Performance Practices in the Schumann Lieder

Abstract Every Lied has its particular characteristics. Its re-creation calls for individual artistic imagination as each performer reacts to the composer’s intention. Yet certain practices are common to the performance of all Schumann Lieder. The first principle to be kept in mind is that the nature of music composition changes from one decade to another. Music is often inappropriately forced into historical periods of considerable length, sometimes as long as half a century or more. Designations such as Early Music, Early Baroque, Late Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, Postromantic, Modern, and Postmodern, frequently are cited with beginning and terminating dates as though nothing changed until one style suddenly was surpassed or elevated to another level, like a boat progressing through a series of canal locks. In point of fact, the history of music is one not of static artistic strata but of flowing gradations of change. This is nowhere more apparent than in the literature of the nineteenth-century Lied.