The Classical Music Book

155

Hugo Wolf wrote several hundred art

songs, often with deeply romantic and

personal themes, as captured on this

postcard depicting a song from his

Spanish Songbook of 1891.

the scene for his songs, as well as

postludes to summarize the mood.

Although Johannes Brahms wrote

two song cycles, both he and

the Austrian composer Hugo

Wolf concentrated on grouping

their songs into combinations

that were suitable for publication,

which did not necessarily imply

that they should be performed

together. Wolf, in particular, was

remarkable for composing Lieder

almost exclusively. In his works,

he successfully incorporated

Wagnerian harmonic complexity

and psychological insight into the

form on the most intimate scale.

Song legacy

Schubert’s wider influence was

enormous, too, and a greater desire

to raise song to a higher artistic

plane coincided, in the second half

of the 19th century, with attempts

to assert and define nationhood,

both in the German-speaking world

Romantics. Subsequent song

cycles often represented attempts

to build on Schubert’s legacy.

Robert Schumann was greatly

influenced by Schubert. His

own song cycles, many of them

composed in a burst of inspiration

in 1840, the year of his marriage

to pianist and composer Clara

Wieck, tend to be on a smaller

scale, offering a series of poetic

impressions or, in the case of

Frauenliebe und Leben (“A woman’s

love and life”), a broad picture of

a relationship. Schumann often

wrote short piano preludes to set

and beyond. The songs of such

composers as Antonín Dvorˇák

and Modest Mussorgsky often

have a nationalistic coloring.

At the turn of the 20th century,

Gustav Mahler firmly put the

genre in the public sphere, not

least because he was one of the

first composers to orchestrate his

songs himself, as would Richard

Strauss. Several of Mahler’s songs

also found their way into his

early symphonies, either complete

or reworked as instrumental

movements. Strauss, meanwhile,

composed songs throughout

his long life and wrote his

valedictory masterpiece, The

Four Last Songs, for soprano

voice and orchestra, in 1948.

The art song also flourished

in France, Great Britain, and the

United States, especially in the

20th century, with such composers

as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gerald

Finzi, Charles Ives, and Benjamin

Britten, who, as a fine pianist,

made a speciality of performing

Schubert’s song cycles. ■

ROMANTIC 1810 –1920

French Romantic chanson

The story of the art song in

France was largely colored

by the cultural landscape in

Paris, where song—mélodie or

chanson—designed primarily for

performance in private salons,

existed in the shadows of opera.

French song faced an additional

problem: the irregular emphases

and rhythms of the language

made it difficult to set words

to music with naturalness.

Nevertheless, the genre in

France became more ambitious

and sophisticated toward

the end of the 19th century,

following works by composers

such as Hector Berlioz, whose

Les Nuits d’été (Summer Nights,

1841), a setting for six poems

by Théophile Gautier, count

among the first songs for voice

and orchestra in the repertoire,

although they were written

for piano accompaniment

originally. While subsequently

influenced by German composer

Richard Wagner, a uniquely

French branch of art song

developed in the hands of

Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy,

and Francis Poulenc.

There is no song

of Schubert’s

from which one cannot

learn something.

Johannes Brahms

US_150-155_Schubert_1.indd 155 26/03/18 1:00 PM