Art Forms
Lied
LEET (rhymes with English "seat"); plural Lieder, LEE-der
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The Lied, German for song, is a form of German art song for solo voice and piano developed to set poetry to music with the piano carrying as much expressive weight as the voice. Settings in German existed before 1400, but the Lied as it is known today emerged from the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, coinciding with the rise of a poetry-reading middle class in the wake of the French Revolution. It takes two basic musical shapes, strophic, in which every stanza of a poem is set to the same repeated music, and through-composed, in which the music changes with each stanza to track the poem's shifting sense. Franz Schubert, who set more than seventy poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe out of over six hundred songs in his short life, became the form's acknowledged pioneering master, and every generation of German composers who wrote Lieder through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries counted him as such.
Facts
MediumGerman-language poetry set for solo voice with piano accompaniment 1 Signature TechniqueThrough-composed setting (durchkomponiert): distinct music written for every line of the poem with no repeat signs, as opposed to a strophic setting that repeats the same music for each stanza. 2 Place of OriginGermany; the earliest Lieder date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, though the genre is generally said to have come fully into its own only in the songs of Franz Schubert. 2 Notable ExampleFranz Schubert's Erlkonig (1815), a through-composed setting of Goethe's poem often cited as the work in which the Lied became a fully mature art form. 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Practitioners
Works In This Form
Sources
1. Schubert's Lieder: Settings of Goethe's Poems (OpenLearn, The Open University)
1. Schubert's Lieder: Settings of Goethe's Poems (OpenLearn, The Open University)
1. Schubert's Lieder: Settings of Goethe's Poems (OpenLearn, The Open University)
1. Schubert's Lieder: Settings of Goethe's Poems (OpenLearn, The Open University)
The Open UniversityWorks In This Form: Gretchen am SpinnradeView the Source 2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationLied, Strophic vs. through-composed settings sectionQuote, Lied, Strophic vs. through-composed settings section
In a through-composed song (German 'durchkomponiert'), there are no repeat signs, and the composer is free...to write distinct music for all of the lines of the poem.
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationLied, Introduction and The mainstream lied tradition in classical music sectionsQuote, Lied, Introduction and The mainstream lied tradition in classical music sections
The earliest Lieder date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries...It is in the songs of Franz Schubert that the genre came into its own.
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationLied, The mainstream lied tradition in classical music sectionQuote, Lied, The mainstream lied tradition in classical music section
It is in the songs of Franz Schubert that the genre came into its own.
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