The Cambridge Companion to the Lied

Beginning several generations before Schubert, the Lied first appears as domestic entertainment. In the century that follows it becomes one of the primary modes of music-making. By the time German song comes to its presumed conclusion with Richard Strauss’s 1948 Vier letzte Lieder, this rich repertory has moved beyond the home and keyboard accompaniment to the symphony hall. This is the first introductory chronicle of this fascinating genre. In essays by eminent scholars, this Companion places the Lied in its full context – at once musical, literary, and cultural – with chapters devoted to focal composers as well as important issues, such as the way in which the Lied influenced other musical genres, its use as a musical commodity, and issues of performance. The volume is framed by a detailed chronology of German music and poetry from the late 1730s to the present and also contains a wide-ranging guide to suggested further reading.

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The Cambridge Companion to the

Lied

. . . . . . . . 

EDITED BY
James Parsons

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Minion 10.75/14 pt.   System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The Cambridge companion to the Lied / edited by James Parsons.
   p.   cm. – (Cambridge companions to music)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 369) and index.
ISBN 0 521 80027 7 (hardback) – ISBN 0 521 80471 X (paperback)
1. Songs – Germany – History and criticism.   2. Songs – Austria – History and criticism.   I. Parsons, James, 1956–   II. Series.
ML2829.C36   2003   2003051229

ISBN 0 521 80027 7 hardback
ISBN 0 521 80471 X paperback

Contents

Contributors

Ruth O. Bingham, after receiving her Ph.D. from Cornell University, moved to Honolulu, where she lectures at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and reviews for Opera News and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Past projects include summer workshops on music in American history for Boise State University and a series of lecture/workshops on early childhood education for the University of Hawaii, Manoa, Childcare Center. Publications include Topical Song Cycles of the Early Nineteenth Century (A-R Editions, 2003), an edition of six cycles, and Music Theory in Practice: A Companion to Fundamentals in Western Music (Kendall-Hunt Publishing, 1995).

Jane K. Brown is Professor of Germanics and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. A former president of the Goethe Society of North America, she works on drama, narrative, and poetry of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and has published extensively on Goethe, particularly Faust, and also on Droste-Hülshoff, Shakespeare, Schubert, and Mozart. Currently she is working on a book on allegory and the advent of neo-classicism in drama and opera from Shakespeare to Wagner.

James Deaville is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. His 1986 dissertation from Northwestern University concerned Peter Cornelius as music critic. Since then, he has spoken and published on the music of Liszt and his circle in Weimar, Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Reger, music criticism, music and gender, television music, and music and race. His edition of the Bayreuth memoirs of Wagner’s balletmaster Richard Fricke was published as Wagner in Rehearsal 1875–1876: The Diaries of Richard Fricke (Pendragon Press, 1997). Essays and reviews by him have appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Norton / New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, Pipers-Enzyklopaedie des Musiktheaters, Studies in American Music, Notes, Canadian University Music Review, Journal of Musicological Research, and Studien zur Wertungsforschung.

Marie-Agnes Dittrich studied history and musicology in Germany at the University of Hamburg where, in 1989, she completed her dissertation, “Harmonik und Sprachvertonung in Schuberts Liedern.” She was a lecturer in Music Theory and Musicology at the Conservatory of Hamburg from 1983 until 1993 and a guest lecturer at the Universities of Ibadan, Ilorin and Nsukka in Nigeria. In 1993 she was named Professor of Formal Analysis at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien. Since 1995, she also has been a lecturer for the Vienna Courses of the American Heritage Association. Her research interests include music analysis, music of northern Germany, and Schubert. Publications by her have appeared in Musica, Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft and numerous collections of essays.

Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway, Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College and Co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival. He is the author of The Life of Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (Cambridge University Press, 1997). He received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1998 and has been musicological consultant and program annotator for The Philadelphia Orchestra since 2000.

Amanda Glauert joined the academic faculty of the Royal Academy of Music in 1994 where she is now Head of Research. She studied at Clare College, Cambridge, and subsequently undertook research into the aesthetics of the Lied at Cambridge and Goldsmith’s College, London. She has held lecturing positions at Trinity College, Dublin, and Colchester Institute. She has contributed essays to Wagner in Performance (Yale University Press, 1992) and The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and her article “‘Ich singe, wie der Vogel singt’: Reflections on Nature and Genre in Wolf’s Setting of Goethe’s Der Sänger” was published in 2000 in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (vol. 125). Her book on Wolf song, Hugo Wolf and the Wagnerian Inheritance, came out in 1999 (Cambridge University Press). She currently is writing a book on the Lieder of Beethoven.

David Gramit teaches musicology at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. A recipient of the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society for his work on the aesthetic context of Franz Schubert’s circle, he has published on a variety of topics including Schubert’s Lieder, the social construction of musical meaning in the nineteenth century, and the social history of German musical culture. He is the author of Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (University of California Press, 2002).

Graham Johnson lives in London and is one of the world’s most sought-after collaborative pianists. The Songmakers’ Almanac – Twenty Years of Song Recitals in London (Thames Publishing, 1996) tells the story of the ground-breaking series of concerts which established his reputation. His complete set of Schubert Lieder for Hyperion on thirty-seven discs includes contributors from (among many others) Elly Ameling, Janet Baker, Ian Bostridge, Brigitte Fassbaender, Matthias Goerne, Thomas Hampson, Felicity Lott, Ann Murray, Peter Schreier, and Christine Schäfer. A Schumann Lieder project on twelve discs now is halfway completed; both series are issued with Mr. Johnson’s own commentaries. He is Senior Professor of Accompaniment at London’s Guildhall School of Music, and co-author of the comprehensive and wide-ranging A French Song Companion (Oxford University Press, 2000). Studies of the songs of Britten and Schubert are in preparation.

Rena Charnin Mueller is a musicologist specializing in nineteenth-century music, in particular the work of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. Articles on Liszt’s compositional aesthetics have appeared in 19th Century Music, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the American Liszt Society, Studia Musicologica Hungarica, The Hungarian Quarterly, Magyar Zene, Muszika, and La Revue Musicale. She has published new editions of Les Préludes for Editio Musica Budapest (1997), the Trois Etudes de Concert (1998) and the Ballades (1996) for Henle Verlag; and her edition of the newly discovered Liszt Walse was issued by Thorpe Music Publishing in 1996. With Mária Eckhardt, she is the author of the Franz Liszt “List of Works” for the revised edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and they are also co-authoring the forthcoming new Franz Liszt Thematic Catalogue (Henle Verlag).

James Parsons is Associate Professor of Music History at Southwest Missouri State University, in Springfield, Missouri. His research centers on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music, Beethoven, musical aesthetics, and the Lied. His article “‘Deine Zauber binden wieder’: Beethoven, Schiller, and the Joyous Reconciliation of Opposites” appeared in Beethoven Forum, vol. 9, no. 1 (2002). Other essays and reviews have been published in Early Music, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Musical Analysis, and Notes. He is the author of the essay on the eighteenth-century Lied for the revised edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. At present, he is at work on a book-length study of the twentieth-century Lied, for which he was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 2002.

Heather Platt, a native of Canberra, Australia, is Associate Professor of Music History at Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana. A particular scholarly interest of hers is the reception of Brahms’s Lieder by subsequent composers; her article “Hugo Wolf and the Reception of Brahms’s Lieder” appeared in Brahms Studies, vol. 2, and her article “Jenner versus Wolf: The Critical Reception of Brahms’s Songs” was published in the Journal of Musicology. She also has published articles using Schenkerian analysis to examine the relationships between text and music in Brahms’s songs in such journals as Intégral and Indiana Music Theory Review. Numerous articles by her on Brahms’s Lieder are included in The Compleat Brahms, ed. Leon Botstein (W. W. Norton, 1999). Her Johannes Brahms: A Guide to the Research, part of Routledge’s Music Bibliographies series, was published in 2003.

Jürgen Thym is Professor Emeritus at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) where he served as musicology department chair from 1982 until 2000. He has lectured, both in the United States and abroad, and published on the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wolf, Weill, and others (mostly on text–music relationships in German Lieder). He is the co-editor of several volumes in the Arnold Schoenberg Gesamtausgabe and co-translator of music theory treatises by Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Heinrich Schenker. In 1983 he received ASCAP’s Deems-Taylor Award. He currently is working on a volume of essays, Of Poetry and Music: Approaches to the German Lied in the Nineteenth Century, and an edition of the writings by composer Luca Lombardi, Construction of Freedom.

Susan Youens is Professor of Musicology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals and of seven books: Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise (Cornell University Press, 1991), Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music (Princeton University Press, 1992), and (all for Cambridge University Press), Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin (1992), Schubert’s Poets and the Making of Lieder (1996), Schubert, Müller, and Die schöne Müllerin (1997), Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs (2000), and Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles (2002). She currently is working on a study of Heine and the Lied as well as a social history of the Lied.

James L. Zychowicz is a musicologist whose specialization is nineteenth-century music, especially the works of Gustav Mahler. His publications include Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, in the series Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure published by Oxford University Press, as well as articles and reviews in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Notes, and the Journal of Musicology. He is the editor of the two-volume critical edition of Mahler’s score for Weber’s opera Die drei Pintos, published recently in the series of Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (A-R Editions, 2000) and given its first performance at Lincoln Center in 2002. Articles on Mahler and Strauss are forthcoming in several collections of essays devoted to those composers.

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance and encouragement of many friends and colleagues during the planning and preparation of this volume. Above all, I am indebted to my contributors, none of whom grumbled even once (or at least not to me) when I allowed my attention to be diverted from this project by others. Working with all of the authors whose work appears in this book has been one of the highpoints of my professional career. From the start, Susan Youens was unstinting in her help, sagacious counsel, and formidable knowledge of the German art song. At Cambridge University Press, Victoria Cooper provided equal amounts of patience and unfailing good faith: every editor of a collection of essays should be so lucky. Nikki Burton, also at the press, cheerfully responded to an endless array of questions. Paul Watt, production editor, was a gracious guiding spirit once the volume went to press; I owe him much. I am grateful to Christopher Gibbs, Rufus Hallmark, Glenn Stanley, Susan Youens, and Neal Zaslaw for helping to identify potential contributors. For other kindnesses, I thank Tom Beghin, Mark Evan Bonds, Michael J. Budds, James S. Fritz, Denise Gallo, Duncan Large, and my dear friends in Springfield, Missouri, Michael Murray, and Joseph Schellhardt. If I have but one regret having to do with this volume, it is that Joe did not live to see it completed.

   My own chapters benefited from discussions with and suggestions from Ruth Bingham, Deanna Bush, Denise Gallo, David Gramit, and my colleague at Southwest Missouri State University (in German studies) Carol Anne Costabile-Heming. I owe Michael Collins a special word of thanks as not only did he read numerous versions of my chapters, he also has been a source of support for more years than either of us would care to own up to: first as an inspiring teacher and, as of late, as a valued colleague, and always a friend. Research on my chapters was supported in part by a Study Visit Research Grant for Faculty from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange [DAAD]) and a Summer Faculty Fellowship from Southwest Missouri State University. This funding facilitated my first visit to Berlin and the Musikabteilung of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz and the Akademie der Künste zu Berlin; being able to work at both collections has been of enormous assistance. Friends made during my now three trips to Berlin likewise have been a source of support, above all Christiane Waskowiak and Frauke Mahrt-Thomsen. Also in Berlin, I am pleased to acknowledge the gracious help of Hermann Danuser, at Humboldt Universität, and Albrecht Riethmüller, at Freie Universität. Berlin is an exciting city right now; its extraordinary archives, amazing art museums, abundant music making, and always tempting restaurants provided a heady backdrop against which to formulate many of my thoughts on the Lied. I also thank the staffs of the Goethe and Schiller Archives and Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, both in Weimar, where I was fortunate to engage in research during a lovely May visit in 2001.

   Thanks also are due to Thomas Tietze at Bärenreiter-Verlag, who graciously granted permission to publish a modified version of Marie-Agnes Dittrich’s essay on Schubert, which first appeared in German in Schubert Handbuch, ed. Walther Dürr and Andreas Krause (Kassel and Stuttgart, 1997).

   Lastly, I am grateful to my family – my mother, Patricia Parker; my brother and his wife, Randy and Brenda Parsons, their vivacious and adorable children, Sarah and Aaron; and my grandmother, Louise M. Vines – for a rare gift that has enriched my life as of late and, I can only hope, theirs too.

The Lied in context: a chronology