German Song Onstage. Laura Tunbridge

Lieder within the classical music sphere.

      The Lied, importantly, was also mobile. Although primarily a German-language tradition, its singers and pianists traveled extensively between venues, cities, and countries. How the genre was translated—literally and more metaphorically—for different audiences is the topic of several chapters. Anglophone perspectives are offered in the chapters by Katy Hamilton, who explores the treatment of Lieder in London, and Heather Platt, who considers the United States. Hamilton investigates the consequences of Natalia Macfarren’s singable translations of Lieder by Brahms on the composer’s reputation and popularity in England. She likens the impetus behind translating the songs (particularly the ensemble songs) to that guiding arrangements of instrumental repertoire; in other words, they were intended to disseminate the repertoire to a larger domestic market. Macfarren’s translations were also hugely influential on subsequent attempts to render Lieder in English, encouraging the use of archaisms that in later decades negatively affected the reputations of the songs themselves.

      Platt’s discussion of the ways in which Lieder were programmed on the East Coast, and how that reflected the European training and experience of particular singers, is to our knowledge the first such study of German art-song performance in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century United States and attests to the importance of transatlantic cultural transfer during the period. German musicians such as August Kreissmann and Americans who had studied in Europe, such as Villa Whitney White (a student of Amalie Joachim), introduced song cycles in their recitals, in turn encouraging a greater number of individual Lieder to be programmed across the country. David Bispham used his championing of Brahms’s songs as a way of promoting his concerts. As well as geographical transfer, gender played a significant role in United States performance culture: women’s music clubs were important venues for recitals but, at the same time, there was considerable flexibility in attitudes about which gender should sing which songs.

      Gender is also significant for Beatrix Borchard’s chapter, which considers the concert hall as a feminized space within the career of Amalie Joachim, a singer whose historically aware recitals signaled a new attitude to Lieder programming. The discovery of archival materials reveals that Amalie Joachim’s role in devising the influential volume Das deutsche Lied had been suppressed; her male collaborator instead took the credit for the collection. Although the careers of female performers continued to be circumscribed by what was deemed socially acceptable, Joachim’s was an era of transition, with the newly sacralized space of the concert hall enabling women such as she to play a more prominent role in musical performance. The recitals on which Das deutsche Lied was based encapsulated efforts to establish the genre’s long German heritage and to court both professional and amateur musicians. Amalie Joachim’s role was not that of an entertainer but that of an educator who, through her nontheatrical mode of performance, attempted to persuade her audiences of the superiority of Lieder over more popular parlor songs.

      The determination to forge a national identity through song is also the subject of Maria Razumovskaya’s chapter, which explains the role of composer and pianist Nikolai Medtner in the promotion of Lieder in early twentieth-century Moscow. Art-song salons were effective vehicles for debating representations of Russianness. The cultural capital of the aristocracy was increasingly called into question, as was the appropriateness of using folk music to convey individual expression. In response, for romances Medtner turned to German Lieder as a musical model and to the poetry of Goethe for texts. In his heyday, Medtner was praised for having managed an integration of German and Russian cultures that other artists had not; with the outbreak of World War I and then the 1917 Revolution, however, his affinity with Brahms was reinterpreted negatively, as a sign of conservatism.

      William Weber and Simon McVeigh look primarily at programming, tracking the development of the solo song recital at what became the Ver sacrum of Lieder singing, the Bechstein (later Wigmore) Hall. Despite reports that Lieder were routinely programmed in recitals, they demonstrate that in fact British, Italian, and French repertoires were much more prominent and that new music was heard in recitals much more often than in other venues. An alternative canon of Lieder composers was evident at the start of the twentieth century in England. Brahms took precedence over Schubert and Schumann, and while figures such as Christian Sinding and Alexander von Fielitz were accorded respect, Max Reger was not. Changes in attitude were encouraged by concerts devised by musicians of German heritage—most notably George Henschel and Elena Gerhardt. Looking backward to the musical past and forward through music of the present has proved to have been fundamental in London vocal recitals until World War I.

      Beyond the conventional concert sphere, Wiebke Rademacher explodes the notion that Lieder were primarily a domestic, bourgeois art form by investigating their presence on programs in working-class concerts organized in Berlin at the start of the twentieth century. It is important to consider the social aspects of Lieder performance, which often served to define distinctions of class and gender. Rademacher explores the educational purposes programming art song might have had as a means of improving the tastes of the lower classes but points out that the repertoire was also part of choral culture. Working-class choirs in Berlin, under the auspices of the Deutscher Arbeiter-Sängerbund, were heavily politicized; they deliberately distanced their activities from the bourgeoisie by programming Lieder alongside agitational and folk songs. Music making was thus both a way to attain upward social mobility and a means through which the validity of class divides could be tested.

      The creative and commercial roles played by performers is apparent in the chapters by Rosamund Cole and Nicholas Attfield. Focusing on individual musicians is a fairly standard route into discussing performance practices, but Cole’s chapter pursues a different angle by considering how the financial aspect of a singer’s working life influenced their artistic choices. Lilli Lehmann turned to recitals when overwhelmed by her operatic schedule and, what is more, used her programs as an opportunity to promote the songs of her friend, the composer August Bungert. Lehmann was influential both because of her performance style and because she sometimes gave recitals dedicated to one composer. What is perhaps most remarkable is that her career change is shown to have been as financially lucrative as her stage work (and sometimes more so).

      Lehmann’s accompanist Reinhold Herman was criticized on occasion for improvising piano interludes between songs. This was, though, a fairly common practice into the early twentieth century, as discussed by Nicholas Attfield. His chapter tackles the approach taken by Hans Pfitzner who, when accompanying songs in concert, took what would now be considered outrageous liberties with their scores—improvising interludes and recomposing sections—that both enhanced the continuity of programs and emphasized their provisional nature. It seems that even into the twentieth century, notions of Werktreue were far from the minds of performing artists; or, rather, that the spirit of the work was conceived in a much more flexible and imaginative way.

      Because of the revisionist purpose of this volume, and its emphasis on documenting performance culture in the long nineteenth century, it seemed important to investigate the attitudes of today’s musicians, to gauge the extent of the historical gap between present and past. To that end, Natasha Loges and I interviewed a number of professional singers and pianists involved in the programming of Lieder recitals. Our sample was determined in large part by availability, but it represents different generations, genders, and nationalities. A selective transcript and digest of our conversations constitutes the final chapter. From the interviews it becomes apparent that there are some deep-seated beliefs in the importance of balance within recital programs, which for many means conveying a kind of coherent drama that can be understood as a whole while allowing for contrast. Often, programs were determined by poet(s) or theme if not necessarily by composer. Few condoned the practice of eclectic programs that mixed genres, associating them with celebrity or gala performances rather than the serious Liederabend. Many were surprised to be shown Clara Schumann’s program from the 1870s, which interrupted Dichterliebe with piano pieces by her late husband as well as music by Chopin and Mendelssohn and claimed that such a disrespectful attitude to the coherence of a cycle would now be unthinkable. Some admitted that they toyed with similar ideas and that they had been intrigued by performances that had attempted them. Indeed, while several musicians professed an interest in semistaged performances, or presentations that somehow provided alternative frames for a song cycle (poetry readings, puppetry), a strong sense emerged