Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein

1844 ließ sich Carl Loewe bei der Komposition seines Oratoriums <Das Hohelied Salomonis> von Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein, einem Kantor, inspirieren. Auch die Gesänge des Komponisten Louis Lewandowskis, der in Berlin an der Seite Lichtensteins arbeitete, weisen einen starken Einfluß des Kantors auf. Um 1878 lernte schließlich Max Bruch durch Lichtenstein das synagogale "Kol Nidre" und drei von Isaac Nathan arrangierte <Hebrew Melodies> mit Texten von Byron kennen. Der Einfluß von Lichtensteins "Kol Nidre" auf Bruchs <Kol Nidrei> ist beträchtlich. Mit seinen <Drei Hebräischen Gesängen> und dem zweiten Thema seines <Kol Nidrei> schloß Bruch sich der englischen Vorlage an.

Fantasies of Improvisation

This book is the first history of keyboard improvisation in European music in the postclassical and romantic periods (c. 1815–1870). Grounded in primary sources, it documents practices of improvisation on the piano and the organ, with a particular emphasis on free fantasies and other forms of free playing. Case studies of performers such as Abbé Vogler, J. N. Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Robert Schumann, Carl Loewe, and Franz Liszt describe in detail the motives, intentions, and musical styles of the nineteenth century’s leading improvisers. The book further discusses the reception and valuation of improvisational performances by colleagues, audiences, and critics, which prompted many keyboardists to stop improvising. Its central argument is that amid the decline of improvisational practices in the first half of the nineteenth century there emerged a strong and influential “idea” of improvisation as an ideal or perfect performance. This idea, spawned and nourished by romanticism, preserved the aesthetic, social, and ethical values associated with improvisation, calling into question the supposed triumph of the “work.”

Carl Loewe’s Performative Romanticism

Chapter 3 is about Carl Loewe, a little-known musician who undertook an unprecedented and remarkable task: improvising entire songs, both the melody and the accompaniment, on poems given to him by the audience. This chapter reconstructs Loewe’s methods for performing this difficult feat and describes the cultural impetuses that motivated it. I propose that Loewe’s improvisations, performed mainly on a series of concert tours he undertook in the 1830s, condensed a number of independent cultural strains—the kapellmeister’s fluency in keyboard improvisation, the practice of touring virtuosos, the literary cult of poetic improvisers, and the genre theory of the ballad, which described it as a species of epic or bardic narration that was understood as improvisatory in character.

Music and Words

This chapter focuses on the different ways language and music construct meaning as revealed through the medium of song. The chapter focuses on the German Lied of the early nineteenth century, and it offers analyses of three settings of Goethe’s lyric poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh.” The first is an 1814 setting by Carl Friedrich Zelter; the second was written around 1816 by Carl Loewe; the third was completed sometime before 1824 by Franz Schubert. These analyses show how each setting changes the interpretation of Goethe’s poem, demonstrating how the different grammatical resources offered by music and language shape the way meaning is constructed in these songs.

The Stillness of Time, the Fullness of Space: Four Settings of Goethe's “Wandrers Nachtlied”

Carl Zelter, Carl Loewe, Franz Schubert, and Franz Liszt all composed settings of Goethe's famous Nachtlied “Über allen Gipfeln.” Gathering multiple layers of rhyme and rhythm, Goethe's poem achieves a rare cogency that invests every syllable with musical significance. Each of the composed settings reflects this process of gathering in different ways, from Zelter's lulling rhythms and Loewe's processional harmonies to Schubert's landscape of echoes and Liszt's drama of cosmic assimilation. Thus this monad of a poem allows each composer to set afresh the temporal and spatial coordinates of human mortality.