In the last third of the eighteenth century Germany blossomed from a marginal participant in European letters to the dynamic center of the movement now called Romanticism – the age that would encompass Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, and Goethe. As the story is almost always told, the German art song begins in the next generation – 19 October 1814, to be exact – when Schubert composes the first of his great Goethe settings, Gretchen am Spinnrade. The logic of this narrative makes the flowering of German poetry, or even of Goethe himself, solely responsible for the emergence of the Lied. Given that there was a flourishing market in books of songs with keyboard accompaniment for domestic use by greater and lesser known composers in the mid-eighteenth century, the conclusion does not do justice to the genre's history. Furthermore, the development of the Lied since the eighteenth century does not follow that of German lyric poetry closely: the historical relation between poetry and song is rather more complex.

Hence to begin this volume with a survey of German poetry is not to assert that the development of poetry drives the genre's development – or vice versa. Goethe is profoundly important for the Lied because he was the most original, most influential, and most representative poet of a period in which poetry and song were closely related and expressions of the same cultural concerns. Rather than ask how poetry results in the Lied or what poetry is best suited to musical treatment, it makes more sense to explore what new or changing cultural attitudes are manifest both in German song and in the poems that composers chose to set. In other words, what made this partnership suddenly thrive and become a major musical genre in the nineteenth century? Because poetry operates with language, it is simpler to chart social and cultural change in poetry than in music. In this fashion – and only in this fashion – can German poetry be understood as a “beginning” for the Lied.