Book completed
Apr. 14th, 2024 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_prime“What will become of my work?”: Genius, gender, and legacy in the life of Clara Wieck/Schumann, by Beverly Taflinger. This is the doctoral dissertation of Tuesday's speaker, and it's book length, and I read the whole thing except the appendices, so I'm recording it here.
Very interesting! I hadn't realized that comparative analyses of biographies could say so much about gender biases. Almost all of her biographers considered her a wife and mother foremost, glossing over her interest in continuing her performing career after marriage, and generally ignoring her probable ambivalence about dropping her composing career. One biographer, though, apparently in reaction to the Nazis' posthumous idealization of her, insisted that actually she was a terrible wife and mother. Meanwhile, when music experts analyzed her compositions, they wanted to interpret her artistic decisions in light of her life events, even though they didn't do the same to male composers working from the same source material (poems by Heine).
Very interesting! I hadn't realized that comparative analyses of biographies could say so much about gender biases. Almost all of her biographers considered her a wife and mother foremost, glossing over her interest in continuing her performing career after marriage, and generally ignoring her probable ambivalence about dropping her composing career. One biographer, though, apparently in reaction to the Nazis' posthumous idealization of her, insisted that actually she was a terrible wife and mother. Meanwhile, when music experts analyzed her compositions, they wanted to interpret her artistic decisions in light of her life events, even though they didn't do the same to male composers working from the same source material (poems by Heine).