Egon Voss, Richard Wagner and the Lied

On 25 November 1935, Thomas Mann noted in his diary: ‘Afterwards, music on the radio from Milan and Vienna. Heard Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll once again: beautiful but insatiable, too much too often. Then “Träume”, very beautiful, but absolutely not a Lied. It’s characteristic that he has no relationship whatsoever to the spirit of the Lied – he’s German!’

Thomas Mann naturally understood Lied to mean the German art song accompanied by the piano – a genre in which Wagner’s achievements hardly stood out when compared to Schubert, Schumann, Brahms or so many others of the 19th century. If we include his Sieben Kompositionen zu Goethes ‘Faust’ (Seven Compositions for Goethe’s Faust) WWV 15, which were presumably conceived for performance in the theatre but have come down to us only in a version with piano – then we have just nineteen completed song compositions by Wagner.