In 1783, the author and pedagogue Christian Gotthilf Salzmann gave over an entire volume of his children’s periodical Unterhaltungen für Kinder und Kinderfreunde (Entertainments for Children and Children’s Friends, 1783:6) to an account of his family’s 5-day “road trip” from Dessau to Erfurt, in Thuringia. Thuringia is where Salzmann—a teacher at the innovative Dessau-based educational institution the Philanthropinum—was born and raised. He longed to bring his family back to his Vaterland to visit their grandmother. The title-page illustration to the volume shows the family in a coach and four crossing a bridge, as though just leaving Dessau at their journey’s outset. A man and woman sit on the coach box, while two children peek out from the coach window, and a young boy rides one of the horses while waving a flag (Figure 1). The boy’s excitement at the adventure to come is palpable, and this illustration would have prompted a similar excitement in the periodical’s readers as they “joined” the seven Salzmann children, their parents, their coachman, and their maid on the journey. “Let’s go to Erfurt! Let’s go to Grandmother!” the children cry (5).

But travel in eighteenth-century Germany was uncomfortable, dangerous, even life-threatening, compounding an already-high infant and child mortality rate in eighteenth-century Europe of 25–40% (Volk and Atkinson, 2013). And Salzmann chose to undertake this journey in March, before winter was past. On the third day, the family meets with a snowy wind and icy path that slows down their horses. Everyone is freezing. Salzmann begins to hear the children whimper at the cold, which he describes as the only kind of travel hazard for which he has no tolerance. “Truly, my friends,” he warns his readers, “if one of you wishes to travel with me one day, you have to promise me (not to complain); otherwise, as soon as you start crying over things that cannot be changed, I will jump out of the coach and let you drive on alone” (55). Luckily, his wife finds a way to restore the peace and “open those mouths that were about to freeze over.” She begins to sing the Lied “Rosen auf den Weg gestreut” (Roses Strewn Upon the Path), a 1776 poem by Ludwig Christoph Heinrich Hölty that had been set by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in his 1779 collection Oden und Lieder as “Lebenspflichten” (Duties of Life) (Figure 2). Salzmann describes the family joining in, while he “sang the bass line from my coach box. Thus we forgot the cold and hardship, and sang until we came to Buttstädt” (55).

Readers encountering the off-set text at this point in the volume might have found themselves singing along with the shivering Salzmann family. After all, Hölty’s poem was well-known, while Reichardt’s Oden und Lieder was already a popular song collection.

Rosen auf den Weg gestreut! Roses strewn upon the path!

It is a strange song for the mother to have chosen to comfort and distract the children, painting a somber picture of fleeting youth and life. Over eight quatrains, a boy’s spring dance gives way to a funeral wreath upon his grave; a young bride’s path to the altar is followed by her lying on the funeral bier. This song is, in other words, a memento mori. Despite its rather grim subject matter, the Salzmann family takes it up enthusiastically, with the father’s bass suggesting a choral performance, as recommended by Reichardt in his jovial, D-major setting, with its instruction “Auch im Chor zu singen” (also to be sung in a choir). This morbid text and jaunty tune was music that was meant to be shared.

The song keeps the Salzmann family warm—or at least distracted—until they complete this stage in their journey. Its success at warding off the dreaded “whining” is clearly meant to inspire readers to draw on song at similar moments of danger or disharmony. It is no surprise, then, that Salzmann pauses his account here, as he has already done before, for a didactic aside. “Singing,” he says, “is very common in my house” (55–56). He describes other occasions on which his children sing together, advising all his readers to learn to sing from and with their friends. That way they can avail themselves of all the wonderful songs by the great German poets of the age, “bringing yourselves and others great joy” (57).

Intra- and intra-generational family singing is found throughout the world’s cultures (Brand, 1986; Trehub, Unyk, & Trainor, 1993; Trehub et al., 1997; O’Hagin and Harnish, 2003; Custodero, 2006). Children’s songs and nursery rhymes are often performed with adult family members, whether simultaneously (in unison or harmony) or sequentially (as in call-and-response) (Berger and Cooper, 2003; Edwards, 2011). In one corpus of printed children’s songs, however, such musical partnering between young and old was scripted, arguably for the first time. These songs appeared in the juvenile print culture of late eighteenth-century Germany (Brüggemann and Ewers, 1982; Rehle, 1989; Mittler and Wangerin, 2004). Emerging from the “moral weeklies” popular among adult readers, children’s periodicals and digests offered a variety of poems, theatricals, riddles, songs, stories, and non-fiction content, all promoting norms around filial obedience, virtue, and productivity. The periodicals often presented a fictional family as a model for readers, who were encouraged to share the content aloud with members of their own extended families. But the “disciplining” going on in this literature was as much emotional as it was moral. Melodramatic plots to dialogues, plays, and Singspiele allowed for tenderness and affection to be role-played in the family drawing room. And the poems and songs included in and spun off from these periodicals constituted, for the first time, a shared repertoire meant to be sung and played by young and old together. Duets for brothers and sisters, parents and children—with such prescriptive titles as “Brotherly Harmony” and “Song from a Young Girl to Her Father, On the Presentation of a Little Rosebud”—not only trained children how to be ideal sons, daughters, and siblings. They also habituated mothers and fathers to the new culture of sentimental, devoted parenthood.

In what follows, I explore songs for family members to sing together in German children’s literature before 1800. These songs appeared in children’s periodicals, digests, and play collections (either as freestanding songs or embedded in theatricals), and as separately published song collections and vocal scores. In surveying this repertoire and its early reception, I uncover the reciprocal learning implied in text, music, and the act of performance itself, as adults and children alike rehearsed the devoted bourgeois nuclear family.

Depending on how they are counted, some forty to fifty German-language children’s periodicals were published in the last third of the eighteenth century, beginning in 1771–72 (Wild, 1987). With average print runs of 1,000, and assuming an average of roughly ten readers per copy (Uphaus-Wehmeier, 1984), we can estimate a total readership of up to 500,000, or around 2.5% of the roughly twenty million inhabitants of the German-speaking lands (Köberle, 1972; Heckle, 1987). Modeled on the moralische Wochenschriften (moral weeklies) popular with adult readers, these periodicals offered a range of edifying amusements: poems, theatricals, riddles, songs, stories, illustrations, and non-fiction content (Mueller, 2021). Like novels, fairy tales, and fables, periodicals belong to the genre of recreational literature, one of a number of genres of eighteenth-century German children’s literature that also includes moral instruction, religious tracts, and educational textbooks in reading, writing, arithmetic, and other subjects (Brüggemann and Ewers, 1982). The periodicals were meant to be shared by all members of a family, read aloud and—in the case of songs and theatricals—performed in the home, in one’s “kleinen Familientheater” or little family-theater, as it was sometimes called (Hiller, 1778).

The most influential, if not the first of the children’s periodicals, was Der Kinderfreund, published in Leipzig from 1775 to 1782. Der Kinderfreund was edited by the poet, playwright, librettist, critic, and pedagogue Christian Felix Weisse (Hurrelmann, 1974; Abert and rev. Bauman, 2001; Mai, 2003; Löffler and Stockingern, 2006). Der Kinderfreund went through four editions extending to 1805, had a print run of at least 10,000, and may have been read by as many as 100,000 children in Germany alone, according to one estimate (Hurrelmann, 1974). Der Kinderfreund’s material was presented within a moralizing frame narrative starring a model family, led by a kindly paterfamilias named Herr Mentor. The name was a clear reference to Telemachus’ tutor in Homer’s Odyssey, known to many eighteenth-century readers through Fénelon ( 1699). Mentor and his friends provide the four Mentor children with a panoply of poems, songs, stories, skits, and plays, all inspired by episodes in the children’s everyday life—from a casual stroll in the woods, to a catastrophic fire in a nearby town, to the sudden illness of elder daughter Lottchen. This content helps the family to process their experiences, while also conveying moral lessons. Emily Bruce has argued that the frame narratives not only showed Der Kinderfreund’s readers how to behave; “(T)he lesson also models a way to read, with the fictional frame children discussing the story they have just heard with their father, identifying with the characters, and investing the story with meaning (from) their quotidian life” (Bruce, 2015, 65). This was, in other words, a shared learning process. Erziehung and Bildung (roughly, education and upbringing) preoccupied many German Enlightenment thinkers, particularly as a means of raising productive bourgeois subjects and thereby increasing the power of the state (whether it be Prussia or the Habsburg lands). And as a corollary to the rise in companionate marriage in the late Enlightenment, the sympathetic bonds between members of an elementary family were increasingly felt to be crucial to those larger projects (Hurrelmann, 1974; Dettmar, 2002). Familial affection of course predated its enshrining in print; what was new, rather, was the notion that this affection must be both choreographed and put on display.

Cooperation and affection between adults and children were key tenets of the German educational reform movement known as Philanthropinism, which we already encountered through Salzmann. Established by Johann Bernhard Basedow in the 1770s, Philanthropinism emphasized play-based learning and cultivating joy and pleasure in parent-child and teacher-student relationships. In addition to treatises and institutions that propagated Philanthropinism, periodicals like Der Kinderfreund were an important means of popularizing its principles (1776:3, 132–138). On a broader level, from its title to every detail of its form and content, Der Kinderfreund emphasized friendship between adults and children. In the very first issue, Mentor professed to love his children “more than all the treasures of the earth, more than the whole world, yes, I almost want to say, more than my life” (Mueller, 2013, 143). It is this insular, all-consuming devotion that I wish to trace in domestic songs for children to perform with their family members.

Music-making served as both a model and catalyst for the emotional habituation of parents and children to the new ideal of the sentimental, devoted family. Even before Weisse started publishing Der Kinderfreund, there already existed a repertoire of Kinderlieder (children’s songs) published in collections and other periodicals and aimed at a young readership (Smeed, 1988; Schilling-Sandvoß, 1996; Freitag, 2001; Buch, 2014). Most Kinderlieder collections appeared in the same cities that produced the majority of children’s literature as a whole: Leipzig and Berlin, the centers of north German publishing and music printing. With multiple editions, high-profile subscribers, and frequent reviews in periodicals like the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, Mannigfaltigkeiten, and the Hamburg Unterhaltungen, Kinderlieder collections and Kinderlieder in children’s periodicals enjoyed wide circulation and critical reception, similar to their counterparts in devotional and domestic Lieder for adult consumers (Head, 1999; 2013; Gramit, 2002; Parsons, 2004; Joubert, 2006).

In addition to freestanding Lieder, readers might encounter arias, duets, ensembles, and choruses for family members (either solely as texts or with musical settings) in the many theatricals for domestic performance that were published in children’s periodicals and in separate collections (Table 2). Theatricals for juvenile readers were often based on everyday life, with children portraying thinly fictionalized versions of themselves, and their parents or older siblings portraying their fathers and mothers. The roles were often stereotyped: “rational fathers, mischievous sons, virtuous daughters, caring mothers,” as Ute Dettmar (2002, 11) summarizes it. This was a participatory, interactive repertoire, one in which, as Dettmar argues, the close-knit family “instantiates itself in its rituals and at the same time celebrates itself in its staging. [Fictional] setting and performance venue blend together, and the family-theater does not seek to build a “fourth wall”; the amateur actors perform as family members and as such are addressed as spectators” (20).

Putting children on display in private theatricals was another way to monitor and coopt their free time for the projects of Erziehung and Bildung. By memorizing moralistic dialogue, submitting to the direction of an adult “director,” and impersonating idealized children, all for the approval of an adult audience, children could affirm the principles of virtue and filial obedience (Wild, 1987). A number of the plays exposed child misbehavior to critique, even mockery, as in “Die Schadenfreude” from Der Kinderfreund (1776:5), or “Denk, daß zu deinem Glück dir niemand fehlt, als du!” (Keep in Mind That You Do Not Need Anyone But Yourself To Be Happy!), from Salzmann’s Unterhaltungen für Kinder und Kinderfreunde (1780:3) (Mueller, 2021). Since this top-down, edifying function of plays, scenes, and dialogues was foregrounded within the works themselves, as well as prized highly by both authors and critics, this tends to be the aspect most frequently emphasized by modern-day scholars (Cardi, 1983; Mairbäurl, 1983; Dettmar, 2002).

As with the Kinderlieder, however, there was more at work in domestic children’s theater than just Foucauldian disciplining of children, or the exporting of religious instruction to an increasingly secular domestic space. Parents needed “disciplining,” too, an opportunity to rehearse the kind of familial intimacy called for by pedagogical reformers. This is confirmed in paratexts such as Carl August Gottlieb Seidel’s preface to his 1780 Sammlung von Kinderschauspielen mit Gesängen (Collection of Plays with Songs), in which he wrote that he not only gave these theatricals to his children, but performed them with them. Meanwhile, the melodramatic plots borrowed from the sentimental theater offered plenty of opportunity for pathos: abandonment and reunion, war, disaster, poverty, and death featured prominently. The heightened emotions and often traumatic nature of such events, as Wild (1987) notes, offered a pretext for tenderness and vulnerability to be foregrounded. As a Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek review of one Kinderschauspiele collection noted, “We already know that Kinderschauspiele are mostly of the sentimental genre [rührenden Gattung], in which innocent children or thoughtful parents are usually the main roles, in contrast to hard-hearted people or spoiled children” (1795:15, 60). In other words, the goal was not just to give children models for how to be innocent instead of spoiled, but also to give parents models for how to be thoughtful instead of hard-hearted. In their “double address” to both children and their parents, then, the dialogues, plays, and Singspiele in collections like Der Kinderfreund encompassed more than moral guidance. They also offered a template for frank emotional expressivity, a training ground for knitting the family together along more intimate lines than ever before.

Nearly all of these children’s periodicals and collections (whether of Lieder or plays) included prefaces in which the author, composer, or editor addressed their readers and set out their goals for the publication. I have already referred to several such prefaces, and there are numerous other examples. Many were addressed directly to “meine kleinen Leser” (my young readers), or “An die Jugend” (to the youth), advancing the conceit that children’s literature was exclusively read by the young. But as all young readers surely knew, the main consumers—indeed, patrons—of children’s literature were parents and educators. Lathey (2006, 2) describes prefaces in children’s literature as seeking “to justify the choice of text, to commend its didactic intent, or to reconcile teachers, parents, and child readers to its provenance and content.” Bruce (2015, 83) puts it somewhat more strongly: prefaces sought “to exert control over the relationship between author and reader,” in much the same way as the aforementioned frame narratives featuring model families sought to circumscribe the reading experience, and by extension, shared free time as a whole.

In prefaces to Kinderlieder collections, composers often enumerated the benefits of singing the songs, while also occasionally offering guidelines for their performance or apologias for their unassuming appearance. Hiller’s preface to his first set of Lieder für Kinder (Weisse, 1769) sets this out plainly: “I have,” he writes, “given preference to light and natural singability over the bombastic and artificial. Good coherence of the voice, pure intonation, and a clear and affecting delivery is more important than (executing) all the mordents, trills, and turns.” Claudius (1780) exhibited a trait common to many of these prefaces: paying tribute to those who had already published in the genre, especially Weisse and Hiller. Claudius acknowledged the primacy of Hiller’s collection, and professed only to have published his set for very young players, “those of you who would always come away from the Clavier with a sad face, and lament that (Hiller’s Lieder für Kinder) was still too difficult for your little fingers.” Claudius went on to insist, with conventional humility, that his melodies were “not nearly as beautiful as those of the excellent Hiller—but I have done what was within my ability, and you will have to be content with that.”

Such modest prefaces may have been a way to forestall criticism—after all, these publications were reviewed in general-interest periodicals like the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (General German Library) as well as specialty education periodicals like the Allgemeine Bibliothek für das Schul- und Erziehungswesen in Deutschland (General Library for the Schooling and Education System in Germany), and in the newly emerging music journals that were establishing a robust critical tradition around music for domestic consumption (Rose, 2019). In fact, like Weisse himself, many of the composers who produced music for the juvenile market were also themselves music critics. Scheibe was the editor of one of the earliest music journals, Der Critische Musicus (1737–38, 1740). Hiller edited one of the earliest music periodicals, the Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend (Weekly News and Notes Regarding Music, 1766–70), which, as Rose (2019) points out, was aimed at amateurs. Reichardt also advanced the cause of simple, unaffected music in his own Musikalisches Kunstmagazin (1782, 1791). With so many of these agents of German canon formation “moonlighting” as composers of music for the young, it is little surprise that the narrative of “edle Einfalt” (noble simplicity) should be such a key tenet of German nationalism in music.

Despite composers’ best efforts, however, music critics pulled no punches when it came to Kinderlieder collections. Possibly the earliest such collection, Scheibe’s Kleine Lieder für Kinder, volume 1 (1766), received a scathing review in the Hamburg Unterhaltungen (1768:5, 343–344) that was particularly unforgiving of Scheibe’s use of parallel fifths and octaves. Scheibe—already infamous for his critique of J. S. Bach in 1737— was incensed enough by this review to publish a sprawling rebuttal that took up seven and a half pages of the eight-page preface to volume two of his Kleine Lieder für Kinder (1768, 1–8). Scheibe even referred to the reviewer as “mein Gegner” (my enemy/adversary). Hiller published a gentler review of Scheibe’s volume two in his Wöchentliche Nachrichten (1766:1, 356–360), sympathetically noting the “heftigen Kritiker” (severe criticism) Scheibe had received, while also confessing, “the more fierce (Scheibe) is, the less we wish to get embroiled in the debate” (356). A few years later, perhaps apprehensive of similar treatment, Burmann wrote in the preface to the first of his collections, Burmann (1773), that “The musical critic will of course find reason enough for criticism—and perhaps no one criticizes more, than myself.”

As for the subject of the present article—songs for family members to sing to or with each other—most critics do not seem to have addressed these songs individually in their reviews of Lieder collections. One exception was Hiller’s (1776:1, 358) review of Scheibe’s volume 2. He praised his fellow composer Weisse for his “expressive melodies,” particularly in those duets where Scheibe supplied different music for different strophes (as discussed above). In general, songs in plays and theatrical anthologies tended to be largely overlooked by critics, in favor of criticisms of plot and language. The only one of Weisse’s three separately-printed children’s Singspiele to have received a review appears to be Hiller’s setting of Die kleine Aehrenleserinn, in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek. The short, muted review suggests that parents who had first read the Singspiele were “doubtless eager to see it performed by their children” (1780:40, 127). The reviewer goes on to observe, however, that Hiller’s music is not accessible to the average child, and was clearly composed with the professional stage in mind. Indeed, a number of these plays made their way into the repertoires of professional children’s troupes (Dieke, 1934; Mueller, 2013).

Another strain of criticism may have been motivated by regional or confessional rivalries. The Jesuit priest Franz Xaver Jann, professor at a Gymnasium in Augsburg, published a seven-volume series entitled Etwas wider die Mode: Gedichte und Schauspiele ohne Caressen, und Heurathen, für die studierende Jugend (Something Against the Fashion: Poems and Plays Without Caresses and Marriages, for Studious Youth, 1782–1821). Nearly every volume included a handful of Singspiele alongside spoken plays, all on vehemently chaste subjects. The first few volumes came in for harsh criticism from the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, with one reviewer singling out the Singspiele as “so indescribably wretched and pedantically dumb that there is nothing more to say” (1789:84, 554). Another reviewer even suggested that a better title for the collection might be “Etwas wider den gesunden Menschenverstand” (Something Against Common Sense) (1790:95, 297). Either or both anonymous reviews may have been by Friedrich Nicolai, the editor of the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, who in his Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz, im Jahre 1781 twice excoriated Jann’s “tasteless” collection (1787:8, 126, 154–155). Concluding that the concept of a “Jesuit comedy” was virtually an oxymoron, Nicolai “pitied” the “poor children who have to ruin their minds with such nonsense.” The occasional critique notwithstanding, the many reprints and anthologies of children’s Lieder and plays shows just how much traction they had in the marketplace.

Free-standing and theatrically embedded songs for parents and children to sing to and with one another constituted—for the first time that we know of in European print culture—a shared, notated repertoire for young and old. The learning taking place here was reciprocal: parents listened to their children perform, siblings listened to one another as they traded verses in a song, and older siblings played parents alongside and in front of their own parents and younger siblings. At the level of the everyday, such reciprocity has been observed in our own time, in more casual musical interactions between parents and infants. Custodero and Johnson-Green (2008, 16) liken such “musical parenting” to “the musical phenomenon of counterpoint,” and describe it as contributing to various aspects of child development. In the eighteenth century, the explicit and implicit goals of German repertoire for family singing bore the weight of many ideological burdens: psychological, moral, social, even nationalistic. As Georg Carl Claudius summed it up in the preface to volume two of his Kleine Unterhaltungen (1783, n.p.): “Honor your God, love your parents, treasure your teachers, respect religion and virtue, and you will—and you must—be happy.” In other words, through obedience, morality, and a sense of shared obligation, children could find fulfillment. A poet and composer of Kinderlieder himself, Claudius knew well the role that singing could play in supporting all of those pursuits. But as the intimate family portrait on the title page of Claudius’ volume makes clear (Figure 9), parents shared their children’s burden of responsibility. They had to make themselves worthy of that all-consuming love, and return it. The father, mother, girl, and boy shown in the engraving are woven together, their hands entwined, their bodies pressed together in a tableau of idealized intimacy. They fulfill Weisse’s profession in the first issue of Der Kinderfreund, to love his own children “almost more than my life.”

This sense of mutual devotion would become even more nostalgic and sentimentalized in the next century. In his Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung [On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795], Friedrich Schiller argued that young and old, like nature and the man-made, were incomplete in and of themselves:

Whether practical or sentimental, utilitarian or romantic, the mutual obligation between young and old, encapsulated in that compound word “Kinderfreund,” was modeled—indeed, transacted—in songs and ensembles for family members to sing to and with each other. None of them, not even the lullabies, were ever truly solos.

As that cold spring journey from Salzmann’s Unterhaltungen für Kinder und Kinderfreunde had allegorized so well, both everyday life and intergenerational rapprochement were treacherous, with many foreseen and unpredictable hazards along the way. But there would always be “Rosen auf den Weg gestreut,” roses strewn upon the path. The children’s authors, poets, and composers encountered here all seem to have shared the hope that, by affirming the blessings of familial affection, children might be helped to weather all of life’s dangers and challenges, while also reassuring their elders that all would be well. “Instantiating and celebrating themselves” in these participatory rituals (Dettmar, 2002, 20), German families consuming this repertoire were afforded both pretexts and scripts for performing the devoted family—along with enough pleasing music to make it worth rehearsing again and again.