Dedicated to the memory of Ann C. Fehn, Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the Nineteenth-Century Lied is a collection of essays by four scholars – Fehn herself, Rufus Hallmark, Harry E. Seelig, and Jürgen Thym – who were brought together in the late 1970s and 1980s by their shared expertise and passion for Germanistik. Through various interactions and collaborations, their research soon began to demonstrate a common bond, a desire to bridge what they perceived at the time as a division between specialists of German Romantic poetry and music scholars of nineteenth-century German lieder. Thus, although the 16 chapters presented here originated variously as lecture demonstrations, conference papers, articles and book chapters across the span of nearly 30 years, they fit together naturally – even rhyme with one another – because of each author's dedication to uncover the ‘network of communicative meaning’ between linguistic and musical structures in lieder.

The book is comprised of three main parts, each containing four or five chapters that are arranged chronologically in order of their publication. ‘Part 1: Close Readings and Comparative Studies’ is dominated by the work of Harry Seelig, who provides four of the five chapters. Seelig writes with passion and precision, particularly in terms of his textual analyses. A dialectical approach underscores each of his discussions, which tend to proceed from an initial comparison, contradiction, or paradox. Chapter 2, for example, begins with a textual comparison of two Suleika poems by Marianne von Willemer (which were falsely attributed to Goethe and included in his West-östlicher Divan). Seelig begins by tracing their parallels in structure, terms, and mood, yet is spurred onward with his premise that their ‘ineffable similarity’ (p. 43) is founded, paradoxically, on difference. He continues with an examination of Schubert's settings of these two poems in his 1821 Suleikalieder (D. 720 and D. 717), teasing out structural, rhythmic, and motivic analogues to the structural and textual features of the poetry. In Chapter 4 Seelig considers the ghazal, an Arabic and Persian poetic form whose unusual if not ‘alien’ structure inspired Goethe's Schenkenbuch and Wolf's later settings of two of its poems. Both text and music are analyzed in terms of the ghazal's implicit tension between its static form of repeated rhyme and the dynamic flow of the poem's content.

Chapter 5 again considers Goethe's work, this time two of his Nachtlieder. Seelig begins by contrasting two settings of ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’: Schubert's ‘buoyantly confident’ D.224 and Wolf's ‘chromatically tormented’ setting of 1883 (p. 123). Goethe's ‘Ein Gluckes’ is likewise examined via two contrasting musical settings, those of Schubert (1823) and Schumann (1850). These four preliminary discussions serve, however, as only a backdrop to the primary concern of the essay, Karl Weigl's treatment of both poems, which Seelig claims links and integrates the best features of all previous musical settings. Seelig's Chapter 6 again invokes a point of comparison as he traces Wolf's parodistic musical features in two cyclically related settings of Goethe's ‘Phänomen’ and ‘Erschaffen und Beleben’, both of which are then compared with a later setting, Richard Strauss's ‘Hans Adam’ (1922).

The shining star of this sextet of essays is that by Jürgen Thym, whose Chapter 3 follows a somewhat different tack by dealing exclusively with one song: Schumann's setting of Eichendorff's ‘Frühlingsfahrt’. Shining it is for those seeking a more balanced reading of both text and music. Whereas Seelig demonstrates time and again his knack for analyzing a text with jaw-dropping precision and depth, Thym's musical analysis moves beyond mostly surface-level correlations of poetic text and structure to the music's harmonies, motives, keys, declamation patterns, and the like, to shed light on deeper levels and more long-range processes in the music. His linear analyses of ‘Frühlingsfahrt’ are a welcome complement to his nuanced textual reading.

The essays within ‘Part 2: Poetic and Musical Structure’ focus on four distinctive poetic types – the Persian ghazal, the sonnet, free verse, and pentameter verse – each of which poses unique, if not thorny, challenges to the composers seeking to set them. Three of the four essays in this section belong to collaborators Ann C. Fehn and Jürgen Thym. Their Chapter 8 examines four musical settings of ghazals – two each by Schubert and Brahms – to uncover how these composers responded to the poem's unique couplet structure and asymmetrical rhyme scheme with musical analogues such as motives, instrumental ritornellos and harmonic progressions. In Chapter 9, Fehn and Thym consider the challenges of setting the 14-line asymmetrical sonnet, a poetic structure that imposed ‘considerable constraints’ upon composers. After locating roughly two dozen settings by major nineteenth-century composers (listed in Fig. 9.1), their discussion hones in on three specific settings of Goethe's sonnet ‘Die Liebende schreibt’ – those by Mendelssohn (op. 86, no. 3), Brahms (op. 47, no. 5) and Schubert (D.673).

In Chapter 10 Fehn and Thym address the difficulties of setting free verse, a poetic genre lacking the normative features of conventional prose such as rhyme, regular arrangements of stressed and unstressed syllables, patterned line lengths, and coordination between syntactical units and line structure. Their discussion of the inherent tensions and syncopations between syntax and line within free verse, and Schubert's treatment of such in his D.291 and D.544 settings, make for richly detailed reading. Fehn and Rufus Hallmark pair up in Chapter 7 to categorize the conventions of pentameter declamation and its relation to line structure in Schubert's settings. Nearly 900 poetic lines are examined in terms of their form, declamation pattern, syntactic boundaries, and metric stress, and these findings are statistically collated and impressively presented in their comprehensive Appendix 7.2. The chapter concludes with three analyses of pentameter settings by Zumsteeg and Schubert (D.159 and D.771).

‘Part 3: In Search of Cycles’ offers a quintet of essays that explore the various means by which songs are united to form larger structures and narratives (e.g., poetic imagery, personae, musical motives, key correspondences, etc.). Seelig (Chapter 11) explores Goethe's concept of the duodrama, the juxtaposition of two personae, each addressing the other in autonomous poems. Through an examination of three duodramas from Goethe's ‘Buch Suleika’, Seelig suggests that their ‘paradox of autonomous interdependence’ (p. 284) gains intensification and cohesion in Wolf's musical settings. Fehn (Chapter 12) discusses the unity afforded by composing a song cycle to texts already conceived by the poet as a lyric cycle. Mahler's setting of Rückert's Kindertotenlieder serves to illustrate the facile correspondences between text and music, which Fehn rightly warns can often result in equally facile analyses. She urges us to listen for aspects of unity at deeper levels of musical and poetic structure than the all-too-obvious local effects of programmatic devices. In contrast, Jürgen Thym (Chapter 14) addresses the opposite situation: the song cycle whose poems fail to outline a story or form a lyric cycle. Such is the case with Schumann's famous song cycle, Liederkreis (op. 39, 1842), based on poems by Eichendorff. Schumann further disrupts any provisional sense of narrative coherence by replacing the opening song of the cycle in the second edition (Liederkreis, 1849), thereby projecting an entirely different emotional trajectory between the two. Thym proposes that one means of understanding this ‘cycle in flux’ (p. 375) can be found in a Romantic aesthetic stemming from Jean Paul and Friedrich Schlegel, which prioritises digression and interruption over linearity, and open-ended uncertainty over unity.

Hallmark (Chapter 13) uncovers cyclic characteristics in Robert and Clara Schumann's compositional collaboration on Zwölf Lieder (op. 37/12). The highlight of this essay – for those concerned with informed artistic shaping – is Hallmark's performance suggestions for the cycle (see his Figure 13.5), which propose not only an ordering for the songs along with the gender and number of speakers for each, but also, and most interesting, a teleological narrative to unify the sequence of the 12 songs (pp. 359–60). In Chapter 15 Hallmark ponders the question of why Schumann wrote two very similar song cycles on poems of Heine within months of each other (Liederkreis, op. 24 and Dichterliebe, op. 48). Is the latter a corrective reading of the first? Perhaps an antithetical completion of the precursor? Although Hallmark offers no definitive answer, his comparison of the two is impressively detailed and balanced in its consideration of both textual and musical matters, and echoes with traces of Bloom's ideas on influence.

Aside from the central core of 14 essays, Of Poetry and Song is preceded by a prelude and succeeded by a postlude. Hallmark's introductory chapter offers an in-depth tutorial on prosody and poetic form (a tutorial that rivals to that offered by Stein and Spillman).Footnote 1 He employs Schubert's lieder to illustrate the many ways a composer may react to and/or translate the text's grammatical, rhetorical and semantic structures into song. And lastly, in the concluding chapter Thym deals with songs by Wolf and Pfitzner that flirt with the stylistic aspects of musical impressionism and modernism. At first glance, this chapter follows somewhat like a non sequitur from the foregoing collection. Indeed, it dates nearly 30 years later than the bulk of research represented here. Upon reflection, however, any perceived shifts in focus or methodology in this postlude can be understood to simply represent the ongoing dynamic nature of song analysis and the latest outcome of a pursuit these four scholars began so many years ago.

As already noted, the majority of these essays originated in the 1970s and 1980s. I repeat this point not as a criticism, but as a means of contextualizing the ideas and methodologies within this collection. Indeed, in the editorial preface Jürgen Thym frankly explains that the approach of these four authors to song analysis is ‘unashamedly structuralist’ and, given the intellectual climate of the time, they may have initially ‘followed a course that was intuitive rather than systematic’ (p. x). Nevertheless, these essays exhibit an impressive level of intellectual rigour and I recommend reading them all. In fact, one of the distinct benefits of collecting them in one place is the total Gestalt they form: what is lacking in one is made up for in another.

The field of song analysis has changed significantly, however, since the majority of these essays were written, and one can't help but notice the inevitable signs of age. Indeed, the most obvious of these is the distinctive text-to-music approach, which begins with a reading of the poem(s), then proceeds to the music with the goal of locating correspondences and analogues to support the meaning(s) – and also, in this case, the structure(s) – of the text. As Kofi Agawu pointed out nearly 20 years ago, in such an approach words cast a shadow on the analysis: ‘Few assertions are made that are not tied to the words because word dependency dictates the terms of the final formulation’.Footnote 2 As a result, the music is invoked primarily to illustrate fortuitous correspondences between it and the text, and similarities between these two expressive domains are privileged at the expense of their often more interesting non-correspondences, tensions and syncopations. What is lacking, then, is discussion of the music per se, of an exploration of music's independent rhetorical forces, structures, rhythms, syntax, internal tensions and emotional trajectories.

In recent years a number of analytical approaches have been advanced by music theorists, which now offer ever greater expressive resources for describing the internal workings and independent forces of song. Among them, the work of Harald Krebs offers a model to describe the interactions between a song's phrase rhythms, its surface metre, and its hypermetre, all of which flow independently yet interconnect with one another and with the textual line to form various periodic layers.Footnote 3 Schenkerian approaches allow us to trace melodies and harmonies, both locally and writ large, and to offer reasons for a song's tonal wanderings, either together with or apart from its text. Lawrence Zbikowski's theories of metaphor and conceptual blending offer an analytical approach that correlates music with different domains of experience, among them language, and describes how their mapping yields numerous possibilities for meaning.Footnote 4 And, most recently, Yonatan Malin demonstrates a music-analytical model for lieder that beautifully blends these approaches and others with the traditional concerns of textual analysis for an even-handed treatment of both music and text in song.Footnote 5

In Jürgen Thym's final chapter to Of Poetry and Song, he concludes that for Wolf and Pfitzner, German art song ultimately served as a ‘terrain upon which the larger questions of musical style and coherence could be and were explored’ (p. 434). Perhaps we might also consider the collected works of Fehn, Hallmark, Seelig, and Thym in similar terms, as a ‘terrain’ upon which we might explore the theory and practice of lieder analysis. At a time when fewer avenues of inquiry were available, these four scholars led to new and creative ways of thinking about texts and their varied settings in song. And despite their traditional structuralist approach, their work reflects in greater and lesser degrees the nascent beginnings of a changing aesthetic in lieder analysis: these models offer us a standard by which we can now measure our own efforts and explore the connective links between their work and ours. For this we owe them a debt of gratitude.