At first glance, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise would hardly suggest itself for choral adaptation. The history of choral arrangements of songs from the cycle bears this out: The only song to have a major presence in choral music since the nineteenth century is “Der Lindenbaum,” which was first adapted by Friedrich Silcher in a way that emphasized its folklike, communal potential over its darker elements. Other songs of the cycle, such as “Der Leiermann,” seem to innately resist any similar treatment. This essay focuses on how the recalcitrance of “Der Leiermann” in relationship to choral arrangement colors the approaches of two recent arrangers to the song, Thomas Hanelt and Gregor Meyer; the chapter then takes into account a more improvisatory group performance of the song presented by student performers at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in December 2008. The possibility of choral or other non-solo approaches to “Der Leiermann” innately forces performers and audiences to approach the wanderer’s solitude, and the cycle’s ending, from new subjective perspectives, even as these arrangements also attractively offer nonprofessional singers a chance to grapple with Schubert’s masterwork.

Although there seems to be an essential relationship between scholarship and performance of the Lied, the process by which scholarly inquiry and practices of performance mutually benefit one another can seem mysterious and undefined. In this introduction to The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology, the editors trace the state of research touching these issues, including the role of the “performative turn” in Lied scholarship, historical performance practice research in the genre, and the tradition of scholars’ guides for performers. They then summarize how the essays of the collection model new ways in which scholarship can contribute to new performance experimentation in the genre, and how reflecting on performance can continue to lead to new research perspectives.

This chapter turns to a series of interviews with five distinguished Lied interpreters, at various stages in their careers and coming from both German and Anglo-American contexts, to look at how professional performers think about the role of musicological inquiry or information in relationship to their art form. Based on interviews with Christian Gerhaher, Thomas Quasthoff, Martha Guth, Randall Scarlata, and Clara Osowski, the chapter examines issues including: the role of understanding historical context in preparing or relating to song performance; “dramatic” vs. more “lyric” approaches to singing and thinking about Lieder; the use of historical research in assembling concert programs; and the role of historical knowledge in decisions concerning transposition and other performance concerns.

Bettina von Arnim is best known for her social role within early nineteenth-century German salon circles and for her literary achievements, which include the three epistolary books, Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835), Die Günderrode (1840), and Clemens Brentanos Frühlingskranz (1844). In addition to being the sister of the writer Clemens Brentano and the wife of Brentano’s close colleague Achim von Arnim, she was personally entangled with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ludwig van Beethoven and maintained other important relationships with prominent cultural figures. From 1810 to 1859, when she lived in Berlin, she was also an integral part of salon life there, as both a frequent guest and hostess. Less well known is the fact that she also engaged in the improvisation and composition of Lieder. Although the scholars Ann Willison Lemke and Renate Moering have done extensive work on her musical compositions and activities, her musical profile remains slight within musicology. Her status as an amateur composer who enjoyed only limited skill in comparison to her abilities as a writer has been problematic for her status as an object of further musicological study. While she did publish a handful of songs to some success, much of the evidence that we have of this salonnière’s compositional activities come in the form of unfinished sketches and other scribbles in her personal musical notebook, held today at the Pierpont Morgan Library as manuscript Heineman 9B.

This essay looks at one of the most pregnant of the unfinished sketches in that source: a melodic outline of a setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ II (‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’). Although nominally a sketch study, this investigation departs from the traditional method of dealing with sketches as preliminary drafts of finished works. I treat Arnim’s sketch as an aesthetic object that points towards overlapping social and aesthetic aspects of Lied composition in relationship to salon musical activity in the early nineteenth century. More specifically, I classify the sketch as what I will call an ‘accidental’ and ‘amateur’ Romantic fragment. This framework builds on the aesthetic category of the Romantic fragment in order to illuminate underexplored aspects of that aesthetic category itself, to broaden its relationship to Lieder as a genre inherently associated with the salon and amateur musical activity, and to interrogate the status of amateur compositional activity – especially by women connected to salon life – within musicological study of the nineteenth century.