Song Loves the Masses is the book on music that Johann Gottfried Herder did not himself write. Drawn from Herder’s writings on religion, history, aesthetics, and music, these translations and the accompanying analyses document the intellectual sea change at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The writings in this volume, published for the first time in English, include the first volumes to gather the repertories Herder, for the first time, called “folk songs,” the most influential modern translation of the Iberian epic, El Cid, and Herder’s seminal works in biblical, anthropological, and historical scholarship.
