German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century

Rufus Hallmark, Rufus Hallmark

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135854577
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Classical Music

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.

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 music—the lieder most obviously, the poems less explicitly—this 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., Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke) and in music (e.g., Mahler’s 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), which—with its abab or abcd rhyme scheme—is 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 (1744–1803) after reading the spurious popular poetry of “Ossian” as well as the authentic examples in Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry of 1765. Herder thereupon avidly collected folk songs and in 1778–79 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 (1806–8). Goethe—reflecting the nascent nationalism of central European literary Romanticism—felt 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 Herder—who had meanwhile published a second edition of his seminal Volkslieder, now known as Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1807)—and the earlier folk-song versions of “Heidenblümlein” that had inspired Goethe to write one of his best-known early poems, “Heidenröslein.” The folk-song-like simplicity and freshness of Goethe’s “Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehn” 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 “Heidenröslein” 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 song’s 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 “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress), “Empfindsamkeit” (Sentimentalism), and “Klassik” (Classicism) effectively served as the wellspring of German Romantic poetry even while Classicism stood in opposition to some of the Romanticists’ lyric intentions during the first third of the nineteenth century.

Goethe’s Contribution

German literary Classicism—i.e., “Deutsche Klassik”—refers to the relatively brief but halcyon period in German letters and culture that followed Germany’s brief but rebellious post-Enlightenment “storm and stress” 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 “give-and-take” and in its celebrated yield of mutually inspired literary publications lasting until Schiller’s untimely death in 1805 (Garland 1976, 466). This “Classical Age of Weimar” embraces salient parts of Goethe’s vast oeuvre from as early as 1786 onward and coexists temporally with much of German—and European—Romanticism well beyond the turn of the new century and is often referred to in Germany as the “Age of Goethe” (Brown 1997, 183). The designation “Romantic” is notoriously controversial in its own right (cf. Plantinga 1997, 82–9), 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 “camps” 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 “period overlap.”³

The word “romantic” was first used in 1798 by Friedrich Schlegel. In influential public pronouncements, he formulated the quintessentially romantic concept of “progressive Universalpoesie” to express the almost infinite scope of German Romanticism’s aesthetic aspirations. By “progressive” and “universal” 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: “It 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.”⁴ He singled out Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), the first edition of which was published with musical settings of the interpolated lyric passages “sung” by Mignon and the Harper, as one of the seminal events and accomplishments of the (Romantic) age.⁵

“Nur nicht lesen! immer singen!” (Don’t ever read it! always sing it!) With these urgent and sonorous words (from his twelve-line poem “An Lina”), 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 weiß, das Lied mich an, Das aus deinem Mund vergöttern, Das ein Herz zerreißen 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 Herder’s writings (Martini 1957, 214): “Melodie ist die Seele des Liedes … Lied muß gehört, nicht gesehen werden” (Melody is the soul of song … song must be heard, not seen). Goethe’s clarion call always to sing his otherwise “incomplete” lieder expresses in nuce the aspirations of poets as well as composers throughout the nineteenth century.⁶ Goethe’s lyric insistence, “immer singen!”—taken together with Schlegel’s “artless song” and programmatically “progressive” view of the Mignon and Harper settings by Reichardt (see Schwab 1965, 31)—emphatically 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...