Conference Agenda

If few women published music criticism in the nineteenth century (Hamer 2019), many wrote about concerts and performers in their diaries and correspondence. In particular, the writings of female concert artistes display musical expertise as well as first-hand experiences (cf. Deiulio 2015). How did these artistes assess other female performers, considering the male-dominated field in which they worked (cf. Liu 2023, Stefaniak 2021, Cvejić 2015)? This paper focuses on the example of Clara Schumann’s private writings about piano virtuosas between the 1830s and 1842. Schumann’s commentaries offer many fresh insights. She identifies an unexpectedly large number of female concert pianists active in German-speaking Europe (cf. Ellis 1997; Ellsworth etc. 2017), and names those who helped younger female colleagues. Unlike aristocratic patronesses’, these mentors’ support networks were rooted in their own pianistic careers. In addition, Schumann notes that almost all virtuosas composed, and performed their works in public. Her observations and critiques invite a reevaluation of the extent of women’s compositional activities (cf. Liu 2023, Reich 2007, Ellis 1997). Perhaps most strikingly, Schumann exposes a professional environment fraught with intrasexual pressures. Women pianists were often invited to play at the same private soirées and in identical towns. Hosts, promoters, and reviewers compared them to each other. These circumstances explain why Schumann portrayed most virtuosas as challengers and judged herself against them; she also criticized any use of coquetry on their part. I argue that the intrasexual negativity and internalized sexism that color Schumann’s writings essentially reflect the gender imbalance in her working environment. As scholars of organizational behavior have recently shown, women tend to compete against each other when pursuing career advancement in male-dominated professions (Kiner 2020). The tremendous pressures faced by Schumann in this period – touring, managing a deteriorating relationship with her father Friedrich Wieck, conducting a long-distance romantic relationship – doubtless intensified her criticism of the pianistically talented, physically attractive women whom she viewed as rivals for Wieck or Robert’s attentions. Schumann’s writings contribute to the nascent history of nineteenth-century female performing artistes and the challenges of their gendered workplace (cf. Storino and Wollenberg 2023, Stefaniak 2021).

Between the 1860s and 1910s, Venezuelan-American Teresa Carreño established herself as an electrifying pianist on the international stage. Her trademark was an approach to virtuosity—often associated with Liszt but increasingly standard to concert pianism—that emphasized extraordinary physical and sonic power.

In this paper, I argue that Carreño joined a generation of late nineteenth-century female pianists who seized upon this “modern” style of virtuosity, turning it into a vehicle for achieving professional prestige and expanding the modes of piano performance available to women; crucially, they did so in ways that the classical music establishment regarded as respectable, not transgressive. Carreño shared this strategy with several contemporaries, including Sophie Menter and Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler. Exploring her work extends our knowledge of pianism, embodiment, and gender. Scholars have emphasized how an aesthetic of feminine delicacy shaped the gendering of performance styles and repertoire (including Ellis 1997, Fauser 2006, and Stefaniak 2021). Carreño reveals an important counterpoint to this story, in which women created and legitimatized pianistic possibilities that broke from this aesthetic.

I illuminate Carreño’s strategies through numerous unexplored programs, writings, and piano rolls. As she developed an international career, Carreño’s gradually came to build concerts around displays of pianistic power, which she combined with the frenetic approach to tempo illustrated in her rolls of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata and MacDowell’s Etude, Op. 36. Carreño framed this unrestrained virtuosity with an unobjectionable public image. First, although her busy career and multiple divorces aligned with stereotypes of the “New Woman,” Carreño ensured that her performances affirmed, even glorified, longstanding ideologies and practices that structured the culture of classical music and women’s positions therein: establishing herself as a Beethoven interpreter, for example, or positioning herself within the lineages of older, authoritative male pianists. Second, in statements on piano technique, Carreño insisted that a massive sound did not involve strenuous muscular exertion. She thereby entered a discourse that preoccupied pianists and critics of her time: confronted with changing approaches to virtuosity, they sought to define an ideal relationship between pianistic power and bodily exertion, with significant implications for how they conceptualized and gendered the perceived strength and stamina of both male and female pianists.

This paper articulates the powerful, yet often silenced impact of widowhood on women’s musical creativity along a continuum of grief, loss, remembrance, and renewal. It develops this thinking through two complementary case studies: Clara Schumann (1819–1896), who pursued a prolific career as a concert pianist, teacher, and curator of Robert Schumann’s legacy during her lengthy widowhood; and Amy Beach (1867–1944), who similarly resumed an international career on the concert platform following the death of her husband (see Davies 2021, Reich 1985, rev. 2001, Stefaniak 2021; and Fried Block 1998, respectively). The paper builds a comparative picture of how Schumann and Beach (re)shaped their identities in the wake of loss, while exploring the ways in which the piano afforded them a vehicle for grappling with the emotional complexities of widowhood. It draws these perspectives from a constellation of primary source material, including diaries, letters, and memorabilia, as well as musical inscriptions of the kind featured in Schumann’s B minor Romanze, written for solo piano in the year of Robert’s death (1856). As the piece draws to a close, chains of falling thirds and chromatic bass lines dissipate into single octaves, marked pianissimo and punctuated by silence. All that remain are the words “Liebendes Gedenken (Loving Memories) Clara”. To whom were these memories dedicated? And what might they reveal of loss and renewal as intricately intertwined? Questions of this kind lead to a reframing of death as both a catalyst for creative endeavor and an invitation to probe the gaps between sound and silence, presence and absence, surrounding women’s contributions to nineteenth-century musical culture.