Screening Clara SchumannBiomythography, Gender, and the Relational Biopic
Clara Schumann, née Wieck, is known today as one of the most distinguished concert pianists of European Romanticism, a major influence on the development of the nineteenth-century piano recital, and a renowned piano teacher and composer.1 She is also remembered as one half of a famous musical couple, and as the subject of a secret romantic courtship and a spectacular legal dispute between her father and future husband. Clara began her career early as a wunderkind trained by her father Friedrich Wieck, and she fell in love with Robert Schumann at the age of sixteen. When Wieck opposed the match and slandered Schumann publicly, Schumann took him to court and finally obtained permission to marry Clara in 1840. The marriage lasted for sixteen years, until the end of Robert Schumann's life, during which Clara gave birth to eight children (one of whom died in infancy). In 1854, Robert Schumann was committed to an insane asylum following a suicide attempt, and he died there in 1856.
Clara Schumann has been variously characterized as a devoted wife, mother of eight, and faithful curator of her husband's legacy, or depending on whom you ask, as a ruthless careerist and conservative impediment to her husband's genius—"that dreadful bitch Robert Schumann married" (Janice Galloway, qtd. in Novak 275). Like many other women who had been sidelined by androcentric music histories, she was resurrected by second-wave feminists in the 1980s and has since been turned into a cultural myth. From 1990 onwards, she was the face of the one-hundred deutschmark note. In 2019, the bicentenary of her birth, three major conferences were dedicated to Clara Schumann,2 as were numerous smaller events, concerts, newspaper articles, and radio features across the globe. Her life story has become highly mediated, narrated in biographies, letters, obituaries, concert programs, brochures of commemorative events, memorials, academic studies, documentaries,3 CD booklets, novels, and biographical motion pictures, or biopics. [End Page 1]
In this essay, I focus on the four biopics made about the Schumanns: Träumerei (1944), Song of Love (1947), Frühlingssinfonie (1983), and Geliebte Clara (2008). In his landmark study of the biopic, George F. Custen reflects on the status of the genre as a form of life writing, concluding, "the fact that real names are used in biographical films suggests an openness to historical scrutiny and an attempt to present the film as the official story of a life" (8)—that is, as a form of biography. As such, the biopic is a medium that lays some claim to the authenticity of its narrative rather than presenting itself as fiction, even though it has license to stray from the historical facts.4 Dennis Bingham similarly frames the biopic as a form of biography, identifying the genre's "charge" as "enter[ing] the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology, one way or another, and to show why he or she belongs there" (10). That there is a strong gender dimension to the idea of biographical "worthiness" has long been a commonplace in biography studies. Narratives of women's lives are shaped by the standard paths and subject positions available to women at a given time. Drawing on gender-sensitive biography criticism and biopic studies, I will consider the four biographical motion pictures in relation to the Schumann "biomyth" as gendered manifestations of Clara Schumann's afterlife. Each film engages with the myth, sometimes confirming, sometimes contesting the image preserved of the subject in cultural memory. I will demonstrate not only how each film speaks to specific norms of femininity by appropriating and developing particular facets of the Schumann myth, but also how these shifts in Clara Schumann's cinematic representation are refracted through the changing conventions and possibilities of their medium.
The Schumann Biomyth: Relational Biography and Gender
In his reflections on Beethoven, Roland Barthes introduces—in passing—the notion of "bio-mythology" as a "system of meaning" that is created around a historical figure and serves as a totalizing explanation of the person's character, life, and work (149-154). Referring to Barthes's concept, Beatrix Borchard suggests that in the case of the Schumanns, it would be more correct to speak of a "Bedeutungskomplex," a loose agglomeration of meanings that cannot be neatly arranged into a coherent pattern ("Von Robert" 81). Her observation that such biographical meanings are emphasized and instrumentalized differently at specific historical moments resonates with Rosemary Kay's work on the "cultural memorialisation" of Charles Dickens.5 Kay examines the "Dickens Myth" as a "resource" for writers, noting that "any sense of responsibility towards the original individual who initiated the cultural memorialisation is outweighed by the benefit gained from appropriating the Myth for contemporary needs" (45). Kay recognizes the inconsistencies and contradictions of the representations she studies, but considers them a defining feature of the myth. Kay proposes a "nodular model" of myth, in which "versions of the historical individual are all connected to the entire web of memorialisation, and might or might not influence one another," and she insists that any new text [End Page 2] "contributes to the composite representation" but "can never replace it" (47). A biomyth can thus be understood as a repository of sometimes conflicting meanings constructed from, and around, a famous person's life. It holds opportunities for ideological appropriation that will add to the myth, changing but also perpetuating it.
Gender concerns are one axis along which a biomyth can change and develop. In the case of two lives as closely intertwined as those of Clara and Robert Schumann, it is unsurprising that the biomyth already taking shape during their lifetimes should come to encompass both lives. Borchard finds the root of the Schumanns' long-lasting image in an often-quoted statement by Franz Liszt: "No happier, more harmonious union was imaginable in the world of art than that of the man who creates with the wife who executes, of the composer representing ideas with the virtuosa standing for their realization" ("Von Robert" 196).6 The constellation Liszt evokes has since been contested on various fronts, not least with reference to the implied gender hierarchy within the Schumann myth. But as the couple's partnership did indeed blend their private and public identities to a degree that would make it difficult to treat either life in isolation, it is only to be expected that the relational approach is also adopted in new renditions of the "Schumann story." Yet, in cinematic terms, relationality traditionally has different implications for the representation of men's and women's lives.
It is worth noting that relationality has been a contentious issue even within gender-sensitive biography studies. On the one hand, feminist critics have long taken issue with biography's historical bias towards "great men" and the concomitant "spotlight approach" to biography—a narrative strategy that decontextualizes and essentializes the subject, presenting him as a "giant among pygmies" (Stanley 6, 214). The "relational biography," which centers on a constellation of two or several persons rather than on just one, is sometimes proposed as an antidote because of its potential to provide a more accurate view of the self. On the other hand, rejecting biographical representations of women as individuals carries its own risks. Caitríona Ní Dhúill also points to the risk in relational biography that the female subject is reduced to the inferior status that history has always assigned to her (192–94). Pictured merely in relation to others, a woman may be once again represented only in her role as the mother, daughter, wife, sister, or muse of some famous man. Relational representation may consequently entrap the historical biographee in what Carolyn Heilbrun once identified as "the only narrative available to [women]: the conventional marriage or erotic plot" (48). With attention to such criticisms, the following sections will focus on the figure of Clara and examine the shifts in filmic representations of the Schumanns' legendary partnership.
Träumerei (1944)
While the famous virtuosa and composer Clara Schumann had more or less been relegated to a footnote of music history by the 1940s, her husband's moderate [End Page 3] success during his lifetime would be superseded by his posthumous fame. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, frequent new editions of Robert Schumann's works were complemented by the publication of several biographies of Robert and Clara and of the Schumanns' correspondence.7 Accordingly, the first Schumann biopic emerged at a time when Robert Schumann had already become a household name around the world, with his music and image tied firmly to a love story and tragic death. Directed by Harald Braun and produced by Deutsche Filmvertriebs-Gesellschaft, Träumerei was released in wartime Germany in May 1944—during the Nazi dictatorship. Structurally, it spans the period from 1839, when Clara Wieck (Hilde Krahl) was already deeply in love with Robert Schumann (Mathias Wieman), to 1891, when Clara Schumann, then a widow and seventy-one years old, gave a final concert. Jeremy Barham, who studied the cinematic appropriation of Robert Schumann's famous op. 15, no. 7 "Träumerei" for solo piano, from which Braun's film takes its title, sums up this first Schumann biopic as "an entirely nonpropagandist biographical account of the composer and his relationship with Clara" (292).8 This judgment is not borne out on closer analysis. The famous court trial of 1840, in which the couple eventually obtained permission to marry despite the objections of Friedrich Wieck (Friedrich Kayßler), constitutes an early climax in Träumerei and also serves as an occasion for Robert Schumann to programmatically declare his view of German music. He proclaims himself one of the leaders of German musical Romanticism and posits his work as a long-needed counterpoint to the "Fremdtümelei" (unpatriotic affectation of foreign customs) that he perceives as the gravest error of German music in that era.
That the film has nationalist undertones is unsurprising, considering that Träumerei was shot in the final years of the Second World War. In a manner typical of German biopics of the time, Robert Schumann is depicted as possessing both a rebellious spirit and the will to take on a leadership role. The character thus accords well with Nazi mythology and the Führer cult (Bovey 30). The film repeatedly uses war-related vocabulary, as in a scene at the end of a long period of touring when a diary entry shown on screen tells us, "We have toured Europe for almost two years, and wherever I played, Robert's music was also victorious."9 Robert Schumann's music conquers Europe through the hands of his faithful steward Clara, their joint victory occurring in a film shot and released when the German army was suffering ever-greater losses, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
In the same 1840 court scene, Clara Wieck declares it a fact that for a woman, love is simply more important than art, and that her own needs as an artist come second to her need to love Robert Schumann. The couple is granted permission to marry, and in the following scene we see her play her "final" concert at the Leipzig Gewandhaus: shots of a triumphant, masculine Robert sternly directing his orchestra alternate with images of an enamored Clara fondly looking up to him (fig. 1 & fig. 2). The changing camera perspective (high-angle shots of Clara vs. low-angle shots of Robert) supports this classic division of gender roles. Träumerei also deals [End Page 4]
Scene of Clara Wieck's final concert in Träumerei (1944), directed by Harald Braun.
Scene of Clara Wieck's final concert in Träumerei (1944), directed by Harald Braun.
[End Page 5]
with the "problem" of the famous woman (historically speaking): the tensions between Clara Schumann's public and private roles, and between her art and her relationships and domestic affairs. While all subsequent Schumann biopics address these tensions, each resolves the issue differently.
Braun's motion picture is visually framed by Hilde Krahl's—that is, Clara's—profile. At the very beginning, we see her face in silhouette surrounded by a circular floral ornament, reminiscent of a cameo portrait or a portrait on a coin—the type of image that is a key medium of cultural consecration and remembrance. At the end of the film, it is again Clara's profile that fades to black. In both instances, the image is accompanied by Robert Schumann's "Träumerei" (Kinderszenen no. 7). This audio-visual arrangement echoes some of Franz Liszt's flattering words to Clara in the film: "Your countenance is reflected in the pure waters of his music."10 The frame indicates Clara Wieck-Schumann's role as Robert Schumann's muse, the traditional role of women in the arts. Surprisingly, though, the film as a whole presents an altogether more complex picture of the famous virtuosa. The fact that the aforementioned diary entry on Clara's European tour also refers to her own playing as "victorious" signals her considerable agency in the world of music. When Clara and Robert attend Liszt's concert in Dresden and Liszt calls her up on stage to play one of his compositions, we see one of several displays of her musical competence and cultural prominence. She plays to a full concert hall, called up by one of the world's leading virtuosos, and receives enthusiastic applause. Significantly, as she sits down at the piano, she first removes her wedding ring, a gesture shown in close-up, which causes Robert Schumann's visible displeasure. (Schumann is generally represented as an overly stern, brooding type who strongly objects to his wife's public concert appearances.) Träumerei here visually dramatizes a conflict between Clara's calling for the stage and her devotion, or subservience, to her husband and children. Remarkably, Braun's film makes it clear that the female protagonist finds this conflict painful. After the concert, she is embraced by Friedrich Wieck, who is overjoyed that his daughter has taken to the stage again after an interlude of seven years, and she sighs happily, "It was so good!"11 The joy the historical Clara derived from her performances is demonstrated by the biographical records. In a letter to Robert Schumann from Vienna on December 21, 1837, for example, she notes, "I had to repeat the Bach fugue and the Henselt variations. No pleasanter feeling than that of having satisfied a whole audience" (qtd. in Litzmann 131).
However, in Träumerei it soon becomes clear that Clara Schumann's joy at performing must be renounced for her husband and children, and this theme of renunciation is key to Braun's film. It is also prominent in the film's depiction of the relationship between Clara and a close friend of the family, Johannes Brahms, the precise nature of which has long occupied musicologists and biographers. In a scene towards the end of Träumerei, immediately after Robert Schumann's untimely death, Clara rejects Brahms's advances: [End Page 6]
There are times in one's life when one must not just search for one's happiness.
And instead?
For a course of action that will not make one feel ashamed of those hours.12
Can I help you?
What could help me?
That which is greater than happiness and grief. [He opens the piano lid.] Art.
It is our consolation and our duty.13
The prominent themes of loss, duty, and endurance—the notion of renouncing personal happiness to serve a greater ideal—can be read in relation to German military expansionism and Fascist notions of self-sacrificial collectivism in the early 1940s. Träumerei confirms Cora Goldstein's observation that German films between 1933 and 1945 are all in some way "laced with ideological subtexts," depicting Germans as "hard working, and loyal, always ready for supreme sacrifice in the service of the Führer and the Fatherland" (47). Moreover, in terms of gender roles, Braun's film also reflects the conflict arising in the National Socialist era between an ideology that promoted German women's exclusive devotion to hearth and home, and a wartime regime forced to increasingly mobilize the female population to replace the men fighting at the front.16 In the years immediately following the war, this situation would change drastically, as men returned from the front and a traditional gender order was reinstated, in Germany as elsewhere. [End Page 7]
Song of Love (1947)
Clarence Brown's film Song of Love, produced for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) in Hollywood and released in October 1947, falls into this period of regendering. Structurally, Song of Love bears striking similarities to Träumerei. It covers the same time span, beginning with the young couple's courtship, with an early climax around the court trial, and ending with Clara's final concert. As in Träumerei, Clara (Katharine Hepburn) delivers a moving speech to the audience at the farewell concert, after which she plays Robert Schumann's "Träumerei" one last time, a piece that features prominently in the structure of both films. The historical Clara Schumann did not play "Träumerei" at her final public appearance, nor have any public farewell speeches been documented.17 While the obvious structural parallels between the two films would suggest that Song of Love was inspired by the earlier German production, it is difficult to confirm lines of influence. According to an April 12, 1945 news item in the Hollywood Reporter, MGM bought the rights to a play by Bernard Schubert and Mario Silva about the Schumanns in 1939 to produce it on Broadway (though the Broadway production never materialized) ("Song of Love (1947)"). However, this does not necessarily rule out other influences. Shortly after the war ended, US occupiers seized control over the German film industry, and many of the films produced during the war were sent to the Office of War Information in New York as "poisonous propaganda" (Goldstein 47). What is more, Harald Braun was one of the first filmmakers permitted to resume activity in occupied Germany. This suggests that he was not considered a threat by the US authorities, which in turn may have favorably impacted the reception of his previous films. Träumerei was ultimately classified as an "E-Film" ("E" for "ernst," serious) with only a "latent political function," so it is possible that it was screened in West German cinemas (i.e., in the American, British, and French zones of occupation) after the war (Tibbetts 600).18 Significantly, representatives of major Hollywood film studios were invited by US authorities to tour Europe shortly after the war, and MGM's vice president and production chief, Edgar J. Mannix, also visited Germany in this context (Harmon).19 Considering the close connections between (post)war film production and international politics, and given the steady traffic between the two national film industries, it is possible that someone involved in the production of Song of Love could have seen Träumerei.
At any rate, the question remains as to why a major Hollywood studio would choose to shoot a film about a famous German couple just months after the Allied victory, especially when that couple's story so easily accommodates a German nationalist frame of reference. To answer this question, we need to consider a number of factors, several of which pertain to Hollywood film culture in the 1940s. One industry-related factor that would have impacted MGM's decision to produce Song of Love is addressed in the July 7, 1947 Motion Picture Herald, where the film is discussed in the context of twenty-six "musicals" released in the first half of 1947: "Hollywood producers are reaffirming the old theory that, dramas and Westerns notwithstanding, musical film fare still spells sure-fire entertainment to the cash customers" ("More Musicals" 21-22). Seven of those twenty-six films mentioned [End Page 8] are biopics, most of them about composers. Hence, there was already a substantial market for musical films, and even musical biopics. As MGM's profile in the biopic segment tended towards "headliners from high culture" (Custen 48), the Schumanns must have been a convenient subject, rendered more suitable still by the continued popularity of both Robert Schumann's and Johannes Brahms's music.20 As Yael Braunschweig observes, Schumann's oeuvre—and "Träumerei" in particular—came to stand for an "aesthetics of nostalgia" in the twentieth century (571). Its perceived romantic inwardness may also have struck a chord with 1950s social conservativism.
In terms of lucrative film genres, the so-called women's pictures offered themselves as another ready mold to accommodate Clara Schumann's biography. The ideological thrust of this genre was guided by the so-called "Hays Code," the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930. Enforced from 1934 to 1968, these regulations aimed to shield the public from films that might "lower the moral standards of those who see [them]" (Leff and Simmons 270-71). Andi Zeisler's feminist analysis of the Hays Code offers a succinct explanation of its moral position:
The Code detailed ways in which films must be plotted and written so as not to tempt audiences into crime, revenge, or moral ambiguity, and it devoted special attention to issues of adultery, interracial relationships, "impure love" . . . and even dancing. . . . the Hays Code was especially preoccupied with the lives of women on-screen, seeing portrayals of fulfilling careers, sexual hungers, and lives that didn't depend on one man as unnatural and—that word again—"impure."
(34–35)
Zeisler sees a close connection between the Hays Code and the rise of the women's pictures of the 1930s and 1940s: "a brew of romance and melodrama that earned them the label 'weepies'," and whose chief themes were "abjection and self-sacrifice in the pursuit of love and motherhood" (37).21 In light of the Schumanns' spectacular courtship and Robert Schumann's early demise, Clara Schumann's biography could easily be made to fit such a pattern.
That MGM marketed Song of Love as a women's picture is clear not only from the title, but also from the company's promotion templates for film theatres, which foreground the film's romance aspects. The film posters feature images of the protagonists kissing passionately, announcing "a love story so beautiful it was set to music" (fig. 3), and that "it will play on the heart strings of all sweethearts!" ("Medium press book").
As regards the reputation of the women's picture, Zeisler notes that:
the era of the women's picture remains an anomaly in American cinema. These weren't movies about women as supporting characters, written to better highlight the story of a leading man; the women themselves were the subjects. Probably no surprise, then, that film critics sniffed at them. . . . The minutiae of women's lives was irrelevant, charged critics.
(38) [End Page 9]
A film poster for Song of Love (1947), a biopic starring Katharine Hepburn, Paul Henreid, Robert Walker, and Leo G. Carroll, and directed by Clarence Brown.
This gendered critical response to women's pictures also comes to the fore in reviews of Song of Love, which point to the film's affinity with the genre. A critic for To-Day's Cinema, for instance, concludes:
We have touched upon the abandoned humours of the Schumann menage, cluttered up with half-a-dozen children, dominated by a forthright maid-servant, and composing held up the while a conference is held as to who shall kill the chicken for dinner. But, of course, it is the musical treatment which dominates this in a series of beautifully staged public concerts, or in the frequent piano solo when either Schumann or Brahms is visited by the divine urge.
("Song of Love")
Household matters are irrelevant distractions in a biographical film about a genius, the reviewer seems to suggest, in contrast to the "divine urge" that visits Robert Schumann (Paul Henreid) and Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker). As in the other Schumann biopics, only the men are visited by divine inspiration; Clara is never shown composing in Song of Love. Like its predecessor, Brown's film projects a view of composing as closely tied to masculine creativity, which illustrates the durability [End Page 10] of the gendered nineteenth-century cult of the musical genius far into the twentieth century.22
Similarly, a later reviewer in Film User (July 1956) notes: "But for all its stress on the domestic affairs of the three musicians, the film entertains and Katherine Hepburn plays Clara with intelligence and feeling" ("Song of Love"). Again, "domestic affairs" are mentioned as a weakness of the film. The domestic sphere has, of course, traditionally been central to the lives of middle-class women, and was certainly important to Clara Schumann's. The suggestion that this realm of experience ought to be excluded from filmic treatment replicates a gendered hierarchy of biographical worthiness. The devaluation of the domestic severely limits the narrative scope of biographies of "notable" women who were required to negotiate both private and public roles.
There are distinct overlaps between the mid-twentieth century "female biopic" and the "women's picture" as heavily gendered genres. Bingham points to the mid-twentieth-century biopic's penchant for women's "suffering, victimization, and failure," which he considers revealing of an "acute fear of women in the public realm" (10)—a stance that the women's biopic would retain for decades to come. Accordingly, in women's biopics female success is generally accompanied by tragedy and conflict (217). Bingham concludes that the "monstrousness of female ambition" must be averted by picturing the protagonist as somehow "'innocent' of a drive to exceed the ordinary expectations of women" (222).
While Song of Love is not a classic "female biopic," as it primarily centers on a couple, it draws on the conventions Bingham identifies. Clarence Brown's Clara starts out as a young woman forced to play the piano by a greedy, ambitious father. In this constellation, any ambition is completely externalized, projected onto someone else. She marries the love of her life, is relieved to be able to abandon her public career, wants nothing but to be Schumann's wife and mother to his children, and hopes for his genius to be recognized. Robert Schumann is charming and kind; they are relatively poor but happy. Significantly, there are none of the conflicting desires experienced by Harald Braun's Clara in Träumerei, nor any talk of renunciation and duty. When Robert dies in Song of Love, Clara is devastated: she withdraws from public life and does not touch a piano for about four years. (This is inaccurate as the historical Clara Schumann embarked on an intensive period of concertizing shortly after Robert's death.) Johannes Brahms then invites her to the premiere of his first symphony (another anachronism). Still lovestruck, Brahms talks to Clara over the music and finally rushes out of his own premiere to have dinner with her. This dinner scene is critical for establishing Clara's motives, and highlights the contrast with Braun's earlier film. At the restaurant, a string ensemble plays Brahms's waltz op. 30, no. 15. In a succession of romantic close-ups in soft focus, Brahms declares his love to Clara and proposes marriage. Clara seems to consider the proposal, but at the crucial moment, the lead violinist plays Robert Schumann's "Widmung," op. 25, no. 1. Brahms knows that his opportunity has passed. Clara declares [End Page 11] her undying love for Robert Schumann and decides to return to the stage to help her deceased husband attain the fame that he longed for. Her decision is a purely personal one, inspired by love rather than an abstract notion of duty, and certainly not by any ambition the pianist might harbor for herself.
As in Harald Braun's Träumerei, the final scene of Song of Love shows Clara playing her farewell concert as an old woman. An establishing shot frames old Clara alone on stage, the large audience in the lavish concert hall demonstrating her status and fame. The camera zooms in to reveal that she is on stage with the bust of Robert Schumann, which reveals his status as a now-famous composer. After a point-of-view shot of the bust, we see a close-up of Clara looking at the bust and smiling blissfully. The sequence positions Song of Love as a film about a woman's perfect, pure, and everlasting love for her husband.
While the historical Clara Wieck-Schumann's extraordinary career and public success already rendered her an anomaly in relation to the nineteenth-century ideal of bourgeois femininity, her Hollywood reincarnation also conflicts with the postwar ideal of "domestic containment" (May 16–36) that relegated American women to the home after a period of gender role upheaval. Media representations at the time worked relentlessly to reassert women's relational position vis-à-vis male breadwinners.23 Yet, Brown's film manages to present a heroine with remarkable achievements without transgressing the bounds of feminine decorum. Not only does Brown's Clara long for a quiet life of domestic fulfilment, but her public success is tempered by private tragedy, precluding the heroine's transformation into a "monster" of female ambition. Perhaps this tragedy, too, struck a chord with postwar audiences, as US troops suffered more than 400,000 casualties in the Second World War.24 The nostalgic traditionalist image of Clara Schumann and her forty-year widowhood in Song of Love may have had additional significance at a time when widows made up a larger proportion of the population.
While both Schumann biopics from the 1940s take care to establish Clara Wieck-Schumann's competence and renown as a pianist, their depictions of the female protagonist and their justifications for her entry into the public sphere differ in subtle but significant ways. Their heroines are constructed in dialogue not only with culturally specific ideas of femininity and their own national political frameworks, but also with the mass-market demands of a burgeoning (inter)national film industry. Almost forty years would pass before the story of the Schumanns returned to the screen for contemporary audiences.
Frühlingssinfonie (1983)
Peter Schamoni's 1983 biopic Frühlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony) is remarkable not least for the fact that it was the first West German film shot at East German locations, produced by Allianz-Film in collaboration with the GDR's state-owned Deutsche Film AG (DEFA).25 It is tempting to think of this collaboration as [End Page 12] foreshadowing Clara Schumann's status as an all-German cultural icon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The focus of Frühlingssinfonie, however, is placed on Robert Schumann, as the following blurb from a programming brochure of the German TV channel ZDF makes clear:
The battle for Clara is at once a battle between different views of art and life, it is a battle of two generations. The film's climax is the court trial about Schumann and Clara's permission to marry. Wieck sees his world collapse, he is the tragic figure in this story. Schumann wins Clara. His "Spring Symphony" is an expression of his love and passion for Clara and of a hard-won victory.26
("Frühlingssinfonie" 59)
The narrative arc of Schamoni's film moves towards the artist-hero Schumann's triumph over his adversary Wieck (an ingeniously cast Rolf Hoppe, familiar from his performance as Göring in István Szabó's 1981 Mephisto). Its structure is quite different from that of its two predecessors, and the comparison helps throw into relief the remarkable similarity between the two earlier films. Frühlingssinfonie begins with a young Robert Schumann (Herbert Grönemeyer) deciding to give up studying law to devote his life to music, while Clara (Anja-Christine Preussler/Nastassja Kinski) is making her first forays into the international concert scene as a child prodigy. The film ends with the premiere of Schumann's first symphony, op. 38, shortly after the marriage. The final scene is set in the concert hall, with Felix Mendelssohn (André Heller) conducting Schumann's symphony up to its triumphant final chords. Low-angle shots of the Schumanns, seated in the balcony overlooking the orchestra, emphasize the elevated position that Robert Schumann now occupies as a "great" composer.
From the reviews, it becomes evident that the earlier Schumann biopics serve as important foils for Schamoni's production—often more so than historical biographies about the Schumanns. In Filmecho/Filmwoche, for instance, Hans Jürgen Weber reflects on the challenges Schumann biopics face: "That the story can quickly result in a failure of the lachrymose variety was amply demonstrated by Harald Braun's film 'Träumerei' of 1944, starring Hilde Krahl" (11).27 When Frühlingssinfonie was released internationally, announcements and reviews appeared in several English-language publications. Variety mentions Katherine Hepburn as a predecessor to Kinski's Clara Schumann ("Frühlingssinfonie (Symphony of Love)" 24). An announcement in the Hollywood Reporter derides both prior films as "a bit on the corny side" and quotes Schamoni's promise of greater historical accuracy (Walden 13). In a similar vein, in a New York Times review, Walter Goodman declares the new "handsome West German movie" to be a "big improvement" on "M-G-M's 1947 potboiler 'Song of Love'" (16). And in Films and Filming, Derek Elley writes that Schamoni's film "shows just how far the composer biopic has come since Paul Henreid's Schumann first banged the ivories in Clarence Brown's Song of [End Page 13] Love almost forty years ago" (46). These comparisons point to the validity of Rosemary Kay's nodular model of biographical mythmaking, which envisions irregular connections between any original source material and the various versions of a life that develop over time. Hence, a new screen version of Clara Schumann becomes meaningful in relation to other fictional versions. As the representation of gender roles are one apparent dimension of the Schumann biomyth's development, it is worth considering how Schamoni's Clara fared in comparison to her predecessors of the 1940s.
One aspect that marks Frühlingssinfonie as a different brand of biopic is its use of biographical material, including a broad range of quotations from diaries and letters. The film's—seemingly poorly motivated—accumulation of "biographemes" has been criticized by several reviewers: critic Nick Roddick called the film "a mishmash of short scenes in which neither Schumann's creative genius nor his relationship with Clara is much illuminated" (278). However, the variety of sources referenced might let Clara appear less one-dimensional in relation to her devotion to home, hearth, and husband. Indeed, Schamoni outlines his approach to the heroine as follows:
Clara Wieck, whom posterity styled as a lovingly self-denying wife, had to appear as she really was. No doubt she was a loving wife too, but she was also a pampered wunderkind, of whom enormous demands were made at the same time. And she was an ambitious artist, exploited in a male-dominated world that is represented differently by her father and lover.28
("Frühlingssinfonie" 62)
Yet despite Schamoni's declarations of the complexity of Clara as a character, Kinski's portrayal of the pianist is notable chiefly for one thing: her sexual appeal. Throughout the film—which includes a nipple slip—Kinski looms lasciviously over Grönemeyer, gazing at him seductively and talking in a breathy, erotically charged voice. This sexualization of Clara is not rooted in the dialogue but is only expressed physically (fig. 4 & fig. 5). It might be understood as a concession to audience tastes at a time when erotic and soft sex films were increasingly gaining prominence in mainstream German cinema—one need only think of the phenomenal success of Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972), Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974), Randal Kleiser's The Blue Lagoon (1980), or Robert von Ackeren's Die flambierte Frau (1983), which came out the same year as Frühlingssinfonie.29 Thus, two decades after the sexual revolution of the 1960s arrived in mainstream cinema, Kinski's performance turns Clara Wieck into the stereotypical object of the "male gaze" that Laura Mulvey famously critiqued in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Ironically, this happens at a time when "exemplary" feminist biography had been firmly established as a medium of second-wave "consciousness raising" to counter stereotypical views of passive, sexualized femininity.30 [End Page 14]
A sexualized Clara Wieck portrayed by Nastassja Kinski in Frühlingssinfonie (1983), directed by Peter Schamoni.
Nastassja Kinski in Frühlingssinfonie (1983), directed by Peter Schamoni.
Schamoni's film centers on Robert Schumann as a rake and underrated genius, someone who overcomes obstacles and adversaries and is rewarded with a sex goddess and the professional recognition he deserves. Even so, Frühlingssinfonie leaves a small but significant space for reflection on Clara's story. Schamoni's accumulative approach to biographical facts—derided by several critics as an amalgamation of "discordant and unrelated elements" (Batchelor 30)—includes a penultimate [End Page 15] scene in which a pregnant Clara remarks to Felix Mendelssohn that her father has at least let her have her grand piano after their quarrel. At this point Robert Schumann bursts out, "I can only hope that the flat is not too small and the walls not too thin for two instruments!" Clara stares at him in disbelief and hisses, "Excuse me?" before leaving the house.31 While Roddick mocks this scene as the culmination of an erratic script's shortcomings—"Worst of all, it completely muffs its climax" (278)—this brief moment of discord reveals Schumann's sense of entitlement over his wife at a time when her reputation in the world of music still greatly exceeded his. It hints at Clara Schumann's well-documented struggles to maintain her artistic practice and career in her new role as Schumann's wife (Reich 85-88). It can thus be read as a flicker of feminist consciousness in Frühlingssinfonie—an awareness of a sex/gender system that worked to the detriment of women in the arts no matter how great their accomplishments.
Nastassja Kinski and Rolf Hoppe in Frühlingssinfonie (1983), directed by Peter Schamoni.
Geliebte Clara (2008)
What Schamoni's film only intimates becomes the central focus of the most recent Schumann film: Helma Sanders-Brahms's 2008 Geliebte Clara (Beloved Clara). This German biopic arrived some twenty years after feminist musicologists had begun to reevaluate Clara Schumann's role in music history—a process that Frühlingssinfonie predated. Nancy Reich's 1985 biography, Janina Klassen's 1990 monograph on Clara Wieck-Schumann's compositions, newly published diaries and correspondences, and several symposia and events on the occasion of the 1996 centenary of Clara Schumann's death illustrate how she came to be considered as [End Page 16] an artist in her own right.32 Rather than present yet another romanticizing rendition of the familiar theme of courtship and endless love, Geliebte Clara is set in the early 1850s, when the Schumanns have been married for about ten years, and all is not well. If the hallmark of feminist biography is a focus on "woman's condition in history," as Rachel Gutiérrez insists (54), Sanders-Brahms's film falls squarely into that category. It unflinchingly addresses the obstacles a woman artist may have faced in the nineteenth century in the private and public domains.
As regards the film's central character constellation, Geliebte Clara focuses on the Robert-Clara-Johannes triangle. Sanders-Brahms's film establishes a polarity between the two male geniuses, with Johannes Brahms as the self-abnegating hero and Robert Schumann as a one-dimensional character, an oppressive and violent psychopath. (This might be explained by the fact that the director Sanders-Brahms is a distant relation of the younger composer.) The triangular relationship works to highlight Clara's suffering and personal growth. When the Schumanns move into their new home in Düsseldorf, Clara (Martina Gedeck) remarks to Robert (Pascal Greggory), "I also want to start composing again," to which he responds, "You have left that behind, haven't you? You are my little wife, right? Isn't that enough?"33 Beyond establishing Robert as the embodiment of a malevolent patriarchy, the reference to composing is significant in terms of Clara Schumann's legacy: Geliebte Clara is the only one of four Schumann biopics to acknowledge that Clara was also a composer. Moreover, it is the only one to feature some of her music in the diegetic soundtrack. In keeping with the Robert/Johannes polarity, it is Brahms (Malik Zidi) who on his first visit to the Schumanns plays Clara's "Romance," op. 11—to her great delight. As a musical biography, Sanders-Brahms's film thus remembers Clara Schumann not just as a resilient survivor, mother of seven, wife of a mentally unstable drug addict, love interest of Brahms, and notable pianist. It also remembers her as a composer in her own right. In the previous films, Clara's place in the history of music is exclusively that of muse and medium to her husband's compositions. Even at the end of Schamoni's 1983 film, just moments after its brief nod to Clara's feminist indignation, a narrator reductively refers to Clara as the editor of Robert Schumann's work and a "celebrated interpreter of his music."34
The conflict that the historical Clara experienced between her wish to compose and a lack of time, space, and self-confidence, in the face of entrenched nineteenth-century beliefs about the limited creative abilities of women, is swept under the carpet in earlier popular representations, as Borchard astutely observes ("Von Robert" 87–88). In a similar vein, Anna Beer, reflecting on Clara Schumann as a composer, identifies a gendered hierarchy of composition and performance. Performance was perceived as less prestigious than composition, and the self-expression of composition might tarnish a woman's reputation, placing her "in the shadow of the courtesan" (2); that is, endangering her feminine virtue. Beer drily notes that Clara Schumann's "part in the narrative was to be the ideal feminine artist," and that "Clara Schumann, composer, is a casualty of that narrative" (225). While it would be a simplification to posit patriarchal oppression as the sole reason behind Clara Schumann's aborted career as a composer (her oeuvre ends just after [End Page 17] op. 20), the records suggest that discouragement by her husband, the misogyny of music critics, and her own internalized view of the inferiority of women composers all played a part.35 It is certainly true that composing has traditionally been seen as a male prerogative requiring genius (again, a heavily gendered concept). While such individual self-expression would have jarred with the social conservatism of the 1940s and even with the sexualization and objectification of Clara in Schamoni's 1983 film, it is a prominent feature of Sanders-Brahms's more recent, feminist biopic, and in keeping with the director's previous female-centered work.36
Geliebte Clara revolves around the achievements, strength, and endurance of a gifted woman who resists the constraints of patriarchy, while also straining to safeguard her feminine image. When Clara replaces her increasingly unstable husband as the conductor of the Düsseldorf orchestra at rehearsals, the musicians are outraged about having to submit to a woman. She wins them over with her competence and wit, and the cinematography of this scene, with the figure of Clara towering over the orchestra she conducts, underlines the powerful agentic position Clara Schumann assumes (fig. 7). Sanders-Brahms explains her rejection of Brahms's advances at the end of the film, which the two 1940s biopics credited to Clara's enduring love for Robert Schumann and her calling to serve German music, as follows: "Clara Schumann is a woman . . . torn between those two men—between the great dying king Robert Schumann and the future king Johannes Brahms—and who eventually opts for art and independence" (qtd. in Palmer and Müller 111). In terms of its feminist politics, Geliebte Clara can thus be aligned with biopics such as Erin Brockovich (2000), or more recently, On the Basis of Sex (2018)—stories of women who emerge triumphant from their struggles in a patriarchal world.
Clara Schumann conducting the Düsseldorf orchestra in Geliebte Clara (2008), directed by Helma Sanders-Brahms.
[End Page 18]
It is not far-fetched—and has indeed been suggested explicitly in the companion to Geliebte Clara by Hartmut Palmer and Konrad Rufus Müller (51)—to read Sanders-Brahms's film as a projection of the director's own struggles in a male-dominated industry. And the film's resonances with contemporary women's lives seem to go well beyond the director's individual biography. In reviews, Geliebte Clara is frequently lauded as a portrait of a professional woman who "asserted her place in a male-dominated world while at the same time living her femininity; that is, one who anticipated much of our current gender discourse" (Gutting).37 If Sanders-Brahms's biopic speaks to the experiences of contemporary women, it anchors them in history, while simultaneously—and paradoxically—collapsing the distance between the nineteenth- and twenty-first centuries. The nineteenth-century biographical subject is thus offered up as a figure of identification for audiences of Geliebte Clara—as a woman "ahead of her time" (Korthase and Adler).
Such comments by reviewers once again highlight the malleability and usefulness of biomyths. The myth becomes essential ground for each new version of the famous life, while it is modified by each one in turn. However, as a series, the four Schumann biopics constitute a distinct strand of representations within the overall biomyth. Hence, like its 1983 predecessor, Geliebte Clara is compared by critics to previous Schumann biopics: "'Geliebte Clara' tells a different story than 'Song of Love,'" the Neue Musikzeitung notes. "Here, the Schumanns are not just the romantic couple till death do us part and beyond . . . . Different, rougher notes are being sounded" (Gaisa).38 The effect of all cross-temporal comparisons, in their references to the contexts, award-winning actors, or sometimes simply the titles of the earlier biopics, is to acknowledge and reinforce the myth's timeless significance. Each new enactment of Clara Wieck-Schumann is a reminder of previous cinematic versions, which are recalled to throw into relief the particularity of this new version's approach and to legitimize it. This accumulation of representations and references confirms the cultural status of the biographical subject, which also helps to raise the status of—and thus to market—the latest film.
If biomyths offer "symbolic" truths, as literary biographer Michael Benton insists (64), they produce ever-new symbols, which are attuned to larger cultural shifts and media-specific regimes of representation—not least in terms of the variable of gender. Clara Wieck-Schumann has appeared on screen as a National-Socialist icon of duty and endurance, as a defender of German musical superiority and arbiter of her genius husband's memory, and as an emblem of postwar American social conservatism and widowhood. In the 1980s she was sexually objectified as a reward for the male biographee's struggles and then in the early twenty-first century turned into a feminist icon in a biopic that centers her person and achievements.
It is precisely because of their relational set-up that the Schumann biopics tell us so much about the malleability of biomyths with regard to gender roles. The films' divergent constructions of relationality are indicative of changing views of [End Page 19] the "notable woman" and the responsibilities towards self and other that her exceptional status entails. We should note, though, that the contrasts between these four biopics emerge so clearly because they all converge in their fundamentally positive evaluation of the female protagonist's life. It remains to be seen whether future filmmakers will resurrect Clara Wieck-Schumann as a postfeminist anti-heroine, or in some other unexpected guise. [End Page 20]
Julia Novak is a Research Fellow at the Department of English, University of Vienna, and an editor of the European Journal of Life Writing. She is coeditor of the collections Experiments in Life-Writing (Palgrave, 2017) and Life Writing and Celebrity (Routledge, 2019). She has published extensively on biographical novels about women artists and has recently edited a special issue on biopics.
Notes
Acknowledgment
. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Grant V543-G23.
1. As regards the writing of her name, Clara (Wieck-)Schumann is identified differently by different critics. Music historian Beatrix Borchard informed me that Clara explicitly chose "Schumann" rather than a double name. I shall mostly refer to the married woman and public figure as "Clara Schumann." When I refer to her life before marriage, it will be as "Clara Wieck." I use "Clara Wieck-Schumann" only in instances where I aim to make a point about certain statements pertaining to the figure of Clara before and after her wedding.
2. "Die Herrlichste von Allen" in Zwickau, Dresden, and Leipzig, Germany; "Clara Schumann and her World" in Oxford, UK; and "Performing Clara Schumann" in Ithaca, NY, US.
3. The documentaries include the film A Letter to Clara–With Hélène Grimaud and the radio segment "Reclaiming Clara Schumann."
4. More recently, in the introduction to The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture, Belén Vidal discusses the biopic's "mimetic imagination" as biographical (11). When I taught Amma Asante's 2013 Belle at the start of a module on biopics in 2016 and discussed the script's various departures from the biographical records, many of my undergraduate students were surprised that what they had viewed on screen was in so many ways not the "true story" of Dido Elizabeth Belle. While the actors' bodies in the biopic are well understood to be figures of historical personages, and hence approximations—a notion famously theorized by Jean-Louis Commoli as "A Body Too Much"—the use of real names still seems to raise the expectation that the filmmakers will follow the biographical records closely.
5. Other Neo-Victorian scholars, such as Hila Shachar, have applied the Barthesian concept of myth more directly.
6. All translations from German are my own unless otherwise noted. The original German: "Keine glücklichere, keine harmonischere Vereinigung war in der Kunstwelt denkbar, als die des erfindenden Mannes mit der ausführenden Gattin, des die Idee repräsentierenden Komponisten mit der ihre Verwirklichung vertretenden Virtuosin." See Borchard, "Von Robert" 82.
7. On the Schumanns' reception, see Borchard; Barham; and Braunschweig (551–52).
8. See also Matthias Wendt's article "Albtraum zwischen Trümmern" for a discussion of both the publication history of Schumann's "Träumerei" and the production history of Braun's film.
9. "Bald zwei Jahre sind wir nun schon unterwegs, kreuz und quer durch Europa. Und überall, wo ich spiele, siegte auch Roberts Musik."
10. "Ihr Antlitz spiegelt sich im reinen Wasser seiner Musik."
11. "Es war so schön!"
12.
Es gibt Stunden im Leben da darf der Mensch nicht nur nach seinem Glück fragen.
Sondern?
Danach, wie man handeln soll, dass man sich nie im Leben dieser Stunden zu schämen braucht.
13.
Kann ich dir helfen?
Was soll mir helfen?
Das, was größer ist als Glück und Schmerz. Die Kunst. Sie ist unser Trost und unsere Pflicht.
14. "Der Vater hat recht gehabt, die Kunst war Trost für mich und wurde für mich Pflicht! Meine Liebe zu Robert und meine Arbeit für sein Werk waren der Inhalt meines Lebens!"
15. "Ich danke Ihnen für so viel Liebe. Sie gilt Robert Schumann, dem Stern meines Lebens."
16. In "Mobilizing Women for War," Karen Hagemann outlines the impressive extent to which the German wartime economy—and even the military—depended on the female workforce.
17. Thomas Synofzik, Schumann scholar and director of the Robert Schumann Haus in Zwickau, considers it unlikely that Clara Schumann ever gave speeches at her public concerts. He points out that two "final concerts" are documented, though neither of them were formal "fare-well concerts": a chamber music recital by the "Frankfurter Trio" (with James Kwast, Fritz Bassermann, Hugo Becker, and Herr E. Welcker) in Frankfurt a. M. in 1891, in which Clara Schumann appeared as a guest; and a recital of Clara Schumann's pupils in her home in Frankfurt in May 1895, to which she contributed a number of solo pieces, though not "Träumerei" (Synofzik).
19. I am very grateful to Hanja Dämon for sharing her extensive knowledge about postwar film with me and for pointing me to these sources. My gratitude also goes to film scholar Eugenie Theuer, who has conducted research in physical archives for this paper and primed me on Hollywood film culture of the mid-twentieth century.
20. On Robert Schumann's reception, see, for instance, Barham and Braunschweig; on Brahms's popular reception, see, for instance, Joelson-Strohbach.
21. Zeisler's list of examples includes Stella Dallas (1937), Now, Voyager (1942), and Mildred Pierce (1945). On the ideological origins and implications of the code, see also LaSalle 63-66.
22. While a measure of skill at the piano formed a set part of the education of middle-class girls in the nineteenth century (Borchard, "Robert Schumann" ch. 2), composing was considered a masculine prerogative. Melanie Unseld outlines how the figure of the eccentric genius in nineteenth-century discourse was imbued with features that were considered masculine, and how this tied in with the increasing split—and hierarchization—of composing and performing, and thus, with gendered processes of canon formation in music history ("Genie und Geschlecht").
23. The acquiescent, suburban, middle-class housewife of the postwar era has long been revealed as a figure of media discourse that did not reflect the material reality of large portions of the female population. See, for instance, Meyerowitz.
24. In Experiencing Chopin: A Listener's Companion, Christine Lee Gengaro draws an explicit connection between Song of Love and films about returning veterans and their coming to terms with loss and life after the war (151).
25. Historian Andreas Kötzing (93) points out that the pre-unification relations—and interactions—between the Eastern and Western German film industries has remained an understudied field to date.
26. "Der Kampf, den die beiden Männer um Clara führen, ist zugleich ein Kampf verschiedener Kunst- und Lebensstile, ist Kampf der Generationen. Höhepunkt des Films ist der Prozeß, der um Schumanns und Claras Eheerlaubnis geführt werden muß. Für Wieck bricht eine Welt zusammen, er ist die tragische Figur der Geschichte. Schumann gewinnt Clara. Seine ‚Frühlingssinfonie' ist Ausdruck seiner Liebe, seiner Leidenschaft für Clara und Ausdruck eines nach vielen Rückschlägen errungenen Sieges."
27. "Daß dies leicht rührselig ins Auge gehen kann, hat Harald Brauns Schumann Film ‚Träumerei' aus dem Jahre 1944 mit Hilde Krahl hinreichend gezeigt."
28. "Clara Wieck, von der Nachwelt zur liebevoll entsagenden Frau stilisiert, mußte so erscheinen, wie sie wirklich war. Gewiß war sie auch eine liebende Frau, aber sie war auch ein gehätscheltes und gleichzeitig hart in der Pflicht gehaltenes Wunderkind, und sie war eine ehrgeizige Künstlerin, ausgebeutet von einer Männerwelt, wie sie auf sehr verschiedene Weise durch den Vater und den Geliebten repräsentiert wird."
29. Interestingly, ZDF had initially objected to casting Kinski as Clara Wieck, due to the actress's reputation as an erotic star, which would jar with the film's "German inwardness" (von Jhering 249). For German audience figures, see Sung and Baumgardt.
30. See the exemplary biographies issued from the early 1970s onwards by the Feminist Press. As a woman who has successfully entered a masculine domain, Kinsky's Clara could also be read in terms of Mary Ann Doane's notion of masquerade, her performance of excessive femininity masking, and thus compensating for, her social transgression (81-82). In response to Mulvey—and within the same heteronormative framework—Doane argues that such hyperbolic performances of femininity open up a space of subversive viewing for the female spectator: "The masquerade, in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance" (81).
31.
Ich kann nur hoffen, dass die Wohnung nicht zu klein ist und die Wände nicht zu dünn sind für zwei Instrumente!
Wie bitte?
32. For a list of sources and critical studies on Clara Schumann's life and work, see the German Schumann Portal: https://www.schumann-portal.de/literaturhinweise.html.
33. "CS: Ich will auch einmal wieder komponieren. RS: Damit hast du doch abgeschlossen, hmm? Du bist doch meine liebe kleine Frau. Reicht dir das nicht mehr?"
34. "Sie war die Herausgeberin und in ganz Europa gefeierte Interpretin seiner Musik."
35. See Beer 211–40. As regards the early years of marriage, however, Dieter Kühn's Clara Schumann, Klavier suggests that Robert Schumann encouraged his wife's compositions precisely to detain her as a performer—that is, to keep her at home (213–14).
36. Several of Sanders-Brahms's earlier films, such as Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (1980) and Mein Herz-niemandem! (1997) have strong female protagonists and emancipatory themes. In an obituary of Sanders-Brahms, director Jutta Brückner explains how in Germany the label "Frauenfilm" quickly became a "straitjacket" for female filmmakers like Sanders-Brahms.
37. "Also als eine Frau, die sich in der Männerwelt durchsetzte und gleichzeitig ihre weiblichen Seiten lebte. Kurzum als eine, die vieles vorwegnahm, was erst heute in der Geschlechterfrage aktuell ist."
