Song forms

In a song the poem comes first, and its shape often decides the shape of the music. Schubert, who wrote more than 600 songs, used three basic plans.

In a strophic song every verse of the poem, or strophe, is sung to the same music, as in a hymn or a folk song. Das Wandern, the first song of Die schöne Müllerin, has five verses and one tune. The music stays the same while the words move on, so the singer’s colour and timing carry the changes.

A modified strophic song keeps the music for most verses but changes it where the poem turns. Winterreise, Schubert’s cycle of 24 songs from 1827, opens with one: Gute Nacht, a walking song in D minor.

A through-composed song follows the text with new music as the story unfolds. Schubert wrote Erlkönig in 1815, at eighteen, on Goethe’s ballad of a father riding through the night with his young son, pursued by the Erlking, a spirit of death. One singer plays the narrator, the father, the terrified boy and the Erlking, while the piano’s hammering triplets, the galloping horse, hardly ever stop.

The poem has its patterns, three temptations and three cries of Mein Vater, mein Vater (my father, my father), each higher than the last. But the music does not repeat itself from verse to verse: it climbs with the boy’s fear until the triplets stop and the last line is sung as a recitative.

Baroque opera and oratorio had another plan, the da capo aria: a first section, a contrasting middle and the first section again, A B A. The singer was expected to decorate the return. He was despised, from Handel’s Messiah of 1741, is a famous example: a slow lament in E-flat major on words from Isaiah, with a middle section in C minor.