The real spirit of song was preserved in the German _singspiele_. These were lively dramatic entertainments, interspersed with songs, like the English ballad operas, except that the music was usually composed especially for the piece. The _singspiele_ were not taken seriously by the educated classes, hence the lightest kind of joyousness reigned in them, and the music was that which would appeal most quickly to the hearts of the people. The tunes were, in fact, generally as much like true folk-songs as their composers could make them. _Singspiele_ were written and performed by the hundreds during the eighteenth century. Many of the more popular songs were remembered and sung by the people as half-naturalized folk-songs, and the successful composers were usually fertile producers of songs independent of the _singspiele_. This was the true song-tradition of Germany before Schubert’s time. It grew out of the art of the people and spoke familiarly to all. It was a dignified and firmly established art institution, though it was given hardly more recognition by the great musicians of the time than the symphony composers of to-day give to operetta. The _singspiel_ folk-song type, moreover, was the type which was called into service for the setting of the works of the standard poets of the time. Zelter’s settings of Goethe’s poems were scarcely to be distinguished, in point of form, from the songs that were sung in the cheap theatres. Among the best of the _singspiel_ composers was Johann Adam Hiller (1728-1804), also distinguished as the first director of the famous Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig and as perhaps the first writer of true _durchkomponierte Lieder_. His songs kept the popular flavor, but strove for vigorous expression of the text and, in doing this, broke out of the simple strophe or stanza form. The spirited character of Hiller’s _singspiele_ is suggested by the names of some of them--‘The Devil is Loose,’ ‘The Hunt,’ and ‘The Village Barber.’ Johann André (d. 1799), fertile composer of _singspiele_, has a place alongside of Hiller as a pioneer in that he was probably the first to adapt the _durchkomponiert_ style to the ballad, setting Bürger’s famous ‘Lenore’ soon after it appeared in 1775. The true ballad style, however, was more freely cultivated by Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg (d. 1802), commonly known as the inventor of the ballad form. He composed settings for several poems to which Schubert and Löwe later set their hands, notably Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ _Des Pfarrer’s Tochter_, and _Ritter Toggenburg_. Johann Schulz, who was another prolific _singspiel_ writer, is chiefly famous for his beautiful ‘Songs in the Folk-Manner,’ which appeared between 1782 and 1790, when Herder’s pioneer collection of _Volkslieder_ (words only) had just commenced to create an interest in the subject of popular song.