The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology is a rich and timely volume, contributing to a growing body of scholarship devoted to studying Lieder and art song through the lens of performers and performance. Editors Benjamin Binder and Jennifer Ronyak have gathered a team of established Lied scholars, three with concurrent expertise as performers (according to the author biographies). The acclaimed song pianist Graham Johnson pays tribute to the renowned Lied scholar Susan Youens, the book’s dedicatee, in his foreword, and credits her with first making academic research meaningful to song performers, bridging a ‘gulf’ between them (p. xvii). Binder and Ronyak’s introduction then discusses the current nature of interactions between song performance and scholarship, asserting that Lied performers necessarily conduct a range of interdisciplinary research during their preparation, while scholars increasingly throw intensified emphasis onto understanding the Lied ‘as an act of performance (rather than only as a text to be “read”)’ (p. 1).

The editors’ aim is to capture something of the interactions between these communities and processes — largely undocumented so far within scholarship — and to promote further dialogue between Lied performance and musicology in the future. To this end, each author investigates a song, cycle, performer, and/or performance context as a window onto ‘the process by which musicological exploration may lead to new approaches to performance and vice versa’ (p. 3). The book ends with a co-authored chapter by the editors, reporting on a series of interviews held with contemporary Lied singers Christian Gerhaher, Thomas Quasthoff, Martha Guth, Randall Scarlata, and Clara Osowski.

Ultimately, Binder and Ronyak assert, the volume ‘opens up diverse avenues for performative experiment and aims to inspire performers to participate in an ongoing conversation with Lied scholars interested in performance’ (p. 3). They seek to go further than recent research into historical approaches to Lieder performance, and one novelty of the book is that the editors aim to relate such knowledge to contemporary performance culture, asking: ‘What might musicological research on historical, cultural, and aesthetic questions within performance have to offer Lied performers today? Can it inspire new ways of thinking about song for performance, presenting song in performance, or other modes of experimentation?’ (p. 4).

With the book comprising nine chapters, many authors explore neglected performers, performance practices, and contexts in ways that shed new light on canonical Lied repertoire, showing what might be gained interpretatively by exploring this repertoire not just through word–music interactions and hermeneutics but from a range of performative perspectives. Another of the book’s novelties is that many chapters throw emphasis not only onto historical performance contexts, but also onto studying contemporary performers and performance culture. For example, there’s new thinking here about Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und ‑leben , which from a gender perspective often poses challenges for performers and listeners today; this is approached anew by Natasha Loges, who recontextualizes the cycle, including by documenting overlooked literary contexts and women’s representation therein, how the songs were programmed by women in Robert’s time (notably by Clara Schumann), and how recent performers have presented the songs experimentally on recordings, with concluding ideas for future historically and politically inspired experimentation.

There’s also new thinking about Dichterliebe , as Laura Tunbridge considers neglected issues, including transposition, a standard practice among performers historically and today, but a sorely neglected topic within song studies in general. The chapter shows how overlooked performance traditions and histories pose challenges to long-held musicological assumptions and approaches. Schubert’s Winterreise is addressed from an equally novel perspective by the book’s co-editor Jennifer Ronyak, who explores recent choral and non-solo arrangements, drawing out questions of subjectivity as well as inclusivity in highlighting amateur participation in this repertoire through collective performance.

Arrangements also arise in Frankie Perry’s study of Aribert Reimann, the composer and collaborative pianist who for many years was a duo partner of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Brigitte Fassbaender, and others. Turning to his compositional activity in more recent years, Perry seeks to recover the ‘artistic multivalence of his relationship with art song’, drawing out ‘the jostling of musicological, compositional, and pianistic impulses within Reimann’s arrangements and reimaginings of nineteenth-century Lieder’ (pp. 103–04). A complex case study is explored with Reimann’s Mignon (1995), which involves the compilation and adaptation of various Schubert Mignon works that Perry reads as a form of musicological and analytical engagement in itself, ‘amounting both to a powerful defense of lesser-known and long-overlooked Lieder, and to a critique, unfolding in performance, of aspects of Schubert historiography’ (p. 104).

Heather Platt documents the performance styles, contexts, and reception of the baritone Max Heinrich, whose celebrity in North America at the turn of the twentieth century earned him the nickname ‘Wizard of Song’. Analysing neglected materials, including his song editions as well as critics’ reviews, Platt reconstructs a performative approach that embraced interpretative freedom when dealing with a composer’s text(s), as well as facial and bodily gestures that, she argues, were vital to the close relationship he developed with socially diverse audiences. Such flexible, gestural approaches — like the use of accessible English translations — have been less prominent within Lied performance after the mid-twentieth century, Platt rightly concludes, briefly proposing that such approaches might become a focus within future experimentation, especially in exploring ways to make art song more accessible to contemporary audiences.

Stephen Rodgers’s chapter brings welcome focus onto the work of neglected nineteenth-century composer Marie Franz, before it surveys performers’ initiatives today in promoting the work of women composers and calls on scholars and performers to share their resources in devising projects that recover neglected agencies and voices. This leads neatly into Lisa Feurzeig’s chapter describing a series of ‘unconventional’ Lieder performances she has co-directed in North America in recent years that were designed to share art song with ‘a broader audience that might not otherwise find its way to this compelling repertoire’ (p. 171). The chapter suggests ideas for future experimentation, from cross-genre and cross-media programming to improvisatory and aleatoric concepts, demonstrating the value of documenting the otherwise fleeting creative experimentation increasingly apparent within song culture today (such experimentation amply demonstrated in the 2025 Oxford International Song Festival, to take just one prominent example).

The authors’ methodologies arise largely from historical musicology and recent art song studies, though they are often novel in their creative blending and adaptation. This approach is broadly framed and introduced in Benjamin Binder’s excellent opening chapter, a close reading of Richard Strauss’s Heine setting ‘Schlechtes Wetter’. Binder combines analysis of the performative qualities of the poem and song with study of associated historical performers and practices: Elisabeth Schumann together with Strauss at the piano, consulting letters and diaries. Binder also consults audio material capturing her in performance with her husband Karl Alwin. There is then a final brief reflection on Binder’s own performances with soprano Sari Gruber and their different performance approaches for different contexts and audiences. Binder expertly demonstrates how the performative dimensions of a song are potentially multiple and how these contribute to the ways song might be understood to create and accrue meaning in and as performance. In this, the chapter frames the volume’s conceptual basis and many of its key approaches.

Viewed as a whole, the book’s authors all contribute in different ways to this project, showing how performers and performance challenge assumptions about what song might be and how it might be interpreted: an act or process as much as a text, contingent as much as fixed, and multiple in its meanings and functions. In this way, the collection advocates for the flexibility sustained and invited by this repertoire and associated interpretative approaches among scholars and/or performers. In turn, many of the chapters contribute new findings to a growing body of knowledge about historical approaches to Lieder performance, showing how many of the practices and values within performance culture today did not necessarily arise with this music in its own time. Important topics elsewhere explored in the field but that receive new case studies and insights here include specialization in concert programming (the all-song or completist song programmes we hear today were rare before roughly the decades around the turn of the twentieth century); Werktreue aesthetics and the authority of the composer and text over the performer and act (much more interpretative freedom was common before the mid-twentieth century, often encouraged by composers as much as performers, within texts as well as acts); and ‘lyric’ versus ‘dramatic’ or ‘storytelling’ ideals of song performance, which in turn raise questions about the aesthetics of Innigkeit so often associated with this repertoire and highlight the significance of bodily gesture, communal performance, and larger categories of identity — such as biography, gender, or class — in shaping the aesthetics, reception, and uses of Lieder, historically and today.

In frequently challenging received wisdom, all these essays open up new thinking, showing how academic approaches to the study of song are limited through their neglect of performance and how current approaches to performing Lieder are very much open to question and thus experimentation, including by looking to historical practice. And yet, given that discussion of future performance approaches is often rather brief in some of the chapters — and performers themselves are in a minority within the volume — I was left wondering at times how far the book achieves all its aims, or at least how far it stages a fully equal dialogue between performance and musicology.

Lied performers themselves enter the discussion in the concluding chapter, ‘Singers Speak about Musicology and Performance’ (in a volume often devoted to recovering neglected agents and voices, I did wonder why no song pianists were interviewed, not least as the pianist within a duo is often deeply engaged in research processes). Themes touched upon within this overview of interviews include many that have arisen throughout the book, leading the editors to justly remark that it’s

On the other hand, as the editors relay, some performers have felt that certain kinds of musicological research and argument are simply not useful to, or don’t sufficiently take account of, the needs of actual performers and performance. Such perspectives lead the editors to reflect that ‘we have been chastened to learn that our work in musicology sometimes comes across as too closed-off or at least argumentatively confident to invite a true plurality of interpretations from performers’ (p. 199). In the book’s final sentences, Binder and Ronyak conclude that, keeping such difficulties in mind, ‘musicologists might ask new questions about how to do and write Lied scholarship, and whom to write it for, so that it leaves a door open through which performance can always enter’ (p. 199).

Such issues could have been addressed in the introduction to the book, if not even more fully within the volume’s conception (it’s perhaps problematic to aim at ‘dissolving boundaries’ (p. 3) between performance and scholarship, as the editors put it at the outset, when the nature of those potential boundaries isn’t articulated). Where possible, a co-written chapter between the editors and one of the singers, for instance, interpreting together a particular case study, may well have been more revealing about the different ways of knowing among — and the values and assumptions held within — these communities than an overview of conversations between them. Though limitations of space were likely a consideration, to print the interviews in full, including the statements of both scholars and performers, would perhaps have been one way to afford performers an even greater voice and representation in the dialogue sought by the editors. This may also have shed further light on the potentials and challenges of a fruitful exchange. Relatedly, greater engagement with literature in music performance studies and practice research may also have been beneficial, for instance gesturing towards autoethnographic methodologies when reflecting on personal approaches to performance (however briefly) or adopting formal interview and analytic methods when gathering data from Lied singers and the embodied knowledge they share. The final interviews appear to have been held informally, and the data analysed equally informally: the question of methodology isn’t raised, in contrast to the scrupulous rigour apparent elsewhere, including when dealing with notation and other written sources.

Still, these are small points, and such approaches, which hold rich though largely unexplored potentials for art song scholarship, may well emerge in future, prompted and supported by a book of this kind. By drawing together a first volume devoted explicitly to promoting exchange between Lied performance and scholarship, the editors have produced an important body of new research, a book in which contributors invariably show huge knowledge, insight, and creativity when dealing with their topics. In particular, the volume makes a significant contribution to historical musicology and art song studies, with a wealth of new knowledge about German song and its performers, performance histories, and contexts.