What is classical music? · Unit 4: Kinds of work
Art song
An , in German a Lied, is a poem set to music for one singer and piano, with the piano as an equal partner. It was written for the recital room or the home rather than the stage. In French the same kind of song is called a mélodie.
Schubert wrote more than six hundred songs. Schumann had published only piano music when, in 1840, the year he married Clara Wieck, he turned to song and wrote well over a hundred.
Among them is Dichterliebe, A Poet’s Love: sixteen songs on poems by Heinrich Heine that follow a love from its first happiness through rejection to bitterness. Schumann sketched the songs in little more than a week that spring. The piano is a full partner: it often begins a song, answers the voice and has the last word.
SchumannDichterliebe, Op. 48The first song speaks of May and of love awakening, yet the music never quite settles. When the voice has finished, the piano stops on a chord that asks for an answer and does not get one.
The poem decides the form. In a song every verse is sung to the same music; in a song, such as Schubert’s Erlkönig, the music keeps changing with the text. Many songs lie in between.
SchumannDichterliebe, Op. 48The second verse is sung to the same tune as the first, over the same piano part: the flowers would weep with the poet if they knew. Only the last verse changes, and the piano’s agitated postlude says what the words cannot.
A group of songs meant to be sung in order is a : Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, of 1816, is generally regarded as the first, and Schubert’s Winterreise, twenty-four songs of a lonely winter journey, is among the greatest.