Songs, Popular

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SONGS, POPULAR

SONGS, POPULAR. The popular song in early modern Europe was a melody, usually widely known in society, that was set to a poetic text and communicated either in private or public performance or in print. The melodies had origins variously in folk music, tavern singing, comic opera, or vaudeville, all-sung opera, or even hymn singing. In fact, they moved back and forth between such contexts, being set to new words. In this period "vaudeville" had different meanings in different countries, referring to courtly songs in France and "country" ballad or song in England.

Here "popular" should be taken to mean "general" culture, part of what almost everyone was assumed to know, rather than an idiom that was distinctive of the lower classes or was seen on a lesser cultural level.

In such countries as France, England, and Germany, popular songs were disseminated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries chiefly by men who both sang and sold them in fairs, most notably on the Pont-Neuf in Paris. The chansonnières were part of the charlatans, unlicensed trades such as jugglers, magicians, or vendors of medical or cosmetic items. Essential to the chansonnières' business was the maintenance of a wide network of connections and news by which to write ballads on topics of general interest. They also formed part of small companies that put on skits in fairs. Editions of songs, which were numerous beginning in the early seventeenth century, became closely linked with political dispute, as in the Recueil general des chansons de la Fronde (General collection of songs of the Fronde) of 1649.

In the early eighteenth century the song became institutionalized within the musical theater known variously as opera buffa, opéra comique, vaudeville, Singspiel, and what was called either English or ballad opera. Their productions combined songs with a spoken text, the latter usually linked to the former in mood rather than plot line. The same songs were attached to dramas in the licensed theaters; by 1700 London playwrights had become concerned that much of the public went to Drury Lane more for the songs than the plays. In both Paris and Vienna some works in these idioms—most notably Die Entführing aus dem Serail and Die Zauberflöte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and Le Déserteur by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729–1817)—were by 1789 thought to stand on a level of sophistication equal to that of all-sung opera.

Writing texts for songs became an extremely important aspect of both amusement and politics during the eighteenth century. Robert Darnton shows that chansons evolved in a process of successive, collective authorship that was deeply rooted in aspects of sociability. It served as a central means by which news was spread, became interpreted, and thereby influenced public life anew. A leading aficionado of chansons was Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas (1701–1781), minister to Louis XV; his collection was published in Émile Raunié's Chansonnier historique du XVIIIe siècle(1879–1884). Some men of letters, most notably Charles Collé (1709–1783), made a career out of writing chansons.

By 1750 editions of the songs in a well-known work that had been done by a famous singer became a major commercial component of music publishing. Tendencies of mass marketing can be detected by 1800 in the production of songs designed to be easy to appreciate by the expanding ranks of people playing and singing at home. Publishers in Britain and Germany pressured composers to write songs on supposedly Irish or Scottish themes that came to be seen as mere fashion and hype in some quarters.

See also Hymns ; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus von ; Music ; Popular Culture .