Lied

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Poster for Robert Schumann's cycle of Lieder Dichterliebe (1840) Dichterliebe.png
Poster for Robert Schumann's cycle of Lieder Dichterliebe (1840)

In the Western classical music tradition, Lied ( /liːd,liːt/ LEED, LEET, German: [liːt] ⓘ ; pl. Lieder /ˈliːdər/ LEE-dər, German: [ˈliːdɐ] ⓘ ; lit. 'song') [1] [2] [3] is a term for setting poetry to music. [4] The term is used for any kind of song in German, but among English speakers, lied is often used interchangeably with "art song" to encompass works that the tradition has inspired in other languages as well. The poems that have been made into lieder often center on pastoral themes or themes of romantic love. [5]

Contents

The earliest Lieder date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, and can even refer to Minnesang from as early as the 12th and 13th centuries. [6] It later came especially to refer to settings of Romantic poetry during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the early twentieth century. Examples include settings by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler or Richard Strauss.

Early history

Terminology

For German speakers, the term "Lied" has a long history ranging from twelfth-century troubadour songs ( Minnesang ) via folk songs (Volkslieder) and church hymns (Kirchenlieder) to twentieth-century workers' songs (Arbeiterlieder) or protest songs (Kabarettlieder, Protestlieder).[ citation needed ]

The German word Lied for "song" (cognate with the English dialectal leed) first came into general use in German during the early fifteenth century, largely displacing the earlier word gesang.

Late Middle Ages or Early Renaissance

The poet and composer Oswald von Wolkenstein is sometimes claimed to be the creator of the lied because of his innovations in combining words and music. [7] The late-fourteenth-century composer known as the Monk of Salzburg wrote six two-part lieder which are older still, but Oswald's songs (about half of which actually borrow their music from other composers) far surpass the Monk of Salzburg in both number (about 120 lieder) and quality. [4]

From the 15th century come three large song collections compiled in Germany: the Lochamer Liederbuch , the Schedelsches Liederbuch, and the Glogauer Liederbuch. [8]

Renaissance

The scholar Konrad Celtis (1459–1508), the Arch-Humanist of German Renaissance, taught his students to compose Latin poems using the metric patterns following the model of the Horatian odes. These poems were subsequently "set to simple, four-part music, incorporate the shifting accenmal patterns of the French vers mesurée". The composers of this style included Heinrich Finck, Paul Hofhaimer, and Ludwig Senfl. The style also became imbued into the new German humanist dramas, thus contributing to the development of Protestant hymnody. The style is present in the earliest German secular polyphony collections such as Johann Ott's Mehrstimmiges Deutsches Liederbuch (1534) and Georg Forster's Frische teutsche Liedlein (about 1540 onwards). According to Chester Lee Alwes, Heinrich Isaac's popular song Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen "became the gold standard of the Lied genre". [9]

The mainstream lied tradition in classical music

With the late 18th century, the term "lied" comes to be used with its primary meaning, "art song in the classical music tradition." For information on this tradition in general, see art song.

The musical forces for lieder were standardized as a single singer, accompanied by a piano. The piano had only recently achieved widespread use; and its greater expressive possibilities relative to the earlier harpsichord may have played a role in advancing the composition of lieder. Usually the intended singing voice is a "high voice", in the sense that it is comfortably within the range of a soprano or a tenor. For both, the music as printed is the same; the soprano sings the notes as written, the tenor an octave lower. Lieder were also written for the lower voices: baritone/bass for men, mezzo/alto for women. Lieder are often sung in transposition, either carried out on the spot by a skilled pianist, or through published transposed editions of the music. Transposition is a fully-accepted practice; for instance, the celebrated lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang a great number of songs transposed downward, to match his baritone voice.

The classical-era masters Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all wrote lieder that are performed today, though for each of them the lied was something of a minor genre. It is in the songs of Franz Schubert that the genre came into its own. Schubert found a new balance between words and music, a new expression of the sense of the words in and through the music. In his short life (1797-1828) he wrote over 600 songs. Some examples of widely-sung lieder by Schubert are Erlkönig , Der Tod und das Mädchen ("Death and the Maiden"), Gretchen am Spinnrade , and Der Doppelgänger .

Schubert's work proved an inspiration to other composers, and songwriting in the tradition he established was continued through the 19th century, notably by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. In the 20th century, the tradition was continued, most notably by Gustav Mahler, who often issued his lieder in two versions, one with the traditional piano accompaniment and one for full orchestra. Other 20th century lieder composers include Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky. Arnold Schoenberg, [10] Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Ernst Krenek wrote tonal, atonal, and twelve-tone Lieder.

Texts

Recordings of lieder typically come with booklets or other material giving the original text, so that non-German-speaking listeners can follow the meaning of the verse as they listen; the same is true of concert programs.

The poetry that the classical composers used to write lieder had a variety of sources. Sometime, the lieder composers were personally acquainted with the poets whose verse they set. Several of Haydn's finest songs are to English-language poetry by his friend Anne Hunter, whom he met during his journeys (1791-1793, 1794-1795) to London. Schubert's active circle of friends included poets (mostly not famous today) who provided poems for him to set. At the same time, the lieder composers also read published poetry, seeking verse to set. For this purpose, it was felicitous that the late 18th and the 19th centuries were a golden age for German versification, in which the most celebrated poets were active. For instance: Goethe, Schiller, and Heine all wrote poems that were set by members of the classical-music pantheon. Yet the most successful lieder did not necessarily come from the greatest poets: Friedrich Rückert is not considered among the very best poets of German literature, yet his poetry proved deeply inspirational to Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler.

Concerning the role of the poem in a Lied, the noted Lieder pianist Graham Johnson has written:

All songs have lyrics, but in many cases the tune comes first. With Lieder the opposite is true: the poet is often more than the composer’s equal and the poem is often a great work of art in its own right, known and loved without music.

The composer’s task is to give this poem a heightened existence through their own vision and imaginative skill. The song’s melody and text are the singer’s responsibility, but it is the addition of a piano accompaniment, subtle and sometimes highly complex, that adds harmony and character to the whole. The greatest Lieder composers conjure an astonishing variety of narratives, moods and atmospheres, a synthesis of word and tone employing almost minimalist means that can take the listener’s breath away.

Performers have to be very word-aware when presenting a poem through this musical prism – a great Lied may be first and foremost an unforgettable piece of music, but the poem that breathes within the structure is its life-force. [11]

On rare occasions the lieder composers would write a song not to poetry but to prose. A notable case is Brahms's Four Last Songs (1896), which sets prose passages from Lutheran Bible.

Song cycles

Song cycles (German: Liederzyklus or Liederkreis) are series of Lieder, usually at least half a dozen, tied by a single narrative or theme. The first was Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte . Schubert's two cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise are among his most famous works and are performed quite frequently in modern times. Robert Schumann also wrote distinguished song cycles: Frauen-Liebe und Leben and Dichterliebe ; Mahler is noted for the bleak but powerful Kindertotenlieder , "Songs on the death of children". [12] [13]

Other national traditions

The art-song tradition established by Schubert was pursued by composers outside the German-speaking lands, where the genre naturally would be referred to by a different name (other than in Dutch, where the word for song is also "lied"). The mélodies of Hector Berlioz, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc are French parallels to the German Lied. Modest Mussorgsky's and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Russian songs are also analogous. 20th-century English examples, as represented by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Ivor Gurney, and Gerald Finzi, were often folk-like in idiom.[ citation needed ]

Musical forces

The diminutive Franz Schubert with his tall friend and collaborator Johann Michael Vogl. Caricature drawing by Franz von Schober Karikatur von Johann Michael Voglund Franz Schubert, circa 1825.jpg
The diminutive Franz Schubert with his tall friend and collaborator Johann Michael Vogl. Caricature drawing by Franz von Schober

A key aspect of most lieder (and other art songs) is a relative equality of the two parts: the pianist is not an "accompanist" to the singer, but tackles a part that usually is equally expressive and musically important. This is in a sense natural, since most of the great composers of lieder (e.g. Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler) were outstanding pianists but at best indifferent singers. Some lieder composers developed a special relationship with a singer who habitually first sang their songs: Schubert with Johann Michael Vogl and Benjamin Britten with Peter Pears. Leading singers of lieder today often collaborate with pianists who have strong independent reputations, e.g. Peter Schreier with Andras Schiff, or Ian Bostridge with Leif Ove Andsnes. Yet there are also pianists whose reputation has come primarily from being outstanding collaborators with lieder singers, notably Gerald Moore and Graham Johnson.

The singers themselves form an artistic population that is at least somewhat separated from the singers of opera (which forms a larger venue for classical singing). Thus, for example, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elly Ameling became celebrated for their lieder singing, though they also ventured into opera from time to time. In the other direction, singers whose reputation arose in opera will sometimes venture into lieder recitals and recordings. Generally, lieder singing does not require the great volume needed to fill an opera house, but audiences expect great musical sensitivity, including close attention to the meaning of the lyrics.

The pianist Artur Schnabel, who for decades performed lieder with his wife Therese Behr, opined (in 1945) on the difference in musical culture between opera and lieder:

In public performances Lieder should be presented in intimate halls. Which successful musical performer would relinquish the biggest halls if he can fill them, and obey artistic demands if they involve sacrifices? Opera singers are rarely able to do justice to the Lied. The 'real' Lieder singer is, vice versa, not suitable for opera. [14]

References

  1. ↑ "lied". Collins English Dictionary . HarperCollins . Retrieved 17 November 2020.
  2. ↑ "Lied". Random House Unabridged Dictionary. New York: Random House, Inc. 1997. Retrieved 17 November 2020– via Infoplease.
  3. ↑ "lied". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). HarperCollins.
  4. 1 2 Böker-Heil, Norbert; Fallows, David; Baron, John H.; Parsons, James; Sams, Eric; Johnson, Graham; Griffiths, Paul (2001). "Lied". Grove Music Online (8th ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.16611. ISBN   978-1-56159-263-0.
  5. ↑ "Lieder". GCSE Bitesize. BBC Schools. Archived from the original on 4 March 2015.
  6. ↑ Lied at the Encyclopædia Britannica
  7. ↑ Orrey, Leslie; Warrack, John (2002). "Lied". In Latham, Alison (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-866212-9.
  8. ↑ Arnold, Devis (1984). The New Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford University Press. p. 1065. ISBN   0-19-311316-3.
  9. ↑ Alwes, Chester Lee (2015). A History of Western Choral Music. Oxford University Press. p. 66. ISBN   978-0-19-936193-9 . Retrieved 10 December 2022.
  10. ↑ Gramit, David (2004). "The Circulation of the Lied: The Double Life of an Art Form". In Parsons, James (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Lied. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 311. ISBN   978-0-521-80471-4.
  11. ↑ Johnson's remarks were posted on the website of the University of Melbourne in conjunction with a visit he made there: .
  12. ↑ Deaville, James (2004). "A Multitude of Voices: The Lied at Mid Century". In Parsons, James (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Lied. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 143. ISBN   978-0-521-80471-4.
  13. ↑ Thyme, Jürgen (2005). "Schubert's Strategies in Setting Free Verse". In Lodato, Suzanne M.; Urrows, David Francis (eds.). Word and Music Studies: Essays on Music and the Spoken Word and on Surveying the Field: Essays from the Fourth International Conference in Word and Music Studies, Berlin, 2003. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi. p. 90. ISBN   978-90-420-1897-6.
  14. ↑ Schnabel (1970:50)

Works cited

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