Art song had blossomed into a multifaceted genre by 1800, and the debate whether to favor recurrent stanza structures or through-composed form was well underway....

Art song had blossomed into a multifaceted genre by 1800, and the debate whether to favor recurrent stanza structures or through-composed form was well underway. Lieder, as the lyrical genre per se, marked out the territory in which musicians could express the most profound emotions. The best composers therefore increasingly chose to through-compose their songs- a logical step, thanks to which they were able to closely follow the content and the speech of the poems they were setting to music. Beethoven already took that very step in his earliest Lieder. The emotional value of a song such as Adelaide op. 46 even managed to convince a late-19th century Vienna music critic otherwise well known for his harshness-Eduard Hanslick, who wrote in 1886: “No depiction of a youth’s enthusiastic love could be more faithful and exemplary than this Adelaide by Beethoven. What sweet, secret bliss shivers in every note of this golden melody!...” Beethoven’s contributions can be described as new arrangements and harmonizations of pre-existing melodies. These were true “songs without words,” since considerations of language could not be taken into account.