David Mamet has frequently admitted that he was an ineffective actor, even a terrible one. As recently as May 2002, when asked how he could direct something he could not do himself, in this case magician Ricky Jay's 2002 magic show, On the Stem, Mamet responded, “It's not much different from acting. I certainly cannot act, which anybody who has ever seen me attempt it can tell you.” Furthermore, in 1996 he also confessed in Make-Believe Town that he “was a terrible acting student.” Rather than give up the theatre, however, he became first a stage director and then a playwright. Actually, before he tried acting professionally as an adult (he had been a child actor in Chicago and performed at the Hull-House Theatre in the early 1960s) and while a student at Goddard College during the late sixties he wrote several drafts of early plays, including Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Few failed actors have substituted one career track for another - or in Mamet's case, two others - with such stunning success. Ironically, Mamet has often stated that he began writing plays not so that he would become a recognized writer but in order to provide young actors with illustrations for points he was making in his teaching and because his first theatre company, the St. Nicholas, could not afford to pay royalties.

Playwrights became involved in the cinema early in the twentieth century when the new medium was scarcely a decade old, and there are few dramatists who have not been courted by a film industry eager to adapt their work or employ them as screenwriters. At first theatre people condescended to the prestige-seeking movie moguls, and the results were frequently unsatisfactory. Just after the First World War Samuel Goldwyn lured the Nobel Prizewinning Maurice Maeterlinck to Hollywood with unhappy consequences, and he had no greater success with George Bernard Shaw who famously rejected his overtures (“There is only one difference between Mr Goldwyn and me. Whereas he is after art, I am after money”). However, Shaw's fascination with the movies was later to involve him in adapting three of his plays in collaboration with the Romanian charlatan Gabriel Pascal.

David Mamet, born in 1947, three years before Shaw’s death, belongs to a generation that grew up after the cinema and television had decisively replaced the theatre as the dominant forms of public entertainment. His primary commitment may be to the stage, but since the early 1980s he has established a parallel career in the movies matched by no more than a handful of dramatists of comparable distinction. One thinks of Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol in France (both chiefly interested in bringing their plays to the cinema-going public with the least interference); of Robert E. Sherwood in the United States (a distinguished film critic, a recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes for drama, an Oscar-winning screenwriter, a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt); and two British dramatists Mamet admires, Terence Rattigan and Harold Pinter.

In 1974, a play set in part in a singles bar, laced with obscene language and charged with a seemingly frenetic energy, was voted Best Chicago Play. Transferred to Off Off and Off Broadway it picked up an Obie Award. Sexual Perversity in Chicago was not David Mamet's first play, but it did mark the beginning of a career that would astonish in both its range and depth.

The following year American Buffalo opened at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in an “alternative season.” It was well received and opened on Broadway fifteen months later where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. It ran for 135 performances, hardly a failure but in the hit or miss world of New York, not a copper-bottomed success either. Nonetheless, in three years he had announced his arrival in unequivocal terms.

David Mamet came as something of a shock, not least because his first public success, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, seemed brutally direct in terms of its language and subject, as did American Buffalo. But it was already clear to many that here was a distinctive talent, albeit one that some critics found difficult to assess, not least because of his characters’ scatological language and fractured syntax, along with the apparent absence, in his plays, of a conventional plot. They praised what they took to be his linguistic naturalism, as though his intent had been to offer an insight into the cultural lower depths while capturing the precise rhythms of contemporary speech (though he did invoke Gorky’s The Lower Depths as being, like a number of his own plays, a study in stasis). That he was highly talented seemed obvious, but what that talent might consist of was altogether less certain.

The presence and significance of the nineteenth-century Lied extend well beyond solo vocal settings with piano accompaniment of German poetry. Composers often wrote songs for other instrumental partners (such as guitar), in multi-voice combinations (duets, for example), and in languages other than German (as did Grieg in Norwegian and Dvořák in Czech). A broad definition of the Lied therefore must take into account the diversity of instrumentations, vocalists, and languages that fits somewhat uneasily within a category exemplified by works of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, and others. Ultimately, the domain of the Lied stretches even farther, into the non-vocal, into purely instrumental compositions, which is our concern in this chapter.

A song, in short, is not always sung. Prominent examples that frame the period under discussion here begin with Schubert's “Wanderer” Fantasy, “Trout” Piano Quintet, and “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet, and extend through Mahler's so-called Wunderhorn symphonies and beyond. Such well-known instances of songs subsumed into keyboard, chamber, and orchestral compositions represent only a small part of a practice with broad musical, aesthetic, and cultural manifestations and implications. The phenomenon encompasses far more than the works of Schubert and Mahler, and in various ways affects most significant nineteenth-century composers, in Germany and elsewhere.

Was the German Lied, as so often has been claimed, born on 19 October 1814 with the composition of Gretchen am Spinnrade? Did Schubert (1797–1828) – known not so much for composing as he was for a kind of channeling while in “a state of clairvoyance or somnambulism, without any conscious action,” as his close friend the singer Johann Michael Vogl once observed – achieve on that day a “breakthrough in the principle of the Romantic art song”? Did he create the Lied, the most important new musical genre of his century, out of a vacuum, without models and other inspirational sources save that of Goethe's “musical poet's genius”? Is it true, as George Grove insisted as long ago as 1883, that Schubert had only to “read the poem, and the appropriate tune, married to immortal verse (a marriage, in his case, truly made in heaven), rushed into his mind, and to the end of his pen”? Or is there nothing new under the sun: are there models and historical antecedents even for Schubert's songs?

In setting Goethe's famous poem “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” the new, according to many critics, is the celebrated accompaniment that imitates the whirling motion of the spinning wheel and the foot treadle of the spinner, all of which succeeds in placing the listener in the middle of a highly realistic albeit imagined scene. But of course, the accomplishment is not as innovative as many have insisted. The Spinnerliedchen from the winter episode of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons (1801) exploits the very same means. Like Haydn, Schubert was guided by an established topos, or “topic” – one of numerous characteristic musical figures associated with various moods, scenes, and situations long familiar to Western Europe.

In a letter to Johannes Brahms (1833–97) from May 1885, Elisabet von Herzogenberg singled out for special praise the composer's Wir wandelten, Op. 96, No. 2, set to a poem translated from the Magyar by Georg Friedrich Daumer. In so doing, she remarked:

Herzogenberg, wife of the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg and herself a highly talented musician and former student of Brahms, easily could have been writing about any number of the composer's some 200 Lieder. Depth of feeling and seeming spontaneity are prized just as much as calculated craft together with the myriad fine points that go into any Lied. In this, she was in good company, for many of the composer's closest friends and admirers enthusiastically commented on the union of music and words to be found in his vocal music. Of these reactions, one of the most revealing and certainly one of the most concise comes from Brahms's only composition student, Gustav Jenner (1865–1920). First published in 1903, Jenner's remarks emphasize that the music must reflect the structure and meaning of the original poem, and he notes that such relations between the text and music include form, musical and verbal syntax, declamation, word painting, and harmony. In view of the depth of insight Jenner offers, together with his association with Brahms, his discussion will serve as the jumping-off point for the present introduction into the expressive world of the composer's Lieder.

Speaking in 1977, David Mamet remarked that, “I can't write novels . . . it's just not the form that touches a person . . . The play succeeds by exquisiteness, the novel by brute force, by repetition, by elaboration. It makes a different kind of impression.” By 1994, he had plainly changed his mind, though not entirely. When he turned to the novel he did deploy repetition and elaboration though scarcely brute force. He discovered - what surely he already knew from his voracious reading, particularly of nineteenth-century British and American fiction - that it, too, could succeed by exquisiteness, if we mean by that form and function in alignment, precise moral and linguistic discriminations.

Why reverse himself in the course of those seventeen years? It was, he explained, because “I always wanted to be a writer, and to me a writer was somebody who wrote novels. That’s what a writer was . . . so I figured well . . . if you want to be one, why don’t you try it.”

At the same time, to turn to David Mamet’s fiction is seemingly to enter a different world from his drama. The style, the approach to character and narrative, the pace of the text appear radically at odds with expectations forged by American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, and Speed-the-Plow, though there are points of contact in an occasionally fragmented dialogue, a sense of the intransitive nature of relationships.

With the onset of the 1980s, David Mamet was widely considered a powerful, yet controversial voice in contemporary American theatre. The decade would further establish him as a playwright of world stature and also as an extremely prolific artist at home in several artistic genres: drama, poetry, fiction, children's literature, nonfiction, and film. As the decade developed, so he was confirmed as one of the most original and important voices not only of his generation but also in the history of American drama, ranking alongside Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard. It was in the 1980s, too, that the dramatist's reputation began to spread internationally, so that, by the beginning of the next decade, his plays were among the most frequently performed in the Western world, in English or in translation. His fame even extended to Asia, where some of his plays were performed in Japan, South Korea, and China.

The 1980s were also marked by a number of controversies surrounding his dramatic work. These were particularly symptomatic of the disturbing nature of Mamet’s theatre: they had already started in the 1970s with his early succès de scandale, Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974), and American Buffalo (1975), and were to continue well into the 1990s, in particular with Oleanna (1992). Mamet’s theatre indeed tends to shock a certain part of the theatregoing audience for four major reasons: its alleged machismo, misogyny, violence (physical and verbal), and the Jewish cultural heritage that he claims for himself, especially in his most recent work.

To many observers at mid century, the Lied was in decline. Despite the activity of Liszt, there was a period between early (Schubert and Schumann) and late (Brahms and Wolf) progenitors when no one figure was seen as leading the way. August Reißmann, in 1861, highlighted one of the dilemmas then facing the Lied – whether it had a future beyond the works of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann:

Twelve years later, Reißmann – as edited by Hermann Mendel – is more sanguine about the Lied's prospects, which he sees as “having grown to a broad stream, which also does not lack depth” (although he considers the “destructive frenzy of the innovators” as jeopardizing the fixed form of the Lied). This said, the ever-growing number of Lieder had be come a recurring concern, especially as they were seen as contributing toward the “spreading dilettantism and fashionableness in this compositional genre.” As Wolfgang Joseph von Wasielewski wrote in 1858, “we are by no means poor in lyrical productions in recent times – at least according to quantity. It has almost become a fashion that young composers put forward a volume of Lieder as Opus 1.” Wasielewskiwould prove accurate on both counts. The number of Lieder would swell past the point of counting just as many a composer would attempt to launch a career with an Opus 1 Lied or set of Lieder. Schubert presumably inaugurated the custom in 1821 with his Op. 1 Erlkönig; others who did likewise include Carl Loewe, Fanny Hensel, Robert Franz, Peter Cornelius, and Arnold Schoenberg.

Perhaps the editor of this volume expects a different article from me than the one that I have written. (Some years ago, an English professor of music informed me that asking performers to contribute to books such as this always resulted in headaches.) But one can read elsewhere about the history of Lied reception, and how important singers – Schubert's friends Johann Michael Vogl and Karl Freiherr von Schönstein (1797–1876), Brahms's Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906), Adolphe Nourrit (1802–39) in France – carried forward the torch of an art form that began as a domestic phenomenon and went on to conquer the world. A glance at Ernst Challier's 1885 Großer Lieder-Katalog is enough to show that the Lied was big business at the end of the nineteenth century. Names now long forgotten rub shoulders with the immortals in astonishingly lengthy lists of settings that have vanished without a trace. In consulting Challier we are, after all, scanning a catalogue where great Lieder and pop songs of the time jostle with each other for attention. At this stage the Lied was still all-encompassing, still nominally something for everyone. Once popular music achieved its own momentum and was hived off to its own discographies and discotheques, we are left with the songs that really matter, the songs that survived. But to whom do these songs matter, and how much? In my case, the question is not merely rhetorical: my living as a concert accompanist depends on that continuing interest.

A widely held stereotype sees the Romantic artist as a vessel of divine and largely uncontrolled inspiration. But Robert Schumann (1810–56) – an ardent Romantic in so many other ways–pursued an almost eerily systematic path in channeling his creativity. One by one, he conquered the important genres of instrumental and vocal music of his day. These ranged from the piano character piece in the 1830s, often grouped in large cycles, to songs, again grouped into cycles or collections, to symphonies, chamber music, and secular oratorio during the early 1840s, all of which gave him confidence in his last years to try his hand at opera and sacred music. During an unusually rich creative career, which lasted more than twenty-five years from the late 1820s to 1854, Schumann, at three different times and always at crucial crossroads, took up the composition of Lieder. The first of these occurred during the years 1827–28 and coincides with his first significant attempts at composing. The second dates from 1840 and overlaps with a period of crisis, both personal and professional, from which he emerged victorious and strengthened. The last came after 1847 when he attempted to renew himself as an artist in the face of demons both within and without; while the former doubtless will elude historical exactitude, the latter were egged on by the political turmoil that swept all of Europe in the late 1840s. As will be seen, there are specific reasons why the Lied, and not some other musical genre, became the catalyst for self-discovery, salvation, and renewal at each of these junctures.

Origins and forerunners of song cycles probably cannot be determined with any finality. Cycles and circles predate history and continue to permeate our lives in an unbroken tradition: seasonal rites and holidays, gathering around a fire, round table discussions, circular dances, ecological circles of life, wedding rings, halos … Even within our comparatively brief musical history, examples of cyclic forms abound, from cyclic Masses and madrigal cycles to cyclic symphonies and record albums. Song cycles are yet another example in an ancient history of cyclic art forms mirroring patterns in our lives. As the nineteenth century approached, however, cyclic forms in all the arts acquired greater significance, blossoming primarily in Germany after the turn of the century into the quintessentially Romantic song cycle, markedly different in style and structure from earlier cycles. Why Germany, why the nineteenth century, and why the Romantic song cycle require explanation: they were not mere coincidence.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, primary sponsorship for composers began to shift from aristocratic classes to ambitious upper middle classes, who displayed their acquisition of culture in their piano parlors, creating an almost insatiable market for songs. Songs that combined bourgeois pleasures with at least the appearance of high art were in particular demand. As the market grew, so of course did the need for composers to distinguish their songs from the rest, prompting ever more fanciful titles. Terms now associated with song cycles arose haphazardly out of vague associations, intentions, and meanings: whimsical titles such as Liederkreis (Lied-circle), Blumenkranz (Flower-wreath), Liederroman (Lied-novel), or Liedercyklus (Lied-cycle) sometimes indicated something new in the music, but sometimes did not, and a fair number of cycles held no characterizing title at all.

The question of the relationship between the theology of John Calvin and later Reformed theology has been the subject of considerable debate since at least the rise of the School of Saumur and the subsequent controversies over Amyraldianism in the seventeenth century. On the whole, the issue has been pressed in terms of the extent to which certain later theologians can be seen to stand in continuity or discontinuity with the thought of Calvin. The method involved in this particular tradition of debate has been to identify certain doctrinal positions held by Calvin and to regard these as normative standards by which later theologians can be judged. This trajectory of scholarship is epitomized in the title of Basil Hall's famous article “Calvin against the Calvinists,” though Hall represents merely one example of such scholarship.

Underlying the various examples of this approach are a number of assumptions which, on close examination, can be seen to be somewhat inadequate as proper historical criteria. First, it is too often assumed that Calvin’s theology has, or had at some point in the past, some kind of normative status within the Reformed tradition. This is historically and ecclesiastically not so. While it is certainly true that the writings of Luther enjoyed unique influence among Lutheran confessional communities, the writings of Calvin never occupied anything approaching such a position.

The group of poets who gathered first in Bristol in 1795 and later in the Lake District introduced new accounts of the relationship of the mind to nature, new definitions of imagination, and new lyric and narrative forms. Their theories of creativity emphasized the individual imagination, but their practice of writing tells another story, one of collaborative writing. This practice originated in imagining a social community that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey called pantisocracy, or government by all. Coleridge and Southey met in June 1794, planned to emigrate to Pennsylvania with a few friends to set up an ideal community based on abandoning private property, and together composed poetry and delivered public lectures to raise money for their emigration. Pantisocracy proved utterly impractical, and Southey withdrew from the plan in the summer of 1795. Their plans for a community of writers with shared property changed to a practice of collaborative writing, dialogic creativity, and joint publication. When Coleridge met William Wordsworth in September 1795, the two began a dialogue in their poems. Their attempts at joint composition were successful only in minor poems, but their best poems were generated in response to others by members of their circle, and were often addressed to them. Their individual poetic voices were generated in a process of poetic statement and counterstatement within a social context that came to be known to the public as the Lake School.

THE THEOLOGIAN

Philip Melanchthon, Luther's close friend and colleague and himself no mean theologian, reportedly dubbed Calvin “the theologian.” Other Reformation leaders, including Luther, published theological treatises of significance. On the Reformed side, Zwingli, Bullinger, Bucer, Beza, and Peter Martyr made theological contributions. Yet it was only Melanchthon who wrote something like a systematic theology with his Loci Communes (1521 and later editions). Even so, Melanchthon was quite willing to acknowledge that Calvin was without peer when it came to theology.

The Institutes

That reputation originally resulted from the favorable reception of Calvin’s magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which has been hailed as one of the books “that has changed the world.” A more modest assessment, and one generally recognized, is that it is a classic of Protestant theology. It should be kept in mind, however, that the first edition of the Institutes (1536) takes up only 243 pages in volume I of the opera selecta, whereas the second edition (1539), in which Calvin really comes into his own, is three times as large; and the final edition of 1559 is almost five times as large as the first edition.

Neither of the key words in my title is unproblematic. 'Literature' signifies a tension between all kinds of writing and a special literary kind of writing: not until the 1830s is there a conception of literature as normatively belletristic, essentially different from other kinds of more public and instrumental writing. 'Politics' is even more problematic, as the word denotes not only the politics of the crown and parliament but also the politics of the extraparliamentary opposition. Moreover, the Enlightenment public sphere that Jöurgen Habermas describes as emerging in the eighteenth century generated a quasi-political republic of letters that invited all, regardless of social origins, to participate in the literary culture in a career open to all talents. Finally, the sense we now have that everything cultural is also political originates in this period.

From the 1740s to the 1830s, the major political trends included the challenge to aristocratic power by an array of democratic forces; the strengthening of the British Empire; and, especially after the defeat of Jacobitism and the final consolidation of the Protestant claim to the throne, an increase of religious toleration, with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism declining but hardly disappearing. Many other trends had political implications: agricultural capitalism flourished, with widespread enclosures of common land dispossessing the rural poor; the industrial revolution began in earnest, with the population roughly doubling in the period; literacy grew as the middle classes increased, so that by 1800 about half the women and two-thirds of the men could read.