Strophe/Stanza
A recurring section of a song.
What it means
A stanza is a section of a song text organized by a fixed construction plan — the same number of lines, the same metre, the same rhyme scheme — that recurs several times. In the strophic Lied, every stanza is sung to the same music. Alongside this there is the varied strophic Lied, in which the music changes from stanza to stanza, and the through-composed Lied, which dispenses with repetition.
Musical use
The strophic layout is the oldest and most widespread song form. Its advantage is practical: whoever knows the melody once can sing along with every stanza — a precondition for congregational and communal singing. Musically a task results from this: the same music meets changing texts, and what fits in the first stanza can seem foreign in the third. Composers meet this by keeping the melody general enough or by setting individual stanzas differently. In art music this contradiction leads to the development of the through-composed Lied.
Performance practice
Read all the stanzas before you sing, and shape each according to its text; uniform repetition is the most common fault in the strophic Lied. Plan an arc over the sequence of stanzas, instead of giving everything right at the beginning. Vary the accompaniment where stylistically possible, or change the scoring. With liturgical use, clarify the number of stanzas in advance. Watch for syllable distributions that differ in individual stanzas, and mark them.
Bear in mind that the number of syllables and the stress do not turn out the same in all stanzas: often one stanza deviates, and the melody must be distributed differently there. Check all the stanzas before the performance and mark such spots. Shape every stanza according to its text and plan an arc over the sequence. In the art song, a distinction is made between the simple and the varied strophic Lied. In metrics, the stanza determines the number and measure of the verses.
Check whether all the stanzas are sung, because older editions often print more than was customary in use.