In the Western classical music tradition, Lied ( , ; , ; )
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.
History
Terminology
For German speakers, the term "Lied" has a long history ranging from twelfth-century
troubadour songs (
Minnesang) via
Folk music (
Volkslieder) and church hymns (
Kirchenlieder) to twentieth-century workers' songs (
Arbeiterlieder) or
(
Kabarettlieder, Protestlieder).
The German word Lied for "song" (cognate with the English dialectal ) 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 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.
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 that convey a journey of the soul, not the body.
(German: Liederzyklus or Liederkreis) are series of Lieder (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, 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
Gustav Mahler,
Hans Pfitzner,
Max Reger,
Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky carried the tradition of the Lied into the 20th century. Arnold Schoenberg,
,
Anton Webern, and
Ernst Krenek wrote tonal,
atonal, and
twelve-tone Lieder. Somewhat later,
Paul Dessau and
Hanns Eisler wrote Lieder 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 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.
Further reading
External links
