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<jats:p>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.</jats:p>

<jats:p>A recurring theme in the reception of Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis is the question mark over its sense of narrative continuity and the presence (or otherwise) of a central protagonist. Up until now, however, scarcely any attempt has been made to view these features in the context of Eichendorff's wider literary production. This article proposes applying an Eichendorffian aesthetic to Schumann's op. 39, viewing its phantasmagoric interconnections, absence of clear narrative order, sense of temporal dislocation and persistent theme of the loss of self as profoundly reflecting the concerns of Eichendorff's prose fiction. Neither the view that Schumann's cycle does possess a unified narrative and central protagonist, nor the converse, that it should be seen as a disparate group of songs, is adequate. Instead, it is the tension between the two views that emerges as crucial in coming to an aesthetic understanding of the cycle. Schumann's procedure, in juxtaposing a number of poems drawn from disparate works, presents an extreme case whereby narrative and subjective identity are put to the test, and the listener is invited to fill the vacant space left by the withdrawal of a unifying subject with his or her own sense of subjectivity.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Observing the use of landscape as a category of reception, whether in nineteenth-century debates about artistic realism or Soviet-era criticism, this article examines the uses of landscape in several songs by Rimsky-Korsakov and replaces a persistent emphasis in criticism on questions of representation with a focus on how music generates a sense of subjectivity. Three approaches facilitate a more subtle and variegated understanding of Rimsky-Korsakov's “soundscapes” than has been proposed so far. First, landscape is interpreted as a facet of Russian national identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Second, the evocation of the sounds of the natural world is seen as a metapoetic commentary on the creative act, providing an “internal” commentary on landscape to match the “external” one of the nation. Intertwined with these two themes is a series of parallels between music, literature, and the visual arts, which together show that Rimsky-Korsakov's songs are indicative of a tension between dynamism and stasis that is characteristic of musical representation of landscapes, and that has often been seen as characteristic of Russian music more generally.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Debussy's early song settings of Théodore de Banville and Paul Bourget foreground the Romantic topic by which the singing voice revokes lost presence. The closed aesthetic space of music becomes, in these songs, the space of the nocturnal garden in which the souls of lovers merge with the containing landscape. But Debussy's fascination with the poetry of Paul Verlaine, over a period of twenty-two years from 1882 to 1904, juxtaposes such evocations of intense sensuous presence with songs of alienated absence and ironic distance. The poems Debussy set from Verlaine's Fêtes galantes (1869) provoke both kinds of song, the latter embodied through the shadowy figures of the commedia dell'arte. In the case of two such poems, “En sourdine” and “Clair de lune,” Debussy produced two different settings of the same text, ten years apart. The usual account is that these show the composer's progression from Romantic lyricism to a more sophisticated but withdrawn style, a development paralleled by a biographical story moving from his youthful passion for the dedicatee of the early songs, Marie-Blanche Vasnier, to the breakdown of his first marriage in 1904. But neither the stylistic nor the biographical narrative provides an adequate account of the Verlaine songs, and both miss their exploration of the economy of desire at the heart of the piano song.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Vaughan Williams's celebrated set of Robert Louis Stevenson settings, Songs of Travel, has lately garnered liberal scholarly attention, not least on account of the vicissitudes of its publication history. Following the cycle's premiere in 1904 it was issued in two separate books, each gathering stylistically different songs. Though a credible case for narrative coherence has been advanced in numerous accounts, the cycle's peculiar amalgamation of materials might rather be read as a signal to its projection of multiple voices, which unsettle the longstanding critical tendency to map a single protagonist through its progress. The division marked by the cycle's publication history may productively be understood to reflect a tension inherent in its aesthetic propositions, one constitutive of much of Vaughan Williams's work, which frequently mediates between the individualistic and the collective, the “artistic” and the “accessible,” and, as I suggest, the subjective voice of the individual artist in its invitation to the participation of a singing and listening community.</jats:p> <jats:p>I propose that Vaughan Williams's early songs frequently frame the idea or demand the engagement of a listener's contribution, as particular modes of singing and listening—and singing-as-listening—are figured and invited within the music's constitution. Composed as he was searching for an individual creative voice that simultaneously sustained a nascent commitment to the social utility and intelligibility of national art music, these songs explore the possibility of achieving a self-consciously collective authorial subjectivity, often reaching toward a musical intersubjectivity wherein boundaries between self and other—and between composer, performer, and listener—are collapsed. In the recognition of such processes lies a means of examining the tendency of Vaughan Williams's work toward projecting a powerfully subjective voice that simultaneously claims identification with no single agency.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Strauss's song “Frühlingsfeier,” op. 56, no. 5, was originally composed for voice and piano in 1906 and orchestrated in 1933. Its choice of poet—Heinrich Heine—–is unusual in the context of the literary trends and political attitudes in Germany at the contemporaneous moments. “Frühlingsfeier” resembles Strauss's opera Salome in subject matter: female grief for a beautiful man. The corybantic musical style of Strauss's setting is emphasized in its orchestral version, which was intended for the soprano Viorica Ursuleac, who recorded it in 1936.</jats:p> <jats:p>Strauss's stature as a Lieder composer—despite the popularity of many of his songs—has often been queried. However, what seems on the surface to be a continuation of the late-Romantic tradition is subtly inflected by his poetic decisions and by musical renderings that need to be understood as part of a flexible continuum between versions of the song. Past and present are of less concern than being able to move fluidly between past, present, and future. Such movement opens up the possibility of a less rigid interpretation of Strauss's historical standing that allows his songs to be considered as other than simply regressive.</jats:p>