Early Romantic Lieder

The lieder with guitar in this collection come from a series of journals published in Braunschweig, Germany during the early nineteenth century under the name Arion. For this collection, we have selected only songs written by German composers, some of which may have been specifically written for these journals. Some of these lieder were composed on well-known poetry by famous German poets such as Göthe and Schiller. In some cases, the texts used in the Arion journals, differ somewhat from the established texts as they are known from literary sources. We have retained the texts, as well as the sometimes archaic spelling, as they appear in Arion. Many of the composers represented are the immediate predecessors of the now more famous ones whose major output were lieder—Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and Carl Loewe. They were a major influence on these later composers in that they marked the beginnings of the art of serious song writing in Germany. They, in turn, often used as their model the solo song styles already established in Italy.