16 - Romanticism and the Ideal of Song

Summary

This chapter considers the quintessential Romantic genre of art song. After a brief background in late eighteenth-century song style, it describes the expansion and deepening of the genre that began in the nineteenth century with the oeuvre of Franz Schubert. As other composers imitated and developed Schubert’s approach to song, poems in many languages were set to music. Across the century, these texts represent the changing emphases and concerns of Romantic poetry. The chapter outlines some central ideas of early German Romanticism: interdisciplinary collaboration, the idealisation of the fragment, and the importance of subjective experience. The gathering of short literary fragments into collections is compared to the song cycle, which groups songs to create a larger story or impression. Three case studies – songs by Schubert, Fauré, and Schumann – are explored to show how various poets and composers used scenes of nature metaphorically to express larger topics of pantheism, intimacy, and mystic unity.