When embarking on this journey, three guideposts were established fairly early on — core concerns that established the creative and scholarly framework within which we navigated.
The first guidepost was pragmatic in nature. The initial impulse for this endeavor came from a practical need recognized by Eric Stokloßa, a professor of voice at Texas Tech University. As part of his compulsory research tied to tenure review at the university, Stokloßa commissioned a new, singable English translation of Dichterliebe for the English-speaking world, an audience that understands, with little exception, no German whatsoever. This is not unusual for translation. Vermeer notes: ‘the aim of any translational action, and the mode in which it is to be realized, are negotiated with the client who commissions the action’ (2004: 227). In this case, the client was Texas Tech University, and the commissioning party and singer (Stokloßa) stressed a desire for a novel, singable translation, maintaining poetic integrity, with the most significantly, stressed words in Schumann’s German setting corresponding with the new, English version.
Stokloßa, a native German speaker, wanted to give his audience the ability to connect more immediately with a cycle he knows and loves intimately, and posited that the distance created by Heinrich Heine’s German perhaps posed the largest barrier to their emotional engagement with the work.
Nineteenth-century song cycles, even for lovers of classical music, can be difficult to appreciate. Dedicated Lieder-philesadmit that art song, in practice and as a genre, is considered particularly ‘pretentious’ as well as ‘old-lace, highbrow’:
‘I daresay that even the greatest Lied enthusiast, when divested of her or his rose-coloured Schubertian Brille, is aware that many people view the art form as a formidably highbrow category (German) of an esoteric sub-section (song) of an embarrassingly emotional corner (vocal music) of an already doomed species (classical music)’, writes Graham Johnson. (2004: 315)
But while language is one of the factors distancing nineteenth-century Lieder from a large swath of today’s public, even for native German speakers the themes, language, and concerns often feel inaccessible; in need of translation.
Classic literature is retranslated around every fifty years in English owing to shifts in idiomatic usages and cultural contexts. The Bible, for example, is currently available in numerous collectively produced English translations, including the King James Version, English Standard Version, Literal Standard Version, Revised Standard Version, New Revised Standard Version, and New American Standard Bible. This is because translations themselves age as cultural understandings shift. When the meaning and context of language are no longer accessible, audiences cannot interact with the work successfully. Translation, then, carries with it an essential aspect of modernization:
If modern French readers read a Shakespearean translation from the last century they feel uncomfortable and cannot take it seriously. This means that every translator, even when trying to give us the flavour of a language and of a historical period, is in fact modernizing the source to some extent. (Eco 2001: 22)
This applies to music as a language as well. Though ragtime was seen as dangerously subversive to (white) audiences in its heyday, a few decades later it was tame enough to put in mainstream musicals and films, such as the extended dream sequence in the 1955 movie version of Richard Rodgers’ and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1943 musical Oklahoma. And though at that time it still had the connotation of being sexy and dirty, if I show the scene to students in the twenty-first century, the music seems cute, almost quaint. They giggle uncomfortably because of what now seems a mismatch between harmless, honky-tonk music they could hear on an old-timey jukebox and Agnes de Mille’s evocative choreography, designed to express the sexual anxiety of young women’s unconscious interiority. ‘Girls don’t dream about the circus,’ de Mille explained. ‘They dream about horrors. And they dream dirty dreams’ (de Mille quoted in Carter 2007).
There are related philosophical reasons to disrupt how Schumann’s cycle is performed, centered on keeping art song a living text, engaged with current concerns. Drawing on philosophical work by both Roland Barthes and Gilbert Simonden regarding Schumann performance practice, Lucia d’Errico contends that Dichterliebe interpretation suffers from a prioritization of taking the score as holy and seeing it as a stable mold to shape pleasing performances. ‘The real “good” form’, she writes, ‘is therefore not that which is perfected and eternally fixated, but to the contrary, that which is pregnant, namely, that is capable of further crossing and enlivening a multiplicity of different fields and situations’ (2019: 318).1 In order to stay relevant, and not simply exist in a museum state, perhaps art song needs to be performed differently from time to time.
This led to a broader discussion about the extent to which we wanted to intervene with the original work. Chanda VanderHart had already experimented with the cycle in terms of musical style, and the team researched various reinterpretations, restagings, recontextualizations — in short, other translations — of Dichterliebe.
While tempted to throw the aesthetic baby out with its murky, nineteenth-century bathwater and start completely anew, we concluded that doing so would obfuscate the work for its intended audience. While Benjamin famously purported that ‘no poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener’ (1997: 152), it might be more honest (and equitable) to admit that any work of art is created in a web of tension between artistic desire and practical reality. Our most venerated compositions were often created in part thanks to external commissions, requests, or to fill practical needs, in congress with internal, artistic, creative drive. While our approach may seem conservative to those outside the realm of art song performance and pedagogy, it is quietly revolutionary from the inside, and it may be that in working from within its time-tested, beloved aesthetic framework, this particular audience will more readily incorporate it into their own understanding.
This led us to our second guidepost. The team agreed that it was the inherent intimacy created by the instrumentation and Schumann’s musical idiom which had drawn us to the cycle initially, and made it a priority to translate within the constraints of the original musical and textual aesthetic. This also meant preserving the cultural context within which the characters of the cycle exist; both poet and lover are locked within the strict moral and cultural codex of their own time. To cite Rufus Hallmark, discussing another gender-laden Schumann song cycle composed the same year as Dichterliebe:
German women were unquestionably subordinate to men in the early nineteenth century. In the light of our modern convictions about gender equality and the great strides that have been made in women’s rights, the conditions under which women lived were deplorable. The legal system, societal attitudes and norms of behavior, and prevalent philosophical ideas were magnified by the relative cultural isolation of Germany. These factors supported male supremacy, the casting of women in the fixed roles of housewife and bearer and nurturer of children, and the attribution to women of sex-determined characteristics such as weakness, emotionality, and dependence. The information we have suggests also that women for the most part accepted this state of affairs. Furthermore, even liberal-minded reformers had much more modest goals than we might imagine and did not challenge many of the basic assumptions of the patriarchal society. As curious, alien, or repugnant as we in the twenty-first century may find this state of affairs, it is necessary to understand it as the context for Chamisso’s poems and Schumann’s songs about women. (2014: 6)
Because nineteenth-century art song cycles were the purview of white, educated, European men, theirs are generally the perspectives on display. In those rare cases where female characters are centered in art song, such as in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Frauen-Liebe und Leben, their interiority is filtered (translated?) through a male lens. This has been described, to quote Ruth A. Solie as, ‘the impersonation of a woman by the voices of male culture’ (1992: 220). Although numerous scholars since have argued that Solie’s critique is harsh, that Chamisso/Schumann’s intentions were revolutionary for their time, and that the protagonist is both sympathetically and complexly portrayed (Dunsby 2007), it is hard for many women today to identify with a character whose narrative journey begins (‘Seit ich ihn gesehen’) and ends (‘Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan’) focused on a man.
In the most lauded cycles, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, Op. 89, D 911 or Die Schöne Müllerin, Op. 25, D 795, Ludwig van Beethoven’s An die Ferne Geliebte, Op. 98, or Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Op. 48 female characters rarely speak directly and their shading is flat. Women in song are often the object, but rarely the subject of song narrative — they demonstrate such minimal agency and are invisibilized in song to the point that it is possible to believe they are nothing more than a figment of imagination for the (male) protagonist. In Die Schöne Müllerin the protagonist is a restless dreamer, maybe a fantasist. ‘How real is his relationship with the Miller’s daughter?’ writes Christopher Fox (2016). Similarly, Florian Boesch asked during an interview, ‘think about Dichterliebe — do we even really believe she exists?’ (VanderHart and Lloyd 2023–24).
The third and final guidepost emerged slightly later, as the translation of the text was developing. During the translation process, specifically while translating Poem IX, ‘Das ist ein Flöten und Geigen’, poet and translator Rebecca Babb-Nelsen was struck by the image of the mad poet as an angry apparition during the wedding of the unnamed female protagonist in the cycle. She felt an immediate need to answer the accusations levied by Heine’s poet. This aligned perfectly with pianist and musicologist Chanda VanderHart’s background in gender studies, where she has focused extensively on uncovering previously marginalized historical narratives. Upon discussion, the decision was made to explore how to more systematically de-invisibilize the female perspective throughout the cycle, effectively moving the passive poet’s lover from object to voiced subject.
In conclusion, our approach was guided by three foundational principles: a pragmatic need for an accessible, singable English translation of Dichterliebe; a commitment to preserving the intimate and historically grounded aesthetic of Schumann’s work; and a deliberate effort to give voice to the often-silenced female perspective within the song cycle. These guideposts shaped our approach, ensuring that the translation remained both artistically faithful and culturally relevant.
Far from a mere academic exercise, this endeavor reflects the evolving nature of translation as both an artistic and philosophical act. Just as language and cultural understandings shift over time, so too must our engagement with historical works in order to keep them alive for contemporary audiences. Rather than discarding Dichterliebe’s original framework, we sought to enrich it — bridging the gap between tradition and modern interpretation while acknowledging the complex interplay between historical context and present-day concerns.
The Poet’s Love(r) underscores the idea that performance, like translation, is not a static act but a dynamic one. By honoring a past composition while interrogating its limitations, we aim to foster a deeper, more inclusive engagement with Dichterliebe — one that resonates not only with scholars and musicians but with listeners who might otherwise find themselves distanced from its world.