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 essay describes a set of unconventional performances that I codirected with cultural historian John Sienicki. It demonstrates how we mixed genres, combining vocal music with related theatrical scenes, novels, and lectures; how historical research and musical praxis intersected in our creative process; how our improvisational rehearsal style worked; and how we designed performances with performers and intended audiences in mind. Some specific topics discussed are Schubert’s songs for female characters; the Vienna Volkstheater and its music; Lieder duets; and links between Schubert and the German historical-fiction writer Benedikte Naubert. These shows grew out of historical research and sometimes led to new research projects. I argue for the value of teaching Lieder performance by bringing in awareness of the songs’ historical and literary contexts. As some songs crossed genre boundaries, the worlds of theatrical music and art song can blend. Lieder existed in a complex, interconnected world, and nonstandard performances can accentuate their beauty and illuminate their meaning.

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 considers the quintessential Romantic genre of art song. After a brief background in late eighteenth-century song style, it describes the expansion and deepening of the genre that began in the nineteenth century with the oeuvre of Franz Schubert. As other composers imitated and developed Schubert’s approach to song, poems in many languages were set to music. Across the century, these texts represent the changing emphases and concerns of Romantic poetry. The chapter outlines some central ideas of early German Romanticism: interdisciplinary collaboration, the idealisation of the fragment, and the importance of subjective experience. The gathering of short literary fragments into collections is compared to the song cycle, which groups songs to create a larger story or impression. Three case studies – songs by Schubert, Fauré, and Schumann – are explored to show how various poets and composers used scenes of nature metaphorically to express larger topics of pantheism, intimacy, and mystic unity.