lied

A German art song for solo voice and piano.

[German Lied, from Middle High German liet, from Old High German liod.]

(Ger.: ‘song’; pl. Lieder)

Term generally used in English for the Romantic art song from Schubert to Wolf and Strauss.

The earliest forms of lied, however, come from the 15th century, including 36 by Oswald von Wolkenstein; they are in two or three parts. A specifically German type, the Tenorlied, first appearing in the Lochamer Liederbuch (c1460), is based on a pre-existing vocal line used as a cantus firmus (or Tenor). In the songs of Isaac and other early 16th-century composers four-part writing is the norm, with the Tenor virtually always in the highest male part. The 260 songs of his pupil Senfl explore many stylistic possibilities, including imitation, and often have a soprano cantus firmus. The heyday of the Tenorlied ended c 1550. Later the form received decisive impetus from Lassus; the highpoint of this period was reached in the c 60 lieder of Hans Leo Hassler, whose synthesis of Italian style with German lyricism was influential. The polyphonic lied figures slightly in the works of Schein and thereafter hardly at all.

In the 17th century a new kind of lied arose, the Generalbass or continuo lied, mainly for literati, students and the cultivated middle class; they were simpler and often cruder than the courtly solo songs of other countries. Adam Krieger was the greatest continuo lied composer; his Arien (1667), mostly solos with continuo and instrumental ritornellos, vary from pastoral love-songs to lascivious drinking-songs. After 1670 the continuo lied declined, but it had a resurgence towards the mid-18th century with such composers as Telemann and J. V. Görner.

After 1750, a new aesthetic led to strophic lieder set to simple folklike melody with uncomplicated harmony and independent accompaniment. Berlin (where lied composers included C. P. E. Bach) was the principal centre. The Second Berlin Lied School of c 1770, including Reichardt and Zelter, used a more complex style and sought out better poetry, including Goethe's and Schiller's. Of Viennese composers only Mozart contributed significantly to the lied development.

Beethoven can be claimed as creator of the Romantic lied, but it was Schubert's setting of Goethe's Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814) and Erlkönig (1815) that first embodied the close identification with poet, character, scene and singer, as well as the concentration of lyric, dramatic and graphic ideas into an integrated whole, which characterize the finest 19th-century lieder. In addition to onomatopoeic devices (of which the cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise provide numerous examples) there are in Schubert's 610 songs hundreds of more deeply personal and less readily explicable verbo-musical ideas, corresponding to sunlight, evening, sleep, love, grief and so on, which occur in infinitely variable permutation.

Schubert's perfect compound of text and music was rarely matched by his successors. In Loewe's 375 songs music is subordinate to words; his best settings are of narrative ballads such as Edward and Erlkönig. Mendelssohn aimed at formal perfection, in strophic songs with a varied last verse or coda. Schumann's 260 lieder recombine the basic elements of verbal equivalence and musical independence, revealing him as Schubert's true heir; his personal innovation was to elevate the role of the piano. The rich flowering of German Romantic song with piano, to which Franz, Wagner, Liszt, Cornelius and others contributed, was maintained to the end of the century by two composers who represent opposite ends of the spectrum of lied composition. Brahms was the supreme traditionalist: most of his 200 songs are carefully unified strophic or ternary structures, with often complex but rarely independent accompaniments. They reach heights of nostalgia and longing scaled by no other songwriter. Wolf's procedures, in contrast, were poetry-orientated; he published songbooks devoted to particular poets (Mörike, Goethe, Eichendorff). His basic style is keyboard writing enriched by vocal and instrumental counterpoint, employing an extended harmonic language; his 300 songs encompass a wider emotional range than any other composer's since Schubert.

Although cultivated with distinction by Strauss and others, the lied with piano lost its central position after 1900, and in the orchestral cycles of Mahler it was taken from drawing room to concert hall. Schoenberg and Berg followed Mahler, but neither paid much attention to the lied after World War I.

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Lied, 1. normally a poem intended to be sung or suitable in its form and content for singing. The Latin Carmina are medieval strophic songs, but the MHG word liet meant only a single verse or strophe, although the plural diu liet is commonly used for a group of verses.

Lieder are now usually understood as poems of two or more verses, generally of identical form. The commonest type uses the four-line verse with either alternating rhymes or rhyming of the second and fourth lines only. Lieder have been written by most German poets, and from the 16th c. onwards there are many folk-songs (Volkslieder) whose original authors are unknown. In the course of time these have often undergone considerable adaptation. Specialized types of Lied include the hymn (see Kirchenlied), soldiers' songs (Soldatenlieder), the closely related marching songs (Marschlieder), student songs (Studentenlieder), Wanderlieder, love songs (Liebeslieder), drinking songs (Trinklieder), etc. The most prolific period for song writing was the Romantic Age (see Romantik), in which Novalis, C. Brentano, Eichendorff, Schenkendorf, Rückert, Kerner, Uhland, and Heine are notably conspicuous. Good song-writing is, however, already found in the 17th c. with F. Spee von Langenfeld, Tscherning, Fleming, Rist, Albert, Dach, Hofmann von Hofmannswaldau, and Abschatz. In the pre-Romantic period Goethe was a most accomplished song writer, as were also M. Claudius, G. A. Bürger, Hölty, and Schiller. After the Romantics the most prominent names are Mörike, A. von Droste-Hülshoff, Th. Storm, and D. von Liliencron. An enormous amount of inferior poetry, some of it political, has also appeared in song form. For Meisterlied see Meistergesang.

2. A special form is the musical Lied of the 19th c. and early 20th c. Mozart wrote the first examples, and Beethoven, in addition to many individual songs, composed the first song cycle (Liederzyklus) in An die ferne Geliebte, but the real creator of the musical Lied was F. Schubert, who used melody, modulation, and significant accompaniment to draw out the full meaning of poems in a remarkably expressive way. Schubert wrote more than 600 Lieder, including two song cycles ( Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise), and tended in his later work to diverge from strophic musical repetition. R. Schumann and Brahms developed the forms which Schubert had originated, but H. Wolf broke away almost completely from strophic form, shaping each Lied as an entity of words and music, voice and accompaniment. The last master of this form is R. Strauss.

3. The word Lied has also not infrequently been used to denote a large-scale work both in poetry (e.g. Schiller's ‘Lied von der Glocke’) and in vocal music (e.g. Mahler's Lied von der Erde). The ballads of C. Loewe are also sometimes styled Lieder.

The plural of lied, the German word for “song.” It refers to art songs in German mainly from the nineteenth century. The most notable composer of lieder was Franz Schubert.

Lied/Lieder:

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