Lied

{{further|Liederhandschrift}}

For German speakers, the term "Lied" has a long history ranging from twelfth-century troubadour songs ({{lang|de|Minnesang}}) via folk songs ({{lang|de|Volkslieder}}) and church hymns ({{lang|de|Kirchenlieder}}) to twentieth-century workers' songs ({{lang|de|Arbeiterlieder}}) or protest songs ({{lang|de|Kabarettlieder, Protestlieder}}).{{citation needed|date=December 2016}}

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.

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.{{cite book|last1=Orrey |first1=Leslie |first2=John |last2=Warrack |author2-link=John Warrack |year=2002 |chapter=Lied |title=The Oxford Companion to Music |editor-first=Alison |editor-last=Latham |location=Oxford and New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-866212-9}} 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.{{cite book |last1=Arnold |first1=Devis |title=The New Oxford Companion to Music |date=1984 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=0-19-311316-3 |page=1065}}

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".{{cite book |last1=Alwes |first1=Chester Lee |title=A History of Western Choral Music |date=2015 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-936193-9 |page=66 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=brq6BwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66 |access-date=10 December 2022 |language=en}}

German-speaking composers Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven wrote {{lang|de|Lieder}} for voice and keyboard.

The great age of German song came in the nineteenth century. With the flowering of German literature, German-speaking composers found more inspiration in poetry.{{citation needed|date=September 2011}}

Schubert found a new balance between words and music, a new expression of the sense of the words in and through the music. He wrote over 600 songs, some of them in sequences or song cycles that convey a journey of the soul, not the body.

Song cycles (German: {{lang|de|Liederzyklus}} or Liederkreis) are series of {{lang|de|Lieder}} (generally three or more) tied by a single narrative or theme, such as Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, or Robert Schumann's Frauen-Liebe und Leben and Dichterliebe. Schubert and Schumann are most closely associated with this genre, mainly developed in the Romantic era.{{cite book|last=Deaville |first=James |year=2004 |chapter=A Multitude of Voices: The Lied at Mid Century |title=The Cambridge Companion to the Lied |editor-first=James |editor-last=Parsons |page=143 |location=Cambridge and New York |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-80471-4}}{{cite book|last=Thyme |first=Jürgen |year=2005 |chapter=Schubert's Strategies in Setting Free Verse |title=Word and Music Studies: Essays on Music and the Spoken Word and on Surveying the Field: Essays from the Fourth International Conference in Word and Music Studies, Berlin, 2003 |editor1-first=Suzanne M. |editor1-last=Lodato |editor2-first=David Francis |editor2-last=Urrows |pages=90 |location=Amsterdam and New York |publisher=Editions Rodopi |isbn=978-90-420-1897-6}}

Typically, {{lang|de|Lieder}} were for a single singer and piano, with orchestral accompaniment being a later development.

The tradition was continued by Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf in the latter half of the 19th century.

Gustav Mahler, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reger, Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky carried the tradition of the {{lang|de|Lied}} into the 20th century. Arnold Schoenberg,{{cite book|last=Gramit |first=David |year=2004 |chapter=The Circulation of the Lied: The Double Life of an Art Form |title=The Cambridge Companion to the Lied |editor-first=James |editor-last=Parsons |page=311 |location=Cambridge and New York |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-80471-4}} Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Ernst Krenek wrote tonal, atonal, and twelve-tone {{lang|de|Lieder}}. Somewhat later, Paul Dessau and Hanns Eisler wrote {{lang|de|Lieder}} of a sometimes overtly political nature.

Some of the most famous examples of Lieder are Schubert's Erlkönig, Der Tod und das Mädchen ("Death and the Maiden"), Gretchen am Spinnrade, and Der Doppelgänger.

The mélodies of Hector Berlioz, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc are French parallels to the German {{lang|de|Lied}}. Modest Mussorgsky's and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Russian songs are also analogous. 20th-century English examples, as represented by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Ivor Gurney, and Gerald Finzi, were often folk-like in idiom.{{citation needed|date=December 2016}}

{{reflist|colwidth=30em}}

• {{cite book|editor-last=Hallmark |editor-first=Rufus|title=German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century|year=1996 |publisher=Schirmer Books |location=New York |isbn=978-0-02-870845-4|url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/germanliederinni0000unse|ref=none}}
• {{cite book|last=Parsons|first=James|title=The Cambridge Companion to the Lied | series = Cambridge Companions to Music|year=2004 |publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge |isbn=978-0-521-80027-3|ref=none}}
• Lieder line by line

{{Commons category|Lieder}}

{{Wiktionary|lied}}

• [http://www.lieder.net/ The LiederNet Archive], texts and translations
• [http://www.liedersoundarchive.org/ The Lieder Sound Archive]
• [https://musescore.com/openscore-lieder-corpus/sets The OpenScore Lieder Corpus], public domain transcriptions to play or download
• [http://TheArtSongProject.com/ The Art Song Project]
• [http://www.berlin1969.com/stories-geschichte/life-on-the-other-side-1971-daruber/ "Life On the Other Side – 1971 Darüber..."], Aubrey Pankey, an African-American lieder singer

{{Romantic music}}

{{Portal bar|Classical music}}

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Category:German music history

Category:Romantic music

Category:Song forms

Category:Medieval music genres