The Art Song

    Haydn and Mozart both wrote a large number of songs, but most of them were simple, rather formal melodies, with an unimportant accompaniment, and the poems which they set were usually rather uninteresting.

    By Beethoven's time the piano had become a much more expressive instrument, able to add appreciably to the effect of a song, and Germany was producing fine lyric poetry, so that the stage was set for the modem art song.  But Beethoven was an instrumental rather than a vocal writer, so that, although he wrote many songs, he did not realize the new potentialities.

    It was Schubert who, with his gift of melody and his spontaneous reaction to poetry, brought the art song to birth.  His settings of Goethe's 'Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel' and 'The Erl King', written when only in his 'teens, are amazing artistic creations.  The form grows out of the words, and the accompaniment adds enormously to the artistic effect.  He wrote 6oo songs in his short life, some in stanzas, more in a continuous whole (durchcomponirt); some using poems of great poets such as Goethe, Schiller and Heine, more using rather second-rate poems written by his personal friends.  But all of them got to the essence of the poetry and expressed it through the voice and the piano in a wonderful new way.  As far as song writing is concerned, Schubert belongs to the new Romantic era, and he paved the way for the great German Lieder writers later in the century.