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German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century
Rufus Hallmark, Rufus Hallmark
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German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century
Rufus Hallmark, Rufus Hallmark
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About This Book
German Lieder in the Nineteenth-Century provides a detailed introduction to the German lied. Beginning with its origin in the literary and musical culture of Germany in the nineteenth-century, the book covers individual composers, including Shubert, Schumann, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler and Wolf, the literary sources of lieder, the historical and conceptual issues of song cycles, and issues of musical technique and style in performance practice. Written by eminent music scholars in the field, each chapter includes detailed musical examples and analysis. The second edition has been revised and updated to include the most recent research of each composer and additional musical examples.
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CHAPTER ONE
The Literary Context: Goethe as Source and Catalyst
Harry Seelig
Because the nineteenth-century German lied and German Romantic poetry are both so inextricably associated with musicâthe lieder most obviously, the poems less explicitlyâthis introduction will trace their origins in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary-musical culture that gave rise to each genre.1 The very term lied clearly indicates a symbiosis of literature and music. In addition to designating a fully independent literary text in and of itself, as well as the art songs that are the subject of this book, it has often been used in the titles of large-scale works in poetry (e.g., Schillerâs Das Lied von der Glocke) and in music (e.g., Mahlerâs Das Lied von der Erde) that have very little to do with the miniature forms we are primarily concerned with here. Yet the basic and still current understanding of lied is that of an autonomous poem either intended to be sung or suitable in its form and content for singing (Garland 1976, 535).
Folk Song Origins
For all its subtlety and complexity, the German lied has its origin in the simple German folk song. German lieder generally consist of two or more stanzas of identical form, each containing either four lines of alternating rhymes or rhymes at the ends of the second and fourth lines only. This pattern also defines the basic four-line stanza of the Volkslied (folk song), whichâwith its abab or abcd rhyme schemeâis arguably the most important source of the nineteenth-century art song. The German term Volkslied was coined by the philologist, theologian, and translator-poet Johann Gottfried Herder (1744â1803) after reading the spurious popular poetry of âOssianâ as well as the authentic examples in Bishop Thomas Percyâs Reliques of Ancient English Poetry of 1765. Herder thereupon avidly collected folk songs and in 1778â79 published two volumes of Volkslieder. Somewhat later, Romantic theorists such as Friedrich Schlegel and the brothers Grimm took these verses to be a kind of spontaneous expression of the collective Volksseele (or folk soul); this rather mystical term received further conceptualization in their theories on Natur- und Kunstpoesie, or nature and art poetry (Garland and Garland 1976, 900).
The search for the poetic roots of the German people reached its apex in the work of Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, who collected and published the many folk songs and quasi-folk songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806â8). Goetheâreflecting the nascent nationalism of central European literary Romanticismâfelt that this excellent source of lieder had a place in every German home. His praise is understandable, given his experience over thirty years earlier as a student in Strasbourg collecting folk songs in the Alsatian countryside, under the tutelage of his mentor Herder. It was the infectious poetic spirit of Herderâwho had meanwhile published a second edition of his seminal Volkslieder, now known as Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1807)âand the earlier folk-song versions of âHeidenblĂŒmleinâ that had inspired Goethe to write one of his best-known early poems, âHeidenröslein.â The folk-song-like simplicity and freshness of Goetheâs âSah ein Knab ein Röslein stehnâ was so invigorating that Herder enthusiastically quoted from it in his Ossian essay of 1773, which introduced the word Volkslied and, also, led to the false assumption that âHeidenrösleinâ was a true folk song. Both real folk song and its imitations, then, ushered in an entirely new lyric style.2
Although German poets had been writing lieder for centuries preceding Herder, it is a peculiarity of the nineteenth-century art songâs heritage that its presumably primordial forerunner, believed to be a spontaneous expression of the Volksseele, arose as a concept only with the Romantic theories of the early nineteenth century. Whereas the Romantic lied finds its theoretical origin in the retroactive speculative constructs of Romantic theoreticians, Romantic poetry per se derives its fundamental impetus from the vast and varied earlier poetic achievement of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose musically inspired lyricism was already flourishing in the three decades before 1800, when the specifically German literary movements of âSturm und Drangâ (Storm and Stress), âEmpfindsamkeitâ (Sentimentalism), and âKlassikâ (Classicism) effectively served as the wellspring of German Romantic poetry even while Classicism stood in opposition to some of the Romanticistsâ lyric intentions during the first third of the nineteenth century.
Goetheâs Contribution
German literary Classicismâi.e., âDeutsche Klassikâârefers to the relatively brief but halcyon period in German letters and culture that followed Germanyâs brief but rebellious post-Enlightenment âstorm and stressâ era; it began soon after Goethe moved from Frankfurt to Weimar in 1785. There he joined his younger and equally gifted compatriot Friedrich Schiller, with whom he would engage in some twenty years of aesthetic discourse exemplary in its intellectual âgive-and-takeâ and in its celebrated yield of mutually inspired literary publications lasting until Schillerâs untimely death in 1805 (Garland 1976, 466). This âClassical Age of Weimarâ embraces salient parts of Goetheâs vast oeuvre from as early as 1786 onward and coexists temporally with much of Germanâand EuropeanâRomanticism well beyond the turn of the new century and is often referred to in Germany as the âAge of Goetheâ (Brown 1997, 183). The designation âRomanticâ is notoriously controversial in its own right (cf. Plantinga 1997, 82â9), but it is problematic in this context because it has been applied to three generations of artists generally regarded as belonging to both Classical and Romantic âcampsâ in literature and music. Goethe (born 1749), Beethoven (1770), and Schubert (1797), whose careers coincided in successive waves from 1790 to 1827 and who played major roles in the era under discussion, illustrate this âperiod overlap.â3
The word âromanticâ was first used in 1798 by Friedrich Schlegel. In influential public pronouncements, he formulated the quintessentially romantic concept of âprogressive Universalpoesieâ to express the almost infinite scope of German Romanticismâs aesthetic aspirations. By âprogressiveâ and âuniversalâ Schlegel meant not only that the basic epic, lyric, and dramatic genres of the literary enterprise should be imaginatively combined and juxtaposed, but also that this endeavor should involve interdisciplinary elements from the other arts, particularly music: âIt embraces everything that is poetic, from the most comprehensive system of art ⊠to the sigh or kiss which the poetic child expresses in artless song.â4 He singled out Goetheâs novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meisterâs Apprenticeship), the first edition of which was published with musical settings of the interpolated lyric passages âsungâ by Mignon and the Harper, as one of the seminal events and accomplishments of the (Romantic) age.5
âNur nicht lesen! immer singen!â (Donât ever read it! always sing it!) With these urgent and sonorous words (from his twelve-line poem âAn Linaâ), Goethe addresses the central cultural-aesthetic issue of the entire art-song century. Although this seventh line has attracted the most attention from critics, it is the last quatrain that actually explains why Goethe feels that lieder should be sung and not merely read:
Ach, wie traurig sieht in Lettern, Schwarz auf weiĂ, das Lied mich an, Das aus deinem Mund vergöttern, Das ein Herz zerreiĂen kann! | Ah, how sad the lied looks to me, in letters black on white, which your voice can sing divinely as it breaks a loving heart! |
(Staiger 1949, 93) |
And the actual musical performance qua lied transcends the mere physical proximity of the lovers, which was primary when she originally played and sang his songs to him at the piano (as the first quatrain describes it).
A similarly proto-romantic articulation of this fundamental conception can be found in Herderâs writings (Martini 1957, 214): âMelodie ist die Seele des Liedes ⊠Lied muĂ gehört, nicht gesehen werdenâ (Melody is the soul of song ⊠song must be heard, not seen). Goetheâs clarion call always to sing his otherwise âincompleteâ lieder expresses in nuce the aspirations of poets as well as composers throughout the nineteenth century.6 Goetheâs lyric insistence, âimmer singen!ââtaken together with Schlegelâs âartless songâ and programmatically âprogressiveâ view of the Mignon and Harper settings by Reichardt (see Schwab 1965, 31)âemphatically anticipates the importance of musical settings of poetry in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Musical settings of many kinds of poetry had been a vital part of aristocratic and bourgeois social activity since t...