The Technological Priestess: The Piano Recital, Photography, and Clara Schumann

Abstract

Musicologists often consider Clara Schumann to be one of the most influential figures in the establishment of the solo piano recital – a musical experience that encouraged the dominance of the serious music aesthetic. Schumann's connection to this ideal is perhaps most evident in her enshrinement as the priestess, a nineteenth-century title that honoured the interpretive power of her virtuosic performances. While her commitment to canonical values cannot be questioned, Schumann's piano virtuosity was also undeniably popular, incredibly physical and acutely tied to the century's rapidly changing musical and visual technologies. Attention to the analytical and imaginative connections between these transformative technologies actively complicates the divine, dehumanized and mythological stature that has come to centre Schumann's historiography. Her mass-produced photographs, and especially her cartes-de-visite, could both compound her priestessness and stimulate unresolvable fissures within it. Aligned with recent scholarship that expands Schumann's virtuosity into the realms of the popular, photographs and other forms of mass media reveal the inherent flexibility of the priestess ideology and this mythology's (seemingly) easy inclusion of various ambiguous and sometimes contradictory ideals. In effect, photographs of Schumann could instigate a kind of exhilarating, cognitive dissonance in their viewers: seeing was not necessarily believing her as only priestess. Seeing could, in fact, mean imagining and reimagining Clara Schumann in all kinds of fantastical ways: ways that aligned her piano virtuosity with the commodified visual technology in an increasingly mechanized world, or ways that underscored her feminine sexuality and virtuosity as socially destabilizing or democratizing.