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The lied's space is affective, scarcely socialized: sometimes, perhaps, a few friends - those of the Schubertiades; but its true listening space is, so to speak, the interior of the head, of my head: listening to it, I sing the lied with myself, for myself. . . . The lied supposes a rigorous interlocution, but one that is imaginar)7, imprisoned in my deepest intimacy.
-Roland Barthes, 19761
[The lied is] a form of lyric poetry whose character resLs on the depiction of a single feeling, which gently moves the soul. The subjectively perceived feeling is objectified in aesthetic form and then works directly on the feelings and only indirectly (through those feelings) on fhe powers of imagination and desire.
- Georg Christoph Grosheim and Gustav Ñaue nberg, 18372
One of the constants in the history of the reception of the nineteenthcentury lied has been a belief in the intimate and direct expressive power of the genre. Different though the vocabulary and concerns of Barthes and the nineteen Lh -century encyclopedists cited above are, their common starting point is a genre they perceive to have uniquely immediate access to the most interior regions of the listener. Joseph Kerman's widely used music-appreciation text introduces listeners to that genre in strikingly similar terms when he characterizes the lied's "intimacy of expression. . . . The singer and the pianist seem to be sharing an emotional insight with you, rather than with an entire authence."3
Although not often so explicidy stated, this understanding of the nature of the lied conditions much of the traditional music-historical discourse about die genre, including the most familiar commonplace of all: Franz Schubert's "establishment of the lied as an autonomous musical form."4 Such assertions as "the Schubert song was practically without ancestry," despite the activity of numerous earlier songwriters, rest largely on the conviction that Schubert's songs achieve an immediacy of emotional expression that has no precedent.^ That immediacy removes the lied from any particular historical or social context and places it in unmediated contact with the individual listener, who can then be moved by, analyze, converse with, or simply luxuriate in the song as an autonomous work of art.
Appropriate and rewarding though all these activities maybe, the understanding of the lied that...