Introduction: why the Lied?

ja m e s pa r s o n s

Of the many kinds of music to which composers from German-speaking

lands have turned their attention, the Lied, or art song, is surely the most
paradoxical. Among those who have fallen under the genre’s spell, it is easy
to discern fervent if not fanatical zealousness. Among those who have not, it
is just as easy to detect bemused bewilderment as to how a musical rendering
of a German poem is capable of inducing so profound a response. Suffice it
to say, the Lied’s fortunes seldom have been static.
The paradoxes do not end here. While Lieder often are thought of as
diminutive, given that a great many last but a short time when compared
to sonatas, concertos, symphonies, or operas, both the history of German
song and the density of expression encountered in many works comprising
the genre belie that characterization. Even in some of the most evanescent
examples, such as Schubert’s Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, the timelessness that
Goethe compresses into his poem combined with the music underscoring
it yield an expansiveness precisely because the song is so short: succinct yes,
diminutive no! At once the most private yet universalizing of art forms, the
Lied, less than a century ago, stood at the forefront of late Romanticism.
Together with orchestral and various types of instrumental music, and later
the music dramas of Richard Wagner, it formed part of a Teutonic musical
juggernaut widely regarded as without peer. On the eve of World War I,
at the peak of the genre’s popularity, song settings of German poetry were
to be encountered almost everywhere. In Berlin alone, between 1900 and
1914, according to a recent tally, public song recitals, or Liederabende, av-
eraged some twenty a week and invariably were sold out.1 The Lied was
equally ubiquitous in private performances, especially those sponsored by
the artistic, intellectual, and economic elite. As one witness has recalled,
“Lieder fitted particularly well into the atmosphere of . . . intimate social
gatherings. The poem was generally read before each setting was sung. One
could easily lose oneself in the mood produced.”2 Yet by 1948, when the
eighty-four-year-old Richard Strauss completed his Vier letzte Lieder, the
status quo had changed considerably, so much so that some have found it
tempting to view Strauss’s four songs as a requiem not only for German song
but also for German culture as cultivated during the past two centuries.
While the supposition behind this last statement is fraught with greater
[3] complexity than most historians would care to admit, there can be little
4 James Parsons

argument that the Lied enjoyed a special place within German musical life.
And yet one wonders: what prompted the keen attentiveness shown this
body of music in seemingly every household of a certain means from the
northern reaches of Schleswig-Holstein to the southern regions of Bavaria
or from Salzburg to Vienna? How long did this passion endure and why is
one informed in most every general music history that it ended, that the Lied
now lives on as a kind of museum rarity within the arena nowadays thought
of as classical music? Although more complete answers to such questions
appear in the chapters that follow, I would be remiss if I did not make
the point here that, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century and
continuing for almost two centuries, poetry played a fundamental role in
individual and collective life. More times than not, verse dressed in song was
an essential means by which this rich body of literature was disseminated.
Goethe succinctly summed up what I have in mind here when he asked:
“Wer sichert den Olymp? vereinet Götter?” (Who secures Olympus, who
unites the gods?); his answer: “Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbart!”
(The power of man, revealed in the poet).3 Mindful of such a pronounce-
ment, it perhaps is easy to understand why a writer from more recent times
has asserted that Germany is “the only country that could have taken seri-
ously Shelley’s famous sweeping dictum that ‘poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.’”4
In contrast to the heights to which it would soar, the Lied began, as
did so much else in an age when communication was not instantaneous,
in the home: the modest pastime of a small but growing middle class. Not
surprisingly, given its initial environment, German song has reflected and
often shaped individual identity. At the same time, it also has played a con-
siderable part in giving voice – literally as it happens – to a burgeoning
German national identity, so much so that by the second half of the nine-
teenth century the Lied had become a kind of sounding manifestation of
cultural hegemony. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that the Lied’s
development parallels that of Germany itself: from a collection of indepen-
dently governed agencies bound only by language in the eighteenth century
to a united country in 1871. Intriguingly, Germany’s saga has provided a
compelling if seldom explicitly acknowledged analogue for those who would
track the Lied’s history: ascent to nationhood, dominion, downfall, splin-
tered afterlife. One can only speculate if, like reunited Germany, the Lied
will experience a comparable revitalization.
If the Lied has traveled a bumpy road during the last fifty years com-
pared to its earlier glory days, its stock shows signs of having risen recently,
thanks in no small measure to the renewed interest in music of the nine-
teenth century – the genre’s heyday. Critical editions of the works of Rossini,
Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi have been launched.5 In the United States, an
5 Introduction: why the Lied?

entire journal devoted to the music of what its editors call “the long century”
recently marked its twenty-fifth anniversary: 19th Century Music (University
of California Press). A great many composers have been reclaimed, at least
partially so, after periods of obscurity. Others, including a fair number
of women, have been made known to a broad public for the first time
after having been consigned to the shadows in their own day, among them
Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann, and Josephine Lang. While such figures
as Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms continue to crowd concert programs,
ways of listening to their music have been tempered by new insights and
interpretations, some of which have been hotly debated.6 Historically in-
formed performance practice – a generation ago the exclusive province of
Baroque and earlier music – now has reached beyond the nineteenth century
to Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps.
Detailed analyses of nineteenth-century music stand alongside studies de-
voted to its social and intellectual backgrounds.7 Moreover, a listener can
embark upon the life-altering adventure of listening to all of the Lieder of
Franz Schubert, thanks to the Lied pianist Graham Johnson, a legion of
singers, and the Hyperion label. Launched in 1987, The Hyperion Schubert
Edition would not attain completion until 1999 with the thirty-seventh CD.
On the heels of this staggering achievement, Johnson is off again, this time
to record all of the Lieder of Clara and Robert Schumann, an endeavor
estimated to take twelve CDs.
Mention of Schubert and the many CDs required to record his more
than 600 Lieder serves as a reminder that this composer’s songs as well as
those who followed after him – Schumann, Brahms, Wolf – constitute for
most people the sum total of the genre’s history. Previous investigations to
some degree have fostered this viewpoint, given that the nineteenth-century
Lied has garnered the lion’s share of scholarly attention. This last statement
is not meant to question the usefulness of such investigations, only to point
out that the complete history of the Lied remains obscured behind the lofty
vistas formed by German song during its most dynamic period. Without
diminishing the value of the scholarly achievement now in place for either
nineteenth-century music or the Lied, in particular, from the same period,
the fact remains that German song existed before the first one completed by
Schubert, dated March 1811 (Hagars Klage, D5), and after the last finished
by Hugo Wolf, on 28 March 1897 (Fühlt meine Seele; he destroyed one fur-
ther song as unworthy). More times than not excoriated by recent criticism,
the eighteenth-century Lied may be shown to have influenced the style shift
from the Baroque to the Classical periods, just as the Lied in the twentieth
century was taken up by those at the forefront of early modernism and also
contributed to a great many of the positive developments in popular music.
Problematic and controversial, such statements seem even more so because
6 James Parsons

both the pre-Schubert and post-Wolf Lied have been underserved by extant
scholarship. Although neither of the subjects can be covered completely in
the chapters devoted to them here, it nonetheless is hoped that the infor-
mation that is provided will spark greater interest in these repertories as
well as additional research and an increased number of performances than
heretofore has been the case.
All of which leads to the aim of this book: to document the Lied in essays
starting with its birth in the 1740s to its presumed demise during World War
II. The first three sections deal with the chronological unfolding of German
song, its early history in the Age of Enlightenment, its halcyon days in the Age
of Romanticism, its supposed fragmentation in the Age of Modernism, while
a fourth addresses issues of reception and performance. Jane Brown leads
off with a consideration of the Lied’s relationship with German poetry from
the generation before Goethe in the eighteenth century to Bertolt Brecht in
the century just past. At one extreme, poets of the earlier age succeeded in
creating verse that mirrored the growing fascination with subjectivity and
self, while Brecht’s texts set to music by such composers as Paul Dessau,
Hanns Eisler, and Kurt Weill primarily were concerned not with individuals
but with classes of people and their various struggles. Given that the Lied
had long stood at the center of German musical life, composers and other
individuals quickly realized that song provided a ready-made medium for
social causes. As the title of a song by Eisler from 1930 proclaims: “Change the
world, it needs it!”8 Predictably enough, supporters of right-wing concerns
looked to song for the very same reasons; this especially is to be seen in some
of the more radical offshoots of the many Wandervogel groups in post World
War I Germany. Walking through the woods or crowded around campfires,
what did German youth do when brought together in companionship in the
first third of the twentieth century? They sang. As the subsequent history of
the twentieth century tragically affirms, what they sang about – the lyrics
with their emphasis on a “reawakening of a genuine Germanness”9 – proves
all too well the power of song as well as its susceptibility to conscription.10
Given that I have indicated that this book covers the entire history of
German song, a logical question is why has its scope been restricted to the
period it has? Does the term Lied not encompass a larger time span, whether
the polyphonic Lied of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries or the Baroque
continuo Lied? Limitations have had to be set and, in so doing, I have opted
for an investigation of “the modern Lied,” a German poem set to music,
generally for solo voice and keyboard – in the nineteenth century almost
always piano – from its self-effacing start in the 1740s to Strauss’s empyrean
paean to this tradition, the previously-mentioned Vier letzte Lieder.11 The
first book in English to cover the full history of German solo song as so
defined, it nevertheless does not treat everything. The American Charles
7 Introduction: why the Lied?

Ives turned on occasion to poetry by Goethe, Heine, and other German

poets, just as did the Norwegian Edvard Grieg. It is my hope that some
future book will include these and other subjects not touched on here.
Following Brown’s poetical overview, I provide a summary of eighteenth-
century Lieder after which Amanda Glauert looks at four focal composers
from the same period. Ruth O. Bingham scrutinizes the ways in which diverse
composers in the first half of the nineteenth century took up the song cycle. A
sub-genre within the Lied’s larger history, the song cycle is important because
of the magnitude and merit of music with which composers responded to its
potential and the way in which it allowed the genre to expand from within.
James Deaville surveys the Lied during the middle of the nineteenth century
and Christopher H. Gibbs examines how German song reached beyond its
own boundaries to influence other musical genres, ranging in time from
Schubert to Mahler. As a glance at the table of contents confirms, most
chapters treat the individual composers who have come to be regarded
as the genre’s most important. Marie-Agnes Dittrich turns to Schubert,
not to endorse yet again his position as the “inventor” of the Lied but
rather to inquire critically into the composer’s ties to his predecessors, the
nature of his achievement, and the ways in which composers after him
responded – or did not – to that legacy. Of these later composers, Jürgen
Thym turns to Schumann and, among other things, reveals that Schumann
tended to underrate the composer of Erlkönig; for Schumann, Beethoven
was the trailblazer when it came to German song. For Lied enthusiasts this
volume also contains a surprise: a chapter on the Lieder of Franz Liszt, a
composer better known for his virtuoso piano works and as the creator of
the symphonic tone poem. As Rena Charnin Mueller argues, the Lied played
a special role within this composer’s compositional career, one previously
overlooked. Heather Platt explores Brahms and his union of words and
music, an examination based in large measure on remarks he made to his
only composition student, Gustav Jenner. Susan Youens assesses the rare
composer known almost exclusively for his contributions to the Lied, Hugo
Wolf. Moving into the twentieth century, James L. Zychowicz takes up two
composers for whom song was equally important – if for different reasons –
Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. I follow with an appraisal of the Lied
to the middle of the twentieth century; although many have claimed that
German song died during this period, the work of such disparate composers
as Reger, Pfitzner, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Eisler, Dessau,
Krenek, and a host of others belies this overly facile supposition. David
Gramit begins Part IV with an outline of the “double circulation” of the
Lied, both as an art form and as a commercial commodity, the latter an
influence largely ignored in previous accounts of the genre but one that
has shaped it just as forcefully as aesthetic considerations. Graham Johnson
8 James Parsons

concludes this section and ends the book at precisely the point I hope many
will take as a point of departure: with performance.

The book’s chronological organization notwithstanding, it may be that the

reader will wish to dip in at whatever point is of immediate interest. With
the exception of my own two chapters, a different author has written each
and there are no overarching threads to be missed should the reader take
chapters out of sequence. In whatever manner this book is utilized, a few
additional words may assist by way of placing the Lied in context. In offering
a précis of what the Lied has meant to composers, performers, and listeners
during the past 250 years, I hope to explain here, at least in part, why the
Lied and indeed all song matters.
Most people who cherish the Lied do so because it is a refuge of inti-
macy. An art form given over to poetry and music, song relies on the bond
between the two. Depending on the period or the composer in question,
one or the other component may dominate; yet it generally is assumed that
the ideal relationship is one where music and words are weighted equally.
Intriguingly, composers have tended to honor such a happy medium in the
breach, the result being that the way in which the two halves come together
frequently strikes the listener as a fascinating balancing act.
However the two ingredients are joined, it generally is agreed that the
resulting union possesses a power exceeding what either words or music
are capable of on their own. At its most epoch-making, the union that lies
at the heart of German song may be expressed thus: “At the sound of songs
all time and space recede.” These words, in English translation, are by Alois
Isidor Jeitteles, an obscure poet and medical student living in Vienna from
about 1815 to 1820, who provided Beethoven with the literary starting point
for his Op. 98 song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (1816). Within Jeitteles’s poem
and Beethoven’s setting, the line quoted here launches the concluding fifth
stanza of the cycle’s first song. Although at first glance they seem hyper-
bolic, it nevertheless is a truism that those devoted to the Lied share a belief
that the coupling of words and music possesses special power if not Or-
phic dynamism. As the eighteen-year-old Schumann put it in 1828, shortly
after having absorbed Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, ballads by Loewe,
and Lieder by Schubert and Marschner, “Song unites the highest, word and
tone.”12 Viewed thus, the twenty-second Lied from Schubert’s 1827 song
cycle Winterreise, Mut, delivers much of the devastating blow it does because
the now delusional wanderer claims he does not hearken to the sentiment of
his own song: “When my heart speaks in my breast I sing loudly and cheer-
fully. I don’t listen to what it says to me, I have no ears.” Stricken with such
affective deafness, Schubert’s lamentable pilgrim loses much more than this:
he is irrefutably helpless. Isolation and madness remain. Schubert’s music
9 Introduction: why the Lied?

matches the clash at the core of Wilhelm Müller’s text: energetic rhythms
proclaim the wayfarer’s resolve to sing, yet the phrase units do not match
the 2/4 meter. The key signature is G minor yet with the appearance of the
voice one hears three measures in tonic minor followed by two measures of
parallel major to which the piano echoes two measures more in the major,
for a total of four. Müller’s protagonist claims one thing and Schubert, sensi-
tive to his internal discord, supports that assertiveness while simultaneously
repudiating it. The message is clear: to be in the presence of song and not
listen is risky business.
One reason why this is so is because song – along with many other modes
of creative expression – came to be thought of as an essential element in
that late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German formulation of self-
cultivation or self-education. Known to Germans as Bildung, the program
it inscribed was one whereby an individual strives for self-actualization
unfettered by guidance or interference from others.13 As Goethe discloses
in what is surely the most celebrated example of the Bildungsroman, or
educational novel, his 1794 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, such a forging of
self depends on the equilibrium of a number of components, be they head
and heart or the earthly here and now and the boundless beyond.14 The
poet Justinus Kerner muses on exactly this in his 1826 poem “Sehnsucht
nach der Waldgegend,” set to music two years later by Schumann as one of
twelve songs forming his Op. 35. Deprived of the “wondrous forest,” the seat
of unspoiled nature and, more importantly, the locus of spiritual harmony
where “in the twilight places bird song and silver stream” inspired “many
a song fresh and bright,” Kerner’s protagonist is now “desolate and mute.”
The songs of yore “seldom stir,” a condition not unlike “the mere half-song
of the bird parted from tree and leaf.”
I daresay all of the authors represented in this volume would agree that
this “Lied sensibility,” as I call it, is palpably to be experienced through-
out the genre’s history even if it is difficult to explain. For the poet Paul
von Heyse, in 1860, and Wolf, in the twenty-third song of his Italienisches
Liederbuch (1890–91, 1896), the empathy for words coupled with music is
expressed in terms of a life force whose source is nature. “What song can
I sing that would be worthy of you?,” Heyse demands. “Where can I find
one? I should like best to dig it deep out of the earth, where no creature has
ever sung it; a song that no man or woman, however old, has ever heard
or sung to this day.” Earlier, the important philosopher Friedrich Theodor
Vischer, in his Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (6 vols., 1846–57),
declared: “Song is something that grows from nature; it can generate itself
from life.”15 Climbing from beneath the rubble of World War II a cen-
tury later, the historian Friedrich Meinecke still could write in 1946 when
he was eighty-four of the reciprocity between poetry – and by extension
10 James Parsons

music – and nature when he sketches the means by which his country might
salvage itself and in part atone for recent horrors. “In every German city
or larger village” Meinecke longs for the establishment of “a community
of like-minded friends of culture” who would take upon themselves “the
task of conveying to the hearts of the listeners through sound the most vital
evidence of the great German spirit, always offering the noblest music and
poetry together.” Aware that so many libraries have been destroyed, the his-
torian argues that it is only in such societies that the young might get “their
first access to the imperishable poems of Hölderlin, Mörike, C. F. Meyer,
and Rilke.” Within these groups, Meinecke longs for nothing less than that
union of words and music that is the Lied: “lyrics of the wonderful sort,
reaching their peak in Goethe and Mörike where the soul becomes nature
and nature the soul.”16 In commenting on Meinecke’s reflection, Peter Gay
has written: “in the impressive literature of German self-accusation, I know
of no passage more instructive and more pathetic than this.”17 Given the
history of German song and verse, I would add that there are few others
more heartrending, unless it is Adorno’s statement that “To write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric.”18
Notwithstanding this German empathy for song, how does one explain
the continuing hold that, say, Schubert’s 1814 Gretchen am Spinnrade exerts
on listeners, many of whom neither read nor speak German and who are
aware of Goethe’s poem only because they are following a text translation?
Is the dominion that Lied composers or their champions claim real? Is a
publication devoted to this music needed? This last question may be an-
swered in the single word “yes” and for at least two reasons: firstly, the sheer
quality and quantity of works making up the Lied and secondly, the role
the genre has played in German culture. The inception of the Lied in the
1740s was premised on matters artistic as well as those relating to nascent
nationalism. Poets and composers alike, weary of what they perceived as the
Baroque predilection for extravagance, found song a ready medium for the
emerging neo-classical aesthetics of naturalism and simplicity. As the liter-
ary critic Johann Christoph Gottsched asserted in his widely-read Versuch
einer critischen Dichtkunst für die Deutschen (1st edn., 1730), not only was
Italian Baroque opera seria artificial and lacking in reason, it was “a pro-
moter of lust and a corrupter of upright morals.”19 In contrast, the more
earnest fare of the Lied, as the influential poet Johann Friedrich von Hage-
dorn noted in 1747, “soothes our earthly life, allays grief, and generously
augments joyfulness.”20 Georg Philipp Telemann had expressed much the
same outlook six years earlier when, in the introduction to a collection of
his own Lieder, he expressed the hope that his songs might spark a “renewed
golden age of notes” worthy of the ancients while also showing “foreigners
how more maturely we [Germans] are able to think than do you!”21 By 1826,
11 Introduction: why the Lied?

Telemann’s dream had become reality. As Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, editor of

the music journal Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, asked in January of that
year: “Has there ever been an age more prolific in song than ours?”22 During
a single month of 1826, German music lovers found themselves inundated
by over a hundred newly-published Lieder. The sum is altogether unheard
of when one knows that during the years from 1736 to 1799 only 779 col-
lections of songs had found their way into print (in other words, from a
rate of one collection per month during the stated sixty-four years to one
hundred times that by 1826). Henceforth, the periodical stated, it would be
possible to review only a small portion of this ever-growing number. As the
century progressed the trend continued, so much so that in 1889 Friedrich
Nietzsche could intone: “The German imagines even God himself singing
Lieder.”23
From this it in part is evident that the Lied stood at the heart of German
musical life beginning slightly before the middle of the eighteenth century
and continuing throughout the nineteenth, and into the twentieth. At its
easy-going best, it worked, as the poet Hagedorn stipulated, to ease earthly
existence, assuage anxiety, and promote human happiness. At its most am-
bitious, like the best Rembrandt painting, the Lied seems to anticipate a
quality of photography – not in the flash-bulb glare or literal reproduc-
tion of a scene but in the assurance that the whole of a character or a mood
can be implied by the revelation of a single poetical-musical instant. At once
frozen into a single frame yet unbounded by music’s ever and ongoing future,
this isolated moment has the power to suggest the continuum of a life from
which it has been discerningly cropped. At their most sharply focused, such
caught moments can do still more, offering links with posterity – a connec-
tion between the then of the Lied in question and the present of those who
would listen.

A few words about some practical concerns may be in order. While it may
appear that English translations of German titles have been capriciously in-
cluded, the policy has been to include them only where the original German
seemed not otherwise obvious. Titles of German poems are given within
quotation marks; those of musical settings of poems in italics. Dates of in-
dividuals figuring in the history of the Lied – especially in chapters relating
to broad time spans – are given on pp. xxxii–xxxv. This seemed prudent
given that some chapters were in danger of becoming weighed down by
long lists of names and dates. It is hoped that the reader will not mind
having to turn the occasional page.