Feminist scholarship in all disciplines has insisted on the study of cultural context, whatever the project at hand. This is because gender relations, while seldom brought to the surface for scrutiny in mainstream scholarship, are constructed by culture and are always among the most fundamental ideological structures operating in any society. It is part of the project of feminist work to keep pointing out, as a character in one of J. M. Coetzee's novels puts it, “how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.” This is as good a description as any of my purpose here, to investigate how gender as a “meaning” resides in the Frauenliebe und -leben songs by Adelbert von Chamisso and Robert Schumann.

We have in these songs a particularly focused, not to say fraught, ideological situation. For one thing, because nineteenth-century listeners expected music to carry messages, the songs would have been understood in their own time to be doing “cultural work,” and indeed would have been used by their culture in ways that made that work explicit and gave social sanction to their message.