Stephen Rodgers: Gathering Leaves: Pauline Decker and the Limits of the Song Cycle

In the 19th century, song offered women composers a socially sanctioned medium of expression, even as monumental musical forms such as symphonies and operas were off limits to them. Yet the song cycle—a monumental form of a miniature genre—remained largely out of reach. Few women produced true cycles, and when they did, their contributions were often minimized or obscured (as in Clara Schumann’s and Fanny Hensel’s joint cycles with their more famous male counterparts). While individual songs could flourish in the domestic sphere, cycles demanded a larger and more public frame of presentation that clashed with prevailing ideas about women’s artistic limits. My presentation focuses on a cycle of songs that I created from Lieder by Pauline Decker (1811–1882), forthcoming from ClarNan Editions. Decker was a celebrated soprano who was forced to give up her performing career after getting married at the age of 21; late in life she published 27 Lieder, most of them individually. Drawing on 19th- and early 20th-century performance practices, in which performers often assembled groups of songs from existing pieces, my cycle (entitled Liebesblätter) unfolds as a dialogue between two lovers who cannot bring themselves to express their love for one another and therefore end up apart, looking back on a future that might have been. The project offers a vehicle for performers who would otherwise have to dig through archives and online databases to access these extraordinary songs, and also an entry-point for listeners who are eager to discover hidden gems from the depths of 19th-century song. Yet even more, it provides Pauline Decker access to a genre that was unavailable to her, as it was to so many other women composers, using curation as a form of advocacy.

Stephen Rodgers is Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music, Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship, and Department Head of Academic Music at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. Rodgers’s research focuses on the relationship between music and poetry in art songs from the nineteenth century to the present day, especially art songs by underrepresented composers. His edited essay collection entitled The Songs of Fanny Hensel was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press; in 2024 it won the Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award from the Society for Music Theory. His book The Songs of Clara Schumann appeared in 2023 with Cambridge University Press. He also hosts a podcast about poetry and song, called Resounding Verse, as well a website devoted to songs by composers whose music has been marginalized, called Art Song Augmented.

Stephen Rodgers: Gathering Leaves: Pauline Decker and the Limits of the Song Cycle

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