In the last third of the eighteenth century Germany blossomed from a marginal participant in European letters to the dynamic center of the movement now called Romanticism – the age that would encompass Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, and Goethe. As the story is almost always told, the German art song begins in the next generation – 19 October 1814, to be exact – when Schubert composes the first of his great Goethe settings, Gretchen am Spinnrade. The logic of this narrative makes the flowering of German poetry, or even of Goethe himself, solely responsible for the emergence of the Lied. Given that there was a flourishing market in books of songs with keyboard accompaniment for domestic use by greater and lesser known composers in the mid-eighteenth century, the conclusion does not do justice to the genre's history. Furthermore, the development of the Lied since the eighteenth century does not follow that of German lyric poetry closely: the historical relation between poetry and song is rather more complex.

Hence to begin this volume with a survey of German poetry is not to assert that the development of poetry drives the genre's development – or vice versa. Goethe is profoundly important for the Lied because he was the most original, most influential, and most representative poet of a period in which poetry and song were closely related and expressions of the same cultural concerns. Rather than ask how poetry results in the Lied or what poetry is best suited to musical treatment, it makes more sense to explore what new or changing cultural attitudes are manifest both in German song and in the poems that composers chose to set. In other words, what made this partnership suddenly thrive and become a major musical genre in the nineteenth century? Because poetry operates with language, it is simpler to chart social and cultural change in poetry than in music. In this fashion – and only in this fashion – can German poetry be understood as a “beginning” for the Lied.

The Lied has a kind of double nature, born of the interaction of poetry and music. This is scarcely an original observation; indeed, it is a truism so familiar that it would not bear repeating if not for its relevance to another sort of double life, one that has far less frequently received consideration: throughout its history, the Lied has existed both as an artistic genre and as a class of commodity, an object for sale in the marketplace. To be sure, this does not by itself set the Lied apart from many other forms of art within capitalist societies – and as we will see, the Lied's existence is closely bound up with a specific phase of capitalist production. That double life, however, is particularly revealing in the case of the Lied, whose status as a genuinely artistic genre long was contested precisely because its status as an all-too-viable commodity appeared to threaten its standing as art. Because of the Lied's location on the border between high art and popular music, a consideration of the ways in which it has circulated can reveal much, not only about the Lied per se, but also about the shifting nature of that border, which is less certain at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it has been since the boundary between high and low came into existence in the minds of the advocates of high art.

“The noble simplicity of song”

Song is such an inborn, seemingly straightforward inclination that it is easy to forget it sometimes has engendered controversy. This especially is the case if the subject is the eighteenth-century Lied. That this is so is something of an anomaly, for the very qualities praised during the genre's heyday are what latter-day critics have most decried: tuneful preeminence, diatonic clarity, strophic design, unaffected simplicity, and directness of appeal. Charles Rosen, a writer who lately has done much to advance understanding of Classical and Romantic music, dispenses with the Lied before Schubert in no uncertain terms: “a despised form, unfit for serious consideration.” The opinion is by no means exceptional. Edward T. Cone, who has written with discernment on Schubert's Lieder, describes those from the century before as so many “tuneful trifles.” For Lawrence Kramer, the achievement of Schubert's predecessors adversely compares with his unrivalled success. “In Schubert's hands the German Lied became the first fully developed genre of Romanticism in music” in contrast to the “anemic chords and arpeggios” filling out the songs of a Reichardt or Zelter. Nor is Kramer the first to suggest that Schubert had to vanquish the lyric efforts of his forerunners. As Eric Sams states in the 1980 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Schubert's song facility was “practically without ancestry.” Rosen makes the point even more emphatically. After Schubert's “first tentative experiments, the principles on which most of his songs are written are almost entirely new; they are related to the Lieder of the past only by negation: they annihilate all that precedes.”

Many song historians might hesitate before presenting C. P. E. Bach (1714–88), Haydn (1732–1809), Mozart (1756–91), or Beethoven (1770–1827) as landmark composers in the development of the German Lied. Some would argue any place for them in such a narrative would depend on their towering achievements in instrumental music or opera, rather than on the value of their songs themselves. These composers’ engagement with song is often taken as a sign of the inclusive nature of their musical ambitions, rather than their interest in the genre for its own sake. In retrospect, Viennese Classicism has become parceled up with the notion of an all-embracing “style” which spread from Italian comic opera to the genres of sacred and instrumental music, a generalization that leaves little room for the Lied. Indeed theories of the Lied, as they emerged through the eighteenth century, demanded a specific stylistic justification from composers, a conscious choice of style based on their individual response to a poetic text. Some theorists reinforced this distinctiveness by denying song composers recourse to instrumental or operatic idioms at all. Yet ideals of stylistic simplicity are less significant perhaps than the broader aesthetic notion that the starting point for a composer's style should be a poem or a poet. For better or for worse, subservience to poetry seems to run counter to the achievements that these four masters of Classicism represent.

“Revolutionary upheaval and conservative retrenchment both move in the same direction”

For those who would concern themselves with music's meaning, the ending of Strauss's Im Abendrot, from his Vier letzte Lieder, prompts any number of questions. Many stem from Eichendorff's text. The poem tells of two individuals walking hand in hand at twilight's glow; the last line asks, “ist dies etwa der Tod?” (is this perhaps death?). Intentionally equivocal – the clause restlessly hinges on the word “etwa” (perhaps) – the poet leaves the matter open-ended. Strauss's music seems less ambiguous. Once the poetical question is sounded, the eighty-four-year-old composer quotes from a work of his written a half century earlier, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration, 1889). A literal echo of Strauss's own past, the gesture provides compelling evidence of a person facing mortality with undiminished faith in the tenets of Romanticism. The song's retrospective sound world, a quality it shares with the three others with which it traditionally is grouped, has incited many to speculate that Strauss intended the set as a farewell to the Lied. For Paul Griffiths, “Strauss could reasonably have thought his Vier letzte Lieder … bore their epithet for the genre.” Or, as Edward F. Kravitt would have it, “Strauss's return late in life to the Lied – when it was of minor importance in the modern world – is further evidence of his conservative nostalgia for things past.” Moreover, “this yearning reminds one also of the past significance of the Lied.” But does Strauss really intend Im Abendrot as a panegyric to an art form that had had its day and expired?

By the time that the fiery, fifteen-year-old Wolf (1860–1903) from the town of Windischgraz in what was then Lower Styria (now Slovenjgradec in Slovenia) arrived in Vienna in 1875 to study at the Conservatory, the Lied had a rich history and an immense repertory, with more songs rolling off the presses each year. The question of how to compose Lieder in an original manner – and originality was a constant desideratum of late Romanticism – when so much German lyric poetry had been colonized many times over was complicated in this instance by a young composer's Wagner-mania. Comparing his predicament to that of a seedling tree trying to grow in the shadow of a mighty oak, the young Wolf struggled to assimilate the music of Schumann and Schubert, Wagner and Liszt, in the formation of “Wölfer's own howl,” as he dubbed his unique compositional voice.

The successful outcome of those struggles was a Lied aesthetic whose true originality we are only beginning to appreciate. In his brief compositional maturity, Wolf made complicated use of Lied traditions in order to forge a style in which late Romanticism's extensions of tonality were applied to nuanced, multivalent interpretations of older poetry. Not for him the poetic avant-garde: there is a revealing anecdote about Wolf reading rhapsodic effusions hot off the press and hopping up and down in rage at the pretentiousness of the poems. Instead, he gravitated to earlier generations of nineteenth-century poets, including three of the century's greatest masters of German lyric poetry: Goethe, Eichendorff, Mörike. Wolf once stated defiantly – he was challenging Schubert with this assertion – that certain poems had to await the creation of a post-Wagnerian tonal language before they could find full realization in music

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.

The presence and significance of the nineteenth-century Lied extend well beyond solo vocal settings with piano accompaniment of German poetry. Composers often wrote songs for other instrumental partners (such as guitar), in multi-voice combinations (duets, for example), and in languages other than German (as did Grieg in Norwegian and Dvořák in Czech). A broad definition of the Lied therefore must take into account the diversity of instrumentations, vocalists, and languages that fits somewhat uneasily within a category exemplified by works of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, and others. Ultimately, the domain of the Lied stretches even farther, into the non-vocal, into purely instrumental compositions, which is our concern in this chapter.

A song, in short, is not always sung. Prominent examples that frame the period under discussion here begin with Schubert's “Wanderer” Fantasy, “Trout” Piano Quintet, and “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet, and extend through Mahler's so-called Wunderhorn symphonies and beyond. Such well-known instances of songs subsumed into keyboard, chamber, and orchestral compositions represent only a small part of a practice with broad musical, aesthetic, and cultural manifestations and implications. The phenomenon encompasses far more than the works of Schubert and Mahler, and in various ways affects most significant nineteenth-century composers, in Germany and elsewhere.

Was the German Lied, as so often has been claimed, born on 19 October 1814 with the composition of Gretchen am Spinnrade? Did Schubert (1797–1828) – known not so much for composing as he was for a kind of channeling while in “a state of clairvoyance or somnambulism, without any conscious action,” as his close friend the singer Johann Michael Vogl once observed – achieve on that day a “breakthrough in the principle of the Romantic art song”? Did he create the Lied, the most important new musical genre of his century, out of a vacuum, without models and other inspirational sources save that of Goethe's “musical poet's genius”? Is it true, as George Grove insisted as long ago as 1883, that Schubert had only to “read the poem, and the appropriate tune, married to immortal verse (a marriage, in his case, truly made in heaven), rushed into his mind, and to the end of his pen”? Or is there nothing new under the sun: are there models and historical antecedents even for Schubert's songs?

In setting Goethe's famous poem “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” the new, according to many critics, is the celebrated accompaniment that imitates the whirling motion of the spinning wheel and the foot treadle of the spinner, all of which succeeds in placing the listener in the middle of a highly realistic albeit imagined scene. But of course, the accomplishment is not as innovative as many have insisted. The Spinnerliedchen from the winter episode of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons (1801) exploits the very same means. Like Haydn, Schubert was guided by an established topos, or “topic” – one of numerous characteristic musical figures associated with various moods, scenes, and situations long familiar to Western Europe.

In a letter to Johannes Brahms (1833–97) from May 1885, Elisabet von Herzogenberg singled out for special praise the composer's Wir wandelten, Op. 96, No. 2, set to a poem translated from the Magyar by Georg Friedrich Daumer. In so doing, she remarked:

Herzogenberg, wife of the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg and herself a highly talented musician and former student of Brahms, easily could have been writing about any number of the composer's some 200 Lieder. Depth of feeling and seeming spontaneity are prized just as much as calculated craft together with the myriad fine points that go into any Lied. In this, she was in good company, for many of the composer's closest friends and admirers enthusiastically commented on the union of music and words to be found in his vocal music. Of these reactions, one of the most revealing and certainly one of the most concise comes from Brahms's only composition student, Gustav Jenner (1865–1920). First published in 1903, Jenner's remarks emphasize that the music must reflect the structure and meaning of the original poem, and he notes that such relations between the text and music include form, musical and verbal syntax, declamation, word painting, and harmony. In view of the depth of insight Jenner offers, together with his association with Brahms, his discussion will serve as the jumping-off point for the present introduction into the expressive world of the composer's Lieder.

To many observers at mid century, the Lied was in decline. Despite the activity of Liszt, there was a period between early (Schubert and Schumann) and late (Brahms and Wolf) progenitors when no one figure was seen as leading the way. August Reißmann, in 1861, highlighted one of the dilemmas then facing the Lied – whether it had a future beyond the works of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann:

Twelve years later, Reißmann – as edited by Hermann Mendel – is more sanguine about the Lied's prospects, which he sees as “having grown to a broad stream, which also does not lack depth” (although he considers the “destructive frenzy of the innovators” as jeopardizing the fixed form of the Lied). This said, the ever-growing number of Lieder had be come a recurring concern, especially as they were seen as contributing toward the “spreading dilettantism and fashionableness in this compositional genre.” As Wolfgang Joseph von Wasielewski wrote in 1858, “we are by no means poor in lyrical productions in recent times – at least according to quantity. It has almost become a fashion that young composers put forward a volume of Lieder as Opus 1.” Wasielewskiwould prove accurate on both counts. The number of Lieder would swell past the point of counting just as many a composer would attempt to launch a career with an Opus 1 Lied or set of Lieder. Schubert presumably inaugurated the custom in 1821 with his Op. 1 Erlkönig; others who did likewise include Carl Loewe, Fanny Hensel, Robert Franz, Peter Cornelius, and Arnold Schoenberg.

Perhaps the editor of this volume expects a different article from me than the one that I have written. (Some years ago, an English professor of music informed me that asking performers to contribute to books such as this always resulted in headaches.) But one can read elsewhere about the history of Lied reception, and how important singers – Schubert's friends Johann Michael Vogl and Karl Freiherr von Schönstein (1797–1876), Brahms's Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906), Adolphe Nourrit (1802–39) in France – carried forward the torch of an art form that began as a domestic phenomenon and went on to conquer the world. A glance at Ernst Challier's 1885 Großer Lieder-Katalog is enough to show that the Lied was big business at the end of the nineteenth century. Names now long forgotten rub shoulders with the immortals in astonishingly lengthy lists of settings that have vanished without a trace. In consulting Challier we are, after all, scanning a catalogue where great Lieder and pop songs of the time jostle with each other for attention. At this stage the Lied was still all-encompassing, still nominally something for everyone. Once popular music achieved its own momentum and was hived off to its own discographies and discotheques, we are left with the songs that really matter, the songs that survived. But to whom do these songs matter, and how much? In my case, the question is not merely rhetorical: my living as a concert accompanist depends on that continuing interest.