German Song Onstage. Laura Tunbridge

Audiences sit in the dark, in silence, usually not eating, drinking, or whoring, at historically informed performances of baroque opera.¹ Similarly, Beethoven’s symphonies are uninterrupted by applause between movements, and his string quartets listened to, back to back, with a veneration that would have perplexed attendees at Ignaz Schuppanzigh’s first play-through.² It is impossible and doubtless undesirable to return to the social, economic, and sanitary situation of listeners in previous centuries. Why, though, is there a belief that today’s quasi-sacred consumption of classical music, which raises so many issues about elitism and access, is the best way of hearing it?

      This question is particularly relevant to German-language art song, a genre that flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps of all types of classical music, the Lied is now considered the most recondite. Its text and music require explication, its performance expertise. As illustrated in my first paragraph, the Lieder recital is considered to be formal and requiring specialist knowledge in order to be fully understood. There has not been a move to historically informed performance to the same extent as in other genres.³ Some sing with fortepiano rather than piano, and occasionally singers adopt ornamentation in the manner of nineteenth-century editions, but the kinds of portamento and rubato noted in reviews and heard across early recordings have not been adopted.⁴ Neither have the programming practices of previous generations; instead, as with Beethoven’s string quartets, there is a tendency toward completion and coherence. Schubert’s friends’ fears about the monotony of a rendition of the entirety of Winterreise probably would be mocked now (in public, at least).

      Taking Lieder so seriously flies in the face of what we know of nineteenth-century practices, which tended to be heterogeneous and communally minded inside and outside German-speaking territories. The domestic origins of the Lied are perhaps somewhat overstated; rarely do contemporary commentators specify what kind of home or musical life is implied.⁵ The means to afford having a piano or guitar in one’s house or purchasing sheet music—let alone the ability to read it—is one important and often overlooked consideration. Another ambiguous situation is the salon: when the affluent host invites guests to listen to skilled and maybe even professional musicians performing in the host’s home, is that a private or public space?⁶

      In its early forms, the Lied served as a vehicle for engaging with poetry in the vernacular through simple strophic musical settings, and it was popular because it catered to many levels of skill. It might be correct, then, to consider Lieder under the rubric of Bildung, as an educational tool that could develop poetic and musical appreciation. Yet Lieder were not yet understood as the deep engagement with the poetic-musical subject, the lyric-I, in which we are so invested today. Instead, as is evident from the Liederspiel roots of Wilhelm Müller’s and Ludwig Berger’s Die schöne Müllerin, song performance had a great deal to do with the entertainment of role-play.⁷ There might be a didactic aspect to that entertainment—as a sort of subjective entrainment (imagine how it feels to be the suicidal miller boy)—but nonetheless it was primarily a means to while away an evening.

      Certainly, when Lieder were presented on public platforms, as part of concert programs, there was little sense of them being high art in the same way as they are considered now. Schubert was represented by graceful individual songs; like Schumann’s, his cycles, now stalwarts of the repertoire, were not presented in their entirety until much later in the nineteenth century. They were thereby perhaps best thought of as introductions to these composers’ œuvres, counterfoils to the rest of the program’s symphonic movements, virtuoso piano pieces, and concert arias.

      The hybridity of nineteenth-century concert programs raises some interesting questions about how various national identities could be expressed through musical choices. The Lied was undeniably a German genre, defined by its use of the vernacular language, romantic poetic themes, and the homelands of the majority of its composers. At the same time, claims made for nation building though the creation and consumption of Lieder need to be nuanced if not critiqued. Lieder traveled around the world in versions modified for national markets. An appreciation of Lieder may have signaled engagement in cultural transfer and might be considered under the umbrella of cosmopolitanism; or it may have represented the incipient hegemony of the Austro-German musical canon, or the need for émigrés to assert their Germanic origins, in the manner of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities.”⁸ The modifications—translations, programming choices, new compositional and poetic contributions—however, suggest something less all-embracing and more particular, or local. Performing German song in America or Russia during the nineteenth century was different from what was happening in central Europe. Composing Lieder elsewhere did not necessarily mean that the touchstones were Schubert or Brahms, Eichendorff or Rückert. A volume such as this points out the need to recognize that although song might be staged as representative of a German tradition, Lieder could also be restaged in different languages and national styles.

      Before introducing the individual chapters of this volume, it might be worth raising questions about methodology. Much of what follows is concerned with programming; as a result, many of the chapters depend on extensive archival work that allows for the quantitative assessment of the activities of various individuals and organizations. On the one hand, that enables some of the practicalities of musical life—such as financial considerations, whose influence should never be underestimated—to be considered. On the other, that data has to be married with qualitative research to enable nuanced interpretation. There is no real way of knowing what these musicians sounded like, what kind of presence they had on the concert platform, and indeed how we might respond to them and their programs were we to encounter them today. Each author negotiates that challenge differently, taking on board aspects of social or cultural context, biography, or musical exegesis as suits them. In the process, a rich and diverse account of musical life in the long nineteenth century emerges and, partly so they can talk to each other in multiple ways, the chapters are ordered in loosely chronological order rather than quarantined into themed sections. It will thus be helpful here to draw together some of their shared concerns as a guide to the volume as a whole.

      Susan Youens begins our journey in Vienna, in 1825, with a concert program that would now be thought impossibly varied. She focuses on one of the most successful singers of that milieu, Anna Milder-Hauptmann, the dedicatee of Schubert’s “Suleika II.” The significance of singers in the history of Lieder composition is rarely given its due and in Youens’s account it is clear that Milder-Hauptmann was important not just in promoting Schubert’s music but in encouraging him to pursue certain poetic themes; in this case, the orientalism of the Westöstlicher Divan. As Youens observes, Schubert would have been unaware that the Suleika poems in that collection were written not by Goethe but by his youthful admirer, Marianne von Willemer, another indication of the important but overlooked roles played by women. Benjamin Binder in chapter 2 also focuses on female performers, considering the assessment by Robert and Clara Schumann of singers in their circle in terms of their moral standing, which was implicitly embedded in questions of gender, nationality, and generic preference. Those judgments in turn inflected the Schumanns’ appreciation of the singers’ interpretative abilities, Italian opera yet again serving as vilified other to true German music. The value placed on the expression of internal emotions through Lieder (conveyed by the term Innigkeit), it seems, was shaped by social politics and petty bigotry as much as by grand philosophical ideals.

      The Schumanns’ self-appointed role as cultural gatekeepers is also apparent in Natasha Loges’s chapter on the programming practices of baritone Julius Stockhausen and pianist Clara Schumann. Loges queries the ideology of fidelity to the work, or Werktreue, within this generation of German artists. Although Stockhausen famously presented the first complete public performances of song cycles by Schubert and Clara’s late husband, they were considered experiments rather than exemplars of how to present Lieder repertoire. Clara Schumann’s preferred approach was to interpolate a rendition of a cycle such as Dichterliebe with piano works, to avoid monotony of voice and style. It was not that Stockhausen and Clara Schumann did not take these works seriously—far from it. Instead, they recognized the need to persuade (more strongly, educate) audiences of the worth of this repertoire, and it was in part their efforts