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

This rich banquet of critical essays on the German lied by Ann C. Fehn, Rufus Hallmark, Harry E. Seelig, and Jürgen Thym revolves around the premise that the meaning of any given lied is produced by the close structural interaction of poem and music. Such a claim may seem relatively unremarkable today, but in the 1970s, when these scholars were beginning their careers, the typical critical approach to the lied was quite different. As Thym explains in his editorial preface to the volume, musicologists at that time tended either to focus exclusively on the music, viewing the poem as incidental, or to point out the music's general depiction of the poem's moods and images. Literary historians, for their part, usually felt that the music of the lied diluted or misread its sophisticated poetry; a composer's setting was praised only when it seemed to reinforce the critic's own understanding of the poet's intentions (p. ix). In contrast, the authors represented in this book made a conscious decision to explore both the music and the poetry of the lied with equal rigor in an attempt to illustrate the ways in which a song's music can articulate a particular interpretation of the poem's linguistic form. The essays compiled here form a retrospective of their authors' critical efforts over the last thirty-five years, and as such they amply display the fruitfulness of this mode of investigation. While certain aspects of the authors' arguments are stronger than others, the essays are consistent in making us palpably aware of the active role that lied composers played as sensitive and penetrating readers of their chosen poems.

Given the interdisciplinary nature of this project, it should come as no surprise that Fehn (who passed away in 1989) was a Germanist by trade, as is Seelig, while Hallmark and Thym are musicologists. All of them generally employ the same strategy in discussing any given song: first analyze the poem, then analyze the music, spending equal time on each while looking for meaningful analogies and divergences between the two during the second half of the process. Musicologists may sometimes raise a skeptical eyebrow at some of Seelig's accounts of compositional details in the scores and the hermeneutic weight they are asked to bear, but by and large all four authors demonstrate a reliable command of both the musical and the poetic dimensions of these works.

While the majority of the sixteen essays in the collection were written as individual undertakings, four of them were jointly authored by one of the Germanists teaming up with one the musicologists. Thirteen of the essays were published previously, two are made available here for the first time in print, and one essay—Hallmark and Fehn's collaborative study of Schubert's treatment of pentameter poetry—is a revised conflation of two earlier published pieces on the same topic. The essays focus on all of the major lied composers of the nineteenth century (Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wolf, Strauss, Mahler), along with the late romantics Hans Pfitzner and Karl Weigl.

The book opens with a "prelude" essay by Hallmark intended to introduce us to the kinds of analytical concerns pervading the book as a whole. Drawing on examples from throughout Schubert's song oeuvre, Hallmark shows how Schubert's music reflects and intensifies the rhythmic, metrical, grammatical, rhetorical, and formal aspects of the poem. This preoccupation with the concrete, material qualities of the poem and their musical shaping is nonetheless intimately tied up with the poem's meaning and expressive content. One relatively modest example will have to suffice. In the first stanza of Karl Gottfried von Leitner's "Der Winterabend," the poet first observes the peaceful descent of evening in two tetrameter lines each marked by a contemplative pause after the second foot. In the third line, as the poet...