In the course of the last two hundred years, different facets of Clara Schumann's artistic, creative and performative persona have been highlighted and different narratives have been produced. As the articles to follow demonstrate, these facets include Clara Schumann as a performer, an improviser, a virtuoso, a priestess, a prophetess, a celebrity, a composer and a curator of flowers and photographs. The Introduction and four research articles in this issue devoted to Schumann suggest in multifaceted ways that her creative identities and legacies are open to new ways of being contextualized in both historical and contemporary contexts. This journal issue initiates important conversations and provides some constructive starting points for considering the nature of Clara Schumann's identities and their legacies, and for pondering how Clara Schumann can help us to think afresh about identity and legacy as concepts.

Grappling with a range of sources in both German and English, this Introduction to the issue embraces the fluid intersections in Clara Schumann's creative world between the visual and the tactile, the sonic and the corporeal. It explores the changing images of Schumann from her lifetime to the present day and reconsiders her creativity from our current perspective.

Musicologists often consider Clara Schumann to be one of the most influential figures in the establishment of the solo piano recital – a musical experience that encouraged the dominance of the serious music aesthetic. Schumann's connection to this ideal is perhaps most evident in her enshrinement as the priestess, a nineteenth-century title that honoured the interpretive power of her virtuosic performances. While her commitment to canonical values cannot be questioned, Schumann's piano virtuosity was also undeniably popular, incredibly physical and acutely tied to the century's rapidly changing musical and visual technologies.

Attention to the analytical and imaginative connections between these transformative technologies actively complicates the divine, dehumanized and mythological stature that has come to centre Schumann's historiography. Her mass-produced photographs, and especially her cartes-de-visite, could both compound her priestessness and stimulate unresolvable fissures within it. Aligned with recent scholarship that expands Schumann's virtuosity into the realms of the popular, photographs and other forms of mass media reveal the inherent flexibility of the priestess ideology and this mythology's (seemingly) easy inclusion of various ambiguous and sometimes contradictory ideals. In effect, photographs of Schumann could instigate a kind of exhilarating, cognitive dissonance in their viewers: seeing was not necessarily believing her as only priestess. Seeing could, in fact, mean imagining and reimagining Clara Schumann in all kinds of fantastical ways: ways that aligned her piano virtuosity with the commodified visual technology in an increasingly mechanized world, or ways that underscored her feminine sexuality and virtuosity as socially destabilizing or democratizing.

Filmic portrayals of Clara Schumann from World War II to the present provide a fascinating insight into changing conceptions of her professional and domestic roles. Just as fictional reshapings of her biography from the late-nineteenth century to the present can be understood to relate to changing social and political contexts, filmic portrayals of this great musical figure over the past 80 years speak to both constancy and change. The image that remains constant, the depiction of a loyal wife in the service of her husband's art, takes on different guises as it is reflected in the mirror of each film's historical, social, and political moment. In Träumerei (1943/44) Clara Schumann provides an idealized depiction of the German woman in the context of war, one who sacrifices her performance career for love of husband, children and domesticity. Song of Love (1947) reflects the revered role of the mother of a large family in post-war America. Limiting its narrative frame to the years leading up to Robert Schumann's death, Frühlingssinfonie (1974) casts a new light on the domestic strands explored in Träumerei, reflecting then recent developments in research in the Neue Schumann-Gesamtausgabe. In Geliebte Clara (2008), whereas the titular focus shifts explicitly to Clara herself, this passionate retelling is based on the familiar narrative that informs all four films. Building on the historiographical work of Beatrix Borchard, Matthias Wendt, and Yael Braunschweig, this article provides a rich cultural context for each film, and explores how that context relates to source materials including letters and diaries. Reaching beyond that scholarship, this article challenges the familiar narrative found in these movies by re-reading passages of Clara's letters and diaries that can be understood to express regret and frustration at the limitations that her domestic life imposed on her artistic career.

This article aims to explain the rise of Western art forms in the musical creation of the Romanian Principalities in the first half of the nineteenth century, as dictated by a particular European political and economic dynamic. I analyse the spread of Western music – usually described as a consequence of the gradual modernization of Romanian society – in terms of the power relations between the European core and a newly integrated periphery at the Eastern border of the continent. To illustrate this change, I discuss Edward Said's concept of orientalism which helps describe the early interactions between Western musicians and professionals and the local music traditions and customs. I then show how these interactions gave the former access to a distinctive musical material used in compositions targeting an expanding European music market. In an age of national struggle in the Romanian Principalities, national music was both a concept and a practice in demand by the local intelligentsia and fostered by composers. However, in addition to this agreement, the concept of national music signalled some significant societal changes that I elucidate by looking at class stratification and the evolution of musical taste. In the final part of the analysis, I draw on dependency theory authors such as Samir Amin and Daniel Chirot to argue that musical life in the first half of the nineteenth century in Wallachia and Moldavia was closely mirroring the economic development of these countries. Thus, I demonstrate that the emergence of the Romanian school of composition must be understood not only at a national level but also within a broader political, economic and social context, defined by the gradual transition to capitalist modes of production and consumption that happened in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Around a third of Clara Schumann's vocal compositions include references to flowers, whether as passing metaphors or as the principal addressee of her chosen text. At first glance this may seem unremarkable given the central place flowers held in the symbology of Romantic literature. But the survival of documents such as the Blumenbuch für Robert (1854–56), in which she collected flowers from her travels around Europe, demonstrate a personal and distinctly feminine engagement with nineteenth-century floral practices beyond the vegetative poetics of male-authored poetry. This article examines the ways in which Clara Schumann engages with the overlapping floral discourses and media of the nineteenth century in four of her flower-centric lieder: ‘Die stille Lotosblume’, ‘An einem lichten Morgen’, ‘Was weinst du, Blümlein’ and ‘Das Veilchen’. In these songs, flowers are explicitly gendered through their material conflation with women's bodies and relationship to a (typically male) lyric persona. I show how Schumann often uses her piano accompaniments to undermine the male construction of passive flowers by granting flowers an emergent agency in her settings. In so doing, Schumann is able to protect the stubborn silences of flowers or reify their secret desires. Flowers in these lieder thus emerge as radically polysemic and multimodal symbols, not only hinting at a myriad of possible meanings, but also reflecting a mode of feminine authorship that can be recalcitrant, revealing and tactfully mutable.

In memoriam Manfred Hermann Schmid (1947–2021), Mozartian extraordinaire

The cadenzas to the Piano concerto in D minor, K466 that Clara Schumann published for the Mozart centenary year raise intriguing questions about authorship: Upon correcting the proofs, she identified an uncanny overlap with a cadenza by Brahms. Following an ambivalent response from the latter, she went on publishing the work under her name regardless, and even left a note on her papers claiming that Brahms had made use of a cadenza by her.

Rather than answering the author attribution either way, the article unpicks the conflicting evidence of the sources in light of the broader contexts within which they are situated. It demonstrates that conventional tools of music philology alone are inadequate for solving this issue (as they had been for Schumann in 1891). Notated sources are but one manifestation of a rich and complex creative process that operate within a multi-sensory, multi-modal and co-creative framework. As such, a close reading of the cadenzas to K466 by Schumann and Brahms interrogate false ontologies of the ‘work concept’ that may have mired our understanding of nineteenth-century music in general.

Schubert's interest in Gothicism is explored in numerous songs written between the 1810s and early 1820s and, in recent years, has served as an aesthetic agenda that some scholars have applied to his instrumental music. One notable exception is the ‘Unfinished’ Symphony (D. 759, 1822), a work whose thematic presentation and form have been frequently related to states of terror and horror, but rarely correlated further to Gothicism and never consistently so across the two completed movements. In light of this relative neglect, this article offers a Gothic reading of the symphony, finding correspondence with Gothic signifiers of ghostly hauntings and the ‘problem of closure’, and draws upon relevant literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory. As I show, the concept of psychoanalytic trauma – a concept widely deployed in current literary criticism to scrutinize repetitive patterns such as hauntings and circular temporality in Gothic literature – is especially instructive in terms of helping construct a richer understanding of the symphony.

Giuseppe Verdi's first French opera, Jérusalem (1847), has often been described as a French version of his fourth opera, I lombardi alla prima crociata (1843). It is hardly a straightforward translation, however; the process of adapting the source to the French stage involved substantial rewriting of the libretto, thoroughly recasting the storyline and therefore requiring numerous changes in the music. Thus, Verdi not only provided several entirely new sections for the score of Jérusalem, but also reused material from I lombardi in radically different dramatic settings.

The purpose of this article is to review changing attitudes toward Jérusalem through the twentieth century, and to assert that it may be perceived both as a reworking of the earlier opera and as a new work in which Verdi, under unique circumstances, deployed strategies of self-borrowing. The first part addresses the historiography of Jérusalem, tracing changing attitudes of commentators gradually recognizing the importance and worth of the French work, and the second part examines in detail the transfer of selected passages that Verdi borrowed from I lombardi and adapted to vastly changed contexts.

Self-borrowing was a common practice in primo ottocento opera. Even though commentators of the era could find it somewhat troublesome, composers indulged in the practice. Drawing on existing scholarship, and reflecting on the work of my co-contributors to this journal issue, I ponder a few sundry notions about the procedure and its context, addressing theoretical, historical and practical perspectives relating to composers, historical commentators, listeners and modern-day scholars. I begin with a survey of terminology that has been applied in discussions of self-borrowing and a review of the manner in which selected present-day scholars have characterized the practice. I then consider the nature of self-borrowing in the ottocento opera repertory against a backdrop of contemporaneous theoretical discussions about how to compose opera, and I contemplate the extent to which self-borrowings in this repertory can be deemed to bear meaning. I conclude by raising the possibility of applying concepts from cognitive theory to operatic encounters with self-borrowing, proposing that the practice served as a tool for composers to fuel expectation, predictability, anticipation and even surprise to enhance musical pleasure. My purpose is to prompt reflection on the reasons behind as well as an appreciation for the value of this oft-maligned compositional ‘tool’ in the interest of gaining insight into its impact on the listening experience and the evaluation of musical works.

Between 1812 and 1816 Rossini took Italian stages by storm and performances cycles of his operas soared in an unprecedented way. The present essay investigates the fundamental role played by self-borrowing in this achievement. As it will be preliminarily clarified, at least for Rossini, self-borrowing does not represent a sub-category of borrowing (i.e. from others: he seldom resorted to other composers’ works), but a peculiar characteristic of his compositional habit, a weapon used to spread his signifiers throughout different stages and genres.

This article focuses on a case study: La gazzetta, an opera deeply rooted in the tradition of the opera comica in Neapolitan, whose authoriality normally resided more in performers (in this case, in the well-known actor/singer Carlo Casaccia) than in poets or composers. Special attention will be given to the use of self-borrowings in some key pieces of the opera, including the recently rediscovered Act I quintet. The essay aims to demonstrate that self-borrowings, far from being a mere time-saving device, helped Rossini to overpower Casaccia's distinctive way of expression, depriving him of his authoriality and of his own voice. With La gazzetta, Rossini conquered the last outpost; after 1816, the mastery of Italian stages (and genres) belonged only to him.

Self-borrowing and Rossini: music theatre scholars are well acquainted with this topic. Many publications have been dedicated to it, most of which concentrate on compositional-analytic aspects, the artistic and communicational nature of self-borrowing and its reception in nineteenth-century periodicals. At present, however, no study has attempted to question the relation between Rossini's self-borrowings and the critical edition of his works. This is the issue to which this contribution is dedicated.

Beginning with the operating indications summarized by the editorial criteria provided for the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini – first published in 1974, and revised and updated in 2015 – this study compares the various methodological approaches adopted while preparing critical editions and dealing with the specific features of each passage in which self-borrowing appears. This comparison furthermore allows us to formulate a general overview of the entire editorial undertaking. This in turn will give us a glimpse of how principles such as the autograph's centrality and concepts such as authenticity and originality have often become problematic and have been put into question. Knowing that Rossini often rewrote the pieces he self-borrowed is fundamental for philologists working on the critical edition of his works. Decoding the modus operandi Rossini adopted in each case of self-borrowing is therefore equally important, and can help choose the sources closest to Rossini's idea of the self-borrowed pieces at the time of their reuse.

Gaetano Donizetti's versatile production unfolded over three decades (1818–43) and was staged in the foremost Italian and European theatres. In this article I question his self-borrowing as a chiefly economic practice, offering novel keys to reading his re-use of existing materials. In the introductory section, I offer a preliminary discussion of the coeval discourse on Donizetti's self-imitation as it surfaces in the press, which appears to follow in the footsteps of that on Rossini's. I then look at his self-borrowings across genres, dwelling on the ways in which he re-functionalized earlier serious passages within comic frames, almost inevitably to achieve a parodic effect. After discussing the links between parody and diegetic music – one of his favourite contexts for employing older materials – I turn to Donizetti's serious production, advancing the hypothesis that his recourse to self-borrowing could take on semantic connotations. In so doing, in the second part of the article I focus on selected case studies grouped into three thematic areas, which – similarly to, and occasionally in connection with diegetic music – all involve the suspension of a character's habitual idioms: deception, rituals and madness. The article includes extended examples from the composer's Linda di Chamounix (Vienna, Kärntnertortheater, 1842), Sancia di Castiglia (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1832), Il paria (Naples, Teatro San Carlo, 1829), Marino Faliero (Paris, Théâtre-Italien, 1835), Enrico di Borgogna (Venice, Teatro San Luca, 1818), and Anna Bolena (Milan, Teatro Carcano, 1830). My ultimate concern is to demonstrate that Donizetti's use of self-borrowing could perform a dramatic function, deliberately connoting the altered modes of expression of the characters to which the earlier piece is associated.

Some albums entail more than meets the ear. In the Age of Ravel and In the Age of Debussy surround representative works of Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) and Claude Debussy (1862–1918) with contextualizing selections from contemporaries. Compellingly rendered by Ransom Wilson and François Dumont, these discs document six decades of innovation. They also illuminate intriguing connections as well as fascinating contrasts among familiar and unfamiliar works. And each celebrates the art of the French flute. But there's more.