If one can describe the first half of the nineteenth century as a golden age of Lieder, it is understandable that composers in the century's second half found the inevitable comparisons with that period to be challenging. For once, it was not the long shadow of Beethoven that overawed, given that the feelings of inadequacy he engendered mostly affected instrumental music. As Brahms revealed during the long gestation of his First Symphony, completed in 1876 at the age of forty-three, “never compose a symphony! You have no idea how it feels … when one always hears such a giant marching along behind.” In the area of song, the source of anxiety stemmed from an altogether different source. As Brahms remarked a decade later in 1887,

Brahms himself risked such comparison in his own Lieder, none of which could fairly be described as botched. This aside, there can be little doubt that the second half of the nineteenth century was so influenced by the past that it raises the question of the impact that increasing historicism had on creativity. Such a perspective comes to bear in a chapter devoted to the Lieder of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Richard Strauss (1864–1949), since both composers seem to sum up their historical positions while simultaneously moving beyond them. The young Mahler, in turning to the Lied in the 1880s through the agency of his beloved Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), looks beyond Schubert to some earlier idea of German folk song, just as the elderly Strauss, in his Vier letzte Lieder, with the rubble of World War II around him, invokes a sound world impossible to describe adequately: tempered by the times he had survived, steeped in the traditions of the Romanticism that shaped him, but not truly part of either.