Jacqueline Waeber (Duke University, Durham)
The prehistory of 'Sprechgesang' in the era of 'Vortragskunst'

Sprechgesang, a mode of vocalization introduced by Engelbert Humperdinck in Die Königskinder (1897), had already been documented in German vocabulary to refer to Wagnerian declamation, notably by the vocal pedagogue Julius Hey who trained Wagner's singers in Bayreuth (1875–1876). Still, the origins of Sprechgesang and its shifting meanings prior to Wagner remain unexplored in scholarship.

My talk revisits the origins of Sprechgesang by going back to the eighteenth century, when the first uses of this compound word were associated either with a form of primeval utterance (Herder, 1769), or with an "elevated" form of theatrical speech in the context of dramatic music. In the early nineteenth century, these two different meanings were subsumed in German lexica where Sprechgesang was routinely considered a Verdeutschung of the Italian recitative.

I argue that these semantic nuances of Sprechgesang were informed by the concept of Sprechmelodie, the intrinsic melos of German language, widely developed in nineteenth-century theories on German declamation and through the artistic practices related to Vortragskunst.

As a music historian, my research deals primarily with the uses and functions of music and its entanglement with language and voice. I am interested in the interactions, often problematic, between music and other artistic discourses, notably theatre and its derivatives: opera, melodrama, fin-de-siècle cabaret and cinema.
Much of my past (and still current) research has focused on the theoretical works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and more broadly on the musical practices and discourses developed during the Enlightenment and their entanglement with philosophies on language and the search for a common origin between music and language. This has led me to explore the genre of melodrama that originated with Rousseau's Pygmalion and its expansion over the entire nineteenth century, which was the focus of my book En Musique dans le texte: le mélodrame de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005).
These recent years, my interests have shifted from French Enlightenment to German Aufklärung, prompting me to revisit the complex associations between music and poetry as epitomized in the specifically German practice of Vortragskunst: this is the subject of my forthcoming new book, Speaking German Musically: Poetic Recitation in Northern Europe, 1760–1820 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press). My talk today will be derived from the book.