Art song in the classical music tradition
In the Western classical music tradition,
Lied
(
,
pl.
Lieder
;
[1]
[2]
[3]
German pronunciation:
[liːt]
,
pl.
[?liːd?]
,
lit.
'
song
'
) is a term for setting poetry to classical music to create a piece of
polyphonic
music.
[4]
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.
[5]
The earliest
Lieder
date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, and can even refer to
Minnesang
from as early as the 12th and 13th centuries.
[6]
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
[
edit
]
Terminology
[
edit
]
For German speakers, the term "Lied" has a long history ranging from twelfth-century
troubadour
songs (
Minnesang
) via
folk songs
(
Volkslieder
) and church hymns (
Kirchenlieder
) to twentieth-century workers' songs (
Arbeiterlieder
) or
protest songs
(
Kabarettlieder, Protestlieder
).
[
citation needed
]
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
[
edit
]
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.
[7]
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.
[4]
From the 15th century come three large song collections compiled in Germany: the
Lochamer Liederbuch
, the
Schedelsches Liederbuch
, and the
Glogauer Liederbuch
.
[8]
Renaissance
[
edit
]
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 mesuree
". 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".
[9]
Common practice
[
edit
]
German-speaking composers
Joseph Haydn
,
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
and
Ludwig van Beethoven
wrote
Lieder
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.
[
citation needed
]
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:
Liederzyklus
or
Liederkreis
) are series of
Lieder
(generally three or more) tied by a single narrative or theme, such as Schubert's
Die schone Mullerin
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.
[10]
[11]
Typically,
Lieder
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
[
edit
]
Richard Strauss
,
Mahler
, and
Hans Pfitzner
carried the tradition of the
Lied
into the 20th century.
Arnold Schoenberg
,
[12]
Alban Berg
and
Anton Webern
wrote
atonal
Lieder
.
Examples
[
edit
]
Some of the most famous examples of
Lieder
are Schubert's
Erlkonig
,
Der Tod und das Madchen
("Death and the Maiden"),
Gretchen am Spinnrade
, and
Der Doppelganger
.
Other national traditions
[
edit
]
The
melodies
of
Hector Berlioz
,
Gabriel Faure
,
Claude Debussy
, and
Francis Poulenc
are French parallels to the German
Lied
.
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.
[
citation needed
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
"lied"
.
CollinsDictionary.com
.
HarperCollins
. Retrieved
17 November
2020
.
- ^
"Lied"
.
Random House Unabridged Dictionary
. New York: Random House, Inc. 1997
. Retrieved
17 November
2020
– via Infoplease.
- ^
"lied"
.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
(5th ed.). HarperCollins.
- ^
a
b
Boker-Heil, Norbert; Fallows, David; Baron, John H.; Parsons, James; Sams, Eric; Johnson, Graham; Griffiths, Paul (2001). "Lied".
Grove Music Online
(8th ed.).
Oxford University Press
.
doi
:
10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.16611
.
ISBN
978-1-56159-263-0
.
- ^
"Lieder"
.
GCSE Bitesize
. BBC Schools. Archived from
the original
on 4 March 2015.
- ^
Lied
at the
Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^
Orrey, Leslie;
Warrack, John
(2002). "Lied". In Latham, Alison (ed.).
The Oxford Companion to Music
. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN
978-0-19-866212-9
.
- ^
Arnold, Devis (1984).
The New Oxford Companion to Music
. Oxford University Press. p. 1065.
ISBN
0-19-311316-3
.
- ^
Alwes, Chester Lee (2015).
A History of Western Choral Music
. Oxford University Press. p. 66.
ISBN
978-0-19-936193-9
. Retrieved
10 December
2022
.
- ^
Deaville, James (2004). "A Multitude of Voices: The Lied at Mid Century". In Parsons, James (ed.).
The Cambridge Companion to the Lied
. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 143.
ISBN
978-0-521-80471-4
.
- ^
Thyme, Jurgen (2005). "Schubert's Strategies in Setting Free Verse". In Lodato, Suzanne M.; Urrows, David Francis (eds.).
Word and Music Studies: Essays on Music and the Spoken Word and on Surveying the Field: Essays from the Fourth International Conference in Word and Music Studies, Berlin, 2003
. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi. p. 90.
ISBN
978-90-420-1897-6
.
- ^
Gramit, David (2004). "The Circulation of the Lied: The Double Life of an Art Form". In Parsons, James (ed.).
The Cambridge Companion to the Lied
. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 311.
ISBN
978-0-521-80471-4
.
Further reading
[
edit
]
External links
[
edit
]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to
Lieder
.
Look up
lied
in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
|
---|
|
Composers and
musicians
| |
---|
Instrumentation
| |
---|
Genres
| |
---|
Other topics
| |
---|
Background
| |
---|
|