Thöne und Melodeyen, Arien und Canzonetten. Zur Musik des deutschen Barockliedes

Around 1630, a genre of secular song emerged in German-speaking lands and remained popular there until ca. 1680: the Baroque continuo song (or lied). Regardless of whether they are scored for solo voice or vocal quintet, these songs are predominately strophic settings of stanzaic poetry in which the voice or voices are accompanied by an instrumental bass part, normally played on a keyboard instrument (the basso continuo part). Most typically the settings display syllabic declamation of the poetry, the majority of which is secular and written by contemporary poets, such as Martin Opitz, August Buchner, Johann Rist, Philipp von Zesen, and a number of others (including a few composers). It is to this still-neglected genre that Werner Braun turns his attention in the present book. Braun, a German musicologist who has focused on the music of the seventeenth century, both sacred and secular, is the author of many important monographs, articles, and editions of music. In the present book he has made a major contribution to the study of a musical genre that has received far less attention from scholars and performers than the operas and sacred music of the era.

Braun divides his study into five major parts ("Fundamental questions," "Under the Sign of Opitz," "New Impulses," "Late History," and "On Systematics"); these five are divided into chapters and subchapters. Parts 1 and 5 treat theoretical and analytical questions, respectively, and serve as a framework for parts 2–4, in which Braun treats the continuo lied chronologically, and discusses various aspects of its history and development. Here the coverage is very broad. Most of the more technical musical discussion appears in part 5, and is written in language that is accessible to non-music-specialists.

Braun's intention is "to sketch a complete picture of the German Lied in the seventeenth century" (i). He focuses on the period ca. 1630–80, the heyday of the continuo lied, but rather than retrace the development of the genre, as previous scholars have done, he instead raises a number of interesting issues that arise out of an examination of the continuo song as a musical, sociological, and cultural phenomenon.

In his treatment of the continuo song in parts 2–4, Braun begins with early developments in Saxony (Leipzig and Dresden), and first focuses on the works of Johann Hermann Schein (1586–1630), most of which predate the important poetic reforms of Martin Opitz (1597–1639) and prefigure the continuo song. He then looks at the emergence of the continuo song in Dresden in the work of Johann Nauwach (pub. 1627) and Christoph Kittel (pub. 1638), and the reform poetry of Opitz, "without [whom] there would be no Baroque Lied" (141). Braun emphasizes the impact and influence of Opitz, and points out that with the new reform poetry of Opitz a new relationship developed between word and music, and thus between poet and composer. Now the composer served as "Beseeler" ("enlivener" or "animator") of the poetry, and as such was courted by the poet. This new relationship defined the continuo song throughout its existence — in the period of its first flowering, as represented by the Königsberg school with its primary representative Heinrich Albert, and its later period, defined by the works of Dedekind, Staden, Löhner, Krieger, and others.

In part 5, Braun looks at the relationship between music and poetry from a more analytical perspective. Here he addresses such topics as the metric (i.e., musical meter) responses of composers to various poetic meters, the effect of various styles of musical declamation on the original form and punctuation of the poetry, the implications of enjambment for musical settings (and the consequences of certain types of musical setting for enjambment), the rediscovery by poets of the dactyl and its musical results, and many other matters central to the more practical aspects of setting poetry to music.