Biographical Listening: Intimacy, Madness and the Music of Robert Schumann

Evaluating music as psychological utterance and biographical confession emerged as a mode of music criticism during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Ever since, critics have characterized Robert Schumann as a composer whose works and life are bound together inextricably. The ramifications of these values in Schumann reception and scholarship form the subject of this dissertation./nThe origins of this practice can be found in the late eighteenth century, when German writers began describing instrumental music as the most inward of artistic genres. Promoting the value of "unity" between life and works bestowed authenticity and aided canonization. It was, furthermore, a view of self that Schumann actively encouraged through his writings. Following an introduction on the concept of biographical listening, I use the frameworks of "intimacy" and "madness" to delineate how such listening has affected the popularization of Schumann's music. More than mere style descriptors, "intimacy" and "madness" connect Schumann's music and persona. They shape how and what listeners hear./nConceptions of the music's intimacy were rooted in reports of Robert's struggle to marry the pianist Clara Wieck. In order to broach perceptions of Schumannian intimacy, I study the reception history of "Träumerei." By the 1890s, "Träumerei" had become the most arranged and published piece by any composer in German-speaking lands, inspiring paintings, poems, short stories, popular songs and even novels. In my first chapter I argue that biographical interpretive methods underlay its popular success, as writers and publishers used perceptions of Schumann's life to promote his music as inward./nIn my second chapter, I study how changing conceptions of gender during the 1930s-1950s helped reshape biographical readings of "Träumerei." The 1944 German film Träumerei and the 1947 Hollywood film Song of Love each prominently featured "Träumerei" in their retellings of the Robert-Clara love story. Juxtaposing German and American cinematic, scholarly, and fictional portrayals of Clara Schumann, I examine how "Träumerei" was used at this time to market both music appreciation and family values./nBesides the love story, a second Schumannian tale has gained notoriety: Robert's early death in a mental institution. I devote two chapters to the relationships between his music, his biography, and his "madness." First, I study the history of Schumann's psychiatric diagnoses. In addition to Schumann's letters, diaries and compositions, many factors have shaped the diagnoses he has been given. I demonstrate how particular social values, molding both psychiatric research and aesthetic evaluation, have shaped Schumann's complex twentieth-century diagnostic history./nMy last chapter is a study of the recent compositional reception of "late" Schumann. Until the 1980s, the late music was often heard as representing an increasingly confused mind. Since then scholars have begun to reclaim these works as rational and music-theoretically lucid. Simultaneously, contemporary European composers have begun composing homages to the mentally-ill Schumann. Demonstrating "health" and romanticizing "pathology" not only show the tenacity of the biographical interpretive mode, they reveal how aesthetic evaluations of Schumann's music are affected by the stigma as well as the mystique of mental illness.

Advisor: Taruskin, Richard