Why Winter Came for Women. Exploring the Exclusion of Women from Winterreise’S Performance Tradition
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Why Winter Came for Women. Exploring the exclusion of women from Winterreise’s performance tradition It has always been my dream to perform Schubert’s Winterreise. However, as a twenty-three-year-old woman, I was not surprised when my voice teacher discouraged me from learning the cycle. When reading Janet Wasserman’s 2017 Schubertian article about female recordings of the work, I felt that my dreams were given justification, yet I was still curious as to why in this day and age, the cycle is deemed solely appropriate for men. Women once were able to perform the work without second thought, yet this female inclusive narrative has somehow been deleted from today’s performance tradition; conditioning audiences to prefer a male portrayal of Müller’s protagonist. At what point in its history did this become the case? While Wasserman suggests that female exclusion was possibly the result of the women’s suffrage movement, I’d like to argue an alternate timeline. The exclusion of women from the performance tradition of Winterreise began during the revitalization of Lied after the second world war, when a new masculine narrative was crystallized by the recording industry and further protracted by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s legacy. The trends of female representation and later, exclusion in live performances and recordings of Winterreise and the way in which they parallel the second world war and Fischer-Dieskau’s influence via the recording industry merit this conclusion. During Schubert’s lifetime, both men and women were free to sing Winterreise, regardless of the clear masculine narrative put forth by Wilhelm Müller’s text. Schubert and his Lied marinated within a period that valued gender transcendence; the German Romantic movement. Works by poets and artists from this movement were characterized by this transcendent narrative; rather than writing with implemented gender roles in mind, they seemed to write for a non-binary spirit who was beyond physical characteristics, like gender.1 While Muller’s poetic protagonist embodied the ideal Bildungsroman male, Schubert’s setting of the work promoted the idea of mapping one’s own narrative onto these Romantic works. Schubert was thought to have done just this with his Winterreise, which proved autobiographical during his own physical and mental deterioration. The semi-public premiere of the work on 10 January 1828 consisted of only the first song, “Gute Nacht,” and was performed by Ludwig Tietze at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna.2 The first half of the cycle was published three days later on 14 January 1828 by Tobias Haslinger, broadening the cycle’s accessibility by making it available to performers both amateur and professional alike. This aim for accessibility proved successful, for only twelve days after Ludwig Tietze’s premiere, the second performance of Schubert’s work occurred; a female performance by Franziska von Pratobevera. In a letter dated 22 January 1828, von Pratobevera’s older sister Marie von Pratobevera wrote to her betrothed, “Our little nightingale really does sing soulfully, especially the latest songs by Schubert, ‘The Winter Journey.”3 In 1826, von Pratobevera was already considered an excellent singer of Schubert’s songs, supporting her legitimacy and popularity as a Lied singer within salon culture.4 While the entire cycle was not published until 30 December 1828, it can be inferred that von Pratobevera sang pieces from the first twelve songs of the set. This account proves extremely important for it points towards the normality of woman singing these works during Schubert’s lifetime, even though their performances were most likely given in semi-private salons. Women such as von Pratobevera would have been considered the ideal singers of the genre, thought to possess the ideal Romantic sensibility appropriate for works such as Winterreise. After Schubert’s death and as we move through the fin-de-siècle, the disregard for gender narratives assigned to the cycle prevailed. This conclusion was made through surveying programmes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Vienna and Berlin, which displayed various female performances of Winterreise.5 Performances of Schubert’s cycle in the fin-de-siècle often were segmented, and only one or two songs from the work were performed per concert. Entire cycles were rarely performed in full, critic 1 Shreffler C. Anne, “The Myth of the Canon's Invisible Hand,” Not Another Music History Cliché!, 27 April 2017, www.notanothermusichistorycliche.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-myth-of-canons-invisible-hand-guest.html?m=1. 2 Program of the Seventh Evening Entertainment held by the Philharmonic Society cited in Deutsch, Otto Erich, and Eric Blom, trans, A Documentary Biography (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1946), p. 709. 3 Letter from Marie von Pratobevera to Josef Bergmann (Vienna, 22 January 1828), cited in Deutsch, (1946), p. 716. 4 Skoda, Eva, and Peter Branscombe, Schubert Studies: Schubert Studies: Problems of Style and Chronology, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 140. 5 Information gathered from programmes within the “Ernst Henschel Collection,” British Library: Henschel, E. (1892). [A miscellaneous collection of prospectuses, programmes, wordbooks and handbills for performances given at various German venues between 1892 and 1938 (the majority in Berlin) and in London between 1938 and 1966, held loosely and arranged chronologically over 37 boxes as the collection of Ernst Henschel.], and within the twelve boxes of “Austria 1824-” within the “CPH collections” housed at the Royal College of Music Library, London. Franz Stoepel writing that “the whole suffers from monotony and for another because the composer in particular has spread it all rather too much.”6 For example, such an instance of segmentation occurred on 5 April 1858 at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna when Marie Kreihuber sang “Die Post.”7 Kreihuber, wife of the famed lithograph artist, was an extension of the Schubertiad group and often attended salon parties at Schober’s home.8 Her close association with Schubert justifies her performance of the work, suggesting that such a female performance would have occurred within the Schubertiad. Throughout the 1890s, singers such as Hermine Spies and Alice Barbi also included “Die Post” in their concerts when signing at halls such as the Saal Bösendorfer in Vienna.9 “Die Post” was often pulled out and performed in concerts by women throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century; possibly due to the guise of gender neutrality presented through the text. Unlike other songs in the cycle, songs such as “Die Post” were gender- neutral, excluding the words “he” or any reference to the male protagonist. Another gender-neutral song often performed was “Der Lindenbaum,” Hertha Demlow doing so on 9 December 1910 at the Beethoven Saal in Berlin.10 Another Lied singer who often featured pieces from Schubert’s Winterreise on her Liederabends was Alice Barbi. In Vienna on two separate occasions in 1890, not only did Barbi perform popular and gender neutral pieces such as “Die Post” and “Der Lindenbaum,” but also sang “Der Wegweiser.”11 This tradition of performing single songs in concert continued well into the twentieth century.12 While pulling out these select pieces of Winterreise was common, baritone Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) began singing full cycles in performance. Regarded as one of Lied’s primary innovator, Stockhausen was the first person to publicly sing the entirety of Winterreise on 27 November 1862 in Hamburg.13 Not only was Stockhausen the first to perform cycles with male protagonists, such as Winterreise and Die Schöne Müllerin in full, but he was also the first to sing the entirety of Schumann’s Frauenleben und Liebe publicly.14 Schumann’s cycle specifically has a female protagonist, tracing a woman’s life and love, yet Stockhausen’s performance implies that the rules regarding gender-specific protagonists in performances of this time were nonexistent. This liberal regard for gendered protagonists applied to his pupils as well, for as Wassermann mentioned, in 1873, his pupil Johanna Schwartz sang parts of Winterreise in recital.15 In 1910 another student of Stockhausen challenged Winterreise’s gendered narrative and sang the full cycle; German contralto Therese Behr-Schnabel. Schnabel was one of the first women to publicly perform the entirety of Winterreise, carrying on Stockhausen’s cycle gender-bending legacy. Of her first performance on 12 January 1910 in Berlin, critic Paul Bekker celebrated her achievement, writing “her ability to grasp the spirit of the work and convey it by the sheer power of suggestion was so irresistible that all the usual demands of the listener seemed to disappear.”16 In 1928, Schnabel once again performed the full cycle within a six evening concert series at the “Beethovensaal” in Berlin. Three of the six concerts were dedicated to complete cycles, performing not only Winterreise on 6 March 1828, but also Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, on 21 February, and Schwanengesang on 27 March.17 In addition to the many live performances by women in the concert hall, the recording industry saw a similar trend. Through her article, Wasserman identifies many women who recorded selections from the cycle, providing the Deutsch song number and the year each was recorded. Many of the recordings pulled 6 Originally in the Munich Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung (July 28, 1828), cited in Deutsch, (1946), p.795. 7 Programme of concert given by Kreihuber, Marie on 5 April 1858 at the Saal der Gesellschaft der Musik freunde, Vienna. Programme found within the twelve boxes of “Austria 1824-” within the “CPH collections” housed at the Royal College of Music Library, London. 8 Clive, Peter, Schubert and his World, A Biographical Dictionary, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p.104. 9 Programme of concert given by Alice Barbi on 8 March1893 at the Saal Bösendorfer, Vienna.