Look over any standard history of music in the nineteenth century, and you’ll learn about a set of gifted songwriters who released published volumes of songs for solo voice and piano. These songs are often described as lieder (the German word for songs), simply because so many German-speaking musicians wrote them: Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, etc. It’s also common to describe a parallel repertoire of mélodies (the French word for melody) by composers such as Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, and Gabriel Fauré. There’s also a tradition in the United States at the same time called “parlor song”—the best known example of such a song is Stephen Foster’s “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.”
Some historians try to combine these styles by talking about “art song” as a category that includes both lied and mélodie, but I personally find the term art song to be a bit backhanded—it seems to imply that the other songs aren’t art (the parlor song is rarely meant when people say “art song”).
All these genres, despite their differences, were designed to be played in one’s own home. In other words, they were domestic music, strongly associated, like instrumental chamber music or solo piano music, with family music making—with the all the feminine associations that you might imagine for a period in which women were expected to be homemakers. The practice of performing these songs in public recitals, in front of a silent, appreciative audience, is actually a relatively modern development. Certainly singers performed these songs in some public concerts during the nineteenth century, but many more of these songs were sung in private concerts organized in people’s homes, particularly in the salons of rich women in major cities.
In other words, when we talk about “art songs,” imagining songs written for the concert hall, we distort a lot of the real context of this music. They were much closer to pop culture in their own time, in that they were designed for a clearly defined social use and had a clear economic function. Songs also made good economic sense for composers. They were cheaper to publish than massive symphonic works, and a large audience of amateur musicians was willing to buy them.
The trend of composing songs for voice and keyboard seems to have started in German-speaking lands in the 1760s. The earliest German lieder were designed for amateurs to sing and play. During the Romantic era, the keyboard parts generally got harder and more musically important, and there was increased attention to setting the text in an evocative manner. Not surprisingly, the increasing difficulty of these songs led toward the professionalization of domestic music. By the end of the nineteenth century, song recitals by professional singers were becoming more common (as were concerts by professional string quartets).
Songs were usually published in sets of three or more. Beginning with Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved), 1816, composers experimented with publishing sets of songs that were linked together in some way. Since these songs were usually settings of well-known poems, it was possible to construct a narrative out of unrelated poems by rearranging them or to set a series of poems about the same characters. Composers also experimented with musical unifying devices, such as key structures, so that the songs had to follow each other in a set order. To make a comparison with modern music—the song cycle is essentially the nineteenth-century equivalent of the concept album.
Franz Schubert (1797–1828) is particularly associated with song cycles. Although Schubert died young, he wrote music in almost every genre—and struggled to find an audience for his work: his operas and symphonies were rarely performed during his lifetime. His 600 songs remain some of his best-known compositions. His Die schöne Müllerin (The lovely girl from the mill), 1825, contains twenty songs and tells the story of a young, suicidal man who is unlucky in love. Schubert’s second cycle, Winterreise (the winter’s journey), 1827, contains 24 songs, and depicts a heartbroken wander traveling through desolate landscapes. It seems unlikely that most people who bought these songs actually performed them as a set in their homes; cycles such as these, however, provided a unified work that singers could perform in public concerts.
Later in the nineteenth century, song composers increasingly turned toward arranging folk songs in a nationalist context. While Beethoven had published arrangements of many folk songs, most of his work had focused on songs from foreign lands (especially Irish and Scottish songs). Later composers published folk songs from their own countries: Johannes Brahms (1833–1896) published sets of German folksongs (1858 and 1894), while Mily Balakirev (1837–1910) did the same for Russian music (1866, 1898).
Matthew Franke's Music History Course Notes 