The Lied Sings its Defense

Extract

To one who has been revelling in and singing the German mastersongs for more than fifty years—I bought my copy of Peters' still unsurpassed Liederkranz in Leipzig in 1905—Professor Jack Stein's derogatory remarks must evoke first a certain sense of outrage and then pity: sincere pity that a man who knows the Lied so well (and you observe that we can hardly talk about it without using the German word as a technical term) has got so little pleasure out of it. Pleasure? No, joy, grief, exhilaration, ecstasy! To me it has always been one of the glories of European culture that this one people could produce, from Haydn on through Richard Strauss, including a number of composers whom Mr. Stein chose not to mention—Beethoven, Cornelius, Franz, Jensen, Liszt, Loewe, Mendelssohn, Weber—such a body of inspired song as no other nation can even approach.