David Mamet spent part of 1969 in a Chicago real-estate office he has described as “a fly-by-night operation” trying to sell “worthless land to elderly people who couldn't afford it.” He would first apologize for telephoning them at home, then tell them that his company's “international president” was in town en route to New York. This gentleman wanted to meet some of the people who had requested a brochure describing “beautiful home-sites in scenic/historic Arizona/Florida” and so might be interested in investing in them: “Your views on the property would be used to help guide our development and they would, of course, be kept completely confidential.”

Mamet has also said that he was not very good at the job, because he could not help identifying with those he was phoning, but he clearly handed on a fair number of “leads” to salesmen who went to the homes of “prospects” for a “sit,” explaining that the president had been unexpectedly called away to Dallas, Houston, or Paris. Those men were actually selling uncharted sand or swamp but could, he has said, have sold cancer: “They were amazing. They were a force of nature . . . they were people who had spent their whole lives never working for a salary, dependent for their living on their wits, their ability to charm. They sold themselves.”

Not for the first or last time, he went on to draw on his memories for a play. Indeed, all that he set out to do in Glengarry Glen Ross, he has said, “was to write about my experiences in a real-estate office.” That sounds disingenuous, since his own comments on both the play’s content and its language make it clear that he wrote and meant to write something richer and more resonant than a documentary. Yet it helps explain one of the play’s strengths, which is the feeling of authenticity it unerringly transmits. Here is Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman at work in the 1980s: just as vulnerable but even more driven, even more compromised and distorted by the pressures of commerce and the harshness of American society.

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

There is a moment in Vanya on 42nd Street that everyone remembers, though it is not quite the same moment for every spectator. It happens shortly after the quasi-documentary opening sequence of Louis Malle's film, once the stage director André Gregory and his actors have made their way to Manhattan's New Amsterdam Theatre to rehearse Uncle Vanya. Inside, expository conversations about the building and the production suggest that the dialogue has been, if not scripted, at least prompted, creating a curious hybrid of cinéma vérité and theatre that persists as two of the actors, Phoebe Brand and Larry Pine, discuss drinking habits. At some point, probably during this conversation, each spectator will suddenly realize that the play has already begun: there must have been an unnoticed shift from the conversation of the actors to the dialogue of Chekhov's characters, Marina and Dr. Astrov, and the mind momentarily goes into reverse, trying to find the moment when it happened, before picking up the thread of the play again. It is a stunning transition.

No-one is quite sure where the idea came from. It is not, of course, in the adaptation of Chekhov’s play by David Mamet (drawing on a translation by Vlada Chernomordik) that Gregory used for this production; Gregory, credited with the idea by Malle, denies it came from him; Pine thinks it originated with one of his suggestions.

Both elusive and allusive, the title Oleanna is a good introduction to the play's linguistic strategies. It was so bewildering to the first audiences and critics that David Mamet added the epigraph from a folk song he had sung at camp to the published version:

Oleanna was a nineteenth-century utopian community founded by the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull and his wife Anna: thus “Oleanna.”This agricultural community failed because the land it had bought was rocky and infertile, and the settlers had to return to Norway. The application to the failed utopian dream of academia becomes evident as the play unfolds, as does the application of Mamet's second epigraph, from Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, which suggests that children who have never known “a genial mental atmosphere” do not recognize its absence, and are easily prevented from finding it out, “or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.”

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.

American Buffalo is at first glance a simple play about simple men who cannot pull off a simple robbery. The drama unwinds in Don's Resale Shop, located on the South Side of Chicago. The junk shop is littered with odds and ends, many of which are objects from the Great Depression and the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. As the play begins we learn that Don Dubrow has recently sold a coin collector a buffalo-head nickel for $90. Now sensing that this customer not only deceived him but somehow affronted his sense of professional competence, Don sets his sights on stealing back the coin and what he thinks must be the man's valuable coin collection.

Don initially picks his young friend, Bob, for the job. However, as Don and Teach, his associate, orchestrate the robbery plans, Teach argues that they should cut Bob out of the deal, an arrangement on which they agree. As it turns out, the heist never happens. Soon after midnight Bob returns, not with the but a buffalo-head nickel, which, he finally confesses, he simply purchased. After learning that Bob lied about seeing the coin dealer leave his apartment earlier that day, Don seems embarrassed and angry, and the paranoid Teach explodes, viciously attacking the helpless boy and trashing the junk shop. Their collective inability to execute a simple robbery only highlights their insignificance, while the only thing they have left of genuine value – friendship – is, like the American buffalo, pushed to the brink of extinction.

David Mamet has frequently admitted that he was an ineffective actor, even a terrible one. As recently as May 2002, when asked how he could direct something he could not do himself, in this case magician Ricky Jay's 2002 magic show, On the Stem, Mamet responded, “It's not much different from acting. I certainly cannot act, which anybody who has ever seen me attempt it can tell you.” Furthermore, in 1996 he also confessed in Make-Believe Town that he “was a terrible acting student.” Rather than give up the theatre, however, he became first a stage director and then a playwright. Actually, before he tried acting professionally as an adult (he had been a child actor in Chicago and performed at the Hull-House Theatre in the early 1960s) and while a student at Goddard College during the late sixties he wrote several drafts of early plays, including Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Few failed actors have substituted one career track for another - or in Mamet's case, two others - with such stunning success. Ironically, Mamet has often stated that he began writing plays not so that he would become a recognized writer but in order to provide young actors with illustrations for points he was making in his teaching and because his first theatre company, the St. Nicholas, could not afford to pay royalties.

Playwrights became involved in the cinema early in the twentieth century when the new medium was scarcely a decade old, and there are few dramatists who have not been courted by a film industry eager to adapt their work or employ them as screenwriters. At first theatre people condescended to the prestige-seeking movie moguls, and the results were frequently unsatisfactory. Just after the First World War Samuel Goldwyn lured the Nobel Prizewinning Maurice Maeterlinck to Hollywood with unhappy consequences, and he had no greater success with George Bernard Shaw who famously rejected his overtures (“There is only one difference between Mr Goldwyn and me. Whereas he is after art, I am after money”).However, Shaw's fascination with the movies was later to involve him in adapting three of his plays in collaboration with the Romanian charlatan Gabriel Pascal.

David Mamet, born in 1947, three years before Shaw’s death, belongs to a generation that grew up after the cinema and television had decisively replaced the theatre as the dominant forms of public entertainment. His primary commitment may be to the stage, but since the early 1980s he has established a parallel career in the movies matched by no more than a handful of dramatists of comparable distinction. One thinks of Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol in France (both chiefly interested in bringing their plays to the cinema-going public with the least interference); of Robert E. Sherwood in the United States (a distinguished film critic, a recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes for drama, an Oscar-winning screenwriter, a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt); and two British dramatists Mamet admires, Terence Rattigan and Harold Pinter.

In 1974, a play set in part in a singles bar, laced with obscene language and charged with a seemingly frenetic energy, was voted Best Chicago Play. Transferred to Off Off and Off Broadway it picked up an Obie Award. Sexual Perversity in Chicago was not David Mamet's first play, but it did mark the beginning of a career that would astonish in both its range and depth.

The following year American Buffalo opened at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in an “alternative season.” It was well received and opened on Broadway fifteen months later where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It ran for 135 performances, hardly a failure but in the hit or miss world of New York, not a copper-bottomed success either. Nonetheless, in three years he had announced his arrival in unequivocal terms.

David Mamet came as something of a shock, not least because his first public success, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, seemed brutally direct in terms of its language and subject, as did American Buffalo. But it was already clear to many that here was a distinctive talent, albeit one that some critics found difficult to assess, not least because of his characters’ scatological language and fractured syntax, along with the apparent absence, in his plays, of a conventional plot. They praised what they took to be his linguistic naturalism, as though his intent had been to offer an insight into the cultural lower depths while capturing the precise rhythms of contemporary speech (though he did invoke Gorky’s The Lower Depths as being, like a number of his own plays, a study in stasis). That he was highly talented seemed obvious, but what that talent might consist of was altogether less certain.

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.

Speaking in 1977, David Mamet remarked that, “I can't write novels . . . it's just not the form that touches a person . . . The play succeeds by exquisiteness, the novel by brute force, by repetition, by elaboration. It makes a different kind of impression.” By 1994, he had plainly changed his mind, though not entirely. When he turned to the novel he did deploy repetition and elaboration though scarcely brute force. He discovered - what surely he already knew from his voracious reading, particularly of nineteenth-century British and American fiction - that it, too, could succeed by exquisiteness, if we mean by that form and function in alignment, precise moral and linguistic discriminations.

Why reverse himself in the course of those seventeen years? It was, he explained, because “I always wanted to be a writer, and to me a writer was somebody who wrote novels. That’s what a writer was . . . so I figured well . . . if you want to be one, why don’t you try it.”

At the same time, to turn to David Mamet’s fiction is seemingly to enter a different world from his drama. The style, the approach to character and narrative, the pace of the text appear radically at odds with expectations forged by American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed-the-Plow, though there are points of contact in an occasionally fragmented dialogue, a sense of the intransitive nature of relationships.

With the onset of the 1980s, David Mamet was widely considered a powerful, yet controversial voice in contemporary American theatre. The decade would further establish him as a playwright of world stature and also as an extremely prolific artist at home in several artistic genres: drama, poetry, fiction, children's literature, nonfiction, and film. As the decade developed, so he was confirmed as one of the most original and important voices not only of his generation but also in the history of American drama, ranking alongside Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard. It was in the 1980s, too, that the dramatist's reputation began to spread internationally, so that, by the beginning of the next decade, his plays were among the most frequently performed in the Western world, in English or in translation. His fame even extended to Asia, where some of his plays were performed in Japan, South Korea, and China.

The 1980s were also marked by a number of controversies surrounding his dramatic work. These were particularly symptomatic of the disturbing nature of Mamet’s theatre: they had already started in the 1970s with his early succès de scandale, Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), and American Buffalo (1975), and were to continue well into the 1990s, in particular with Oleanna (1992). Mamet’s theatre indeed tends to shock a certain part of the theatregoing audience for four major reasons: its alleged machismo, misogyny, violence (physical and verbal), and the Jewish cultural heritage that he claims for himself, especially in his most recent work.

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.