this endearing exterior.13
Clara’s discovery of a dissonance between Meerti’s “endearing exterior” persona and the “arrogant” dimension of her true personality is linked here with the idea that the Belgian Meerti is unfit to sing German Lieder. Ironically, in confessing her vexation over the bad review, Meerti also revealed herself to be insincere and not entirely good and genuine, noble and demure, as Robert had once maintained. For Clara, Robert’s deeply felt Lieder ought not to be heard coming from Judas lips like these.
Clara was rather more patient with the zweite Sängerin in the 1840–41 Gewandhaus season: Elise List, the younger sister of Clara’s dear friend Emilie List and the daughter of the railroad magnate Friedrich List. Robert and Clara despaired over Elise’s preference for Italian opera and the concomitant tendencies toward superficiality and vanity in her personality that they felt could only be exacerbated by that preference.14 In the months leading up to Elise’s public debut in October, Robert and Clara recommended that she focus on Lieder instead, although privately Clara worried that Elise “lack[ed] a deeper impulse, a heartfelt understanding (inniges Erfassen) of the text” to truly be compelling in that repertoire.15 Once the season began, Elise struggled mightily with stage fright; Robert wrote that “the very material of her voice was impaired”16 and “misted over by fear” and a lack of self-assurance in public, which dampened all the natural expressivity they claimed to hear in Elise’s vocal instrument at home.17 Clara ruminated on this in the marriage diary:
Robert thinks the only thing Elise’s singing lacks is heart, soul (“Herz, Gemüth”). This has often occurred to me already, for her singing still has never moved me, as for example a Lied sung by [Wilhelmine Schröder-] Devrient or Pauline [Viardot-] Garcia, but it would always appear to me that she has soul in her everyday life, [so] why couldn’t that express itself in her singing? I can’t understand it!—I believe that once she falls in love, then she will sing with more soul as well. That love does a lot on that score is certain, I’ve experienced it myself. When I began to love my Robert so very profoundly (“so recht innig”), then for the first time I felt what I played, and people said that it must have been a deeper emotion that made me play so soulfully.18
Clara describes her own music making here as a flow of sincere expression that moves back and forth, seamlessly and harmoniously, between her authentic personal life experience and store of emotion, her public performing persona, and the work she performs—this was the mark of the successful bourgeois performing artist. In Clara’s estimation, this success eluded Elise List because when Elise stepped onto the public stage to sing, she became too self-conscious to “be herself” or even to convincingly “act like herself,” ultimately confirming the Schumanns’ suspicion that she may not have had enough of a feeling self to draw on in the first place. Two years later, after Elise again tried and failed to launch her career, this time in Berlin, Robert offered this final assessment: “Lucky for her that she realized that she lacks the main thing for art—a warm heart that can sacrifice everything for art. Too bad about her beautiful voice; but it seems only to come from the throat.”19
Moving to the opposite end of the spectrum in every imaginable way, we can turn to the Schumanns’ reception of one of the great singers of the age, the “demonic”20 Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whose heart seemed to come directly from her throat, as the Schumanns and other critics routinely maintained.21 A transformative artist in the history of opera whose public appearances invariably captivated Robert and Clara in both opera and song, Schröder invested her stage performances with an unprecedented degree of dramatic verisimilitude and emotional truth in a kind of method acting avant la lettre,22 drawing on a range of tumultuous life experiences that expanded well beyond the boundaries of bourgeois respectability, including three marriages, four children of whom Schröder did not maintain custody, and a sexually liberated lifestyle. Robert’s report in the marriage diary on Schröder’s participation in the final Gewandhaus concert of the 1840–41 season reflects an awareness of this essential yet problematic relationship between Schröder’s life and her art: “The performance of the Schubert Lied that Schröder sang [‘Am Meer,’ from Schwanengesang] was my favorite. My goodness, what lies within her! As though she knew all the mysteries of the heart! A bona fide actress who in this minute offers herself as a godmother [to Clara’s first child—Clara was newly pregnant], and in the next [minute] could move us to tears with her painful tones! But such an artist can never be a homemaker, a wife, a mother, and she really isn’t one either.”23 Here Robert is assuaging Clara’s anxieties about motherhood and its effect on her own career trajectory, but he is also suggesting that in order for an artist like Schröder to give searingly heartfelt performances of any song she chooses with “demonic” flexibility, she must therefore have a kind of “demonic” flexibility in how she conducts her real life, no matter how much it might offend bourgeois sensibilities such as theirs.24 Offstage, Robert and Clara found Schröder to be amusing, charming, and kind but with a cutting satirical edge, extravagant tastes, and a tendency toward disaster in her personal affairs.25 These qualities may explain why Robert dedicated Dichterliebe to Schröder, and why “Ich grolle nicht,” the most bitterly sarcastic and melodramatic song of the cycle, became a staple of her concert appearances.26
In a different way, the Schumanns’ perception of Schröder’s personality may also explain the content of the album of songs that they compiled for Schröder shortly before she collaborated with Clara in a series of soirées in the concert hall of Dresden’s Hotel de Saxe in 1848–49 (see table 2.1).27 In these soirées, Schröder sang three of Robert’s songs from the album (“Der Nussbaum,” “Die Lotosblume,” and “Frühlingsnacht”) on repeated occasions and an unnamed song by Clara, perhaps also from the album, on February 6.28 With the exception of “Waldesgespräch,” whose ill-fated conversation between a chivalrous knight and the witch Lorelei would have had obvious dramatic and theatrical appeal in Schröder’s hands, the protagonists of all the songs from the album would have inspired Schröder to call exclusively upon her “better self,” suggesting again how the Schumanns believed that the character of a song (in Auslander’s sense) could elevate the person of the performer under the right conditions. The album’s ardent love lyrics and tender nature scenes might have been chosen for their potential salutary effect, nurturing and drawing out the more angelic parts of Schröder’s demonically complex personality. In the same vein, Clara praised Schröder’s performance of all eight songs of Frauenliebe und -leben at a soirée in 1848, exclaiming “There is but one Devrient!,”29 and she singled out Schröder’s public performance of “Du Ring an meinem Finger” two weeks later at the Hotel de Saxe, writing that she could not imagine the song sung more beautifully30—a fascinating claim considering that Schröder had just gone through a bitter divorce from her second husband eight months earlier.
Table 2.1. Liederalbum für Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, circa 1848.
| Robert: “Widmung,” op. 25 no. 1 Robert: “Der Nussbaum,” op. 25 no. 3 Robert: “Die Lotosblume,” op. 25 no. 7 Robert: “Du bist wie eine Blume,” op. 25 no. 24 Robert: “Intermezzo,” op. 39 no. 2 Robert: “Waldesgespräch,” op. 39 no. 3 Robert: “Mondnacht,” op. 39 no. 5 Robert: “Schöne Fremde,” op. 39 no. 6 Robert: “Frühlingsnacht,” op. 39 no. 12 Robert: “Stille Liebe,” op. 35 no. 8 Robert: “Erstes Grün,” op. 35 no. 4 Clara: “Liebeszauber,” op. 13 no. 3 Clara: “Ich hab’ in deinem Auge,” op. 13 no. 5 |
Source: Robert and Clara Schumann, Liederalbum für Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, ed. Angelika Horstmann (Kassel: Bärenreiter: 1994).
By the same token, the Schumanns also appreciated moments when Schröder’s charismatic public persona transfigured the character of the song she was performing. At the end of the final concert of the 1840–41 season at the Gewandhaus, Schröder sang Mendelssohn’s “Volkslied,” op. 47 no. 4, with the composer