Study Of Early German Art Songs

The art-song, as the term is generally used to describe a vocalised solo song written with piano accompaniment. This began about the middle of the eighteenth century and quickly became very popular, as we perceive it today, art-song is a hybrid form consisting of poem and melody. Therefore, poem has never lost its association with music. First of all , the development of poem and music in the early eighteenth century was directly related to the social backgrounds , culture . Its function was linked to t the growing damands of the bourgeoisie classes. This new class of peoples who were not satisfied with their cultural position in the society and wanted to find a means to express the experience and emotions of its own kind . as a result, a marked pattern of change can be observed after the middle of the eighteenth century in the use of the solo song, in that while it had been cultivated by professional musicians of the baroque era as a minor form beside large vocal works in opera or church music, it now became a favourite of the amateur singer who sang not for aristocrats but for his own pleasure and that of his family and friends. On the other hand , With the appearance of lyric poetry which concentrated on describing the life of the middle class , which many composers from about the early 1740' s began to use the words for producing musical compositions. From that moment, the new genre of solo song, along with the changes of characteristics of lyrical poetry , appeared many dif-ferent styles. The study of this dissertation is an attempt to illustrate a moment in the musical life of eighteenth century Germany, in which both poetry and music are seen as complementary to each other and both as embedded in the social and political realities of their age.The thesis contains three parts of the preface, the main text and the conclusion . the preface clarifies the significance of the question for study. The main text consists of three parts as well. The first one shows the common ground in the process of the development of poetry and music, in the second part, the author elucidates the combination of lyrical poetry and solo song since 1740s and three different phrases in the development of the art-song in the eighteenth century. The last part explains the effects which was impressed by poetry and other influencing factors and the significance of realism.Finally , the conclusion identifies the characteristics of lied in the eighteenth century and the influence to the art-song in the Nineteenth century.