Performing the Lied, performing the self: Singing subjectivity in Germany, 1790--1832.

摘要

This study analyzes salon and concert performances of Lieder (German art songs) in Germany between 1790 and 1832, which often involved major figures in German literary Romanticism (including Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) as well as the composers and elite intellectual circles most closely associated with them. I argue that performances of Lieder brought to life important but often under-recognized currents in German thought around 1800 concerning the nature of the individual. Although Romantic discussions of subjectivity and the art song genre emphasized the self's inward orientation and isolated core, my research demonstrates that actual performances of Lieder questioned the veracity and cultural centrality of such autonomy. Song performances fostered a surprising permeability between isolation and community, between expression rooted in self or other, and between private and public utterances correspondingly, they worked---and arguably still work---to underscore the mobile nature of individuals' positions on the continuum of autonomy, intersubjectivity, and community. Additionally, this dissertation draws heavily on previously unexplored archival materials concerning performance contexts and musical practices, bringing new historical information to light about the specific details of social and musical practices that affected song performances during the period.Part One of the dissertation, entitled Free Sociability (containing Chapters One and Two), shows that performing Lieder among friends could provide just as often for an increased ease of communication and self-exploration as it could for the retreat of the self from sociable openness such distinctions often fell along gendered lines. Chapter One, "Free Sociability in Theory and Practice," introduces, contextualizes and critiques Friedrich Schleiermacher's notion of free sociability, a key tenet in early German Romanticism. Schleiermacher, who was a frequent visitor to Berlin's salons, outlined this ideal and steps towards achieving it in his 1799 treatise, Towards a Theory of Sociable Conduct, painting the ideal salon as a place where individuals can fully express themselves through the "free play" of their faculties while broadening the sphere of their understanding through their interactions with others. In so doing, he provided an exciting external, sociable, and thus intersubjective extension to an existing Kantian and Schillerian aesthetics that called for the "free play" of an individual's faculties. Chapter Two, "Sociability and the Stugemann Schone Mullerin, or, Free Play in the Biedermeierzeit," analyzes this ideal's promises and limits (especially with regards to gender) against the 1816-17 performance of the Schone Mullerin Liederspiel in the salon of Elisabeth von Stagemann. The chapter focuses on the divergent performances of Wilhelm Muller and Luise Hensel and examines their poems and the music of their salon collaborator, Ludwig Berger.Part Two, Autonomous Subjectivity (which contains Chapters Three and Four), questions the tenability of Goethe's notion of autonomy as presented throughout his writings. This section interrogates, especially, the degree to which singers approaching his Lied poetry could be expected to keep the input of author, composer, work, and performer safely distinct from one another in performance. Chapter Three, "Autonomy in Wilhelm Meister, the Goethean Lyric, Schiller's Aesthetic Education, and the Goethe-Cult," explains the pervasive reach of subjective autonomy in the work of Goethe and Schiller, as well as its strong hold upon the minds of their closest followers in the Weimar and Berlin salons the chapter also points to parallel notions concerning the physical and organic roots of subjectivity that contain the potential to challenge many of Goethe's and Schiller's central claims. Chapter Four, "Carl Friedrich Zelter's Goethe Lieder and the Messa di Voce , or, Breathed Subjectivity and the Limits of Autonomy," considers how Carl Friedrich Zelter's settings of Goethe's poems, which emphasized breath-expression markings to an unusual degree, were ostensibly designed to present the autonomous and inner utterances of the poetic personae within Goethe's poems. These markings, nonetheless, left much-contested room for the performer to find the source of expression, alternately, in him- or herself, the poet, or somewhere in between.Part Three, Desecrating Intimacy (which contains Chapter Five), illuminates the previously obscure early years of Lied performances on public concerts, making clear exactly what repertoire first appeared in this context and showing how such performances confused the boundary between the intimate and the public self, demanding that the performer creatively mediate between them for an increasingly separated audience. Chapter Five, "Sehnsucht, Interiority, Intimacy, and Publicity in the Early Public Performance of the Lied," investigates how even the most apparently "private" of Lied texts, which explore the inner feeling of Sehnsucht (longing), were performed in highly "public" contexts (often with expanded and publicizing musical settings to match, e.g. in settings by Beethoven, Andreas Romberg, and Gasparo Spontini), calling into question any strict contemporary division between public and private modes of expression.