Schubert's Lieder: Settings of Goethe's poems

This free course, Schubert's Lieder: Settings of Goethe's poems, looks at the short poems in German that were set to music by Franz Schubert (17971828) for a single voice with piano, a genre known as 'Lieder' (the German for 'songs'). Once they became widely known, Schubert's Lieder influenced generations of songwriters up to the present day. The course then discusses a selection of Schubert's settings of Goethe's poems, and recordings of all of them are provided. You can find the poems, in German with parallel translations into English and the music scores of four of the song settings, on the home page of the course. You are not expected to be able to read the music, but even if you are not very familiar with musical notation, you may well find the scores useful in identifying what is happening in the songs.

• Introduction
• Learning outcomes
• 1 Schubert: introduction
• 1 Schubert: introduction
• 2 Schubert and Vienna
• 2 Schubert and Vienna
• 2.1 Introduction
• 2.2 Schubert and Johann Michael Vogl
• 3 Schubert and the Lied
• 3 Schubert and the Lied
• 4 The songs
• 4 The songs
• 4.1 A note on the translations and scores
• 4.1.1 ‘Heidenröslein’ (‘Wild Rose’, 1815) and ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ (‘Wanderer's Night Song II’, 1822)
• 4.2 Simplicity and complexity
• 4.3 Voice and accompaniment
• 4.3.1 ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (‘Gretchen at the Spinning-Wheel’, 1814)
• 4.4 ‘Erlkönig’ (‘The Erl-king’, 1815)
• 4.5 Two mythological songs: ‘Prometheus’ (1819) and ‘Ganymed’ (1817)
• 4.5.1 ‘Prometheus’
• 4.5.2 ‘Ganymed’ (‘Ganymede’)
• 5 Conclusion
• 5 Conclusion
• Discography
• References
• Further reading
• Acknowledgements