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, displaying good bourgeois values of earnestness and moral rectitude.5
When Robert and Clara Schumann contemplated the realm of vocal music on the nineteenth-century concert stage, the type of music they linked most consistently to theatrical and inauthentic performers and performance was Italian opera, while the genre of greatest substance and authenticity was, for them, the German Lied. A performance of a Lied was at the same time a performance of a singer’s personal sincerity, depth of feeling, musicality, and Germanness, all closely interrelated qualities that Robert and Clara would have summed up in two words: Wahrheit and Innigkeit. In an article from 1840, for example, Robert wrote the following about a song by Norbert Burgmüller, whose poetic text he believed to have been written by the composer himself:
[Burgmüller’s] composition came into being during a painful time, [it is] deeply melancholy, but inspiring of the most heartfelt sympathy (“zur innigsten Theilnahme anregend”), and true (“wahr”). True—does your little heart not tremble, composers, when you hear this word? Embed yourselves ever more cozily in your pretty song-lies, yet it will bring you no higher than to be sung by some other Judas lips, seductively enough, perhaps. But if a truthful singer (“ein wahrhaftiger Sänger”) steps again among you, then flee with your affected art, or learn Truth, if it’s still possible.6
In the following study of the Schumanns’ reception of some concert singers from the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, I want to suggest that what Robert and Clara most wanted to experience on the concert stage was an inniger Vortrag of a German Lied by a wahrhaftiger Sänger (or Sängerin), a sincere and truthful performance in which person, persona, and character transparently aligned in an act of heartfelt self-disclosure. For the Schumanns, the performance of German song turned the concert stage into a proving ground for a singer’s moral and musical worth, a crucible of bourgeois subjectivity in performance that sometimes continues to serve as a framework for the reception of Lieder singers today.
We can begin with the Belgian soprano Elisa Meerti, who served as erste Sängerin for the 1839–40 season of subscription concerts at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. In his review of the season later that spring, Robert wrote,
The public’s sympathy for [Meerti] increased visibly with each evening; she doesn’t quite count as one of those glittering bravura talents who know how to conquer the public on their first appearance; one recognized her virtues only gradually, as she only unfolded them little by little in all their charm. … Only in her farewell concert did she sing a German Lied by Mendelssohn [“Frühlingslied” from op. 34], which at least in us resonated longer than all the rest [i.e., Italian and French pieces], so did it seem to come from such a sincere, warm soul (“innigem Gemüth”); for she has in her voice and her delivery something exquisitely noble and demure about her.7
In Robert’s recollection, Meerti’s moving Lied performance represented the culminating high point of her season in that it finally revealed the full measure of her tender personality;8 two days before this performance, in fact, Robert had a social call from Meerti and wrote to Clara that he found her to be “a good, genuine girl” (ein gutes, echtes Mädchen).9 Moreover, the shy, incremental manner in which Meerti unveiled her virtues as a performer created a stage persona that harmonized well with the qualities of nobility and modesty that Robert so admired in Meerti’s singing.
Meerti’s farewell concert took place on January 16, 1840, but despite Robert’s claim to the contrary, this was not the first time that she had sung Lieder during that season, as Robert himself noted in a letter to Clara from December 1, 1839: “Now I want to tell you about Meerti, who is supposed to be a splendid young lady, by the way. She recently sang German compositions for the first time [in a concert on November 29], ‘Ave Maria’ by Schubert and a song by Mendelssohn [‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’], and with the most magnificent delivery and voice, such that only now have we really heard her.”10 Once again, Robert suggests that Meerti’s artistic gifts could fully emerge only when they found a suitable musical vehicle, the German Lied, that also corresponded to her laudable personal qualities. To “really hear” Meerti was to hear something deeper at the level of the authentic person, through the technical, interpretive, and attitudinal attributes of her emerging stage persona. But this deeper, truer hearing only became possible when Meerti adopted song characters that resonated with the inner essence of this “splendid young lady”: a virtuous maiden’s prayer to the Virgin Mary on the one hand (Schubert) and an amorous yet chivalrous ode to the imaginative power of song on the other (Mendelssohn).
When Meerti returned to Leipzig in the company of her mother for the 1841–42 concert season, Clara finally got to know her and came to share Robert’s judgment of her personality. As a result, however, Clara found herself puzzling over why she was nonetheless disappointed by Meerti’s performance in the subscription concert on October 28, 1841, as expressed in her entry from that night in the marriage diary she shared with Robert: “We made a return visit to the Meertis. Mother and daughter please me greatly, if only she sang better—I had built up rather great expectations of her, and found myself hardly satisfied, also she sings hardly any good stuff, and precisely that not well.”11
The “good stuff” from that evening’s program must have included excerpts from Mozart’s Idomeneo and a Lied by Mendelssohn (“Der Blumenkranz,” WoO 7), but although the review of the concert in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung maintained that Meerti had been especially compelling in her performances of Lieder that season, Clara apparently did not agree.12 About a week later, after another personal and musical encounter with Meerti, Clara settled on the reason for her dissatisfaction—Meerti was not what she seemed to be:
On Monday evening I sang through a few of Robert’s Lieder with Meerti in order to select [some] for my concert [later in the month]. But only a German heart that can feel deeply (“innig”) is suitable for German Lieder. … What others have too much of, Meerti has too little of—cleverness (“Klugheit”). She is beside herself that she was criticized in Robert’s journal [for certain faults