Josephine Lang and Johanna Kinkel, complete: two Romantic song collections, free to play
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PracticeClef's catalog just added two more complete composer collections, and both happen to be women who wrote 19th-century German Lieder: Josephine Lang (1815–1880), 52 pieces, and Johanna Kinkel (1810–1858), 45 pieces. “Complete” here means every playable engraving of theirs in our source corpus is live — not every piece either woman ever wrote. Lang alone published more than 200 songs in her lifetime; the 52 here are what our source corpus (the OpenScore Lieder collection) contains in playable form.
One labeling note before the music: nearly everything below is the piano part of a song for voice and piano — the accompaniment, not the vocal line. Each piece page says so plainly, and the vocal melody isn't included. Difficulty below is PracticeClef's published 1–9 scale.
Josephine Lang: 52 pieces, intermediate to advanced
Lang was championed in her own time by Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, who published one of her songs in the supplement to his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Across the 52-piece collection, the majority of accompaniments sit at difficulty 5 and 6, with a handful reaching 7 and one piece at 8. These three are good entry points.
Mignons Klage, Op. 10 No. 2 — Josephine Lang
This piece is in B minor, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
A setting of Goethe's Mignon, the same character made famous by Schubert's and Schumann's settings of the same poems — hearing Lang's take alongside theirs is a genuine discovery, not a footnote.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Frühlings-Glaube, Op. 25 No. 1 — Josephine Lang
This piece is in C major, sits at level 4 of 9, and takes about 3 minutes to play.
Uhland's spring-faith poem, also set by Schubert, in a gentler reading than most of the Lang collection — one of the few pieces in the set that sits below difficulty 6.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Schilflied, Op. 26 No. 6 — Josephine Lang
This piece is in A major, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
A setting from Lenau's reed-song poems (Mendelssohn set the same cycle). The accompaniment drops its three sharps for an inner section before returning to A major for the close — a small piece of harmonic storytelling worth watching for on the score.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Johanna Kinkel: 45 pieces from a composer, conductor, and revolutionary
Kinkel was a composer, conductor, and writer who took part in the 1848 revolutions before her death in 1858. No published key data exists for her songs in the sources we work from, so every key below is PracticeClef's own harmonic analysis rather than a marking from Kinkel's manuscript — worth knowing if you're comparing editions.
Die Lorelei, Op. 7 No. 4 — Johanna Kinkel
This piece is in E minor, sits at level 5 of 9, and takes about 2 minutes to play.
Heine's Lorelei is the single most-set poem in German Romantic song, and Kinkel's version predates most of the settings that made the story famous. A good starting point if you know the poem but not this setting.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Die Zigeuner, Op. 7 No. 6 — Johanna Kinkel
This piece is in E minor, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about one minute to play.
A compact, minor-key miniature that closes out Kinkel's Op. 7 set — a quick, intense contrast if you've just worked through Lorelei's longer arc.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Sehnsucht nach Griechenland, Op. 6 No. 1 — Johanna Kinkel
This piece is in A minor, sits at level 6 of 9, and takes about one minute to play.
“Longing for Greece” opens Kinkel's Op. 6, a set of six songs that's complete in our catalog end to end — all six numbers shipped together in the same batch.
Open this score when you want to play it.
Explore it
Both collections, and everything else in the catalog, are free to browse in the full library — filter by composer or difficulty and start playing straight from the browser. If you're new here, connect a digital piano for live note feedback. Turn on Wait mode when you want the cursor to advance after you play the written notes. See the docs for setup. No account is needed.
A note on the numbers. Every count, key, and difficulty grade in this post comes from each piece's own metadata record on practiceclef.com and can be checked there directly. “Complete” means every playable engraving in our source corpus for that composer, not every piece she ever wrote. Length figures are estimates derived from the score, not measured performances, and are marked with a “~”.