Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars by Laura Tunbridge

Abstract

Reviewed by: Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars by Laura Tunbridge Natasha Loges Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars. By Laura Tunbridge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. [viii, 168 p. ISBN 978-0-226-56357-2. $55] There seems to be no end to what the history of performance can teach us about ourselves, musicians and music, and the social, cultural and political world in which we live. This is beautifully demonstrated in Tunbridge's recent study of Lieder performance from the 1920s to the 1950s in two Anglophone urban centres: New York and London, both regular stopping points in international singers' careers. Tunbridge's highly readable and well-paced study is divided into an introduction and four chapters which are loosely chronologically organised: 'Transatlantic Arrivals', which recounts the reintroduction of German music and musicians to New York and London after World War I; 'Languages of Listening', which considers issues of translation and listening practice in concerts, recordings, broadcasting, and film; 'Lieder Society', which explores the social groups which emerged around Lieder and art music; and finally, 'Saving Music', which closes with changing attitudes to German music and musicians from the 1930s until the aftermath of World War II. 'Anxiety' and 'civilization' are the dual underpinning themes (p. 2). The focus is mainly, but not exclusively, on how the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Strauss were used, in live and mediated performances, to construct national, social, and cultural identities. Art song is a particularly astute choice of genre because of its protean qualities. It is at once democratic and exclusive, quickly politicised and de-politicised through language, immensely portable, speedily learned, and seamlessly slotted into new contexts like recording and film. The study embraces a huge range of Austro-German, British, and American musicians (as well as a few from elsewhere). These range from the extremely famous (Richard Strauss, but as performer rather than composer) to the lesser known but no less remarkable (such as the dashing Louis Graveure, who was born as the Englishman Wilfrid Douthitt, but invented a more marketable Belgian identity). We learn how different groups in London, New York, and other British and American groups received and regarded Austro-German art song and musicians, but equally, how artists adapted aspects of their personae to maximise their professional chances. For example, Tunbridge's account of the Czech-born German-American contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink reveals an impressively resilient and determined figure who performed despite experiencing extraordinary personal and political conflict—her sons fought and died on both sides of the war. On the one hand, Tunbridge traces a detaching of 'work' from 'nation'—is a Schubert Lied, sung on an American film in English, a 'German lied'? Is the [End Page 228] phenomenally popular Christmas carol 'Stille Nacht' the same when it is sung by Ernestine Schumann-Heink on one hand as when it is crooned by Bing Crosby in 1935? On the other hand, she captures details which reveal the explicit hardening of national categories, even when these tip into the absurd, for example renaming German measles 'liberty measles' (p. 19)! Nationality is anything but homogenous; instead, the cultural allegiances encoded within hearing the Lied are constructed around varying, sometimes conflicting, parameters of income and class; so, for example, Schubert was associated with the 'middlebrow', which functioned 'as a nexus for prejudice towards the lower middle classes, the feminine and domestic' (p. 66). The Lied emerges as a musical refugee, and one learns—movingly—about the precarious world of immigrants and exiles. A particular richness of the study is Tunbridge's determination to grapple with the impact of new media, including recording, radio, and film in order to make a deeper point about the changing nature of listening, particularly 'serious' listening and its association with the Austro-German canon. Each mode of listening—to recordings, broadcasts, concerts, and private performances—entails a different type of agency and intensity of experience ranging from immersive to desultory, and indeed, a single listener may experience the full range over the course of an evening...