ABSTRACT
The German Romantic Lied, or ‘Art Song’, offers an exemplary genre through which to teach music students about the complex interaction or layering of different historical and artistic ‘voices’ that can continue to inform critical listening, performance and analysis of the nineteenth-century musical canon. Beginning with an introduction to the nuts and bolts of poetic craft, as exemplified in Goethe’s famously compact ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’, I turn to Schubert’s setting of this little lyric in his op. 96 no. 3 to exemplify some of the fine refashioning inherent to much artful musical ‘text setting’. Raising the conventional, contested distinction between ‘lyric’, ‘dramatic’ and ‘narrative’ discourse, I proceed to introduce some of the distinct challenges that come with the expanded ‘song cycle’ genre, as in the great settings of Wilhelm Müller in Die Winterreise, before exemplifying some ways in which literary and musical critique together can inform the evaluation of various performances—whether relatively ‘text faithful’ or more extravagantly re-compositional in nature. The overall result is an invitation to reconsider our evolving relationship to the musical canon, as it has been transmitted across two centuries through notation and modern recording media alike.
