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

On the surface, Laura Tunbridge's monograph is a reception history: "a narrative about canon formation" (p. 2). It examines the response to lieder— mainly that of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Richard Strauss—between the world wars, when such older repertoire and its myriad cultural, artistic, and national associations had become increasingly old fashioned and unpopular. But this is not essentially a book about repertoire but rather about changes in the performance and reception of lieder at a time when many of its renowned participants were in flux— both literally, as they crossed seas in search of success and often political freedom, and figuratively, as they swore allegiances to newly adopted countries. Fittingly, the focus is on New York and London—two "important nodes on the transatlantic musical network" (p. 6) that had complicated relationships with the national home of the genre because of large German immigrant populations (in the case of New York and the United States in general) or close geographical proximity and royal crown ties (in the case of London and Great Britain). Tunbridge ultimately argues that "this small-scale, primarily romantic form … akin to a musical refugee" (p. 1) was (somewhat surprisingly) resurrected in the 1940s; in fact, during interwar years "the performance culture surrounding lieder with which we are now familiar came into being" (p. 2). But to describe this book as a study about the transformation of lieder is not to do it justice either, for it includes so much more. It touches on many aspects of Anglo-American musical cultures—and tangentially German ones—in the politically and socially complex, newly born modern era that W. H. Auden deemed "the age of anxiety."

As Tunbridge clarifies in the introduction, "An Anxious Age," her book is a "use-history"; it examines how this "older technolog[y]" of (mainly) nineteenth-century lieder "was learned, sung, and listened to in regular concerts" in New York and London and how the genre intersected with new technologies and mass media, mainly through sound recording, radio, and film (p. 2). Tunbridge also considers audience members—their social classes and how and why they listened. She interrogates lieder's use in helping to solidify, and then erase, German enemy lines in the context and aftermath of one world war and its role in the later war in preserving "civilization."

To show this transformation in the "use" of lieder over time, the book moves somewhat chronologically, beginning and ending with the transnational and cosmopolitan space of ocean liners. Chapter 1, "Transatlantic Arrivals," focuses on musicians, mainly singers, embarking on and disembarking from journeys between Europe and the US. Tunbridge begins with concerts on board the ships—"striking for their wide-ranging programs" that included art music, Hawaiian guitar music, cabaret artists, and banjo playing— arguing that "while liners may have reinforced social boundaries according to the different classes of passengers, they were ideal spaces for chance meetings between nations and cultures" (p. 14). The entertainments on board were "also intended to introduce passengers to their destinations" (p. 14), but overall "despite or even because of their class associations—[they] were an integral part of this imaginary civilized cosmopolitanism" (p. 15).

Three sections follow that focus on the "disembarkation of musicians in New York or London as a means of illustrating the ways in which the First World War impacted musical life on both sides of the Atlantic" (p. 15). She begins by discussing American wartime attitudes toward German music and musicians. These attitudes were complicated, on the one hand, by widespread anti-German sentiment, and, on the other hand, by the presence of large German immigrant communities and German professional musicians. Tun-bridge elucidates this context particularly well through the example of the German-American contralto Ernestine Schumann...