Reading Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London Between the Wars is an immersive experience. Sandwich papers rustle at the National Gallery lunch recitals in London inaugurated in 1939 (all other concerts were on pause as blackouts blanketed the city); New York society ladies – and some-time lieder listeners – smoke, drink, play bridge, and dive into plunge pools wearing red regulation bathing suits; tears fall and Lotte Lehmann's voice cracks as she gives her 1951 farewell concert at New York's Town Hall, leaving her pianist to complete the final phrase of Schubert's ‘An die Musik’ alone. Lieder are sung on the radio, in luxury hotels, in concert halls, on makeshift stages, on transatlantic liners, on freight ships, by comic Hollywood tenors. Dedicated lieder recitals are a rarity. Lieder singers on the transatlantic circuit – some of whom are in political exile – are often able to transition fluidly between ‘high’ art and more popular fare and medias (recital hall, German Christmas carols for US radio, film). Tunbridge recaptures in high definition an era of possibility for the lied, a genre marked by its closeness, its sense of authenticity, and, perhaps most important for the interwar period, its nostalgia. At the same time, she shows how live and technologically driven performance practices interacted with turbulent politics to shape how and where we expect lieder to be performed and heard today.

Singing in the Age of Anxiety is thus a book about German art song, but it is also a book about a particular cultural affect. German art song – small-scale and intimate, far from the vanguard, an unremarkable, everyday element of the existing musical landscape – hardly seems an obvious medium for uncovering the grain of the interwar world. After all, historians tend to characterize eras through innovations – what it was that was different. But by beginning with the lied, the book contours the mood of an era. Tunbridge describes it as a ‘decentered’ account, which, looking beyond institutions and composers, offers something more like a ‘use-history’ (here she invokes historian of science David Edgerton), to help think about the roles of the pre-existing technologies that remain ubiquitous in a given period (2). Keenly felt through the book is the nostalgic hankering of the interwar years for a sense of a civilization lost (one, perhaps, that never quite existed), concerns about race and class, and the fear of a future that may not contain the genteel settings, safeties, and norms associated with the spaces and comfortable subjectivities of lieder performance, given fast-moving political and technological change. ‘Auch kleine Dinge können teuer sein’ (11), Tunbridge reminds us, quoting Paul Heyse, set by Hugo Wolf in the first song of Italienisches Liederbuch. Indeed, German lieder prove to render finely the social and political intersections between three contexts – Germany, the UK, and the US. Tunbridge shows us convincingly just why and how the lied between the wars matters.

The two key generative concerns at the core of the book are about anxiety and civilization. Thus the affective terrain of the book is marked out – one of dark nights and disconnected and unverifiable news conveyed by distant, technologically mediated voices, of intense dread and intense jubilation. Tunbridge acknowledges the multivalence of the term ‘civilization’ (or ‘Zivilization’) in the period. Its usage ranges from its deployment in anti-Nazi rhetoric, to – lighter – ‘hotel civilization’, and particular kinds of music were mobilized in its name (4). Through the lens of the sources Tunbridge collates, we see an era on many brinks: technological, aesthetic, social (with the changing function of aesthetics within a so-called middlebrow). In addition, however, this was a time when the world felt unsafe, precarious, close to its end, when risks could be taken, and when the moral edges and geographical limits of ‘civilization’ were under threat and thus up for contestation. Barbarism, and specifically the barbarism of fascism, the counterweight to ‘civilization’, lurked on the doorstep of the British and American national imaginations, whereas German national discourse's supposed phantom was ‘the Jew’. Although the stakes for the era are impossible to recapture – and we cannot quite listen ‘with a period ear’ (11) – through the fullness of her account Tunbridge succeeds in recreating the echo of those stakes, and it makes for compulsive reading.

Writ large within the anxieties of the age was the problem of Germanness. Tunbridge uses the lied to characterize changing conceptions of what it meant to be German in London and New York in the first half of the twentieth century, or to sing in the German language when Germany's enemy status teetered between recent memory or imminent fact in the era's configuration of global conflict. Tunbridge carefully shades how reactions to German-language song differed when they were reintroduced in Britain and the US to concert programmes after the end of the First World War (frequently negative), as opposed to during the Second, when they became a sign of the superior, progressive politics of the Allies. Lieder functioned in multiple ways in the period, then, both encroaching on Allied cultural spheres as part of the so-called ‘German invasion’, but also expanding the limits of imagined spaces of ‘civilization’ – and a way of showing that the Allies were taking the moral high road, cherishing Germany's cultural heritage and Romanticism's universalist ideals.

As a ‘decentered’ account, Tunbridge's book resists historical neatness. A different author might have set out with the intention of making a particular argument about the lied in the era. Not so Tunbridge, who leads with a set of concerns linked to the lied, with its modest scale and German heritage, before creating a vast mosaic of historical moments that seems to make few concessions to whether anything ‘fits’. The book puzzles over individual actors and stories, picking them up, putting them down, figuring out what work the lied does. As Tunbridge puts it, ‘[t]he story of transatlantic musical life during the interwar years, as told through the performance and reception of lieder, yields no grand, overarching narrative. It does, however, intersect with concerns about the importance of art and culture, within and beyond an individual's own nation and social group’ (12). And, as Tunbridge shows us, lieder do manifold kinds of cultural work that differ vastly across the period in question, in different settings and for different singers and listeners – a source of solace for British war-time workers; elsewhere more like aural wallpaper for high-society functions, an (albeit limited) vehicle for African-American singers such as Roland Hayes or Marian Anderson to demonstrate cultural prestige and universality within the constraints of profoundly unequal societies (and yet – more problematic – at the same time a means of acquiescing within complex discourses of assimilation); a way of navigating class boundaries; a referent for the German enemy; but also a way of demonstrating the open mindedness the Allies sought to preserve. Tunbridge does not saturate her history with theory; although relevant thinkers surface productively from time to time – Michel Foucault on heterotopias, Joan Shelley Rubin on the ‘middlebrow’, Pierre Bourdieu's habitus, Nina Sun Eidsheim on singing and race – engagement is deliberately light. It seems Tunbridge's aim is to leave history as it is. This is not a book that ties things up tidily or gives easy answers, even if this approach sometimes creates a quasi-objectivity that feels slightly disengaged from some of the more politically salient subject matter, such as questions about race and song in the interwar period.

Tunbridge connects, balances, and contrasts New York and London with aplomb. For all the cities’ affinities in the interwar period, their differences were pronounced; indeed, the two cities often explicitly defined themselves against one other. Highlighting passage and circulation between the two contexts, the book begins and ends with the Atlantic Ocean, the connective tissue (or a ‘connective lifeline’, for Daniel T. Rodgers (6)Footnote ¹) that primarily linked, rather than separated, London and New York. But the Atlantic also does some important metaphorical work, a powerful image within a book underpinned by a sense of unease. Seas are vast, dangerous, and disorienting, and early twentieth-century passengers making an ocean crossing were subjectively ‘lost’ in a kind of time and space that no longer exists. Travellers were temporarily disconnected from both cities, and time itself was under adjustment, unstable in transit as ships moved between time zones. In the opening chapter, the sea is a space of luxury mobility with the focus on transatlantic liners of the 1920s and the transient, cosmopolitan collections of musicians – both professional and amateur – and wealthy travellers they brought together; the lied, within wider onboard distractions, is then a token of cosmopolitan opulence. By the book's war-time end in the mid-1940s, however, live lieder singing on the Atlantic signifies quite differently. At the news of Japanese surrender over the wireless to the freight ship on which she was one of only four commercial passengers, Elisabeth Schumann's self-accompanied version of ‘Nacht und Träume’ by Schubert is a pinprick flare of renewed optimism for humanity existing beyond nationality within a desolate, uncertain sea.

Chapter one, ‘Transatlantic Arrivals’, deals with the politics of the transnational concert circuit in the aftermath of the First World War, particularly with respect to attitudes towards German singers and music. Significant anti-German sentiment in the US prompted by the war, for instance, had resulted in the folding of German-language magazines and theatres, and Germans changing their surnames to signal their cultural assimilation; not even German measles escaped, becoming ‘liberty measles’ (19). When, just after the war's end, contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink gave recital-attendees in Newark, New Jersey, the option of leaving her concert early to avoid hearing a group of lieder by Brahms, two hundred calmly took her up on the offer (16). Segueing from the ‘heterotopic’ (15) space of the transatlantic liner, the chapter considers the – often politically fraught – disembarkations of well-known musicians in New York or London, among others Schumann-Heink (a naturalized American of German birth), the Irish-American tenor John McCormack, African-American tenor Roland Hayes, Richard Strauss, and German soprano Elisabeth Schumann. Besides illuminating the challenges for German musicians post-war, this chapter is a fascinating study of singers’ negotiation of musical subject positions vis-à-vis the idea of German nationality and the German language. For instance, Roland Hayes was based in London from 1920 to 1923, and how the British press addressed his race as it intersected with his growing pre-eminence in German song is a politically trenchant case study. Although deftly handled, this is one moment where a more interventionist attitude to the historical material might have been welcome.

The second chapter might have been called ‘Lieder and the Media’, but steering away from half-rhymes, ‘Languages of Listening’ puts the focus not on the era's changing technologies themselves, but on their impact on audiences, working to ‘renegotiate boundaries between cultural hierarchies’ (43) (specifically, creating an emerging middle-class listener), as well as the politics of the German language in the changing global markets that these technologies enabled. Tunbridge skilfully explores how the interwar lied was mediated by several mechanisms: translation (responding both to anti-German sentiment and to socially optimistic educational objectives), radio, gramophone records, and sound film. She also considers the influence of new technologies on performance practice (for instance, the advent of ‘crooning’, which took advantage of more sensitive microphones to favour lighter, more conversational vocal styles). Tunbridge guides us to think alongside, but perhaps not quite through, media theory. The section titled ‘Listening in, with furrowed brow’ (66) highlights the sociological relationship between listener and lied. As media technologies such as gramophone and radio increased the accessibility of this repertoire, lieder were positioned ambivalently within early twentieth-century projects of cultural uplift. This is a nuanced analysis of art song in light of the new-found early twentieth-century sociological fascination with the middle classes, and a preoccupation with how emerging forms of mass listener, such as radio listeners, transitioned from those indiscriminates who just ‘let [music] buzz round their ears’, to listeners ‘who have begun to find it interesting’ to those coveted few who ‘know enough about real music to be able to make a mental transition from the ethereal shadow which they hear and form some concept of the original’ (66, quoting The Times, 1926).

Chapter three, ‘Lieder Society’, is perhaps the most arresting, including a finely rendered picture of New York's high society as it circulated within mid-town Manhattan, and – of course – also formed an audience for live music. From its vivid descriptions of activity within prestigious clubs and societies, to depictions of the emergence of ‘modern’ hotel culture, supposedly capturing (at least for Henry James) the aspirational spirit of America with its ‘civic presence, public rooms, professionalized management and staff’ (108), the chapter tracks the public and private places and spaces where lieder were performed live. For instance, The Colony Club was the first New York club founded in 1903 by and for women. Its members worked out, took Turkish baths, discussed headlines and horseracing, and were core attendees of the exclusive (and unadvertised) Manhattan concert series Bagby's Musical Mornings that took place in the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, newly relocated from the site of the new Empire State Building to nearer Grand Central Station. The story of the lied thus interweaves with the changing spaces and habits of urban high society in the first half of the twentieth century as the city's urban geography rapidly evolved. This social class was racially determined (white Anglo; neither Germans nor Jews could make the cut), and the ‘Social Register’ was a physical listing of its members. But it was only really the core ‘Four Hundred’, to cite the memorable numerical designation of contemporary commentator Ward McAllister, to whom ‘high society’ truly referred: ‘If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease’ (109). To suggest that sometimes, as Tunbridge makes clear, lieder served a primarily social (and class-establishing) function, much more than they did any particularly edifying aesthetic one, is refreshing – for instance, as seemed largely the case at the Bagby Musical Mornings which, as Time magazine commented, ‘spared … audiences heavyweight music’ (107). Meanwhile, in London, discussion centres on the London Lieder Club, spearheaded in 1933 by Walter Legge (then working in production at HMV; later, post-Second World War, he went on to become a significant British record producer). In part, it was a money-making enterprise encouraging subscriptions to fund his main enthusiasm, the Hugo Wolf Society, which aimed to record Wolf's songs for gramophone. The London Lieder Club promoted lesser-known German lieder and saw the London introductions of many international singers. Within a climate of increasing British protectionism, Legge's unabashed cosmopolitanism, including how he helped artists fleeing Germany, warrants the detailed attention Tunbridge gives it.

Finally, chapter four, ‘Saving Music’, furnishes a series of case studies that function as hermeneutic climaxes. If not a resolution – Tunbridge has already forewarned the reader not to expect any analytic arch – she nonetheless clarifies a sense of the political stakes for the German art song in the period, as well as a sense of the hermeneutic potential for all this discussion. And those political stakes are wide ranging. German art song becomes quite a different political vehicle when embodied and envoiced by different singers, and for different audiences. One case study is contralto Marian Anderson's famous concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, protesting her cancelled appearance at Constitution Hall, when the Daughters of the American Revolution voted to sustain a ban on non-white performers appearing before a non-segregated audience; another is the post-war reintegration onto the US concert scene of Norwegian singer Kirsten Flagstad in light of the unresolved question of her complicity with the Nazis, triggering audience protests at her concerts. Though both are billed ‘protest songs’ by Tunbridge, the lieder and their singers clearly point to questions of the oppression or relative freedoms of completely different groups in varied contexts. Women feature strongly in Tunbridge's narrative: majority female audiences in chapter two, and, in chapter four, women as mobilizers, such as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who lobbied her husband for Anderson's concert, or pianist Myra Hess who, in a particularly rich account, pioneered the above-mentioned National Gallery war-time concert series in London from 1939 to 1946. The volume is not, however, the place to look for a history of New York and London life on the margins. Parts of this book are a microhistory of the wealthiest and most privileged citizens in two of the wealthiest and most privileged cities in the world. If this landscape of prosperity and luxury seems of questionable urgency given disciplinary imperatives towards alterity, what the study nonetheless offers is an understanding of how cultural and social hierarchies work in practice, and how a particular repertoire interlaced with and therefore illuminates those hierarchies and their gatekeepers.

Tunbridge shows the political valence of the lied. She acknowledges early on that a study of the lied between the wars focuses on an anachronistic nineteenth-century genre written by white Austro-German composers. In her history, however, it tells far from reactionary stories. Listening to the interwar lied enfolds issues of exile and nationalism, finessing intercultural connection points. It explores altruism and political expedience, optimism, and nostalgia. Tunbridge's methodology is exciting. But at times, perhaps, with her elegant prose conjuring an often-glittering account of upper-class life, Tunbridge's seductive study feels a little too polished. Deeper vulnerability about the lived experience of exile, race, and class, as well as its unknowability – perhaps with recourse to more theory – could strengthen further scholarship in this mould. Singing in the Age of Anxiety opens the door for such work.

To position the lied as a lens for an era, then, is not only to reveal it afresh, it is also to explore a repertoire that resonates with certain contemporary ethical and methodological priorities within musicology. But it is also surprisingly politically salient. The book is an analysis of mobile, cosmopolitan elites and the dangers of their myopias. It pays careful attention to those people who got it quite wrong in thinking that their ethics were universal and their broadly pro-internationalist outlook was unassailably and self-evidently superior, those people unable or unwilling to see the power and intensity of populist nationalism and who reaped primarily the benefits of globalization and transportation. Such liberal complacency feels uncomfortably familiar in the early months of 2020, and contemplation of its historical and aesthetic conditions correspondingly urgent. As nations again turn inward, steeling themselves against a global health crisis and its long-term impacts, the questions about anxiety and about civilization Tunbridge spotlights, seem set only to become more trenchant.