However transmuted Schiller's dramas are (or are not) in Rossini's Guillaume Tell (1829), Verdi's Don Carlo (1867) or Tchaikovsky's Orleanskaya deva (1881), one always assumes the storyline moves between mediums more or less intact. Closer scrutiny frequently tempers this conjecture. With Schiller's poetry the supposition is shakier still. Although admittedly an extreme example, in the finale of the Ninth Symphony Beethoven rearranges the poet's ‘An die Freude’, mixing the 1786 first and 1803 second published versions overseen by Schiller, and freely augmenting and trimming the poem. Inasmuch as Beethoven surely knew his setting was not the first, these liberties are probably not so much a comment upon the verse itself as they are an acknowledgment of the challenges Schiller poses the would-be songster. In 1809, long before the choral finale, Beethoven remarked to Czerny: ‘Schiller's poems are very difficult to set to music. The composer must be able to lift himself far above the poet; who can do that in the case of Schiller? In this respect Goethe is much easier’ (Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Life of Beethoven, revised edition by Elliot Forbes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 472). In the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung for 9 January 1811 an anonymous critic of Johann Friedrich Reichardt's Schillers lyrische Gedichte, in Musik gesetzt (1810) launches a six-column critique by pointedly observing that ‘from the beginning Schiller has been a dangerous poet for composers’. Seeking to explain why, the commentator asks who ‘would not feel seized, enlivened, lifted by the depth and power of his thoughts, by the richness and splendour of his images, by the magnificence and fullness of his language?’. What the reader's imagination supplies, music makes either not enough or too distinct. ‘For the composer these merits not only are detrimental, they in general are even bothersome and injurious.’ Indeed, ‘those things that are most advantageous to the musician and finally put him in his element are the things most notably only sporadically encountered in this exalted poet’. Setting the scene as the writer has, one is little surprised in reading on to learn that Reichardt does not always measure up. Whereas ‘An Emma’ is ‘faithfully and earnestly felt’, ‘An die Freude’, a poem ‘that seems so easy to compose’ that ‘every bandsman [Spielmann] has attempted it’, receives at Reichardt's hands ‘some amazingly stale music … which would have been far better left out’ (column 24; my translation).

Mark Evan Bonds has recently argued that a ‘fault-line … between high and low’ reshaped the musical landscape ‘in the decades after 1800’, the result being that some composers turned their back on ‘writing for a universal audience’. Many continued to do so, but if they did ‘they now ran the risk of being accused of “pandering” to the public taste, as opposed to creating great art’ (‘Listening to Listeners’, in Communication in Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Danuta Mirka and Kofi Agawu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 47). Georg Günther's impressive volume, in tandem with the AmZ review, serves as a compelling reminder that the cleft located by Bonds cut a great deal deeper than just instrumental music, his chief concern. On the one side was a long line of music directed towards amateur music-makers, above all German song; on the other a growing array of what have since been called Kunstlieder, or art songs, and instrumental works whose composers embraced comparatively greater complexity and virtuosity, and, as the nineteenth century unfolded, penned their music in the expectation that it would find a permanent home in what Lydia Goehr has called The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). As Bonds correctly insists, the AmZ ‘raised the standards of listening’. But lifting the bar extracted a price. When the ties between the music and its generating culture lost out to ‘the work’, the majority of listeners became passive spectators, a reality exacerbated at the end of the century with the rise of sound recordings. Even if they are not expressly articulated, the anonymous 1811 correspondent touches on almost all of the issues I mention here, thereby prompting a question two hundred years in the making: has Reichardt (along with the many lied composers who worked alongside him) been judged appropriately, or have the norms suitable for one paradigm become enmeshed with those of another?

As it pertains to the lied, answering this query requires that we discard the one-size-fits-all criticism normally accorded German song, and instead inquire how composers responded to Goethe, Schiller and Heine, among others, poem by poem, poet by poet. (The poet-based investigations of Susan Youens and Richard Kramer are notable exceptions; see Youens's Schubert's Poets and the Making of Lieder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Kramer's Distant Cycles: Schubert and the Conceiving of Song (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994). More recently, see Youens's Heinrich Heine and the Lied (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).) It is also worth inquiring whether Beethoven was right when he asserted that Goethe is easier to set to music than Schiller. How this relates to my other points comes into view if one judges the Schiller settings edited by Günther in the context of contemporaneous settings of Goethe. Schubert offers a good place to start. In contrast to the lyric compression Goethe inspired in Gretchen am Spinnrade, Schiller sparked something altogether different. Whereas in Gretchen Schubert maximizes the minimal with a composition lasting not quite four minutes, his second completed lied, the ballad Leichenfantasie (1811), d7, weighs in at nineteen. Subsequent Schiller works trigger the nearly twenty-five-minute Der Taucher, d111, a text Schubert took up in 1813 and 1814. Two songs from 1815, Der Liedler, d209, at over fifteen minutes and Minona oder die Kunde der Dogge, d152, at eleven, are similarly protracted. Schiller may be dangerous, yet the reason for the danger seems to have much to do with the length of many of his poems. It is important, then, that the criteria used to assess a work such as Gretchen are not misapplied to the ballad or to other lieder aspiring to what I herewith dub Schubert's Schillerian sublime.

With its inclusion of forty-one settings published between 1782 and 1825 by twenty-two known and two anonymous composers, from Anton Felix Franz Beczwarzowsky to Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, the 350 pages of Frühe Schiller-Vertonungen bis 1825 provide an excellent resource by which to assess how composers responded to the various pressures posed by song composition, including accommodating the needs of a sizeable Liebhaber audience while keeping an eye on posterity. As Günther's anthology makes abundantly clear, composers negotiated all of this in the context of a near-ubiquitous role for song, demonstrating that our present understanding of the German lied is a great deal more restrictive than what it was during and immediately after Schiller's lifetime: when we think of the lied nowadays, we invariably neglect songs with a social dimension or those that go on at too great a length.

The volume's most obvious strength is its variety, which encompasses the Gesänge and Melodien culled from Zumsteeg's incidental music for the 1782 second edition of Schiller's Die Räuber, Zumsteeg's monologue for Johanna from Die Jungfrau von Orleans (one from 1801, a second similar but much longer version from 1803), Zumsteeg's ‘Reiterlied’ from Wallensteins Lager, and no fewer than seventeen different settings of ‘An die Freude’ (including Reichardt's). Among the latter Günther includes the very first, that by Schiller's friend Christian Gottfried Körner. First issued as a fold-out item before the poem in the poet's literary journal Thalia in 1786, this setting was brought out again in 1800 by the Hamburg publisher Johann August Böhme in his Vierzehn Compositionen zu Schillers Ode An die Freude. Günther's seventeen include all fourteen from the 1800 publication, as well as two others, both by Zumsteeg. All are strictly strophic in form, except for the seventeenth and last one by Wilhelm Tepper von Ferguson, who in 1797 responded to the 108 lines of the 1786 version of Schiller's poem with an ambitious 453-bar through-composed cantata featuring, in anticipation of Beethoven, four vocal soloists in addition to four-part chorus (though the orchestra is left to Beethoven; Ferguson calls solely for ‘cembalo’).

Günther's volume is meticulously produced, including copious (though not consistently complete) bibliographic information and reproductions of title pages and other illustrative material (some of it unfortunately too diminutively and dimly reproduced). My one grumble is that Günther's fifty-four-item Literaturverzeichnis cites only German titles. Of his 272 footnotes, I spied only one (note 252) that directs the reader to an English-language source. If this were 1811 or 1911 such parochialism would have arched nary an eyebrow. As it is, for more than thirty years a remarkably large number of individuals (including the undersigned) have written on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lieder. But I do not wish to end sourly. Günther's edition makes it possible for song specialists throughout the world to ponder Friedrich Schiller's extraordinary influence on music. If the most hard-to-pin-down fallout from that stimulus remains the Schlußchor of Beethoven's Ninth, endeavouring to sort out that daunting movement remains an engaging and inspiring hurdle for all musicologists. In the meantime, the highest compliment we can pay the editor of Frühe Schiller-Vertonungen bis 1825 is to take up his volume, sing, listen, learn and sing again.