January 11, 2027
6 pm CET
Susan Wollenberg: Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und –leben cycle (1840): signals and significance
The invitation to participate in the Artsong programme offers a welcome opportunity to rehearse some ideas concerning Schumann’s song cycle to poetic texts by Adelbert von Chamisso, portraying a woman’s life and love (it goes better in that order in English). The male-gendered joint authorship is not fundamentally problematic (for reasons I will briefly elucidate in my talk). Interestingly, Laura Tunbridge (in The Song Cycle, published by Cambridge University Press) notes that the first public performance of the cycle was by the baritone Julius Stockhausen.
(However questions of its gender-related interpretation are formed, Schumann’s (and Chamisso’s) work could have contributed in some way towards inspiring more than one compositional project in our own time, by women composers portraying women’s lives.)
If we asked listeners to identify the most significant point in the cycle – its most affecting moment or passage – I imagine it would probably be the final song chosen, where she is shown as distraught at her husband’s death. It begins so differently – and powerfully – in comparison with the other songs up to that point. And it exerts a long-range influence on the structure of the entire cycle.
But for all its significance that’s not the song that has initially triggered the main part of my contribution to this series. Nor is it the momentous revelation captured in song 6, with her indication of her pregnancy. The moment that particularly serves as catalyst for my talk comes at the end of song 5, ‘Helft mir ihr Schwestern’. It was here on first encountering the cycle that I was struck by the insistent motif contained in its piano postlude, that of the ‘Farewell’ (the horn-call), probably most readily associated with Beethoven’s ‘Les Adieux’, his Sonata for Piano in E♭, Op. 81a. This passage resonated most insistently in my mind after that first encounter with the cycle.
Schumann here presents it in march-topical clothing, thus mingling the farewell to her sisters, as they help the bride-to-be with preparations for her wedding, with the idea of the Wedding March. Among other aspects of the cycle, I will consider the Farewell motif’s implications within and beyond the song containing it. This song – located in the centre of the cycle – is altogether extremely meaningful in relation to both sisterhood, and marriage.
Susan Wollenberg is Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. Among her published work on women composers she edited the conference proceedings ‘Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn Bartholdy) and her Circle’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review (2007), and co-edited with Aisling Kenny Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied (2015). She contributed chapters to Clara Schumann Studies, ed. Joe Davies and The Songs of Fanny Hensel, ed. Stephen Rodgers (2021); the Routledge Handbook of Women in Music, ed. Rhiannon Mathias (2022); and Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context, eds. Thomas Schmidt and Benedict Taylor (2025). She co-edited with Mariateresa Storino, Women Composers in New Perspectives (2023) and with Matthew Head the Cambridge Companion to Women Composers (2024).
Harald Krebs: A Munich Maiden Makes her Mark: Josephine Lang’s Early Songs for Men’s Chorus
In the early 1830s, at the age of 15, Josephine Lang composed six songs for men’s chorus. These yet unknown songs deserve to be cared about and cared for (through editions, recordings and academic investigation), both because they played an important role in the composer’s career and because they are astonishingly fine works.
In a recent article on Josephine Lang’s early years, Anna Bredenbach points out that the first public performance of Lang’s music mentioned by the press featured a song for men’s chorus; the performing ensemble was the Liederkranz, Munich’s premier men’s choir. This prestigious performance provided Lang with widespread exposure within Munich and contributed significantly to the launching of her compositional career. Another early interaction with the Liederkranz, equally important in her career, was a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s arrangements of two of her solo Lieder for men’s chorus and brasses, completed and performed during his second visit to Munich in 1831. This public evidence of Mendelssohn’s regard for Lang’s talent immensely bolstered her reputation in the city. Once she had access to the Liederkranz, she continued to compose songs for them. Bredenbach documents two additional performances in the early 1830s.
Two of these early songs –respectively, a serenade, and an autumn song describing women’s activities during harvest time–exhibit a dancelike grace and lightness. The remaining songs feature distinctly masculine themes, such as fishing (“Fischerchor”), battle (“Schlacht-Gebet” and “Trinklied vor der Schlacht”), and drinking (aside from the preceding, she composed a “Trinklied im Maÿ”). The songs addressing these topics are quite different in style, filled with rhythmic surprises such as offbeat accents and non-quadratic hypermeter (see Examples 1 to 3). All of these songs reveal Lang’s skills, acquired without formal music education, in four-part writing and in the application of early 19th-century chromatic devices. For example, “An den Frühling” contains an abrupt modulation to flat VI and a return to the tonic key via an augmented sixth chord.
Harald Krebs is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of Victoria, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He was President of the Society for Music Theory in 2011-13. His publications on 19th-century music include Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonance in the Music of Robert Schumann(OUP, 1999), which won the Society for Music Theory’s Wallace Berry Award. His research on Josephine Lang (1815-80) led to the book Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs (OUP, 2007—co-authored with Sharon Krebs), as well as to several editions of Lang’s songs. His current research explores the song autographs of Josephine Lang and Fanny Hensel.
Rebecca Grotjahn: Queer songs? On the question of vocal parts in the lieder of Johannes Brahms
For decades it has been debated whether in performing lieder – not just those of Brahms – the poetic subject and the singer should be of the same gender. In 2005, Beatrix Borchard argued that the gender of the singer to be largely irrelevant in nineteenth-century lieder performance. On the other hand, Marion Gerards identified in Brahms’ song settings strategies for negotiating various song subjects (the poetic ‘I’, the singing voice, the female or male singer etc.) that aim to construct a masculine subject. I wish to explore this question from a musical-analytical perspective. My aim is to demonstrate that Brahms’s compositional strategies allow for performance in the notated register (which generally corresponds to the voice types soprano, mezzo-soprano or alto) as well as an octave lower (tenor, baritone, bass) without causing any harmonic irregularities such transposition might cause, which is by no means the case for all art songs of this era. Through the texture of his piano parts, Brahms thus ensures that the songs can be performed by all ‘vocal genders’. Consequently, I would like to develop the thesis that in doing so, he creates a framework that allows for alternative conceptions of gender, extending as far as queer and non-binary casting practices.
Prof. Dr. Rebecca Grotjahn (1961) has worked since 2006 as professor of musicology with a focus on gender studies at the University of Paderborn and the Detmold University of Music. She obtained her doctorate in 1997 from the University of Music, Drama, and Media Hannover and completed her habilitation in 2004 at the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. Her research focuses on the history of singing, 19th-century songs and song cycles, gender studies related to Johann Sebastian Bach, the social, everyday and media history of music, and material music culture.