ABSTRACT
If the great majority of songs composed throughout the nineteenth century were neither unduly exacting as far as the performers were concerned nor particularly experimental in idiom, this would be in the main due to the temperament of the composers, few of whom were revolutionary in their approach. In part also, I would guess, it was due to the fact that they had an eye on the amateur market in an age when song enjoyed vast popularity in German-speaking Europe. But in addition, there was strong theoretical underpinning of conservative values in song and constant insistence on an ideal of unaffected emotional directness and ease of performance. For the reviewers in the most widely read and influential musical periodicals do not eagerly welcome new developments. On the contrary, they fear them and try to check experimentation and the movement towards technical difficulty. This approach is so consistently adopted in the main journals up to and somewhat beyond the middle of the century that the value-judgements so revealed almost coalesce into an editorial policy on song. (This is particularly marked in the AMZ and the NrMZ). Since the reviews, essays and treatises from which the following summary has been made were mostly written by men who were themselves song-composers, they are an invaluable pointer to the views current in this important period of expansion and experiment.
