Lied

In the Western classical music tradition, Lied ( LEED, LEET, German: [liːt] ; pl. Lieder LEE-dər, German: [ˈliːdɐ] ; lit. 'song') is a term for setting poetry to music. The term is used for any kind of song in German, but among English speakers, lied is often used interchangeably with "art song" to encompass works that the tradition has inspired in other languages as well. The poems that have been made into lieder often center on pastoral themes or themes of romantic love. 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. It later came especially to refer to settings of Romantic poetry during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the early twentieth century. Examples include settings by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler or Richard Strauss.¶

Terminology

For German speakers, the term "Lied" has a long history ranging from twelfth-century troubadour songs (Minnesang) via folk songs (Volkslieder) and church hymns (Kirchenlieder) to twentieth-century workers' songs (Arbeiterlieder) or protest songs (Kabarettlieder, Protestlieder). The German word Lied for "song" (cognate with the English dialectal leed) 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".¶

The mainstream lied tradition in classical music

With the late 18th century, the term "lied" comes to be used with its primary meaning, "art song in the classical music tradition." For information on this tradition in general, see art song. The musical forces for lieder were standardized as a single singer, accompanied by a piano. The piano had only recently achieved widespread use; and its greater expressive possibilities relative to the earlier harpsichord may have played a role in advancing the composition of lieder. Usually the intended singing voice is a "high voice", in the sense that it is comfortably within the range of a soprano or a tenor. For both, the music as printed is the same; the soprano sings the notes as written, the tenor an octave lower. Lieder were also written for the lower voices: baritone/bass for men, mezzo/alto for women. Lieder are often sung in transposition, either carried out on the spot by a skilled pianist, or through published transposed editions of the music. Transposition is a fully-accepted practice; for instance, the celebrated lieder singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang a great number of songs transposed downward, to match his baritone voice. The classical-era masters Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven all wrote lieder that are performed today, though for each of them the lied was something of a minor genre. It is in the songs of Franz Schubert that the genre came into its own. Schubert found a new balance between words and music, a new expression of the sense of the words in and through the music. In his short life (1797-1828) he wrote over 600 songs.¶

Texts

Recordings of lieder typically come with booklets or other material giving the original text, so that non-German-speaking listeners can follow the meaning of the verse as they listen; the same is true of concert programs.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Lied”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Lied is classical art song in the German tradition, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 23 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶