Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion), and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the theme of the self-sacrificing musician devoted to his art, or “priest of music,” with its quasi-mystical and German Romantic implications of purity seemingly at odds with the lived reality of Brahms’s bourgeois existence. While such German Romantic notions of art religion informed the thinking on musical purity and performance, after the failed socio-political revolutions of 1848/49, and in the face of scientific developments, the very concept of musical priesthood was questioned as outmoded. Furthermore, its essential gender ambiguity, accommodating such performing mothers as Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, could explain why Brahms never married while leaving the composer open to speculation about his health and masculinity. Supportive critics combined elements of masculine and feminine values with a muddled rhetoric of prophets, messiahs, martyrs, and other art-religious stereotypes to account for the special status of Brahms and his circle. Detractors tended to locate these stereotypes in more modern, fin-de-siècle psychological frameworks that scrutinized the composer’s physical and mental well-being. In analyzing these receptions side by side, this book revises the accepted image of Brahms, recovering lost ambiguities in his reception. It resituates him not only in a romanticized priesthood of art but also within the cultural and gendered discourses overlooked by the absolute music paradigm.
This chapter delves into the largely unexplored intersections of gender stereotypes and art-religious rhetoric in music criticism. It introduces case studies on the priestesses of art—and champions of Brahms’s compositions—Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, showing how for these performers, repertoire selection and performativity influenced the creation of motherly priestesses. In the context of nineteenth-century discourses on gender and sex roles, intensified by the nascent women’s rights movement, we encounter a paradox of the pure style: Priestesses were invested with a kind of natural sensual authority that was suited only to women as primordial life-givers. This analysis establishes a more nuanced gendered context for understanding the priestly rhetoric and its criticism.
This brief epilogue addresses the relationship—historical and present—between the exclusivity of the priestly performing persona and the development and perpetuation of canonical compositions. The author suggests that the two reinforce each other; Clara Schumann’s status as a priestess was informed by her selection of certain repertoire, but at the same time her “restrained” performance of the pieces helped mark them as serious works worthy of preservation. Jumping to today’s world of performance, the author analyzes the rhetoric in a New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini comparing two young pianists. The juxtaposition of these sources suggests that some nineteenth-century values of priestly performance, such as “seriousness” and “modesty,” still inform music criticism today.
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