Conference Agenda

Henri Herz (1803–1888) was the quintessential piano virtuoso before Liszt, a performer/composer so renowned, his music sold four times as well as anything by his competitors. But according to the Gazette musicale (1834), writing at the height of Herz’s fame, Herz’s music was just silly nonsense for “chatty girls.” This style of gendered criticism appears prominently in Herz coverage, but also appeared in discussions of other “popular” composers. Because awareness of gendered musical discourse is familiar to music history (since at least McClary 1991), this coverage has seemed unremarkable. This paper, however, examines the deeper assumptions and anxieties that drive statements like these, from the viewpoint of attentional and celebrity studies, arguing that these statements are the more visible remnants of a profound shift in conceptions about music and the self.

Crucial to understanding the Gazette’s coverage is that it was planted as a part of a revenge campaign (Weitz 2019). Although the authors may have believed what they wrote, they were weaponizing an understanding whereby calling someone’s music girly was embarrassing. This is a psychological persuasion tactic called negative esteem, which I argue is structurally dependent on celebrity concepts.

Within celebrity studies, Claire Brock (2006) has argued that fame became feminized in the late eighteenth century, as it became associated with stage actresses. But a popular male composer painted as effeminate allows a way to separate real women from the broader societal misogyny that, I posit, is woven into the historical suspicion of celebrity and discourse surrounding musical value. While claiming an effeminate present toward reclaiming a masculine past may be an old story (Head 2013), the rise of celebrity in the early nineteenth century—with its new concepts about selfhood that allowed taste to function as evidence of a person’s soul—gave this rhetoric a particular force that enabled a knotted set of associations about the musical “negative” to evolve. By examining how misogyny became laundered into aesthetic philosophy through an analysis of attacks on Herz and other “popular” musicians, this paper reveals how nineteenth-century attacks on popular music established evaluative frameworks that persist today.

Alma Mahler-Werfel is one of the most well-known and yet simultaneously neglected composers of the 20^th century. As well as being a gifted composer, she was a skilled pianist, writer, entrepreneur, and pioneer of the arts. Yet despite her impact on the musical cultures of Austria, Germany, and the USA, scholarship has chosen to focus on her romantic relationships, framing her as a muse, femme fatale, and a power-hungry temptress. And yet, even though her sex life has been the focus of every mainstream biography (of which there are currently five), none of them critically examine the impact that early 20^th-century gender and identity politics had on her life and works. As Viennese New Womanhood swept across Europe many women began to seek greater economic and sexual autonomy, and Alma Mahler-Werfel was no exception. Just like the Viennese New Woman, she was intellectual, independent, athletic, and sexually liberated, and she strove to move beyond the domestic and take up space in the male-dominated public. This prompted a crisis of masculinity that Elaine Showalter describes an “awakening of consciousness of what it means to be a man.” Gustav Mahler’s marriage to Mahler-Werfel becomes a perfect site of excavation for such work, and Nancy Newman’s 2022 article ‘#AlmaToo: The Art of Being Believed’ offered a provocative and refreshing reframing of their relationship through the lens of the #MeToo movement. However, this study only scratched the surface of a much broader conversation that needs to be had about the politics of gender in Alma Mahler-Werfel’s world. From a consideration of her relationships with men such as Oskar Kokoschka or Gustav Klimt, to the sexist criticism of her in Mahler scholarship in the 1980s (and beyond), this paper situates Mahler-Werfel within a wider conversation on sex and gender in the 20^th century. By examining the gendered climate of Vienna at the turn of the century, it interrogates the presentation of insecure masculinity in response to a rise in female agency in Vienna’s artistic cultures and considers to what extent this shaped the distorted view of Mahler-Werfel that still holds weight today.

Though numerous scholars have identified the significance of the sublime in nineteenth-century France, its twentieth-century manifestations are less frequently discussed. Despite extensive scholarship on Maurice Ravel’s La Valse (1920), no study has yet seen this piece through the lens of the sublime. Perhaps this is because the Viennese waltz is often linked to light‑heartedness and frivolity. Indeed, Carl Schorske (1981) described the Viennese waltz as “the gay symbol of Vienna.” However, critical reception of La Valse, including Schorske’s, has employed language aligned with ideas central to the theories of the sublime articulated by Edgar Allan Poe.

Ravel’s dedication to perfecting his craft and his prioritization of beauty are defining qualities of a compositional aesthetic that was indebted in large part to Poe (Huebner, 2011). Poe’s literary theories of beauty included the cohabitation of the beautiful with the sublime, but he also sought to link the sublime with the grotesque, picturesque, and arabesque (Burwick, 1998). If Ravel’s particular brand of musical Symbolism can be traced through Poe’s lineage, I suggest that his understanding and adaptation of the sublime concept with the arabesque was also shaped significantly by Poe’s work. In this paper, I reconsider sublimity as an aesthetic category that engages both beauty and terror. I relate this to the arabesque and its manifestations in Ravel’s La Valse, where I align Poe’s influences with specific musical features.