lied

lied and lieder: see song.

German song, particularly an art song for voice and piano of the late 18th or the 19th century. The Romantic movement fostered serious popular poetry by poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Composers often set such poetry to folk-influenced music, but the lied could also be highly sophisticated and even experimental. At first generally performed at private social gatherings, it eventually moved into the concert-hall repertoire. The most influential and prolific lied composer was Franz Schubert, who wrote more than 600; Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss are most prominent in the lied's subsequent history.

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Lied (plural Lieder), (plural [ˈliːdɐ]) is a German word, meaning literally "song"; among English speakers, however, the word is used primarily as a term for European romantic music songs, also known as art songs. More accurately, the term perhaps is best used to describe specifically songs set to a German poem of reasonably high literary aspirations, most notably during the nineteenth century, beginning with Franz Schubert and culminating with Hugo Wolf. Typically, Lieder are arranged for a single singer and piano. Sometimes Lieder are gathered in a Liederkreis or "song cycle"—a series of songs (generally three or more) tied by a single narrative or theme. The composers Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann are most closely associated with this genre of romantic music. A Japanese horror anime has been made with the title Elfen Lied (meaning 'Elf Song').

History

For German speakers the term Lied has a long history ranging from 12th century troubadour songs (Minnesang) via folk songs (Volkslieder) and church hymns (Kirchenlieder) to 20th-century workers songs (Arbeiterlieder) or protest songs (Kabarettlieder, Protestlieder).

In Germany, the great age of song came in the 19th century. German and Austrian composers had written music for voice with keyboard before this time, but it was with the flowering of German literature in the Classical and Romantic eras that composers found high inspiration in poetry that sparked the genre known as the Lied. The beginnings of this tradition are seen in the songs of Mozart and Beethoven, but it is with Schubert that a new balance is found between words and music, a new absorption into the music of the sense of the words. Schubert wrote over 600 songs, some of them in sequences or song cycles that relate a story—adventure of the soul rather than the body. The tradition was continued by Schumann, Brahms, and Hugo Wolf, and on into the 20th century by Strauss and Mahler.

Other national traditions

The Lied tradition is closely linked with the German language. But there are parallels elsewhere, noticeably in France, with the melodies of such composers as Berlioz, Fauré, Debussy and Francis Poulenc, and in Russia, with the songs of Mussorgsky and Rachmaninov in particular. England too had a flowering of song in the 20th century represented by Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten.

The Polish composer Stanisław Moniuszko (1819–1872) composed 278 songs. 276 were compiled in 12 booklets called The Home Songbook (Śpiewnik Domowy). The songs were set to poems by the most famous Polish poets of that time, such as Adam Mickiewicz.

Bibliography

• Hallmark, Rufus (1996). German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Schirmer.
• Parsons, James (2004). The Cambridge Companion to the Lied. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

External links

• The Lied and Art Song Texts Page