2. Schubert.

It was Schubert who, by fusing the verbal and musical components of the lied, first synthesized in significant

quantity the new element predicted by Goethe. His essential apparatus was a mind infinitely receptive to

poetry, which he must have read voraciously from early boyhood on. His 660 or so settings (including duets,

trios and quartets, as well as songs in Italian) demonstrate familiarity with hundreds of textual sources,

including novels and plays as well as poems, and ranging from the complete works of acknowledged literary

figures to the sometimes overambitious verses of his friends and, on one occasion at least (Abschied D578),

his own heartfelt, if undeniably amateur, efforts. His passionate response to imaginative writing impelled him

to bring the musical component of song to a level of expressiveness and unity never since surpassed.

It is arguable that Schubert made no innovation; even the continuous narrative unity of Die schöne

Müllerin and Winterreise was already inherent in Müller’s verses. Even with such a pre-ordained structure,

however, the hand of the master is to be discerned in what he chose to leave out or change. For example,

in transposing the order of Müller’s poems (in Die Nebensonnen and Mut) Schubert infused the closing

minutes of Winterreise with a spellbinding intensity which owes almost as much to his literary sensibility as

to his musical genius. All Schubert’s infinite variety of styles and forms, melodic lines, modulations and

accompaniment figures are essentially the result of responsiveness to poetry. Equally notable is his evident

sense of responsibility. His revisions confirm that he was actively seeking to re-create a poem, almost as a

duty; he would rewrite, rethink, give up and start again, rather than fail a poem that had pleased him, and

his aim was to find an apt expressive device that could also be used as a structural element. Each such

device occurs, at least in embryo, in his predecessors, whether the quasi-operatic techniques and popular

elements of the north German school or the inspired motivic ideas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. From

the former he absorbed the ideas of simplified folklike melody, interpolated recitative, a range of forms from

miniature strophic or modified strophic to extended cantatas, and expressive sound-effects. Thus the

‘typically Schubertian’ brooks and rivers that flow so effortlessly through his piano parts took their rise in

north Germany. So did the musical metaphors of human motion and gesture: walking or running rhythms;

tonic or dominant inflections for question and answer; the moods of storm or calm; the major–minor

contrasts for laughter and tears, sunshine and shade; the convivial or melancholy melodies moulded to the

shape and stress of the verse. All these abound in Schubert’s precursors, notably Zumsteeg, on whose

work his own is often closely and deliberately modelled.

Schubert’s debt to the musical resources of Zumsteeg’s generation is so evident in his earliest surviving

song, Hagars Klage, as to suggest a set composition exercise. The music, though manifestly immature,

rises fresh from deep springs of feeling about human fate, here a mother’s concern for her dying child and a

father’s inexplicable cruelty to his youngest son, factors which seem to have some resonances in the

psyche of the 14-year-old composer and his tempestuous relationship with his own father. (The early

songs Der Vatermörder and Leichenfantasie, not to mention Erlkönig, also explore father-son relationships.)

Like Schumann (particularly in 1840) and Brahms after him, but unlike the fastidious and secretive Hugo

Wolf, there are often telling, if contentious, biographical conclusions to be drawn from Schubert’s choice of

texts at different points in his career. Although music cannot in itself be autobiographical, it is a unique

feature of song that a composer is susceptible, when selecting a text, to poetry that happens to chime with

current moods, feelings or predicaments, in the manner of any ordinary reader – indeed, some sort of

personal identification may well be needed in order to kindle a musical response. In this context it is

unsurprising that the pubescent composer, already fighting with a disapproving father for a measure of

musical independence, should have alighted on Hagars Klage as a first-time model in preference to

Zumsteeg’s many other ballads; what songs were about mattered to Schubert from the start, and that fact is

at the heart of his subsequent greatness. The composer identifies with poet, character, scene and singer

and strives to concentrate lyric, dramatic and graphic ideas into an integrated whole. It was this

concentration that distilled the whole essence of the Schubertianlied, but the process was a gradual one

and took time to master. Long, diffuse ballads or cantatas on Zumsteegian lines continued for some years,

as in Die Bürgschaft and Die Erwartung. They seek with varying success to unify disparate elements such

as melody, often inset for dramatic purposes to indicate a song within a song (as at ‘Ich singe wie der Vogel

singt’ in Der Sänger), recitative, and interpolated descriptive or narrative music (the interludes in Der

Taucher or Die Bürgschaft). It is no coincidence, however, that Schubert’s earliest masterpieces are

settings of shorter and more readily unifiable lyrics on his favourite theme of intense personal concern,

whether of a girl for her absent lover (Gretchen am Spinnrade), a father for his doomed son (Erlkönig) or an

awestruck observer for the immensities of nature (Meeres Stille). Each is imagined against a background of

moods and scenes suitable for quasi-dramatic re-creation in sound. Further, all three poems are by Goethe,

whose genius lay in making the universal singable, and these songs were selected by Schubert for earliest

publication as reflecting the greatest poet and the most modern spirit of the new age.

They made an instant and intense appeal to an intellectual avant garde, the apostles of Romantic

individualism. Thus 300 copies of Erlkönig were sold within 18 months; the correspondence of Schubert’s

own circle and its adherents (comprising lawyers and civil servants as well as musicians and artists) is full of

excited references to new songs; the Schubertiads in his honour were staunchly supported by his

numerically few but culturally influential devotees. This professional middle-class audience was the musical

segment of the wider public for the poetic renaissance described earlier. The musical components of the

songs corresponded to the new poetry of which they were the setting and hence the equivalent: a blend of

classical and popular, dramatic and lyric, complex and simple. The music of the palace had united with the

music of the people to produce the music of the drawing-room. In the process the focus of artistic attention

had shifted from the larger scale to the smaller, and from the plot or scene to the individual. So the musical

motive power of each of these songs, and of Schubertian lied in general, comes from a dramatic source

condensed into lyric terms. It is opera with orchestra reduced to voice and keyboard, with scenery and

costumes thriftily expressed in sound, transported from the theatre to the home, and economically entrusted

to one or two artists rather than to a company. And one stylistic source of the keyboard accompaniment

effects and motifs in Schubert’s songs is the piano scores of opera and oratorio (which may help to explain

why Schubert’s keyboard writing is sometimes held to be unpianistic). Thus the ominous figure of the night

ride in Erlkönig recalls the dungeon scene of Fidelio, while the becalmed semibreves of Meeres Stille have

their counterparts in Haydn’s Creation. Each such sonorous image is set vibrating by verbal ideas, and the

increasing range and resonance of response from these early masterpieces, through Die schöne

Müllerin and the Rückert songs (both 1823) to the final year of Winterreise and the Heine settings, is the

history of Schubert’s development as a songwriter. In addition to obvious onomatopoeic devices and other

self-evident equivalences, there are hundreds of deeper, more personal and less readily explicable verbo-

musical ideas, corresponding, for example, to springtime, sunlight, evening, starlight, sleep, love, grief,

innocence and so on, and occurring in infinitely variable permutation. Songs in which such expressive

motifs are embodied represent the apotheosis of Schubert’s lieder, whether the linking force is rhythm

(Geheimes), harmony (Dass sie hier gewesen), melody (all strophic songs), tonality (Nacht und Träume),

variation form (Im Frühling), imitation (Der Leiermann), quasi-impressionism (Die Stadt), or incipient leitmotif

used either for dramatic (Der Zwerg) or descriptive ends (the river music of Auf der Donau or the brook

music ofDie schöne Müllerin). The ‘star’ chords already noted in Beethoven, to take just one instance out of

hundreds, can be observed in a wide range of illustrative or structural use, as in Adelaide, Die Gestirne, Der

Jüngling auf dem Hügel, Todesmusik, Abendstern, Die Sterne, Der liebliche Stern,Totengräber-Weise, Im

Freien and many other songs.

3. Loewe and Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn is Loewe’s antithesis. His approximately 90 songs include no true ballads; indeed, there is

rarely any hint of drama, character or action. The music is autonomous in most, and one can readily

imagine them arranged as ‘Lieder ohne Worte’ (which may have been the origin of that title). Although

Mendelssohn was taught for many years by the doyen of the north German school, Carl Zelter, only the

very earliest songs (such as Romanze op.8) show any influence of opera or Singspiel, or any hint of musical

subordination to the words. On the contrary, the texts seem almost to have been chosen to be dominated

by the music; thus the most frequent of Mendelssohn’s 30 poets was his versifying friend Klingemann, with

eight settings (as against five by Goethe). Songs and sketches alike suggest that the main aim was formal

perfection, normally conceived as strophic with a varied last verse or coda. The piano offers unobtrusive

accompaniment in arpeggios or four-part harmony; the tonality is diatonic with occasional altered chords,

often diminished 7ths over a bass pedal. But none of these effects seems clearly related to the poems; and

in general there are few overt equivalents for verbal ideas, as though the music had no deep roots in

language. Yet Mendelssohn was both original and influential, especially on Brahms. His genius for

expressive melody, well exemplified by Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (op.34 one of five Heine settings), was

manifest from the first. Indeed, publication of his earliest songs in Paris in 1828 may have stimulated the

development of the MÉLODIE there. His aim of formal perfection was both salutary and timely; and there are

many German poems of the period for which melodic and formal beauty are in themselves close

equivalents. In such settings, where the musical expression relies on vocal lilt and cadence, structural

pattern and design – Lenau’s An die Entfernte op.71 or Geibel’s Der Mond op.86 – Mendelssohn excels.

More than a mere footnote to the songwriting achievements of Mendelssohn are the lieder of his sister,

whose roughly 300 songs show a considerable creative personality; indeed it is arguable that Fanny

Mendelssohn was temperamentally better suited than her brother to explore the passionate and dramatic

aspects of the medium.

4. Schumann and Franz.

Mendelssohn’s praxis compared with Loewe’s suggests that the Schubertian compound of words and music

was still unstable and could readily split into its narrative and lyric components, losing some energy in the

process. Schumann was well placed to reunite them. Like Mendelssohn he was a melodist; like Loewe he

was literary. But he too began with the 18th-century notion that the music of a song should just express the

poem, which implied not only that songwriting was an inferior art (as he at first believed, according to a letter

of June 1839 to Hirschbach) but also that the composer had a secondary role – whereas Schumann was by

temperament a dominant innovator and leader. Hence perhaps his own tentative début as a songwriter at

18. The following decade as a pianist and composer gave him the necessary foundation of independent

musicianship; the emotional crisis of his betrothal to Clara Wieck heightened his receptivity to poetry. The

mixture was explosive: his total of 140 songs written in the 12 months beginning February 1840 is

unmatched even by Wolf or Schubert for quality and quantity of output in a single year, and it includes most

of the best and best-known of his nearly 260 lieder.

These recombine the two basic elements of the lied, the verbal equivalence exploited by Loewe and the

musical independence stressed by Mendelssohn, thus revealing Schumann as the true heir of Schubert,

with whose quasi-verbal expressive style he had always felt the deepest affinity (according to passages in

the Jugendbriefe and Tagebücher) and whose immense legacy of songs was increasingly available for

study throughout the 1830s. Schumann had complete command of the musical metaphor exploited by

Schubert. In particular, his introduction of contrasting sections in related keys (such as the mediant minor)

without genuine modulation yielded new and subtle contrasts. But his personal innovation was a new

independence, to the point of dominance, in the piano part. The paradigm of a Schumann song is a lyric

piano piece, the melody of which is shared by a voice. As Mendelssohn played songs on the piano and

called them Lieder ohne Worte, so Schumann sang piano pieces and turned them back into lieder. Thus the

preludes and postludes to his songs tend to be self-expressive solos rather than merely illustrative as were

Loewe’s.

This piano style, together with Schumann’s literary leanings and his personal feelings, led him to write love

songs in groups or cycles arranged by poet, often with a deliberately unified tonality. It seems as though

Schumann understood better than anyone before him that ‘the song cycle is the embodiment of the

Romantic ideal: to find – or create – a natural unity out of a collection of different objects without

compormising the independence or the disparity of each member … the large form must appear to grow

directly from the smaller forms’ (Rosen, op. cit., 212). Heine (Dichterliebe op.48 and Liederkreis op.24) and

Eichendorff (Liederkreis op.39), both master lyricists of intense and changing moods, were Schumann’s

favourite poets in early 1840, with 41 and 14 settings respectively. Later in the same year his songwriting

became more objective, beginning with the 16 Chamisso songs, including Frauenliebe und -leben, lyrics

that reflected his lifelong social concern.

Schumann’s second songwriting phase began with the Rückert and Goethe songs of 1849. His harmonic

language had become more intensely chromatic, and the consequent absence of diatonic tensions and

contrasts meant than a new principle of organization was needed. In the Wielfried von der Neun songs of

1850 Schumann sought a solution through use of the short adaptable motif, already adumbrated by

Schubert and Loewe, which could be changed and developed to match the changing thoughts of the

verses; but his increasing illness probably inhibited his further development of such ideas, which later

became the province of Wagner in opera and of Wolf in the lied. The extent to which the songwriting of

Schumann’s later years represented the deliberation of illness rather than a consciously adopted new style

remains controversial. Some of his later lieder, once almost universally thought to be ineffective and

rambling, found increasing favour with performers and critics in the late 20th century, alongside many other

non-vocal works of the final period. Moreover censensus now seems to be that Schumann, even if his

powers were weakened by illness, possessed talent superior to that of most of his songwriting

contemporaries of unimpaired health. Another important developement in Schumann studies has been

emergence of Clara Schumann as a prolific and significant composer, and the subject of a spate of

biographichal study and re-evaluation. If she is not the equal of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel as a song

composer, it is probably because the liedinterested her less than instrumental forms. Certainly the study of

Schumann’s songs would have been easier if Clara had made an annotated performing edition fo his lieder,

which she regularly accompanied; unfortunately, many of their secrets (particularly as regards tempos) died

with her and Brahms. Schumann himself acknowledged Clara’s influence by publishing some three of her

songs as part of their joint op.37 (1840), a cycle from Rückert’s Liebesfrühling which celebrated nuptial

bliss. Mendelssohn had led the way with this kind of family collaboration 12 years earlier in his songs opp.8

and 9, in which six of the 24 songs are by his sister Fanny.

With Schumann songwriting was conscious, even cerebral; he was the first theorist of the lied, which he

described as the only genre in which significant progress had been made since Beethoven (NZM, xix, 1843,

pp.34–5). This he attributed to the rise of a new school of lyric poets – Eichendorff and Rückert, Heine and

Uhland – whose intensity of emotion and imagery had been embodied in a new musical style. As example

he chose the op.1 of Robert Franz, himself a notable theorist of the lied as well as a practitioner with about

280 songs. For Franz, musical expression of poetry in the 18th-century tradition was a sine qua non. He

was explicit, too, about his aims and methods: ‘In my songs the accompaniment depicts the situation

described in the text, while the melody embodies the awareness of that situation’. He claimed that in

addition to all the techniques developed by previous songwriters he (and he alone) had deliberately sought

to draw on the resources of Bach and Handel, the Protestant chorale, and traditional folksong; and it is true

that Franz included modal as well as chromatic harmony.

His own invention, however, especially of melody, was not quite abundant enough to give his songs the

musical autonomy characteristic of the best 19th-century lieder, so that his work seems old-fashioned by

comparison with that of his contemporaries. As in Mendelssohn’s songs, a deliberate limitation of scope

resulted in the absence of dramatic or narrative songs. The piano parts are unobtrusive to a fault, and there

are few independent preludes or postludes because the musical material is so economically tailored to the

poem. Mendelssohnian too is Franz’s extensive use of the undistinguished verses of a close friend

(Osterwald, with 51 settings). There are also certain palpable defects, such as an overreliance on the

sequential treatment of melody (as in Für Musik op.10) and an overinsistence on formal perfection, with

sometimes contrived effects. The compensation is a Schubertian devotion to lyric verse, typified in his

passionate identification with Heine (67 settings, the greatest concentration in the lied repertory). Thus

in Aus meinen grossen Schmerzen op.5 the piano part is itself a small-scale song because the poem is

about the fashioning of small songs; the illustrative arpeggios at ‘klingend’ are woven into the texture with

unobtrusive dexterity; and the slight divergence of vocal and instrumental lines at the end makes the poetic

point most tellingly. The craftsmanship is self-effacingly immaculate. Though a minor composer, Franz is a

major lied writer, greatly admired by Schumann, Liszt and Wagner; his work is long overdue for reappraisal.