Research on the musical cultural characteristics and styles of German and Austrian art songs during the Romantic period

Abstract

The Romantic period in music history persisted from the late 18th century to the early 19th century, and their music was innovative and passionate, exploring themes of human identity, the natural world, and spirituality. From the center of this musical revolution, those art songs or Lieder from Germany and Austria could be analyzed as poetry and music in a concentrated form as composers chose this media in which to externalize personal thoughts and feelings. This paper aims to identify and analyze the main musical and cultural features of German and Austrian art songs in the period of Romanticism while focusing on the specific achievements of major composers of time including Johannes Brahms, Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf and Robert Schumann. These composers built the genre in their fashion: Schubert with the Austrian folk influences, Schumann with the featured harmonic inventions harmonic control and Brahms with his outlook towards classically inspired music. The last significant contributor and the most significant in many ways was Hugo Wolf, whose interpretations brought Lied to newer lyrical and many cases, emotional heights inspiring the following generations. The subject matter is the impact that the cultural, literary, and philosophical trends in art songs at the time had on the thematic and stylistic aspects of art songs involving Romanticism, individualism, and nationalism, as well as other literary and philosophical movements of the time. Therefore, while analyzing the relationship between text and music, this paper seeks to offer an insight into the techniques employed in creating such musical works and the extent of their contribution to the art of song literature.