Beethoven's reworking of Lieder
Date
1990
Authors
Hill, Bruce Kirkpatrick
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Abstract
Beethoven's career as a song composer has been unjustly neglected.
He composed some eighty lieder at a time when the genre was beginning to take shape, and when the value of the through-composed song as against that of the strophic, folk-style song was being hotly contested in German poetic circles. This paper examines four song texts that Beethoven set more than once. His motivations for reevaluating an existing composition were never the same from one song to another, and a spectrum of levels of reworking is revealed. In Chapter Two this process involves the simple correction of the details of phrasing and accompaniment, in the case of the parallel settings of Stall's lyric "An die Geliebte". At the other end of the continuum are Beethoven's four simultaneous settings of Goethe's , 1 "Sehnsucht", a set of discrete, if similar, musical entities. Chapter Three deals with the more thoroughgoing revision of a setting of Tiedge's "An die Hoffnung". The later setting of 1814 represents a completely new approach to the text. Chapter Four deals with Matthisson's "Opferlied", which reappeared in Beethoven's work in slightly altered forms over a period of thirty years.
While it is impossible to prove precisely why Beethoven felt compelled to re-compose these songs, their texts all seem to have had a particular value to him and he went to considerable trouble in his search for an optimal setting of each of them. An unusually large body of documents records the evolution of these songs and their impact on Beethoven's biography. Some of the sketches for these songs survive and the compositional process revealed by a brief analysis of them reveals the persistence of a few key musical motifs, in the late reworking of Opferlied, in contrast to the rich diversity of material used in the fashioning of the An die Hoffnung settings.