The Lied
Mirror of Late Romanticism
The German lied, a song form that fuses music and poetry, provides a key to understanding musical and cultural history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first comprehensive study of the late-romantic lied, Edward F. Kravitt shows how this popular genre mirrored far-reaching cultural changes of the period, when tensions in artistic politics pitted tradition against innovation, naturalism against universalism. Kravitt surveys five major composers - Wolf, Mahler, Strauss, Pfitzner, and Reger - as well as the young Schoenberg and dozens of lesser-known figures, such as Engelbert Humperdinck and Joseph Haas. He examines the composers' changing attitudes toward musical and poetic structure, their reasons for turning to the lied, performance practices of the day, the cultural background of the various types of lieder (such as folksong, ballad, and kinderlieder) and melodrama, and the aesthetic principles underlying them.
Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.
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What the reading experience may hold
A fuller profile for choosing with more confidence—not just another copy of the preview.
Nonfiction
Use these as starting points rather than limits; the most memorable books often stretch beyond their catalog labels.
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Dark tone · Measured pace
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
A good fit if…
Readers who want a thoughtful experience and enjoy noticing the connections beneath a book’s surface story.
This book's DNA
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Spoiler-Free Emotional Arc
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A quick reading snapshot
Edition facts and catalog signals to help you decide whether this book fits what you want to read next.
- ISBN-13
- 978-0-3000-6365-3
- Language
- English
- Edition record
- OL10318268M
A more thoughtful way into this book
This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.
A comfortable full-length choice for steady daily reading.
Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.
Read for connection, not completion.
Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.
Three questions to carry with you
- Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
- Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
- How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?
Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.
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