Concert Song and Concert Speech Around 1800

The rise of the German lied as a concert genre cannot be fully understood without taking into account the cultivation of declamation around 1800. As a musical interpreter of poetry, the lieder singer lends her voice and physical appearance to the imaginary voice or voices contained in the musical-literary work, without, however, fully embodying a character. In this ambiguous task, she had a predecessor and competitor: the declamation artist. The German fashion for stage declamation had a high point around 1810, and declamation frequently featured in concert settings in the so-called musikalisch-deklamatorische Akademien. By presenting poetry and dramatic excerpts viva voce before an audience, declamation 'prepared the stage' for the art song.

This practice of stage declamation was accompanied by a body of theory, for which Gustav Anton von Seckendorff provides a useful focal point. Seckendorff and other declamation theorists explicitly addressed the question of how the speaker might bring poetry to life by finding some middle ground between stage acting, oratory, and straightforward reading. In this respect, declamation theory inherited most of its concepts from rhetoric. It also continued the age-old rhetorical interest in the expressive and musical qualities of speech prosody. A widespread doctrine holds that there is a vocal continuum, from declamation as a heightened form of speech to song as heightened declamation. While this view has remained controversial, it is commonly accepted that certain elements of declamation such as accent and phrasing are subsumed into composition.

Declamation and lieder singing most closely approximate each other in the so-called declamatory style, of which Schubert's collaborator Johann Michael Vogl is a prominent representative. The connections between the declamatory style in singing, the declamatory stance as prescribed by declamation theorists, and the interplay of lyrical and dramatic features within the lied genre are highlighted in a discussion of some of Schubert's early lieder.