Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century by Jennifer Ronyak (review)

Performers and scholars of nineteenth-century song are continually faced with the challenge of identifying and expressing subjectivity. Jennifer Ronyak's monograph Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century seizes upon this problem. Its first part (chaps. 1–3) sheds new light on the interconnectedness among nineteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic views of subjectivity, notions of the German term Innigkeit, and the development of semiprivate contexts—like the Stägemann salon in Berlin—for the performance of subjectivity. Its second part (chaps. 4–6) explores a range of public performance circumstances that involved lieder and that developed from ca. 1800 to 1832 (the year of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's death) in northern and central Germany. Overall, the book argues that subjectivity, as perceived in intimate poetry and its musical setting, was affected by and understood through the situation of its performance.

The book embarks on two ambitious, interrelated projects: (1) it tracks the development of private, semipublic, and public performance contexts and venues, focusing on Berlin and Leipzig, and (2) it examines the relationship between self-formation (Bildung) and self-expression of interiority (Innigkeit) that the salon and public concert facilitate to different extents. In chapters 1 and 2, Ronyak speculates, on the one hand, about how performers might engage in degrees of "intimate expression," either shielding or revealing their "inner self" (p. 21) as prompted by performance indications or personal interpretation of interiority conveyed in a lied. On the other hand, she explains in chapter 3 that the early salon, particularly the home of Friedrich August and Elisabeth von Stägemann in Berlin, was also a site of self-cultivation, owing to the creative composition and performance of lyric poetry and music in the Liederspiel and the free social interactions that it fostered. Salon members built self-knowledge and honed their capacity for intimate expression with each other, thereby "setting apart innerness as a valued cultural quality" (p. 22) while also providing a safe haven for its expression that was circumscribed by the "walls of the salon themselves" (p. 32).

These topics in chapters 1 through 3 flesh out Ronyak's main claim: that performance as conceived in the nineteenth century embodies two types of subjectivity, which the author derives from Goethe and Friedrich Schleiermacher. According to Ronyak, Goethe describes an autonomous self that requires protection from others, while Schleiermacher's treatise on sociability and other publications (e.g., the Athenäum Fragments) promote entering the self into playful, mutually beneficial social interactions. Ronyak's invocation of protected versus shared subjectivity is essential to her argument that prevailing trends in lied scholarship have focused too heavily on analyzing text–music relations, thereby eschewing an understanding of how early nineteenth-century performance contexts influenced the formation and expression of subjectivity in these works. In the book's epilogue, Ronyak writes:

Since Edward Cone's discussion of Schubert's songs in The Composer's Voice [University of California Press, 1974] and other texts, the tendency to use text-music hermeneutics to trace the psychological—or dramatic or narrative process—of a given persona has been a central theme that always runs the risk of blinding us to other musico-poetic approaches or possible contextual arguments. Now might be the time to distrust this tradition as a necessary song analysis starting point, at least momentarily, in order to at least see what other opportunities may then arise when looking at the lyric genre of song.

(p. 216)

Whereas Cone might view a musical setting (in part) as a composer's reading of the text, Ronyak advocates for viewing a musical setting as inessential garb, which only enhances poetic utterances that she classifies as expressing a literary "lyric mode" (p. 2). According to Ronyak, meaning resides in the ephemeral performance of these utterances and does not...