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Humanity is perhaps unique among the animal kingdom for its ability to express abstract concepts such as the notion of an autonomous self, issues of morality and emotional reactions and responses, including lust and desire, love and hatred, envy and jealousy to name but a few. This expression takes on a multitude of guises, the most obvious of these being spoken and written language, each having in common the crucial element that they are used by humans to communicate certain ideas as a function of the society that gave rise to them. This is to say that in articulating a personal impression of the world one cannot help but to deliver, with the originally intended message, a huge shipment of matters that are raised by the very usage of the particular chosen vehicle of communication. This is because the method of transmitting and receiving ideas is, itself, a construct of society and so it cannot help but be controlled and accepted on its own (cultural) terms, in a very similar manner as the way that ethical values are organically reproduced and developed on an enormous scale by a mass faith in some divinity or other, designed and guarded by humankind.

Our most flexible tools of communication involve the manipulation of our visual and auditory surroundings through both conventional, spoken and written, language and through an enormous collection of ‘normal’ behavioural patterns such as our continuous preoccupation with seemingly useless pursuits such as the arts. The manner in which large-scale societal concerns are transmitted to us, through a medium that masquerades as nothing more than a metaphorical one-man canoe, is demonstrated by the way we talk about our own discipline and the activity of those involved within. When discussing a particularly moving or challenging composition we often refer to that work as a ‘masterpiece’ , this being defined in the Oxford Modern English Dictionary as “an outstanding piece of artistry or workmanship.” Immediately we can see that that simple term is loaded with gendered connotations, firstly if we look up its prefix, ‘master’, in the same dictionary – “a person having control of persons or things; a male head of a household.” – and by taking note of its definition : an excellent piece of workmanship. As Ruth Solie points out, “the everyday terms we use for subjectivity make universal claims but are nonetheless situated as male within cultured practise.” , so maleness becomes seen as a constant and universal, through saturated usage of these terms, and, therefore, femaleness and femininity as different and particular. Shepherd takes this issue one step further by saying that “men’s desire to control women...derives from their desire to control the social world as something external to them.” and this principle, discussed at length in the coming chapters, is no less relevant in reference to the way in which a number of socially conditioned ideas regarding class, race, gender, sexuality, age, religious standpoint etc. are expressed as an underhand symptom of the way we, as a group, have learned to communicate with one another. This essay homes in on how these messages were, and continue to be, put across in the music of the nineteenth century, this period being particularly pertinent because of the social conditions of the time and their impact on Western Europe’s perception and understanding of how music can profoundly influence, not only the stereotyped insular life of the composer and performer, but also the lives of those belonging to society at large.

In his book, Music in the Romantic Era, Einstein argues that “Real abstract music first appears when Romanticism is dead.” , going on to say that there is no such thing as abstract Romantic music because the two concepts are opposed to one another. In a sense he is only half right; the term ‘abstract music’ suggests an art form that is designed to occur merely as a series of sounds that an audience may or may not find pleasant to listen to, devoid of any kind of communication from author to auditor and, therefore, quite separate from, and unaffected by, the composer’s placement in his/her society. But, as I will discuss in the chapters to come, music grows out of a societal need to express itself on some level and, in particular, the need of a series of individuals to be ‘artistic’ . It, “...like its sister art forms , grows out of a specific social context.” , expressing fundamental assumptions about the culture in which it originates and so even so-called ‘abstract’ music expresses something equally fundamental about both contemporary social processes and the composer’s position as a catalyst from process to cultural reality and vice versa. The reason, it seems, that Einstein considers Romantic music, especially, as essentially contrary to the model of abstract music is due to the way music’s role in nineteenth century Western European society shifted from one of an outwardly utilitarian instrument of political and cultural power to an art form apparently free from the constraints of the church and aristocratic patrons . This gave writers of the time the impression that they were able to write music about, and for, a sub-culture of their own choosing; a music that was relevant only to that distinctive group . As a result, musicians increasingly considered themselves as individual voices expressing a wealth of previously suppressed emotion and tenderness, a voice singing for its own sake and on its own terms.

Robert Schumann is a figure that matches this model of a melancholy poet perfectly. Working in the early to mid-nineteenth century, he was the source of an outpouring of material that was deeply personal to his own cultural positioning to the extent that it could be considered autobiographical. He is of particular interest to this dissertation due to the complexity of his psyche as scrutinized by many musicologists through the study of his music and his prolific correspondence to those whom he trusted and looked toward for guidance. The circumstances that led to his marriage to Clara Wieck and the details of his life since are well documented but these studies, based on various differing biographies of Schumann, are often contradictory in the way that they attempt to reconcile his musical output with the intimate experiences he described in his letters. This essay will attempt to side step such preoccupations and focus on the ways we, and the audiences of the 1800s, understand Schumann in terms of an isolated artist who used his pen, consciously or otherwise, as a means of enhancing authorial subjectivity. His art-songs and cycles will be in the spotlight, partly because they demonstrate clearly how music and poetry are able to come together and bring with them a high level of explicit and implicit social propaganda that empowers certain factions of society through the back-handed tactics of masquerading as harmless expressions of love, and also in order to demonstrate the global significance of the sharing and reinventing of cultural ideals. The particulars of this thesis become more interesting when one considers that Robert Schumann’s own view of poetry was one of an inferior art form, unable to communicate with the same depth and intensity as music alone, as he said in a letter to Hermann Hirschbach in 1839, that the poems must “yield to [the music] like a bride”. In this simile, Schumann makes a bold statement about the nature of nineteenth century marital relationships as they relate to musical and poetic issues of structure, and the hierarchy that could be expected to take hold of any such affiliations, this attitude often speaking through in his compositional manner as well as his written word.