AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday afternoon 89
schuMAnn AnD MenDelssohn
r. larry todd, Duke university, chair
THE HORTICULTURAL AESTHETICS OF
SCHUMANN’S BLUMeNStüCK, OP. 19
Holly Watkins
Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
Discussions of Robert Schumann’s little-known Blumenstück (Flower-Piece), a short piano
work published in 1839, typically begin with apologies. Composed during Schumann’s brief
tenure in Vienna, the piece exhibits an accessible style perhaps geared to quick (and muchneeded)
sales. Suspicion of Blumenstück begins with Schumann himself; in various letters, he
referred to the piece as “not very significant” and “delicate—for ladies.” Recent writers, while
recognizing that Blumenstück is hardly simple, tend to echo Schumann’s judgments: Anthony
Newcomb classes the piece as “a higher level of salon music”; John Daverio observes that the
title inspires low expectations; and Erika Reiman, even after a revealing analysis, concludes
that the work has “no pretensions to grandeur.”
Schumann’s apparent targeting of “ladies” as the consumers of Blumenstück helps to explain
the discomfort stemming from its gendered title. Besides the long-standing trope of woman as
flower, the title refers to flower-painting: in a letter to Clara from Vienna, Robert mentioned a
number of small pieces he intended to name “‘little Blumenstücke,’ like one calls pictures.” By
the nineteenth century, flower-painting was a genre almost exclusively associated with women
and, hence, little esteemed. Yet despite its domestic connotations, the flower also serves as
a gateway to the metaphysical in Romantic discourse. Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, for
example, compares the flower’s marriage of matter and spirit to that of metaphor. The dreaming
artist in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale ritter gluck listens to flowers singing in a valley, while
the love-struck poet of Heinrich Heine’s dichterliebe (set by Schumann in 1840) hears flowers
speaking in the garden. In an especially glowing review published in the Neue Zeitschrift für
Musik, Schumann equated music, the “speech of flowers,” and the “speech of the soul.” How
can we square the lofty poetics of the flower with the abject domesticity of artistic and musical
“flower-pieces”?
This paper argues that the interplay between textural and melodic simplicity and formal inventiveness
in Blumenstück—an example of the “dialectic of triviality and sublimity” Daverio
finds in much of Schumann’s music—gives voice to the dual trope of the flower in German
Romantic culture. Wild and cultivated, feminine and masculine, natural and artificial,
Blumenstück destabilizes familiar aesthetic categories. In response, I propose to outline an aesthetics
of intermediacy inspired by horticulture, an aesthetics that celebrates the hybrid and
the cultivar. Blumenstück’s altered rondo form, in which tonal center and refrain are initially at
odds, blurs the status of origins and organic development, bringing to mind the paradox Paul
de Man locates in the Romantic desire for art to “originate like flowers” (Hölderlin). Natural
objects like the flower possess an “intrinsic ontological primacy” in Romantic thought, argues
de Man, yet the Romantic creator cannot access that transcendence: artworks must originate
anew every time. Using this paradox to challenge organicism, I offer a horticultural mode
of understanding Schumann’s quasi-organic approach to form, his generic experiments, and
music at home in either salon or imaginary museum.