The Lied and the character piece

At the start of the 19th century, a generation of poets, painters and musicians claimed the right to express what was most personal: passion, longing, dreams, fear, wonder at nature. This is Romanticism. For these artists, music became the supreme art, because it says what words cannot. As early as 1810, the writer and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann, writing about Beethoven's Fifth, presented music as the most Romantic of all the arts.

The great Romantic themes

• Longing (in German Sehnsucht): a desire with no precise object, a yearning for some unreachable elsewhere.
• The lonely wanderer (Wanderer) walking through nature, and nature itself as a mirror of the soul: forests, streams, moonlight.
• Night, dreams, the fantastic: elves, ghosts, folk tales.
• The fragment: a small piece, a thought, a suspended moment can say as much as a large form.

Two genres express this ideal especially well: the Lied and the piano character piece. Both are made for the salon, the reception room of middle-class homes, where friends gather around the piano.

The Lied: a poem, a voice, a piano

The Lied (plural Lieder, "songs" in German) sets a poem for voice and piano. The piano is not mere accompaniment: it paints the setting and the state of mind. The master of the genre is Franz Schubert (1797–1828), who wrote some six hundred in a very short life.

• At seventeen he composed Gretchen am Spinnrade ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel", 1814), on a text from Goethe's Faust: the piano's right hand turns endlessly like the wheel, and stops dead when Gretchen remembers Faust's kiss.
• In Erlkönig ("The Erl-King", 1815), a father gallops through the night with his sick child: the piano hammers out the gallop, and a single voice embodies the narrator, the father, the terrified child and the Erl-King, each with its own colour.
• His cycles Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise ("Winter Journey", 1827), on poems by Wilhelm Müller, tell a story in some twenty songs: the second follows a rejected lover wandering through the snow.

Schubert, shy and little known to the wider public, lived surrounded by artist friends who organised musical evenings for him, the Schubertiades. He died at thirty-one, also leaving symphonies, chamber music and piano pieces (impromptus, moments musicaux) of rare depth.

Robert Schumann devoted almost the whole of 1840 to song (Dichterliebe, "A Poet's Love", on poems by Heine): the year he finally married the pianist Clara Wieck, after a long legal battle with her father. Clara Schumann, one of the greatest pianists of the century, also composed songs and piano pieces. Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix's sister, saw some of her songs published under her brother's name.

The character piece: a poem without words

At the piano, the Romantics invented or renewed a host of small forms, often with an evocative title: nocturne, impromptu, moment musical, song without words, album leaf, ballade, reverie… Each sets up an atmosphere and develops it in a few minutes.

• Felix Mendelssohn wrote Songs without Words: true Lieder for solo piano, in which the right hand sings.
• Robert Schumann composed cycles of miniatures full of characters: Carnaval, Kinderszenen ("Scenes from Childhood", 1838). A music critic, in 1834 he founded a journal in which he wrote under two names, fiery Florestan and dreamy Eusebius, the two sides of his personality. It was he who greeted the young Chopin with a famous "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!".
• Frédéric Chopin, a Pole settled in Paris from 1831, preferred salons to large halls and gave few public concerts. He took up the nocturne invented by the Irishman John Field and made it sing like an Italian opera aria; he raised the dances of his homeland, mazurkas and polonaises, to the level of poems.
• Franz Liszt, by contrast, was the virtuoso of the great halls, but he also wrote meditative pieces (Consolations) and transcribed dozens of Schubert's songs for piano, making them known all over Europe.

Here is the first phrase of Träumerei ("Reverie"), from Schumann's Kinderszenen: a melody that rises in a single curve, like a breath, then gently falls back.

M:4/4
L:1/8
Q:1/4=66
K:F
C2 | F2- F3 E F A | c f f4 e d | c f G A B d F G | A c G6 |]

The composer as a free artist

In the 19th century most composers were no longer in the service of a prince or a church: they lived from concerts, pupils and publishers, and sometimes from a post as conductor or teacher (Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory in 1843). They wrote about music, read and criticised one another. For how to play this repertoire on the piano (rubato, pedal, singing tone), see the lesson The Romantic period in the final chapter.

What to listen for

• A long, singing melody, highly expressive, often within an enveloping accompaniment.
• More colourful harmony: chromaticism, unexpected modulations, enriched chords.
• A flexible tempo (rubato) that breathes with the phrase.
• A title or a text that guides the listener's imagination.

Listen

• Schubert: Gretchen am Spinnrade; Erlkönig; Der Lindenbaum (Winterreise); Impromptu Op. 90 No. 3.
• Schumann: Dichterliebe; Kinderszenen.
• Mendelssohn: a Song without Words, for example the "Venetian Gondola Song" Op. 19 No. 6.
• Chopin: Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2; Liszt: Consolation No. 3.