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SUSAN YOUENS is J. W. Van Gorkom Professor Emerita of Music at the University of Notre Dame. She is author of Schubert, Müller, and “Die schöne Müllerin”; Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs; Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song-Cycles; and Heinrich Heine and the Lied.
2Song in Concert as Observed by the Schumanns
Toward the Personalization of the Public Stage
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,
