German and Song 1740 - 1900

1740 - 1900

John Smeed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367856960
• eBook ISBN: 9781000768589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1987, this volume charts the development of German song across a century and a half, relating it both to poetry and to the cultural scene in Germany. By emphasising genre rather than individual composers and while paying heed to acknowledged masterpieces – by quoting extensively from forgotten composers, the book avoids historical over simplification and arrives at a fuller picture of this rich tradition. In so doing, it uncovers much neglected material. The book investigates the relationship between German poets and composers and their native folk tradition. It further explores the interaction between convention and innovation and demonstrates how one poem can be interpreted quite differently by different composers. The book is accessible both to students of literature and music.

1

The Beginnings: 1740-80

As I have said, it seems reasonable to date the beginnings of the Lied as we know it from about the 1740s although continuo-song had flourished in Germany for a full century before that. These continuo-songs consisted of the vocal melody plus a bass-line, usually figured, which the player was expected to realise on his instrument (harpsichord, organ, lute and so on: the title-pages and prefaces often give a wide choice of possibilities). The songs were usually strophic and often very simple, direct and fresh in style,¹ so that it is tempting to see them as the natural forerunners of the Lied. But a more elaborate virtuoso style, more commonly associated with cantata and opera, also occasionally invaded these songs, sometimes in such a way that works of a single composer may vary between the utterly simple and the very ornate. Here is part of Heinrich Albert’s setting of Simon Dach’s ‘Herbstlied’ (Autumn Song):²

That tune points back to the simple folk-melodies woven by sixteenth-century composers into their polyphonic works, and is at the same time an oddly exact anticipation of the tone to be adopted by J. A.P. Schulz and his imitators when, over a century after Albert, they attempted to reintroduce the style of such folk melodies into their songs. But here is an extract from another piece in the same collection by Albert (iii, 14):

If we look at the poems it seems no coincidence that Dach’s unaffected ‘ Herbstlied’ has a close affinity with the many German folk poems which bewail the passing of summer, while the text of the second extract quoted (also by Dach) is wholly in thrall to the Baroque style, being full of hyperbole, metaphor, apostrophisation and all the tricks of rhetoric. That is to say, the simpler melodic style is most often to be found in combination with a type of verse recognisably close to the German folk tradition, while florid Italianate vocal writing is more likely in settings of mannered Baroque texts which clearly show the invasion of German poetry by classical, Italian and French influences. Study of the texts of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century continuo-song shows the coexistence of simple and homely native strains (pseudo-folksong, versified proverbial wisdom) and Baroque extravaganzas in which half the pantheon is invoked to support the lover’s pleas. It is the simple songs drawing on a native poetic tradition which we may justifiably regard as the true predecessors of the Lied.

Sperontes’s collection Singende Muse an der Pleisse (4 parts, 1736-45)³ was to prove, if not precisely a forerunner, at least something of a challenge to later song-composers. For Sperontes (J.S. Scholze) did not, as we today would automatically expect, start with the texts and devise suitable melodies for them; in the great majority of cases he took existing instrumental dances and other pieces and fitted poems to these readymade tunes. (This process is called Liedparodie by the Germans.) The texts are mainly Sperontes’s own, with a minority by the Silesian poet, J.C. Günther. Delightful as the music often is, Sperontes’s short-comings as a maker of songs (one can hardly say ‘song-composer’) are obvious: the words take second place and must somehow accommodate themselves to melodies which owe their existence to musical logic and (often) the exigencies of dance. The matching of words and music has the character of a lottery. Here are two extracts, both involving odes to peace and solitude. The first happens to fit the elegant slow aria very well; the second is at odds with its jaunty polonaise tune (Sperontes had a fatal liking for this particular dance-form):

(Note how the phrase ‘and enjoys the most pleasant peace’ is approached via an upwards leap of a minor ninth!)

Whether musical and poetic declamation accord with each other seems purely accidental. In the following passage, ‘schmal’ and ‘Brücke’ fit the accents of the tune well, but impossible weight is laid (twice!) on the indefinite article. A composer who took the text as his starting point would never, if he knew his job, be guilty of such resoundingly false accentuation:

The popularity of the Singende Muse is, however, well attested and not difficult to understand. It offered fairly simple songs well suited to domestic music-making in a period when most composers were cultivating the florid style of opera and cantata, a period in which the technically less demanding type of continuo-song was falling out of fashion. But it does not need much historical hindsight to perceive that Sperontes’s method of ‘parody’ was a false start as far as the Lied was concerned. So it comes as no surprise to find song-composers of the 1740s and 50s reacting vigorously against this method and insisting that they, unlike Sperontes, had not put the cart before the horse. ‘I have suited my tunes to the poems, according to their titles and contents’, says Görner in 1752. Similarly, C.G. Krause a year later sees song as a collaboration between poet and composer in which, however, the poet leads and the composer must follow. C.F. Endter, writing in 1757, is yet more emphatic: ‘I regard it as an inviolable law that the musical expression should agree as completely as possible with the sentiments of the poem which is to be set to music.’⁴

No account of any aspect of life in eighteenth-century Germany can afford to underrate the importance of middle-class values and culture. The growing prosperity of the middle classes, especially the merchants in the important trading cities, led to a new confidence and self-assertiveness. This found its expression in the countless imitations of The Tatler and The Spectator which began to appear, from the second decade of the century onwards, in Hamburg and other cities. Called moralische Wochenschriften (moral weeklies) by the Germans, these papers extolled the values of the middle-class way of life, claimed that the merchant or professional man was at least as worthy and useful to society as the aristocrat and propounded a somewhat utilitarian philosophy of life, which praised reasonableness, virtue, moderation, a pious and philanthropic existence within a framework of solid but unpretentious prosperity, etc. In this rather comfortable view, professional or business success, the approbation of one’s fellow-men and of God, moral integrity and a judicious pursuit of pleasure all coexisted happily. Music-making was very much a part of the innocent and convivial domestic culture of the prosperous middle classes, so that a demand for printed music, both instrumental and vocal, grew rapidly. Side by side with the collections of easy keyboard music, we find increasing numbers of songs: settings of German texts, predominantly secular and light in tone, well within the technical compass of the amateur performers. (The precise way in which the poetry of these songs reflected the values of the largely middle-class consumers will be discussed later.)

Opposition to the florid and often Italianate style of opera and cantata was strong. J.G. Gottsched, the most influential writer on aesthetics in the mid-eighteenth century, made merry at the ornate and ‘unnatural’ style reigning in the operas and cantatas of his day (Versuch einer Critischen Dichtkunst, ii, 3-4). He and his sympathisers disliked virtuoso display with its trills and scales, and rejected the melismatic attitude towards word-setting that could devote twenty bars of music to a single phrase. They detested the sort of mannerist lingering on key words (‘rise’, ‘fall’, ‘sigh’, etc.) which had played such an important part in Western European vocal music from the late Renaissance on. Attacks on the florid manner are common in theoretical works, in the prefaces to collections of song and, to a lesser extent, in the moral weeklies. If such complaints continue to be made into the early 1780s, this merely shows that some German song-composers were slow to learn this particular lesson, especially in regard to ornamentation (see below).

The opposition was not merely on aesthetic grounds; it was undoubtedly coloured by patriotic resentment, dislike of the many foreign virtuosi hired by the courts, part of a general distrust of foreign affectations and fashions. To mock a fashionable castrato who buried the vocal line under trills and conceits (and sang in a language incomprehensible to most Germans anyhow) was part and parcel of a more general attack, closely linked to all the polemical contrasts made in the moral weeklies between a solid and unpretentious German way of life and the posturings of courtiers and dandies who preferred French to German and prided themselves on following the latest French and Italian fashions.

Hence, the new school of song, together with the Singspiel (ballad-opera) with its catchy songs to German texts, was in one important way Germany’s answer to foreign vogues. We have already heard Görner taking pride in the fact that Germany was belatedly catching up on other countries in the matter of song. Similarly, Löwen’s ode ‘An die Deutschen’, set to music by Marpurg and included by him in volume ii of the Berlinische Oden und Lieder (1759), urges the Germans to prize their own poets and composers and not to over-praise ‘welsche Triller’ (welsch = Italian). The anonymous compiler of the Musikalisches Handbuch of 1782, a sort of critical lexicon of contemporary musicians, virtually takes ‘German’ as a yardstick of worth, stressing the ‘German-ness’ of C.P.E. Bach’s melodies and praising Gluck for having purified music from foreign dross. The parallel with some of the moral weeklies, where it is axiomatically assumed that ‘German’ = good, while ‘foreign’ = showy, untrustworthy, immoral, etc., is quite clear; the general point has simply been applied to the musical sphere. Those who think of the nineteenth century as the heyday of nationalistic fervour in music may find this surprising, but to the student of eighteenth-century Germany who finds evidence of the Germans’ resentment of foreign cultural domination at every turn, it will seem natural enough.

As we listen to ‘Die Forelle’ or Schumann’s ‘Nußbaum’, we might be tempted to think of the Lied as something natural and spontaneous, needing no theoretical underpinning. But in the eighteenth century, treatises and essays which sought to explain the function, possibilities and limits of song seem almost as common as the songs themselves. If we find this puzzling, says Gudrun Busch, we should bear in mind the strong Rationalistic and speculative tendencies of the German Enlightenment together with the fact that the Lied was still a comparative novelty.⁵ In the middle of the century there gradually grew up around the genre a system of what Busch calls ‘musical rhetoric’. To discuss this in detail would call for a book of its own; in the following few pages I will try to sum up eighteenth-century theories of music as they affect song, and show how they influenced at least the general attitude of song-composers to their craft.

At the root of these theories is a constant appeal to ‘nature’. Unfortunately, Natur was one of the most used but vaguest words in eighteenth-century Germany. To begin with, it was used to suggest that the basic elements of music did not need to be invented by man, but already existed in nature, so that a capacity to respond to music was something innate. Song, particularly, was seen as natural: a primitive and instinctive mode of expression, more direct in its appeal than instrumental music. Hence, composers and performers alike must cultivate ‘natural’ strains and not obscure or destroy them by ‘art’. We have already encountered one form taken by this view: the opposition to florid (= ‘unnatural’) styles of vocal writing. E.G. Dressier (1774) distinguishes between virtuosity, which merely amazes the hearer, and a natural style, which moves him. Examples of this sort of distinction could be multiplied almost indefinitely. The danger is, of course, that ‘nature’ comes to be used as a blanket term of approval; once you have praised a composer for being natural or condemned him for being the opposite, you need elaborate no further. (The anonymous compiler of the 1782 Musikalisches Hand-buch is much given to this practice in his critical judgements.) Many composers seem confident that a reference to ‘die Natur’ or ‘das Natürliche’ in the title or preface to a book of songs will automatically commend it to the public. The terms ‘nature’ and ‘art’ are bandied about everywhere, as when Johann Mattheson notes that too much art obscures the beauty of nature, or F.G. Fleischer says that his aim was to combine art with nature in his songs.⁶ Although modern commentators on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Orginal Title Page
• Orginal Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Beginnings: 1740-80
• 2. ‘Im Volkston’
• 3. Switzerland and Austria
• 4. Song-texts in the Latter Part of the Eighteenth Century
• 5 Composers and Performers
• 6 Simplicity as an Ideal
• 7 The New Adventurousness in the Late Eighteenth Century
• 8. The Eighteenth Century — A Summing-up
• 9. From the Turn of the Century to Schumann, Mendelssohn and Franz
• 10. The Development Towards Greater Complexity
• 11. Theories of Song and the Ideal of ‘Hausmusik’
• 12. The Importance of Folksong
• 13. A General Assessment
• 14. Paths into the Twentieth Century
• Select Bibliography
• Original Versions of Passages Quoted in Translation
• Index