Historical Performance

Jennifer Ronyak

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253035790
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

The German lied, or art song, is considered one of the most intimate of all musical genres—often focused on the poetic speaker's inner world and best suited for private and semi-private performance in the home or salon. Yet, problematically, any sense of inwardness in lieder depends on outward expression through performance.

With this paradox at its heart, Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century explores the relationships between early nineteenth-century theories of the inward self, the performance practices surrounding inward lyric poetry and song, and the larger conventions determining the place of intimate poetry and song in the public concert hall. Jennifer Ronyak studies the cultural practices surrounding lieder performances in northern and central Germany in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, demonstrating how presentations of lieder during the formative years of the genre put pressure on their sense of interiority. She examines how musicians responded to public concern that outward expression would leave the interiority of the poet, the song, or the performer unguarded and susceptible to danger. Through this rich performative paradox Ronyak reveals how a song maintains its powerful intimacy even during its inherently public performance.

1Safeguarding the Self

THE SCENE FROM Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre introduced at the end of the introduction focuses on singing in solitude and for one other person; it only refers to a larger group of friends through a fictive religious metaphor concerning community. In contrast this chapter and the two that follow focus on real-life social institutions in which novels like this one would have been read and discussed: literary salons in Germany at the start of the nineteenth century. Salons were one of the most important and documentable secular venues where the dynamics of the inner self and sociability could play out.

Salons were domestic gatherings that primarily involved a city’s elites. These individuals could include local or visiting members of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy who took a non-professional interest in the arts and sciences, as well as professional artists, writers, musicians, philosophers, scientists, and the like.¹ Salons were semipublic, as opposed to fully private, in that both friends and more distant acquaintances would be present to discuss current intellectual trends and indulge in the arts and games. Early nineteenth-century German salons engaged with the contributions of Goethe and a number of other poets and philosophers during the period. Salon-goers read texts in salon company and discussed the ideas involved. Prominent literati and thinkers were frequent guests. Salon hostesses and salon-goers also read intimate poetry aloud for the group and sometimes sang such poems in the form of lieder.

For some salon hostesses and salon-goers, it was also important to embody or to work toward ideals concerning the inner self articulated by the writers whose work they read and with whom they interacted. Individuals within the salons encountered two significant and related, although divergent, schools of thought concerning the self and its relationship to activities involving intimate expression. The two groups of writers who propagated these positions divided along the following rough lines, although they were neither fully antagonistic to one another nor so simply divided in all their ideologies or efforts: Goethe and Schiller, sometimes referred to as the Weimar Classicists, and the early Romantic circle, which included Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher and which was centered in Jena and Berlin. Regarding the self, inwardness, and intimate expression, the Goethean camp and the Romantic circle offered overlapping but distinctive perspectives concerning the relative importance of solitude, autonomy, and sociability. The depth and integrity of the inner self was central to both positions, but there were noticeable differences in opinions concerning where to place borders on inwardness so as to guard it. In general Goethe and Schiller suggested that an individual’s own autonomy could serve as the desired, primary enclosure for inwardness. Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and additional members of their group demonstrated a greater willingness to set aside this narrow boundary around the self to allow for a freer intersubjectivity in social interaction. Schleiermacher posited that a safe boundary might be moved from one that directly surrounds the inner self to one that enclosed an idealized social group—the walls of the ideal salon. The authority of these influential figures in early nineteenth-century German thought not only reached the salons but permeated their cultural practices. And sometimes these men exerted such authority in person. For example at one gathering at which Goethe was present, the painter Caroline von Bardua (1781–1854) sang one of Hummel’s or Zelter’s lieder on a poem of Goethe. The poet was quick to vex the amateur singer “not a little” if she did not deliver his words clearly.²

This example only shows Bardua to have been making some technical errors. Yet in the salons—which were, by definition, women-led institutions—women’s approaches to the work of Goethe, Schiller, and the Berlin/Jena Romantics presented larger and ongoing challenges to their ideologies regarding inwardness. Women in the salons questioned ideologies of autonomy and a freer intersubjectivity through their activities as hostesses, readers, performers, and writers—whether meaning to do so or not. Furthermore the live, unpredictable social interactions of the era’s salons found an analogue in the periodical pages of Berlin and other northern and central German cities. Both serious journals and lighter, entertainment-oriented magazines reported on the work of Goethe, Schlegel, and others, and satirical pieces also appeared with some frequency, demonstrating that the conversations salon-goers likely had concerning lofty claims about autonomy or sociability may have turned derisive. The public nature of women’s practices in salons and the lively, often not very serious conversations concerning ideologies of the self in the press exemplify how lived practice could challenge ideologies of innerness and how to enclose it. To perform lieder in salon contexts was to encapsulate these larger tensions within the concentrated space of a single song.

Efforts to enclose innerness were, nevertheless, ongoing and important. They were the only way of setting apart innerness as a valued cultural quality. The persistence of this project signals the extent to which the inner self was also sensed to be fragile and undeveloped. This aspect of interiority connected it to the German inflection of the idea of self-cultivation, known as Bildung, that Goethe and others theorized and that formed part of the general cultural outlook of the bourgeoisie in general. Setting some kind of an enclosure around the inner self or around an ideal social gathering thus allowed the self-in-progress to grow in a way that would be beneficial to the individual and society in general. Singing intimate lyric poems in the form of lieder had a role to play in this process as well.

Autonomy as a Protective Enclosure: Goethe and Schiller

In the scene first introduced at the end of the introduction, the Harper sings alone and then privately for Wilhelm in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Goethe’s description of the relative roles of solitude, fellow feeling, and even an imagined broader sociability can at first give the reader the impression that these states might all have equal importance for the inner self. Yet the Harper’s second song emphasizes an autonomous version of self-protection in solitude to such a degree that it overtakes the other perspectives:

Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt Ach! der ist bald allein, Ein jeder lebt, ein jeder liebt, Und lässt ihn seiner Pein. Ja! lasst mich meiner Qual! Und kann ich nur einmal Recht einsam sein, Dann bin ich nicht allein. Es schleicht ein Liebender lauschend sacht, Ob seine Freundin allein? So überschleicht bei Tag und Nacht Mich Einsamen die Pein, Mich Einsamen die Qual. Ach werd’ ich erst einmal Einsam im Grabe sein, Da lässt sie mich allein!^3

He who turns to solitude Alas! He is soon alone, Each one lives, each one loves, And leaves him to his pain. Yes! Leave me to my torment! And if I can just once Truly dwell in solitude Then I will not be alone. A lover softly creeps and listens, Whether his beloved is alone? And so come creeping, day and night To me, in my solitude, my pain, To me, in my solitude, my torment. Oh, when I will finally be In my solitary grave Then my sorrow will leave me alone!

The Harper’s slant on solitude is full of despair and even pathological; however, Goethe nevertheless gestures here toward a view of solitude he means to praise. Though he begins the song “He who turns to solitude / Alas! He is soon alone,” he concludes the stanza with an ironic twist on this conceit: “And if I can just once / Truly dwell in solitude / Then I will not be alone.” Perhaps more painfully, but also decisively, he similarly concludes the second stanza: “Oh, when I will finally be / In my solitary grave / Then my sorrow will leave me alone.” The poem depicts the Harper’s pathological suffering, but it also validates solitude (the state of being “einsam,” as opposed to “allein,” or lonely) to a significant degree. One’s inner self is one’s own most important companion, whether in peace or in pain.

The concern for autonomy, and even solitude, that surfaces in the poem of the Harper has parallels in a number of Goethe’s other poems and plays, as it does in Schiller’s literary and philosophical output. Autonomy even appears as a guiding notion for both thinkers in the place where it would seem to be most alien: in the way the two friends styled their formative relationship with one another in their correspondence. While each man emphasized that the other was in some way a perfect foil for his thoughts and creative processes, this double mirror also foregrounded the two poets’ relative autonomy and distance from one another. They implied the existence of a protective barrier that kept the autonomous inner core of each man intact. Both Schiller and Goethe spoke at times as if their original natures were independent, autonomous, and even incommensurable. There were of course basic personal reasons for this rhetoric, including the difference in age between the men (Goethe was born in 1749, while Schiller was born in 1759). Yet given their philosophical postures elsewhere, it is also unsurprising that they framed their inspiring encounters in this way. The two writers indicate their interaction shaped and further refined their character and abilities and indeed extended and enlarged their faculties, but it did not, in their view, introduce foreign content into their autonomous inner selves.

One poignant exchange of thanks between the two men features guarded autonomy, even as it points toward the value each placed on the insights and personal developments resulting from their friendship. While he was working on parts of his Wallenstein trilogy, as well as Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Letters on the aesthetic education of man), Schiller tells Goethe that he owes his literary improvement to “knowing” Goethe. He then pinpoints the nature of their relationship, as he sees it:

For only the prolonged and frequent contact with a mind of a nature so opposed to mine and objectively set apart from me, and then the intense movement which draws me to it and the combined effort which I apply to contemplate it and simultaneously assimilate it in thought—only this fortunate circumstance could render me able to move back so far and in all directions the boundaries of my own nature.⁴

Schiller concludes by acknowledging a process in which he “assimilates” Goethe’s very different nature into thought. The German text indicates that he struggles to “think” Goethe’s nature, and thereby “moves back” the boundaries of his own nature. Throughout this passage, he frames this activity as an autonomous act of contemplation of a distant, outside force. Despite all of the camaraderie the two poets had come to enjoy, Schiller describes the fundamental principle of this encounter in terms of a lasting distance. He “can consider” Goethe’s nature “at a distance to be an objective reality”; though he is drawn to it, he only “contemplates” it and “assimilates it in thought” with effort. Through a lens adjusted to emphasize autonomy, Schiller thus renders an otherwise sociable and likely fun collaboration as an effort-laden exercise in aesthetic contemplation. This posture would accord well with his extended account of the autonomous contemplation of autonomous works of art in his own aesthetic theory.

Goethe, referring to Schiller’s tendency toward reflective philosophical speculation as a poet as against his own more objective instincts, also gives primacy to autonomous contemplation as the result of their collaborations:

If I rendered you the service of being for you the representative expression of a good number of objective realities, in return you have brought me back from a too rigorously objective observation of the external world and its laws to withdrawal into myself. You have taught me to look with more attention at the complexity of the inner man, you have procured me a second youth and made of me once again the poet I had practically ceased to be.⁵

Goethe acknowledges Schiller’s vital effect on his worldview, gesturing toward an objective versus subjective distinction between the two poets made famous as part of Schiller’s concept of the naïve and the sentimental in poetry. Yet he also frames the interaction as an outer influence on his own unchangeable inner core. Goethe treats the intersubjective aspect of his conversations with Schiller as an important but secondary waystation on a journey that begins with his own autonomous self and ends with “withdrawal into” that same autonomy as its goal. Correlatively he learns to contemplate (like Schiller, always at some distance) “the complexity of inner man” in others for the sake of writing about them. Given this tone it is perhaps no surprise that on the first full publication of the Goethe-Schiller correspondence in 1828, the reviewer for the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung (Pages for literary conversation) found this rhetorically maintained distance striking. He points out Goethe’s own commitment to a more distanced, “practically based” friendship, quoting the poet’s own ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Safeguarding the Self
• 2 Breathing Subjectivity
• 3 Serious Play in the Salon
• 4 The Poetic Public Sphere
• 5 Lieder in an Aria’s Clothing
• 6 Mignon as Public Property
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover