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Loges, Natasha, and Laura Tunbridge, eds. German Song Onstage: Lieder Performance in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020. Paper, 292 pp" $32.00. ISBN 978-0253-04701-4; eBook $16.99 ISBN 9780253047021. www.iupress. indiana.edu
The role of German song in recital programs, while perhaps not sacrosanct, is certainly firmly established, and equally entrenched are the performance mores for lieder. As the authors in this collection of essays explain however, currently accepted performance practice is not always analogous with historical practice. This compendium, an outgrowth of a conference devoted to German song, is edited by Natasha Loges, Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music, and Laura Tunbridge, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. The volume provides a wide ranging discussion about the presentation of lieder in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as observations on the genre by contemporary German song recitalists.
The volume contains twelve essays that focus extensively on programming, with correlative emphasis on specific performers who influenced the creation and performance of German song. In the opening chapter, Susan Youens explains that the career of Anna Milder-Hauptmann exemplifies the multifaceted effects of a singer on both composer and audience. MilderHauptmann was Beethoven's first Leonora and the dedicatee of Schubert's "Suleika II," and her clarion voice was the inspiration for the latter's Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, D. 965. Youens shares examples of concert programs in which Milder-Hauptmann presented lieder and operatic excerpts interspersed with orchestral works and chamber music. Such patterned miscellany programs are unusual today, but recital programs that encompassed both song and instrumental works were commonplace in the nineteenth century. In another chapter, Loges...