The Art Song Takes Shape

Vienna in 1815, when piano and voice become equal storytellers in the short song.

Related

RomanticMelodyPiano

Time and place

Vienna, 1815. Schubert wrote hundreds of songs in a single year, and Erlkönig turned Goethe's ballad into a duel between piano and voice. Twenty-five years later Schumann composed Dichterliebe in Leipzig, joining sixteen Heine poems into one cycle.

What happened

Earlier songs were often a melody with accompaniment, the piano supplying harmony. Schubert gave the piano scene and psychology, with triplets imitating hoofbeats, the low register the father's weight, the high register the child's fear. The singer shifts colour to distinguish narrator, father, son and the Erlking. Schumann went further, letting piano preludes and postludes say what the words leave unsaid, with the whole cycle sharing keys and motives.

What changed

Song became a serious genre rather than a parlour diversion. Poetry and music met as equals, the piano became a second narrator, and the song cycle joined short lyrics into a psychological novel. Publishing and domestic performance sustained the genre; Wolf, Strauss, Fauré and Rachmaninoff all worked along this line. Art song also carried poetry into ordinary living rooms.

Listen to the turn

In Erlkönig follow the piano's gallop, then the voice changing breath between four characters, and finally the two closing chords that chill the story. The opening of Dichterliebe sounds like a door slowly opening; the voice enters without hurrying. In Après un rêve the melodic rise follows French stress while arpeggios keep the warmth of a dream just after waking.

Related

This turn belongs to Romantic; see Melody, and the core accompaniment is Piano.

Sources

• Grove Music Online 的 Lied 条目，用于核对舒伯特 1815 年《魔王》与十九世纪艺术歌曲的发展
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3 (Oxford, 2005), for the song cycle and the domestic Lied

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.