Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Robert Schumann's Schubert: Inventing a Mädchencharakter
- 2 Disseminating a Mädchencharakter: Gendered Concepts of Schubert in German-Speaking Europe
- 3 Performing Schubert's Music in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- 4 Performing Schubert's Music in Nineteenth-Century Art
- 5 A “Slipper-and-Dressing-Gown Style”: Schubert in Victorian England
- Conclusion
- Notes
- List of Journals and Newspapers Cited
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Robert Schumann's Schubert: Inventing a Mädchencharakter
- 2 Disseminating a Mädchencharakter: Gendered Concepts of Schubert in German-Speaking Europe
- 3 Performing Schubert's Music in Nineteenth-Century Literature
- 4 Performing Schubert's Music in Nineteenth-Century Art
- 5 A “Slipper-and-Dressing-Gown Style”: Schubert in Victorian England
- Conclusion
- Notes
- List of Journals and Newspapers Cited
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
This book has documented the nineteenth century's reception of Schubert and his music from the standpoint of gender. It located a point of origin in Schumann's coining of the term Mädchencharakter in 1838 and considered its ramifications in that composer's criticism and music. The subsequent invocation of this term during the second half of the nineteenth century reflects its significance in the formulation of Schubert's identity. Further, the frequency with which the composer's music was construed as feminine indicates that this idea became embedded in Schubert's reception, extending beyond history, biography, and criticism. In contemporary works of literature and art, writers and painters could count on it as a familiar sign by which their audience might recognize the nature of the individuals who performed and listened to the composer's works.
Some of what one may conclude from this evidence is by no means revelatory at this stage of scholarship on both Schubert and the nineteenth century. For a composer of, at best, modest reputation at the time of his death in 1828, a legacy that was popularly framed by a published catalog of art songs and short works for piano could not easily resist an association with femininity, given that the private world of the middle-class home became the recognized universe for such a repertoire. Of course, the links between domesticity and gender were not an invention of the nineteenth century.
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- Information
- Schubert in the European Imagination , pp. 210 - 214Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006