Around a third of Clara Schumann's vocal compositions include references to flowers, whether as passing metaphors or as the principal addressee of her chosen text. At first glance this may seem unremarkable given the central place flowers held in the symbology of Romantic literature. But the survival of documents such as the Blumenbuch für Robert (1854–56), in which she collected flowers from her travels around Europe, demonstrate a personal and distinctly feminine engagement with nineteenth-century floral practices beyond the vegetative poetics of male-authored poetry. This article examines the ways in which Clara Schumann engages with the overlapping floral discourses and media of the nineteenth century in four of her flower-centric lieder: ‘Die stille Lotosblume’, ‘An einem lichten Morgen’, ‘Was weinst du, Blümlein’ and ‘Das Veilchen’. In these songs, flowers are explicitly gendered through their material conflation with women's bodies and relationship to a (typically male) lyric persona. I show how Schumann often uses her piano accompaniments to undermine the male construction of passive flowers by granting flowers an emergent agency in her settings. In so doing, Schumann is able to protect the stubborn silences of flowers or reify their secret desires. Flowers in these lieder thus emerge as radically polysemic and multimodal symbols, not only hinting at a myriad of possible meanings, but also reflecting a mode of feminine authorship that can be recalcitrant, revealing and tactfully mutable.
Still, readers from various backgrounds will find much to enjoy here. The book is filled with informative tables, maps, musical examples and reproduced images of sources, venues and performers. At the end of the book, the author provides four appendices. The first catch-all appendix contains 'Abbreviations, Spelling, Pitch System, Currency, Conversion Rates, Cost of Living, Glossary', the second provides further musical examples from a Luso-Brazilian pasticcio, Demofonte (c), the third gives a chronology of musical and theatrical performances in Portuguese America from to , and the fourth provides a chronology of musico-dramatic performances in Rio de Janeiro from to . Nine further musical scores, relating to material in chapters , and , can be found on the book's companion website. These sources, and the many others included throughout the book, make this study an important read for students of Brazilian opera as well as readers interested in learning about theatrical life in the Atlantic world.
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