Klavierlieder

The CD focuses on a repertoire of Viennese song composition spanning four decades, which is rarely found in the programs of song recitals or recordings. Most of the pieces assembled here (except the songs of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert) are hardly known today. Some of them are supposed to have been presented to the public for the first time after more than 200 years in the archive. Composed in the Viennese period between Josephinism and the Congress of Vienna, German-language piano songs enjoyed increasing popularity in the private and semi-public music salons of the Viennese intellectual circles. Already in the first half of the 19th century, they were replaced by the new romantic ideal of song associated with Franz Schubert, and soon fell into oblivion. A recent research project by Gundela Bobeth on the Viennese song culture around 1800 emphasizes the extensity and diversity of the exciting repertoire that was created since the 1770s in Vienna. The project has tripled the available source materials and contributed to a fundamental re-evaluation of this long neglected chapter of Viennese music history. Knut Schoch and Henning Lucius revive a representative selection from this rich repertoire for the first time and give an impression of the remarkable range of Viennese song compositions, from the early printed song collections to the time of the young Schubert.