Professional Documents
Culture Documents
JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
Dalhousie University
1. Earlier versions of this article were presented as papers at the 37th Annual
Conference of the Royal Musical Association on “Theory and Practice of Musical
Biography,” King’s College, London in 2001, and at the annual meeting of the
American Musicological Society in Atlanta in 2001.
39
40 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
developments in the humanities. Musical biography today must accept the challenges
history faces in the areas of both methodology and narration, and reconsider its
traditional premises.
2. Exceptions include Hermann Abert, “Über Aufgabe und Ziel der musikalischen
Biographie,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 2 (1920); Walther Vetter, “Gedenken
zur musikalischen Biographik,” Die Musikforschung 12 (1959); Jacques Barzun,
“Biography and Criticism: A Misalliance?” in Critical Questions: On Music
and Letters, Culture and Biography 1940–1980, ed. Bea Friedland (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 198–220; Hans Lenneberg, Witnesses
and Scholars. Studies in Musical Biography (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988);
Maynard Solomon, “Thoughts on Biography,” in Beethoven Essays (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 101–115, Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of
Music History, trans. J.B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 26–29, 34, and 45–46; Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven. Approaches to his
Music, trans. Mary Whittall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1–42; Hermann Danuser,
“Biographik und musikalische Hermeneutik: Zum Verhältnis zweier Disziplinen
der Musikwissenschaft,” in Festschrift Rudolf Stephan zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Josef
Kuckertz (Laaber: Laaber, 1990), 571–601.
3. Jacques Barzun, “Truth in Biography: Berlioz,” The University Review: A
Journal of the University of Kansas City (Summer 1939), 275–280, as reprinted in
Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism, 1560–1960, ed. James L. Clifford (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 155–161, quotation on p. 161.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 41
9. A few exceptions include Stuart Feder, Charles Ives, “My Father’s Song”:
A Psychoanalytic Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1992); John Daverio, Schumann, Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). But even in these rare cases, the sections
explaining the authors’ approach are dropped almost as quickly as they are introduced.
10. See, for example, Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York:
HarperCollins, 1995).
11. For example, Glenn Stanley, “Some Thoughts on Biography and
Chronology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 6–7.
12. Best-known biographies informed by psychoanalytical theory include
Maynard Solomon’s Beethoven (New York: Schirmer Books, 1977), and Mozart: A
Life; and Feder, Charles Ives. Psychoanalysis influenced biography writing in North
America more than it did in Europe, as many famous European Freudians settled in
the United States as exiles.
44 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
18. For an analysis of Ranke’s veiws on history and his methods, see, for
example, Georg G. Iggers and James H. Powell, Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping
of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990).
19. See Guido Adler, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft,”
Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1 (1885), 5–20.
48 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
20. See preface to Jahrbücher für musikalische Wissenschaft (1863). See Frank
L. Harrison, Mantle Hood, and Claude V. Palicsa, Musicology (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963), 42, 90.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 49
21. The view that failed works are related to biographical data was explained in
one of the primary manifestos of the New Criticism, in Wimsatt and Beardsley’s
“The Intentional Fallacy”: “If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself
shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then . . . the critic
must go outside the poem—for evidence of an intention that did not become effec-
tive.” The mistake, they believed, is to think that a work of art remains tethered to its
author. They assert that the work “is detached from the author at birth and goes about
the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it.” See William K. Wimsatt
(with Monroe C. Beardsley), The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 4–5. By contrast, Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1889–1950) criticized the recourse to biographical data when a work
of art presented an aesthetic challenge, and believed that such a procedure was
indicative of the need for clarification of our own feelings. See Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Beliefs,
ed. Cyril Barnett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). The view that bio-
graphical data are legitimate sources of explanation of failed works has survived until
this day. See, for example, Dahlhaus, Ludwig van Beethoven: Approaches to the Music,
5–8; and James Webster, “Music, Pathology, Sexuality, Beethoven, Schubert,”
19th-Century Music 17/1 (1993), 91.
22. On Lina Ramann and Marie Lipsius as biographers of Franz Liszt, see
James Deaville, “Writing Liszt: Lina Ramann, Marie Lispius, and Early Musicology,”
Journal of Musicological Research 21 (2002), 73–97.
50 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
only in his music but also in his life—despite evidence that does not
always confirm such involvement. As I argue elsewhere, such a
picture suited the needs of a country deprived of statehood and the
purpose of sustaining respect for the nation’s political and intellectual
elite.31 The emphasis on Chopin’s Polishness in the publications of
nineteenth-century Polish authors can be explained by the manner in
which those writers addressed the particular political and cultural
situation in Poland from 1795 and throughout the next century,
divided among Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and deprived of inde-
pendent statehood. A composer of Chopin’s stature—writing in the
Polish “national spirit,” while living in the cosmopolitan atmosphere
of Paris—was the perfect example needed to prove the existence and
vitality of Polish culture and tradition, despite the lack of a Polish
state. It was simply a matter of course to assume that a composer so
obviously “Polish” in his music also had to be a staunch Polish
patriot, according to nineteenth-century standards: that is, if not
directly taking part in military actions, at least supporting the Polish
national cause in some other way. This image was reinforced by
parallel examples provided by some Polish Romantics, the most
spectacular being Adam Mickiewicz, a Polish poet who, after the
collapse of the November Uprising in Poland in 1831, was involved
in political activity in Paris as a writer and lecturer. During the
Revolutions of 1848, Mickiewicz organized a volunteer Polish
legion in Italy to fight against Austria, and during the Crimean
War (1853–1856) he supported the formation of Polish troops in
Constantinople to fight against Russia.
Furthermore, nineteenth-century musical biography reflected
the cultural and ethical norms of the time. With the circulation of
such influential works as Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes, Hero-Worship
and the Heroic in History (1841) and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Representative Men (1850), biography became the domain of the
unique and exemplary citizen. Thomas Carlyle believed that the
historian’s task was to find out who these men were, to clean the
dirt from them, to place them on their proper pedestals, and to offer
testimonials by narrating the shining events of the hero’s life, revealing
him as noble, upright, chaste, and severe, thus providing inspiration
for the younger, weaker, and less fortunate.32 Franz Schubert, for
example, was represented by his early biographers as the epitome of
acceptable middle-class values, despite evidence to the contrary.
Robert S. Winter’s analysis of Schubert’s early biographies demon-
strates the extent to which Anton Schindler’s depiction of Schubert33—
repeated by Heinrich Kreissle von Hellborn34 and others—established a
stereotype of Schubert as “a modest and pure man who ‘was born
poor and remained poor,’ who ‘stood alone,’ and whose character
seems more befitting an Eagle scout than a Biedermeier composer.”35
Similarly, Susan McClary noted that Schubert’s biographies, beginning
in the nineteenth century, have most often resembled hagiographies
in which “the less flattering aspects of the composer’s life are air-
brushed out, leaving only an ideal image that seems compatible with
the preferred reception of the music itself.”36 Early biographers of
Schubert labored hard to clear him of any hint of sexual ambiguity by
simply denying the existence of such ambiguity and emphasizing his
heterosexuality. For example, Newman Flower wrote “it is scarcely
correct” that Schubert had “an overruling antipathy to the daughters
of Eve,”37 but he did not provide any evidence supporting this con-
tention. Perhaps most ironically, Erich Deutsch himself—despite his
respect for evidence, as demonstrated in his “documentary bio-
graphies”—went quite far in ignoring evidence in order to defend
32. This practice may be rooted in the very beginning of the history of
biography. For Plutarch, considered the father of biography, the genre had a moral
purpose: He believed that men are imitative and hoped that his depiction of the
lives of great men would serve as good examples. To further his purpose, Plutarch
softened the faults in his subject’s lives, “as a painter, forced to deal with an ugly
wart on a famous face, applies a gentle, forgiving, obscuring brush.” See: Robert
K. Massie, “Narrating the Past: History or Biography?” in Biography and Source
Studies, 105.
33. Schindler’s account is included in Otto Deutsch, Schubert: Die Erinnerungen
seiner Freunde (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1957), English ed. as Schubert: Memoirs
by His Friends, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London: A.&C. Black,
1958).
34. In Franz Schubert (Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1865). Kreissle’s biography
was translated into English by Arthur Duke Coleridge as The Life of Franz Schubert,
2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1869).
35. Robert S. Winter, “Whose Schubert?” 19th-Century Music, 17/1 (1993), 96.
36. Susan McClary, “Music and Sexuality: On the Steblin/Solomon Debate,”
19th-Century Music 17/1 (1993), 85.
37. Newman Flower, Franz Schubert: The Man and His Circle (New York:
Frederick A. Stokes, 1928), 51.
56 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
42. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1983), I, 7.
43. About the contractual basis of the Victorian biography, see Robert Skidelsky,
“Only Connect: Biography and Truth,” in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. Eric
Homberger and John Charmley (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), 1–16. “Ironically, it is
the requirements of scholarship, as much as anything else, which tethers contemporary
biography to its Victorian ancestor. Original sources mean, in practice, the subject’s
private papers; the widow means the person or persons who control access to, and
quotation from, those papers. Thus the contractual basis of the Victorian biography. .. has
been reinforced by the increased emphasis on ‘original research.’” Ibid., 8.
44. Lenneberg, Witnesses and Scholars, 145–149.
58 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
45. See Judith Cherniak, “‘Guilt Alone Brings Forth Nemesis.’ The last days of
Schumann at Endenich: Extracts from a Doctor’s Diary,” The Times Literary
Supplement, 31 August 2001, 11–13.
46. Hildesheimer, Mozart.
47. See Joseph Kerman, “The Miracle Worker,” The New York Review of
Books, April 23, 2000, 32–33.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 59
49. Philip Brett, “Musicality, essentialism, and the closet,” in Queering the
Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and
Gary C. Thomas (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 9–26.
50. In a somewhat contradictory way, John Butt writes: “Philip Brett’s
article . . . is a rare example of a direct attack on Bach and his achievement, particu-
larly with regard to his influence and reception as a teacher. . . . Yet what is valuable
about Brett’s approach is the fact that the target of his attack is the reception of Bach,
the way Bach has been appropriated as an instrument of repressive musical thinking
over the last two centuries or so.” The Cambridge Companion to Bach, ed. John Butt
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 251 n. 5.
51. Gary C. Thomas, “‘Was George Frideric Handel Gay?’ On Closet Questions and
Cultural Politics,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 181.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 61
52. Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000).
62 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
53. See John Butt, “The Saint Johann Sebastian Passion,” The New Republic,
July 10, 2000, 33.
54. See, for example, a review by David Schulenberg in Notes, 58 (September
2001).
55. For a detailed analysis of these and other assumptions meant to prove
Bach’s scientific and intellectual disposition, see Butt, “The Saint Johann Sebastian
Passion.”
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 63
64. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1974), 4.
65. Albert Camus, Carnets, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962–1989), III, 17.
66. For a discussion on the origins of modern biography, see, for example,
Michael McKeon, “Writer as Hero: Novelistic Prefigurations and the Emergence of
Literary Biography,” in Contesting the Subject, 17–42.
67. Paula R. Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 94.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 67
It has in our own time become the justification for moralized greed on a grand scale,
an expression of the right of the individual to reject social demands except on the
smallest scale by the nearest at hand. . . . What began as a construction of bourgeois-
liberal political liberation is now a force for bourgeois-liberal political oppression.69
70. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 463; A.T. Nuyen, “Postmodern
Theology and Postmodern Philosophy,” Philosophy of Religion 30 (1991), 65–76.
71. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 305.
72. For example, social constructivism discussed in Levine, “Introduction:
Constructivism and the Reemergent Self,” 1–2.
73. Jerrold Seigel, “Problematizing the Self,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New
Dimensions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn
Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 284.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 69
implications not only for morality and politics but also for the creative
process. The third dimension of the self is also the one most
contested in the recent debates, which deny the presence of reflex-
ivity and autonomy and attempt to assimilate the self wholly to the
body or social relationships. But such attempts, argues Seigel, are
capable of turning into “radical claims for autonomy, because they
leave the material or relational self in a pure state, making it the only
basis for whatever active agency human beings may display.”74
The recent debates about the nature of the self have implications
for biography writing. If, indeed, individuals cannot be separated
from the social, cultural, and symbolic world in which they act, and
no one “invents” a self apart from cultural notions available in a par-
ticular historical setting, then a biographer should not be looking for
a single psychic conflict that “unlocks” the subject’s life but, rather,
for other factors: the evidence of a self that is performed to create an
impression of coherence; an individual with multiple selves whose
different manifestations reflect the passage of time and the demands
and options of different settings; a variety of ways in which others
seek to represent this individual. The self-fashioning may consist
in adapting models from history, literature, and theater, or from
elements of conventional middle-class behavior. And because identities
take shape within an historically specific setting that imparts meaning,
to understand how people assume the identity which situates them in
relation to others, it is necessary to grasp the symbolic world from
which they construct meaning in their lives.
Viewed from this perspective, stereotypes of prominent composers
whose lives were fixed on one formative idea, created by traditional
musical biography, appear as nothing more than propositions contin-
gent upon a specific historical concept of the self and of the creative
process. This is not to argue that—contrary to nineteenth-century
views—new concepts arising from recent debates have the quality
of eternal verities about them, but that they advance our understanding
of the self and the creative process, and offer new perspectives with
which to approach the life and work of a biographical subject.
Emphasizing context in the formation of the self also means the
rejection of an important epistemological premise of psychology that
informed traditional biography: that a psychic process operates inde-
pendently of culture and produces universal psychic symptoms. Instead,
It has been argued since then that personal and cultural identities
depend on interactions with other referents on the outside or margin,
and that all identities evolve in relation to some difference.77
The case of Chopin illustrates the process and politics of identity
formation in cross-cultural encounters. Chopin’s life developed as a
dialectic interaction between two worlds, Poland and France:
between the circles of Polish exiles in Paris and the cosmopolitan
world of Parisian salons; between his traditional Polish upbringing
and the radically liberal views of George Sand; and between
his memories of Poland and his attraction to Paris. Contrary to the
traditional views represented primarily by nineteenth-century Polish
biographers, in which “Polishness” occupied a central place in
the interpretation of Chopin’s life and work, it appears that Chopin
constructed his identities from various heterogeneous—rather than
homogeneous—elements, and that “Polishness” was not the most
prominent one among them. Neither was “Polishness” most typically
associated with his public persona, except perhaps for his early
years in Paris. Stephen Heller, a Hungarian pianist and composer
who came to Paris in October 1838, associated Chopin with the
cosmopolitan Parisian salons.78 Chopin’s compatriot, poet Adam
Mickiewicz, criticized Chopin for his lack of “Polishness” and for
“tackling aristocratic nerves” instead of moving the masses with his
music; he definitely did not see Chopin as an embodiment of “Pol-
ishness,” either in his music or in his life.79 For others such as Franz
Liszt (or rather Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, who was presumably
the author of Chopin’s first biography, which appeared under Liszt’s
name in 1852), “Polishness” was a handy way to render Chopin’s
originality and otherness, which defied easy categorization at a time
when a sense of national belonging became a significant marker of
identity. Besides, in the course of the 1830s, “Polishness” acquired
connotations among the French that Chopin might not want to be
associated with. Polish exiles who settled in Paris after the collapse
of the November Uprising in the Russian sector of Poland in 1831
84. On the concept of authorship, see, for example, Seán Burke, Authorship:
From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1995), xvi–xix, 5–11.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 75
89. Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity
in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 15.
90. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 17.
91. Ibid., 24.
92. For example, Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive Variations: Music
and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996); Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
93. Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 18; Karol Berger,
“Chopin’s Ballade Op. 23 and the Revolution of the Intellectuals,” in Chopin Studies
2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 72–83.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 77
CONCLUSION
The recognition of the rhetorical aspect of biography changes
our perception of the genre and makes biographers an active part of
what they write, rather than passive transmitters of eternal verities. Biog-
raphy is not transparently representational, but moral and political; it
is a construction—not a reconstruction—of its subject’s life.103 Para-
phrasing James Grier, because biography is a critical act, different
authors produce different biographies even under the most rigorous
scholarly circumstances.104 But this recognition implies the neces-
sity of stating and discussing the critical and interpretative assump-
tions from which the biography emanates. If these assumptions were
stated openly and recognized as legitimate difference, much of the
polemics surrounding biography might subside.
The recognition of the rhetorical aspect of biography also
means a challenge to the uncritical adoption of nineteenth-century
realism, and a challenge to generate new narrative–historical forms
and alternative representational practices for biographers to
employ. While archival research should serve the useful end of
105. As early as 1920, in his “Über Aufgabe und Ziel der musikalischen
Biographie,” Hermann Abert insisted that a biography be rewritten every fifty years,
a proposal that was met with reserve in scholarly circles at the time. Abert was aware
that we are conditioned by our own times, our biases and fads, and that we cannot be
entirely objective. See Walther Vetter, “Gedanken zur musikalischen Biografik,”
Die Musikforschung 12 (1950), 132, as quoted by Lenneberg, Witnesses and Schol-
ars, 8 n. 15.
106. The Seductions of Biography, 3.