German Song Onstage. Laura Tunbridge

of venue and potential audiences were also important in our interviewees, with London’s Wigmore Hall assuming a gravitas that would have been almost incomprehensible to its earliest patrons. If an exclusive venue such as the Wigmore is now at one end of the spectrum, there is—to our knowledge—no equivalent to the working men’s clubs that promoted Lieder in late-nineteenth-century Berlin. There are, however, increasingly numerous examples of Lieder being reworked and presented in unconventional venues. Tenor Ian Bostridge has toured a staged version of Hans Werner Henze’s Winterreise (directed by Netia Jones). Henze’s score is for small ensemble rather than piano, adding percussive sound effects to convey the wintry landscape. Bostridge forsook the conventional white tie of the recitalist for trench coat and face paint: Winterreise became grotesque cabaret. As part of the Spitalfields Festival in East London, in December 2017, sixteen musicians were commissioned to recompose a song from Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Each was performed in a different room, in various Huguenot houses owned by the Landmark Trust, with the audience traipsing between them, not necessarily in the order of Schumann’s cycle. The musicians involved in Schumann Street, as it was called, were for, the most part, from outside the classical sphere, and perhaps as a result felt greater freedom to mash up Schumann’s music.⁹

      The boundary between Schumann Street and the kind of musical arrangements of preexisting works devised in the nineteenth century is not all that clear. That the liberty is extended to the manner in which the audience consumed the cycle is even more interesting—freed from the concert hall, the listeners return to the home. Even if that home is not their own (though, interestingly, the Spitalfields Huguenot Houses are not museums but occupied residences), and even if the music they hear is mostly new rather than old, there was a pull back to past practices. History lurks in the presentation of the Lied. Acknowledging that history is not unidirectional but forked and fragmented is important, for it allows us to query claims made on behalf of a genre and set of performance practices that might deter musicians and musicologists from thinking through its historical and contemporary significance rather than liberate them to do so.

      Notes

      1.On audience behavior, see Michael Burden, “Pots, Privies and WCs: Crapping at the Opera in London before 1830,” Cambridge Opera Journal 23, nos. 1–2 (July 2011): 27–50.

      2.See James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

      3.On nineteenth-century performance practices, see the AHRC-funded project Transforming 19th-Century Historically Informed Performance at the University of Oxford and Clive Brown’s Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

      4.John Potter, “Beggar at the Door: The Rise and Fall of Portamento in Singing,” Music and Letters 87, no. 4 (2006): 523–50; Daniel Leech Wilkinson, “Listening and Responding to the Evidence of Early Twentieth-Century Performance,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, supplement 1 (2010): 45–62.

      5.See, for instance, Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) 3: 119–86.

      6.These issues are tackled as they pertain to chamber music in Marie Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

      7.Jennifer Ronyak, “‘Serious Play,’ Performance, and the Lied: The Stägemann Schöne Müllerin Revisited,” 19th-Century Music 34, no. 2 (2010): 141–67.

      8.See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).

      9.Reviews of Schumann Street were published in the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Times, and the Artsdesk. See Erica Jeal, “Schumann Street Review,” Guardian, December 10, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/10/schumann-street-review-spitalfields-london-dichterliebe-huguenot-houses; Richard Morrison, “Concert Review: In the Light of Air/Schumann Street at Spitalfields, E1,” Times (London), December 11, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-in-the-light-of-air-schumann-street-at-spitalfields-e1-6hqzm30g7; Ivan Hewett, Rupert Christiansen, and John Allison, “The Tallis Scholars on Snuffly but Stirring Form at St John’s Smith Square, plus the Rest of December’s Best Classical Concerts,” Telegraph, December 21, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/classical-music/mezzo-soprano-cecilia-bartoli-best-worst-barbican-plus-decembers/; Helen Wallace, “Schumann Street, Spitalfields Festival Review—Illumination on a Winter’s Night,” artsdesk, December 13, 2017, http://www.theartsdesk.com/classical-music/schumann-street-spitalfields-festival-review-illumination-winters-night.

      Bibliography

      Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.

      Brown, Clive. Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

      Burden, Michael. “Pots, Privies and WCs: Crapping at the Opera in London before 1830.” Cambridge Opera Journal 23, nos. 1–2 (July 2011): 27–50.

      Johnson, James. Listening in Paris: A Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

      Leech Wilkinson, Daniel. “Listening and Responding to the Evidence of Early Twentieth-Century Performance.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, supplement 1 (2010): 45–62.

      Potter, John. “Beggar at the Door: The Rise and Fall of Portamento in Singing.” Music and Letters 87, no. 4 (2006): 523–50.

      Ronyak, Jennifer. “‘Serious Play,’ Performance, and the Lied: The Stägemann Schöne Müllerin Revisited.” 19th-Century Music 34, no. 2 (2010): 141–67.

      Sumner Lott, Marie. The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

      Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford History of Western Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

      LAURA TUNBRIDGE is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. She is author of Schumann’s Late Style, The Song Cycle, and Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars and coeditor of Rethinking Schumann.

       1“Eine wahre Olla Patrida [sic]”

       Anna Milder-Hauptmann, Schubert, and Programming the Orient

       Susan Youens

      ALL ONE NEED do to astonish present-day musicians is to display various early-nineteenth-century European concert programs, with their variety-over-unity approach to programming and their frequent mixture of certifiably “great” music (in the present-day canon) with lighter fare.¹ In particular, today’s singers desirous of a theme for their programs or any other sort of coherent design are understandably flabbergasted by concerts such as this one given by the famous singer Anna Pauline Milder-Hauptmann on January 13, 1825 in Vienna (see table