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ОглавлениеA SINGER IN EVENING dress, a grand piano. A modest-sized audience, mostly well-dressed and silver-haired, equipped with translation booklets. A program consisting entirely of songs by one or two composers. This is the way of the Lieder recital these days. There is an assumption among performers and audiences that this performance tradition is long-standing. As this book demonstrates, however, it is not. For much of the nineteenth century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home and salon and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. The dedicated program was rare; the dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was, then, a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The purpose of this volume is to unsettle some of our assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage, in the hope that greater historical awareness will open up discussion about how and why we care about, and make a case for, Lieder.
In a generation in which the notion of period performance has become firmly established as a routine mode of interpretation, it is striking that many of our concert habits have little to do with known historical practices. 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 that resulted in the elevated status of 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 that the straight recital dedicated to Lieder grouped by work, poet, or composer was the gold standard.
Considerations 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.
