A group of individually complete songs designed as a unit (aptly described in German as ‘zusammenhängender Complex’), for solo or ensemble voices with or without instrumental accompaniment. Song cycles can be difficult to distinguish from song collections, which were frequently presented in a planned design. They may be as brief as two songs (dyad-cycles) or as long as 30 or more (e.g. Schoeck’s Das holde Bescheiden op.62). The term ‘song cycle’ did not enter lexicography until 1865, in Arrey von Dommer’s edition of Koch’s Musikalisches Lexikon, but works definable in retrospect as song cycles existed much earlier. The coherence regarded as a necessary attribute of song cycles may derive from the text (a single poet; a story line; a central theme or topic such as love or nature; a unifying mood; poetic form or genre, as in a sonnet or ballad cycle) or from musical procedures (tonal schemes; recurring motifs, passages or entire songs; formal structures); these features may appear singly or in combination. Because the elements that provide cohesiveness are so many and variable, however, exceptions abound: Schumann’s Myrthen is unusual in setting the words of more than one poet, and Schubert’s songs from The Lady of the Lake are exceptional in mingling choral numbers and solo song.
3. Schumann and other composers.
SUSAN YOUENS
Song cycles are associated primarily with the 19th century (a view arising from and consonant with Romanticism’s claims of uniqueness) but existed much earlier. Groups of madrigals, chansons or partsongs may be considered cyclic in cases where modes, affects, textual topics or recurring musical gestures lend cohesion (as in Schein’s Venus Kräntzlein, 1609, with its exploration of love, or Heinrich Albert’s ‘death-cycle’ Musicalische Kürbs-Hütte, 1645). Song cycles were not uncommon in 17th- and 18th-century Germany and England; they include John Danyel’s Grief Keep Within (1606), James Hook’s The Aviary (c1783) and The Anchoret (c1792) and J.C.F. Bach’s Die Amerikanerin (1776, Gerstenberg). The 20 years surrounding the turn of the 19th century saw an explosion of song publications, including topical cycles such as F.F. Hůrka’s Die Farben (1795, poetry by C. Müchler), Reichardt’s Musikalischer Almanach of 1796, which contains choral settings, solo and chorus settings, and a trio, Kuhlau’s Die Blumen (1805, Scholz), and Weber’s Die Temperamente beim Verluste der Geliebten (1816, F.W. Gubitz). In some cases, a number of brief songs in folksong style (Lieder im Volkston) were strung together to produce a cycle, as in Neefe’s Bilder und Träume (1798). The tradition of the thematic cycle, its formal structure analogous to a ‘spoked wheel’ whose individual parts radiate from a central conception, is evident as late as 1820, in Friedrich Schneider’s Die Jahreszeiten (T. Heinroth). Still other early 19th-century song cycles on patriotic themes, by Weber, F.H. Himmel and others, have historical significance for the light they shed on the Napoleonic wars and as evidence of nationalism in art.
Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1815–16, A. Jeitteles) is the first known cycle with Liederkreis in its title, although his six Gellert songs op.48 (1802) have some claim to be considered a cycle. Beethoven originally designated the Jeitteles set as Sechs Lieder, but perhaps the need to explain six songs with a single final cadence and the desire for novelty as a marketing ploy played a role in the new title. (Liederkranz, Liederzyklus, Liederreihe, Liederstrauss and Liederroman were also used later, the last carrying the clearest implication of a plot or story.) It has been speculated that the ‘lean years’ Beethoven was experiencing at the time of composition resulted in an openness to experimentation and a turn to hybrid genres; it is notable that he composed no further works in this novel format (although he had perhaps been influenced by Ferdinand Ries’s Verschiedene Empfindungen an einem Platze, c1815). The innovations are striking: the key succession is planned and rounded, the beginning melody is recalled at the end, the music is continuous, and the piano is given a more prominent role than in other contemporary song cycles. The poetic text even anticipates the exploration of psychological-emotional states in later works. But this was not a model followed by later composers, who preferred the concept of cycle found in Conradin Kreutzer’s settings of Uhland’s Wanderlieder and Frühlingslieder (c1820), works that Schubert was said to admire.
The narrative poetic cycle did not become common until about 1815; its predecessor was the Liederspiel, pioneered by Reichardt in 1800 with the highly successful Lieb’ und Treue. Himmel’s Alexis und Ida (1814), a pastoral idyll setting 46 poems by C.A. Tiedge, is an early example, lasting three hours or so in performance, its problematic length not helped by the slow-paced narrative. The early 19th-century insistence in German-speaking countries on Einheit (coherence) and Vielfältigkeit or Mannigfältigkeit (variety) in a song cycle is, albeit awkwardly, demonstrated in this work. The transition from Liederspiel to song cycle is embodied in Die schöne Müllerin, which began as a song-play devised by the young members of a Berlin salon at the home of the state councillor Friedrich von Stägemann; Wilhelm Müller took the part of the young miller, the Stägemanns’ daughter was the miller maid, the artist Wilhelm Hensel the hunter, and other members of the circle played subsidiary roles. With the poems completed, the circle asked the pianist and composer Ludwig Berger to set selected poems, the result a cycle entitled Gesänge aus einem gesellschaftlichen Liederspiele ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ op.11. Müller later revised and augmented the poems as a monodrama with all but two numbers (a prologue and epilogue by ‘The Poet’) in the miller lad’s voice; it was that version Schubert set to music, omitting five poems, in 1823. Despite recourse to pairing songs with the same keys (e.g. Des Müllers Blumen and Tränenregen, nos.9–10, in A major), the cycle’s coherence does not depend on a unifying tonal scheme – it ends a tritone away from the beginning key – or thematic recurrence, since musical means of cohesion did not become widespread until later. It is now known that Schubert experimented with song cycle before and after Die schöne Müllerin. His 20 settings of poems by the north German poet Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten in June–October 1815 have been identified as a cycle; there has been speculation that Schubert originally designed the Heine songs as a cycle but then abandoned the idea (see R. Kramer, 19CM, viii, 1984–5, pp.213–25); and it is possible to perform the ten songs to poems from Ernst Schulze’s posthumous Poetisches Tagebuch as a cycle, although they were not published as such.
Song cycles with a plot fall into at least three categories in the 19th century. Die schöne Müllerin epitomizes those with an internally cohesive narrative, as, more problematically, does the setting of Müller’s Die Winterreise (1827); Schubert drew on two textual sources, the first (earlier) one incomplete, the second complete. Winterreise is a psychologically profound study of alienation and melancholia, of Romantic consciousness in disintegration. Neither its tenuous narrative nor its music conforms to later expectations of ‘organic unity’, but its self-sufficient coherence is unquestionable. A second category consists of cycles setting poems or songs extracted from a larger narrative framework such as a novel or play, and therefore without the same degree of narrative coherence as the internal-plot cycles (e.g. Conradin Kreutzer’s and Leopold Lenz’s Faust cycles, each with a different approach to Goethe’s drama, and Bernhard Klein’s posthumous Sieben Gesänge aus den Bildern des Orients und der Frithjofssaga, from an orientalizing poetry anthology by H. Stieglitz and a neo-Norse epic by E. Tegnér). Schubert’s Gesänge nach dem Ossian, published posthumously in 1830, and his Sieben Gesänge (1825) from Scott’s The Lady of the Lake are notable examples of this type, which could be used in various ways: as companions to the literary work, as music for amateur parlour performance, or as a cycle of songs assuming the audience’s knowledge of the external literary context. Eduard Mörike, for example, compiled a supplement with settings by three composers to accompany his novel Maler Nolten in 1832. Among the later distinguished specimens of this type is Brahms’s Romanzen aus Ludwig Tiecks Magelone (1865–9). The third category of narrative is that of the ballad cycle; among Loewe’s many contributions are several tracing the history of the Hohenstaufen dynasty (e.g. Kaiser Karl V op.99 and Gregor auf dem Stein op.38), in which the boundaries between ballads (which tell a story and are multi-sectional) and songs are suggestively blurred (Loewe also composed song cycles, including Bilder des Orients op.10 and Frauenliebe- und Leben op.60).
Such minor composers as Carl Banck responded to the earlier model of Schubert’s two cycles, but it is Schumann’s return to song composition in 1840 that marks a watershed in the history of the song cycle. It was at that point that composers shifted from conveying poetry through vocal mimesis to a focus on poetic interpretation by means of harmony and the structure of the whole, through formal coherence borrowed from instrumental cycles such as is found in Schumann’s 12 Kerner settings op.35, Dichterliebe op.48 (Heine), the two Liederkreise to texts by Heine (op.24) and Eichendorff (op.39) and the Maria Stuart Lieder op.135, as well as smaller cycles. Notable in several of his cycles is Schumann’s way of reordering the poetic material, thus assuming (in part) the role of Dichter. Such musical features as unification by tonal design, recapitulation of passages from earlier songs, and links between songs are prominent, as is the recurring significant use of certain harmonies (the diminished 7th chord in Dichterliebe, for example). Song cycles poured off the presses in German-speaking countries during Schumann’s lifetime and after, including Marschner’s Bilder des Orients opp.90 and 140 (Stieglitz) and Osterlieder eines Musikanten im schlesischen Gebirge op.86 (Hoffman von Fallersleben), Ferdinand Hiller’s Reimer von Bingen and Cornelius’s Brautlieder and Weihnachtslieder; Brahms, more given to ‘collections’ and ‘sets’ than cycles, nonetheless composed the superb Vier ernste Gesänge (1896) near the end of his life (the last song was composed earlier, the first three as a musical memorial to Clara Schumann).
In France, Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (1840–41, T. Gautier) is among the best-known cycles from the earlier half of the century; his Neuf mélodies (Irlande) op.2 (1830) exemplifies the blurring of the distinction between ‘collection’ and ‘cycle’. Later in the century the lied (primarily in the form of translations of Schubert’s songs) began to exert an influence, and cycles became increasingly prevalent; Massenet was among those particularly attracted to the genre with his series of Poèmes (1866–95) and the experimental Expressions lyriques (1913), which includes passages of spoken declamation. Gounod composed only one song cycle, during his extended stay in London: Biondina (1872, G. Zaffira), to Italian, not French, poetry, subsequently influenced Hahn’s cycle Venezia (1901). Fauré’s works belong among the best of the late 19th- and early 20th-century efflorescence of the French song cycle, including La bonne chanson (1894, P. Verlaine), La chanson d’Eve (1906–10, C. Van Lerberghe), Mirages (1919, Brimont) and L’horizon chimérique (1922, J. de La Ville de Mirmont). Other notable cycles include Chausson’s single foray into the genre, Serres chaudes op.24 (Maeterlinck), Koechlin’s Rondels (1890–94, T. de Banville), Roussel’s Odes anacréontiques (1926), and Ravel’s contributions written between 1903 and 1934, including Shéhérazade and the Chansons madécasses. Debussy favoured the three-song format for his sets and cycles: such works as Fêtes galantes (1891, 1904, Verlaine), Chansons de Bilitis (1897–8, P. Louÿs) and Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913) raise interesting issues about the relationships between ‘sets’ and ‘cycles’. Song cycles by Les Six include Poulenc’s Airs chantés (1927–8, J. Moréas), Tel jour, telle nuit (1936–7, P. Eluard) and Calligrammes (1948, G. Apollinaire) and Milhaud’s Catalogue de fleurs (1920, L. Daudet).
In the Russian repertory, Musorgsky’s The Nursery (1870, texts by the composer), Sunless (1874, A. Golenishchev-Kutuzov) and Songs and Dances of Death (1875–7, Golenishchev-Kutuzov) exemplify his mature style of flexible, asymmetrical melody and an idiosyncratic tonal language, masterfully deployed. Dvořák wrote a number of song cycles, between 1865 and 1894, and a remarkable later addition to the repertory from Czechoslovakia is Janáček’s The Diary of One who Disappeared (1917–20, on anonymous Wallachian dialect poems), for tenor, alto, three female voices and piano. Mahler gravitated to cyclical composition almost from the beginning; such works as Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1883–5, texts by Mahler, after Des Knaben Wunderhorn), Kindertotenlieder (1901–4, Rückert) and the song cycle-symphony Das Lied von der Erde (1908–9, H. Bethge, after Chinese poems) are notable for progressive tonality (each of the four wayfarer songs ends in a different key from that in which it began) and other Mahlerian hallmarks including the ‘death-lullabies’ which typically conclude his cycles. Richard Strauss enriched the genre with Mädchenblumen op.22 and, most famously, Vier letzte Lieder (1948); Zemlinsky and Szymanowski also made their mark. The contributions of the Second Viennese School include Schoenberg’s atonal masterpieces Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1908–9, S. George) and Pierrot lunaire (1912, A. Giraud, trans. O.E. Hartleben), as well as various vocal sets and cycles by Webern. Hindemith’s best-known work in the genre is Das Marienleben (1922–3, R.M. Rilke); the composer believed so strongly in musical unification in song cycles that he added a lengthy preface to the revised version (1935–48) explaining how he had achieved greater cyclical unity.
Among other 20th-century song cycles may be mentioned Stravinsky’s French-influenced Three Japanese Lyrics (1912–13) and Bartók’s Village Scenes (1926), as well as works by Vaughan Williams, Britten, Tippett, Copland, Ginastera, Falla and Villa-Lobos; later in the century Boulez (Pli selon pli), Berio (Circles), Foss (Time Cycle) and Crumb (Ancient Voices of Children) contributed works that have secured a place in the repertory. The ‘concept’ album in rock music may also be considered a type of song cycle as defined here; see Album.
J. Mark: ‘The Song Cycle in England: some Early 17th-Century Examples’, MT, lxvi (1925), 325–8
H.M. Mustard: The Lyric Cycle in German Literature (New York, 1946)
D.L. Earl: The Solo Song Cycle in Germany, 1800–1850 (diss., Indiana U., 1952)
E. Zimmermann: Gestaltungsfragen in klassischen und romantischen Liederzyklen (diss., U. of Bonn, 1952)
L.E. Peake: The Song Cycle: a Preliminary Inquiry into the Beginnings of the Romantic Song Cycle and the Nature of an Art Form (diss., Columbia U., 1968)
B. Turchin: Robert Schumann’s Song Cycles in the Context of the Early Nineteenth-Century ‘Liederkreis’ (diss., Columbia U., 1981)
D. Neumeyer: ‘Organic Structure and the Song Cycle: Another Look at Schumann’s Dichterliebe’, Music Theory Spectrum, iv (1982), 92–105
L.E. Peake: ‘The Antecedents of Beethoven’s Liederkreis’, ML, lxiii (1982), 242–60
R. Kramer: ‘Schubert’s Heine’, 19CM, viii (1984–5), 213–25
B. Turchin: ‘Schumann’s Song Cycles: the Cycle within the Song’, 19CM, viii (1984–5), 231–44
P. McCreless: ‘Song Order in the Song Cycle: Schumann’s Liederkreis, op.39’, MAn, v (1986), 5–28
B. Turchin: ‘The Nineteenth-Century Wanderlieder Cycle’, JM, v (1987), 498–525
C. Lewis: ‘Text, Time, and Tonic: Aspects of Patterning in the Romantic Cycle’, Intégral, ii (1988), 37–73
S. Youens: ‘Behind the Scenes: Die schöne Müllerin before Schubert’, 19CM, xv (1991–2), 3–22
S. Youens: Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin (Cambridge, 1992)
R.O. Bingham: The Song Cycle in German-Speaking Countries, 1790–1840: Approaches to a Changing Genre (diss., Cornell U., 1993)
R. Kramer: Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago, 1994)