Singing in the Age of Anxiety
Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction An Anxious Age
One Transatlantic Arrivals
Two Languages of Listening
Three Lieder Society
Four Saving Music
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
BBC Music Magazine
“This beautifully written book considers an intriguing juncture in music history . . . . Tunbridge brings exemplary scholarship and a warmly-accessible prose style to the book, making this a fascinating, hopeful study of how the ‘musical refugee’ of Lieder found unexpected shelter during anxious times. . . . Four stars.”
The New York Review of Books
“[The book] doesn’t concentrate on what are usually thought of as the main musical issues of the twentieth century: the developments of big institutions, modernism, and popular music. Its interest and achievement are to show how a quintessentially Austro-German art form, grounded in the German language and deeply implicated in both German nationalism and German Romanticism, was transmitted into the late twentieth century and beyond, to become in the LP age the hallmark of cosmopolitan and civilized music-making. . . . Tunbridge's tracing of the ups and downs of lieder singing in translation is subtle and extensive.”
CHOICE
“Within her tight focus on a particular musical form as performed in two cities over three decades, Tunbridge conveys a remarkable wealth of cultural history alongside the main narrative, which traces the evolving reception of German art songs by English-speaking audiences from WWI to the aftermath of WWII. . . . Recommended.”
Roger Parker, King’s College London
“Laura Tunbridge’s fascinating new book gives us a biography of German art song in troubled times. Her theme is a musical repertoire that, perhaps against the odds, proved remarkably patient of interpretation, adapting readily to new technologies and new ways of seeing the world. Her cast of characters, always sensitively drawn, comprises a fascinating miscellany of transatlantic musicians — of working men and women trying by means of their art to make sense of a perilous age.”
Susan Youens, University of Notre Dame
“In this important and beautifully written book, we learn much about the changing state of lieder performance between the two world wars, with mass media and the uses of song in cultural diplomacy all playing their roles in a shifting landscape. We discover fascinating tales of canon formation, of the venues and clubs and societies devoted to this small Romantic genre, of the singers who crossed the Atlantic between New York and London to offer German song to a variety of audiences, of the roles of radio broadcast shows in offering lieder to middle-brow listeners, and much, much more. From programming aboard ocean liners to the Schubert centenary in 1928, there are riches galore here, all of it connected by Tunbridge’s analyses of the dual workings of anxiety and civilization in the story of this genre. I repeat: this is an important book.”
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