A song cycle (German: Liederkreis or Liederzyklus) is a group, or cycle, of individually complete songs designed to be performed in sequence, as a unit.[1]
The songs are either for solo voice or an ensemble, or rarely a combination of solo songs mingled with choral pieces.[2] The number of songs in a song cycle may be as brief as two songs[3] or as long as 30 or more songs.[1] The term "song cycle" did not enter lexicography until 1865, in Arrey von Dommer's edition of Koch’s Musikalisches Lexikon, but works definable in retrospect as song cycles existed long before then.[1] One of the earliest examples may be the set of seven Cantigas de amigo by the 13th-century GalicianjongleurMartin Codax.[4]Jeffrey Mark identified the group of dialect songs 'Hodge und Malkyn' from Thomas Ravenscroft's The Briefe Discourse (1614) as the first of a number of early 17th-century examples in England.[5]
A song cycle is similar to a song collection, and the two can be difficult to distinguish. Some type of coherence, however, is regarded as a necessary attribute of song cycles. It may derive from the text (a single poet; a story line; a central theme or topic such as love or nature; a unifying mood; poetic form or genre, as in a sonnet or ballad cycle) or from musical procedures (tonal schemes; recurring motifs, passages or entire songs; formal structures). These unifying features may appear singly or in combination.[1] Because of these many variations, the song cycle "resists definition".[6] The nature and quality of the coherence within a song cycle must therefore be examined "in individual cases".[6]
Song cycles in German Lieder
Although most European countries began developing the art song genre by the beginning of the 19th century, the rise of Lieder in "Austria and Germany have outweighed all others in terms of influence."[7] German-language song composition at the end of 18th century shifted from accessible, Strophic form, more traditional folk songs to 19th century settings of more sophisticated poetry for a more educated middle class, "who were gradually supplanting the aristocracy as the main patrons of the arts".[8] Since these songs were relatively small-scale works, like the lyric poetry used for their musical settings, they were often published in collections, and consequently borrowed various poetic terms to mark their groupings: Reihe (series), Kranz (ring), Zyklus (cycle) or Kreis (circle).[9] In the first few decades of the 1800s, the collections of poetry and the subsequent song settings took on more underlying coherence and dramatic plot, giving rise to the song cycle.[10] This coherence allowed the song genre to be elevated to a "higher form", serious enough to be compared with symphonies and cycles of lyric piano pieces.[11]
Two of the earliest examples of the German song cycle were composed in 1816: Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte (Op. 98), and Die Temperamente beim Verluste der Geliebten (J. 200-3, \Op. 46) by Carl Maria von Weber.
The genre was firmly established by the cycles of Schubert; his Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827), settings of poems by Wilhelm Müller, are among his most greatly admired works. Schubert's Schwanengesang (1828), though collected posthumously, is also frequently performed as a cycle.
Wolf made the composition of song collections by a single poet something of a specialty, although only the shorter Italian Songbook and Spanish Songbook are performed at a single sitting, and Eisler's Hollywood Liederbuch also falls into the category of anthology.
The six songs of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été (1841), first published with piano accompaniment but later orchestrated, is a notable early example of the French song cycle.[14] French cycles reached a pinnacle in Fauré's La bonne chanson (Verlaine) of the early 1890s, La chanson d'Ève, premiered complete in 1910, and L'horizon chimérique (1921). Chabrier's four 'Barnyard songs' (1889) "introduced a new note into contemporary French music" and prefigured Ravel's Histoires naturelles.[15]Poulenc produced a long line of song cycles, from Le Bestiaire (1919), the Poèmes de Ronsard of 1925, Chansons Gaillardes (anonymous 17th-century texts) of the following year, Quatre poèmes de Guillaume Apollinaire (1931), Tel jour telle nuit (poems by Paul Éluard), 1937, Banalités (poems by Apollinaire, 1940), to his last, La Courte Paille (1960) - seven songs in eight minutes.
Raising Sparks (1977) by the Scottish composer James MacMillan (1997) is a more recent example. Trevor Hold wrote numerous song cycles, including many setting his own words, such as The Image Stays (1979), River Songs (1982) and Book of Beasts (1984).[16] The English composer Robin Holloway's many song cycles include From High Windows (Philip Larkin) (1977), Wherever We May Be (Robert Graves) (1980) and Retreats and Advances (A.S.J. Tessimond) (2016). His pupil Peter Seabourne's five song cycles include Sonnets to Orpheus (2016) setting eleven poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. Stephen Hough has written three cycles: Herbstlieder (Rilke) (2007), Dappled Things (Wilde and Hopkins) (2013), and Other Love Songs (2010) for four singers and piano duet. Graham Waterhouse composed several song cycles, based on texts by Shakespeare, James Joyce, and Irish female writers, among others.
In 2020, Rodrigo Ruiz became the first Mexican composer known to have written a song cycle. Ruiz's Venus & Adonis sets Shakespeare's eponymous narrative poem in what became the first song cycle to ever be written entirely to Shakespearean texts.[19][20]
The orchestral song cycle Sing, Poetry on the 2011 album Troika consists of settings of Vladimir Nabokov's Russian and English-language poetry by three Russian and three American composers.[21]
The R&B singer Raphael Saadiq's 2019 album, Jimmy Lee, is composed as a song cycle with personal narratives thematizing issues affecting African Americans, including addiction, stress, domestic conflict, AIDS, perpetual financial hardship, and mass incarceration.[23][24]
Ingo Müller: "Eins in Allem und Alles in Einem": Zur Ästhetik von Gedicht- und Liederzyklus im Lichte romantischer Universalpoesie. In: Günter Schnitzler und Achim Aurnhammer (Hrsg.): Wort und Ton. Freiburg i. Br. 2011 (= Rombach Wissenschaften: Reihe Litterae. Bd. 173), S. 243–274.
Related Research Articles
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin was a German poet and philosopher. Described by Norbert von Hellingrath as "the most German of Germans", Hölderlin was a key figure of German Romanticism. Particularly due to his early association with and philosophical influence on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, he was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism.
Nikolaus Lenau was the pen name of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau, a German-language Austrian poet.
Winterreise is a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert, a setting of 24 poems by German poet Wilhelm Müller. It is the second of Schubert's two song cycles on Müller's poems, the earlier being Die schöne Müllerin.
The dithyramb was an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god. Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb." Plato also remarks in the Republic that dithyrambs are the clearest example of poetry in which the poet is the only speaker.
"Erlkönig" is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It depicts the death of a child assailed by a supernatural being, the Erlking, a king of the fairies. It was originally written by Goethe as part of a 1782 Singspiel, Die Fischerin.
"Die Forelle", Op. 32, D 550. is a lied, or song, composed in early 1817 for solo voice and piano with music by the Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797–1828). Schubert chose to set the text of a poem by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, first published in the Schwäbischer Musenalmanach in 1783. The full poem tells the story of a trout being caught by a fisherman, but in its final stanza reveals its purpose as a moral piece warning young women to guard against young men. When Schubert set the poem to music, he removed the last verse, which contained the moral, changing the song's focus and enabling it to be sung by male or female singers. Schubert produced six subsequent copies of the work, all with minor variations.
An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98, is a composition by Ludwig van Beethoven written in April 1816, setting poetry by Alois Jeitteles.
Liederkreis, Op. 39, is a song cycle composed by Robert Schumann. Its poetry is taken from Joseph von Eichendorff's collection entitled Intermezzo. Schumann wrote two cycles of this name – the other being his Opus 24, to texts by Heinrich Heine – so this work is also known as the Eichendorff Liederkreis. Schumann wrote, "The voice alone cannot reproduce everything or produce every effect; together with the expression of the whole the finer details of the poem should also be emphasized; and all is well so long as the vocal line is not sacrificed." Liederkreis, Op. 39, is regarded as one of the great song cycles of the 19th century, capturing, in essence, the Romantic experience of landscape. Schumann wrote it starting in May 1840, the year in which he wrote such a large number of lieder that it is known as his "year of song" or Liederjahr.
In the Western classical music tradition, Lied is a term for setting poetry to classical music to create a piece of polyphonic music. The term is used for any kind of song in contemporary German and Dutch, but among English and French 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.
Franz Schubert's Wiegenlied"Schlafe, schlafe, holder süßer Knabe", D 498, Op. 98, No. 2, is a lullaby composed in November 1816. The song is also known as "Mille cherubini in coro" after an Italian language arrangement for voice and orchestra by Alois Melichar.
Der Handschuh is a composition by Graham Waterhouse. He wrote the setting of Friedrich Schiller's ballad for cello and speaking voice in 2005. It was published in 2007 in Heinrichshofen's Verlag.
Hermann Reutter was a German composer and pianist who worked as an academic teacher, university administrator, recitalist, and accompanist. He composed several operas, orchestral works, and chamber music, and especially many lieder, setting poems by authors writing in German, Russian, Spanish, Icelandic, English, and ancient Egyptian and Greek, among others.
The orchestral song is a late romantic genre of classical music for solo voices and orchestra.
Franz Schubert's best known song cycles, like Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise are based on separate poems with a common theme and narrative. Other song cycles are based on consecutive excerpts of the same literary work: Schubert's "Ave Maria" is part of such a song cycle based on excerpts of the same poem, in this case by Walter Scott.
Sechs Hölderlin-Fragmente is a song cycle for high voice and piano composed in 1958 by Benjamin Britten (1913–76), and published as his Op. 61. It consists of settings of six short poems and verse fragments by the German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843).
Geistliche Oden und Lieder, also known as Gellert Oden, is a collection of songs by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach with texts by Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. Originally published in 1758, Bach's work enjoyed continuous popularity for several decades and influenced numerous composers, most importantly Ludwig van Beethoven, who composed his own settings of six of Gellert's poems.
Graham Waterhouse, cellist and composer especially of chamber music, has written a number of song cycles. As a cellist, he has used string instruments or a Pierrot ensemble instead of the typical piano to accompany a singer. In 2003 he composed a first cycle of songs based on late poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. In 2016, he set nursery rhymes, excerpts from James Joyce, and texts by Shakespeare. In 2017, he wrote settings of poems by Irish female writers, and in 2022 a cycle of Buddhist texts for mezzo-soprano, cello and piano.
Wilhelm Killmayer, a German composer, wrote several song cycles, which form a substantial part of his compositions. The earliest cycle dates from 1953, the last was completed in 2008. He set poems by German romantic writers such as Friedrich Hölderlin and Joseph von Eichendorff, but was also inspired by French, Greek and Spanish poems, and by texts from the 20th-century poets Georg Trakl and Peter Härtling. He used mostly piano to accompany a singer, but also added percussion or other instruments, and scored some cycles in a version for voice and orchestra. His Hölderlin-Lieder, setting poems from the author's late period, were performed at major festivals and recorded.
Sechs Lieder, Op. 68, is a collection of six Lieder by Richard Strauss. He composed them, setting poems by Clemens Brentano, in 1918 for soprano and piano, and orchestrated one in 1933 and five in 1940. The piano version was first published by Adolph Fürstner in Berlin in 1919. They are also known as Brentano Lieder.
Sechs Gedichte und Requiem, Op. 90, also called the Lenau-Lieder, is a song cycle by Robert Schumann. It was composed in 1850, shortly before the Schumanns moved to Düsseldorf.
Bingham, Ruth O., "The Early Nineteenth-Century Song Cycle", in The Cambridge Companion to the Lied, ed. James Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.101–119.
Hallmark, Rufus, ed. (2010). German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century. Routledge Studies in Musical Genres (paperbacked.). New York: Routledge. ISBN978-0-415-99038-7.
Ferreira, Manuel Pedro. 2001. "Codax [Codaz], Martin". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Youens, Susan. n.d. "Song Cycle". Grove Music Online, edited by Deane Root. Oxford University Press. Web. (accessed 23 September 2014) (subscription required)
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