The Cambridge Companion to the Lied(Cambridge Companions to Music Series) Book

A collection of articles on the German Lied, in the Cambridge Companion series. It begins with an article on the poetry most often set, which discusses the history of German poetry from the late eighteenth century on and distinguishes more historical styles than I was really aware of -- I tend to think of all the poetry of this period at least after Goethe as "Romantic", but this article divides it into Classic, Sturm und Drang, Romantic, Biedermeier, and so forth. The next article discusses the Lied before Schubert, and gives a good history of the development of the genre and its original aesthetic presuppositions. The third article discusses the lieder of Mozart and Beethoven in more depth. Then come the articles on the expected figures, chapters on Schubert, Schumann, the mid-century, Brahms and Wolf; followed by a discussion on the transformation of the lied at the end of the century, an article on Mahler and Strauss and one on the other twentieth century composers. The book ends with an article on "the circulation of the lied", i.e. the economic conditions of lieder production/reproduction (which is in some respects the most interesting chapter) and one on performance issues. All the articles were interesting to me, which is not always the case with a multiple author book like this.