ABSTRACT
I. The German tenor lied was one of the most stubbornly conservative genres in music history. For more than a hundred years, a large number of composers worked along virtually identical textual and musical lines, in different social surroundings (be they court or city, professional or "hobby"2 composers) and under vastly changing social conditions. Their output was great in number and considerable in quality, although it was smaller than that of the French chanson composers and much smaller than that of the Italian madrigalists, and certainly less important than either from an aesthetic point of view. About 1300 pieces were printed, about 1500 in total are known. 3
II. Just because this is so, the decline and fall of this tradition is of special interest to the historian. How does it happen that a genre so firmly rooted in tradition and so conservative in its outlook breaks down at all and breaks down so suddenly (although it does not completely disappear until well into the seventeenth century)?
