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
