Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs Marie Sumner Lott Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs. By Harald Krebs and Sharon Krebs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. [xiii, 308 p. ISBN-10: 0195173635; ISBN-13: 9780195173635. $45.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliographic references, appendices, index, compact disc. This latest book on the life and works of composer, singer, and pianist Josephine Lang contributes to a growing body of scholarship devoted to increasing awareness and appreciation of nearly forgotten artists. It will probably not surprise readers of Notes to hear that this woman composer, well known and revered in her time, has been written out of musical history since the onset of the twentieth century. This omission is slowly being corrected by the husband and wife team of Harald Krebs and Sharon Krebs, two formidable individual [End Page 278] researchers and performers, who accomplish together a significant feat in Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs. The book is the result of several years of ongoing involvement with the documents of Lang's career, including her musical autographs, surviving letters between Lang and her colleagues and family members, published songs and piano pieces, and printed biographical studies from Lang's own time to the present. The study revisits the facts of Lang's life and career, adding some details that had previously been overlooked or suppressed, and provides many insightful commentaries on her artistic output. Illustrated throughout with copious music examples, the analysis provides a lively and engaging discussion of the composer's music. The authors also provide several essential tools for future investigators of Lang's music beyond their own text. An essential component of any reassessment of a marginalized composer is access to scores. Some of Lang's works were published in modern editions as part of the Women Composers Series edited by Judith Tick (Da Capo Press, 1982). To supplement this collection, many of the music examples in Josephine Lang provide full-length songs, and several other works are available online on a companion Web site hosted by the Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart (http://www .wlb-stuttgart.de/referate/musik/lang.html, accessed 22 August 2007). Unfortunately, whenever the site is mentioned in the book, an errant "%7Ewww/" is included in the address. (I found that omitting this typo led me to the correct site.) The Web site includes PDFs of nineteenth-century printed editions of several songs and a painstakingly detailed database of Lang's autographs. Harald Krebs has also edited a collection of songs by Lang forthcoming from Hildegard Publishing Company (Bryn Mawr, PA); when this collection is published, the majority of the songs discussed in the text will be easily available. The only other tool that one might request before launching into an investigation of an unknown composer and her works is a selection of well-performed recorded examples of the music, and by including a compact disc of thirty of Lang's songs discussed in the main text the Krebs provide just that. The captivating performances on the compact disc are a welcome addition to the discussion, even more helpful in this context, as they are rendered by the authors themselves (Sharon singing with Harald at the piano), lending special credence to their insights into Lang's works. Thus, the authors have created an entire collection of resources, appropriately packaged together, to allow the reader a comfortable entry into Lang's creative world. Having provided all the requisite tools, the authors advise the reader to keep in mind Lang's oft-repeated phrase, "my songs are my diary," and leap into the task at hand. The Krebs structure their work chronologically around Lang's biography, telling the story of her travails as a middle-class woman of weak constitution and pervasive bad luck and illustrating her emotional responses to her life with evidence from her song output. Chapter 1, "The Beginning of Josephine Lang's Compositional Career," covers her earliest musical experiences with her musician parents up to her first documented songs and her influential meeting with Felix Mendelssohn in 1830. From an early age, Lang's gift and charm led to some fame in her hometown of Munich. She performed in salons and for...