Scholarly publications
There seems to be an essential relationship between performance and scholarship of the German Lied. Yet the process by which scholarly inquiry and performative practices mutually benefit one another can appear to be mysterious and undefined, in part because the dialogue between the two disciplines usually unfolds in relatively informal environments such as the rehearsal studio, seminar room, or conference workshop. Through essays by leading musicologists and the perspectives of prominent Lied performers, this volume builds on these interactions to reconsider topics such as Werktreue aesthetics and concert practices, the authority of the composer vs. the performer, the value of lesser-known, incomplete, or compositionally modified songs, and the traditions, habits, and prejudices of song recitalists regarding issues like transposition, programming, and dramatic modes of presentation. The book illustrates the productive relevance of Lied musicology and performance to one another, opening doors of interpretative artistry and intellectual discovery.
We think we know what Winterreise is: a formal live performance by a classically-trained baritone and concert pianist in a recital or concert hall, featuring all twenty-four songs of the cycle presented without interruption or deviation from the printed score in Schubert’s original publication order. But in the full sweep of Winterreise’s reception history since 1827, performances satisfying all or even most of these conditions have been much less common than we might assume. The fact is that there are just as many Winterreises as there are performances, each informed by its own set of social, cultural, personal, historical, and technological factors. In this survey of Winterreise’s life in performance from Schubert’s day up until the present, I observe how the cycle’s meaning is fundamentally dependent upon the manner and context of its presentation: performance as reception. The essay includes material on performances of songs from Winterreise during Schubert’s lifetime, singers who engaged notably with the cycle (including Johann Michael Vogl, Julius Stockhausen, Gustav Walter, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and Hans Hotter), a dichotomy in the performance tradition between “lyrical” and “dramatic” approaches, and more recent creative adaptations of the cycle inside and outside of the concert hall.
Click here for a preview of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s ‘Winterreise’ on Google Books.
“Performance Matters in Heine: The Case of Pauline Viardot’s ‘Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter’”
Heinrich Heine’s poem “Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter” (Die Heimkehr 29) can be read as a meta-poem about the ambivalence of the poet’s ironic art. The poet looks through his window into the stormy darkness, and we cannot tell if his perceptions of a mother carrying groceries and her daughter sitting at home are real, imagined, or somewhere in between. Reception of the poem has been similarly divided, with some critics likening the poem to a genre painting in a realist vein, and others citing it as another manifestation of Heine’s love-hate relationship with Romantic idealism. Literary translations and musical settings of the poem each take their own stand on the poem’s ambiguities, but the manner and context of performance will be crucial to what any presentation or adaptation of the poem might mean. A particularly cosmopolitan example of such a context is Pauline Viardot’s Karlsuhe salon in the winter of 1869. Performing her setting of the poem in this environment, Viardot seems to have been saying something about her relationship with her own daughters, but how we understand that message depends on the musical and contextual evidence we choose to highlight and the imagined performance that emerges from that evidence.
In this essay, I analyze Wasting the Night (1990), a song cycle by the American composer Scott Wheeler (b. 1952), to show how the composer unifies the disparate voices and critical perspectives of five poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay into a single narrative centered on her poem “Recuerdo” (from A Few Figs and Thistles, 1920) and its idealized memory of a lovers’ night on the town. Whereas the figures of Millay’s poetry usually celebrated ephemerality, untethering themselves from the burdens of the past and freely pursuing new lovers in that spirit, the heroine of Wasting the Night is fundamentally sentimental and nostalgic. After a detailed discussion of Millay’s poems in the context of their original publication and reception in the 1920s, I show how Wheeler unifies and sentimentalizes these poems by means of tightly interwoven musical cross-references between songs that recall the Romantic song cycle and its treatment of the psychology of memory, particularly Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben. My analysis shows how Wheeler’s cycle thus reveals a similarity between the heroine of Frauenliebe, the old-fashioned nineteenth-century trope of the Poetess (vs. the modern New Woman of the 1920s), and the mid-century cabaret divas that Wheeler explicitly cites as influences on Wasting the NIght.
“Song in Concert as Observed by the Schumanns: Toward the Personalization of the Public Stage”
In German Song Onstage: Lieder Performance in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Natasha Loges and Laura Tunbridge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020), 52-69.
While Lieder were still largely consumed in private contexts within Robert and Clara Schumann’s milieu during their lifetime, the evidence also suggests that they enjoyed, embraced, and advocated for the performance of Lieder in public concerts. What is perhaps most striking about the Schumanns’ concept of good Lieder singing, especially in concert settings, is that they cherished those occasions when the “person” of the singer – that is, their performance of self in everyday life – overlapped or blurred with their stage “persona” as well as the “character” depicted in the song (borrowing concepts from the performance studies scholar Philip Auslander). Rather than uphold the strict Werktreue ideal of a selfless or self-emptying performer, Robert and Clara felt that the essence of a Lieder singer’s off-stage personality would and should be expressed in their performance, for better or worse. What Robert and Clara most desired to experience on the concert stage was a sincere and truthful performance in which person, persona, and character transparently aligned in an act of heartfelt self-disclosure. This essay articulates and analyses the Schumanns’ ideology of Lieder singing by exploring their reception of five concert singers from the 1830s, 40s and 50s: Belgian soprano Elisa Meerti, Clara’s friend and budding soprano Elise List, as well as Wilhemine Schröder-Devrient, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, and Jenny Lind, three giants of the operatic and concert stage. In order for a song performance to meet Robert and Clara’s ideals, their off-stage experience of the singer in social contexts had to correlate closely with both the singer’s public image in the eyes of audiences as well as the poetic character implied by the song (whose dramatic specificity may already have been highly attenuated as in so many Lieder). The Schumanns’ discourse on Lieder performance provides us with another perspective on the problematics of sincerity, authenticity, and selfhood in nineteenth-century performance culture explored elsewhere by Mary Hunter, Karen Leistra-Jones, and Jennifer Ronyak. 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.
“Disability, Self-Critique, and Failure in Schubert’s ‘Der Doppelgänger.’”
In Rethinking Schubert, ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian Horton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 418-436.
This essay offers a new reading of Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger,” one of the most frequently analyzed songs in the musicological literature. Building on conceptions of “late style” articulated by Theodor Adorno and Joseph Straus, I hear the song as an artistic response to disability (Straus) that takes the form of a reflective self-critique (Adorno) in which Schubert stages the failure of his own psychological and compositional identity. First, the protagonist unsuccessfully resists the gradual distortion of the song’s four-bar ostinato, which is to say that he struggles to maintain a unified identity. Schubert creates this effect by invoking and then sabotaging an inflexible pattern of repetition, suggesting that his trademark mastery of pliable repetitive designs has abandoned him. Next, the protagonist yields to the shadowy figure of his former self with a fitful and ultimately aborted mazurka in D# minor. Here Schubert portrays himself as too incapacitated to revisit his hedonistic past: he can’t dance anymore. Finally, in the protagonist’s last vocal phrase, we hear a self-consciously performed melody, a lurching lyrical effusion that desperately mimics Schubert’s most prized natural possession. Ultimately there can be no return to the “alter Zeit” before Biedermeier pessimism and illness, when authentic and unencumbered musical subjectivity was still possible.
Click here for a preview of Rethinking Schubert on Google Books.
“Art and Science, Beauty and Truth, Performance and Analysis?”
Music Theory Online 22/2 (June 2016).
In this essay, I invoke the age-old conflict between the “two cultures” of art and science (C. P. Snow) as a point of comparison for understanding some of the communication problems that have plagued the somewhat analogous relationship between performance and analysis. Drawing upon some ideas that surfaced during a recent public conversation held between the novelist Ian McEwan and the theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed, I suggest that although performers and analysts express themselves in very different languages, they are both pursuing the art of interpretation, and a deeper acknowledgment of this common ground might help both cultures appreciate and learn from each other’s perspectives more fruitfully. The article includes a reconsideration of Leonard Bernstein’s 1954 television lecture on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, cited by Arkani-Hamed as an artistic example of scientific “inevitability.”
“The Lied from the Inside Out”
Part of the “Colloquy” entitled “Studying the Lied: Hermeneutic Traditions and the Challenge of Performance,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67/2 (August 2014): 549-555.
What role should the score play in an understanding of the Lied as performance? In this short essay, I consider the role of the score in a context for song that was still widely embraced during the first half of the 19th century: the performance for the performer(s) alone. Even as late as 1843, Robert Schumann still singled out some Lieder as most appropriate for purely private performance. Building on ideas of Edward T. Cone, Nicholas Cook, Philip Auslander, and Elizabeth LeGuin, I suggest that as critics of the Lied, we might productively exchange our seat in the concert hall for the piano bench of the performer who plays and sings for and as themselves, revealing traces of early 19th-century performance culture that have been hiding in the scores in plain sight. In particular, I examine a song by Schumann (“Ich wandelte unter den Bäumen,” from the Heine Liederkreis op. 24) in order to re-examine the celebrated relationship between voice and piano in Schumann’s Lied scores. I argue that the self-consciousness inherent in all Western art music performance is often thematized and intensified in Schumann’s songs as a specifically Romantic self-consciousness, one which is experienced by those who perform the song and embody the relationship between voice and piano scripted by the score.
“Robert, Clara and the Transformation of Poetic Irony in Schumann’s Lieder: The Case of ‘Dein Angesicht’”
Nineteenth-Century Music Review 10/1 (June 2013): 1-28.
In the last decade, musicologists have definitively put to rest the lingering concern that Robert Schumann misunderstood poetic irony in his settings of Heinrich Heine's poetry. My contribution to this project begins with Robert's written correspondence with his fiancée Clara Wieck in the years leading up to their marriage in 1840. Relying on passages in the letters that have previously received little or no critical attention, I closely observe the lovers’ views about the workings of ironic language in their relationship, especially concerning the technique that scholars of Heine's poetry have called the Stimmungsbruch (‘breaking of mood’): a sudden reversal of tone that punctures a poem's lyric beauty and maliciously invalidates its apparent sincerity. Clara detested this gesture when it came from Robert in everyday life or in his letters; she insisted that Robert share his negative feelings openly, even though Robert knew that this would distress her. The letters thus provide a helpful context in which to understand Schumann's idiosyncratic compositional treatment of the Stimmungsbruch in ‘Dein Angesicht’ (1840). Using the evidence of the letters, I argue that Heine's poem would likely have had strong personal associations for Robert and Clara. In his setting, Robert thus transformed the poem's dual Stimmungsbruch to reflect pain honestly without inflicting it at the same time. Focusing primarily on the torturous dialectic between major and minor in the song, I show how Robert has the protagonist absorb the thrust of Heine's damaging Stimmungsbruch into himself, keeping the beloved out of harm's way while still allowing the dark, throbbing energy of the wound to radiate from beneath the surface.
“Kundry and the Jewish Voice: Anti-Semitism and Musical Transcendence in Wagner’s Parsifal”
Current Musicology 87 (Spring 2009): 47-131.
Kundry, the only female character in Richard Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (1882), is also the only character to make an overwhelming impression with the raw power and extreme versatility of her singing voice. In this article, I explore some pertinent aspects of Wagner’s anti-Semitic ideology in order to set up a close reading of what happens to Kundry’s voice in Acts II and III. Even beyond her last vocal utterance, Kundry’s “voice” remains, although its potency is subjugated and channeled into the work of transfigurative redemption whose blinding musical sublimity moves us at the same time that it requires complicity with its deep-seated anti-Semitic agenda. Finally, in an epilogue, I suggest another view of Kundry’s voice, inspired by a different facet of Wagner’s thought, that may help us understand more fully why anti-Semitism and transcendence are so inextricably and uncomfortably linked in Parsifal, both musically and dramaturgically: the voice of an animal.
Public musicology
In this blog I consider an ambiguous passage at the end of Wilhelm Müller’s poem “Morgengruss,” set famously by Schubert as the eighth song of his song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. In his classic monograph-length analysis of this song (recently published by Oxford), David Lewin offers one reading of the poem’s ending, supported by observations about Schubert’s score, but how have performers interpreted the same passage? Listening closely to performances by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Olaf Bär, Michael Schade, and Jonas Kaufmann, we discover that the meaning of Müller’s words in Schubert’s setting changes depending on how those words are sung (and played).