1815–1880 · Romantic
Josephine Lang (1815–1880) was a German pianist and composer from Munich who wrote a large number of songs for voice and piano, setting verses by Goethe, Heine, Uhland and other poets. Felix Mendelssohn and Ferdinand Hiller helped her learn the craft of song-writing. For pianists today, her music is of interest chiefly through these songs, which range across several levels of difficulty.
Josephine Caroline Lang was born on 14 March 1815 in Munich, the daughter of the violinist Theobald Lang and the opera singer Regina Hitzelberger. Her mother taught her piano, and by the age of five the girl was already showing a marked gift for composing. Felix Mendelssohn and Ferdinand Hiller later gave her grounding in the craft of song-writing, and both used their connections to help get her music into print.
From a young age Josephine had a delicate constitution, and keeping up her studies and performances while looking after her health was a constant balancing act. During one performance before Bavaria's royal couple, Queen Caroline Augusta noticed how unwell Josephine looked and had her taken to Wildbad Kreuth, in the Alps of southern Germany, to recover. It was there that she came to know Christian Reinhold Köstlin, who worked as a lawyer and wrote poetry in his spare time; the two fell for each other, and their marriage turned out a happy one. They married in 1842; he held a professorship at the university in Tübingen.
Köstlin died in 1856, now thought to have been of cancer. To support her family, Lang returned to composing songs and giving piano lessons. After financial hardship and failed attempts to get her music into print, she turned for help to Ferdinand Hiller and Clara Schumann. Clara herself organised a benefit concert built around Lang's compositions and played the piano at it. In 1867 Hiller put together a biographical sketch of Lang for publishers, and it was largely this piece that turned her into a recognised composer whose work began to sell successfully.
Lang's final years were marked by illness and loss: she outlived all three of her sons, who died of various causes, and once her two daughters were married — one in 1868, the other in 1870 — she felt lonely and left behind. She herself suffered from ill health during these years, yet she kept composing music and teaching piano throughout. Lang died in Tübingen on 2 December 1880, of a heart attack.
Most of Lang's output consists of Lieder — songs for voice and piano — together with a few choral pieces; her catalogue also includes a handful of solo piano works, among them marches and short character pieces such as the Two Character Pieces, Op. 32, and the cycle Songs without Words, Op. 35.
Her earliest published collections, Op. 1 and Op. 2, came out in Munich in 1831; Op. 1 included settings of Goethe, Schiller and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, among others. She also set her husband's verse to music: for instance, every song in the Op. 12 set (Leipzig, 1845) and the Op. 14 set (Leipzig, 1848) is set to words by Christian Reinhold Köstlin.
Among the poets whose verse Lang set to music was Ludwig Uhland — his words appear, for example, in the Op. 7 set (Munich, 1838) and the Op. 11 set (Leipzig, 1845). Among her works is the Elegie on the Death of Ludwig Uhland, Op. 31 (Stuttgart, 1863). Both of these collections also include poems by Justinus Kerner.
The site presents her music through 45 songs for voice and piano: twenty-four of them are rated upper intermediate, and the remaining twenty-one advanced, including Am Bache, Op. 20, and Auf der Reise, Op. 22. A good place to start with her music is In Welschland, Herz, mein Herz, so schweig auch du!, or Wenn du wärst mein eigen.
Her music appeared in print in many different cities: besides Munich and Leipzig, publishers in Stuttgart, Vienna and Weimar brought out her songs, while the Op. 13 set (1847) names three cities at once — Mainz, Antwerp and Brussels.