Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied (review)

This collection of sixteen essays by Ann C. Fehn, Rufus Hallmark, Harry E. Seelig, and Jürgen Thym covers a span of forty years, considering that Seelig’s “The Musical ‘Spirit’ of Goethe’s ‘Suleika’: Schubert’s Settings D. 720 and D. 717” (39–70) began as a lecture-demonstration with soprano Dorothy Ornest at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in May of 1971. The origin of this chapter is characteristic of the volume as a whole. Regardless of their primary professional affiliation as musicologist, singer, or teacher of German studies, all four contributors developed expertise in interpreting Lieder both as poetry and as song. At professional meetings in the 1970s and 1980s, they shared ideas and frequently collaborated with one another; for example, all four pieces dealing with “Poetic and Musical Structure” (155–280) were co-authored with the late Ann Clark Fehn, to whose memory Of Poetry and Song is dedicated.

At the conclusion of his essay on “The Rückert Lieder of Robert and Clara Schumann” (originally published in 1990 and likewise dedicated to the memory of his recently deceased colleague), Rufus Hallmark provides suggestions for how this cycle of twelve songs from the year 1841 might best be performed today, including the assignment of gender and voice type for the nine solo songs. Hallmark also observes, however: “It probably never crossed Robert’s or Clara’s mind that their Liebesfrühling cycle might receive a complete, formal performance. Concert renditions of excerpted numbers and informal singing of the songs at home was likely all they would have anticipated” (359). For the volume at hand, the main question for Jürgen Thym as editor must have resembled that of the Schumanns as they considered the selection and then the arrangement of songs from the 400-odd lyrics contained in Rückert’s Liebesfrühling: which essays by him and his collaborators should he publish, and in which sequence? The solution is genial. Following a hitherto unpublished lecture by Hallmark, “On Schubert Reading Poetry: A Primer in the Rhythm of Poetry and Music,” which anticipates many of the themes of the volume as a whole, readers are presented with five close readings and comparative studies of individual songs, beginning with the aforementioned piece by Seelig and ending with a 2007 publication by the same author entitled “‘Hans Adam’—Goethe’s Parodistic Creation Myth: A Parody Parodied by Hugo Wolf and Richard Strauss.” The ensuing co-authored essays on poetic and musical structure examine “Text and Music in Schubert’s Settings of Pentameter Poetry” (Hallmark/Fehn), “Repetition as Structure in the German Lied” (Fehn/Thym), “Sonnet Structure in the German Lied: Shackles or Spurs?” (Fehn/Thym), and “Schubert’s Strategies in Setting Free Verse” (Thym/ Fehn). Part Three of the volume is entitled “In Search of Cycles” (281–406); here we encounter, alongside the essay on the Schumanns’ Rückert Lieder, four other chapters by each of the volume contributors that deal with Wolf’s setting of the Hatem/Suleika “Duodrama” from Goethe’s Diwan (Seelig); text and music in Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Fehn); the Schumann/Eichendorff Liederkreis with and without the inclusion of the poem more familiar from its “folksong” rendition as “Der frohe Wandersmann” (Thym); and Schumann’s Opus 24 setting of nine poems from the Junge Leiden section of Heine’s Buch der Lieder in comparison with the arrangement of twenty poems from Lyrisches Intermezzo that became known as Dichterliebe in their sixteen-poem selection in Opus 48 (Hallmark). Finally, Thym’s discussion of Eichendorff poems set to music by Wolf and Pfitzner at the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century serves as an appropriate “Postlude” to the volume as a whole, particularly given its lucid analysis of “musical impressionism” not only in these settings, but also in Schumann’s “Auf einer Burg” and “Mondnacht.”

The song texts chosen for analysis in this volume largely belong to the classic-romantic canon of...