EL LIED ROMÁNTICO

(The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Eric Sams/Graham Johnson)

Lied

IV. The Romantic lied

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.

2. Schubert.

3. Loewe and Mendelssohn.

4. Schumann and Franz.

5. Wagner, Liszt and Cornelius.

6. Brahms.

7. Wolf.

Lied, §IV: The Romantic lied

1. Intellectual, social and musical sources.

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 accelerated the development of the lied, which was
initially something small and homely but which gradually acquired a
surprisingly potent expressive power disproportionate 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 Romantic 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
introspection in verse, and composers followed in their footsteps
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 almanacs 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 Wonne
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 forget autonomy.
Lied, §IV: The Romantic lied

2. Schubert.
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 overambitious verses of 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 Müllerin 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 Klage 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.
Lied, §IV: The Romantic lied
3. Loewe and Mendelssohn.
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.
Lied, §IV: The Romantic lied

4. Schumann and Franz.

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.
Lied, §IV: The Romantic lied
5. Wagner, Liszt and Cornelius.
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.
Lied, §IV: The Romantic lied

6. Brahms.
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.
Lied, §IV: The Romantic lied

7. Wolf.
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.

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