personal feelings, led him to write love songs in groups or cycles arranged by poet, often with a deliberately unified tonality. It seems as though Schumann understood better than anyone before him that ‘the song cycle is the embodiment of the Romantic ideal: to find – or create – a natural unity out of a collection of different objects without compormising the independence or the disparity of each member … the large form must appear to grow directly from the smaller forms’ (Rosen, op. cit., 212). Heine (Dichterliebe op.48 and Liederkreis op.24) and Eichendorff (Liederkreis op.39), both master lyricists of intense and changing moods, were Schumann's favourite poets in early 1840, with 41 and 14 settings respectively. Later in the same year his songwriting became more objective, beginning with the 16 Chamisso songs, including Frauenliebe und -leben, lyrics that reflected his lifelong social concern.
Schumann's second songwriting phase began with the Rückert and Goethe songs of 1849. His harmonic language had become more intensely chromatic, and the consequent absence of diatonic tensions and contrasts meant than a new principle of organization was needed. In the Wielfried von der Neun songs of 1850 Schumann sought a solution through use of the short adaptable motif, already adumbrated by Schubert and Loewe, which could be changed and developed to match the changing thoughts of the verses; but his increasing illness probably inhibited his further development of such ideas, which later became the province of Wagner in opera and of Wolf in the lied. The extent to which the songwriting of Schumann's later years represented the deliberation of illness rather than a consciously adopted new style remains controversial. Some of his later lieder, once almost universally thought to be ineffective and rambling, found increasing favour with performers and critics in the late 20th century, alongside many other non-vocal works of the final period. Moreover censensus now seems to be that Schumann, even if his powers were weakened by illness, possessed talent superior to that of most of his songwriting contemporaries of unimpaired health. Another important developement in Schumann studies has been emergence of Clara Schumann as a prolific and significant composer, and the subject of a spate of biographichal study and re-evaluation. If she is not the equal of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel as a song composer, it is probably because the lied interested her less than instrumental forms. Certainly the study of Schumann's songs would have been easier if Clara had made an annotated performing edition fo his lieder, which she regularly accompanied; unfortunately, many of their secrets (particularly as regards tempos) died with her and Brahms. Schumann himself acknowledged Clara's influence by publishing some three of her songs as part of their joint op.37 (1840), a cycle from Rückert's Liebesfrühling which celebrated nuptial bliss. Mendelssohn had led the way with this kind of family collaboration 12 years earlier in his songs opp.8 and 9, in which six of the 24 songs are by his sister Fanny.
With Schumann songwriting was conscious, even cerebral; he was the first theorist of the lied, which he described as the only genre in which significant progress had been made since Beethoven (NZM, xix, 1843, pp.34–5). This he attributed to the rise of a new school of lyric poets – Eichendorff and Rückert, Heine and Uhland – whose intensity of emotion and imagery had been embodied in a new musical style. As example he chose the op.1 of Robert Franz, himself a notable theorist of the lied as well as a practitioner with about 280 songs. For Franz, musical expression of poetry in the 18th-century tradition was a sine qua non. He was explicit, too, about his aims and methods: ‘In my songs the accompaniment depicts the situation described in the text, while the melody embodies the awareness of that situation’. He claimed that in addition to all the techniques developed by previous songwriters he (and he alone) had deliberately sought to draw on the resources of Bach and Handel, the Protestant chorale, and traditional folksong; and it is true that Franz included modal as well as chromatic harmony.
His own invention, however, especially of melody, was not quite abundant enough to give his songs the musical autonomy characteristic of the best 19th-century lieder, so that his work seems old-fashioned by comparison with that of his contemporaries. As in Mendelssohn's songs, a deliberate limitation of scope resulted in the absence of dramatic or narrative songs. The piano parts are unobtrusive to a fault, and there are few independent preludes or postludes because the musical material is so economically tailored to the poem. Mendelssohnian too is Franz's extensive use of the undistinguished verses of a close friend (Osterwald, with 51 settings). There are also certain palpable defects, such as an overreliance on the sequential treatment of melody (as in Für Musik op.10) and an overinsistence on formal perfection, with sometimes contrived effects. The compensation is a Schubertian devotion to lyric verse, typified in his passionate identification with Heine (67 settings, the greatest concentration in the lied repertory). Thus in Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen op.5 the piano part is itself a small-scale song because the poem is about the fashioning of small songs; the illustrative arpeggios at ‘klingend’ are woven into the texture with unobtrusive dexterity; and the slight divergence of vocal and instrumental lines at the end makes the poetic point most tellingly. The craftsmanship is self-effacingly immaculate. Though a minor composer, Franz is a major lied writer, greatly admired by Schumann, Liszt and Wagner; his work is long overdue for reappraisal.
The admiration of both Liszt and Wagner is relevant because they too belong to lied history, even though their creative gestures were generally too wide and sweeping for the lyric form. Their early songs are rather inflated in style, as in Wagner's 1840 setting of Heine's Die Grenadiere in French. Liszt himself later acknowledged this aspect of his own early songs (letter to Josef Dessauer, Franz Liszts Briefe, ed. La Mara, ii, 1893, p.403), and although he stood far nearer than Wagner to the lyric mode (writing 83 songs as against Wagner's 20), he was not a native German speaker, which caused him some uncertainty of style and scansion (see the first versions of Über allen Gipfeln and Die Loreley). In general Liszt's songs are eclectic and experimental, and their inspiration seems to have been social or personal rather than literary, drawing on 44 poets in five languages, with texts ranging from acknowledged masterpieces to trivial salon verses. They are treated with musical unity and fidelity to the text, and they tend to be dominated by local colour or sound-effects. Thus even the late Die drei Zigeuner illustrates the surface rather than the substance of Lenau's poem. Although the listener may protest that the song is musically exciting as a portrait of gypsy music, the poet makes a broader philosophical point which is overwhelmed by Liszt's pianistic illustrations. The much later setting by the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck is to be preferred for its understanding of Lenau's intentions, and the preservation of the poem's shape.
Liszt was well aware of his difficutlies with the form, these problems, as his revisions show. His integrity as well as his development can be measured by comparing various versions of a single song, as, for example, the three settings of Goethe's Mignons Lied (1842–60); his perseverance was comparable only to Schubert's and was equally motivated by genuine devotion. He may also have been fired by Schumann's songwriting, for his own 62 German settings began in 1840 (when the two met) with a Heine poem set by Schumann in that year, I'Am Rhein. Although lack of deep knowledge and response to language may leave Liszt as only a tributary to the lied, he was nevertheless a powerful influence in the mainstream, and through several channels. He was an active propagandist, both in his prose writing (essay on Franz in Gesammelte Schriften, iv, 1855–9) and more generally through his piano transcriptions of lieder (Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Franz as well as his own songs). His keyboard techniques were a source of new effects and sonorities, and his harmonic originality was also seminal (for example, some passages in Die Loreley of 1840 and Ich möchte hingehn of 1847 are strikingly predictive of Tristan). Finally, his gift for simple but refined melody, especially in his late settings of unpretentious texts, enabled Liszt to achieve unusual effects of poignancy and even irony, with altered chords and semitonal clashes (as in Es muss ein Wunderbares sein, 1857), which look forward to the 20th century, in particular to the songs of Richard Strauss.
Wagner's
later songs, notably the five Wesendonk lieder of 1857–8, are also forerunners
of Tristan (avowedly so in the third and fifth, implicitly in the rest).
Despite their voice and piano scoring they were clearly conceived in broad
orchestral terms rather than as re-creations of lyric poetry. In a small,
intimate genre like the lied, it is often the minor master like Franz or Peter
Cornelius who excels. Cornelius, too, was praised by Liszt and Wagner, and for
much of his life he fell directly under their shadow, since he worked for each
in turn as an amanuensis. If they were turbulent tributaries, he was a
mainstream backwater, receiving multiple influences but contributing little.
Yet his very receptivity, to plainsong and Baroque traditions as well as to the
latest developments in harmony and declamation, gave him, like Franz, a
broad-based originality. Cantus firmus (in the Vater unser cycle op.2)
and chorale (in the Weihnachtslieder op.8) appear as unifying devices.
Free tonal fluctuations are used for colour or contrast within a diatonic style
or, as in the juxtaposition of E major within D
major at the word ‘Jubel’ in op.2 no.2, as a
deliberate equivalent for a verbal image. Vocal melodies often linger on one
note or move by step, as though the words were recited. Such devices and many
more, including meaningful motifs, are put at the service of lyric verse.
Alone among lied composers Cornelius was his own favourite poet, with 50 settings of his approximately 100 songs. This was both strength and weakness. Its advantage was that Cornelius had a genuine if slender poetic gift, and as a composer he was well placed to know what musical equivalence was appropriate and how it could be achieved. But the essence of the lied was diluted by using his own poetry: pre-existing familiarity must inevitably lessen the impact of verse on the musical mind. Further, his lyrics themselves tended to be rather wistful and colourless, and hence not especially striking or memorable when wearing their matching music. The repetitive or limited emotional content, form and metre of the verses is often reflected in repeated rhythms and melodies of restricted range. Thus the well-known Ein Ton (op.3 no.3), in which the voice part has but a single note, in its way symbolizes not only the poem but the whole Cornelian approach to the lied. Yet this quietly inward and spiritual work in music and poetry, based on domestic scenes of worship (Weihnachtslieder) or betrothal (Brautlieder, 1856–8) and often grouped, like Schumann's songs, into sequences or cycles, has its own enduring value. Among other works of the so-called New German School, the songs of Adolf Jensen have received little attention, regrettably so since there are his Spanish-inspired settings, for example, a verve and theatrical flair not to be found in Cornelius's deeply felt lieder. Indeed, Jost (MGG2) has identified the lieder of Jensen as the missing stylistic link between the songs of Schumann and Wolf.
In his approximately 200 songs Brahms was both more and less objective than Cornelius. He was neither poet nor connoisseur, and never set any verse of his own, but his choice of texts regularly reflects his own inner moods and needs. Hence his comparative neglect of such major poets as Goethe (only five settings) and Mörike (three) and his devotion to such minor lyricists as Daumer (19) and Groth (11) whose specialities were erotic and nostalgic sentiment respectively. Similarly, Brahms had a predilection for anonymous texts, notably so-called folksongs, whether originally German or translated (46 solo settings, including four from the Bible). Such verses have no identifiable creative personality of their own, and are thus easily adapted for autobiographical purposes. In that sense Brahms departed radically from the 18th-century tradition of re-creating the poem, but in that sense only. In other respects he was both by temperament and by training the supreme traditionalist. He received perhaps the most thorough grounding of all great lied composers, and was a practised songwriter at an early age: Heimkehr (1851) and Liebestreu (1853) are already mature in their grasp of word-music relations and synthesis. Apart from some essays in the extended Schubertian ballad style, the Magelone-Lieder op.33, almost all Brahms's songs are carefully unified formal structures consciously elaborated from certain basic ideas by a process described by the composer in a discussion with Georg Henschel (M. Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, 1904–14, ii/1, pp.181ff). In his insistence on craftsmanship he reverted to the practice of Mendelssohn, whom he much admired and whose influence is apparent in even the earliest songs. He felt that a strophic poem should be set in verse-repeating forms, and in fact nearly half his own songs are strophic, most of the rest being simple ternary forms. Even Brahms's expressive devices are academic and formular. Like Franz and Cornelius, Brahms had assimilated the forms and techniques of early music, including the modality of folksong (Sonntag) and the four-part texture of chorale (Ich schell mein Horn), together with such devices as augmentation (Mein wundes Herz), inversion and contrary motion (Vier ernste Gesänge). Like Schubert, of whose songs he was collector and orchestrator as well as general devotee, Brahms preferred a song texture of melody plus bass, and indeed he advocated this approach not only as a procedure but as a criterion. The essential Brahms song model is the instrumental duo, the violin or clarinet sonata, whence the typical long-breathed melodies (Erinnerung), some of which are embodied in the violin sonatas (for example, Regenlied in the finale of op.78).
Brahms's song melodies rarely have purely vocal inflections, and thus it is rare in Brahms to find a syllable prolonged or shifted in response to its poetic significance or proper scansion. Similarly, the use of harmonic or textural colouring for analogous reasons is as rare in Brahms as it is common in Schubert or Wolf. The tonal schemes are usually long-range, much as in instrumental forms. Though often complex, the piano parts are essentially integrated with or subordinate to the vocal lines, rather than being dominant or independent. They are mainly accompaniment figurations (arpeggios or broken chords) altered and disguised; textural and rhythmic variety are cultivated as deliberately yet unobtrusively in the songs as in the duo sonatas.
Against this background Brahms's expressive vocabulary tends to sound so purely musical that its quasi-verbal significance may not be readily apparent. Thus the favourite hemiolas used at cadence points had for Brahms the idea of a calming and broadening finality, as of a river reaching the sea (Auf dem See) or, more metaphorically, eternal love (Von ewiger Liebe). His other motivic elements tend to be similarly unobtrusive and predictably related to personal feeling rather than to the poem as such; thus the descending octaves that signify death in Auf dem Kirchhofe and Ich wandte michare almost incongruous in Feldeinsamkeit. This autobiographical element gives Brahms's lieder a special and unique development over 40 years of personal and musical experience, with heights of nostalgia and longing scaled by no other songwriter, culminating in the Vier ernste Gesänge of 1896.
Hugo Wolf represented the opposite end of the spectrum of lied composition; hence, no doubt, his fanatical anti-Brahmsian, pro-Wagnerian, stance as a critic. His procedures in his own 300 songs were intuitive and poetry-orientated. As an originator rather than a traditionalist he had to create his own models by assimilating the wide variety of vocal and keyboard techniques and devices needed to express the deep emotive content of verse. In one sense this involved a return to the 18th-century concept of poetic dominance; like Schumann, Wolf published songbooks devoted to particular poets (Mörike, Goethe, Eichendorff) under the title ‘Gedichte von …’. Far more vital, however, were the 19th-century metamorphoses of poetic elements into musical substance. Wolf was no theorist, but his descriptions of the word-music relation instinctively drew on metaphors of organic unity and symbiosis: music absorbs and thrives on the essence of poetry like a child on milk, or a vampire on blood. These similes are pertinent to Wolf's own creative function. From the first he battened on poetry and language, absorbing their rhythms, overtones and cadences. In several ways his development as a songwriter is reminiscent of Schumann's career. Like Schumann, he acquired relevant linguistic disciplines through his years as a critic. By composing in all forms he gradually accumulated a personal compendium of expressive device designed to subserve compositional ends which – again like Schumann's – were essentially associated with words and ideas. The parallel is completed by Wolf's choice of texts (the early Heine and Chamisso settings strongly under the Schumann influence, later independent treatments of translations from the Spanish) and most spectacularly by Wolf's delayed and Schumannesque outburst of concentrated songwriting in 1888 – as if the word-music hybrid compensated for its slow germination and growth by a sudden and profuse flowering.
The basic Wolf song style is keyboard writing enriched by vocal and instrumental counterpoint. As with Franz, Wolf's years of training and practice in choral music yielded a four-part piano texture that could be used expressively in its own right for religious songs (Gebet) and also serve as background material on which to embroider expressive motifs. In the depiction of individual emotion (as distinct from the re-creation of great poetry) towards which Wolf evolved in the Spanish, Italian and Michelangelo songs, the four parts can become so independent as to suggest string quartet writing (Wohl kenn ich Euren Stand). Such linear thinking also yields a variety of counterpoints for expressive purposes, like the duet between voice and piano in Lied eines Verliebten, or within the piano part itself in the postlude to Fühlt meine Seele (the latter a frequent image in the love songs generally). Wolf’s keyboard style is related to that of the contemporary piano reductions of Wagner operas by Klindworth and others, including such masters of expressive techniques as Liszt and Rubinstein. His own pianistic prowess disposed him to add bravura illustrative interludes (Die Geister am Mummelsee) like those found in Loewe, and to write songs whose piano parts are in effect independent solos, as so often in Schumann. To this basic concept Wolf often added a voice part that was not only itself independent, as in Brahms, but was also moulded to the words in their every inflection, whether of sound or sense; Auf dem grünen Balkon is an example. This characteristic fluidity of melodic line is wholly Wolfian, differing from its Wagnerian equivalent as poetry recitation differs from stage declamation. Thus, the sustained notes Wagner gave Isolde in Tristan (Act 1 scene iii) express the feeling of the character, while the same effect in Wolf's Die ihr schwebet expresses the beauty of the individual word ‘geflügelt’. The same distinction applies to Wolf's use of the extended harmonic language of Wagner and Liszt: for Wolf harmonic complexity expressed the symbolic connotations of poetry. Wolf regarded the development of his own detailed motivic language as his most significant contribution; it is a language that varies, in ways too detailed to summarize, from the illustration of a single word (such as ‘traurig’, in Alles endet, with a deliberately altered minor chord) to the development and contrast of motifs throughout a whole song (Auf einer Wanderung). It includes local colour effects, instrumental imitations and a Debussian sensitivity to the placing and spacing of chords and notes. It offers musical equivalents not only for the subject matter of poetry but also for its technical devices such as dialogue and irony. All this is further enhanced by the extremes of his emotional range – hilarity and desperation, comedy and tragedy. Finally he added a new dramatic dimension within the lyric frame, for his songs encompass dance and incidental music as well as lighting, costume and scenery. The Wolfian lied thus continued the Schubertian tradition, culminating in a complete theatre of the mind, a Gesamtkunstwerk for voice and piano.
Wolf's creative maturity was perhaps too brief to permit radical change or development; the four-part textures of the Italian songs, for example, are already outlined in the Mörike volume. But there is a discernible trend: the dramatic or theatrical element became more rarefied, more generalized. The Spanish songs, and more particularly the Italian, are a musical comédie humaine. Social life is conceived as a stage, with ordinary men and women the players. In this respect the Romantic lied ended as it had begun, with individual concern set against a broader social background as its principal theme. But the element of conflict had evaporated. Neither nature nor society was conceived as puzzling or hostile in the Wolfian lied. Rather, in the poems Wolf chose, the human heart and mind increasingly engender their own delight and despair, without reference to an external cause. Increasingly, too, Wolf turned to translations for his texts, and not to original German verse (as Brahms had similarly had recourse to the Bible in German translation). The end of the century seems to signal an end of the German poetic renaissance, and hence a decline in the power of the lied.
The same may apply to audiences. The Schubert song had become accredited and established; Schumann and his successors, especially Brahms, had come to command a wide public for their songs. But Wolf was offering a new genre. Just as Schubert had reduced Mozart and Beethoven operas and Haydn oratorios to the miniature domestic frame, so Wolf adopted Wagner. That allegiance and that idiom imposed difficulties of appreciation, further restricting the appeal of an arct already limited to the poetry lovers among music lovers. So Wolf’s work took longer to gain ground and find adherents. As before, dissemination of the new art was through friends and admirers and their immediate circle. The Wolf-Verein in Vienna corresponded to the Schubertiads of 70 years earlier, but with fewer active members (a relation that persists in posterity). It is as if the springs that had powered the early years of the lied had, for whatever reason, relaxed. An art of strong direct expressiveness culminated in an art of refinement, nuance, subtlety, and perfection within limitations.
The high road had narrowed and arguably reached an impasse. So had some earlier byways, such as accompanied recitation, despite one example from Schubert (Abschied d829), three from Schumann (e.g. Die Flüchtlinge) and six from Liszt (e.g. Lenore). A much more rewarding development was the addition of vocal lines, as in the duets and partsongs with or without accompaniment written by all the major masters of the lied, and still, despite neglect, an essential aspect of their art. But most significant of all was the addition of extra instruments. Schubert had used instrumental obbligato for quasi-verbal effect (e.g. the pastoral sound of the clarinet in Der Hirt auf dem Felsen). Schumann orchestrated his song Tragödie, presumably in order to enhance its dramatic content. Liszt's song orchestrations and Wagner's Wesendonk lieder pointed clearly along that road; so, less demonstratively, did Brahms's songs with viola obbligato, op.91. A crucial stage was reached with Wolf's 20 orchestral versions, including one (Der Feuerreiter) for chorus instead of solo. But these new departures meant a farewell to the lied as here considered, namely as a musical expression of the poetry of individual or social concern within the framework of domestic music-making. At the same time, poetry and its musical setting were losing their power to unify and stimulate any special segment of European society, German or other. The hegemony of the lied was in decline.
The lied was essentially a 19th-century genre, and its history in the 20th century is that of a brief and rapid continued development followed by a sudden decline. Schoenberg and Strauss, to take two representative composers, both wrote many lieder before 1918 and few thereafter: Schoenberg's opp.1–22 (1897–1916) include 45 lieder, his subsequent works only three. The reasons for this falling of interest have certainly as much to do with public tastes and requirements as with compositional techniques and aesthetics. Hindemith, the 20th-century composer of practical music par excellence, recognized that there was little call for lieder from the amateurs of his time. In general, the lied since World War I has been the province of specialist composers (Kilpinen, Schoeck, Reutter), or else it has been cultivated to meet commissions from those few lieder artists interested in the 20th-century repertory (notably Fischer-Dieskau in the 1960s and 70s).
Before World War I the genre was flourishing, even if many lied composers were in thrall to the examples of Brahms and Wolf. Reger was proving himself the heir of Brahms, although he was not a naturally lyrical musician and his lieder suffer more than his instrumental works from clogged counterpoint and a resurrection of Baroque devices and attitudes. Strauss, on the other hand, was cultivating a dramatic, declamatory style, with a free use of melisma and opulent accompaniments; his allegiances were to Wolf, Wagner and Liszt. The possibility of a novel departure in the lied was offered by the new symbolist poetry, concentrating on the significant moment rather than on narrative, and in particular by the work of Richard Dehmel. Dehmel's poems were set by Reger and Strauss around the turn of the century, and also by Schoenberg (in opp.2, 3 and 6, 1899–1905), who remarked in a letter to the poet that his verses had helped him ‘to find a new tone in the lyrical mood’. This ‘new tone’ involved a floating harmonic stasis and an exquisiteness of texture, a sumptuous clarity illuminating the instant, and it contrasts with that of the rhetorical monologue lieder which were Strauss’s great strength and which were being composed by Schoenberg at the same time. It is to be found most clearly and purely in the Dehmel settings of Schoenberg and his pupil Webern (Fünf Dehmel Lieder, 1906–8).
If a modern poet was thus encouraging composers to press forward the expressive possibilities of the lied, another contemporary, Mahler, had already found his stimulus in the quasi-folk poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. In fact, the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1883–5), to his own words, had displayed his mature lied style before he had composed his first settings from that collection, but it was there that he found the qualities – observation of nature, religious feeling and a Romantic sense of apartness, all expressed without selfconsciousness – which most appealed to him as a song composer in the 1890s. Where others found new subject matter for the lied in symbolist verse, Mahler took up the old Romantic themes, but presented them with a new nakedness of expression. The set of Lieder aus ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ was conceived with orchestral accompaniment, as were the later settings of Rückert (the cycle Kindertotenlieder and five other songs, 1901–4) and Hans Bethge's Chinese translations (the symphony–song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, 1908–9), for only with a full and sensitively used instrumental ensemble could Mahler bring to his texts the weight, exactitude and complexity of response that made possible the extremely subjective character of his lieder. With Mahler the lied was taken from the drawing-room or recital platform to the concert hall: it was no longer a polite genre.
Mahler's favouring of the orchestra, as well as his choice of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Die chinesische Flöte, was not without effect on his contemporaries. Strauss was least influenced, for he had established both his song style and his orchestral brilliance before 1890; his lieder, even – or perhaps especially – those with orchestra, remained more comfortable, smoother and richer than those of Mahler. Schoenberg, however, produced a quite Mahlerian work in his Sechs Orchesterlieder op.8 (1903–5), two of which are to Wunderhorn poems, and he developed the Mahlerian orchestra of varied chamber ensembles to a culmination in the Vier Lieder op.22 (1913–16). (His other set of orchestral songs, Gurrelieder, 1901–11, is almost an oratorio.) The influence of Mahler is also present in the lieder of Zemlinsky and of Schoenberg’s two principal pupils, particularly in Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder (1905–8, orchestrated 1928) and Webern's Vier Lieder op.13 for voice and small orchestra (1914–18), which include two settings from Die chinesische Flöte. Webern, however, distilled Mahler's style to produce the fine lyricism and urgency that characterize many of his lieder from after World War I as well.
Alongside the influence of Mahler on the Second Viennese School must be placed their continuing interest in new poetry. For Schoenberg and Webern, Dehmel was succeeded by Stefan George, whose still more rarefied images helped bring atonality to birth in Schoenberg's cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten op.15 (1908–9) and Webern's opp.3–4 (1908–9), both for voice and piano. Rilke, Altenberg, Mombert, Trakl and Kraus were all set by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern during the next decade, the intense, visionary and often brief poems fitting well with the qualities of early atonal music, delicate, erratic and adrift.
Strauss has already been mentioned as relatively unaffected by the means and matter introduced by contemporary poets and composers. He was not alone. Medtner wrote lieder in a somewhat Brahmsian manner, and Wolf had a direct follower two decades after his death in Joseph Marx, who even set those poems from Heyse's Italienisches Liederbuch which his model had omitted. Pfitzner, with his conscientious respect for Schumann, Eichendorff and the spirit of German high Romanticism in general, went on composing lieder essentially in the old mould throughout the first four decades of the century, contributing some fine examples to close a rich tradition.
It was perhaps no accident that the lied tradition as Pfitzner might have seen it was also perpetuated after 1918 by two composers from outside the Austro-German territories, the Swiss Othmar Schoeck and the Finn Yrjö Kilpinen; for they were able on occasion, despite their ties with the tradition (Schoeck was a pupil of Reger), to produce something new and distinctive in conventional modes. Their works contrast markedly with the lieder of composers who, in the 1920s, attempted to recapture the 19th-century manner from the perspective of later experiences. Krenek, for example, made such a deliberate effort in his Schubertian Reisebuch aus den oesterreichischen Alpenop.62 (1929), and the cycle has a feeling of irony, of stylistic displacement, which is quite lacking from the lieder of Pfitzner or Schoeck. In general, however, the neo-classical movement had little effect on the lied: most composers associated with it were looking to periods well before the early Romantic. Hindemith's Das Marienleben op.27 (1922–3, controversially revised in 1936–48) is a rare instance of an important song cycle composed on neo-Baroque lines.
Nor did Schoenberg and Berg pay much attention to the lied after World War I. For Schoenberg words had given a framework in the atonal period of opp.15 and 22; the development of 12-note serialism provided once more the means for elaborating independent musical structures, and it was not until 1933 that he returned, for the last time, to song composition with the Drei Lieder op.48. Berg, who had been a compulsive writer of lieder in his youth, produced only one song in his last 20 years. Webern, however, cultivated the lied almost to the exclusion of other genres between 1914 and 1925. Most of his works of this period are accompanied by a small group of instruments, enhancing his nervously mobile and intensely lyrical responses to the texts. The influence of Pierrot lunaire in this (though it is noteworthy that Webern's Zwei Lieder op.8 for voice and eight instruments antedate Schoenberg's work) is particularly clear in the Sechs Lieder op.14 (1917–21), setting Trakl poems for voice, two clarinets and two strings. Hindemith also drew something from Pierrot in his Trakl cycle, Die junge Magd op.23 no.2 (1922) for contralto, flute, clarinet and string quartet.
Pierrot lunaire itself has not been considered here, since its use of Sprechgesang perhaps disqualifies it from classification as a cycle of lieder; but it could be regarded as the tradition's culmination, remaining unique despite imitation, exacerbating the expressive possibilities of both voice and accompaniment. One source of the work, the cabaret song (a genre to which Schoenberg had contributed in 1901), was developed in a quite different direction by the composers associated with Brecht: Weill, Eisler and Dessau. Their lieder, often using popular dance rhythms, tinges of jazz and a dance band instrumentation, were explicitly designed to appeal widely and to encourage activism in the socialist cause. Eisler, a Schoenberg pupil, was the greatest exponent of this style, and notable examples of his work include the Solidaritätslied op.27 (1931) and Das Einheitsfrontlied (1934), both to Brecht texts. The genre originated with the ‘Songspiel’ version of the Brecht-Weill Mahagonny (1927) and persisted after World War II as an important part of musical life in the German Democratic Republic.
In the 1930s, therefore, one might distinguish three categories of lied composition: the mass-directed political style; the direct continuation of the 19th-century tradition by Pfitzner and others, and also by new composers such as Hermann Reutter; and the beginning of an exploration of lyricism on 12-note serial lines. Webern, like Schoenberg and Berg, had turned away from the lied on mastering the new technique, but he returned to it for two final sets with piano accompaniment, opp.23 and 25 (1933–4). During the next 20 years some of the finest lieder were composed by musicians from outside Austria and Germany: Martin in his Sechs Monologe aus ‘Jedermann’ for contralto or baritone with piano or orchestra (1943), Babbitt in his Stramm setting Du for soprano and piano (1951) and Dallapiccola in his Goethe Lieder for female voice and three clarinets (1953).
Writing during the same period, Strauss could reasonably have thought his Vier letzte Lieder (1948) bore their epithet for the genre. Even Henze, with the abundant lyrical gift displayed in so much of his music, contributed only his Fünf neapolitanische Lieder for voice and small orchestra (1956) and a few numbers in Voices for two soloists and chamber ensemble (1973) which might count as lieder. Other composers at that time wrote lieder for particular singers, notably Benjamin Britten and Aribert Reimann for Fischer-Dieskau, but the culture of intimate, personal and national expression that had produced the lied seemed moribund by the 1970s. (The national aspect had been undermined by the gathering of foreign composers to set German poetry, a phenomenon crucial to the history of the lied since 1918.) The writing of lieder was then revived by a new generation of German composers, among whom Wolfgang Rihm has composed several sets, usually on verse conveying emotional extremity to the point of insanity (e.g. Hölderlin-Fragmente, 1976–7; Wölffli-Liederbuch, 1980–81), as if at the end of the tradition could come only mad songs. Berio in some works, notably Coro for chorus and orchestra (1975–6), has explored the lied tradition as part of the larger history of song; his one composition with the title Lied is a recorder piece.
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