Clara Schumann, Historiography, and the Visual

(Re)Considering the Priestess: Clara Schumann, Historiography, and the Visual

April L. Prince

Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Volume 21, 2017, pp. 107-140 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2017.0007

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/673632

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] (Re)Considering the Priestess Clara Schumann, Historiography, and the Visual

April L. Prince

In memoriam K. M. Knittel

evered and celebrated, Clara Schumann has long held a place of prestige within musicology. She stands out as an anomaly among female pianists of Rthe nineteenth century, having achieved extraordinary accolades from the very outset of her career and maintaining a phenomenally long and proliﬁ c public presence. Shaped foremost by Berthold Litzmann’s and Nancy Reich’s biographies, the scholarship on Schumann most oft en turns to her own words regarding her place within the musical tale of the nineteenth century.1 Her explanations very

1 Berthold Litzmann edited Clara Schumann’s diaries and letters under the instruction of Schumann’s oldest daughter, Marie. Nancy Reich reconsiders much of his source material while also including vast scores of letters and reviews previously unseen and untranslated. That being said, as Ruth Ellen Boetcher- Joeres notes in her discussion of German women writers, even this written evidence, which places great authority in Schumann’s written word, is not without extraordinary complications: “Epistolary self- representations are no more reliable refl ections of truth or unproblematic mirrors of the soul than are the ostensible objective views of the canon makers. . . . To see letters as credible displays of authentic personal confessions does not take into account such issues as self-censorship and self-masking or the heavy presence of external opinion and expectation” (Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth- Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 37). Many of the most fundamental aspects of Schumann’s career espoused in her own writings correspond with the “external” masculine perspective and understanding of serious music. It is also well known that her private writ- ing was mediated fi rst by her father and later by her husband (especially in their shared diaries). Naturally, I am not arguing for the complete disavowal of Schumann’s own voice, but I am asking us to acknowledge that her words were also infl uenced by the patriarchal perspective under which she lived and performed. With that argument in mind, this article somewhat self- consciously weighs her visual representation more heavily at the expense of her written expression. I have intentionally not included most of Schumann’s thoughts on the subject. See Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life Based on Material Found in Diaries and Letters, trans. Grace E. Hadow (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1913); and Nancy Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). oft en correspond to one of the most dominant historical narratives within musicology: a story that extols the instrumental, autonomous musical work and its composer and, in so doing, celebrates the serious listening experience.2 This understanding has, since the nineteenth century, been a way to measure musical worth and value by privileging mindful (masculine) over bodily (feminine) interactions with music.3 In a historical era fi xated on establishing gender diff erences, wherein music played a crucial role, it is curious that a female pianist developed into one of the preeminent symbols for this masculine aesthetic. Schumann’s attachment to this ideal is perhaps most evident in her revered title of “the priestess,” which emphasized her saintly “devotion” to the musical work and the “quiet dignity” of her performances.4 This label, itself originating during Schumann’s lifetime, attempted to regulate her sexuality and femininity in seemingly benign terms: she became the appropriately domesticated other or the desexualized and disembodied conduit to the composer or his musical work. Given the circumstances, with social forces desperately working to transform the public taste into one of a “cultivated” bourgeoisie, interpretations that attempt to disavow or regulate her gender are hardly surprising.5 What is surprising, however, is that modern scholars continue to regulate Schumann’s gender similarly to that of the nineteenth century. As Reich argues at the outset of her biography, “[Schumann] is viewed even today as her nineteenth- century contemporaries saw her—as a saint or ‘priestess,’ as a dedicated wife, mother and musician.”6 Ludim Pedroza also notes this constancy:

2 I am using the term “serious music” in line with David Gramit’s arguments. Most important for my purposes here, Gramit considers how the prestige aff orded this music was garnered by “limiting access to it along the lines of existing social divisions, prominent among them class, gender, education, and nationality” (Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770– 1848 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 21). 3 As Marcia Citron argues, “pure” instrumental music rose to prominence within bourgeois patriarchy because “it affi rmed the ideology of the mind-body dualism and the resultant devaluation of the body. Connotations of the body tie in with the feminine and with the debasing and morally lesser associations of female sexuality. The notion of absolute music, therefore, has acted as an ingenious means of elevating the masculine notion of mind while at the same time suppressing the body, sexuality, and the feminine” (Gender and the Musical Canon [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 142). For the power of this masculine aesthetic, which Judy Lochhead traces from Kant’s era to modern-day conceptions of the sublime and beautiful, see also Judy Lochhead, “The Sublime, the Ineff able, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics,” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 12 (2008): 63– 74. 4 I take these descriptive excerpts from Reich’s biography, wherein she describes the use of this term thusly: “Clara Schumann was frequently described metaphorically as a ‘priestess’ by Schumann, Brahms, Hanslick, Liszt and many others— undoubtedly because of her devotion and quiet dignity” (Clara Schumann, 264). 5 See Gramit, Cultivating Music; and William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Both texts engage with notions of public taste and musical “cultivation” among middle-class audiences. Gramit, in particular, works through the various methods in which “serious music advocates” sought to ensure this music’s integral place within bourgeois culture, which they recognized as ascendant. 6 Reich, Clara Schumann, 9.

108 Women & Music Volume 21 The “priestess,” as Clara Schumann was labeled by Liszt and other contemporaries, has been recognized as the harbinger of the self-denying pianist-interpreter. Accounts of public reactions to Schumann’s performances seldom allude to ecstasy, rapture, or fainting episodes. . . . Up to this day [emphasis added], her public persona remains an emblem of sobriety, nonsentimentality, rationality, and objectivity; not surprisingly, on account of her unwavering commitment to preserving the integrity of the musical work and to upholding the composer’s intentions, Schumann’s name continues to be associated with the Werktreu ideology.7

As both Reich and Pedroza outline, we still attach Schumann to a nineteenth- century ideal that demanded the performer defer to the musical work; this belief, at its core, empowered (and continues to empower) the musical structure that the bourgeois male sought so desperately to secure. Categorizing Schumann as an “emblem of sobriety, nonsentimentality, rationality, and objectivity” allowed (and continues to allow) her musical legacy to exist purely within the mindful, “masculine” realm, privileging her repertoire choices and engagement with the musical structure over all other aspects of her performative persona. So while it is clear that both critics and Schumann herself cultivated this kind of performing ideal, it cannot be ignored that this characterization became a way to obfuscate almost entirely the presence of the feminine in music and of Schumann herself. This perception, to use Pedroza’s words, “self- denies.” In this kind of historiographical mindset, the bodily (the feminine) becomes off - limits, and we seemingly ignore the contradictory evidence it might reveal. Schumann’s performing career, in eff ect, is narrowed to celebrate her as primarily an emptied agent or “executant.” By reducing the power of her visual, bodily, feminine presence, however, we ignore important aspects of her performance identity (or identities) that could perhaps engage diff erently with this historical narrative. In an eff ort to consider Schumann’s story from a perspective that asks us to think in more dialectical terms, this article reconsiders her historiography by ana- lyzing selected images from the surviving record of her visual presence. Most importantly, visual evidence asks us to acknowledge that the creation of Schumann as priestess was instigated and perpetuated likely because of the social unease sur- rounding the public feminine body, which portraiture— because of the nature of the medium—helps expose. At its most fundamental, this project seeks to tease out the dynamics of Schumann’s reception that elucidate ways in which she, as a woman, was able to perform in this preeminent public space and embolden (rather than degrade) the ascendancy of the masculine. Even while challenging the hege- mony of the male pianist, Schumann was nonetheless positioned to entrench the mores of the musical masculine to an even greater degree. These contradictions rest at the center of this project, and I hope in beginning to expose such ambigu-

7 Ludim Pedroza, “Music as Communitas: Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, and the Musical Work,” Jour- nal of Musicological Research 29 (2010): 296. For a pointed discussion of the Werktreu aesthetic, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay on the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 242.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 109 ities that we can not only explore her career with more nuance but also recognize Schumann’s ability to shape profoundly the public sphere within which she so frequently worked. By embracing a “more liberal, non-masculinist deﬁ nition of the public sphere,” we can also begin the project of rethinking Schumann as “an ex- ception,” a label that obscures the real, important ways women were participating in or even transforming nineteenth- century public musical life.8 When we think of Schumann as a “special” case, we celebrate her with an “essentialism that could reinscribe oppressive social prescriptions,” as opposed to upending them.9 While scholars have oft en positioned Schumann as an almost genderless performer, I argue that her gender became one of the most important aspects of her performance identity, primarily because it demanded constant mediation.10 We have yet to explore fully the extent to which Schumann destabilized the aesthetic concepts to which she was bound. In our reticence, we have perhaps rather unwittingly empowered and reinforced an ideology that likens Schumann’s extraordinary achievements to her male counterparts; she is so successful because she absorbs, reinforces, and upholds the patriarchal boundaries within which she worked.11 By examining negotiations of gender between the performer and the public vis- à- vis the visual, it is possible to consider how Schumann was so fervently embraced, even as she posed an inherent threat to the masculine bourgeois public sphere within which she performed. Both of these aspects of her reception—the celebration and the tension— become equally important in understanding her appeal to the audiences of the nineteenth century. To begin, I consider what visual evidence can off er our understandings of this performer, and from there, I study four images of Schumann. Some pictures uphold the “priestess” ideology more ﬁ rmly and others less so; all reveal how her public persona was perhaps more complicated and ambiguous than the “priestess” ideology admits.

Seeing Performance in Portraiture In The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body, Richard Leppert seeks to theorize the “slippage” between the physical act of producing sound and music’s ethereal, “abstract nature.”12 Because sound disappears almost

8 Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen, eds., Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789– 1914 (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 3. 9 Balducci and Jensen, Women, 2. 10 I am not dismissing Reich’s fi nal conclusion regarding Schumann’s exceptionality. There certainly is evidence—both visual and written—that references her masculine playing and her musical “muscle.” I am, however, skeptical that Schumann somehow escaped her gender completely (or was considered above the gender construction itself), even if both male and female critics attacked her equally. Reich’s argument is as follows: “There was no question of a ‘weaker sex’ as far as Clara Schumann’s musicianship was concerned. She had been trained as a professional, she was a fi gure of power and authority in the musical world before she was forty, and as an artist was either extravagantly admired or fi ercely criticized by both men and women. . . . She was generally regarded as unique, almost above gender” (Clara Schumann, 177). 11 Ivan Raykoff , in this same vein, identifi es Clara Schumann as a “forte woman.” This characterization emerges precisely because she performed a kind of “masculine virtuosity.” See Ivan Raykoff , Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 189. 12 Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), xxi.

110 Women & Music Volume 21 immediately aft er it is made, the visual off ers a kind of record that “is crucial to both musicians and audience alike for locating and communicating the place of music and musical sound within society and culture”; in essence, images can reveal what “sounds meant.”13 At the core of his theoretical model sits the importance (and problematic presence) of the body. Undoubtedly, the visual can powerfully capture the embodied nature of musical activity—found in the activity of both those who perform and those who watch. Leppert’s analyses focus primarily on the act of making sound. In Schumann’s case, this focus is rendered nearly impossible, because she is rarely shown in active performance. She seems a special case in the realm of the visual primarily because all of her portraits, except for one famous pastel drawing by Ad- olf von Menzel, are posed inactive and not in performance.14 Also surprising, only a handful of her images include any reference to the musical. Out of sixty- two pieces of visual evidence, I have counted a mere seven images that include a piano or visible sheet music.15 This gap in representation is perplexing at ﬁ rst, especially when we consider the legions of images that feature anonymous women playing the piano in the private sphere, the sheer number of caricatures and pictures of other male virtuosos, and the fact that actresses and vocalists were frequently depicted in performance—especially by the middle decades of the century.16 This void also

13 Leppert, The Sight of Sound, xxi. 14 In my study of Clara Schumann’s imagery, I have relied on three main sources that contain a wide-ranging catalog of portraits. These catalogs, while extensive, are by no means exhaustive. See Ingrid Bodsch and Gerd Nauhaus, eds., Clara Schumann 1819– 1896: Ausstellung des Stadtmuseums Bonn und des Robert- Schumann- Hauses Zwickau in Verbindung mit dem Heinrich- Heine- Institut Düsseldorf aus Anlaß des 100. Todestages von Clara Schumann (Bonn: Stift ung Kunst und Kultur des Landes Nordrhein- Westfalen, 1996); Bernhard R. Appel, Inge Hermstrüwer, and Gerd Nauhaus, eds., Clara und Robert Schumann: Zeit- genössische Porträts; Katalog zur Ausstellung des Heinrich- Heine- Instituts, Düsseldorf und des Robert- Schumann- Hauses, Zwickau in Verbindung mit der Robert- Schumann- Forschungsstelle der Robert- Schumann- Gesellschaft , Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994); and Ernst Burger, Robert Schumann: Eine Lebenschronik in Bildern und Dokumenten (Mainz: Schott, 1999). Across these three sources and my own additional research, I have counted sixty-two unique visual representations of Schumann. Her portraits extend across all genres: photographs, daguerreotypes, lithographs, oil paintings, watercolors, pencil drawings, pastel drawings, miniatures, proﬁ le plaster casts, busts, and steel engravings. Her earliest “portrait” is a small anonymous miniature from 1828. Her latest visual representation is a bronze bust made by Friedrich Christoph Haus- mann in 1896. The seven images that contain a musical element are listed here: an 1832 lithograph by Edu- ard Clemens Fechner shows Schumann holding a piece of sheet music in her lap; an 1835 lithograph by Julius Giere shows her sitting at the piano with her own opus 7 piano concerto on the music stand; an 1840 oil painting by Johann Nepomuk Höfel shows her sitting at the piano with her hands stretched on the keys and music by Franz Liszt on the piano stand; an 1850 daguerreotype by Johann Anton Völlner shows her sitting at the piano while Robert Schumann stands; an 1859 engraving from the 1850 daguerreotype by J. Schuberth & Company; an 1854 pastel drawing by Adolph von Menzel shows her playing a concert with Joseph Joachim; and, ﬁ nally, an 1878 photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl shows Schumann sitting at the piano and looking back over her shoulder. 15 In one fascinating example, Raykoff discusses how Schumann’s 1866 portrait by Carl von Jagemann was framed “with the autograph score of her short piece that became the theme for the ‘Andantino de Clara Wieck’ in her husband’s Sonata in F minor, op. 14, composed three decades before. The historicity conveyed by the true- to- life photograph parallels the authenticity of the handwritten score that serves as its musical caption.” See Raykoff , Dreams of Love, 103. 16 Given the scarcity of public visual representations, some of my analyses draw on the symbolic framework provided not only by public portraiture but also by private, domestic music making. To reiter- ate, there are many, many images of women at the piano in private settings.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 111 seems odd considering the incredible length of Schumann’s career, which spanned some sixty years. It is perhaps this lack of visual “activity,” however, that justifi es why we so oft en ignore her portraiture, while an exciting and expanding discourse surrounds the visual legacy of other contemporary virtuosos like Franz Liszt and Sigismond Thalberg.17 This attempt to deny the bodily activity of performing, however, remains consistent with the dominant historical narrative that so anxiously attempted to negotiate or undermine the bodily, public performances of female pianists— perhaps especially of those performing “serious” music.18 When discussing Ro- mantic pianists as “sound-bodies,” Ivan Raykoff argues that “representations of the pianist’s playing typically refl ect conventional cultural attitudes about the body’s social meaning”; since there are almost no visual representations in Schumann’s case, the “anti-active- visual” perhaps worked to deny, quite terrifi cally, how (some) women’s performing “physical bodies [were] unruly and unpredictable things.”19 Even given the gap in visual representation of Schumann in performance—or perhaps precisely because of it— I argue that portraits can in fact reveal traces of her performing self. So how might a posed, inactive portrait do this kind of (musical) work? Certainly, portraits are unique in the realm of the visual.20 It is perhaps because of its very functionality, commercial appeal, and sheer pervasiveness that “portraiture as an artistic genre has remained understudied, aesthetically problematic, and crit- ically suspect.”21 As Heather McPherson argues, portraiture is also idiosyncratic because it inscribes social status through a close connection to fashion and etiquette while also preserving a person’s features and inner psychological self for posterity. A portrait is incredibly social and yet incredibly individualized. While this confl ict

17 For example, see Richard Leppert, “Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt,” in Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 264– 65. See also Ivan Raykoff , “Part Two: Sight,” in Dreams of Love, 91– 152; and Ernst Berger, Franz Liszt: A Chronicle of His Life in Pictures and Documents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 18 Generally speaking, the German “serious,” instrumental- music concert was altered to serve as the countermeasure to the degenerative (bodily, feminine) experiences happening in other musical forums. In accordance with the now bourgeois concerns for social cultivation and ascendance, concert programs became more homogeneous, superﬂ uous virtuosity was rejected, instrumental music was positioned as superior to all other genres, and serious music advocates came to dominate critical commentary. Although the symphony came to be hailed as the epitome of absolute and autonomous expression— most capable of poetic interpretation—sonatas and other genres functioned alongside the symphony as smaller, yet sig- niﬁ cant inclusions in this “interpretive” category. Carl Dahlhaus reiterates piano music’s inclusion in this critical category by arguing that “the idea of poetic music dominated early- nineteenth- century aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of piano music.” Categorically, piano music stood at the locus of the complex negotiations between autonomous and functional music. Piano music and musicians, therefore, become particularly interesting sites to expose the fragility of these now well- entrenched binaries. See Carl Dahl- haus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Robert Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 142. 19 Raykoff , Sounds of Love, 176. 20 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 2005), 73. 21 Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth- Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2001), 2.

112 Women & Music Volume 21 has allowed critics and academics to dismiss the genre, it is this very peculiarity that has ensured the portrait’s well- established “commercial viability.”22 This tension also creates what McPherson describes as a “mysterious ‘factor x’ [that] contributes to our fascination with the psychodynamics of portraiture as a process for transcribing life, as well as to the frustration of attempting to analyze portraits objectively as autonomous works of art.”23 In this way, portraiture acts as a kind of art that is at odds with itself: it is both a “historical record and [a] transformative fi ction.”24 So while we might think of portraits as diluted by their commodifi cation and, therefore, almost resistant to artistic interpretation, it is perhaps precisely because of this dynamic inconsistency that these kinds of images become such rewarding sites for musical recovery. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the portrait went through a series of seismic shift s. On the one hand, painters of the nineteenth century placed the genre on the front lines of artistic innovation.25 On the other hand, with the development of the lithograph, carte de visite, and photographic touch- up technology, the commodifi cation of portraiture increased dramatically, further reinforcing the medium’s entanglement with functionality. These mass- produced images, however, seemed only to enrich the intimacy of the portrait, as collectibles confi rmed social status while simultaneously encouraging an imagined, personal relationship to develop.26 For the famous, the portrait’s “mysterious ‘factor x’” heightened dramatically. Following the publication of Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Physiognomisch Fragmente in the late 1770s, the establishment of physiognomic realism shaped interaction with all kinds of celebrity portraiture.27 As Eva Giloi argues, while technological developments increased the kinds and quantities of images produced, they also expanded the range of interpretive possibilities:

Portraits of cultural heroes—engravings, woodcuts, lithographs—[were] studied to gain insight into the celebrities’ innermost being. Such graphic techniques [like the lithograph] also off ered the possibility of depicting the great man in action, or in the process of the creative act. As such, lithographic portraiture was used not only to re- ﬂ ect the actual countenance of the cultural genius, but also the emotions and artistic principles that his work represented.28

This kind of focused interaction would only intensify with the advances in pho-

22 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 2. 23 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 2. 24 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 2. 25 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 3. 26 See Eva Giloi, “‘So Writes the Hand That Swings the Sword’: Autograph Hunting and Royal Cha- risma,” in Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth- Century Europe, ed. Edward Ber- enson and Eva Giloi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 41– 52. 27 See Robert A. Sobieszek, “Photography and the Expressive Face,” in Ghosts in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850– 2000 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 16– 32. 28 Giloi, “‘So Writes the Hand,’” 48.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 113 Fig. 1. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, no. 14, April 4, 1866, 116.

tography and the development of the carte de visite.29 By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, these small, sturdy photo cards would cause a “European- wide sensation, especially for celebrity portraits,” as they were “handled, circulated, and traded . . . and readily slipped in and out of the windows of photograph albums.”30

29 For an introduction to these technological advances, see Suren Lalvani, “Photography and the Bourgeois Body,” in Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 43–86; and William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth-Century Photography (Gettysburg: W. C. Darrah, Publisher, 1981). 30 Giloi, “‘So Writes the Hand,’” 47. Clara Schumann’s own photo album contains around 160 cartes de visite in total. Her collection included photographs of herself, her family, and her friends. To give a few examples, she had pictures of Adolph Henselt, Johannes Brahms, Joseph Joachim, Stephen Heller, Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, Jenny Lind, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Ignaz Moscheles, Ferdinand David, Anton Rubenstein, Emil Devrient in various acting costumes, and Richard Wagner, just to name a few. See Thomas Synofzik and Jochen Voigt, Aus Clara Schumanns Photoalben: Photographische Cartes de Visite aus der Sammlung des Robert- Schumann- Hauses Zwickau (Chemnitz: Edition Mobilis, 2006).

114 Women & Music Volume 21 Fig. 2. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, no. 28, July 11, 1866, 228.

Even with the more static visual results of the carte de visite, these photos could easily off set this eff ect by containing various props or additional imagery to represent the sitter’s social and cultural activity.31 It is perhaps precisely because of the image’s stillness that consumers had to study the picture more intensely; these pictures, then, demanded even more interpretive eff ort. Along these lines, even a posed or (oddly) static portrait of Schumann could become intimately connected to her active musical persona. Her images, therefore, revealed details about her musical expression and cultural celebrity while simultaneously encouraging consumers to “introduce their own subjectivity into the act.”32 This personal interaction is paramount in Schumann’s case, given the ways in which her image was mass- produced and marketed. Figures 1 and 2 (along with the many cartes de visite she has left behind) imply that her portrait was a sought- aft er commodity. In these advertisements, the sale of her image is showcased

31 The process required a longer, ten- second exposure time, during which the sitter had to remain completely still. See Giloi, “‘So Writes the Hand,’” 49. 32 While here Giloi references the idiosyncrasies in displaying and organizing photo albums, the point stands that a consumer’s subjectivity was front and center in her relationship to personally owned photographs and images. Giloi, “‘So Writes the Hand,’” 47.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 115 prominently alongside that of musical scores and other visual memorabilia.33 At the very least, these advertisements substantiate the importance and accessibility of her portraiture while suggesting that the visual could both intersect with and perpetuate aspects of her public musicality. Furthermore, this evidence points to a number of interpretive possibilities: by marketing her image and their “owner- ship” of it, publishers could generate excitement and support for her past and upcoming performances; celebrate and validate their own music criticism; promote musical works that her musicality seemingly endorsed by placing the sale of her portrait alongside those works; encourage amateurs to buy their publications to play at home as she might play in public; and cultivate (or complicate) her association with the serious musical culture to which she was becoming so intimately bound, especially by 1866. Her portraits here, while only in advertised form, have the potential to do quite a lot of (musical) work. Such interpretive ﬂ exibility implies that in order for any portrait to make sense to the viewer, it would have to engage with the lived—or perhaps even the desired or imagined—experiences of both the artist and the listener.34 In Truth and Method Hans- Georg Gadamer underscores how a portrait becomes representative of what the viewers expect or represents what the audiences have, in fact, coded onto it. In so doing, the portrait becomes both personal and representational. Ga- damer is relatively unbothered by the functionality of the medium, as the portrait only heightens (or exacerbates) the conﬂ ict inherent in all images:

The portrait is only an intensifi cation of what constitutes the essence of all pictures. Every picture is an increase of being and is essentially defi nable as representation, as coming- to- presentation. In the special case of the portrait this representation acquires a personal signifi cance, in that here an individual is presented in a representative way. For this means that the person represented represents himself in his portrait and is represented by his portrait. . . . The best judges of the portrait are never the nearest relatives, nor even the person himself. For a portrait never tries to reproduce the individual it represents as he appears in the eyes of people close to him. Of necessity, what it shows is an idealization, which can run through an infi nite number of stages from the representative to the most intimate.35

Here, the portrait is a heightened illustration couched within the larger representational phenomenon. The portrait both “represents” and “is represented,” and the “person” it produces is both deeply intimate and deﬁ antly idealized.

33 J. Rieter- Biedermann (the publisher of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung) capitalized on the sale of Schumann’s portrait, marketed in April and July 1866, during some of her most prolifi c concertizing years. Having only recently acquired the AmZ from Breitkopf & Härtel, which had revived the journal in 1863 aft er a fi ft een-year hiatus, the paper associated itself fi rmly with the “conservative,” anti- Wagnerian camp under the editorship of Selmar Bagge. See Karl Kügle, “Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung,” RIPM, http:// www .ripm .org / ?page = JournalInfo & ABB = AMZ. 34 See Leppert, The Sight of Sound, xxi. 35 Hans- Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), 142.

116 Women & Music Volume 21 Gadamer’s more abstract aspect of portraiture allows not only for a personal and individual understanding to develop but also for the visual to function as a commentary on the larger social framework and the subject’s (imagined) position within it. The image renders an intensely personal piece of art wherein the personal can be extracted—or ignored—and the portrait becomes representational. This representational aspect can come to defi ne the person presented, or, rather, the subject herself becomes subjugated by the viewers and brought into the image’s “own reality.” Accordingly, the visual exists in limbo between its representational being and its many possible interpretations. In this “idealized” version of the image’s persona, we can tease out those signifi ers suggesting— or refuting— the idealization in order to create a semicoherent “present memory.” The signifi cance of the portrait exists in the comprehension of whoever beholds and, while beholding, attempts to (re- )create the whole meaning of the object. Ultimately, if we dismiss the painted or photographed portrait as mundane, disposable, or artistically infe- rior, we underestimate the incredible amount of interpretation these images seem to encourage— or desire. For portraits do, perhaps, desire. To go to an art museum and enter the hall of portraits— sometimes reluctantly— is to look at picture aft er picture of people we do not know. A portrait wants us to see that the person mattered— that he or she still matters.36 In asking “What do pictures want?” W. J. T. Mitchell positions the desires of images on an equal footing with the desires of the artist, subject, and beholder. For Mitchell, images “absorb and [are] absorbed by human subjects” and as such not only are an “imitation of life” but also can take on “lives of their own.”37 The portrait—an exchanged, displayed, and frequently traded commodity—seems particularly primed for this kind of independent “life.” In thinking of images in this way, we open up new ways for refl ecting on and approaching portraiture:

Perhaps the most interesting consequence of seeing images as living things is that the question of their value (understood as vitality) is playing out in a social context. We need to ponder that we don’t just evaluate images; images introduce new forms of value into the world, contesting our criteria, forcing us to change our minds. . . . Images are not just passive entities that coexist with their human hosts, any more than microorganisms that dwell in our intestines. They change the way we think and see and dream. They refunction our memories and imaginations, bringing new criteria and desires into the world.38

By reﬂ ecting on the desires of images, we can position the “relationality of image

36 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 73. 37 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 2. 38 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 92.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 117 and beholder” alongside other modes of visual inquiry.39 We can also recognize the visual as refl ecting and yet actively shaping our understanding of the subject displayed. As Mitchell suggests, we can consider “what pictures want” by craft ing any number of seemingly impossible and unanswerable questions that can inspire new kinds of analyses. When considering the many portraits of Schumann, we can perhaps also push Mitchell’s theory further to take stock of how individual portraits interact with each another and, in so doing, how all of these portraits together construct an almost self-contained living visual realm that stimulates a range of desires and discourses about those desires.40 Portraits are unique in their deep, tangible connection to lived life— they are of real people, aft er all— and yet also distinct because we want to discount them for that very reason.41 At fi rst glance, we might not think they want much of us, but in relying on Mitchell’s theory, we can admit that all pictures, even the most mundane, want something. In their preservation for posterity and their sheer ubiquity, portraits seem to take themselves very seriously—they want to matter. What would it mean for us to take portraits as seriously as they want us to? In essence, visual texts become a space of “cultural practice” that, as Grisel- da Pollock argues in a pointedly feminist critique, constructs kinds of meanings and frameworks for how those meanings are understood.42 Within these analyses I work to push past stylistic observations to readings that speak to the portrait’s rich- ness of meaning, contradictory messaging, and oft en messy attempts to stabilize (or destabilize) the feminine. Ultimately, as Pollock advocates, in order to explore Schumann as a sign and symbol of femininity and musicality and to consider her images within the complex web of ideological meaning, I seek how portraiture and its associative cultural practices “do a job which has a major social signifi cance in the articulation of meanings about the world, in the negotiation of social confl icts, in the production of social subjects.”43 At its most basic, how did a female pianist who was actively subverting the bourgeois order engage with, uphold, over-

39 Mitchell argues that “the point, however, is not to install a personiﬁ cation of the work of art as the master term but to put our relation to the work into question, to make the relationality of image and beholder the ﬁ eld of investigation. The idea is to make pictures less scrutable, less transparent; also in turn analysis of pictures toward questions of process, aff ect, and to put in question the spectator position: what does the picture want from me or from ‘us’ or from ‘them’ or from whomever? Who or what is the target of the demand/desire/need expressed by the picture? One can also translate the question: what does this picture lack; what does it leave out? What is its area of erasure? Its blind spot? Its anamorphic blur? What does the frame or boundary exclude? What does its angle of representation prevent us from seeing, and prevent it from showing? What does it need or demand from the beholder to complete its work?” (What Do Pictures Want?, 49). 40 In a powerful conclusion, Mitchell situates our own relationality to images thusly: “To get the whole picture of pictures, then, we cannot remain content with the narrow conception of them, nor can we imagine that our results, no matter how general or comprehensive, will be anything more than a picture of images . . . as they appear to some of us at this moment. For whatever the picture is . . . we ourselves are in it” (What Do Pictures Want?, xvii). 41 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 73. 42 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Diff erence: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art (London: Rout- ledge, 1988), 6. 43 Pollock, Vision and Diff erence, 7.

118 Women & Music Volume 21 come, and even challenge these conﬁ gurations? As Pollock argues, these questions sit at the heart of recovering the feminine experience in the nineteenth century; accordingly, images can contain vestiges of other kinds of realities, no matter how concealed by the dominant perspective.44 Schumann’s portraiture exists as a central part of and yet a deviation from the dominant masculine narrative. Exploring her career and attending to both her conformations and deviations allows us to further challenge and undermine the binaries we have created not only around gender in the nineteenth century but also around music. Crucially, I am making no “authoritative claims of accuracy” here; instead, I am hoping that these analyses can help expose the complexities of Schumann’s performative persona and its careful construction. These interpretations are “found” and not “made”—the concept of conscious artistic or photographic in- tentionality is, at least in my view, beside the point. It is only when we make con- siderable “hermeneutic eff ort” to engage with both the overt and covert meanings and details that we can perhaps, as Norman Bryson argues, ﬁ nd a kind of (impossible) “truth.”45 This ever- elusive truth exists in a space between the representative and the interpretive, pushing the limits to their possible extremes and asking new questions of the portrait. Given that Schumann has been so oft en positioned on one extreme, these analyses oft en tend to the possibilities of its opposite. By considering a variety of focal points within the context of nineteenth- century portraiture and photography—ranging from pose, dress, composition, medium, background, framing, props, facial expression and physiognomy, and even the desires of the image— we can uncover traces of Schumann’s performing persona that have been long cloaked by a masculine understanding of her career. While her portraiture wants us to see the priestess, perhaps it also wants us to see something more. Most importantly, we can acknowledge that Schumann’s gender was anything but secondary to how audiences consumed and understood her musical expression. In- deed, Schumann’s portraits help us blur the (gendered) boundaries that we have placed around her and all kinds of musical expression. In creating even the briefest

44 As Pollock outlines, “The bourgeois revolution was in many ways a historic defeat for women and it created the special confi guration of power and domination with which we as women now have to contend. It is the history of its consolidation, i.e. of bourgeois social relations and of their dominant ideological forms, that we need to analyse and subvert . . . in order to be able to identify the specifi c confi g- urations of bourgeois femininity and the forms of bourgeois mystifi cation which mask the reality of social and sexual antagonisms and, denying us vision and voice, deprive us of power” (Vision and Diff erence, 49). 45 I include the crux of Norman Bryson’s argument here: “The point is not that such interpretations make any authoritative claim to accuracy, but on the contrary that because it requires a certain amount of hermeneutic eff ort, because it must extract meaning from the image of diffi culty and uncertainty, the connotations are experienced as found, not made; and this exactly confi rms the natural attitude, where meaning is felt to inhere in an objective world and is not apprehended as the product of particular cultural work. . . . Since the elusive meanings are hard to draw out of the image, and seem to engage the viewer in a private act of investigation far more intimate and personally determined than the public activity of iconographic recognition, they are valued over those meanings which the image places on display; because they are understood as superfl ux, as detail unrequired by the image’s civic or offi cial project, the logic of suspicion lowers its guard and accords to the elusive meanings the status of proof: somewhere in this unmapped territory of connotation, the truth . . . is to be found” (Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983], 64– 65).

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 119 escape for Schumann from our still patriarchal positioning of her— that she inevitably worked for the work— we can better understand her legacy to nineteenth- century music and her relationship to the musical object.

Visually Constructing the Priestess Some nineteenth- century performing women used visual eccentricity as a way to navigate the public space and confi rm that “they had become culturally unintelli- gible to their public.”46 Others used imagery to diminish the power of their public presence—to prove their social conformity and decorum or to soothe away their “unintelligibility.” These latter kinds of images oft en presented a private persona in an eff ort to ensure social respectability, a trend that Roberta Montemorra Mar- vin explores in published images of nineteenth-century prima donnas. In such displays, the performer sought to deny aspects of her performative identity that might confl ict with the prevailing middle- class status quo. Accordingly, a lot of this imagery overfl owed with domesticated signs and symbols that could uphold the “epitome of femininity.”47 Tracy C. Davis makes a similar argument regarding Victorian actresses. While I am careful not to confl ate all stage- performing women, they too strove “to make the propriety of their private lives visible and accepted”; remarkably, even this strategy could easily backfi re, because “by providing proof of their respectable ‘normalcy’ actresses showed disregard for privacy, modesty, and self- abnegation.”48 While it is clear that Schumann was aff orded social acceptability, it was inevitably tenuous and carefully constructed. Accordingly, her publicly displayed feminine performing body could be used against her at any moment. Most of her portraits—no matter the medium—attempt to reify her safe femininity and her subservience to the patriarchal forces to which she and her musical successes were bound. At fi rst glance, Clara Schumann’s portraiture seems to fall mostly into the “safer” category of female celebrity imagery as outlined by Martin and Davis. Even as such, however, her expansive visual record also revels in discreet ambiguities, beget perhaps by the social anxieties her performances could create. Close attention to (and even a celebration of) such complexities creates a compelling frame through which to consider Schumann’s career. As Colleen Denney explains, for female celebrities,

anxiety comes into play . . . when we explore how she is pictured in relation to society’s view of her as an anomaly—a professional woman—and hence perceives her as transgressive and scandalous. Does she conform to . . . constructions of womanhood as passive, docile and submissive, even though that construction does not include her,

46 Mary Louise Roberts, “Rethinking Female Celebrity: The Eccentric Star of Nineteenth- Century France,” in Berenson and Giloi , Constructing Charisma, 48. 47 Roberta Montemorra Marvin, “Idealizing the Prima Donna in Mid- Victorian London,” in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 28. 48 Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women (London: Routledge, 1991), 69.

120 Women & Music Volume 21 Fig. 3. Anonymous, Clara and Robert Schumann, lithograph (1859). (Made aft er the daguerreotype by Johann Anton Völlner of 1850.) Credit: bpk Bildagentur / Art Resource, NY. or does she seek a diff erent view of self outside that realm and, if the latter, how does she negotiate that liminal space visually?49

Even though Schumann’s portraiture contains pronounced notions of domestic disciplining, feminine docility, and the celebration of the nineteenth-century masculine vantage point, it also off ers a way to approach reception that, because of the medium, places her transgressive feminine musical body front and center. As much as these portraits might work to deny or control Schumann’s body and show her as a “moral exemplar,” her imagery sometimes seems to “seek out a dif- ferent view of self.”50 Schumann’s incredibly long career could have benefi ted from this tension: she couched her performances within an ideal of the “safe” even as she simultaneously allowed, or even encouraged, listeners to savor the creative confusion and feminine deviancy that her performances stimulated. We have positioned Clara Schumann as a musical conservative, but what if instead she also held hints of the radical?51 Is it possible to further complicate the mind-body divide that we so oft en rely on to frame nineteenth-century musical experiences? To engage with not only aspects of bourgeois disciplining but also traces of social subversion, I have chosen the following four images because they represent a range of visual representations and interpretive planes. I fi rst analyze two portraits that seem to fi t fi rmly within the conservative, priestess- oriented ideal. From there, I move on to two images that confound or more forcefully resist that ideal. In every picture, however—from the most conservative to the most resistant— there are details that seem to relish their interpretive complications. These aspects desire us to notice them, and, as a result, we work to make sense of them. Figures 3 and 4, two of the most familiar images of Schumann, are repro- duced frequently in biographies and textbooks. Figure 3 gives us a glimpse into the familial and musical relationship between Robert and Clara Schumann, while fi g- ure 4 shows Clara Schumann’s transformation to widowhood. Both images share similarities of facial expression, gaze, and general interpretive goals. In so doing, these portraits confi rm a “representational type” and validate the overwhelming power of bourgeois ideological conventions that sought to dictate Schumann’s social conformity.52 Generally speaking, fi gures 3 and 4 present a public persona of Schumann that celebrates her most as a version of the “priestess”: as an exemplar of the German serious music aesthetic, or as domestic and appropriately subservient to the masculine. This perspective, while perhaps the most dominant, is at times

49 Colleen Denney, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandal- ous Reconsidered (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), 2. 50 See Lalvani, “Photography and the Bourgeois Body,” 55. 51 Mark Evan Bonds argues for this shift in thinking as related to Eduard Hanslick: “We should consider that even as Hanslick advocated for ‘music’s past,’ his aesthetic theories were decidedly in the ‘small minority’ (especially when compared to Wagner and Liszt). As such, they could be understood as ‘radical’ instead of ‘conservative’” (Absolute Music: The History of an Idea [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 173– 74). 52 See Lalvani, “Photography and the Bourgeois Body,” 56.

122 Women & Music Volume 21 Fig. 4. Franz Hanfstaengl, Clara Schumann, photograph (1857). Credit: HIP / Art Resource, NY.

delicately complicated by other visual details. So even as I establish ﬁ gures 3 and 4 as perhaps more compliant within our current historiography of Schumann, I also wish to explore how these images might invite moments of creative resistance. In ﬁ gure 3, Schumann’s subservient nature is most emphasized by the presence of the upright, domestic piano and, of course, Robert Schumann. This en-

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 123 graving also reveals a consistency across Schumann’s portraiture, especially in how she is most oft en shown interacting with the piano. For example, the similarities between ﬁ gures 3 and 5 are quite remarkable: Schumann directs both her gaze and her body away from the piano; she wears a plain stoic facial expression; she places her left hand carefully on the keyboard and her right hand in her lap; and her lavish gown exposes her shoulders. The excess fabric of the gown, ornately draped, billows around her, balancing feminine allure and sexual modesty.53 As she looks away from her left hand, she reminds us of a central “truth” of “bourgeois ideology: that the world may be civilized by the domestication of the hand by the head.”54 Perhaps most conspicuous, however, is that both images show Schumann as unusually static. Figure 3 is an 1859 lithograph drawing made aft er a daguerreotype from 1850. This reimagining, while changing some details (facial expression, gaze direction, stance, and props) nevertheless maintains the rigid expressions that long and uncomfortable daguerreotype sittings required.55 At ﬁ rst glance, there is very little that is demonstrably active about Schumann’s engagement with the instrument— the body of one of the most celebrated virtuosos of the nineteenth century is carefully disciplined and controlled. Figure 3 works to create a musical experience that establishes Schumann as nonthreatening; this is an image that calms—that convinces. She is presented as a performer / wife subservient to the needs of the masculine composer / husband / serious musical work. Encased in the shadows, Robert Schumann stands with his hand at his chin in contemplative thought. Against her stillness, he takes an active step forward. Even his facial features appear more expressive and nimbler than hers. As he gazes down at her, his body connects intimately with the instrument itself: his elbow rests on the lid, and his leg mimics the curve of the piano leg. In this attachment to the instrument, Robert seems to impose a kind of authority over its (and the player’s) musical expression. As he looks down at Clara, she directs both her body and her gaze toward him, seemingly rejecting the instrument and almost waiting for his direction. That said, even in her appearance of “passivity,”

53 These images are also consistent with the one of Marie Pleyel at the piano. In an image from 1846, Pleyel wears a shoulderless gown and a symmetrically parted hairstyle, leans back from the instrument, maintains a plain facial expression, and poses her hands carefully on the keys of the piano. When looking further into Clara Schumann’s visual record, the 1878 photograph by Franz Hanfstaengl also shows a similar interaction with the piano, especially in how her upper body turns away from the piano while her hands are placed carefully on the keyboard. 54 See Lalvani, “Photography and the Bourgeois Body,” 52. 55 In the original 1850 daguerreotype by Johann Anton Völlner, Robert Schumann’s foot appears more “crossed over” his other foot, which reads almost “leisurely” as opposed to “active.” He also examines a stack of music scores on the top of the piano. Clara Schumann wears a slight smile, and her gaze is more off set to the left — it is not directed toward Robert Schumann. Her head also stands straighter in the original, as opposed to bending forward slightly in the later lithograph. The original also lacks the elaborately drawn curtain, instead showing the corner of a chair. All in all, the original daguerreotype seems to intimate more forcefully a collaborative engagement. For a more detailed discussion of the daguerreotype process, see John Tagg, The Burden of Representations: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 40– 44.

124 Women & Music Volume 21 Fig. 5. Julius Giere, Clara Wieck, lithograph (1835). Credit: De Agostini Picture Library / A. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images. does ﬁ gure 3 ask (or desire) us to “imagine” Clara Schumann’s activity?56 While her presence creates a kind of domestic harmony with Robert Schumann, we know that she plays in public; we know that even as she performs this domesticity, she actively upends it elsewhere. It is this incongruence that creates some of the most interesting tension of the portrait. While Robert has a more visibly active role as he takes a step forward, Clara perhaps intimates her activity through her directional gaze and spatial situ- ation in the portrait. As he shows his mindful, compositional authority with his height over the instrument and the performer, Clara’s body dominates the lower half of the portrait. She directs her gaze toward his waist—the exact part of his body that aligns (or merges) with her instrument and her “space.” The piano, an instrument intimately tied to Clara and nineteenth- century bourgeois women in general, becomes united with his body. As she plays the piano, she takes agency over his body and “plays” it as well; her performative control over his music and body is decisive. We see a collapse of the clear division between the public and private realms. Indeed, while the piano could symbolize “social harmony and domestic order,” it could also represent a powerful link between the private and the public— between “men and women in their social relations, and between bourgeois desire and erotic capacity . . . and their sublimation.”57 In an era that denied bourgeois women pleasure—that indeed saw sexual pleasure as morally deviant— Schumann’s focused desire of (and performative control over) her husband’s body and music marks her playing as a product of her focused and authoritative feminine musicality. Given this kind of entanglement, this image engages with the well-known nineteenth- century representational trope that featured the “woman at the piano” under the direction of a male teacher.58 Shown in Western European art as early as the seventeenth century, the music lesson came to represent a wide range of meanings— as the domestic piano was wont to do—from moral purity to “forbid- den desire.”59

As a visual subject in the nineteenth century, the lesson became . . . more voyeuristic. When it was portrayed as a chaperoned event, its strict “purity” was preserved. More common, however, were representations in which the music lesson was a pretext for depicting seething passions: a young man might stare intently at his considerably younger pupil while she plays demurely.60

56 For example, even in fi gure 5, her left hand is in plain view, carefully posed over the piano, and we easily see the opening theme of the fi nale to her Piano Concerto op. 7. As she looks directly at those who are looking at her, Schumann seems ready to “play,” and to play a piece that she composed to display her virtuosic ability at its fi nest. While this image was made well before the priestess ideology was fi rmly entrenched, it is interesting that this kind of careful, visual interaction with the piano would begin so early and extend until the later years of her career (or at least to 1878). 57 Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 139. 58 See E. Douglas Bomberger, Martha Dennis Burns, James Parakilas, Judith Tick, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Mark Tucker, “The Piano Lesson,” in Parakilas, Piano Roles, 133– 80. 59 See Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 161– 67. 60 Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 161.

126 Women & Music Volume 21 While I am not saying that fi gure 3 overwhelms with “seething passions,” this image resonates with visual signs that confound and uphold the typical gendered hierarchy. (It was, however, this tension that made these kinds of images so appeal- ing.) More pointedly, the meaning of the portrait hinges on the way Robert gazes so intently and moves actively toward Clara. In turn, she waits— with her focused gaze and poised hand— for his musical direction. Yet even as she waits, she antici- pates, and she gazes intently. She balances his compositional “dominance” with her own feminine musical authority; she refuses to be “demure.” While fi gure 3 attends to Schumann’s subservience to and authority over the musical work, fi gure 4 works even harder to accentuate the domestic over transgressive femininity.61 This photograph was taken in 1857, when Schumann was newly widowed and had just completed her 1856 concert season. During this season she performed over fi ft y concerts— the most of any in the course of her career.62 Given these circumstances, fi gure 4 perhaps mediates her frequent public presence and newly widowed social status more defi nitively. As photographic portraiture became a space where “identity was performed rather than expressed,” poses, back- grounds, and props came to be fairly homogeneous; such details, however, were oft en accented by more nuanced aspects of dress and posture.63 In this case, the image disciplines her body into one of “performed” social conformity in a variety of ways.64 Schumann wears an ornate, elaborately draped gown with a modest collar that accentuates closure with a large, round clasp. Her hairstyle, too, emphasizes an almost taut severity, pulled back and contained precisely in a lace net and black ribbon— a marker of her widowhood. We see this severe parted hairstyle again and again throughout Schumann’s portraiture, a hairstyle that showcased not only her modesty but also the symmetry of her face and, therefore, her physiognomic appeal.65 The directional lighting even shines across her face and hair, drawing our attention to the smoothness of her hairstyle, small earring, high forehead, and delicate cheekbone— all markers of her middle- class status, conventional beauty, moral aptitude, and intelligence.66 Her hands, an important sign of gentility, are

61 While Clara Schumann’s concertizing saw a decline in 1857 aft er Robert Schumann’s death in July 1856 and an arm injury in October 1857, she was still performing between thirty and forty concerts a season between 1857 and 1860. See Reinhard Kopiez, Andreas C. Lehmann, and Janina Klassen, “Clara Schumann’s Collection of Playbills: A Historiometric Analysis of Life-Span Development, Mobility, and Repertoire Canonization,” Poetics 37 (2009): 57– 58. 62 Kopiez, Lehmann, and Klassen, “Clara Schumann’s Collection of Playbills.” 63 Juliet Hacking, ed., Photography: The Whole Story (New York: Prestel, 2012), 102. 64 Lalvani argues that nineteenth-century portraiture was an integral tool to discipline bodies into ones of social order and compliance: “Portraiture is always about public display, even if the photograph is limited to private consumption” (“Photography and the Bourgeois Body,” 59– 60). 65 As Valerie Steele and Marvin discuss, clothing held a kind of signiﬁ cance that related implicitly to notions of bourgeois morality. For Marvin, “the ways in which women adorned themselves were considered signiﬁ cant criteria in assessing their ethnic, social, and moral identities. Style, fabric texture and pat- tern, degree of décor, jewelry, and so on could all impart messages, at least to the portion of the audience attuned to their covert meanings. . . . Judging from visual representations of fallen women, excess in or- nament of any kind was oft en symbolic of deviants, transgressors, or at least ‘others’” (Marvin, “Idealizing the Prima Donna,” 32). See also Valerie Steel, Fashion and Eroticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 66 See Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 72– 74.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 127 fully exposed, and while the left gets caught up in the blurrier corners of the photograph, the right is sharply detailed and prominently displayed.67 Schumann’s posture and pose also contribute to a vision of modesty and sexual inaccessibility while reinforcing patriarchal power. For instance, our view of her tiny waist, the central focal point of the image, is carefully mediated. The well- established and ever- present column and the billowing curtain help frame and accentuate her waist’s import, as do the blurrier outer edges. The precise positioning of her propped right arm and the careful arrangement of her left sleeve create a window that allows the viewer access. This strictly controlled display—wherein the small, corseted waist becomes the marker of both sexuality and domesticity— accentuates how Schumann epitomizes the bourgeois feminine physical ideal.68 Her body, however, is regulated: her positioning not only allows us a judicious kind of access but also underscores how “sexuality in domesticity was licit but also repressed and repressive.”69 Alongside these hints of sexuality, domesticated markers abound in the presence of standard photographic props, such as a delicate, decorative chair— clearly a piece of furniture in the bourgeois home. With its ornate woodwork and latticed frame, bourgeois furniture provided the literal space for respite and leisure while simultaneously being a marker of class and cultivation. As the chair intrudes on Schumann’s space and intermingles with the bottom of her skirt, the two pieces of domestic life join together in solidarity. Schumann appears digniﬁ ed and stoic in her appropriately domesticated setting. Within the goals of nineteenth- century portraiture, she is an exemplary model for others to emulate.70 Many other images of Schumann conform quite easily to this reading; generally speaking, her photographic portraits follow a fairly standard format that emphasizes her middle- class and domesticated status, thereby legitimizing the patriarchal bourgeois status quo. One prop, however, creates a brief moment of creative ambiguity and resistance. Schumann’s right hand holds a small appointment book. Is this book a list of her household duties? Or is this appointment book a schedule of her upcoming concerts? (Schumann would go on to perform around forty concerts during her next season.) If she were actively reading or planning, she might hold the book open the very same way, with her ﬁ ngers keeping back the pages. It almost seems as if the photographer has interrupted her, and she keeps the small book open so as not to lose her place.71 Even as the image overwhelms us with a domesticated Schumann, this one central detail invites uncertainty and allows us to visualize her on the public stage—the composer and his work are completely absent. The small detail lets the beholder imagine that she plans where and what she plays. In

67 Hacking, Photography, 107. 68 The ideals of feminine sexuality and bourgeois morality were oft en entangled with physical attri- butes, which clothing helped to accentuate. See Steele, Fashion and Eroticism, 161. 69 Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 161. 70 See Audrey Linkman, The Victorians: Photographic Portraits (London: Tauris Parke Books, 1993), 46. 71 Clara Schumann had long held creative control over her concert scheduling, programming, and collaborations. See Nancy Reich, “The Concert Artist,” in Reich, Clara Schumann, 258– 88.

128 Women & Music Volume 21 Fig. 6. Adolph von Menzel, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim in Concert, pastel drawing (1854). Credit: Private Collection Peter Willi / Bridgeman Images. so doing, this portrait also aff ords her a kind of performative agency and creative control that diverge ever so slightly from the bourgeois feminine ideal and from that of the priestess.

Visually (De)Constructing the Priestess Figures 3 and 4 create an ideological framework that shows crucial facets of the domesticated priestess ideology while at times indulging in subtle ambiguities that speak to the performative authority and activity of Schumann in more dynamic ways. Figures 6 and 8 showcase even greater complexity and creative engagement with this historiography. The familiar drawing shown in fi gure 6 depicts Schumann and Joseph Joachim’s Berlin performances of December 10 and 16, 1854. Adolph von Menzel, one of the most renowned German artists of the time and an enthusiastic supporter of both theater and music, recounted this event visually. From a rough pencil sketch, he completed the fi nal chalk drawing a few days later, notating it as a “memory” in the left - hand- corner margin: “A.M. Erinnerung 20 Dec / 54.”72 This extraordinary image, as noted earlier, is the only visual record of Schumann in performance. Both players appear focused and active and the event warm and welcoming. That said, this drawing fl uctuates between celebrating Schumann’s musicality and simultaneously containing it. In this case, we get a fascinating fi rsthand look at how her performance identity was molded into the fi nal product. Menzel exposes a diff erent kind of reality in the pencil sketches, which (we assume) he draft ed during the performance itself or very soon thereaf- ter. These confl icting visual records create an interesting interpretive framework precisely because the lived experiences are subtly at odds with the fi nal Erinnerung. In this case, we get a glimpse of how Schumann’s musical sexuality—sometimes dangerous and overly passionate— was normalized by the fi xing of the masculine vantage point. Although rudimentary and just a rough draft , Menzel’s pencil sketch (fi gure 7) is particularly powerful because of its unmediated exposure of Schumann’s music making—an activity that appears quite diff erent in the fi nal version. Aside from the scant details of the piano and candelabra, Menzel provides no other markers of spatial orientation or locale. Additionally, Schumann and Joachim are placed on individual pages with no attempt to portray them interacting or making music together. Joachim wields his violin bow with vehemence, and Schumann looks just as (if not more) dynamic and invested in the physicality of her performance. She comes out of her imaginary seat, both of her arms are viewable, and her hands, while indistinct, contain a furor of activity and movement. Her chin even reaches to her chest—a result of her intense focus on her hand technique. Schumann’s face, contrasting sharply with Joachim’s tranquil, indistinct expression, is oddly

72 By the time the image was ﬁ nished, Schumann and Joachim were in Leipzig preparing for the concert at the Gewandhaus on December 21. See Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher, Adolph Menzel 1815–1905: Between Romanticism and Impressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 270– 71.

130 Women & Music Volume 21 Fig. 7. Adolph von Menzel, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim in Concert, pencil sketch (1854). Credit: bpk Bildagentur / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY. detailed and unsettling. We see clear wrinkles around her pinched mouth as she furrows her brow over her sharply angled eyebrows and focused eyes. Even the distance between her nose and mouth seems a bit stretched. What is surprising in this portrayal is its oddness within the larger visual oeuvre of Schumann, and even though a simple sketch can be easy to discount, the intensity of her facial expression is surprising. Here, she shows the dynamic facial rhetoric of performing— her own subjective feelings, interpretive choices, and physical challenges are apparent and exposed.73 Indeed, as with fi gures 3, 4, 5, and 8, Schumann most oft en wears a plain expression that easily conforms to nineteenth- century physiognomic notions of bourgeois beauty and intellect.74 Here, her face is anything but controlled or calm.75 Given that, according to Lavater’s reading of physiognomy, “facial features were understood to be manifestations of levels of normalcy or deviancy, restraint or excess,” her tense mouth and furrowed brow— coupled with her active body—seem to hint at the deviant side of the feminine self.76 Within the ideals of physiognomy, physical beauty and moral virtue were synonymous; Lavater states this unequivocally in the fragment entitled “On the Harmony between Moral Beauty and Physical Beauty”: “Beauty and ugliness of the face are closely related to the moral constitution of Man: thus, the more morally good he is, the more beautiful he is; the more morally bad, the uglier.”77 In this case, without the mediation of the masculine, Schumann seems to get close to a state of being that Lavater attributed to feminine excess or social deviance. A side of her performances, which are bodily, active, and overwhelmingly feminine, comes into focus— if only for a brief moment, and if only in a rough, oft -dismissed sketch. This scenario is decidedly reimagined in the fi nal chalk drawing (fi gure 6).

73 Tom Beghin, The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty- First- Century Keyboardist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 191. 74 Marvin argues that this kind of plainness of expression was quite valued in the prima donna of London. In fact, this restraint became associated with heightened intellect while simultaneously speaking to inner beauty. See “Idealizing the Prima Donna,” 30– 31. 75 If we want to push this interpretation farther, we could consider Schumann as almost unattractive or even “ugly” in this representation. Throughout history, the ugly in art, categorically opposed to the beautiful, oft en referred to those disenfranchised of power or those outside of moral dictums. “At its most basic, ugliness served as the all- purpose repository for everything that did not quite ﬁ t [beauty’s] centered and elevated norm: mundane reality, the irrational, evil, disorder, dissonance, irregularity, excess, deformi- ty, the marginal: in short, the Other” (Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Ugliness,” in Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed., ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Schiff [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 281). See also Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 172; and Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth- Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (1985): 226. 76 Marvin, “Idealizing the Prima Donna,” 28. 77 Quoted in Christopher Rivers, “Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Zola’s Nana,” in Physiognomy in Proﬁ le: Lavater’s Impact on European Culture, ed. Melissa Percival and Graeme Tytler (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 147. This excerpt comes from a fragment entitled “De l’harmonie entre la beauté morale et la beauté physique.” The entire quote in French is presented here: “La beauté et la laideur du vis- age ont un rapport étroit avec la constitution morale de l’Homme: ainsi, plus il est moralement bon, plus il est beau; plus il est moralement mauvais, plus il est laid.” Sander L. Gilman also discusses the notions of beauty and ugliness, outlining a long history that extends as far back as Hippocrates’s The Physician. See Health and Illness: Images of Diff erence (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 66.

132 Women & Music Volume 21 Here, Menzel works to renegotiate Schumann’s musical expression through a re- organization of the drawing’s spatial boundaries, which, as Pollock argues, provided extraordinarily powerful ways for images to indicate “the very meaning of the terms masculine and feminine.”78 Ultimately, the image refl ects normative gender relationships through several diff erent methods: linguistic markers, literal boundaries around Schumann herself, a close association and mirrored interaction between performers, and, fi nally, a reconfi guration of her activity at the piano. The image also works to underscore and celebrate Schumann’s relationship with the serious music aesthetic. Interestingly, even though Schumann is “in performance” here, this work makes reference, surprisingly on the drawing itself, to its status as a “memory”— Erinnerung.79 This linguistic intrusion attempts to stabilize the meaning of the image or, rather, undermine the tension in portraying the spatial publicness of her performance. In “Rhetoric of the Image,” Roland Barthes argues that “all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifi ers, a ‘fl oating chain’ of signifi eds, the reader is able to choose some and ignore others.”80 For Barthes, the use of the linguistic symbol on an image works to anchor or guide meaning in order to “fi x the fl oating chain of signifi eds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs.”81 What we are seeing— or at least what we are guided to see— is a “memory” and not immediate reality. More pointedly, Barthes argues that linguistic markers work to refl ect or maintain certain kinds of social values:

The text directs the reader through the signiﬁ eds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of an oft en subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance. . . . The text is indeed the creator’s (and hence society’s) right of inspection over the image; anchorage [anchoring meaning through text] is a control, bearing a responsibility— in the face of the projective power of pictures— for the use of the message. With respect to the liberty of the signiﬁ eds of the image, the text has thus a repressive value and we can see that it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested.82

78 Pollock, Vision and Diff erence, 69. 79 In looking through Menzel’s output, the mark of Erinnerung does happen on occasion, especially in the 1850s; for example, see Lady with Opera Glasses from 1850 and Recollection of Paris from 1855. By the same token, there are many of his works depicting public entertainment that are not distinctly marked as “a memory.” While Keisch and Riemann-Reyher pointedly claim that the mark means he completed the work from memory, it is also possible that Menzel is marking this as a token of the concert for Joachim himself, which might also explain the positioning of the performers within the drawing (or at least Joa- chim’s primacy). The provenance of the drawing, however, shows that it was in the Menzel family until 1958. The provenance, as recorded by Keisch and Riemann-Reyher, is listed in its entirety here: “Provenance: Emilie Krigar- Menzel, Berlin; 1907, Doctor Otto Krigar- Menzel; 1958, M. Henry E. Hirschland, Rochester, NY; Georg Hirschland, Essen; Evelyne Dolk- Hirschland, Rochester, NY; Doctor Fritz Nathan, Munich.” Earlier in the text, the authors also make this claim regarding this mark: “The word ‘Erinnerung’ frequently appears on work done subsequently, sometimes meaning ‘from memory,’ sometimes referring to rapid pencil sketches done on site, which he used to mark with a cross when he had used them” (Keisch and Riemann- Reyher, Adolph Menzel, 260). 80 Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 39. 81 Barthes, Image Music Text. 82 Barthes, Image Music Text, 40.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 133 In marking the image with the word Erinnerung, the artist inevitably reconfi g- ures the reality of Schumann’s performance. The artist’s mediated, masculine perspective (his memory) seems to evacuate Schumann’s agency in performing; it becomes safe to look. This power structure—the primacy of the masculine vantage point or the containment of Schumann—is confi rmed in a variety of ways throughout the image. Now performing alongside Joachim, Schumann is pushed to the background of the portrait and spatially demarcated and contained: the chair back, violin bow, candelabra, and edge of the canvas create a boundary around Schumann’s musical activity. Even as this spatial ordering moves Joachim to the expected foreground position for the performance of a violin sonata, the arrangement itself dictates Schumann’s interaction with him in an interesting way. In this scenario, her collaboration would cause her to look over her right shoulder and behind her, obviously a diffi cult (if not impossible) movement in performance.83 Joachim’s eyes even slide away from her.84 His bow almost parallels Schumann’s back—one of the few signals of her expressive activity aside from her wide eyes. In this move, what he uses to make sound on his instrument becomes aligned with Schumann’s own performative gestures. In this arrangement, with their playing mirroring one another, the performers seem to work together in almost subconscious (or spiritual) collaboration. (Also, in fi gure 7, Schumann’s waist bizarrely resembles the waist and lower bout of a violin.) The concert on December 10 closed with Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, and as Reich notes, “The two were particularly noted for their playing of Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano.”85 This piece, of course, would demand the kind of intense focus, musical collaboration, and concentration real- ized in this image. It would also require an incredible amount of virtuosic ability. And yet in this rendition Schumann no longer looks at her hands— her attention has been decidedly refocused to concentrate not on her technique but on the musical source. To further emphasize her concentration, there is also now signifi cant space between her chin and chest, and her eyes (which were small and very focused in the sketch) widen dramatically. Her active hands and arms from the pencil sketch now reveal no motion—her hands, in fact, are now completely obscured, as is her left arm. Her literal performance— or, rather, the physicality of her performance—has been rendered completely invisible. This invisibility is reinforced by the fact that her instrument itself is almost completely missing from the image as well. Her virtuosity has been reconfi gured to emphasize her inner understanding, as opposed to her technical prowess. While the aspects of “feminine danger” are obviously latent— especially

83 I have seen several other images from a bit later in the century that also present this kind of interaction— with the accompanist positioned literally behind the violinist. Perhaps one of the most fascinating is an 1870 drawing of violinist Wilma Neruda in public performance. That being said, there are other contemporaneous images that feature the violinist in the bend of the piano or in a more convenient, obviously collaborative position. 84 Did these two musicians, in fact, always “[see] eye to eye musically”? Reich, Clara Schumann, 221. 85 Reich, Clara Schumann, 221.

134 Women & Music Volume 21 given that the image hinges on emphasizing and reemphasizing Schumann’s containment—this event nevertheless off ers a real promise of pleasure. From her golden dress, to the incandescent candles, to the warm yellow hue of the entire image, these details comfort and reassure, and the listener, as it were, revels in the light that this experience can off er. The drawing’s pleasant yellow background even mirrors the coloring in Schumann’s gown, which reassures the listener through its obvious associations with light and, therefore, knowledge and cultivation.86 Here- in lies the most interesting contradiction. Even as Schumann seems contained in a variety of ways and is perhaps marked as the secondary fi gure in her accompani- ment of Joachim, this image simultaneously marks her as the representative fi gure of the serious music aesthetic—even more so than Joachim himself. Not only does her color quite literally overtake the entire space, but Schumann’s profi led face draws our attention to her almost uncomplimentary bulging eyes as she leans forward to focus quite exaggeratedly on the score. In drawing attention to her aesthetic seriousness or, rather, her clear devotion to the score in such an intentional way, the image positions her as the symbol of cultivated music. Schumann’s own body comes to epitomize the ideals of aesthetic seriousness. The dialectical relationship between the seemingly antifeminist nature of the image and Schumann’s marked superiority— within the very structure that demands her inferiority— creates an exciting contradiction. This image complicates the possible oppositions at the heart of the serious music construct or at least exposes them as decidedly tenuous: the masculine versus feminine, the musical work versus the virtuoso, and the mindful versus the bodily. Indeed, when we see the transformation from the sketch to the fi nal version, the instability of these dualis- tic understandings of nineteenth- century musical experiences is further exposed. As Mary Hunter argues, in some cases “performance was conceived, both explicitly and implicitly, as a resolution, or occasion for the collapse, of these oppositions.”87 In the fi nal version, with its clear associations between performative expression and listener enlightenment, Schumann herself is empowered and emboldened by (perhaps Beethoven’s) music and her performance of it. She is not necessarily an emptied executant or, given the dominant yellow hue, even really submissive. As Hunter suggests, “It emerges that there was another kind of discourse about the act of bringing works to life, one in which the performer’s role was considered to demand genius and in which the performer—even, or especially, the interpretive (as opposed to the improvising virtuoso) player— was regarded as a fully fl edged artist on par with the composer.”88 The pleasure of the drawing, therefore, hinges on this dissonance: even if Schumann’s presence is complicated by her femininity,

86 In his chapter on Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, Mark Evan Bonds outlines the commonly held beliefs regarding the dissemination of knowledge through Gutenberg’s printing press, the triumph of light over darkness, and German nationalism. See Aft er Beethoven: Imperatives of Originality in the Symphony (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 87 Mary Hunter, “‘To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer’: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58 (2005): 371. 88 Hunter, “‘To Play,’” 361.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 135 her musical expression overrides all other elements. She creates a new interpretive space that does not necessarily hinge on her def- erence to the musical work. In this realm, she dominates.

Visually Revering, Visually Desiring Schumann’s dominance within the nineteenth-century pianis- tic world is undeniable, as is her dominance within the scholarly discourse; and yet we have limited her infl uence to align with more “conservative” or “serious” musical trends. Visual evidence, however, suggests that Schumann’s musicality encompassed many diff erent oppositional ideologies, ranging from bourgeois feminine subservience as the “priestess,” to Fig. 8. Anonymous, Clara Schumann, photograph (1862). Credit: Robert- Schumann- Haus, Zwickau. feminine musical deviance and dominance. In conclusion, I consider one fi nal photograph. This last image more forcefully complicates the priestess ideology while simultaneously celebrating Schumann as the consummate female pianist. This portrait demands reverence for the “priestess” just as it questions (or even undermines) the bourgeois moral codes that provoked its creation. Indeed, this 1862 photograph shows Schumann as an icon of power, wealth, and undeniable success, not as passive or even contained. The sheer amount of excess lace fabric and domestic “things,” coupled with the lush velvet textured dress, which takes up the majority of the photo, illustrates her prominence and prestige. Figure 8 displays an extraordinary amount of minute detail in extreme clarity; her success is quantifi able and undeniable. Rather than presenting Schumann as an emblem of controlled domesticity, this representation speaks more to her public activity and social power by emphasizing the extravagant material results— results that both surround and affi x onto her body. Her comfortable pose, compounded with the dramatic interplay of a variety of props, creates a marvelous kind of self-containment (or self-satisfaction) that most of her other portraiture denies. In so doing, this photograph exists in its own autonomous realm. As Mitchell argues, “The process of pictorial seduction . . . is successful precisely in proportion to its indirectness, its seeming indiff erence to the beholder, its antithetical ‘abruption’ in its own internal drama. The very special

136 Women & Music Volume 21 sort of pictures that enthrall [us] get what they want by seeming not to want anything, by pretending that they have everything they need.”89 As she disengages with the viewer by sitting in profi le and displaying her luxuries, this portrait reveals Schumann’s independence and desire for adoration. I selected this photograph primarily because of its delightful peculiarity; most photographs of Schumann contain only a few props and pose her facing forward. Despite accentuating Schumann’s social status, fi gure 8 also seems to create a disorderly amalgam of symbols that suggests both the masculine and the feminine; in my view, this instability becomes the essence of the photograph’s power. This gendered uncertainty seems to ask us to confront the feminine— and Schumann herself—as an “unstable sign.”90 More to the point, the instability of this photograph reveals the nebulous nature of Schumann’s performative persona more generally and the problems inherent in representing her. This anxiety, while rippling throughout the other images as well, perhaps reveals itself more openly here. Oddly, fi gure 8 contains almost too many signs and symbols.91 The column in the background assumes a masculine association of sorts as it blends eff ortlessly, if not somewhat chaotically, with the oft - used symbols of the domestic: the ornately decorated table leg, the fl oral-embellished bowl, and the stack of novels. These disparate elements all infringe upon each other’s space, creating a natural sense of confusion or an absence of hierarchy magnifi ed by the indistinct object in the lower left . The props here do little to establish themselves as signifi ers of anything specifi c; rather, their meaning is in their disarray and, again, their sheer excess. Against this disorder Schumann turns her back. She appears relaxed, comfortable, and assured. And as she disengages from these disorderly things, she rejects their symbolic purposes and their ability to help defi ne her femininity. Schumann’s slightly reclined pose and profi led Romantic, distant gaze (another frequent trope in masculine imagery) are highlighted by subtle brightening around her body and especially her profi le. This haloing—possible through photographic touch-up technology established in the 1850s—inevitably creates what Pollock identifi es as the “sign of holiness or saintliness, of a cult fi gure like the Madonna.”92 As with her yellow incandescence in fi gure 6, Schumann shines. In direct contrast with this aura of saintliness, however, her clothing rejects its normative, domestic function of modest inaccessibility. Schumann wears a dark gown and an ornate lace snood. The white clasp at the base of her neck signals closure, but, due to the transparent lace in its clutch, her shoulders remain open and exposed. Her clothing also aff ords us generous access to the shape of her body—at least the sloping of her breasts to her waist, where her hands stop our gaze (right in the middle of her lap); she even shift s her left shoulder slightly to invite our view.

89 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 42. 90 Pollock, Vision and Diff erence, 138. 91 Nineteenth- century portraits oft en featured women posing with a small object— a book, a piece of sheet music, or a modest example of embroidery— or alongside home furniture to showcase their domestic productivity. 92 Pollock, Vision and Diff erence, 137.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 137 The lace coverlet in her lap spills to the fl oor. It, too, appears somewhat disheveled and excessive, in clear alignment with the other symbols throughout the image. This ineff ective drapery, as it were, further mimics the material in Schumann’s dress and hair: all make eff orts at domestic covering, but all fall short and, instead, reveal. Similarly, her reclined posture defi es outright how piano playing disciplined the bodies of bourgeois women and girls, and, in eff ect, it challenges her usual public posture: that of a performer.93 Or, to take the interpretation a step further, in this position, she perhaps refuses to act in accordance with her culturally prescribed role of “priestess” and, more importantly, that of domesticated woman. She rejects both the symbols behind her, and her body refuses to conform to any kind of expected pose. In a series of analyses considering the trope of the “reluctant pianists” in nineteenth- century imagery, Leppert contends that images that violate the feminine “expectation of passivity” created a kind of fantasy for the (male) viewer of enforcing her submission: “The ability to imagine taming the woman’s sexual agency drives the pleasure to be derived from looking at her.”94 This kind of sexual imagining was also the foundation of the pornographic imagery of the nineteenth century, which hinged on the “realm of [sexual] possibilities.”95 If we take this image to its (uncomfortable) extreme, in Schumann’s reclined pose and disheveled clothing (which all inevitably reveal), this notion of imagining seems to be at the center of this image. More pointedly, her almost comfortably defi ant stature and the latent sexual desire herein would aff ord the viewer (or listener) a diff erent kind of agency. The image, therefore, desires that wedesire , just as it desires that we revere. This interpretation correlates with Schumann’s career at this time, which hinged on both the preservation of German serious, “masculine” works and the celebration of her virtuosity far outside of Germany. While as her programming became more canonic and homogeneous, her international prestige increased, even extending across the Atlantic.96 By this point in her career Schumann had completely destroyed any semblance of being contained by a private sphere.97 While we oft en emphasize and celebrate her establishment of more conservative, homo-

93 Ruth Solie, Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 95. 94 Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 183– 84. 95 Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815–1914 (New Bruns- wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 2. 96 Older composers began dominating her repertoire, and “she emerged as the prime performer of works by Schumann, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn!” If we consider Schumann’s programming between 1859 and 1863, not only did her concertizing stabilize to the high average of 36.7 recitals per season, but this period heard more diversity across her repertoire (not necessarily a diversity of composer but of the pieces themselves), a rise in the age of the compositions she was playing, and an entrenchment of the serious masculine canons. Out of all her diverse repertoire performed for solo piano, piano and orchestra, and cham- ber music, she most frequently played the music of Robert Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Bach, and Beethoven. She infrequently played Scarlatti, Mozart, Handel, Weber, and Schubert. She performed the works of Grell, Haydn, Rameau, Tartini, Hiller, David, Clementi, and Kirchner only once. See Kopiez, Leh- mann, and Klassen, “Clara Schumann’s Collection of Playbills,” 58–59. See also Reich, Clara Schumann, 278. 97 Her 1867 concert season would see her perform in Great Britain more than any other country, even Germany. Kopiez, Lehmann, and Klassen, “Clara Schumann’s Collection of Playbills,” 58– 59.

138 Women & Music Volume 21 geneous programming, fi gure 8 desires us to focus on something else: her social ascendance and public power. She is not only a musical saint and priestess but also the reigning queen of the piano world. She wears a crown of photographic light. Indeed, fi gure 8 seems preoccupied with establishing that Schumann is an incredibly powerful and even somewhat dangerous feminine force to be reckoned with. Schumann reveals both sides of the feminine in this photograph—and the result instigates a brief moment that simultaneously exposes both her danger and her appeal. This photograph illustrates the inevitable anxieties (and obvious frac- tures) related to the construction of bourgeois masculinity. As Pollock argues, “At times the [fetishized] mother and the erotically dangerous conjoin in a frozen moment of exposure and disavowal. . . . [A]t other times, they are elaborated in distinct but interdependent imageries.”98 In acknowledging the power (and anxiety) that Schumann’s representations reveal, we can perhaps consider how her femininity became an integral part of her appeal. Decidedly, this appeal is not necessarily “male” authored, although it can be male mediated, nor is it necessarily willing to abide by the naturalizing rules that we so oft en ascribe to Schumann.99 It becomes seemingly impossible to resolve the confl icts that Clara Schumann embodies, nor is that the goal of this article. Only in acknowledging the contradictions of Schumann’s (fl exible) performative self can we begin to consider how her musical expression was molded into one that fi t within the dominant serious music aesthetic. While each of these images displays facets of the “priestess,” each also speaks to her own performative agency and creative resistance to this ideology. By attending to Schumann’s various poses and activities throughout all of these portraits, we can refl ect on the visual desires that question or even collapse her subservience to the musical work. In this disintegration, her (feminine) performance equals and, at times, even surpasses the value of the (masculine) work itself. We oft en position Schumann as unwilling or unable to fully assert her power as a woman. In fact, we continually deemphasize her femininity, as when we conclude that Clara Schumann was “generally regarded as unique, almost above gender.”100 Here, however, I am arguing that this kind of genderlessness would have been almost impossible, especially during a time when the categories of both music and women were anything but stable. The silencing of Clara Schumann’s sexuality was and still is a critical piece of the aesthetic puzzle. By allowing her an even fl eeting expression of her inherent doubleness—that she did not always simply capitulate or defer to masculine “normalcies”—we can acknowledge that perhaps she opened up other kinds of exciting, dangerous, bodily laden, virtuosic musical experiences for her audiences, all within the patriarchal-declared guise of a mindful, “serious” experience.

98 Pollock, Vision and Diff erence, 140. 99 See Adriana Craciun, Fatal Women of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 100 Reich, Clara Schumann, 177.

Prince, (Re)Considering the Priestess 139 april l. prince studied with the late K. M. Knittel at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on reception and iconography, primarily that of nineteenth- century pianists and early twentieth- century country music and blues women. Forthcoming publications focus on southernness and feminine agency in the recordings of Rosa Lee Carson and Roba Stanley. Prince is a senior lecturer at the University of North Texas.

140 Women & Music Volume 21