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GERMAN SONG:
FROM ROMANTIC LIEDER TO THE CABARETS OF BERLIN

The poetic dimension of German song

This anthology allows you to discover more than a century of Germany’s culture. It deals with the Romantic Lied of the 19^th century, and its consequent evolutions at the turn of the 20^th century with orchestral versions of songs and readings that show the influences of jazz, musicals and cabarets. The composers featured here are either German (Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Kurt Weill, Friedrich Hollaender) or Austrian (Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg). As elegant men of letters, they would be capable of setting poetic texts to music, pieces written by major writers such as Goethe, Heine and Brecht, although they didn’t neglect minor authors known for the musicality of their verse.

How can the Romantic Lied be defined?

In a programme she presented on Radio France Culture, Laurence Equilbey would emphasise that “the Lied phenomenon is important.” She clarified by saying it was music without insolence, anchored in the country and its people, and its origins lay in Germany’s Romantic movement. Even though its form is not exactly contemporary with Romanticism in literature, the Lied necessarily achieved popularity due to its ingredients (as shown by the setting to music of Goethe’s poem Der Erlkönig (“The Era King.”) Of course, it was also the emergence of a popular art-form (one that already interested Goethe and Brentano) but it was propagated by the bourgeoisie at whom it was aimed. It reminds one of the works written for meetings between friends – like the famous Schubertiades held to celebrate Schubert – where people sang only for pleasure.

In the Romantic Lied, mythology and aristocratic figures are excluded; the songs refer to the lives of people who are simple and humble, like the character of the miller or the wanderer, the vagabond, the central figure in Schubert’s Winterreise. XX^th century composers like Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg would always make reference to the Lied, sometimes in the classic voice-piano format. But they would innovate by broadening its expression towards the orchestral Lied. With Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, this song-form would stand apart by its militancy, both political and social, in its activism, and it would take on the showy guise of the universe to which jazz and the cabarets belonged.

One reason for its success at the time of its creation (and still today) is due to a form of simplicity that stems from the popular nature of the Lied itself. It is a simplicity that can be resumed as follows: the Lied is the statement of a poetic and musical idea clasped inside a brief form which, musically speaking, demands neither development nor counterpoint, but calls for a form of dialogue between the voice that states the poetic text and the accompaniment of the piano, which has to come forward to be in tune with the sentiment.

The Lied is in essence a miniature that in only a few words condenses a destiny over an exploration of existential abysses. Its preferred themes (which are little-explored by classic songs that favour the desire and grievances of love) deal with aimlessness, consolation in death, and the consequences of a bond with nature, to which can be added the essential motif of all poetry, whatever its genre or country: the love for a woman who is unattainable. But we can emphasise that, beyond its recurrent themes, it is indeed the music that always has pre-eminence in the dialogue with poetry.

The romantic Lied established itself with Schubert. In his remarkable study published in the magazine Diapason, musicologist Sylvain Fort demonstrated that with Schubert we were witnessing a total transfiguration of the Volkslied (the “song of the people,” with its nuance and strong folklore connotations). A triple revolution took place, not only in politics and the imagination but also in performing. Henceforward, the Lied symbolised Romanticism’s relationship with the world. To underline the poetic revolution, we can point to Schubert’s friendly ties with the poets Mayrhofer (an Austrian) and Schober (born in Sweden to Austrian parents), and the sureness of the literary tastes of Schumann and Wolf.

The combination of voice and piano

Roland Barthes, who took singing lessons and hated the bourgeois pomposity in the voice of a Gérard Souzay, once commented in a radio programme: “In opera, it is the sexual timbre of the voice that is important; in the Lied, it is the tessitura that counts. So here, no excessive notes, no cries or outbursts, no physiological prowess. The tessitura is that modest space of the sounds that each of us can produce, and within whose limits it is possible to fantasise about the reassuring unity of the body. In all Romantic music, vocal or instrumental, it is the song of the natural body. It is music that has meaning only if I can sing it in my self with my body.” All recordings confirm this; all vocal timbres colour the universe of the Lied, but the extremes in the register that belong more to the world of opera are to be avoided. And so, in the Lied, the vocal technique is most often translated by a fusion between the air and the recitative.

In the literature of the Lied, the melodies are spellbinding and sensual. And the piano never counters the voice. In fact, as musicologist Sylvain Fort nicely puts it, “The piano constantly modulates, and it changes its tone as if in a conversation; it changes key, and the line of the song is constantly infused.” The finality is that the music should always have the last word in the dialogue with poetry. Besides, as the musicologist Hélène Cao has said, the music frees itself from its subjection to the verse in order to take charge of the dramatic and psychological evolution; and the forms are diversified by the changing of the piano part while the singer repeats the melody. It is important to note that all the 19^th century composers were gifted pianists, and that this privileged the diversification of their writing, which itself  went hand in hand with the diversification of the harmonic language.

Teca CALAZANS and Philippe LESAGE

adapted into english by Martin Davies

Our thanks to the musicologist Hélène Cao, and to Jean Buzelin for his knowledge of Kurt Weill’s Berlin years.

Bibliography: Anthologie du lied, Hélène Cao & Hélène Boisson (Buchet Chastel, Paris)

© 2025 FRÉMEAUX & ASSOCIÉS

Discographie
LA VOIX GERMANIQUE - DU LIED ROMANTIQUE AU CABARET BERLINOIS

CD1   

1) Ständchen (Schubert – Ludwig Rellstab)    
Du recueil Schwannengesang D 957 (Le Chant du Cygne) D 957         
Dieter Fisher-Dieskau (baryton) Gerald Moore (piano)
7 octobre 1951
78 t HMV DB 21349    

2) Abschied (Schubert – Rellstad)       
Du recueil Schwanengesang D 957 (Le Chant du Cygne) D 957
Dieter Fisher – Dieskau (baryton) Gerald Moore (piano)          
A Schubert Lieder Recital / 1955         
LP HMV 1295 

3) Gute Nacht (Schubert – Wilhelm Müller)    
Recueil Die Winterreise D 911 (Le Voyage d’Hiver)    
Hans Hotter (baryton) Gerald Moore (piano)    
Mai 1954        
Emi Angel Records 3521         

4) Die Post (Schubert – Müller)
Recueil Die Winterreise D 911 (Le Voyage d’Hiver)    
Same as 3       

5) Der Leiermann (Schubert – Müller)
Recueil Die Winterreise D 911 (Le Voyage d’Hiver)    
Same as 3       

6) ErlKönig (Schubert – Goethe) D328
(Le Roi des Aulnes)    
Gérard Souzay (baryton) Dalton Baldwin (piano)         
Juin 1961       
Philips 835 097 AY      

7) Ganymed D.544 opus 19 N°3 (Schubert – Goethe)
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (soprano) Edwin Fischer (piano)
Octobre 1952  
Columbia 33 CX 1040 

8) Im Frühling D.882 (Schubert – Schulze)    
Same as 7       

9) An Die Music D.547 op 88 N°4 (Schubert – Schober)         
Same as 7       

10) Gretchen Am Spinnrade D.118 op 2 (Schubert – Goethe) 
Same as 7       

11) Nachtviolen D752 (Schubert – Mayrhofer)
Same as 7       

12) Die Florelle D 550 (Schubert – Schubart)  
Gérard Suzay (bayton) Dalton Baldwin (piano)
Juin 1961       
Philips 835 097 AY      

13) Der Dopplegänger (Schubert – Heine)      
Recueil Schwanengesang D.957 (Le Chant du cygne)  
Same as 12     

14) Die Rose, Die Lilie, Die Taube (Schumann – Henri Heine)
Du recueil Dichterliebe op.48 (Les Amours du Poète)  
Dieter Fisher-Dieskau (baryton) Jorg Demus (piano)    
1960   
DG 18370

15) Und Wüssten’s Die Blumen (Schumann – Heine) 
Du recueil Dichterliebe op.48 (Les Amours du Poète)  
Same as 14     

16) Das Ist Ein Flötten Und Geign (Schumann – Heine)        
Du recueil Dichterliebe op.48 (Les Amours du Poète)  
Same as 14     

17) Hoï Ich Das Liedchen Klingen (Schumann – Heine)         
Du recueil Dichterliebe op.48 (Les Amours du Poète)  
Same as 14     

18) Ein Jüngling Liebt Ein Mädchen (Schumann – Heine)    
Du recueil Dichterliebe op.48 (Les Amours du Poète)  
Same as 14     

19) Ich Hab’ Im Traume Geweinet (Schumann – Heine)        
Du recueil Dichterliebe op.48 (Les Amours du Poète)  
Same as 14     

20) Aus Alten Marchen (Schumann – Heine)  
Du recueil Dichterliebe op.48 (Les Amours du Poète)  
Same as 14     

21) Meerfahrt op 96 n°4 (Brahms – Heine)    
Dieter Fisher-Dieskau (baryton) Jorg Demus (piano)    
1960   
DG 18370      

22) Der Tod, Das Ist Die Kühle Nacht op 96 n° 1 (Schumann – Heine)
(La mort, c’est la nuit fraiche) 
Same as 21     

23) Gesang Weylas (Hugo Wolf – Mörike)      
Du recueil Mörike-Lieder IHW 22       
Christa Ludwing (mezzo -soprano) Gerald Moore (piano)        
1957   
EMI Columbia 33 CX1552      

24) Auf Einer Wanderung (Hugo Wolf – Mörike)      
Du recueil Mörike-Lieder IHW 22       
Same as 23     

25) Mignon (Wolf – Goethe)   
Du recueil Goethe-Lieder IHW 10       
Imgard Seefried (soprano) Erik Werba (piano) 
LP Anthologie du lied (2)        
1961   
DG 18155      

CD2   

1) Wenn Mein Schatz Hochzeit Macht (Mahler)        
Recueil Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gessellen IGM 5 (chants d’un compagnon errant)       
Christa Ludwing (mezzo-soprano) Philarmonia Orchestra, dir Sir Adrian Boult 
18 oct 1958     
EMI Angel records S 35776     

2) Ging Heut’Morgen Übers Feld (Mahler)   
Recueil Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gessellen IGM 5 (chants d’un compagnon errant)       
Same as 1       

3) Im Abendrot (Richard Strauss – Joseph von Eichendorff)    
Recueil 4 Letzte Lieder, TrV 296 (Quatre dernier Lieder)
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (soprano) Philarmonia Orchestra, direction Otto Ackermann     
25 Sept 1953   
EMI Columbia 33 SC 107I      

4) September (Richard Strauss – Herman Hesse)        
Recueil 4 Letzte Lieder, TrV 296 (Quatre dernier Lieder)
Same as 3       

5) Isoldes Liebestod (Wagner)
Acte 3 de Tristan & Isolde       
Christa Ludwig ( mezzo zoprano) Philarmonia Orchestra , dir Otto Klemperer  
25 mars 1962  
EMI Columbia SAX 2462        

6) Seele, Wie Bist Du Schöner (Alban Berg -Peter Altenberg) 
(Ame, combien tu es plus belle)
Recueil Fünf Orchestenlieder nach Ansichtskar­tentexten von Peter Altenberg op 4       
Betty Beardslee (soprano) Columbia Symphony Orchestra, direction Robert Craft        
5 et 17 juin 1959         
Columbia ML 5428 / MF 61035

7) Sahst Du Nach Dem Gewitterregen Den Wald (Berg -Altenberg)  
(As-tu vu, après la pluie d’orage)         
Same as 6       

8) Über Die Grenzen Des All (Berg – Altenberg)        
(Par-delà les frontières de l’univers)    
Same as 6       

9) Nichts Is Gekommen (Berg – Altenberg)    
(Rien n’est venu)        
Same as 6       

10) Hier Ist Friede (Berg – Altenberg)
(Ici c’est la paix)         
Same as 6       

11) Lulu’s Song (Berg)
De Lulu Suite IAB 4    
Helga Pilarczyk (soprano) London Symphony Orchestra, dir Antal Dorati         
19 au 22 Juin 1961      
Mercury SR -90278     

12) La Complainte de Mackie (Kurt Weill – Bertold Brecht)  
Extrait de L’Opéra de quat’sous
Wolfgang Neuss (Moritatsanger) / Orchestre des Sender Freies Berlin, direction Wilhelm Brückner – Ruggeberg
1958   
CBS 78279      

13) Duo de la Jalousie / Eiffersuchtsduett (Weill – Brecht)    
Lotte Lenya et Willy Trenk -Trebistch ; Lewis Ruth Band, dir Theo Mackeben  
1930   
Ultraphon 77752         

14) Barbarasong        
Lotte Lenya, même formation que 13   

15) Surabaya Jonny (Weill – Brecht) 
Chanson de Happy End
Lotte Lenya, Theo Mackeben mit seinen Jazz Orchester
Berlin 1929     
Orchestrola 2311        

16) Bilbao Song (Weill – Brecht)        
Chanson de Happy End
Lotte Lenya, même formation que 15   

17) Alabama Song (Weill – Brecht)    
Extrait de Aufstieg und fall der Stadt Mahagonny        
Lotte Lenya & The Three Admirals ; direction Theo Mackeben & His Jazz Orchestra    
Berlin 24 février 1930
Ultraphon A 37           

18) Denn Wie Man Sich Bettet, So Lieght Man         
Same as 17     

19) Falling In Love Again (musique : Friedrich Hollaender – texte : Connelly)
Tiré de Der Blaue Engel (L’Ange Bleu)
Marlene Dietrich         
6 février 1930
HMV B3524    

20) Wenn Die Beste Freundin (Hollaender)    
Marlene Dietrich, Margo Lion, Oscar Karlweiss et accompagnement au piano de Mischa Spoliansky    
2 juin 1928     
Electrola EG 892        

21) Jonny (Hollaender)
Marlene Dietrich ; orchestre Peter Kreuder      
1931   
Ultraphon A887          

22) Lili Marlene (musique : Norbert Schultze – texte : Hans Leip & Marlene Dietrich)
Marlene Dietrich ; orchestre Charles Magnante
7 septembre 1945        
Decca 73031   

23) Das Nachtgespenst (Rudolf Nelson ; texte : Friedrich Hollaender) 
Kurt Gerron (chant) Rudolf Nelson (piano)      
Mars 1930      
Ultraphon Telefunken A388