ABSTRACT
By now I hope that a pattern will have become discernible, in which a handful of famous composers — innovators in widely differing ways — made the pace and urged song into ever more complex and difficult forms. But at the same time, a host of minor composers wrote their songs in more traditional and technically simpler styles. Influential music critics, working mainly in and through the periodicals of the day, strove to check the development towards complexity, helped by those who made propaganda in the cause of Hausmusik. Active and admiring pursuit of the Volkston, both on the part of poets and composers, was a major — perhaps the main — factor in the persistence of the drawing room song as a cultural activity easily accessible to amateurs. In the following pages I will try to give some idea of how the song-composers, both famous and obscure, set their most famous poets. It is not easy to do this without slipping into an anthology of snippets, but I have tried to choose representative examples of the various trends.
