Father & Son

Ever since the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, the collection and research of folksong texts were associated with the initiation of a tradition. A “folksong idea” began to spring up based on concrete historical sources and facts, which became a guiding light both for enlightened education and also for the classical and early romantic generation of writers – as a medium for the universal shaping of the human character, as symbol of a lost Golden Age and as a yearned-for “German nation” seen as a cultural archive. However, this ideal did not recognise a solidifi ed artefact in the creatively adapted and re-set ‘Volkslied’, but the traces of a practical experience – Johann Gottfried Herder , the inventor of the term ‘Volkslied’, felt himself transported back “away from paper (...) into the living emotion of the people”. Against the background of contemporary speculations about cultural theory, the association of word and music in song thus became a social act endowing a sense of identity, behind which the assumed substantial and elemental relationship between language and music mysteriously shimmers like a water mark.