GERMAN SONG ONSTAGE
GERMAN SONG ONSTAGE
Lieder Performance in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Edited by Natasha Loges and Laura Tunbridge
Indiana University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Loges, Natasha, editor. | Tunbridge, Laura [date], editor.
Title: German song onstage : lieder performance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries / Natasha Loges and Laura Tunbridge.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019053391 (print) | LCCN 2019053392 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253047007 (hardback) | ISBN 9780253047014 (paperback) | ISBN 9780253047038 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Songs, German—19th century—History and criticism. | Songs, German—20th century—History and criticism. | Songs, German—Performances.
Classification: LCC ML1400 .G47 2020 (print) | LCC ML1400 (ebook) | DDC 782.4216809/43—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053391
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053392
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Contents
Introduction: Restaging German Song / Laura Tunbridge
4Natalia Macfarren and the English German Lied / Katy Hamilton
7Nikolai Medtner: Championing the German Lied and Russian Spirit / Maria Razumovskaya
9German Song and the Working Classes in Berlin, 1890–1914 / Wiebke Rademacher
10Lilli Lehmann’s Dedicated Lieder Recitals / Rosamund Cole
12Performers’ Reflections / Natasha Loges and Laura Tunbridge
THIS COLLECTION AROSE after the conference German Song Onstage 1789–1914, which took place at the Royal College of Music and Wigmore Hall in February 2016. We are grateful to the following institutions for financial and other support: the German Historical Institute, the Royal College of Music, Wigmore Hall, Music and Letters, the British Academy, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities), and Music Talks. We are also grateful to Janice Frisch and the staff of Indiana University Press for seeing this volume to production and to the anonymous readers for their extremely helpful suggestions. Finally, thanks to all our contributors and, as always, our families.
GERMAN SONG ONSTAGE
A 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