Lieder

In the Western classical music tradition, ( , ; , ; ) is a term for setting poetry to classical music. The term is used for any kind of song in contemporary German and Dutch, but among English and French speakers, 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.

The earliest ''Lieder'' date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, and can even refer to from as early as the 12th and 13th centuries. 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.

History

Terminology

For German speakers, the term "Lied" has a long history ranging from twelfth-century troubadour songs () via folk songs (') and church hymns (') to twentieth-century workers' songs (') or protest songs (').

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. 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.

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

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".

Common practice

German-speaking composers Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven wrote for voice and keyboard.

The great age of German song came in the nineteenth century. With the flowering of German literature, German-speaking composers found more inspiration in poetry.

Schubert found a new balance between words and music, a new expression of the sense of the words in and through the music. He wrote over 600 songs, some of them in sequences or song cycles that convey a journey of the soul, not the body.

Song cycles (German: ' or ''Liederkreis'') are series of (generally three or more) tied by a single narrative or theme, such as Schubert's ''Die schöne Müllerin'' and ''Winterreise'', or Robert Schumann's '' Frauen-Liebe und Leben'' and '' Dichterliebe''. Schubert and Schumann are most closely associated with this genre, mainly developed in the Romantic era.

Typically, were for a single singer and piano, with orchestral accompaniment being a later development.

The tradition was continued by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf in the latter half of the 19th century.

20th century

Gustav Mahler, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky carried the tradition of the into the 20th century. Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Ernst Krenek wrote tonal, atonal, and twelve-tone . Somewhat later, Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler wrote of a sometimes overtly political nature.

Examples

Some of the most famous examples of ''Lieder'' are Schubert's '' Erlkönig'', ''Der Tod und das Mädchen'' ("Death and the Maiden"), ''Gretchen am Spinnrade'', and '' Der Doppelgänger''.

Other national traditions

The mélodies of Hector Berlioz, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc are French parallels to the German . 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.

References

Further reading

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* '' Lieder line by line''

External links

The LiederNet Archive
texts and translations

The Lieder Sound Archive

The OpenScore Lieder Corpus
public domain transcriptions to play or download

The Art Song Project

"Life On the Other Side – 1971 Darüber..."
Aubrey Pankey, an African-American lieder singer

{{Authority control

German music history
Romantic music
Song forms

Medieval music genres