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German Song Onstage
Lieder Performance in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
by Natasha Loges and Laura Tunbridge
Published by: Indiana University Press
302 Pages, 15 b&w illus., 26 music exx., 27 tables
- eBook
- 9780253047021
- Published: May 2020
$16.99
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A singer in an 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. While it might seem that this style of performance is a long-standing tradition, German Song Onstage demonstrates that it is not. For much of the 19th century, the songs of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms were heard in the home, salon, and, no less significantly, on the concert platform alongside orchestral and choral works. A dedicated program was rare, a dedicated audience even more so. The Lied was a genre with both more private and more public associations than is commonly recalled. The contributors to this volume explore a broad range of venues, singers, and audiences in distinct places and time periods—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Germany—from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. These historical case studies are set alongside reflections from a selection of today's leading musicians, offering insights on current Lied practices that will inform future generations of performers, scholars, and connoisseurs. Together these case studies unsettle narrow and elitist assumptions about what it meant and still means to present German song onstage by providing a transnational picture of historical Lieder performance, and opening up discussions about the relationship between history and performance today.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Restaging German Song / Laura Tunbridge
1. "Eine wahre Olla Patrida [sic]:" Anna Milder-Hauptmann, Schubert, and Programming the Orient / Susan Youens
2. Song in Concert as Observed by the Schumanns: Toward the Personalization of the Public Stage / Benjamin Binder
3. From Miscellanies to Musical Works: Julius Stockhausen, Clara Schumann and Dichterliebe / Natasha Loges
4. Natalia Macfarren and the English German Lied / Katy Hamilton
5. "For Any Ordinary Performer It Would Be Absurd, Ridiculous or Offensive": Performing Lieder Cycles on the American Stage / Heather Platt
6. The Concert Hall as a Gender-Neutral Space: The Case of Amalie Joachim, née Schneeweiss / Beatrix Borchard, Translated by Jeremy Coleman
7. Nikolai Medtner: Championing the German Lied and Russian Spirit / Maria Razumovskaya
8. From the Benefit Concert to the Solo Song Recital in London, 1870–1914 / Simon McVeigh and William Weber
9. German Song and the Working Classes in Berlin, 1890–1914 / Wiebke Rademacher
10. Lilli Lehmann's Dedicated Lieder Recitals / Rosamund Cole
11. "Eine Reihe bunter Zauberbilder": Thomas Mann, Hans Pfitzner, and the Politics of Song Accompaniment / Nicholas Attfield
12. Performers' Reflections / Natasha Loges and Laura Tunbridge
Timeline
Index
Natasha Loges is Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music. She is author of Brahms and His Poets: A Handbook. She is also editor (with Katy Hamilton) of Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance and Brahms in Context, as well as editor (with Anja Bunzel) of Musical Salon Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century.
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 editor (with Roe-Min Kok) of Rethinking Schumann.
"German Song Onstage abounds with fresh insights, the result of asking new questions about German song—all based on meticulous research. . . . Such a publication, of intrinsic value in its own right, provides a timely reminder that there are always fresh ways to approach a subject we thought we knew all there was to know."
~James Parsons, Professor of Music History , Missouri State University
"What emerges from [German Song Onstage] is a much fuller picture of historical lieder performance than has hitherto been available. Lieder is released from its patina of constraint back into the more fluid and flexible settings of the period which first produced it."
~Susan Rutherford, Martin Harris School of Music and Drama, University of Manchester
"The essays herein should appeal to a wide range of readers from the informed concert-goer who enjoys vocal music to conservatory students to the professoriate who will appreciate the exemplary scholarly apparatus. The editors are to be commended for a fine compilation that will pique interest in discovering or re-visiting the wide range of German song repertoire and the acclaimed artists who presented these cultural offerings to the world."
~Barry Zaslow, Miami University, Music Reference Services Quarterly
"This volume offers a multifaceted overview of the rich history of German song, and challenges contemporary performers and audiences, like Janus with a wide angle lens, to look at the totality oflieder's history to determine performance practice. It is highly recommended."
~Debra Greschner, Journal of Singing
"The editors are to be commended for a fine compilation that will pique interest in discovering or re-visiting the wide range of German song repertoire and the acclaimed artists who presented these cultural offerings to the world."
~Barry Zaslow - Miami University, Music Reference Services Quarterly
"The variety of methodologies and contexts probed in this volume will doubtless inspire future performance-centric song scholarship. The novel inclusion of current performers' voices will hopefully broaden scholarly discourse about lieder and, more generally, art song."
~Verica Grmuša, Music & Letters
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