¹ Joanna Kane, The Somnambulists: Photographic Portraits from Before Photography (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2008), n.p.

² In 1823, as she began her English concert tour, The London Magazine noted that ‘[t]he three principal capitals of Germany, … Vienna, Berlin, and Munich, have each at the present moment to boast of a great piano forte player, at a very juvenile age. Vienna, of Franz Ziszt [sic]; Berlin, of Mendelsohn [sic]; and Munich, of Mademoiselle Schauroth’. ‘Report of Music’, The London Magazine 8 (July 1823): 77. She is again mentioned alongside Liszt and other prominent prodigies of the day in ‘Youthful Composers’, The Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review 9 (1827): 454–5.

³ This particular photograph was created using a cast labelled ‘Delphine Charuost, musician’ in the Edinburgh Phrenological Society records. In their companion essay to the collection, Duncan Forbes and Roberta McGrath explain Kane's process. See Duncan Forbes and Roberta McGrath, ‘Hieroglyphic Heads’, in Joanna Kane, The Somnambulists: Photographic Portraits from Before Photography (Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2008), n.p.

⁴ While biographies of Felix Mendelssohn generally mention Schauroth to some extent, substantial discussion of her abilities and musical relationship with Mendelssohn can be found in the following: Huber, Annegret, Das ‘Lied ohne Worte’ als kunstübergreifendes Experiment: Eine komparatistische Studie zur Intermedialität des Instrumentalliedes 1830–1850 (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 2006), 299–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jost, Christa, ‘Im Odeon und auf der Wies'n Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy fand das Leben in München behaglicher als in Berlin’, Literatur in Bayern 49 (1997): 52–7Google Scholar; Richter, Brigitte, ‘Delphine von Schauroth’, in Frauen um Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1997), 74–8Google Scholar; Schwarz-Danuser, Monika, ‘Delphine von Schauroth versus Cécile  Mendelssohn Bartholdy geb. Jeanrenaud. Femme fatale versus Madonna?’ in Frauen um Felix, ed. Leggewie, Veronika (Würzburg: Edition Linea classica, 2002), 121–40Google Scholar; Todd, R. Larry, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 228–31, 234, 248–50, 289, 291, 402, 411CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In addition, ethnomusicologist Helen Martens conducted substantial archival research to inform her novelistic treatment of Mendelssohn and Schauroth's relationship: Martens, Helen, Felix Mendelssohn: Out of the Depths of His Heart (Enumclaw, WA: Annotation Press, 2009)Google Scholar. Schauroth also appears in scholarship about other women musicians of the nineteenth century. For her relationship with Josephine Lang, see Krebs, Harald and Krebs, Sharon, Josephine Lang: Her Life and Songs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 44, 226CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On her encounters with Fanny Hensel, see Lambour, Christian, ‘Fanny Hensel – Die Pianistin: Teil V – Fanny Hensel beurteilt die Pianisten ihrer Generation’, Mendelssohn-Studien 15 (2007): 252–7Google Scholar; Todd, R. Larry, Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 144, 237Google Scholar.

⁵ Hofmann, Dorothea, ‘“Tag und Nacht möchte man so spielen hören …”. Notizen zu Delphine von Schauroth – Kritiken als biographische Quelle’, Musik in Bayern 60 (2001): 59–78Google Scholar.

⁶ Schwarz-Danuser, Monika, ‘Schauroth, Delphine von, geschiedene Hill Handley, geschiedene Henniger von Eberg, geschiedene Knight’, in Frauen in Sachsen-Anhalt: Ein biographisch-bibliographisch Lexikon vom Mittelalter bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Bohlau, 2016), 393–96Google Scholar. While previous scholarship has mentioned the publication of Schauroth's compositions and Robert Schumann's responses, no scholars have engaged substantially with her compositions.

⁷ Loges, Natasha, ‘Clara Schumann's Legacy as a Teacher’, in Clara Schumann Studies, ed. Davies, Joe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 275Google Scholar.

⁸ Children and students played a pronounced role as early biographers of other nineteenth-century musical women. Fanny Hensel's son, Sebastian Hensel, devoted significant attention to her legacy in his chronicle of the Mendelssohn family. Sebastian Hensel, Die Familie Mendelssohn, 1729–1847, nach Briefen und Tagebüchern, 3 vols (Berlin: B. Behr, 1879). As Harald Krebs notes, Josephine Lang's son, Heinrich, was also an important early biographer for her. Harald Krebs, ‘The “Power of Class” in a New Perspective’, Nineteenth Century Music Review 4 (2007): 39. Clara Schumann's daughter Marie preserved her diaries and oversaw Berthold Litzmann's biography of Schumann. Nancy Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 139. In contrast, Schauroth's unstable family life likely contributed to the dearth of her preserved personal papers. There is record of one child, Charles, from Schauroth's short-lived first marriage (1833–c.1837) to Edwin Hill-Handley, but Schauroth had to leave him in England when she separated from Hill-Handley, and he died at the age of four. Her other marriages, to Stephan Heninger Freiherr von Eberg in 1848 and to Edward Knight in 1856, both ended in divorce and with no record of children. Schwarz-Danuser, ‘Schauroth, Delphine von’, 394–5.

⁹ Head, Matthew, ‘Rethinking Authorship Through Women Composers: Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy in the Age of the French Revolution, by Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson’, Women & Music 6 (2002): 36–50Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Schumann, Robert, ‘Delphine Hill Handley, née de Schauroth, Sonate brillante (C-Moll). 1 Fl. 45 kr. Wien, Diabelli’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 2, no. 31 (17 April 1835): 125Google Scholar.

¹¹ Madame de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33–4.

¹² Notable recent contributions about the impact of Corinne include: Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 78–103, 110–28; Linda M. Lewis, Germaine de Staël, George, Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003); Kari E. Lokke, Tracing Women's Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence (New York: Routledge, 2004); Judith E. Martin, Germaine de Staël in Germany: Gender and Literary Authority (1800–1850) (Plymouth: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011); Patrick H. Vincent, The Romantic Poetess: European Culture, Politics, and Gender 1820–1840 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004). Corinne figures sometimes took the form of musicians in literary works, as is demonstrated by Julia Effertz, ‘Between Ideal and Performance: Corinne in Female-Authored Singer Narratives of the 1830s’, in Staël's Philosophy of the Passions: Sensibility, Society, and the Sister Arts, ed. Tili Boon Cuille and Karyna Szmurlo (Lanham: Bucknell University Press, 2013): 281–301; and Phyllis Weliver, ‘George Eliot and the Prima Donna's “Script”’, The Yearbook of English Studies 40/1–2 (2010): 103–20.

¹³ On the influence of Corinne in the musical realm, see Melina Esse, ‘Encountering the Improvvisatrice in Italian Opera’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66/3 (2013): 709–70; Melina Esse, Singing Sappho (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021); Dana Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Ellen Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 91–102.

¹⁴ Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 85.

¹⁵ For Gooley's introduction of the term ‘free playing’, see Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation, 7–8.

¹⁶ Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation, 134–5, 222. Gooley addresses the poetic improvisation of Karoline Leonhardt-Lyser, called ‘Deutschlands Corinna’ (141–6), and briefly mentions a number of women pianists.

¹⁷ On the gendered nature of genius in the nineteenth century, see Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: The Women's Press, 1989); Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Žarko Cvejić, ‘Gender and the Critical Reception of Virtuosity’, The Reception of Instrumental Virtuosity, c. 1815–c. 1850 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 214–61.

¹⁸ Mary Hunter ‘“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”: The Idea of the Performer in Early Romantic Aesthetics’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 58 (2005): 357–98, esp. 370.

¹⁹ The earliest evidence found of her public career is a review of a concert in Mannheim that took place on 31 March 1822. ‘Miszellen’, Flora. Ein Unterhaltungs-Blatt 2, no. 58 (11 April 1822): 232.

²⁰ In this double acrostic poem, the first letters of the lines spell out ‘Delphine’, and the final letters spell ‘Schauroth’. According to the article in which it appears, the poem was written in March of 1822, which coincides with her first public performances. ‘Miszellen’, Flora ein Unterhaltungs-Blatt 2, no. 87 (31 May 1822): 348. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

²¹ For a summary of the association of the sublime with the masculine, see Judy Lochhead, ‘The Sublime, the Ineffable, and Other Dangerous Aesthetics’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 12 (2008): 63–74.

²² On the association of Pindar with the musical sublime, see Mark Evan Bonds, ‘The Symphony as Pindaric Ode’, in Haydn and His World, ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 131–53. On the use of eagle imagery by Romantic poets, see Michael Ferber, Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38–43.

²³ ‘Intelligence Relative to the Fine Arts’, The European Magazine and London Review (June 1823): 542.

²⁴ ‘Intelligence Relative to the Fine Arts’, 542.

²⁵ ‘Kunst Nachrichten aus London’, Zeitung für Theater, Musik, und bildende Künste, zur Unterhaltung gebildeter, unbefangener Leser 3, no. 45 (8 November 1823): 179.

²⁶ On the understanding of child prodigies as musical automata, see Carolyn Abbate, ‘Outside Ravel's Tomb’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999): 480–81; Annette Richards, ‘Automatic Genius: Mozart and the Mechanical Sublime’, Music & Letters 80 (1999): 381–2.

²⁷ Schauroth first performed in France in 1823, and was again in Paris from 1824–25 (when she studied with Kalkbrenner) and in 1827. ‘Concert: De Mlle Delphine Schauroth, âgée de 9 ans. (9 mai 1823)’, Le Miroir des Spectacles, des Lettres, des Moeurs et des Arts no. 840 (15 May 1823): 3; ‘Foreign Music Report’, The Harmonicon 2, no. 18 (June 1824): 119; ‘Concerts’, Revue Musicale 1 (1827): 167–8. Schauroth actually would have been ten years old at the time of the 1823 concert.

²⁸ ‘Concert: De Mlle Delphine Schauroth’, 3.

²⁹ Later in the volume, he predicts that she will become ‘the Paganini of the piano’. Stendhal, Vie de Rossini (Paris: M. Lévy frères, 1854), 276, 350. Although the book was first published in 1824, these notes do not seem to appear until the revised edition of 1854. As a staunch advocate for the individualistic creative displays of singers, Stendhal may have appreciated Schauroth's marriage of technical skill and distinctive expressiveness. As Melina Esse notes, Stendhal protested Rossini's supposed reigning in of the inventive powers of singers; Melina Esse, Singing Sappho, 59.

³⁰ Stendhal (Henri Beyle) to Victor Jacquemont, Paris, [day unknown] May 1823, in Correspondance de Stendhal, vol. 2, ed. Henri Martineau and Victor Del Litto (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 747.

³¹ It is likely that the lithograph is from this time, both due to Schauroth's youthful appearance and the fact that Pierre Langlumé was active in Paris as a lithographer from 1820 until his death in 1830. ‘Langlume Pierre’, Dictionnaire des imprimeurs-lithographes du XIXe siècle, École nationale des chartes, http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/imprimeurs/node/22611 (1 June 2022).

³² Christine Giviskos, Set in Stone: Lithography in Paris, 1815–1900 (Munich: Hirmer, Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 2018), 54.

³³ Indeed, a few years later, Felix Mendelssohn recounts in a letter to his sister Rebecka that he had turned down being the subject of a lithograph (Schauroth was to have performed during his sitting to keep his expression cheerful!) and would continue to do so in case he didn't end up being a ‘great man’. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Rebecka Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Paris, 20, 23 and 24 December 1831, in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Sämtliche Briefe II: Juli 1830 bis Juli 1832, ed. Anja Morgenstern and Ute Wald (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2009), 439.

³⁴ Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme conquistata, Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/0872.

³⁵ Staël, Corinne, 40.

³⁶ Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, ‘Gothic and Romantic Engagements: The Critical Reception of Ann Radcliffe, 1789–1850’, in Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4–5.

³⁷ ‘Intelligence Relative to the Fine Arts’, 542. Emphasis in original.

³⁸ Liszt had twice performed publicly in Oedenburg and Pressburg in 1820, prior to his Viennese debut. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 68, 77–8.

³⁹ ‘Conzert’, Eos, Zeitschrift aus Bayern no. 40 (10 March 1824): 160.

⁴⁰ ‘Da ich von Musik schreibe, so fällt mir das wundervolle Paar ein, wie die Welt es wahrscheinlich noch nicht sah. Alle Blätter reden einstimmig von den ausserordentlichen Talenten der 11 ½ jährigen Mlle. Schauroth, und dem 13jährigen Lizt [sic]. Beide geben Concerte auf dem Clavier und stehen fast neben den gröβten Meistern’. ‘Correspondenz-Nachrichten. Aus Paris’, Abend-Zeitung no. 127 (28 May 1825): 508. See note 2 for another article in which Schauroth is ranked similarly.

⁴¹ ‘Miszellen’, Flora: Ein Unterhaltungs-Blatt 3, no. 163 (16 October 1823): 652.

⁴² ‘Korrespondenz’, Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 2, no. 11 (16 March 1825): 85.

⁴³ ‘Nachrichten’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 30, no. 22 (28 May 1828): 360. See also ‘Miszellen zur Tagsgeschichte’, Flora: Ein Unterhaltungs-Blatt no. 57 (20 March 1829): 235–6; ‘Ueber das erste abonnirte Konzert vom 18. März’, Munchener Musikzeitung 2, no. 26 (28 March 1829): 408.

⁴⁴ For more on Schauroth's class standing and how class, age and marriage impacted her career, see Hofmann, ‘Tag und Nacht’, 63–6. For more on how class impacted German women musicians in the nineteenth century, see Krebs, ‘The “Power of Class” in a New Perspective’, 37–48; and Nancy Reich, ‘The Power of Class: Fanny Hensel’, in Mendelssohn and his World, ed. R. Larry Todd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991): 86–99.

⁴⁵ Schauroth's separation and return to Munich was announced in the musical press; see ‘Vermischtes’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 6, no. 11 (7 February 1837): 46.

⁴⁶ ‘wer Frau v. Hill-Handley-Schauroth früher spielten hörte, muβte in Beziegung auch der gröβten Schwierigkeiten und in Klarheit und Gefühl des Vortrages doppelt die ausserordentlicher Meisterschaft bewundern, welche diese Wahre Künstlerin seitdem in noch viel höherem Grade sich errungen’; ‘Revue der Einläufe’, Der Nürnberger Lustwandler, no. 44 (13 April 1837): 173–4.

⁴⁷ ‘wo sich enorme Technik mit tiefem, ewig schönem Gefühle in so hohem Grade vereint, ist das Höchste geleistet … Frau von Hill-Handley, geborne von Schauroth, hat sich durch künstlerische Verdienste nicht nur in München, sondern beinahe in der ganzen groβen Welt hohe Achtung und ansgebreiteten Ruf’ erworben’; ‘Conzert zu Beethovens Monument’, Der Bazar für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Geselligkeit no. 55 (7 April 1837): 220.

⁴⁸ ‘Ueber Clavierspiel und Clavier-Composition’, Wiener Zeitung no. 292 (19 December 1839): 1839.

⁴⁹ ‘Delphine von Schauroth, Hofdame in München, aus der Künstlerwelt zurückgetreten, eine ausgezeichnete, geistvolle Vistuosin, besonders in Vortrage gediegener Compositionen, wie K. M. von Weber's, Beethoven's’. Conversations-Lexikon der Gegenwart, vol 23 (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1841), s.v. ‘Virtuosen’, 268.

⁵⁰ For information on her second and third marriages, see note 7. I have not been able to find any evidence of concerts by Schauroth between March 1841 and February 1861 (when she performed in a charity concert); see ‘Vermischtes’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 14, no. 22 (15 March 1841): 90; ‘Kunst und Wissenschaft’, Badesche Landeszeitung (23 February 1861).

⁵¹ Moscheles referred to Schauroth as an ‘outstanding pianist’ in an 1861 letter to Max Maria von Weber. Ignaz Moscheles to Max Maria von Weber, Leipzig, September 1861, Carl Maria von Weber Gesamtausgabe, https://weber-gesamtausgabe.de/de/A001353/Korrespondenz/ A045798.html. Ferdinand Hiller helped Schauroth to arrange concerts in the 1860s. Martens, Felix Mendelssohn, 312–16. Wilhelm von Lenz recounts visiting Schauroth with Meyerbeer in 1862. Wilhelm von Lenz, ‘Berliner Bekannschaften’, Neue Berliner Musikzeitung 25 (13 September 1871): 291–4. Liszt and Schauroth exchanged letters in the late 1860s, and he may have been involved in her admission to the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in 1870, addressed later in this article.

⁵² Following the bicentenary in 2019, several major books (and articles too numerous to list) on Schumann have been released: Beatrix Borchard, Clara Schumann: Musik als Lebensform – Neue Quellen – andere Schreibweisen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2019); Joe Davies, ed, Clara Schumann Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Alexander Stefaniak, Becoming Clara Schumann: Performance Strategies and Aesthetics in the Culture of the Musical Canon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021); Stephen Rodgers, The Songs of Clara Schumann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

⁵³ On the understanding of women musicians as reproductive artists, see, for example, Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 45–54; Beth Abelson Macleod, Women Performing Music: The Emergence of American Women as Classical Instrumentalists and Conductors (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001), 23, 92–3.

⁵⁴ In the novel, Corinne is described as an exceptional interpreter of tragedy and performs in a production of Romeo and Juliet, for instance. Staël, Corinne, 22, 121–8.

⁵⁵ ‘Report of Music’, The London Magazine 8 (August 1823): 208.

⁵⁶ ‘Correspondenz: Neuberg an der Donau’, Flora: Ein Unterhaltungs-Blatt no. 101 (21 May 1829): 413.

⁵⁷ Of these, the Caprice cannot be found at present.

⁵⁸ I am aware of album-leaf manuscripts by Schauroth in the albums of Ferdinand Hiller, Josephine Lang, Felix Mendelssohn and Clara and Robert Schumann. While several encyclopaedia articles mention additional pieces, no details about these works can be found in Schauroth's critical reception or in archival collections. Linda Maria Koldau mentions a Sonata in A minor that was composed around 1835, but provides no further details. Linda Maria Koldau ‘Schauroth, Delphine von’, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart Online, accessed 6 April 2021. In addition to that sonata, Schwarz-Danuser notes that a Sonata in E flat Major that could not be located. Schwarz-Danuser, ‘Schauroth, Delphine von’, 396. It is likely that the Sonata in E flat Major is the Sonate brilliante: some critics refer to it as such since the final movement is in that key.

⁵⁹ Information on minor women composers is often lacking, but I have only been able to identify a small number of women who published piano sonatas between 1800 and 1834: Marie Bigot, Margarethe Danzi, Katerina Veronika Anna Dusíkova, Helene Liebmann, Hélène-Antoinette-Marie de Nervo de Montgeroult, Maria Hester Park, Maria Frances Park and Julie Baroni-Cavalcabó (von Webenau). Other women publishing compositions in large-scale forms (aside from the piano sonata) in this period include Leopoldine Blahetka, Louise Farrenc, Katerina Maier and Maria Theresia von Paradis. Regarding the German women composers most well-known today, in 1834 Fanny Hensel had not yet published any works (under her own name) and Clara Wieck had published only her Op.1 through Op.6, which consist of character pieces and dance genres. Her first large-scale work, the Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, was performed in 1835 and published in 1836. The gendered implications of genres are discussed later in this article.

⁶⁰ As Dorothea Hofmann points out, critics reviewing her performances in the years immediately after the publication of these works (1837–1841) do not mention her compositions. However, in her later years her status as a composer is more consistently recalled; Hofmann, ‘Tag und Nacht’, 73.

⁶¹ ‘Berlin’, Signale für die Musikalische Welt 28, no. 16 (19 March 1863): 251

⁶² ‘Kunst und Wissenschaft’, Badesche Landeszeitung (23 February 1861), 237. A review from 1862 also mentions Schauroth performing some of her own short works to conclude the concert, suggesting that she may have routinely featured her compositions as finales or encores at this point in her career. ‘Wissenschaftliche und Kunst-Nachrichten’, Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen (2 December 1862), n.p.

⁶³ ‘Dur und Moll’, Signale für die musikalische Welt 28, no. 10 (10 February 1870): 149.

⁶⁴ ‘Feuilleton’, Musikalisches Wochenblatt 1, no. 2 (7 January 1870): 30. Schauroth is listed among the composers featured, but no details are provided about the specific compositions.

⁶⁵ ‘Bekanntmachung des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 66, no. 8 (18 February 1870): 80.

⁶⁶ Mendelssohn mentions Schauroth's composition in a letter to his family. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Munich, 23 July 1830, in Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Sämtliche Briefe II, 52. Todd suggests that Schauroth's Lied ohne Worte in E major may have been a response to Mendelssohn's Rondo capriccioso, Op. 14 and speculates about Mendelssohn's returned musical missive in his Op. 19b, no. 6. Todd, Mendelssohn, 229–30, 234. As Annegret Huber notes, this exchange means that Schauroth would have worked in the genre of the Lied ohne Worte before Mendelssohn published his first collection. Huber, Das ‘Lied ohne Worte’ als kunstübergreifendes Experiment, 299. For more on nineteenth-century album leaf collections in general, including Felix Mendelssohn's, see Oliver Huck, ‘Albumblätter für Klavier – Manuskripte und Kompositionen im 19. Jahrhundert’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 75 (2018): 244–77.

⁶⁷ Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Munich, October 6, 1831, in Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Sämtliche Briefe II, 404. Todd suggests that this may have been one of the first movement's ‘noisy octave or arpeggiation passages’. Todd, Mendelssohn, 249.

⁶⁸ ‘Wissenschaftliche und Kunst-Nachrichten’, Berlinische Nachrichten (2 December 1862), n.p.

⁶⁹ Miranda Stanyon remarks on ‘the new twilight zone between literature and music theory or criticism’ in Romantic writing. Stanyon, ‘Music and Romantic Literature’, in The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 37. On music and the fantastic in the nineteenth century, see also Francesca Brittan, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

⁷⁰ For more on the Wertktreue ideal in relation to performance in the nineteenth century, see Angelika App, ‘Die “Werktreue” bei Clara Schumann’, in Clara Schumann – Komponistin, Interpretin, Unternehmerin, Ikone, ed. Peter Ackermann and Herbert Schneider (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1999), 9–18; Lydia Goehr, ‘After 1800: The Beethoven Paradigm’, in The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 205–42, especially 231–2; Karen Leistra-Jones, ‘Staging Authenticity: Joachim, Brahms, and the Politics of Werktreue Performance’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66 (2013): 207–36; Alexander Stefaniak, Schumann's Virtuosity: Criticism, Composition, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), 156–7, 195–238.

⁷¹ Hunter, ‘“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”’, 361.

⁷² Hunter, ‘“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”’, 370, 384.

⁷³ Alexander Stefaniak, ‘Clara Schumann and the Imagined Revelation of Musical Works’, Music & Letters 99/2 (2018): 195.

⁷⁴ Stefaniak, ‘Clara Schumann and the Imagined Revelation of Musical Works’, 200.

⁷⁵ My work on the reception of Clara Wieck in the 1830s contrasts significantly with Stefaniak's findings. Amanda Lalonde, ‘The Young Prophetess in Performance’, in Clara Schumann Studies, ed. by Joe Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 187–201.

⁷⁶ As Stefaniak acknowledges, Schumann's reception is fascinating from a gendered perspective, in that critics needed to reckon with how a woman could authentically reveal the spirits of male composers and the essences of their works. That Schauroth represents a vastly different approach to performance, and yet was also highly admired, is significant for our understanding of the gendered reception of female virtuoso pianists in the nineteenth century. Stefaniak, ‘Clara Schumann and the Imagined Revelation’, 196, 198–9. Schauroth might thus provide a counterexample to Cvejić's assertion, in an examination of Marie Pleyel and Clara Schumann, that ‘only male virtuosi were seen as “literal embodiment[s] of extreme virtuosity” because, to put it simply … individuality and subjectivity themselves were gendered male’; Cvejić, The Reception of Instrumental Virtuosity, 222.

⁷⁷ ‘Reclamation’, Allgemeine Zeitung 44, no. 67 (8 March 1841): 534; ‘Feuilleton’, Fränkischer Merkur no. 75 (16 March 1841): n.p.

⁷⁸ ‘Ihr Spiel zaubert dieses Conzert selbst für den, der es schon hörte, zu einem ganz neuen, noch nie gehörten um; so haucht ihr Genius demselben einen eigenthümlichen Reiz, einen neuen Zauber ein. Die unendliche Virtuosität ihrer Fertigkeit erregt Bewunderung, und die Seelenvolle Innigkeit und zarte Eleganz ihres Vortrages ist mit nichts zu vergleichen als mit dem hohen Liebreiz und der idyllisch anmuthigen Persönlichkeit der Künstlerin selbst’. ‘Philharmonischer Verein’, Der Bazar für München und Bayern: Ein Frühstücks-Blatt für Jedermann und jede Frau no. 219 (18 September 1833): 878.

⁷⁹ Hunter, ‘“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”’, 362–3.

⁸⁰ ‘Ich glaube, derjenige Philosophe, welcher behauptete, die Seele wohne in den Fingerspitzen, der war entweder ein Geldwechsler, oder er hat Fräulein von Schauroth Klavier spielen gehört! Ich spreche gar nicht von der ungeheuern, fast unbegreiflichen Fertigkeit, sondern blos von dem eigenen Reiz der Zartheit und Innigkeit, mit dem sie die tiefsten, geheimsten Geister der bezauberten Saiten heraufzubeschwören weiβ, daβ sie ihr Rede stehen und ihre geheimwaltenden Mächte entfalten. Als ich hinaus gieng, war jemand so einfältig, mich zu fragen: “Wie hat Ihnen die Schauroth gefallen?” Er hätte eben so gut fragen können: “Wie hat Ihnen das Morgenroth geschmeckt?”

Ich sagte blos: ich habe so eben mit eigenen Ohren die Grazien auf dem Klavier die Iliade tanzen gesehen!’ ‘Die Sonntags-Mittagsstunde am 20sten Mai’, Der deutsche Horizont: Ein humoristisches Blatt für Zeit, Geist, und Sitte 2, no. 82 (22 May 1832): col. 656.

⁸¹ George Sand, Consuelo, trans. Fayette Robinson (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1870), 331. Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 187.

⁸² Although Schauroth was an acclaimed ‘Passagenfabrikantin’, it is not known whether she actually improvised during these performances. Both Beethoven's ‘Emperor’ Concerto and Hummel's Concerto in A minor provide cadenzas for the pianist. Hunter's conception of early romantic performance aesthetics encompasses ‘the ideal of a performance that is clearly not, but seems to be, created on the spot’. Hunter, ‘“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”’, 393.

⁸³ ‘während sich durch das ganze Spiel eine seltene Verständigkeit, eine höchst geniale Auffassung der Komposition ausspricht, ist über das Ganze eben so sehr der wunderbare Reiz des tiefsten Gefühles verbreitet, als die kräftigeren und marquirten Stellen sich durch einen meisterhaft präcisen und charakteristischen Vortrag auszeichnen. In manchen Stellen scheinen die zarten Finger nur mehr leise über den Tasten zu schweben, und der kurz angeschlagene Ton weht wie Aeolsharfenlied silbern aus den Saiten auf. Von mechanischer Fertigkeit bei dieser Künstlerin zu sprechen, wäre Sünde, denn wie die Phantaste, an kein mechanisches Hinderniß gebunden, sich ihre Blumenreiche und Zauber aufbaut, eben so ist's, wenn diese Künstlerin spielt, nicht, als wenn sie spielte, sondern, als wenn sie nur wollte, daß sich jetzt Ströme von Tönen in dieser oder jenen Weise aus den Saiten ergießen; man hört die Meisterin und vergißt darüber, zu sehen, daß sie da ist, obwohl man auch hier nicht verlöre’. ‘Conzert’, Aurora, Zeitschrift aus Bayern no. 34 (22 April 1829): 140.

⁸⁴ On the reception of female pianists, including their appearance, see Katharine Ellis, ‘Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 353–85, esp. 374–5.

⁸⁵ Hunter, ‘“To Play as if from the Soul of the Composer”’, 359.

⁸⁶ Corinne likens the human imagination to the Aeolian harp; Staël, Corinne, 45. On the Aeolian harp see, for example, Susan Bernstein, ‘On Music Framed: The Eolian Harp in Romantic Writing’, in The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Phyllis Weliver (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 70–84.

⁸⁷ Annette Richards, ‘C.P.E. Bach's Free Fantasy and the Performance of the Imagination’, in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, ed. Annette Richards and Mark Franko (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 133n11.

⁸⁸ Kordula Knaus, ‘Fantasie, Virtuosität und die Performanz musikalischer Inspiration: Pianistinnen und Pianisten in Wien um 1800’, in Anklaenge: Wiener Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft (2013): 57–73.

⁸⁹ Valerie Goertzen, 'Setting the Stage: Clara Schumann's Preludes', in In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, ed. Bruno Nettl and Melinda Russell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 240.

⁹⁰ For the importance of music, among other arts, to Corinne's improvisatory practice see Simone Balayé, ‘Plotting with Music and Sound in Corinne’, in The Novel's Seductions: Staël's Corinne in Critical Inquiry, ed. Karyna Szmurlo (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999): 69–83; Tili Boon, ‘Women Performing Music: Staging a Social Protest’, Women in French Studies 8 (2000): 48–50; Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 95.

⁹¹ Staël, Corinne, 236. On the practice of piano preluding, see Valerie Woodring Goertzen, ‘By Way of Introduction: Preluding by 18th- and Early 19th-Century Pianists’, The Journal of Musicology 14 (1996): 299–337.

⁹² Staël, Corinne, 45–6.

⁹³ Staël, Corinne, 46.

⁹⁴ Dana Gooley's study of piano improvisation, or ‘free playing’, in the nineteenth century focuses on ‘forms of improvisation that were considerably more free, extensive, and elaborate than improvised preludes, embellishments, introductions, and shorter cadenzas’, and as a consequence few women appear in the book. Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation, 7. On the other hand, as Marcia Citron notes, formal reception provides only a partial view of historical practices, which is especially true with regards to the reception of women artists. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 189.

⁹⁵ See, for instance, Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 78, 84–5; Martin, Germaine de Staël in Germany, 130.

⁹⁶ Dana Gooley, ‘Saving Improvisation: Hummel and the Free Fantasia in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, vol. 2, ed. George Lewis and Benjamin Piekut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 187–8.

⁹⁷ Fanny und Felix Mendelssohn, Briefwechsel 1821 bis 1846, S. 317, 19. September 1839.

⁹⁸ Goertzen, ‘By Way of Introduction’, 303.

⁹⁹ Hofmann rightly suggests that, in the nearly 50 years that had passed since the start of Schauroth's performing career, the ideals of piano performance certainly had changed; Hofmann, ‘Tag und Nacht’, 75.

¹⁰⁰ ‘ihr Spiel … zeigte … nur noch die Trümmer ehemaliger Herrlichkeit, indem man wohl noch Fertigkeit, aber keine Correctheit mehr gewahrte, und dann war der Vortrag auf eine Weise hypermanierirt, die geradezu entsetzlich gennant werden muß. Und nun noch die Art und Weise, in welcher sie mit den unterstellten Sachen – von Mendelssohn, Chopin, Bach ₂c. – umsprang! Eine solche Verballhornung durch Weglassen, Zusetzten, Verändern, Verbrämen u.s.w. hätten wir uns kaum träumen lassen. Ein Dilettant, der nach dem Gehöre spielt, konnte es kaum schlimmer machen’. ‘Musik’, Europa-Chronik: Wochenchronik, no. 7 (1870): 105.

¹⁰¹ ‘Daß sie zu jener Zeit, als sie den Jüngling Mendelssohn zu einer seiner besten Compositionen inspirirte, eine eminente Künstlerin gewesen sein müsse, war selbst jetzt noch erkennbar, wo ihr Spiel, nur mehr an seine frühere Größe zu erinnern vermochte und durch vieles Manierirte und Verzerrte getrübt erschien. Namentlich waren ihre eigenen Compositionen, sowie ihre im Character der Improvisation gehaltenen Zuthaten zu zwei Compositionen von Chopin für uns von besonderem Reiz’; ‘Dur und Moll’ (10 February 1870): 149

¹⁰² ‘Leipziger Musikbericht’, Die Tonhalle no. 8 (14 February 1870): 116.

¹⁰³ The Hofmeister catalogue confirms that the Caprice was published by Diabelli and provides the information that the piece is in B flat major. Adolph Hofmeister, ed, C. F. Whistling's Handbuch der musikalischen Literatur oder allgemeines systematisch-geordnetes Verzeichnis der in Deutschland und in den angrenzenden Ländern gedruckten Musikalien auch musikalischen Schriften und Abbildungen mit Anzeige der Verleger und Preise. Dritte, bis zum Anfang des Jahres 1844 ergänzte Auflage, vol. 2, (Leipzig: Friedrich Hofmeister, 1844), 168. I have not been able to locate a copy of this caprice.

¹⁰⁴ ‘Den Kindern aber wird's im Traum bescheert. Die Caprice von Delphine Hill Handley, Manchen vielleicht unter dem Namen Schauroth bekannter und lieber, gehört mit allen ihren kleinen Schwächen zu den liebenswürdigen. Die Mängel sind welche der Ungeübtheit, nicht des Ungeschicks; der eigentliche musikalische Nerv fühlt sich überall an. Diesmal ist es noch eine sehr zarte leidenschaftliche Röthe, die dies Miniaturbild interessant macht’. Robert Schumann, ‘Pianoforte. Phantasieen, Capricen’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 5, no. 33 (21 October 1836): 131–2.

¹⁰⁵ The preceding section is a fairly eviscerating review of a set of Nocturnes by Carl Kulenkamp.

¹⁰⁶ On music and dreaming in the nineteenth century and their relationship to the improvisatory and fragmentation, see Halina Goldberg, ‘Chopin's Oneiric Soundscapes and the Role of Dreams in Romantic Culture’, in Chopin and his World, ed. Jonathan Goldman and Halina Goldberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 15–43.

¹⁰⁷ While Christian Friedrich Michaelis held the caprice as synonymous with the seriousness and sublimity of the free fantasia, other nineteenth-century writers on music, such as Carl Czerny, viewed the caprice as lighter. Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 134–5; Gooley, Fantasies of Improvisation, 76. Regarding a somewhat earlier comparison of the genres (though continuing into the nineteenth century), see Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 114–18 and Gretchen Wheelock, ‘Mozart's Fantasy, Haydn's Caprice: What's in a Name’, in The Century of Bach and Mozart: Perspective on Historiography, Composition, Theory, and Performance, ed. Sean Gallagher and Thomas Forest Kelly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 317–41.

¹⁰⁸ ‘Lauter Augenblick, Gegenwart klingt heraus. Keine Angst um das, was geschehen, keine Furcht vor dem, was kommen könnte. Und wäre gar nichts daran, man müßte die Corinna-Schwester loben, daß sie sich von der Miniatur-Malerei weg zu höheren Formen wendet und ein Bild in Lebensgröße geben will. Hätte ich doch dabei sein können, wie sie die Sonate niederschrieb! Alles hätte ich ihr nachgesehen, falsche Quinten, unharmonische Querstände, schiefe Modulationen, kurz Alles; denn es ist Musik in ihrem Wesen, die weiblichste, die man sich denken kann’; Schumann, ‘Delphine Hill Handley, née de Schauroth, Sonate brillante’, 125.

¹⁰⁹ ‘ja sie wird sich zur Romantikerin hinaufbilden und so ständen mit Clara Wieck zwei Amazonen in den funkelnden Reihen’; Schumann, ‘Delphine Hill Handley, née de Schauroth, Sonate brillante’, 125.

¹¹⁰ As Ellen Lockhart notes, poetic ‘improvisers were said to become flushed, sweat copiously, gesture extravagantly, [and] flash at the eyes…as they performed’. Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 96–7.

¹¹¹ Marcia Citron and Jeffrey Kallberg have examined analogies made between visual art and musical genres that are laden with gendered significance. Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 122–3, 127–8. Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 30–61. As William Weber notes, even in the 1840s, composition ‘in the more highly valued genres’ was often considered unfitting for women. William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 166. For additional context, see note 59 of this article.

¹¹² Matthew Head, ‘Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship: Fanny Hensel's “Scottish” Sonata in G Minor (1843)’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review 4 (2007): 72. Given Schauroth's connection to Felix Mendelssohn and her acquaintance with Fanny Hensel, it is possible that Hensel would have been aware of Schauroth's sonata.

¹¹³ John Rink and Marco Targa both identify the nineteenth-century brilliant style with the improvisatory. John Rink, ‘Chopin and Improvisation’, in Chopin and His World, ed. Jonathan Goldman and Halina Goldberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 249; Marco Targa, ‘Improvisation Practices in Beethoven's Kleinere Stücke’, in Musical Improvisation and Open Forms in the Age of Beethoven, ed. Gianmario Borio and Angela Carone (London: Routledge, 2018), 182.

¹¹⁴ ‘Literatur der Tonkunst’, Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode no. 156 (30 December 1834): 1248. The movement is certainly constructed with reference to sonata form, though a full analysis is beyond the scope of this article. As Annette Richards notes, for earlier writers about music such as Johann Nikolaus Forkel, the fantasia could be understood as ‘on the margins of rational communication in music …, the accidental by-product of a failed sonata’. Richards, The Free Fantasia, 37.

¹¹⁵ On reductive readings of formal deviations as resisting ‘male-defined conventions of composition’ see Matthew Head, ‘Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship’, 71.

¹¹⁶ ‘Literatur der Tonkunst’, 1248.

¹¹⁷ Targa, ‘Improvisation Practices in Beethoven's Kleinere Stücke’, 182.

¹¹⁸ The only earlier examples of which I am aware are Schubert's String Quartet No. 1, D. 18 (1810 or 1811) and his – possibly unfinished – Piano Sonata in A flat major, D. 557 (1817), neither of which was published until the end of the nineteenth century. On directional tonality in genres other than the sonata cycle in the early nineteenth century, see Krebs, Harald, ‘Alternatives to Monotonality in Early Nineteenth-Century Music’, Journal of Music Theory 25, no. 1 (1981): 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Wadsworth, Benjamin K., ‘Directional Tonality in Schumann's Early Works’, Music Theory Online 18, no. 4 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁹ ‘Literatur der Tonkunst’, 1248.

¹²⁰ ‘Literatur der Tonkunst’, 1248.

¹²¹ ‘Literatur der Tonkunst’, 1248.

¹²² On the centrality of modulation to the fantasy, see Richards, The Free Fantasia, especially 40–42.

¹²³ ‘Literatur der Tonkunst’, 1248.

¹²⁴ ‘selbst Beethoven – dem man doch das Prädicat ‘Genie’, unter welchem Manche eine Lossprechung von jeder Regel verstehen, nicht wird absprechen wollen – in allen seinen Werken beobachtet hat, die letzten Erzeugnisse seiner gleich ihm selbst erkrankten Phanasie [sic] etwa ausgenommen’. ‘Literatur der Tonkunst’, 1248.

¹²⁵ ‘Das ganze Werk zeugt von reicher Erfindungsgabe, die nicht ins Bizzare zu schweifen braucht, um sich als originell zu erweisen; von voller Kenntniß der Harmonie [ … ], von Energie, Zartgefühl, und von großer Meisterschaft im Spiele: denn wer solche Aufgaben stellt, kann sie gewiß auch lösen’. ‘Literatur der Tonkunst’, 1248.

¹²⁶ Staël, Corinne, 111.