Screening Clara Schumann: Biomythography, Gender, and the Relational Biopic

Abstract

Screening Clara SchumannBiomythography, Gender, and the Relational Biopic Julia Novak (bio) 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...