At first glance, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise would hardly suggest itself for choral adaptation. The history of choral arrangements of songs from the cycle bears this out: The only song to have a major presence in choral music since the nineteenth century is “Der Lindenbaum,” which was first adapted by Friedrich Silcher in a way that emphasized its folklike, communal potential over its darker elements. Other songs of the cycle, such as “Der Leiermann,” seem to innately resist any similar treatment. This essay focuses on how the recalcitrance of “Der Leiermann” in relationship to choral arrangement colors the approaches of two recent arrangers to the song, Thomas Hanelt and Gregor Meyer; the chapter then takes into account a more improvisatory group performance of the song presented by student performers at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in December 2008. The possibility of choral or other non-solo approaches to “Der Leiermann” innately forces performers and audiences to approach the wanderer’s solitude, and the cycle’s ending, from new subjective perspectives, even as these arrangements also attractively offer nonprofessional singers a chance to grapple with Schubert’s masterwork.

The tonal relationships between the songs of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe Op. 48 (1840) have been studied extensively by musicologists. Indeed, it is typically key, more than poetry, narrative, or style, upon which arguments for the coherence of the song cycle hang. Such careful analytical accounts, however, are rarely heeded by performers, who often transpose songs. Schumann did not specify a voice type for Dichterliebe; the dedication of the first edition to Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient seems more to do with her character than her Fach. A tenor may sing the whole cycle at pitch, but baritones, basses, sopranos, and mezzos rarely do so, with one exception: the seventh song, “Ich grolle nicht,” which almost everybody performs in the original key of C major. The primary reason for so doing appears to be that age-old weakness of singers to show that they can manage the high note: here, an ossia top A. Exploring the historical and poetic contexts of “Ich grolle nicht” illustrates the tensions between the hermeneutics of reading and analyzing a score and interpreting that same score in performance. David J. Levin wrote about how performances can “unsettle” even canonical operas; the same is true of song cycles, but perhaps musicology can also unsettle approaches to performance.

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.