At first glance, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise would hardly suggest itself for choral adaptation. The history of choral arrangements of songs from the cycle bears this out: The only song to have a major presence in choral music since the nineteenth century is “Der Lindenbaum,” which was first adapted by Friedrich Silcher in a way that emphasized its folklike, communal potential over its darker elements. Other songs of the cycle, such as “Der Leiermann,” seem to innately resist any similar treatment. This essay focuses on how the recalcitrance of “Der Leiermann” in relationship to choral arrangement colors the approaches of two recent arrangers to the song, Thomas Hanelt and Gregor Meyer; the chapter then takes into account a more improvisatory group performance of the song presented by student performers at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in December 2008. The possibility of choral or other non-solo approaches to “Der Leiermann” innately forces performers and audiences to approach the wanderer’s solitude, and the cycle’s ending, from new subjective perspectives, even as these arrangements also attractively offer nonprofessional singers a chance to grapple with Schubert’s masterwork.

Aribert Reimann (b. 1936) long maintained a dual career as a composer and as a collaborative pianist, with Lieder at the heart of both. In the early 1990s, Reimann stepped away from professional performance in order to focus fully on composition, and around this time he embarked upon a project of Lieder arrangement that has included, to date, eight adaptations of sets of nineteenth-century songs scored for voice and string quartet. This chapter illustrates the spectrum of ways in which Reimann’s arrangements and reimaginings of Lieder advance both musicological and performance-related concerns. My main case study is the complex Schubert-based Mignon (1995), which pulls together four voice-piano songs, two incomplete fragments, and a male voice part-song from Schubert’s many engagements with Goethe’s character. The presentation of Schubert’s songs in Mignon demonstrates Reimann’s close analytic engagement with the source songs—his compilation makes clear use of Schubertian harmonic traits—and his awareness of the history of these early settings in performance and scholarship, specifically within traditions that have primarily valued Schubert’s later engagements with particular texts. Ultimately, I argue that Mignon constitutes both a powerful defense of lesser-known and long-overlooked Lieder, and a historiographical critique that comes to life in performance.

The tonal relationships between the songs of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe Op. 48 (1840) have been studied extensively by musicologists. Indeed, it is typically key, more than poetry, narrative, or style, upon which arguments for the coherence of the song cycle hang. Such careful analytical accounts, however, are rarely heeded by performers, who often transpose songs. Schumann did not specify a voice type for Dichterliebe; the dedication of the first edition to Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient seems more to do with her character than her Fach. A tenor may sing the whole cycle at pitch, but baritones, basses, sopranos, and mezzos rarely do so, with one exception: the seventh song, “Ich grolle nicht,” which almost everybody performs in the original key of C major. The primary reason for so doing appears to be that age-old weakness of singers to show that they can manage the high note: here, an ossia top A. Exploring the historical and poetic contexts of “Ich grolle nicht” illustrates the tensions between the hermeneutics of reading and analyzing a score and interpreting that same score in performance. David J. Levin wrote about how performances can “unsettle” even canonical operas; the same is true of song cycles, but perhaps musicology can also unsettle approaches to performance.

The perennially popular song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben, Op. 42, composed by Robert Schumann to poems by Adelbert von Chamisso in 1840, continues to provoke controversy arising from its presentation of women’s attitudes to love and life. This essay offers two fresh explorations of its context, drawing on the historical model of Susan Youens’s work alongside the ethically-driven epistemology of Gayatri Spivak. First, an examination of overlooked literature contemporary with Chamisso’s writings, as well as later in the century, challenges the assumption that he accurately represented the views of German Biedermeier women in the 1830s, or indeed in the 1860s when the cycle gradually attained popularity in public performance. Second, a survey of the early performance history of the cycle reveals a fragmented approach to the work on the concert stage, especially by Clara Schumann and her contemporaries. These women regularly performed the cycle only in parts, and/or in combination with other works, an approach which, I argue, mitigates its expressive limitations and enriches its undeniable lyrical value. I conclude by examining some contemporary performance approaches. Taken together, these explorations may lead to a fresh understanding and approach to performing the work today.

Although there seems to be an essential relationship between scholarship and performance of the Lied, the process by which scholarly inquiry and practices of performance mutually benefit one another can seem mysterious and undefined. In this introduction to The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology, the editors trace the state of research touching these issues, including the role of the “performative turn” in Lied scholarship, historical performance practice research in the genre, and the tradition of scholars’ guides for performers. They then summarize how the essays of the collection model new ways in which scholarship can contribute to new performance experimentation in the genre, and how reflecting on performance can continue to lead to new research perspectives.

This chapter turns to a series of interviews with five distinguished Lied interpreters, at various stages in their careers and coming from both German and Anglo-American contexts, to look at how professional performers think about the role of musicological inquiry or information in relationship to their art form. Based on interviews with Christian Gerhaher, Thomas Quasthoff, Martha Guth, Randall Scarlata, and Clara Osowski, the chapter examines issues including: the role of understanding historical context in preparing or relating to song performance; “dramatic” vs. more “lyric” approaches to singing and thinking about Lieder; the use of historical research in assembling concert programs; and the role of historical knowledge in decisions concerning transposition and other performance concerns.

Even as late as the 1880s singers attempting to integrate the Lied into US concert life confronted a variety of barriers; in addition to difficulties of the German language, audiences preferred large-scale works and assumed the Lied was a rarified genre. Nevertheless, Max Heinrich (1853–1916), the acclaimed “Wizard of Song,” succeeded through performances that captivated audiences and immersed them in the world of each song, be it an intimate lyric or a dramatic ballad. His style and the critics’ reception of his recitals are compared with those of the equally famous baritones of his day, George Henschel and David Bispham. Although Heinrich did not make recordings, his philosophy that performing Lieder rested on a singer’s intellect is documented by numerous publications, including his annotated English-language scores of over 150 Lieder. His distinctive subjective performativity is explored through reviews and a discussion of Schumann’s “Die beiden Grenadiere.” At times critics observed that Heinrich’s interpretations did not conform to the published scores, and thus were in violation of the Werktreue tradition that was characteristic of Henschel. Yet highly perceptive critics, such as Philip Hale, acknowledged that his original interpretations encouraged listeners to perceive well-known pieces in new ways.

Scholars of nineteenth-century music often use the term “long nineteenth century” to refer to the 125-year period between the beginnings of the French Revolution and the First World War. If the nineteenth century was long, however, it was also deep, containing vast numbers of musical scores that extend well beyond the canonical works that have dominated scholarly journals, recital halls, and course syllabi. My chapter focuses on a composer from the deepest regions of the Lied genre—Marie Franz—who wrote inventive and affecting songs that raise important questions about the analysis and performance of nineteenth-century song. Franz’s songs suggest that as much as we should attend to the activities that women musicians engaged in during this period, we should also attend to the pieces that they wrote, no matter how small in size or few in number. They prove that even in the most private spaces women were composing songs of bracing originality, and that discovering the full scope of that originality often requires digging deeply for unpublished repertoire. And they show that to fully illuminate the astonishing, extensive, and little-studied songs from this century, we need the commitment not just of scholars, but also of performers.

In this essay, I explore the text and contexts of Richard Strauss’s “Schlechtes Wetter,” Op. 69 No. 5 (1918), in order to illustrate the nature of song as interpretation. First, from the musicological side (and with brief reference to two classic theoretical accounts of the methodology of Lied analysis by Kofi Agawu and Lawrence Zbikowski), I consider Heinrich Heine’s poem and Strauss’s setting of it as meta-texts that reflect on the artists’ creative processes, observing in particular how Strauss’s song can also be heard to reveal the creative and interpretative essence of the traditional manner of identifying text-music relationships in the Lied. Turning then toward the work and perspectives of performers, I explore Strauss’s song as it was interpreted by soprano Elisabeth Schumann and the composer at the piano on their 1921 tour of the United States, along with some brief concluding reflections on my own performance of the song as pianist with soprano Sari Gruber in recitals given over the past decade. These performances radically alter our understanding of what the song is about and who we are to understand its vocal persona to be, illustrating the vital role of performance in determining what a song is and means.

This chapter assesses the state of Clara Schumann studies and argues that more attention needs to be devoted to her musical works. It previews three of the book’s main arguments: (1) that Clara Schumann should be viewed as her own song composer, rather than as a composer whose style and success are measured against her husband’s; (2) that detailed musical analysis has a crucial role to play in demonstrating her importance to the history of the nineteenth-century Lied; and (3) that musical form is indelibly linked to poetic form and meaning. The chapter also briefly outlines the content of the chapters to come.

In June 1853, Clara Schumann set to music six inset-poems from the novella Jucunde, hot off the press earlier that year, by the minor poet Hermann Rollett. Schumann and Rollett actually met in Vienna in July 1856, shortly after her husband’s death, and she gave him a presentation copy of her Op. 23 songs. The young Rollett was a political firebrand; he wrote differently after the revolution ended in failure, but he included some of his earlier poems in Jucunde, and covert hints of continued adherence to former doomed ideals are still apparent. So too with Robert and Clara Schumann: both harboured republican sympathies, and both would signal their disillusionment and unchanged political views in several of their songs from the 1850s. If these works seem harmless at first hearing, semi-hidden hints of underlying politics emerge on closer examination. From Robert Schumann’s ‘Des Sennen Abschied’, Op. 79 No. 22; ‘Heimliches Verschwinden’, Op. 89 No. 2; and ‘Warnung’, Op. 119 No. 2, we arrive at Clara Schumann’s ‘Geheimes Flüstern’, Op. 23 No. 3, whose harmonic, tonal and motivic elements hint to the cognoscenti of sadness over political failure and of unconquerable hope for the future.

One of the most striking aspects of Clara Schumann’s songs is the way they flow. They tend to move in four-bar phrases, but each four-bar phrase is connected seamlessly with the one that follows it. One way that she creates this feeling of seamless continuity is by weakening or avoiding cadences at the ends of musical sections and the poetic stanzas associated with them, fusing together adjacent sections and stanzas by softening, smudging or even erasing the musical and poetic punctuation marks at the end of them. This chapter considers how and why she does this. Through a close analysis of two representative songs – ‘Warum willst du and’re fragen’, Op. 12 No. 11, and ‘Ich hab’ in deinem Auge’, Op. 13 No. 5 – it highlights the strategies that she uses to join together sections and stanzas, as well as the various ways that those strategies relate to the poetry. In so doing, the chapter not only reveals a crucial hallmark of Clara Schumann’s song aesthetic, but also ponders a question that has been largely neglected in recent studies of romantic form: how do musical and poetic closure relate to one another?

A survey of dissertations on Strauss reveals trends that emerged over time in terms of topics and methodologies that captured the interest of emerging scholars as well as the geographic locations and eras that produced the most research. Yet Strauss scholarship is not merely defined by the issues it addresses and questions it puts forward, but also by those it ignores or unwittingly pushes to the margins of discussion. After assessing the past, this chapter proposes topics and approaches largely absent in existing Strauss scholarship, many of which have been more thoroughly explored in related fields. While far from comprehensive, this discussion points to potentially fruitful paths for future research: the Lieder, his influence on contemporaries, his role as Kapellmeister and administrator, his material possessions, and his relationships with figures trusted to construct his legacy.

This chapter deals with Pauline Strauss-de Ahna as a singer and as the wife of a prominent composer and conductor. Her professional career from its beginnings at Munich’s Royal Conservatory and her period of instruction as a pupil of Richard Strauss and Emilie Merian-Genast to her engagements at the opera stages, primarily of Weimar, Munich, and the Bayreuth Festival, is traced and contextualized within the typical structures of professional female singers. Special focus is on the question of how women were able to negotiate the role of a public performer on the one hand and that of a middle-class wife and mother on the other around 1900. Select reviews of her performances help profile her voice and repertory as an opera singer. The chapter also surveys her national and international activities as a Lied singer and examines the "bourgeois comedy" Intermezzo of 1924 with regard to the public image Richard Strauss staged of his wife and marriage.

Wayne Heisler Jr addresses ‘song-ballets’ from the 1960s and 70s, choreography set to Lieder by Gustave Mahler, in order to explore inter-relationships between music, dance and the written word. He pursues the historical implications of his subject matter, considering social, cultural and philosophical discourses, and their appeals to music and the body with an aim to expanding interpretive pathways, suggesting ways in which dance can refuel Mahler’s music, repurposing its expressive vocabulary. Through critical readings of both live and recorded performances, Heisler suggests the resonance of Mahler’s danced songs with the composer’s biography and musical personality, as well as their impact on characterization, drama and musical structure. In doing so, Heisler acknowledges the inter-disciplinary methods underpinning his analysis, noting in particular the relevance of both performance studies and phenomenology.