Pauline Decker (née von Schätzel) was a German opera singer who published about thirty songs later in her life. Born into a distinguished musical family—her grandmother was the renowned soprano Margarethe Luise Schick, and her mother, Juliane von Schätzel, was also a celebrated singer—Decker began performing in her teens. At seventeen she made her operatic debut at the Königliche Oper in Berlin, where she soon became a leading soprano.
Her public career ended in 1832, however, when she married the royal court publisher Rudolf Ludwig Decker, but she remained an active presence in Berlin’s musical life. She performed regularly at the Sunday musicales hosted by Fanny Hensel and presented ambitious musical gatherings in her own home, occasionally mounting full operas.
Decker’s songs were almost all issued individually. Like so many women composers of her era, she never produced a song cycle. The genre was largely inaccessible to women in the 19th century; while individual songs could flourish in the domestic sphere, cycles demanded a more expansive and public frame of presentation that clashed with prevailing ideas about women’s artistic limits. This past summer I undertook a project to create a cycle of songs from Decker’s standalone pieces. I wanted to provide a vehicle for performers who would otherwise have to dig through archives and online databases to find her music. At the same time, I wanted to provide Decker access to a genre that was unavailable to her, as it was to so many other women composers, using curation as a form of advocacy.
The resulting cycle of eight songs, titled Liebesblätter (Love Leaves, or Love Letters), was published in September 2025 by ClarNan Editions. Below are video recordings of three of the songs (nos. 1, 4, and 8). These are the first ever recordings of Decker’s songs. I commissioned mezzo soprano Katie Bray, tenor James Gilchrist, and pianist Jocelyn Freeman to do a complete recording of the Liebesblätter songs, and I plan to release a CD of the cycle in the coming year.
Additional Resources
- Cox-Williams, Briony. “Absence and Dialogue: Pauline von Decker in a Performing and Cultural Context.” In Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied, ed. Aisling Kenny and Susan Wollenberg. Routledge, 2016.
- Cox-Williams, Briony. “Composer of the Month: Pauline von Decker 1811–1882.” Salon Without Boundaries.
- Schlegel, Theresa. “Clara Schumann als Spur—Musikerinnen und Geschlechterdiskurse im 19. Jahrhundert. Möglichkeitsräume und Hindernisse” [with a chapter on Decker]. In-progress dissertation, University of Potsdam.
- Rodgers, Stephen. “Love Letters” [a discussion of the Liebesblätter cycle]. Women’s Song Forum.
