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.
