Musical Biography and the Myth of the Muse[‡]
Christopher Wiley
Great Male Composers and their Female Muses
Recent scholarship by Marcia Citron and others has explored various agents responsible for enforcing the historical effacement of women as composers,[1] but the specific role played by biographical writings has less frequently been the focus of detailed critique, perhaps because the broader investigation of musical biography for its historiographical significance remains itself a largely untapped area of musicological enquiry. Yet the genre flourished in the hagiographical environment of the nineteenth century so crucial to canon formation: since it fundamentally embodied a form of hero-worship in which the whitewashed lives of select individuals were placed on lofty pedestals, it was ideally suited to reinforcing music history’s top-down predication upon an elite set of idolised Great Men. Jim Samson has explored the cultivation of notions of greatness and creative genius as a hallmark of nineteenth-century music history; William Weber has comprehensively traced the multi-faceted trends that led, inter alia, to the century’s establishing a historical repertory of great works by (often deceased) classical composers.[2] Musical biography likewise became complicit in the processes of construction and subsequent perpetuation of male-dominated musical canons of wider conceptual importance; as Ruth Solie has remarked of the genre, ‘whatever spin is put upon the story, on the level of cultural myth it remains irremediably a male story’.[3]
In this chapter I examine the ideologies that historically emerged from biographies of some of Western art-music’s most treasured personages precisely by marginalising the secondary characters that Catherine Peters has described as being those who ‘lived in the shadow of the main subject, often paralleling or contrasting with it’.[4] I aim not to question the portrayal of the principal protagonists so much as that of specific females with whom they were associated, and whose union was presented as deriving from shared artistic bonds, with the woman assuming the role of the composer’s ‘muse’. Though silenced and largely invisible throughout much of the text, these ancillary figures typically came into view at critical junctures in biographies, as signifiers of the productivity and increasing creative power of their accompanying male composer; moreover, they were depicted as having inspired that person to acts of artistic greatness.
While in some respects such practices may reflect the generic expectation for biography to provide an engaging, novelistic reading experience, in the field of music – in which female ‘heroes’ were very few and far between, and little cultural space existed for anything more than a select handful of exalted men – an ideologically loaded pattern developed in the course of the nineteenth century over and above that which is recognisable in other disciplines. This is the model to which I refer as the ‘myth of the muse’ or, to repeat a term I have used elsewhere, the ‘muse paradigm’.[5] Following the lead of recent scholarship on mythology, in this context the word ‘myth’ is used not to denote a widely held misconception with limited factual basis so much as the ways in which information has been selected and reported to facilitate the dissemination, perpetuation and elaboration of cherished narratives that functioned to reinforce particular cultural values within their interpretive communities.[6]
The scope of this chapter permits only a cursory, fantasia-like exegesis of a phenomenon that my research has identified to be widely prevalent in musical biography, and which undoubtedly warrants more extensive academic attention. I proceed by working outwards from some of the most pronounced examples offered by music history by way of imparting an illustrative, albeit modest, cross-section of evidence. However, my interest lies in examining the mould into which a succession of women were cast with some consistency in composer life-writing, rather than focussing on any one individual and whether they might have deserved more credit for certain aspects of their music-related activity (whether as composer, performer or indeed patron of the arts) than they are traditionally afforded, or grappling with the much wider question of how history has portrayed women as composers and musicians in their own right.
Musical biography has, historically speaking, frequently not been kind to women (even in relation to other arts disciplines). As Julie Anne Sadie has noted, since women composers of past epochs were often the relatives, lovers or students of better-known male counterparts, they were often presented only as performers, with ‘no hint of their creative output’, and thus accorded a lesser status;[7] and, while Clara Schumann was afforded a multi-volume life and letters over a century ago, the first major biography of Fanny Mendelssohn (Hensel) appeared, in French, as recently as 1992.[8] That notwithstanding, my purpose in this study is merely to provide indications of the spread and longevity of the myth of the muse, as well as to draw attention to the migration of manifestations of the paradigm from life-writing on one subject to that of another and, in later sections, briefly to consider its resonances within and implications for current musicology.[9]
The Myth of the Muse in Writings on Music
Etymologically speaking, music is the art of the Muses, and notions of love for a specific female figure having inspired a composer to feats of greatness remain entrenched in some of the most famous works in the Western canon: Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Harriet Smithson; Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Mathilde Wesendonck; the ‘Adagietto’ from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and Alma Schindler; Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Mathilde Zemlinsky.
Within musical biography itself the trope was more extended and has remained remarkably intact, on the face of it, across composers, countries and centuries. It was a model that, historically, has been explicitly recognised when writing about music: as early as 1880, George Upton’s Woman in Music examined how females had given impetus to the work of eight great composers – including Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schumann (a subsequent edition added three extra names to the list) – commenting that they had collectively ‘elevated music to greater heights by inspiring its creation’.[10] Likewise, Édouard Schuré’s 1908 book Femmes inspiratrices et poètes annonciateurs prominently features Wagner, of whom its author was an advocate; its opening chapters were abridged and translated as Woman: The Inspirer a decade later.[11] At the same time, life-writing in music cast female figures in a rather different role from that found elsewhere in nineteenthcentury literature, such as the redemptive nature of the Faustian ‘eternal feminine’ (ewig Weibliche) or the identification in fictional works of music and its practitioners as constituting dangerous or threatening elements in relation to sexuality – a perception that might therefore have been intensified where women musicians were involved.
The archetypal muse within musical biography was, of course, Clara Schumann, whose idealised relationship with Robert Schumann (and subsequently Brahms) would have found much synergy with other ‘working partnerships’ through which women were celebrated by nineteenth-century biography, as Alison Booth has recently shown.[12] Clara was viewed, literally as well as metaphorically, as Schumann’s ‘right hand’, given that the injury that had abruptly ended his own professional performing career had made it necessary for his wife to disseminate his compositions publicly in his stead. However, this model also downgraded Clara to the lesser role of merely reproducing her husband’s works, sidelining her own activity as a composer.
While it would be entirely justifiable to describe Clara Schumann as having been primarily a performer, the point nonetheless stands that musical biography came to suggest, incorrectly, that the stimulation of creative genius flowed in a single direction between man and wife. Robert Schumann’s correspondence likewise repeatedly identified that Clara was a source of inspiration for his compositions (in which respect she was not unique within his life story; other examples included Ernestine von Fricken for Carnaval and, possibly, Pauline von Abegg for the ‘Abegg’ Variations and Henriette Voigt for the Piano Sonata in G minor). Perhaps inevitably, biographers from Wasielewski to Worthen have, for instance, presented the couple’s love as an impetus for Robert’s prolific output in the so-called ‘song year’ (Liederjahr) coincident with their marriage.[13] We may view in the same light the more recent scholarly preoccupations with isolating themes and other resonances in the output of Schumann as well as Brahms that were seen to reflect Clara,[14] notwithstanding that such enquiries intersect with the wider mythology of Schumann’s Davidsbündler (of which Clara was part) and the general use of ciphers and reminiscences in his music.
Clara Schumann’s implication as a muse figure (though by no means the only one) at certain points in Brahms’s life story, meanwhile, provides ideal demonstration of the paradigm’s capacity as an indicator of defining moments in the developing genius of the associated composer. The fact of her surprise appearance at the first performance of his German Requiem in 1868 provided a rhetorical signal within biographical writing of the magnitude of the work as a turning-point in the composer’s career, not least because (in the oft-recounted story) Brahms had expressed privately that he would feel her absence from the occasion particularly keenly. This having been secretly conveyed to her, she made the last-minute decision to attend, accompanying the composer into Bremen Cathedral shortly before the performance.
An analogous example comes in the form of Tchaikovsky’s belief that he was writing his Fourth Symphony for Nadezhda von Meck, whose benefaction enabled the composer to devote himself to his creative activity – its score even bore the dedication ‘to my best Friend’. That Meck was often invisible elsewhere in Tchaikovsky’s life story heightens the significance of her appearance in connection with this milestone work. In this respect, the condition she stipulated that she should not meet the recipient of her patronage was rather convenient to life-writing on the composer.
The case of Tchaikovsky also demonstrates that the muse paradigm could simultaneously operate both positively and negatively, for Meck’s financial support commenced at around the time of the composer’s disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova (popularly portrayed as a decision influenced by the plot of his opera Eugene Onegin), which was seen to have inhibited rather than enhanced his creativity. Musical biography yields a number of other instances in which marriages that were partly or wholly unsuccessful were rationalised as being the result of the wife’s inability to serve as muse. Mozart’s marriage to Constanze Weber has been the cause of particular tension. As the less musically talented sister of Aloysia (with whom Mozart had been in love, and who might have provided a more convincing muse figure), history has come to view Constanze rather unfavourably on grounds including her supposed lack of comprehension of her husband and the negative influence she was perceived as exerting upon him, to the extent that she required a recent ‘vindication’ by H.C. Robbins Landon.[15]
Similar ploys were at least implicit in life-writing on Haydn and Wagner, to cite just two examples, by way of justifying their ill-fated marriages and their seeking out alternative muses in characters including Luigia Polzelli and Rebecca Schroeter in Haydn’s case, and Mathilde Wesendonck and Cosima von Bülow (née Liszt) in Wagner’s. Several of these unions were far from morally virtuous in the age of the ‘exemplary life’, often for reasons over and above the obvious matter of extra-marital liaison; yet the paradigm enabled their being presented in a more optimistic light.
Death of the Muse, Death of the Musician
A fascinating further aspect of the myth of the muse concerns the reappearing of certain otherwise peripheral female characters towards the end of the life story of an associated male composer, not merely to herald the apotheosis of his creative greatness but also such that her death was linked directly to his. One clear example is to be found in biographies of Mendelssohn, whose musically gifted sister Fanny was a ‘foil’ to his own genius. Their artistic talents had been developed in tandem in their formative years. Fanny had published music under Felix’s name and, indeed, the sister would seem sometimes to have been more prominent within the text than other female figures such as Mendelssohn’s own wife, Cécile. Fanny Mendelssohn’s death was presented as directly bringing about her brother’s final burst of creativity: his last major work, the String Quartet in F minor, is held to have been a requiem for his deceased sister, autobiographically reflecting his grief and sense of loss. Moreover, the portrayal of the demise of the muse as having actually precipitated that of her accompanying composer extends back as far as Lampadius’s volume on Mendelssohn, originally published in German in 1848, which claimed that ‘The death of the sister was … the cause of the death of the brother’ given the shock he experienced upon hearing the sad news.[16]
A parallel manifestation is to be found in life-writing on Brahms, whose constitution was said to have been irretrievably weakened by Clara Schumann’s passing, and specifically his distress at having become delayed on his train journey to attend her funeral. Florence May, who had studied piano with both Clara Schumann and Brahms, wrote that ‘neither [Brahms’s] mind nor body really recovered [from] the double shock of Frau Schumann’s death and of the anxious journey’.[17] That Frankfurt was a focal point of both stories adds to the already striking similarity between them; and, in accordance with its precedent, the descent towards death of Brahms’s muse prompted one last great work, the Four Serious Songs, Op. 121 (thereby drawing parallels with the German Requiem, whose composition may have been spurred on by the death of his mother).
Other instances of this archetypal plot occur elsewhere in composer biography like variations on a proverbial theme. Tchaikovsky was reportedly preoccupied towards the end of his life by the souring of his relationship with Meck, both her monetary support for the composer and the correspondence between them having run dry. His brother related in his landmark biography that in the composer’s final days he ‘continually repeated’ Meck’s name (albeit disparagingly).[18] Notwithstanding the scepticism with which this sensationalised account of Tchaikovsky’s death was viewed, both at the time and subsequently, the anecdote was reprised in biographical writings for some years thereafter. Though the muse had in this case survived the composer, she had essentially already disappeared from his life; and, as if to restore the equilibrium, Meck herself died a mere matter of weeks later.