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2Song in Concert as Observed by the Schumanns

Toward the Personalization of the Public Stage

Benjamin Binder

IN A REVIEW of some classic Lieder recitals on film screened at Lincoln Center in 2014, the New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe drew attention to the artifice that underlies what often seems to many concert audiences to be the revelation of a singer’s authentic, real-life personality on stage:

[Lieder recitals] appear to dispense with illusion—no sets or costumes, just a singer and a pianist—but they are not necessarily more real for it. Seemingly transparent, they are also opaque. They don’t offer a singer unadorned, as many claim, but rather demand the most subtle and difficult kind of performance: the performance of self.

How would you act if you had to act like you?¹

It is casually assumed that Lieder singers in concert are more or less being themselves, either because they have stepped down from the operatic stage and out of theatrical costume for the evening, or because they are not generally associated with the operatic stage to begin with. Following Woolfe, however, it would be more precise to say that they are acting like themselves.

We can refine the levels of identity at play here in terms borrowed from the performance studies scholar Philip Auslander.² A recital performance of Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh,” D776, by Renée Fleming promises to give us a glimpse of the genuine “person,” Renée Fleming, who lies beneath not only the “character” or protagonist of Schubert’s song (whose dramatic specificity is already highly attenuated as in so many Lieder), but also the public “persona” “Renée Fleming”—that is, Renée Fleming qua opera star and concert artist, with a distinctive interpretive style and manner that cuts across all her performances.³ The aura of sincerity, intimacy, and candor that is often felt in Lieder performance derives in no small part from the apparent possibility that the singer’s person is shining through the layers of persona and character, layers that seem to be more permeable than usual because of the poetic and performing conventions of the genre. It is the potential intermingling and overlap of these three layers of identity that can make a Lieder recital so compelling as a convincing presentation of self. For Woolfe, this is what makes Lieder performance pertinent to our own age of social media, “with our lives—carefully crafted visions of our lives—ever more on public display. Simultaneously honest and untrustworthy, both a performance and not, Lieder [performance] has never been so relevant and valuable.”

In the past decade or so, musicologists have begun to historicize our assumptions about the honesty and trustworthiness of the relationship between person, persona, and character in classical music performance, particularly in the realm of nineteenth-century instrumental music, where, instead of a character, performers are charged with portraying a “work.” Mary Hunter has shown how the performer’s task in early-nineteenth-century musical aesthetics was not simply to follow the instructions of the score, but rather to reanimate the composer’s work as it was originally conceived by channeling the very soul of the composer in the depths of their own soul. In this view of performance as self-transformation, the performer’s “lower self” aims to identify fully with the composer’s “higher” or “better” self, as Novalis might have put it. Musicality was therefore moral, in that it betrayed the performer’s inner worth and substance as a person, or perhaps a troubling lack thereof.⁴ Meanwhile, Karen Leistra-Jones has described how certain performers in the middle to late nineteenth century such as Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms took pains deliberately to perform their musicality by consciously cultivating an on-stage persona of selfless devotion to the work. By staging their authenticity as musicians (and, consequently, as human beings), these Werktreue performers set themselves against figures like Franz Liszt, whose flamboyant theatricality and showmanship in concert would therefore have to indicate inauthenticity—that is, a disturbing lack of transparency between person, persona, and work. Moreover, authentic musical performance was linked to a type of music—absolute music—that was itself thought to be substantial rather than theatrical. Honest, unshowy musicians chose to play honest, unshowy music, displaying good bourgeois values of earnestness and moral rectitude.⁵

When Robert and Clara Schumann contemplated the realm of vocal music on the nineteenth-century concert stage, the type of music they linked most consistently to theatrical and inauthentic performers and performance was Italian opera, while the genre of greatest substance and authenticity was, for them, the German Lied. A performance of a Lied was at the same time a performance of a singer’s personal sincerity, depth of feeling, musicality, and Germanness, all closely interrelated qualities that Robert and Clara would have summed up in two words: Wahrheit and Innigkeit. In an article from 1840, for example, Robert wrote the following about a song by Norbert Burgmüller, whose poetic text he believed to have been written by the composer himself:

[Burgmüller’s] composition came into being during a painful time, [it is] deeply melancholy, but inspiring of the most heartfelt sympathy (“zur innigsten Theilnahme anregend”), and true (“wahr”). True—does your little heart not tremble, composers, when you hear this word? Embed yourselves ever more cozily in your pretty song-lies, yet it will bring you no higher than to be sung by some other Judas lips, seductively enough, perhaps. But if a truthful singer (“ein wahrhaftiger Sänger”) steps again among you, then flee with your affected art, or learn Truth, if it’s still possible.⁶

In the following study of the Schumanns’ reception of some concert singers from the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, I want to suggest that what Robert and Clara most wanted to experience on the concert stage was an inniger Vortrag of a German Lied by a wahrhaftiger Sänger (or Sängerin), a sincere and truthful performance in which person, persona, and character transparently aligned in an act of heartfelt self-disclosure. For the Schumanns, the performance of German song turned the concert stage into a proving ground for a singer’s moral and musical worth, a crucible of bourgeois subjectivity in performance that sometimes continues to serve as a framework for the reception of Lieder singers today.

We can begin with the Belgian soprano Elisa Meerti, who served as erste Sängerin for the 1839–40 season of subscription concerts at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. In his review of the season later that spring, Robert wrote,

The public’s sympathy for [Meerti] increased visibly with each evening; she doesn’t quite count as one of those glittering bravura talents who know how to conquer the public on their first appearance; one recognized her virtues only gradually, as she only unfolded them little by little in all their charm. … Only in her farewell concert did she sing a German Lied by Mendelssohn [“Frühlingslied” from op. 34], which at least in us resonated longer than all the rest [i.e., Italian and French pieces], so did it seem to come from such a sincere, warm soul (“innigem Gemüth”); for she has in her voice and her delivery something exquisitely noble and demure about her.⁷

In Robert’s recollection, Meerti’s moving Lied performance represented the culminating high point of her season in that it finally revealed the full measure of her tender personality;⁸ two days before this performance, in fact, Robert had a social call from Meerti and wrote to Clara that he found her to be “a good, genuine girl” (ein gutes, echtes Mädchen).⁹ Moreover, the shy, incremental manner in which Meerti unveiled her virtues as a performer created a stage persona that harmonized well with the qualities of nobility and modesty that Robert so admired in Meerti’s singing.

Meerti’s farewell concert took place on January 16, 1840, but despite Robert’s claim to the contrary, this was not the first time that she had sung Lieder during that season, as Robert himself noted in a letter to Clara from December 1, 1839: “Now I want to tell you about Meerti, who is supposed to be a splendid young lady, by the way. She recently sang German compositions for the first time [in a concert on November 29], ‘Ave Maria’ by Schubert and a song by Mendelssohn [‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’], and with the most magnificent delivery and voice, such that only now have we really heard her.”¹⁰ Once again, Robert suggests that Meerti’s artistic gifts could fully emerge only when they found a suitable musical vehicle, the German Lied, that also corresponded to her laudable personal qualities. To “really hear” Meerti was to hear something deeper at the level of the authentic person, through the technical, interpretive, and attitudinal attributes of her emerging stage persona. But this deeper, truer hearing only became possible when Meerti adopted song characters that resonated with the inner essence of this “splendid young lady”: a virtuous maiden’s prayer to the Virgin Mary on the one hand (Schubert) and an amorous yet chivalrous ode to the imaginative power of song on the other (Mendelssohn).

When Meerti returned to Leipzig in the company of her mother for the 1841–42 concert season, Clara finally got to know her and came to share Robert’s judgment of her personality. As a result, however, Clara found herself puzzling over why she was nonetheless disappointed by Meerti’s performance in the subscription concert on October 28, 1841, as expressed in her entry from that night in the marriage diary she shared with Robert: “We made a return visit to the Meertis. Mother and daughter please me greatly, if only she sang better—I had built up rather great expectations of her, and found myself hardly satisfied, also she sings hardly any good stuff, and precisely that not well.”¹¹

The “good stuff” from that evening’s program must have included excerpts from Mozart’s Idomeneo and a Lied by Mendelssohn (“Der Blumenkranz,” WoO 7), but although the review of the concert in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung maintained that Meerti had been especially compelling in her performances of Lieder that season, Clara apparently did not agree.¹² About a week later, after another personal and musical encounter with Meerti, Clara settled on the reason for her dissatisfaction—Meerti was not what she seemed to be:

On Monday evening I sang through a few of Robert’s Lieder with Meerti in order to select [some] for my concert [later in the month]. But only a German heart that can feel deeply (“innig”) is suitable for German Lieder. … What others have too much of, Meerti has too little of—cleverness (“Klugheit”). She is beside herself that she was criticized in Robert’s journal [for certain faults of singing technique]! this she can’t believe, since after all she’s in good standing with us, is supposed to sing in my concert, etc. She would have acted more prudently not to let her irritation be noticed; an arrogance lies therein which I wouldn’t have looked for inside this endearing exterior.¹³

Clara’s discovery of a dissonance between Meerti’s “endearing exterior” persona and the “arrogant” dimension of her true personality is linked here with the idea that the Belgian Meerti is unfit to sing German Lieder. Ironically, in confessing her vexation over the bad review, Meerti also revealed herself to be insincere and not entirely good and genuine, noble and demure, as Robert had once maintained. For Clara, Robert’s deeply felt Lieder ought not to be heard coming from Judas lips like these.

Clara was rather more patient with the zweite Sängerin in the 1840–41 Gewandhaus season: Elise List, the younger sister of Clara’s dear friend Emilie List and the daughter of the railroad magnate Friedrich List. Robert and Clara despaired over Elise’s preference for Italian opera and the concomitant tendencies toward superficiality and vanity in her personality that they felt could only be exacerbated by that preference.¹⁴ In the months leading up to Elise’s public debut in October, Robert and Clara recommended that she focus on Lieder instead, although privately Clara worried that Elise “lack[ed] a deeper impulse, a heartfelt understanding (inniges Erfassen) of the text” to truly be compelling in that repertoire.¹⁵ Once the season began, Elise struggled mightily with stage fright; Robert wrote that “the very material of her voice was impaired”¹⁶ and “misted over by fear” and a lack of self-assurance in public, which dampened all the natural expressivity they claimed to hear in Elise’s vocal instrument at home.¹⁷ Clara ruminated on this in the marriage diary:

Robert thinks the only thing Elise’s singing lacks is heart, soul (“Herz, Gemüth”). This has often occurred to me already, for her singing still has never moved me, as for example a Lied sung by [Wilhelmine Schröder-] Devrient or Pauline [Viardot-] Garcia, but it would always appear to me that she has soul in her everyday life, [so] why couldn’t that express itself in her singing? I can’t understand it!—I believe that once she falls in love, then she will sing with more soul as well. That love does a lot on that score is certain, I’ve experienced it myself. When I began to love my Robert so very profoundly (“so recht innig”), then for the first time I felt what I played, and people said that it must have been a deeper emotion that made me play so soulfully.¹⁸

Clara describes her own music making here as a flow of sincere expression that moves back and forth, seamlessly and harmoniously, between her authentic personal life experience and store of emotion, her public performing persona, and the work she performs—this was the mark of the successful bourgeois performing artist. In Clara’s estimation, this success eluded Elise List because when Elise stepped onto the public stage to sing, she became too self-conscious to “be herself” or even to convincingly “act like herself,” ultimately confirming the Schumanns’ suspicion that she may not have had enough of a feeling self to draw on in the first place. Two years later, after Elise again tried and failed to launch her career, this time in Berlin, Robert offered this final assessment: “Lucky for her that she realized that she lacks the main thing for art—a warm heart that can sacrifice everything for art. Too bad about her beautiful voice; but it seems only to come from the throat.”¹⁹

Moving to the opposite end of the spectrum in every imaginable way, we can turn to the Schumanns’ reception of one of the great singers of the age, the “demonic”²⁰ Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whose heart seemed to come directly from her throat, as the Schumanns and other critics routinely maintained.²¹ A transformative artist in the history of opera whose public appearances invariably captivated Robert and Clara in both opera and song, Schröder invested her stage performances with an unprecedented degree of dramatic verisimilitude and emotional truth in a kind of method acting avant la lettre,²² drawing on a range of tumultuous life experiences that expanded well beyond the boundaries of bourgeois respectability, including three marriages, four children of whom Schröder did not maintain custody, and a sexually liberated lifestyle. Robert’s report in the marriage diary on Schröder’s participation in the final Gewandhaus concert of the 1840–41 season reflects an awareness of this essential yet problematic relationship between Schröder’s life and her art: “The performance of the Schubert Lied that Schröder sang [‘Am Meer,’ from Schwanengesang] was my favorite. My goodness, what lies within her! As though she knew all the mysteries of the heart! A bona fide actress who in this minute offers herself as a godmother [to Clara’s first child—Clara was newly pregnant], and in the next [minute] could move us to tears with her painful tones! But such an artist can never be a homemaker, a wife, a mother, and she really isn’t one either.”²³ Here Robert is assuaging Clara’s anxieties about motherhood and its effect on her own career trajectory, but he is also suggesting that in order for an artist like Schröder to give searingly heartfelt performances of any song she chooses with “demonic” flexibility, she must therefore have a kind of “demonic” flexibility in how she conducts her real life, no matter how much it might offend bourgeois sensibilities such as theirs.²⁴ Offstage, Robert and Clara found Schröder to be amusing, charming, and kind but with a cutting satirical edge, extravagant tastes, and a tendency toward disaster in her personal affairs.²⁵ These qualities may explain why Robert dedicated Dichterliebe to Schröder, and why “Ich grolle nicht,” the most bitterly sarcastic and melodramatic song of the cycle, became a staple of her concert appearances.²⁶

In a different way, the Schumanns’ perception of Schröder’s personality may also explain the content of the album of songs that they compiled for Schröder shortly before she collaborated with Clara in a series of soirées in the concert hall of Dresden’s Hotel de Saxe in 1848–49 (see table 2.1).²⁷ In these soirées, Schröder sang three of Robert’s songs from the album (“Der Nussbaum,” “Die Lotosblume,” and “Frühlingsnacht”) on repeated occasions and an unnamed song by Clara, perhaps also from the album, on February 6.²⁸ With the exception of “Waldesgespräch,” whose ill-fated conversation between a chivalrous knight and the witch Lorelei would have had obvious dramatic and theatrical appeal in Schröder’s hands, the protagonists of all the songs from the album would have inspired Schröder to call exclusively upon her “better self,” suggesting again how the Schumanns believed that the character of a song (in Auslander’s sense) could elevate the person of the performer under the right conditions. The album’s ardent love lyrics and tender nature scenes might have been chosen for their potential salutary effect, nurturing and drawing out the more angelic parts of Schröder’s demonically complex personality. In the same vein, Clara praised Schröder’s performance of all eight songs of Frauenliebe und -leben at a soirée in 1848, exclaiming “There is but one Devrient!,”²⁹ and she singled out Schröder’s public performance of “Du Ring an meinem Finger” two weeks later at the Hotel de Saxe, writing that she could not imagine the song sung more beautifully³⁰—a fascinating claim considering that Schröder had just gone through a bitter divorce from her second husband eight months earlier.

Table 2.1. Liederalbum für Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, circa 1848.

Robert: “Widmung,” op. 25 no. 1 Robert: “Der Nussbaum,” op. 25 no. 3 Robert: “Die Lotosblume,” op. 25 no. 7 Robert: “Du bist wie eine Blume,” op. 25 no. 24 Robert: “Intermezzo,” op. 39 no. 2 Robert: “Waldesgespräch,” op. 39 no. 3 Robert: “Mondnacht,” op. 39 no. 5 Robert: “Schöne Fremde,” op. 39 no. 6 Robert: “Frühlingsnacht,” op. 39 no. 12 Robert: “Stille Liebe,” op. 35 no. 8 Robert: “Erstes Grün,” op. 35 no. 4 Clara: “Liebeszauber,” op. 13 no. 3 Clara: “Ich hab’ in deinem Auge,” op. 13 no. 5

Source: Robert and Clara Schumann, Liederalbum für Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, ed. Angelika Horstmann (Kassel: Bärenreiter: 1994).

By the same token, the Schumanns also appreciated moments when Schröder’s charismatic public persona transfigured the character of the song she was performing. At the end of the final concert of the 1840–41 season at the Gewandhaus, Schröder sang Mendelssohn’s “Volkslied,” op. 47 no. 4, with the composer at the piano (see example 2.1). The first three stanzas of Feuchtersleben’s poem reflect on the initial idea that “in God’s plan, it is certain that one will part from what one loves most,” but at the end of the final stanza, the poet offers some consolation by reminding us that “when people part from one another, they say ‘Auf Wiedersehen’”—that is, they look forward to seeing each other again, perhaps in the hereafter. In her performance of the song, Schröder directed the words “Auf Wiedersehen” directly to the audience and gave a little curtsey, as if to say goodbye to her public before departing for her next engagement. The reviewer for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung was horrified by this “common stage effect” and wrote that Schröder’s breaking of the fourth wall “profaned” Mendelssohn’s “magnificent and characteristically true” (wahr) composition.³¹ Robert’s review, on the other hand, embraced Schröder’s gesture, reporting that the audience even “joined in to sing [with her] in joyous agreement,”³² perhaps to the accompaniment of the piano interlude in measures 23–24.³³ In contrast to the negative review in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Robert heard “truth” in Schröder’s performance because of an especially resonant harmony between person, persona, and character, in which Schröder’s genuine feelings informed her stage persona and commandeered the character of the song in her performance. For Robert, any violation of Werktreue in Schröder’s delivery was trumped by its powerful expression of Wahrheit.

Example 2.1. Felix Mendelssohn, “Volkslied,” op. 47 no. 4.

Clara was especially close with another giant of the operatic stage who figured prominently in the Schumanns’ discussion of Lieder singing: Pauline Viardot-Garcia. Ever since Clara met Viardot in 1838, she regarded the singer as an unfailingly sincere and warmhearted friend, genuine and unaffected in everything she did and said offstage, and a consummate musician to boot, with a warm and expressive voice.³⁴ These personal and musical qualities led Clara to suggest in March 1840 that Robert dedicate his recently composed opus 24, Liederkreis, to Viardot, noting that Viardot “is a being who is capable of grasping your songs in their German spirit”³⁵—this despite Viardot’s Spanish ancestry and Parisian operatic career. Four months later, in a letter to Emilie List, Clara reaffirmed her personal judgment of Viardot in expressing her relief at having finally received a letter from the singer after a long and unaccountable gap in their correspondence, saying that receiving the letter “so pleased me, since I believed I had been totally forgotten by her, and almost succumbed to the temptation to equate her with other singers with respect to character, for I thought she had been spoiled by her triumph in the end. But her letter still shows me the old friend (‘die Alte’) and her beautiful open character. I must write to her soon. I will put aside the Lieder for her and send them to her as soon as she gets to Paris.”³⁶ In Clara’s mind, Viardot’s increasing renown after the triumph of her dazzling operatic debuts in London and Paris the previous year had the potential to corrupt her “beautiful open character” (or rather, her “person,” in Auslander’s sense) with the pretention and inflated ego of the prima donna, but this recent letter reassured Clara that Viardot’s virtue and thoughtfulness were still intact, leading her to return once again to the idea that Viardot ought to sing Robert’s newly published Lieder, most likely the Liederkreis, op. 24. By January 1841, Clara was still waiting for this performance to happen, writing in the marriage diaries that “Pauline Garcia[-Viardot] would be the only one, I believe, who would understand Robert’s Lieder completely truthfully (ganz wahrhaft)—if only I could hear one of them from her sometime!”³⁷

In the meantime, Viardot did not always live up to Clara’s ideal of Wahrheit when she sang the Lieder of other composers. In her comments about Elise List from October 1840 quoted earlier, Clara mentions Viardot along with Schröder as the two singers whose Lieder singing could move her because they possessed sufficient heart and soul at the personal level to infuse their portrayal of a song’s character with genuine emotion that was directly connected to their true selves. Yet only a month earlier, Clara had articulated her disappointment in Viardot’s Lieder singing in the marriage diaries at the level of Viardot’s performance persona: “I heard Pauline sing Schubert’s ‘Gretchen [am Spinnrade],’ which she performed more as though grasping for effect instead of with the inner ardor expressed so magnificently by [Goethe’s] words just as much as by Schubert’s music. Pauline has delighted me every time [she performs], only she left me unsatisfied precisely in this German Lied, which I really cannot believe from this creature who is musical through and through, who usually understands everything in its total truth (in seiner ganzen Wahrheit) with the greatest rapidity!”³⁸

Clara’s assessment of Viardot’s singing throughout the 1840s continued to reflect a tension between Viardot’s unimpeachable excellence as a person and musician and her tendency to “grasp for effect” in her performances.³⁹ For Clara, this defect was an unfortunate consequence of Viardot’s professional engagement with the operas of Bellini, Meyerbeer, Halévy, and the like; in terms of content and style, the demands of that repertoire infected Viardot’s performance persona with a manipulative theatricality that made it difficult for her to connect her true personality to the song characters she portrayed. Even if Viardot the person possessed the “inner ardor” demanded by Goethe and Schubert’s Gretchen, Clara felt that Viardot the performer could not channel it freely and sincerely, at least not on this occasion. In Clara’s view, the theatrical approach might work for Viardot’s French and Italian operatic roles, but in the Lied, it was a fatal flaw.

It was Jenny Lind, the bourgeois opera star par excellence, who refused to succumb to this supposed flaw and, in so doing, proved to be the most perfect realization of the Schumanns’ long-cherished ideals for the singing of Lieder in concert. Lind became a sensation because her relatable public persona so thoroughly matched what many observers reported to be her real-life personality. She was gracious and modest, natural and unaffected in her conduct and dress onstage and off, a benefactor to the poor, and a sterling model of female propriety, totally circumventing the theater stereotypes of unapproachable diva or working-class profligate. Moreover, Lind would take on only operatic characters and songs that fit this persona, or else she reinterpreted them after her own image; for example, Sonia Gesse-Harm describes how, in Lind’s hands, the title role of Bellini’s Norma became “a compassionate, self-sacrificing wife and a loving mother” instead of the “merciless priestess” audiences normally encountered.⁴⁰

It is not surprising, then, that the Schumanns came down with an intense and enduring bout of Jenny Lind fever after meeting and collaborating with her for concerts in Leipzig and Vienna in 1846–47. Clara teamed up with Lind to rehearse and perform Lieder by her husband and Felix Mendelssohn in Hamburg in March 1850, and the experience was a revelation. One quote from Clara’s diary will have to stand for many similar expressions of simultaneous admiration for Lind’s unassuming thoughtfulness as a person and penetrating insight as a Lied performer:

In the afternoon Lind visited us for a little Lieder rehearsal that turned into something more, for she sang a whole lot of Robert’s songs, and how she sang them, with what truth (“Wahrheit”) with what heartfelt sincerity (“Herzinnigkeit”) and simplicity, how she sang at sight “Marienwürmchen” and “Frühlingsglaube” from the album, having not known it before—this will remain unforgettable; what a magnificent, divinely gifted creature she is, what a pure, genuinely artistic soul, how everything she says is refreshing, how she always comes up with the right thing [and] expresses it with a few words, in short: I have probably never loved and honored a woman more than her. These Lieder will resound forever in my heart, and were it not an injustice, I would like to say that I never want to hear them sung by anyone any longer except her.⁴¹

Clara’s intemperate “injustice” of ruling out any other singer for these songs reveals the perfect fit she perceived between Lind’s reflective and considerate personality (lacking in Schröder), the intuitive and spontaneous musicianship and interpretive directness of her performance persona (corrupted in Viardot), and the sweet, gentle, childlike characters of the two cited songs, both of which most likely came from Robert’s recent Liederalbum für die Jugend, op. 79, published just four months earlier in November 1849.⁴² In the Hamburg concerts, Lind sang a variety of Robert’s songs in the same vein, including “Der Nussbaum,” “O Sonnenschein,” “Stille Liebe,” and “Der Himmel hat eine Thräne geweint.”⁴³ In certain private circumstances, Lind could sometimes be prone to fickle, diva-like antics,⁴⁴ but the Schumanns’ own encounters with Lind bear no witness to such behavior. For them, Lind was in no way “acting like” herself but always simply “being herself,” wahr and innig to the core, whenever she was on stage, in rehearsal, or in the drawing room.

The Schumanns’ ideology of public Lieder performances proved to have considerable staying power. It has its roots in the literary, musical, and performative discourses and practices of Goethe and his contemporaries relating to song that Jennifer Ronyak explores extensively in her recent book on the subject.⁴⁵ It lingers today in the unexamined assumptions about authenticity, sincerity, and intimate revelation in Lieder singing that Woolfe felt the need to lay bare in his 2014 review quoted earlier. Yet if for Woolfe the Lied’s relative lack of character specificity (in comparison with opera) engenders a provocative mélange of transparent personal expression and carefully crafted dissimulation that can help us explore the ways we perform ourselves to each other in an image-conscious, technologically mediated world, for the Schumanns this tension was unbearable. They welcomed Lieder in concert, but because song had to share a large public stage with opera arias and extracts, they perceived a risk that the theatrical means necessary for dramatic impersonation (which they sometimes viewed as “grasping for effect”) would somehow corrupt the presentation and appreciation of song, even if in actual practice many singers drew on the same techniques to bring truth to their performances in both genres, including the private performance of song. In order to conceive of the stage as a safe space for Lieder, the Schumanns had to find a way to distinguish truth (that is, their idea of truth) from fakery and avoid being duped by a disingenuous song performance, and they found their solution in the example of Jenny Lind, the supreme bourgeois performing artist. In Lind’s carefully programmed Lieder performances, person, persona, and character seemed to fuse in a magical synthesis that proved to be the apotheosis of the Schumanns’ vision for the personalization of the public stage through song.

Notes

1.Zachary Woolfe, “The Singer’s Artifice, Flickering on Film: Lincoln Center Screens Bygone Lieder Performances,” New York Times, February 7, 2014, http://nyti.ms/1eFWKll.

2.Philip Auslander, “Musical Personae,” Drama Review 50, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 100–119, esp. 101–2.

3.Auslander’s use of the word persona is therefore not the same as that of Cone in Composer’s Voice. Cone’s concept of persona, long familiar to students and scholars of the Lied, is more or less equivalent to Auslander’s character.

4.Mary Hunter, “‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer’: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 357–98.

5.Karen Leistra-Jones, “Staging Authenticity: Joachim, Brahms, and the Politics of Werktreue Performance,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 397–436.

6.Robert Schumann, “Drei gute Liederhefte,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 13, no. 30 (November 29, 1836): 118. “Die Composition ist in schmerzlicher Zeit entstanden, tiefmelancholisch, aber zur innigsten Theilnahme anregend, und wahr. Wahr—zittert euch nicht euer kleines Herz, Componisten, wenn ihr dieses Wort hört? Bettet euch immer weicher in eure schönen Gesangslügen, ihr bringt’s doch nicht höher, als von einigen andern Judaslippen gesungen zu werden, vielleicht verführerisch genug. Aber, tritt dann wieder einmal ein wahrhaftiger Sänger unter euch, so flüchtet mit eurer erheuchelten Kunst, oder lernt Wahrheit, wenn es noch möglich ist.” All translations in this chapter are my own.

7.Robert Schumann, “Musikleben in Leipzig, während des Winters 1839/40 (Fortsetzung),” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 12, no. 38 (May 8, 1840), 151: “Die Theilnahme des Publicums für die erstgenannte [i.e., Meerti] steigerte sich mit jedem Abende zusehends; sie gehört eben nicht zu jenen glänzenden Bravourtalenten, die sich schon bei’m ersten Auftreten ihr Publicum zu erobern wissen; ihre Vorzüge erkannte man erst allmählig, wie sie sie auch nach und nach erst in all’ ihrer Liebenswürdigkeit entfaltete. … Erst in ihrem Abschiedsconcert sang sie ein deutsches Lied von Mendelssohn, was in uns wenigstens länger fortklingt als all’ das andere, aus auch so innigem Gemüth schien es zu kommen; wie sie denn in Stimme und Vortrag etwas vorzüglich Edles und Sittsames an sich hat.”

8.The review of this concert in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung echoed Robert’s sentiments in strongly emphasizing the degree to which Meerti’s personal qualities of “unpretentiousness and modesty” (Anspruchlosigkeit und Bescheidenheit) played the pivotal role in engendering the public’s “heartfelt sympathy” (innige Theilnahme) with her and were just as relevant as Meerti’s musical talent to the public’s warm reception of her. See Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 42, no. 4 (January 22, 1840): 76.

9.Eva Weissweiler and Susanna Ludwig, eds., Robert and Clara Schumann, Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 2001), 3: 871.

10.Weissweiler and Ludwig, Schumann, Briefwechsel, 2: 809. “Da will ich Dir gleich von der Meerti erzählen, die übrigens ein vortreffliches Mädchen sein soll. Sie sang neulich zum erstenmal deutsche Compositionen von Schubert das Ave Maria, und v. Mendelssohn ein Lied, und mit herrlichstem Vortrag und Stimme, daß wir sie erst jetzt recht gehört haben.” “Auf Flügeln des Gesanges” is specifically cited as the Mendelssohn selection in the review of Meerti’s concert in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 41, no. 49 (December 4, 1839): 978.

11.See Gerd Nauhaus, ed., Robert Schumann: Tagebücher (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1987), 2: 189–90. Quotations from the marriage diaries by Clara Schumann will be indicated as such. Clara: “Der Meerti machten wir einen Gegenbesuch. Mutter und Tochter gefallen mir sehr, sänge sie nur besser—ich machte mir ziemlich große Erwartungen von ihr, und fand mich wenig befriedigt, auch singt sie so wenig Gutes, und, gerade Das nicht gut.”

12.See Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 43, no. 44, November 3, 1841, 909.

13.Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher, 2: 191 (Clara, November 7, 1841): “Montag Abend sang ich mit der Meerti einige Lieder vom Robert durch, um für mein Concert auszusuchen. Doch zu deutschen Liedern gehört nur ein deutsches Herz, das innig fühlen kann. … Was Andere zu viel besitzen, hat die Meerti zu wenig—Klugheit. Sie ist außer sich, daß sie in Roberts Zeitung getadelt wird! das kann sie nicht begreifen, da sie doch gut mit uns steht, in meinem Concert singen soll ect: Sie thäte gescheidter sich nichts von Aerger merken zu lassen; es liegt darin eine Arroganz, die ich in diesem lieben Äußeren nicht gesucht hätte.”

14.See, for example, Clara’s letter to Emilie List, June 24, 1841, in Eugen Wendler, “Das Band der ewigen Liebe”: Clara Schumanns Briefwechsel mit Emilie und Elise List (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1996), 105.

15.Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher, 2: 105 (Clara, September 24, 1840): “Von Roberts Liedern sang [Elise] Einige, doch scheint mir, zu deutschen Liedern fehlt ihr eine tiefere Regung, ein inniges Erfassen des Textes, ich kann mich darüber gar nicht so aussprechen, es ist Etwas, das ich nicht zu benennen weiß.”

16.Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher, 2: 112 (Robert, October 11–18, 1840): “[Elisens] Angst war freilich groß und that selbst dem Material der Stimme Eintrag.”

17.Robert Schumann, “Zweites Abonnementconcert, den 11 October.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 13, no. 36 (October 31, 1840): 144. “An der Schönheit der Stimme, wie sie auch durch die Aengstlichkeit umflort schien, konnte Niemand zweifeln, der nur einige Tacte gehört, eben so wenig über die gute Schule, in der sie gebildet ist, so daß man deutlich sah, die Sängerin wollte nichts, als was sie sicher konnte. Aber freilich, was man unter vier Augen auf das trefflichste kann, kann man unter tausenden noch nicht zur Hälfte so gut, und geht dies bedeutenden Künstlern und Männern so, um wie viel mehr einer Novizin, einem achtzehnjährigen Mädchen.”

18.Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher, 2: 117 (Clara, October 24, 1840): “Robert meint, das Einzige was Elisens Gesange fehlte, sey Herz, Gemüth. Dies ist’s was mir oft schon einfiel, denn niemals noch rührte mich ihr Gesang, wie z.B. ein Lied von der Devrient oder Pauline Garcia gesungen, aber immer wollte es mir doch scheinen, als habe sie im gewöhnlichen Leben Gemüth, warum sollte sich das nicht auch im Gesang äußern können? ich begreife es nicht!—Ich glaube, wenn sie einmal lieben wird, dann wird sie auch mit mehr Seele singen. Daß die Liebe dabei viel thut, ist gewiß, das hab ich an mir erfahren. Als ich so recht innig meinen Robert zu lieben anfing, da fühlte ich erst was ich spielte, und die Leute sagten, eine tiefere Regung müsse es seyn, die mich so seelenvoll spielen mache.”

19.Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher, 2: 255 (Robert, February 17, 1843): “Zu ihrem Glück, daß sie es eingesehen hatte, daß ihr zur Kunst die Hauptsache fehle,—ein warmes Herz, daß alles für die Kunst aufopfern kann. Schade um die schöne Stimme; aber sie scheint nur aus der Kehle zu kommen.”

20.Robert used this adjective to describe Schröder, Paganini, Napoleon, and Adolph Henselt in a letter to Clara of January 2, 1838. See Weissweiler and Ludwig, Schumann, Briefwechsel, 1: 65.

21.See, for example, the reviews of Schröder’s performances of Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio from the 1830s cited in Stephen Meyer, “Das wilde Herz: Interpreting Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,” The Opera Quarterly 14, no. 2 (Winter 1997/98), 26. For similar examples from the Schumanns’ writings, see Robert Schumann, “Concerte: Zwanzigstes Abonnementconcert, den 18ten März,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 14, no. 29 (April 9, 1841): 118, and Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben durch Tagebüchern und Briefen, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1907), 2: 119.

22.Thomas Grey makes the connection to method acting in discussing Wagner’s admiration for Schröder in the introduction to his translation of excerpts from writings by Claire von Glümer and Henry Chorley on Schröder’s career. See Claire von Glümer and Henry Chorley, “Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient and Wagner’s Dresden,” in Richard Wagner and His World, trans. and ed. Thomas Grey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 204.

23.Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher, 2: 155 (Robert, March 14–21, 1841): “Der Vortrag des Liedes v. Schubert, das die Schr. sang, war mir das Liebste. Was ruht doch in ihr! Als wüßte sie alle Geheimniße des Herzens! Eine echte Schauspielerin die in dieser Minute sich zu Gevatter bittet, und uns in der andern zu Thränen rühren könnte mit ihren schmerzlichen Tönen! Aber eine Hausfrau, ein Weib, eine Mutter kann eine solche Künstlerin nicht sein, und sie ist es wohl auch nicht.”

24.According to Schröder’s first biographer, Alfred von Wolzogen, Schröder herself was known to make the very same argument when confronted by public criticism of her offstage lifestyle choices (Alfred von Wolzogen, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des musikalischen Dramas [Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1863], 91).

25.For examples, see Clara’s remarks in Weissweiler and Ludwig, Schumann, Briefwechsel, 3: 1177 (from Clara to Robert, April 11, 1842); Litzmann, Clara Schumann, 119–20 (Clara’s diary from January 24, 1849); and Kazuko Ozawa-Müller, “Clara Schumann und Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,” in Clara Schumann, 1819–1896: Katalog zur Ausstellung, ed. Ingrid Bodsch and Gerd Nauhaus (Bonn: Stadtmuseum Bonn, 1996), 185 (letter to Ferdinand Hiller, April 11, 1849). See also Robert’s remarks in Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher, 2: 236 (August 6–22, 1842).

26.For a contemporary observation along these lines on “Ich grolle nicht,” see Claire von Glümer, Erinnerungen an Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1862), 119.

27.Robert and Clara Schumann, Liederalbum für Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, ed. Angelika Horstmann (Kassel, Ger.: Bärenreiter, 1994).

28.For information on Clara’s programming for these soirées, see April Prince, “Der anmutreichen, unschuldsvollen Herrin: Clara Schumann’s Public Personas,” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2009, 334–37. See also Ozawa-Müller, “Clara Schumann und Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient,” 180.

29.Litzmann, Clara Schumann, 118 (diary entry of October 14, 1848): “Soiree zu Ehren der Schröder-Devrient, die Roberts ‘Frauenliebe und Leben,’ alle 8 Lieder, ganz herrlich sang! Es war für uns ein hoher Genuß, und wieder mußten wir ausrufen: ‘es gibt doch nur eine Devrient!’”

30.Litzmann, Clara Schumann, 119 (diary entry of October 31, 1848).

31.“Nachrichten: Leipzig,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 43, no. 15 (April 14, 1841): 315–16. “Entschieden missfallen hat uns das in der That unbegreifliche Verkennen der tiefen und ernsten Bedeutung des so wunderschönen Volksliedes von Feuchtersleben, zumal da F. Mendelssohns treffliche, karakteristisch wahre Komposizion desselben schon an sich für jedes musikalische Gemüth ein solches Verkennen unmöglich machen könnte. Die ersten 3 Verse trug Mad. Schröder-Devrient vortrefflich vor und man bemerkte die grosse Wirkung hiervon an allen Zuhörern; als sie aber bei der in der Dichtung und Komposizion, denn beide gehen hier recht eigentlich Hand in Hand, so schönen Schlusswendung, das hier sehr ernst und bedeutungsvoll erscheinende ‘auf’s Wiederseh’n!’ speziell auf sich und das Publikum bezog, mit einer freundlichen Verbeugung begleitete und mithin geradezu profanirte, war auch alle edlere Wirkung hin, und was in der Seele der Zuhörer lang und tief nachgeklungen hätte, ging so als ein gewönlicher Coulisseneffekt schnell und spurlos vorüber.”

32.Robert Schumann, “Concerte: Zwanzigstes Abonnementconcert,” 118. “Das Publicum hörte wie gebannt, und als sie zum Schluß Mendelssohn’s mit den Worten ‘auf Wiedersehn’ endigendes Volkslied sang, stimmten alle in freudiger Zustimmung ein.”

33.A few months later, members of the Gewandhaus would restage Schröder’s gesture toward Mendelssohn by singing the “Volkslied” to him on the evening of July 28, 1841, with the composer joining in for the last verse. Mendelssohn departed for Berlin the next day. See R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 409.

34.For characteristic assessments of Viardot by Clara along these lines, see Wendler, “Band der ewigen Liebe,” 73 (Clara to Emilie List, July 7, 1840); Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher 2: 197 (Clara, December 17, 1841) and 267 (Clara, August 1843).

35.Weissweiler and Ludwig, Schumann, Briefwechsel 3: 985 (Clara to Robert, March 14, 1840): “Welche Bedenken hast Du, lieber Robert, gegen die Dedication [of the op. 24 Liederkreis] an Pauline? ich rathe Dir gewiß dazu; das ist ein Wesen, das Deine Lieder aufzufassen vermag in ihrem deutschen Sinn.”

36.Wendler, “Band der ewigen Liebe” (Clara to Emilie List, July 7, 1840, 72): “Es hat mich so sehr gefreut, da ich mich von ihr ganz und gar vergessen glaubte, und beinah in die Versuchung gerieth, sie anderen Sängerinnen in der Hinsicht des Charakters gleichzustellen, denn ich dachte, sie sey am Ende durch die Triumphe verdorben. Doch der Brief zeigt sie noch ganz die Alte und ihren schönen offenen Charakter. Ich muss ihr nächstens schreiben. Die Lieder hebe ich auf für sie und sende sie ihr, sobald sie nach Paris kommt.”

37.Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher 2: 140 (Clara, January 16, 1841): “Es erreicht doch Keiner das Ideal, das ich von Roberts Liedern in mir trage! Pauline Garcia wäre das Einzige, glaube ich, die sie ganz wahrhaft erfassen würde—könnte ich nur einmal Eines von ihr hören!”

38.Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher 2: 105 (Clara, September 24, 1840): “Es drängte sich mir dasselbe Gefühl einmal auf, als ich von Pauline Garcia das Gretchen von Schubert hörte, was sie mehr nach Effect haschend vortrug, als mit dieser inneren Gluth, wie diese Worte, sowie Schuberts Musik so herrlich es aussprechen. Pauline Garcia hat mich jedes Mal entzückt, nur gerade bei diesen deutschen Lied ließ sie mich unbefriedigt, was ich eigentlich gar nicht begreife bei diesem durch und durch musikalischen Wesen, die sonst Alles in gröster [sic] Schnelligkeit in seiner ganzen Wahrheit erfaßt!”

39.For another example of Clara’s reception of Viardot along these lines, see Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher 2: 268 (Clara, August 1843). See also the testy exchange of letters between Clara and Viardot in January 1848, translated into French and discussed in Beatrix Borchard, “‘Ma chère petite Klara—Pauline de mon cœur’: Clara Schumann et Pauline Viardot, une amitié d’artistes franco-allemande,” Cahiers Ivan Tourguéniev 20 (1997): 135–37.

40.See Sonia Gesse-Harm, “Casta Diva: Zur Rezeption Jenny Linds in der Musikkulture um 1850,” Musikforschung 62, no. 4 (October–December 2009): 347–63, esp. 354–55.

41.Cited in Litzmann, Clara Schumann, 208–9: “Vormittags besuchte uns die Lind zu einer kleinen Lieder-Probe, aus der aber noch mehr wurde, denn sie sang eine ganze Menge von Roberts Liedern, und wie sang sie sie, mit welcher Wahrheit, mit welcher Herzinnigkeit und Einfachheit, wie sang sie ‘Marienwürmchen’, ‘Frühlingsglaube’ aus dem Album, das sie nicht kannte, vom Blatt—das bleibt einem unvergeßlich; welch ein herrliches gottbegabtes Wesen ist das, welch eine reine echt künstlerische Seele, wie erfrischt einen alles, was sie sagt, wie trifft sie immer das Rechte, spricht es aus mit wenig Worten, kurz nie wohl liebte und verehrte ich ein weibliches Wesen mehr als sie. Diese Lieder werden ewig in meiner Seele klingen, und wäre es nicht ein Unrecht, so möchte ich sagen, nie will ich mehr die Lieder von andern hören als von ihr.”

42.Robert’s Liederalbum für die Jugend contains “Marienwürmchen,” as well as several songs with Frühling in the title, but none by the name of “Frühlingsglaube” specifically. With the second song title, it is possible that Clara was instead referring to Schubert’s famous “Frühlingsglaube,” D686, although it is hard to imagine that Lind would “not have known” that song already, even if she was sight-reading from Clara’s album.

43.For information on the programming for these concerts, see Nauhaus, Schumann Tagebücher, 3: 783–84.

44.For example, see Gesse-Harm, “Casta Diva,” 357–58.

45.Jennifer Ronyak, Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

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———. “Drei gute Liederhefte.” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 13, no. 30 (November 29, 1836).

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BENJAMIN BINDER is Associate Professor of Music at Duquesne University. He is also a collaborative pianist.