Singing in the Age of Anxiety

Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars

Laura Tunbridge

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226563572
• eBook ISBN: 9780226563602
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: 20th Century History

In New York and London during World War I, the performance of lieder—German art songs—was roundly prohibited, representing as they did the music and language of the enemy. But as German musicians returned to the transatlantic circuit in the 1920s, so too did the songs of Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf, and Richard Strauss. Lieder were encountered in a variety of venues and media—at luxury hotels and on ocean liners, in vaudeville productions and at Carnegie Hall, and on gramophone recordings, radio broadcasts, and films. 

Laura Tunbridge explores the renewed vitality of this refugee musical form between the world wars, offering a fresh perspective on a period that was pervaded by anxieties of displacement. Through richly varied case studies, Singing in the Age of Anxiety traces how lieder were circulated, presented, and consumed in metropolitan contexts, shedding new light on how music facilitated unlikely crossings of nationalist and internationalist ideologies during the interwar period.

Notes

Introduction

1. W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, ed. Alan Jacobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 9.

2. Ibid., 13.

3. Ibid., 3.

4. David Trotter, Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

5. Musicological studies of the interwar period in New York and London that indicate these predilections include Carol J. Oja, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Ralph Giordano, Satan in the Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008); John Howland, “Ellington Uptown”: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan press, 2009); and Alexandra Wilson’s forthcoming book on operatic culture in 1920s Britain.

6. Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011).

7. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

8. Laura Tunbridge, The Song Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

9. Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), 243.

10. The locus classicus is Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

11. Remarque’s first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, was about the struggles of a young German who joined the army after the First World War. Despite publishers’ belief that the appetite for war-related material had waned, it was one of the best sellers of the late 1920s, including in translation. Heralded as a tribute to pacifism, it was banned in the Third Reich as degenerate.

12. Erich Maria Remarque, The Promised Land, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Vintage, 2015), 293. Remarque’s widow had published a version of the manuscript in 1971, the year after he died.

13. See Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970); of course, in the 1920s many conceived of the era as postwar.

14. Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 7; and, on the period experiencing “a crisis of civilization,” 363–69. Alexandra Harris discusses anxiety and civilization in the interwar period in the preface to her Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010); David W. Ellwood touches on pessimism about Europe and the “civilization under threat” mentality of the later 1920s in The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 145–46.

15. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Gouldsblom, and Stephen Mennell, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

16. On the context of Elias’s conception of Kultur and Zivilisation, with particular reference to the contradictory opinions of his contemporaries Oswald Spengler and Siegmund Freud, see Jacinta O’Hagan, Conceptualizing the West in International Relations: From Spengler to Said (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 59–82; and Harry Redner, The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2015).

17. See Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

18. Clive Bell, Civilization: An Essay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1928), 13.

19. The contentious boundaries between high-, middle-, and lowbrow cultural experiences, particularly with regard to new media, are discussed by, among others, David Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Erica Brown and Mary Grover, eds., Middlebrow Literary Culture: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (London: Palgrave, 2011).

20. Joseph Horowitz, Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siècle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012).

21. Raymond Williams, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism” (1985), in The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 37–48.

22. There were, of course, significant venues outside of these neighborhoods, such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

23. For more on Anglo-American relations, see Genevieve Abravanel, Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

24. In his discussion of network analysis, Jürgen Osterhammel cautions against overlooking hierarchies and argues for considering nodes that may be of varying “thicknesses”; see his The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 710–24.

25. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1.

26. Stephen Greenblatt, “A Mobility Studies Manifesto,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Ines Županov, Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus, Heike Paul, Pál Nyíri, and Friederike Pannewick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 250–53.

27. The term “Dollarland” appears in newspaper clippings from 1915 and 1921 in Frieda Hempel, My Golden Age of Singing, annotated William R. Moran, with a prologue and epilogue by Elizabeth Johnston (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1998), 226 and 339.

28. Cavicchi, Listening and Longing, 5.

29. An exception is the theorist Heinrich Schenker’s diary of his wireless listening; see Kirsty Hewlett, “Heinrich Schenker and the Radio,” Music Analysis 34 (2015): 244–64.

30. See Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–13). An equivalent history is not available for music, but some information on New York is available in Walter B. Bailey, “‘For the Serious Listeners Who Swear Neither At nor By Schoenberg: Music Criticism, the Great War, and the Dawning of a New Attitude towards Schoenberg and Ultra-Modern Music,” Journal of Musicology 32 (2015): 279–322; and The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, ed. Christopher Dingle, is forthcoming.

31. According to the Grove Dictionary, 103 music journals were founded in Great Britain between 1920 and 1940; in North America the total was 91. This was not more than had appeared in the first decade of the century, but they included some titles that became very well established (for comparison, between 1900 and 1909 fifty-five such journals appeared; however, most did not last more than five years). Many of the smaller interwar journals admittedly were also very short-lived and unstable: in a 1921 editorial the Monthly Musical Record pointed out that The Sackbut had changed editorship three times in eigh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• introduction  An Anxious Age
• one  Transatlantic Arrivals
• two  Languages of Listening
• three  Lieder Society
• four  Saving Music
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index