German Song Onstage. Laura Tunbridge

which Goehr has argued is a crucial way of communicating a work’s status to audiences.⁶ I will conclude by exploring some scholarly imperatives that have unwittingly encouraged the marginalization of this rich performance history.

      My case study is seven public performances of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, op. 48, given by the baritone Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906), the Lied’s “founding father,” with Clara Schumann.⁷ These concerts all took place in major German-speaking cities within a single decade, 1862–72. They were years of exploration and experimentation in the performance of song cycles in public; for example, Stockhausen had given the landmark first complete performance of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, D795, in 1856, and the first Dichterliebe in 1861.⁸ He continued to perform cycles in various formats during the 1860s. In 1874, his post as director of Berlin’s Stern choral society slowed his recital activities.⁹ The period 1862–72 also aligns with a peak in Clara Schumann’s career, before personal tragedies and declining health severely curtailed her playing.¹⁰ Such performances laid the foundations for the subsequent “monumentalization of the canonized Lied” in the 1880s.¹¹