In "The Politics of Belle Époque Ballet," I confront the complex enmeshment of music and dance both historically as well as historiographically. To that end, the dissertation is divided into two broad sections. The first chapter considers the understudied dancer Natasha Trouhanova, whose ubiquity on all sorts of Parisian stages is belied by the critical silence surrounding her life and performances. Her eclecticism has made Trouhanova into something of a historical curiosity, worthy of passing interest but by no means a pivotal character in the story of ballet, or even dance more broadly, in Paris. Her varied career complicates neat demarcations historians have tended to make between the activities of lightly clad performers in popular venues, fragile émigré ballerinas, and the hallowed generation of female modernists who overhauled contemporary choreographic practice. I examine an evening performance she gave in the spring of 1912, which included works by Dukas, d'Indy, and Ravel. Her simulated nudity in Istar and her lilting coquetterie in Adélaïde, ou le langage des fleurs expose competing notions of beauty and femininity that themselves were products of the nation's declining birthrate and the resultant pronatalist movement. Chapter Two discusses Daphnis et Chloé and L'Après-midi d'un faune. While an examination of Trouhanova's career yielded a surfeit of uncombed historical evidence, these ballets by Ravel and Debussy have received much more critical attention. That said, scholars have yet to think fully about the choreographed component of these works within the larger gestural life of belle époque Paris. I present links between Fokine and Nijinsky's movements for Daphnis and Faune respectively and interest in contemporary optical technologies like chronophotography to animate classical statuary. Such connections reveal a new culture of visuality, one that privileged Faune's minute flexing of the observed physique over Daphnis's fluid and fluent gestures of the contemplated body.

The second half of the dissertation examines the attendant methodological complications of historiography on dance. My discussions of Trouhanova and Faune and Daphnis benefited from a comparative abundance of archival material, thereby allowing consideration not only of larger gestural context but also of specific choreography. Jeux, the topic of the third chapter, has had a respectable, though curious, material afterlife. That afterlife, however, has animated other problems, namely the continued bifurcation, indeed amputation, of gesture and music by admirers and critics alike. This chapter, and the one that follows, offer an opportunity to meditate on the potential yield and lingering limitations of studying so-called "lost" works. Chapter Three argues that Jeux's gradual evaporation--its transformation from material balletic production to immaterial abstracted score--serves as a parable of sorts. While I suggest that said evaporation was a function of the social divergence between supposedly healthy athleticism and enervating intellectualism, it is, I also argue, symptomatic of a larger problem with current historiographical practice, detectable in the Darmstadt reception of and reverence for Jeux and amplified in musicological writing to follow. The final chapter reflects on the most acute cases in the dissertation: La Boîte à joujoux and Dolly. Neither of these ballets have mobilized sustained critical interest. How then does one write about such works, which lack consistent documentation, and whose most stable artifact is the musical score itself? Through a reading of belle époque toy culture and Dalcrozean theory (among other contemporary sources), I suggest that, like the genre of ballet itself, French childhood faced a crossroads: an emphasis on physical excellence--whether in danced virtuosity or potentially militaristic training--upended concerns about emotiveness and individuation. I reach such a conclusion through a more speculative and searching approach to critical inquiry than has previously been used when thinking about ballet.

This dissertation examines the politics of children’s music education in the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. The East German state famously attempted to co-opt music education for propagandistic purposes by mandating songs with patriotic texts. However, as I show, most pedagogues believed that these songs were worthless as political education: children, they argued, learned not through the logic of texts, but through the immediacy of their bodies and their emotions. These educators believed music to be an especially effective site for children’s political education, as music played to children’s strongest suit: their unconscious mind and their emotions. Many pedagogues, composers, and musicologists thus adapted Weimar-era methods that used mostly non-texted music to instill what they held to be socialist values of collectivism, diligence, open-mindedness, and critical thought. I trace the fates of four of these pedagogical practices—solfège, the Orff Schulwerk, lessons in listening, and newly-composed “Brechtian” children’s operas—demonstrating how educators sought to graft the new demands of the socialist society onto inherited German musical and pedagogical traditions.

I argue that this marriage of old ideas and new aims was often fraught, as pedagogues and even state officials proved reluctant to interrogate fully the possible political uses of an art form which, in the Romantic tradition of Hoffmann and Hanslick, was held to be autonomous and stubbornly intractable to worldly purposes. Accordingly, music education in German socialism proceeded from a vision of aesthetic education that privileged the freedom of the individual—an ideal that proved loyal less to the beliefs of Soviet communism than to the fundamental ideologies of German liberalism. More generally, the dissertation shows how even the most fervently socialist didactic ideals and practices often broke down on the issue of music. Children’s music pedagogy represents, then, a moment in which developing human bodies and beliefs can be held up against the “real existing socialism” that the GDR claimed to have achieved: it exposes both the ideological underpinnings of German socialism and the halting practical steps that educators took to build it.

This dissertation is an historical, stylistic, and sociological analysis of new Russian music from the mid 1980s until today. It examines how Russia's social transformations of the past quarter century have affected the way composers write music and critics write about it. As a case study, it focuses on the works, activities, and critical reception of Russia's "middle generation" of modernist composers - that is, those composers born in the 1940s and 50s who entered the professional ranks before perestroika and were middle-aged at the time of the Soviet collapse. The study is organized longitudinally, tracing these composers' activities and critical reception from the mid 1980s onward. As a point of comparison, the dissertation looks, too, at the activities and reception of Russia's first post-Soviet generation, educated during the 90s and who entered the professional ranks in the 2000s. The study is based upon interviews with composers, musicians, and musicologists conducted throughout 2007-08, along with analyses of recent musical works, archival research, and readings from the contemporary Russian musicological literature and musical press. It focuses almost exclusively on music and musical life in Moscow, the site of the author's research.

This dissertation argues that social conditions during the late Soviet era bred a high degree of group cohesiveness and artistic likemindedness among modernist composers. As these social conditions changed, this cohesiveness and likemindedness largely dissipated. With the collapse of the Soviet system, modernist composers in Russia could no longer rely upon the same well-worn networks for information. At the same time, they enjoyed new opportunities to pursue careers abroad, develop new professional relationships and peer groups, and court new patrons. As a result, the homogeneous group approaches common in Soviet modern music circles of the 1980s gave way to an increasing diversity of styles during the 90s and beyond.

These stylistic developments were motivated not just by aesthetic concerns, but also by changes in the resource environment within which professional composers worked. With the end of the Soviet system, domestic institutions supporting composers largely collapsed, too. European organizations, especially government foundations and contemporary music groups, became the main source of support for Russian new music composers. Facing an institutional vacuum at home, integration with Europe--professional, personal, and stylistic--provided Russian composers the best strategy for preserving and advancing their careers. Those composers who chose to participate in European networks had strong incentive to conform to the stylistic norms expected within them. The more thoroughly one could conform to these norms and demonstrate professional aptitude in the eyes of European colleagues, the more likely he or she was to be accepted into these networks as a peer, thus gaining greater access to funding and career opportunities. As detailed in chapters 3 and 5, these stylistic adaptations took several forms: while some composers wrote pieces in the early 90s proving conversance with recent trends in new European music, others purged from their works features perceived as too old-fashioned or Soviet.

This study looks, too, at composers' perception of their position in post-Soviet society - and, more broadly, debates in Russia today about the status of classical music in contemporary Russian life. While many of the musicians featured in this study have emerged as "winners" in the post-Soviet transition, having gained in prestige or benefitted materially since 1991, most report feeling more like "losers," stranded in a society that little values their talents. These feelings of social irrelevance were amplified by the rapidity of the Soviet collapse and the quickness with which domestic institutions supporting and honoring composers have deteriorated. In the past few years, various groups have proposed programs of reform to fix Russian music and return it to its position of prominence. For some, the solution lies in emulating the cultural institutions of Western Europe; for others, Russian music's salvation lies not in emulating the West, but in rejecting it, and restoring to Russian music the qualities of tunefulness and beauty eroded from the 60s onward by the corrosive effects of the avant-garde.

This thesis discusses the political, social, and cultural impact of operetta in Vienna after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. As an alternative to the prevailing literature, which has approached this form of musical theater mostly through broad surveys and detailed studies of a handful of well-known masterpieces, my dissertation presents a montage of loosely connected, previously unconsidered case studies. Each chapter examines one or two highly significant, but radically unfamiliar, moments in the history of operetta during Austria's five successive political eras in the first half of the twentieth century. Exploring operetta's importance for the image of Vienna, these vignettes aim to supply new glimpses not only of a seemingly obsolete art form but also of the urban and cultural life of which it was a part.

My stories evolve around the following works:

Der Millionenonkel (1913), Austria's first feature-length motion picture, a collage of the most successful stage roles of a celebrated operetta comedian, which aimed to advertise the artistic potential of the new and controversial medium of film;

Bruno Granichstaedten's Der Orlow (1925) and Reklame! (1930), two of a series of jazz-inspired, American-themed revue operettas meant to prove that--even after World War I--the genre was still relevant and Vienna remained its foremost innovator;

Ralph Benatzky's Das kleine Café (1934) and Herzen im Schnee (1937), two "intrinsically Austrian" operettas, endorsed by the Austrofascist government and tourism office to promote the geographical and cultural treasures of the "New Austria," both at home and abroad;

Rudolf Weys's version of Franz Lehár's Der Rastelbinder (1902/1944), one of the Third Reich's many operetta revisions, with which the Nazis hoped to replenish Greater Germany's repertory of "Aryan" works;

Die Straussbuben (1946), Vienna's first postwar Singspiel, a trusty Strauss pastiche that became the touchstone for a recovering Austrian national pride, and likewise proved a last--missed--chance to find operetta a new lifeline.

The patchwork adumbrated by these historical scraps points to a larger trend: after the fall of the Habsburg Empire, operetta was considered cultural capital for Vienna and, as such, increasingly became an object of political relevance. While this development inextricably linked operetta to the image of Vienna (and Austria), and at points helped to keep this form of musical theater alive, it was also largely responsible for operetta's hopeless stagnation.

Russian Opera in the Age of Psychological Prose examines the relationship between opera and literature in Russia between 1866 and 1881, considering the ways in which both art forms reflected and contributed to contemporaneous understandings of human subjectivity. The status and psychology of the individual was a vital issue for Russian writers of the time, owing to both the new social circumstances that arose from Alexander II's Great Reforms and the still-reverberating salvos from the radical critics of the 1860s, who believed that the political destiny of Russia depended on the psychological constitution of Russians. I argue that opera, a genre that has always traded in the externalization of inner emotional states, played an important and little-understood role in these conversations. Interdisciplinary in orientation, my project draws liberally from the fields of musicology, Slavic studies, psychology, comparative literature, and the history of ideas.

After an extended historical and theoretical introduction in "Opera, Literature, and Psychological Realism in 1870s Russia," three chapters focus on the works of Modest Musorgsky and Pyotr Chaikovsky, Russian opera's most celebrated psychologists. "Boris Godunov and the Terrorist" discusses Musorgsky's treatment of Tsar Boris' upstart antagonist, the historical figure of Dmitri the Pretender, in light of the contemporary controversy surrounding Dmitri Karakozov's 1866 assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II. Considering texts by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky, this chapter contextualizes the Pretender's ambiguous operatic fate within a broad debate about the morality and psychology of political violence. In "Nowhere Man: Evgeny Onegin and the Politics of Reflection in Nineteenth-Century Russia," I put Chaikovsky's opera in dialogue with the reception history of Pushkin's novel, investigating the ways in which the opera responds to, and transforms, key questions about the status and politics of introspection in contemporary Russian culture. Taking its title and central questions from Tolstoy's 1869 War and Peace, "Khovanshchina, The Maid of Orleans, and the Force that Moves the Nations" interrogates Russian ideas about the role of the individual in history. I juxtapose Chaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans with Musorgsky's Khovanshchina, examining the divergent takes these operas present on history and human agency.

Together, these studies propose that opera, far from a mere nationalist vehicle or cultural divertissement, served as public staging ground for the exploration, reflection, and enaction of many of the most important social and intellectual issues of late imperial Russia.

This dissertation examines modernist twentieth-century applications of the pipe organ and the carillon in the United States and in the Netherlands. These keyboard instruments, historically owned by religious or governmental entities, served an exceptionally diverse variety of political, technological, social, and urban planning functions. Their powerful simultaneous associations with historicism and innovation enabled those who built and played them to anchor the instruments’ novel uses in the perceived authority of tradition, church, and state. This usage became particularly evident after World War II, when Philips Electronics and the engineers and musicians whose careers were shaped by the military-industrial complex and the Cold War used the organ and carillon to present alternative visions and performances of their research, knowledge, and services.

The organ served as a vehicle for innovation for early electronic music and sound synthesis pioneers in three ways. First, it provided a model for an efficient user interface for new synthesizer technologies that found both musical and military communications applications. Second, the pipe organ became the first instrument to be electronically simulated on a commercially viable basis. As a result, the first federal legal proceedings to define the successful simulation of musical sound centered on the electronic organ. Electronic organs also helped shape a historicist “neo-baroque” movement that was, in part, both a reaction to and an outgrowth of their commercial success. Third, inventors in the field of electronics, particularly military electronics, turned to organ building to satisfy a desire to connect with historicist ideas about craft and tradition. They became leaders of the Organ Reform Movement after World War II, dedicated to reviving aspects of Baroque organ building. I build on Richard Taruskin’s critique of “historically informed performance” as itself a form of modernism in order to elucidate previously overlooked relationships between Reform organ building, organ recording artists, the military-industrial complex, and cold war politics.

The carillon served as a vehicle for international exchange after World War II, facilitating the sharing of soundscape and landscape design ideas between America and the Netherlands. In the 1950s, the people of the Netherlands donated a carillon to the United States as a sounding symbol of political harmony between the two allies. However, the resulting political squabbles and the disharmony and decay of its bells tolled the ineffectiveness of this instrument of diplomacy. In the following decade, Philips Electronics took inspiration from suburban American corporate research parks to construct a techno-cultural complex in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This International Style park used the Dutch carillon’s sonic and visual symbolism to re-center the perceived core of Eindhoven and of civic authority onto Philips’ campus.

An important part of the broader history of postwar expansion and the military-industrial complex are the science-fiction, mystery, and filmic spinoffs and sonic imaginaries associated with these reinvented carillons and organs, and the way such narratives cross the boundaries between high art and popular culture. The institutions and donors that built carillons often justified them with utopian rhetoric about creating community, public music, and elevating general musical taste. However, a vein of dystopian fiction about bells in literature, opera, film, and television counterbalanced that discourse. The realm of fiction ties together this dissertation’s overarching themes of historical revival, technological innovation, modernism, and military electronics research.

This study explores Russian thought about music in thirty-five years leading up to the establishment in 1921 of the music research department at the Institute for Art History in St Petersburg, generally considered the key event in the institutionalization of musicology as a scholarly discipline, and for a decade after that. Drawing on sources that include newspapers and articles across half a century and hitherto little-known archival materials, such as transcripts of meetings, official resolutions, and personal correspondence, I show how Russian musicology grew up in dialogue with the broader intellectual developments of the period. The temporal framework of this study bridges the “revolutionary divide,” dismantling the persistent notion of 1917 as the zero hour in the history of Russian and Soviet culture. Where existing studies have tended to conceptualize writing about music in the early Soviet era either as the voluntary acceptance of ideological directives from the State or as the total ideological crackdown on free scholarly thought, my findings reveal a volatile two-way relationship between the State and individual scholars, in which musicologists themselves exhibited a nuanced range of attitudes toward the centralized ideology and could be active agents of the sweeping ideological change.

Chapters 1 and 5 deal with institutions and the thorny quest to legitimize musicology as an academic profession; Chapters 2, 3, and 4 focus on the vibrant discourse on the study of music that appeared in the press. In its earliest stage, the institutionalization of musicology was slowed by the relentless focus of the music conservatories on the social legitimization of the profession of a musician, which left no space for the advocacy of the professional scholar. During this same early period, musicological thought was being forged in the debates in the popular press over the competing claims of positivism and idealism. Where positivism upheld the idea that music scholarship should concern itself with the scientific search for universal laws governing both the historical development of music and its inner workings, the idealist camp favored the understanding of music as an ineffable art, out of reach of the rational mind.

In Chapter 1 I analyze Nikolai Findeisen’s criticism of the conservatory professor Liveriy Sacchetti, an expert in European music historiography and aesthetics, and Findeisen’s nationalist vision for musicology, which was gaining momentum in the two pre-revolutionary decades. Chapter 2 presents a longitudinal study of the Russian reception of Eduard Hanslick’s influential treatise "On the Musically Beautiful," which reveals two ideological shifts, first to positivism, then away from it. Chapter 3 concerns itself with an example of this positivist influx and the strong idealist opposition it elicited in certain avant-garde artistic circles of the 1910s: Emiliy Medtner’s criticism of Nadezhda Bryusova’s work, rife with anti-modernism, racial anxiety, and fear of the prescriptive ambitions of science. Chapter 4 looks at the same ideological clash from a different perspective. Members of the Scriabin Society, offended by the critical stance the music critic Leonid Sabaneyev took in his monograph on the recently deceased composer, attempted to besmirch his reputation by casting him as a clueless rationalist who could not approach the true meaning of Scriabin’s music. Chapter 5 examines the increasing ideological pressure that The People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) put on the musicologists at the Russian Institute of Art History in the late 1920s, steeped in the infamous rhetoric of “formalism” that later informed the public denunciations of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. My focus on the personal communications between Boris Asafyev and Alexey Finagin reveals that adapting one’s convictions to the changing ideological climate often came at the cost of personal relationships.

Recently, the most exciting productions of operas have attracted attention by rebelling against established ideas of the opera's text and stagings - Peter Sellars' New York settings of Mozart operas are just one example among many. Likewise, the most stimulating developments in opera criticism have been in the area of performance, where a much-needed sharpening of opera-production theory has formed around such extraordinary re-stagings. This focus on performance is a welcome one, particularly for opera, where the visual component is of no less importance than the aural. Yet the nearly exclusive attention on extraordinary productions and a concomitant valorization of the provocative is troubling. Such selectivity, particularly when founded on loaded criteria such as "strong" and "innovative" runs the risk of creating more canons of "great works" or "great men."

This dissertation will seek to redress some of the problems with current methodologies for studying opera productions, illustrated with case studies of four of Leos Janacek's operas: Kat'a Kabanova, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropulos Case, and From the House of the Dead. My thinking on this subject has been filtered through work on Janacek's operas which, I have found, fit uneasily into existing models of opera studies. Unlike the Italian, German, and French operas that form the canon of opera criticism, Janacek's were notoriously slow starters. Only the premieres of his last few operas could be considered important musical events and even then only within the Czech Republic. Works such as Makropulos and The House of the Dead have acquired significance in international opera houses only relatively recently. The unusual relationship these pieces have with the operatic performance canon required developing new approaches to their study. First, I propose supplementing any examination of opera production with the very different information reception history provides. Alone, neither production nor reception can completely represent the impact of performance: on the one hand, the visual traces of productions, particularly those pre-dating video recording, are frustratingly ephemeral; on the other, the written texts that usually comprise reception history tell only part of the story. Bringing the two together, can fill in some of the pieces missing in either alone. Second, the myopic effect caused by focusing on single productions should be countered: as Gundula Kreuzer has recently argued, studies of newer productions often lack historical perspective. Thus I suggest along with Kreuzer, that the chronological purview of any such study be radically expanded to include stagings from the premiere up to recent years. Lastly, I suggest a shift in focus from difference to sameness. Reception histories in music have typically concentrated on changes in a work's meaning as indicators of shifts in broader historical, social, or political contexts. The problem with looking exclusively for difference is, as Jim Samson has argued, that a work's meanings may become so unstable as to render them meaningless. Tracing sameness or, to borrow from Jan Broeckx, "residual layers of receptional insight" through the history of an opera's production and reception not only reintroduces stability through continuously regenerated meanings of the work, but also provides us with new insights.

The "La Clayette" manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. fr. 13521) is large codex of 419 folios, unique among surviving books of thirteenth-century polyphony for combining a substantial fascicle of motets (some 55 in total, over 22 folios) with an otherwise entirely non-musical collection of literary works. Those texts are all in Old French, almost all devotional or didactic in tone. They are vernacular literary materials of precisely the kind read by or to the lay devout, circulated and consumed ever more enthusiastically in the decades after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, and used in the cultivation of lay piety. The book has been granted a position in the canon of thirteenth-century polyphonic anthologies only to the extent that its music is considered to have originated separately from its remaining leaves. This dissertation begins with a codicological study of the manuscript, which demonstrates that the music was collected into it for the earliest of three identifiable bindings, probably before the death of Louis IX in 1270. The motets may be considered a cornerstone of the book's didactic project. I argue that the techniques of fascicular construction used to build the codex betray a hopeful uncertainty about where and when written polyphony might be encountered and copied in the vernacular book trade. That uncertainty contrasts with restrictive scholarly conceptions of the motet's social purview; and it is the manuscript's implications for a social history of thirteenth-century polyphony that I set out to explore.

A new paleographical assessment of La Clayette's notation uncovers a broadly consistent set of procedures for notating rhythm, and reveals nuances of rhythmic style not previously identified in published editions of the repertory. Telling paleographical details suggest the book sustained a performance practice in which a single musical reader coached other singers live from the manuscript. This is akin to the practice advocated by La Clayette`s literary works, in which a reader would perform the texts aloud for his audience; though the musical version of the practice incorporated the literature's auditors as singing participants. The only skill required to sing these pieces was the willingness to be taught how. I suggest that the value of singing the motets lay in their ability to produce devotional mental images in ways continuous with the literary texts, and to script a performer's response to them in ways the literary texts could not. Several of the motets engage the memory of ribald vernacular songs, then rewrite that memory devotionally through Latin contrafacture. Thus the pieces offered a devotional training in interpretation itself, one that was contingent upon their musical difficulty, and which cast devotion as a practice adopted by choice and through labor. In later stages of the manuscript's life, its compilers unfolded some of the music's other interpretative possibilities through literary choices that did not fit the volume's first devotional frame. The unruliness of La Clayette's final form betrays changing interpretations of its musical contents over time, and puts pressure on scholarly assumptions about how material texts must anchor the interpretation of music and literature.

Finally, through an analysis of a single motet from the La Clayette manuscript (Par une matinee [807] / Mellis stilla [808] / Alleluia [unidentified]), conducted in dialogue with a paleographical study of each of its fifteen manuscript witnesses, we see how composers could articulate from within motets new ideas about the social domain of music writing in ways that left a lasting legacy to the fourteenth century. I argue that a musicopoetic gambit in the French triplum satirically represents the overheard (but newly composed) song of a shepherdess and her lover as unwritable, and therefore irrational. But its satire is doubly undone, first in that the notational "house style" of La Clayette renders it illegible except through precisely the kinds of oral practices to which it would claim superiority as an written composition; and second, in that the Latin motetus against which the French voice was composed was known far more widely, as a popular sung prayer that did not need writing to endure. While the triplum's style would assert the distinction of the notation in which it was written (in a manner resembling the tendentious, roughly contemporaneous social commentary of Johannes de Grocheio), Mellis stilla suggests that the reach of music writing had limits that did not match the more widespread ability to sing in polyphony. Beyond the written testimony, vernacular polyphony in a style so similar to the motet as sometimes to be indistinguishable from it thrived in ways the triplum's composer probably would not have encouraged, but which our historiographies should now acknowledge.

Evaluating music as psychological utterance and biographical confession emerged as a mode of music criticism during the early to mid-nineteenth century. Ever since, critics have characterized Robert Schumann as a composer whose works and life are bound together inextricably. The ramifications of these values in Schumann reception and scholarship form the subject of this dissertation.

The origins of this practice can be found in the late eighteenth century, when German writers began describing instrumental music as the most inward of artistic genres. Promoting the value of "unity" between life and works bestowed authenticity and aided canonization. It was, furthermore, a view of self that Schumann actively encouraged through his writings. Following an introduction on the concept of biographical listening, I use the frameworks of "intimacy" and "madness" to delineate how such listening has affected the popularization of Schumann's music. More than mere style descriptors, "intimacy" and "madness" connect Schumann's music and persona. They shape how and what listeners hear.

Conceptions of the music's intimacy were rooted in reports of Robert's struggle to marry the pianist Clara Wieck. In order to broach perceptions of Schumannian intimacy, I study the reception history of "Träumerei." By the 1890s, "Träumerei" had become the most arranged and published piece by any composer in German-speaking lands, inspiring paintings, poems, short stories, popular songs and even novels. In my first chapter I argue that biographical interpretive methods underlay its popular success, as writers and publishers used perceptions of Schumann's life to promote his music as inward.

In my second chapter, I study how changing conceptions of gender during the 1930s-1950s helped reshape biographical readings of "Träumerei." The 1944 German film Träumerei and the 1947 Hollywood film Song of Love each prominently featured "Träumerei" in their retellings of the Robert-Clara love story. Juxtaposing German and American cinematic, scholarly, and fictional portrayals of Clara Schumann, I examine how "Träumerei" was used at this time to market both music appreciation and family values.

Besides the love story, a second Schumannian tale has gained notoriety: Robert's early death in a mental institution. I devote two chapters to the relationships between his music, his biography, and his "madness." First, I study the history of Schumann's psychiatric diagnoses. In addition to Schumann's letters, diaries and compositions, many factors have shaped the diagnoses he has been given. I demonstrate how particular social values, molding both psychiatric research and aesthetic evaluation, have shaped Schumann's complex twentieth-century diagnostic history.

My last chapter is a study of the recent compositional reception of "late" Schumann. Until the 1980s, the late music was often heard as representing an increasingly confused mind. Since then scholars have begun to reclaim these works as rational and music-theoretically lucid. Simultaneously, contemporary European composers have begun composing homages to the mentally-ill Schumann. Demonstrating "health" and romanticizing "pathology" not only show the tenacity of the biographical interpretive mode, they reveal how aesthetic evaluations of Schumann's music are affected by the stigma as well as the mystique of mental illness.