Title: The lied : mirror of late romanticism /
Authors: Kravitt, Edward F.
Publisher: Yale University Press,
Year: 1996
Subjects: Songs, German History and criticism.; Songs, German History and criticism.
Abstract: The German lied, a song form that fuses music and poetry, provides a key to understanding musical and cultural history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first comprehensive study of the late-romantic lied, Edward F. Kravitt shows how this popular genre mirrored far-reaching cultural changes of the period, when tensions in artistic politics pitted tradition against innovation, naturalism against universalism. Kravitt surveys five major composers - Wolf, Mahler, Strauss, Pfitzner, and Reger - as well as the young Schoenberg and dozens of lesser-known figures, such as Engelbert Humperdinck and Joseph Haas. He examines the composers' changing attitudes toward musical and poetic structure, their reasons for turning to the lied, performance practices of the day, the cultural background of the various types of lieder (such as folksong, ballad, and kinderlieder) and melodrama, and the aesthetic principles underlying them.
Contents: pt. I. Introduction: The Fin de Siecle -- Modernism versus Tradition. 1. Innovation. 2. Preservation of Tradition. 3. End of the Romantic Era -- pt. II. The Disparate Aesthetic: Naturalism, Nationalism, Symbolism, and Other Trends. 4. Declamation. 5. Naturalistic Description and the Reaction It Provoked. 6. The Height of Naturalism in Music: The Actor and Musician in Collaboration. 7. Pan-German Nationalism. 8. The Ballad and the Kinderlied. 9. The Twilight of Late Romanticism -- pt. III. The Unifying Aesthetic. 10. Expressive Aesthetics in Performance. 11. Structural Principles and the Common Aesthetic. 12. Late-Romantic Expansiveness.