Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars
ISBN: 9780226563602
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / University of Chicago Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Musicology and Music 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.

Laura Tunbridge is Professor of Music and Henfrey Fellow and Tutor in Music at St Catherine's College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Schumann's Late Style and The Song Cycle.

hidden image for function call