Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination

Abstract

AbstractThe recreation of Jenny Lind's first American concert by soprano Frieda Hempel in 1920 was a popular success, but raised a number of questions for critics. Examining its reception—and that of the concert on tour in Britain—shines light on postwar attitudes toward music history, as manifest in responses to particular repertoires, and to sound recordings. Hempel's hybrid programs, which included operatic coloratura arias, lieder, and American popular song, ran counter to the trend elsewhere toward specialization. At the same time, they resonated with attempts to cultivate a newly minted sociocultural group, the middlebrow. And, while the Lind project on many levels strove for historical accuracy, on others it overturned ideas of authentic performance. An altogether more complex picture of vocal performance in the age of mechanical reproduction thus emerges.