Future highlights of the careers of many who appeared on stage in 1924, including Evelyn Laye, Florence Mills and Adele and Fred Astaire, are summarized, as are the legacies of musicals such as Kid Boots, Il paese dei campenelli, Madame Pompadour, Gräfin Mariza, Rose-Marie and The Student Prince on stage and screen.

The technical limitations of early recording technologies did not deter the nascent gramophone industry from attempting to capture on cylinders the great Wagner singers of the late nineteenth century. As recording technologies improved, with inventions such as the microphone, magnetic tape, the long-playing record, and stereophonic sound, more Wagner, at greater length, was committed to disc and broadcast on the radio. Performance history can be traced through recordings: from who sang what where, to stylistic choices. Yet recordings have also shaped performance styles over time, with certain voices proving more easily reproducible than others and editing enabling a technical perfection rarely attainable live on stage. Listening to Wagner on headphones as one walks through a city or rides a train is far removed from making a pilgrimage to a production at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

Although there seems to be an essential relationship between scholarship and performance of the Lied, the process by which scholarly inquiry and practices of performance mutually benefit one another can seem mysterious and undefined. In this introduction to The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology, the editors trace the state of research touching these issues, including the role of the “performative turn” in Lied scholarship, historical performance practice research in the genre, and the tradition of scholars’ guides for performers. They then summarize how the essays of the collection model new ways in which scholarship can contribute to new performance experimentation in the genre, and how reflecting on performance can continue to lead to new research perspectives.