Orchestral song

The orchestral song (German Orchesterlied) is a late romantic genre of classical music for solo voices and orchestra.

What was effectively song with instrumental accompaniment – the cantata and the aria – had been part of music since the early baroque. Beethoven and Schumann too had occasionally provided instrumental accompaniment to some songs. Full orchestration, to enable a song to "hold its own" in a 19th-century concert environment, developed from the 1840s. Among the earliest experiments with orchestral song are those of Liszt who orchestrated several of his songs in the 1840s but did not publish them. Liszt also had the operetta composer August Conradi orchestrate his Le juif errant and Jeanne d'Arc around 1848, but these too were neither published nor performed. Long after Berlioz' publication of his orchestrations of Les nuits d'été in 1856, Liszt finally published his own orchestration of Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher, as a dramatic scene for voice and orchestra in 1874. The form was brought to fruition by Mahler, to the extent that it is difficult to say where Mahler's symphonies end and where his symphonic songs begin.

The genre of orchestral song tends to longer programmed pieces than songs accompanied by piano. For this reason the orchestral song may be either be a longer single song or, more commonly, a cycle. An example of a single long song text is found in Sibelius' tone poem Luonnotar. Other examples include Grieg's Den Bergtekne, op. 32. Hugo Wolf scored twenty-four of his songs for voice and orchestra, including Prometheus. The genre of the story-telling cantata continues alongside the orchestral song, as Poulenc's cantata Le bal masqué and La voix humaine, a one-act opera for one character.

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