The Lied has a kind of double nature, born of the interaction of poetry and music. This is scarcely an original observation; indeed, it is a truism so familiar that it would not bear repeating if not for its relevance to another sort of double life, one that has far less frequently received consideration: throughout its history, the Lied has existed both as an artistic genre and as a class of commodity, an object for sale in the marketplace. To be sure, this does not by itself set the Lied apart from many other forms of art within capitalist societies – and as we will see, the Lied's existence is closely bound up with a specific phase of capitalist production. That double life, however, is particularly revealing in the case of the Lied, whose status as a genuinely artistic genre long was contested precisely because its status as an all-too-viable commodity appeared to threaten its standing as art. Because of the Lied's location on the border between high art and popular music, a consideration of the ways in which it has circulated can reveal much, not only about the Lied per se, but also about the shifting nature of that border, which is less certain at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it has been since the boundary between high and low came into existence in the minds of the advocates of high art.