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Journal of Musicological Research 23: 39–80, 2004

Copyright © 2004 Taylor & Francis


0141-1896/02 $12.00 + .00
DOI:10.1080/01411890490276990

Memory, History and Meaning:


Musical Biography and its
Discontents1

JOLANTA T. PEKACZ
Dalhousie University

Musical biography remains largely uninfluenced by theoretical reflection and is


reluctant to consider new approaches. Our present-day perceptions of the lives
of prominent composers and performers were largely formed by the cultural and
political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers, but their followers have
been happy with both the politics and the premises. Musical biography typically
develops in a way similar to a realistic novel—a coherent, unified voice claims to
present the truth about a life, while omniscient narration, repeating themes and
symbols, and a linear chronological presentation of events provide readers with
the illusion of totality and closure. The cause-and-effect linearity implied by the
chronological plot is considered a reliable way of ordering the subject’s life, and the
author a trustworthy narrator who understands the relationship between the private
self and the public world. At the same time, epistemological upheavals in the
humanities in recent decades have made scholars critical about the traditional
assumptions of biography. Critics argue that the coherence of life as presented in a
traditional biography is illusory—created by papering over the cracks, concealing the
unknown, and making causal connections that stem from the mind of the biographer
rather than from the subject. Not only do lives not have the neat trajectory that the
biographer typically aspires to achieve, but the personalities—“selves”—of the
subject are fragmented and shifting rather than unitary and coherent, defying any
biographical aspiration to identify the “real” person. Furthermore, biography
reflects a central cultural understanding of its time; as that understanding changes,
the need for a new biography arises. The claim that biographies should be periodically
rewritten becomes a legitimate proposition.
The purpose of this essay is to subject the traditional assumptions of musical
biography to critical scrutiny in view of the recent epistemological and methodological

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.

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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.

Musical biography as a genre has rarely been an object of


theoretical and methodological reflection.2 The few of its practitioners
who ventured such reflection were more concerned with defending
their own premises and beliefs than with engaging in a more widely
applicable debate about biography writing, and with presenting
these premises and beliefs as timeless truths for all biographers to
follow if they were to pass the test of authorial respectability.
Jacques Barzun, for example—writing in 1939, when debunking
was a reaction to the previous era’s worshiping every famous man—
expressed little patience with biographers “unsympathetic” to their
subject. Barzun proposed “feeling with”—a priori sympathy—as a
principle for a biographer to follow, and insisted that “ ‘feeling
against’ the subject is sure falsification, for life is lived by everyone
on the assumption that it has meaning, that he who lives it is a rational
being, honest, worthy, and human.”3 Why this assumption should
be taken for granted, and why “feeling against” the subject was
falsification on the part of a biographer and “feeling with” was not,
Barzun never justified. Such unspoken assumptions help to explain

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

why the reverential attitude of biographers to their subjects has


been a much more common source of bias in biography than has
debunking.
Musicologists are more comfortable addressing biographical
issues that arise in individual case studies than in engaging in
metareflection on musical biography as a genre. These case studies
sometimes provide illuminating insights, especially with respect to
the cultural significance of older biographies of canonic composers.4
Nevertheless, theoretical and methodological discussion on musical
biography has not advanced much beyond Carl Dahlhaus’s Founda-
tions of Music History, first published in German in 1977, and remin-
iscent of the views of the German cultural critic, Siegfried Kracauer
(1889–1966), for whom biography was a form of false autonomy
offered by mass culture.5 Dahlhaus’s disparaging opinion on biography
seems to be taken as an article of faith by some musicologists, even as
they rely extensively on biographical data to support their conten-
tions.6 In fact, Dahlhaus’s skepticism about biography is symptomatic

4. For example, Christopher Gibbs, “‘Poor Schubert’: Images and Legends of


the Composer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David Gramit, “Constructing a
Victorian Schubert: Music, Biography, and Cultural Values,” 19th-Century Music
17/1 (1993), 65–78; and most recently, Karen Painter, “Mozart at Work: Biography
and a Musical Aesthetic for the Emerging German Bourgeoisie,” The Musical
Quarterly 86/1 (2002), 186–235. A valuable critique of present-day feminist musical
biography of Fanny Mendelssohn is included in Marian Wilson Kimber, “The
‘Suppression’ of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Musical Biography,” 19th-Century
Music 26/2 (2002), 113–129.
5. Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Biographie als neubürgerliche Kunstform,” in Das
Ornament der Masse: Essays ed. Siegfried Kracauer (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1977).
6. For example, Richard Taruskin, in a way reminiscent of Dahlhaus’s rhetoric,
locates biography in “the time-honored tradition of bourgeois historiography.” See
Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 106. At the same time, he uses the notion of
“biography” to discuss Stravinsky’s works in Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions:
A Biography of the Works through Mavra, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996). Biography of the composer is thus passé, but a biography of his works
is not. Similarly, in the introduction to his recent work on Schumann, John Daverio
muses about the end of biography in a way reminiscent of Dahlhaus and focuses on
Schumann’s music rather than on his life or the relationship between the two. See
Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age” (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997), “Introduction: Schumann Today,” 3–4.
42 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

of the ambiguous position biography has occupied in the field of


musicology from its inception in the nineteenth century, and the lack
of theoretical reflection is a consequence of this ambiguity.
Our present-day perceptions of the lives of prominent musical
figures of the past were largely formed by the cultural and political
assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers, whose followers
have been happy with both the premises and the politics. Older
biographies are more often “revised” for “accuracy” of details than
scrutinized for their premises and underlying cultural assumptions.
Musical biography typically develops in a way similar to a realistic
novel: a coherent, unified voice claiming to present the truth about
a life; omniscient narration, repeating themes and symbols; and a
linear, chronological presentation of events provide readers with
the illusion of totality and closure.7 The cause-and-effect linearity
implied by the chronological plot is considered a reliable way of
ordering the subject’s life, and the author a trustworthy narrator who
understands the relationship between the private self and the public
world. Musical biography remains largely uninfluenced by theoretical
reflection and reluctant to consider new approaches. This reluctance is
especially evident when it comes to the lives of the canonic masters.8
Traditional ideas about biography remain assumed rather than justified.
There typically is no presentation—never mind discussion—of method,

7. Exceptions include Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s, Mozart, trans. Marion Faber


(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), with its innovative structure.
8. The extent to which this state of affairs may result from circumstances
unrelated to biographers’ intentions needs to be established. Publishers’ policies or
specific recommendations shape biographies at least in some cases. In Franz Schubert:
A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Elizabeth Norman McKay offers an
interesting insight when she explains that initially she was requested to write “a
‘straight biography’ to be read through without interruptions by too much detail or too
many references to sources in footnotes.” She also agreed “to limit information about
the music to a minimum and concentrate on the man.” With the change of the editor,
the requirements changed in favor of “a book of greater length, with more emphasis on
Schubert’s life as a composer and the importance of his music in his life” (v).
See also Jan Swafford’s response to Charles Rosen in “ ‘Aimez-vous Brahms?’:
An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books, 46 nr. 5 (March 18, 1999), 57. Similarly,
the “Master Musicians” series by the Oxford University Press has an established
format where chapters on life and personality alternate with those on music; the
format which makes at least some authors uncomfortable. See Jim Samson, Chopin
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), v.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 43

as though biography were an area of self-evidence and universality.9


This lack is particularly surprising in the case of biographies explicitly
based on a specific theoretical approach, such as psychoanalysis.10
Rather than disclosure of their mediation, musical biographers typic-
ally offer declarations of their scholarly honesty, lack of bias, and
truthfulness to primary sources pertaining to their subjects. As if
unwilling to assume authority over the text they produce, biographers
present themselves as mere “transmitters” of the verities included in
their sources. By the same token, they typically apologize for the
subjectivity that necessarily occurs when evidence is missing and
undocumented lacunae must be filled in with speculations and
hypotheses. Interpretation as a tool of explanation is all too often
viewed as a necessary evil, and a “non-interpretative biography” (what-
ever that means) as close to the biographical ideal as one can get.11
Of all technical and methodological innovations, psychoanalysis
has received the most attention in musical biography,12 but it is also
the most flawed, for two principal reasons. First, there is a problem of
evidence, in that much personal material indispensable to recovering
the subject’s infantile experience cannot be obtained by a biographer.
Hence, the link between evidence and interpretation in psychoanalytical
biographies remains too often unconvincing. Second, Freud’s theory
of emotional development (or any other contemporary school of
psychoanalysis) is culture-bound and rooted in the child-rearing
practices and mental attitudes (especially toward sex) of late nineteenth-
century middle-class urban society. The application of this theory to
individuals living in times other than the later nineteenth century is thus

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

anachronistic. The structure of human personality over time is precisely


what needs to be investigated, rather than being reduced to a formula.
The considerable scholarly efforts musicologists have undertaken
recently to verify the accuracy of older biographies often present
some fundamental problems resulting from their adherence to traditional
assumptions about biography writing. Under the label of “demythol-
ogization,” they scrutinize biographies of prominent composers for
errors, misconceptions, lack of scholarly rigor, and the like, and
demand the separation of “fact” from “fiction” in the lives of these
composers. The misuse of the notion of “myth” for this activity has
been noted by at least one author, as well as the dichotomy implied
in it between “myth” and allegedly objective “facts.”13 This dichotomy
obscures the often problematic epistemological status of “fact” and
quite falsely asserts the possibility of arriving at a “definite” conclusion
about the biographical subject. Further, the zeal toward establishing
biographical “truth” often implies the rejection of illuminating inter-
pretations of earlier authors and is accompanied by a rather crude
methodological assumption about one’s own infallibility, resulting
in a “definitive” refutation of all that cannot be “verified.” Thus,
“demythologizing” has the effect of “modernizing” biographical
discourse in that whatever cannot be “proven” is dismissed or treated
as suspicious—just as the professionalization of the humanities in the
nineteenth century replaced older practices of scholarship with a
standardized new ethos. Although in essence a healthy attempt to
scrutinize older biographies, “demythologization” cannot achieve
much more than creating new orthodoxies and “myths” as problematic
as the old ones, unless they are accompanied by a serious theoretical
reflection and rigorous methodology.14 By the same token, the lack
of scholarly rigor generates new myths quite independently from
old biographies. For example, feminist biographers manufacture
stories of suppressed female geniuses in a way that demonstrates the

13. For example, a review article by Julia Moore, “Mozart Mythologized or


Modernized?” Journal of Musicological Research 12 (1992), 83–109.
14. An example of “demythologization” leading to the creation of another myth
is Maynard Solomon’s recent biography Mozart, in which the author takes it upon
himself to refute one of the classic biographical tropes applied to Mozart—the idea
of Mozart the eternal child. However, by adhering to the explanatory schemes of
psychoanalysis, Solomon effectively replaces the myth of “Mozart the child” with
the myth of Leopold Mozart as a “sinful father.” See Matthew Head, “Myths of a
Sinful Father: Maynard Solomon’s ‘Mozart,’” Music & Letters 80/1 (1999), 74–85.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 45

unreflective adherence of these authors to predetermined explanatory


schemes and political agenda, to familiar nineteenth-century plots of
heroic and masculine biography, as well as their disregard for historical
context, let alone evidence.15
Epistemological upheavals in the humanities in recent decades
have made many scholars critical about the traditional assumptions
of biography. Critics argue that the coherence of life presented in a
biography is illusory, created by papering over the cracks, concealing
the unknown, making causal connections that stem from the mind of
the biographer rather than from that of the subject. Not only do lives
not have the neat trajectory that the biographer typically aspires to
achieve, but personalities and “selves” often are fragmented and
shifting rather than unitary and coherent, defying any biographical
aspiration to identify the “real” person. Furthermore, biography
reflects a central cultural understanding of its time—and, as that
understanding changes, the need for a new biography arises. We
might conceive of this cultural understanding as something like
Michael Foucault’s epistemes formed and transformed in the
continuing process of discourse. Or we might think of this under-
standing in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s conception of paradigm shifts
in scientific understanding, which assumes that scientific revolutions
happen when competing claims of truth destabilize an older conceptual
model. “Definitive” biographies lose their privileged position due
both to changes in the ways in which we talk about the world and
ourselves, and to new evidence that changes our understanding of
historical truth.16 Thus, paradoxically, recognizing the limits of the
biographical undertaking also enables us to recognize its potential.17

15. For example, biographical representations of Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn,


including Françoise Tillard, Fanny Mendelssohn, trans. Camille Naish (Portland,
Ore.: Amadeus, 1996); Gloria Kamen, Hidden Music: The Life of Fanny
Mendelssohn (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); and Marcia J. Citron’s entry
on Fanny Mendelssohn in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd
Ed., ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrel (London: Macmillan, 2000), vol. 16, 388. The
story of the alleged suppression of Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s creative ambitions
by her famous brother, Felix, fabricated by feminist musicologists recently has been
refuted by Marian Wilson Kimber in “The ‘Suppression’ of Fanny Mendelssohn.”
16. Frank Shuffelton, “Being Definitive: Jefferson Biography under the
Shadow of Dumas Malone,” Biography 18/4 (1995): 294–295.
17. Works analyzing various aspects of biography writing are too numerous to
be listed here. The most important include The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John
46 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

The purpose of this article is to examine how musical biographers


have conceived of the genre—important, in my view, to understanding
its present-day condition, as many unspoken assumptions of the
traditional biography are still with us—and how we may reconsider
its premises, boundaries, and objectives in view of the challenges of
the new paradigms of history writing, and of the theoretical and
analytical writing on biography that has appeared in the last two
decades. This is not to argue that biographies produced in the past
are of no value; nor is it to advocate any particular theoretical position.
However, musical biography today must accept the challenges that
history has faced in the areas of both methodology and narration,
and reconsider its traditional premises: the conception of biography
as a reconstruction of the subject (the realistic fallacy); biography as
an accumulative, rather than interpretative, enterprise (the positivistic
fallacy); and the conception of the unified self of the subject. These
premises often are problematic when subjected to scrutiny and when
confronted with insights resulting from recent epistemological shifts
in anthropology, literary studies, and cultural history. A more rigorous
methodological approach to musical biography is needed, compatible
with present-day standards of historical writing. Because the sub-
ject obviously requires much more comprehensive treatment than

Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Shaping Lives: Reflections on Biography,


ed. Ian Donaldson, Peter Read, and James Walter (Canberra: Humanities Research
Centre, Australian National University, 1992); Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives
Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Leon
Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: Norton, 1984); David Ellis,
Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (New York: Routledge,
2000); William H. Epstein, Recognizing Biography (Philadelphia: University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1987); Contesting the Subject: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Prac-
tice of Biography and Biographical Criticism, ed. William H. Esptein (West Lafayette,
Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991); Park Honan, Author’s Lives: On Literary
Biography and the Arts of Language (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Biography
and Source Studies, vol 1, ed. Frederick R. Karl (New York: AMS Press, 1994); Ira
Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1984); The Seductions of Biography, ed. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New
York and London: Routledge, 1996); The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions,
ed. Dale Salwak (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996); Le désir biographique,
ed. Philippe Lejeune (Paris: Université Paris X, 1989); Linda Wagner-Martin,
Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1994); Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism
and Writing of Women’s Lives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 47

allowed by the limited scope of a journal article, I can only sample


selected representative areas.

BIOGRAPHY AND THE PROJECT OF MUSICOLOGY


Musical biography was shaped by the nineteenth-century origins
of the discipline of musicology as a product of modernity. Musicology
was founded on a scholarly tradition that utilized the erudition of the
past, including the art of text edition and criticism, in order to recreate
that past on the basis of secure evidence but limited interpretation.
This was the philosophical foundation of modern historical science
developed by German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886),
according to which the role of an historian was not to engage in the
interpretation of the past, but simply to report how it actually was—
wie es eigentlich gewesen.18 Archival sources under critical safeguards
seemed to guarantee the objectivity of one segment of the historian’s
work—the establishment of facts. It was believed that historians
must not reason beyond the document; they must be critics, not
interpreters. On the one hand, musicology was grounded on the
assumption of the autonomy and self-referentiality of a work of
music; on the other hand, it relied on the scientific approach to
the study of music history that dominated historical studies when
musicology was born.
The assumption of the autonomy and self-referentiality of music
implied that musical works must be approached and understood
through the analysis of their inner structures, exclusive of extra-
musical factors, and effectively relegated the genre of biography to
the margins of the discipline of musicology. For example, one of the
founding fathers of musicology, Guido Adler (1855–1941), believed
that the focus of the new musical learning was the musical work
itself, and the purpose of research in music was to elucidate the
theoretical and aesthetic principles of the art in the various periods of
its history.19 A generation earlier, Friedrich Chrysander (1826–1901)
saw the need for a new standard for musical knowledge that would put

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

it on the same level of objective validity as science.20 The scientific


approach to the study of music history assumed that the past could be
reconstructed, and the more evidence from primary sources collected,
the more likelihood of arriving at the true answers about it. It also
assumed that the reconstruction of the past could and should follow
the model of the natural sciences.
The implications of the scientific approach for musical biography
were significant. For one, it was believed that the goal of biography
was the reconstruction of the subject’s life, and that primary evidence
organized in a chronological order was the means of arriving at this
end. Second, a scholarly biography was expected to be “scientific” and
to engage only in “verifiable” questions, such as those pertaining to the
chronology of the composer’s life and works. Further, the subjectivity
of the biographer could and should be eliminated. Further still, biog-
raphy was viewed as an accumulation of primary sources, rather than
as a conceptual, interpretative work. Consequently, biographies grew
in size, compiling more and more material, while interpretation of this
material lagged behind; because archival scholarship often was an
obstacle to eloquence, pedantry crept into musicological works.
Finally, the emphasis on the factual and documentary aspects of biog-
raphy, and the lack of recognition that biography is also a literary
genre and a social and cultural activity, made a theoretical reflection
on biography almost redundant—it was taken as a matter of course
that all that the biographer needed to do was Quellenkritik.
In his important article of 1885, “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der
Musikwissenschaft,” which articulated the proposed classification of
the subject of musicology as an academic discipline, Guido Adler
designated biography as an auxiliary area of study. Adler’s low opin-
ion of the uses of biography for musicology—despite the thoroughness
and documentary accuracy of such biographies as Chrysander’s (of
Handel, 1858–1867) and Spitta’s (of Bach, 1873–1880), which should
have satisfied his standards of “serious” scholarship—can be inter-
preted as his desire to keep the new discipline reputable (by being
“scientific”) and clear of the unsettling impact of an expanding literary
biography, as well as to protect the assumed autonomy of music from
attempts to explain it through its author’s emotional states, or from any

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

other biographical or contextual contamination. Such an understanding


of biography was grounded in the nineteenth-century concept of a
genius as a transmitter of divine inspiration independent from outside
influences. The subject’s musical development was independent from
his life unless there was an interruption in this development—a decline
in creative powers or an unexpected stylistic development—in which
case a biographical explanation typically was given: illness, personal
tragedy, and the like.21 In his own biography of Mahler, Adler had no
use for the composer’s life and focused solely on his music.
Further, biography became an area of contested claims of expert-
ise and authority. The examples of early biographers, such as
Nikolaus von Nissen (whose biography of Mozart appeared in 1828)
and later Otto Jahn (the author of Mozart published in 1856–1859),
demonstrated that the genre could easily become the domain of
learned amateurs. Worse yet, it could become a domain of women,
as the examples of La Mara (Marie Lipsius, 1837–1927) and Lina
Ramann (1833–1912) demonstrate.22 Learned amateurs had no expertise
and no authority to deal with music in a proper “scholarly” manner;
hence, they tended to focus on life. But because music was believed to
have a limited relationship to life, literary biography was held in low

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

esteem by musicologists.23 In effect, the “life and work” scheme for


music biography, which musicologists gradually developed and in
which life and work occupied two separate sections, grew out of a
desire to find a compromise between an anti-biographical position
favoring an impersonal, “scientific” study of music, and a recognition
of the necessity for some biographical information.24 This scheme
effectively reinforced the idea that life and work were to be kept apart.
Finally, in the nineteenth century, the relationship between art and
science, poetry, and truth came to the forefront, and for the first time
in its history, biography as a genre was scrutinized along these lines.
This gave birth to the myth of “pure biography”—both historically
accurate and well constructed—written with no other purpose than
that of conveying to the reader an authentic portrait of the individual
whose life was being narrated.25
Probably the best incarnations of the ideal of scientific biography
in musicology were three volumes of the “documentary” biographies
of Schubert, Handel, and Mozart compiled by Otto Erich Deutsch.26
Each volume was a collection of documents pertaining to one of these
composers’ lives and works, arranged in chronological order and
providing valuable biographical raw material. It is quite mislead-
ing, however, to call these volumes “biographies,” as the English
translations of their German titles do, because what makes a biog-
raphy is narrative, which implies selection and interpretation; a col-
lection of documents cannot, by definition, be a biography. The

23. It can be argued that treating musical works as a domain of professional


musicology and beyond the reach of ordinary mortals only triggered the production
of biographical literature addressed to the general listening public and offering some
graspable framework for understanding of these works, typically popular psychology.
24. For example, the “Master Musicians” series founded in 1899 by J. M. Dent
and recently taken over by Oxford University Press.
25. About the notion of “pure” biography, see Harold Nicolson, “The Practice
of Biography,” American Scholar 23 (1954), 153–161. Nicolson saw what he called
“pure” biography collapsing under the weight of the information that biographers
can now dredge up, and foresaw “scientific” biography going off in one direction
and “literary” biography being driven in the opposite one—to “wander off into the
imaginative, leaving the strident streets of science for the open fields of fiction.”
“Pure” biography will have become impossible. Harold Nicolson, The Development
of English Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1927; reprint 1933), 155.
26. Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Erich Blom (London: J.M. Dent
& Sons, 1946); Handel: A Documentary Biography (London: Adam and Charles
Black, 1955); and Mozart: A Documentary Biography, trans. Erich Blom, Peter
Branscombe, and Jeremy Noble (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1965).
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 51

original German subtitles of each of the three volumes—Die Doku-


mente seines Lebens—reflect the contents of Deutsch’s volumes
much more accurately. But even this effort toward objectivity was
deceiving because of the unspecified criterion of “relevance” to the
composers’ lives that Deutsch applied in deciding which documents
to include and which to leave out. Not only was the “relevance” of
the included documents taken for granted, the criteria for eliminat-
ing “irrelevant” documents remained unspecified.
The positivistic (“scientific”) approach (and by positivistic I
mean an approach based on the gathering of empirical evidence as
the only admissible source of knowledge about the past, and also on
the assumption of the possibility of structuring human knowledge
by analogy with the natural sciences) failed to reconstruct the past as
it was and to render an “objective” picture of the subject, because
the task was simply impossible to achieve—the past cannot be
reconstructed as it was, because the conditions of the past cannot be
reconstructed. The failure of the “scientific” approach to biography
was also due to its unreflective approach to what constitutes the
essence of biography—the narrative—and in the failure to recognize
the power of the narrative in constructing the subject. The purpose
of an “objective” biography was never carried to the full, because
even if there were no explicit bias on the part of the biographer,
there were definitely unspoken assumptions. In a hierarchical
culture—such as the nineteenth century’s—reproducing itself
through biography, the biographer’s role was to perpetuate the system
and to reproduce the pattern considered worthy of reproduction.
The narrative had never been merely a “neutral” vehicle of ordering
biographical data chronologically, but an active vehicle transmitting
these unspoken assumptions and hierarchies, and a powerful tool
for constructing the subject according to current political, cultural,
moral, and personal agendas. The rise of professional scholarship
and the new “scientific” musicology it generated were particularly
closely related to the strong currents of nationalism. As a result,
despite their claims to objectivity and detachment, nineteenth-
century musicologists produced highly politicized and histor-
ically contingent biographies and provided a solid foundation for
this practice in the future. Many orthodox views established by
nineteenth-century biographers (for reasons quite different from
the declared search for the “truth”) are still with us, and musical
biography has been an effective tool for shaping collective memory
52 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

and the perception of national cultural heritages. In fact, nineteenth-


century biography was instrumental in the construction of the discipline
of musicology and a means of critically policing the musical (in the
discourse of and about biography).27

POLITICS OF BIOGRAPHY AND THE CONSTRUCTION


OF THE SUBJECT
Not surprisingly, the most prominent composers were first
targeted for appropriation. For example, according to the orthodox
view of Johann Sebastian Bach established by German nineteenth-
century scholars—with Philipp Spitta (1814–1894) in the foreground—
Bach’s career was dedicated essentially to the music of the Lutheran
liturgy and reached its climax in the form of the cantata. However,
Spitta’s dating of Bach’s cantatas, which supported such a view
of the composer, rested on more than a simple miscalculation.
As Joseph Kerman noted, “The idea of having the cycle of chorale
cantatas come late in Bach’s lifetime fitted only too well with the
orthodox nineteenth-century view of the composer.”28 Spitta por-
trayed Bach’s life in terms of an evolution of the composer through
the stages of organist, Kapellmeister, and cantor; its culmination is
the Protestant “arch-cantor”—that is, the creator of the chorale cantata
representing the ideal genre of true Lutheran church music.29 This
orthodox view of Bach as a latter-day Luther survived until the
1940s, when evidence supporting a different periodization of Bach’s
work came to light. The discoveries of this evidence not only
changed the dating of a number of his works, but also curved the
straight line that Spitta designed for Bach’s life. The whole ideological
edifice on which Bach’s image was built was seriously undermined.
In a broader context, the focus of German musicologists on
Bach’s involvement in church music as the source and expression
27. This process was not unique to musicology; biography affected the
construction of other academic disciplines as well. See David Amigoni, Victorian
Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1993).
28. Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52.
29. As one of the anonymous reviewers of this article noted, Spitta’s biog-
raphy can be linked to political causes going beyond the religious—Bach’s elevation
to the rank of a fifth evangelist at the time of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf clearly was
serving the goals of the Protestant hegemonic power in the new Reich.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 53

of his greatness can be viewed as rooted in the German Aufklärung


historians’ positive attitude toward religion—much more so than
the attitude of the French philosophes, who viewed religion as a
deplorable source of errors and superstition and an impediment to
progress; one that had to be abandoned or at least reduced to a
rationally acceptable deism. For the German historians, religion
was not just a convenient tool of a fearful, barbarian, and not yet
rational humankind; it was a basic element of human life. Conse-
quently, the idea of historical progress developed by the German
Aufklärer made possible the revival of interest in church music of
the past. In studying a past age, Aufklärung historians treated it as
a unique and hence unrepeatable phenomenon, while the philoso-
phes believed in the superiority of later periods over earlier ones.
The lack of immanent development directed at an ultimate
mundane aim focused the attention of German historians on the
process of change itself and fostered a more profound appreciation
for each age.30 The difference between the German and French
outlooks may be attributed in turn to the Germans’ better relation-
ship between lay powers and the church in their areas, as well as to
the innovative work of some eighteenth-century theologians and
ecclesiastical historians, some of them teaching at the University
of Göttingen, where scholars such as Johann Nicolaus Forkel
(1746–1818) and Philipp Spitta were active. This specific histor-
ical context explains the extent to which the nineteenth-century
Bach biography was historically contingent and localized, and a
specific character of this contingency.
While Bach’s early biographers could admit religion as a major
factor shaping Bach’s identity because of a specific place of religion
in German intellectual and cultural climate at the time, ascending
nationalism was a powerful cultural force whose impact was felt
across Europe in the ways composers were appropriated as
“national” artists. The more strategically important a figure was for the
preservation of the nation’s cultural memory, the more energetically
was his life appropriated for this purpose. Frédéric Chopin, for
example, was constructed by his early Polish biographers as an
incarnation of a Polish patriot, totally immersed in things Polish—not

30. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval & Modern (Chicago


and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 220–221.
54 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

31. See Jolanta T. Pekacz, “Deconstructing a ‘National Composer’: Chopin and


Polish Exiles in Paris, 1831–1849,” 19th-Century Music, 24/2 (2000), 161–172.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 55

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

Schubert’s heterosexuality.38 This creation of Schubert was a neces-


sity, explains David Gramit, because musical evaluation has depended
to a large degree on the evaluation of the personal merit of the composer
and both reflected values of paramount importance for Victorian
society, such as class and gender constructs.39
Schubert was, of course, not the only one whose biography was
sanitized and appropriated. Chopin’s nineteenth-century biographies
show a striking similarity to the way Schubert was represented by his
early biographers. Just as Schubert’s sexuality could not raise any
serious questions, so Chopin’s liaison with George Sand was played
down—appropriate to nineteenth-century standards of an exemplary
life. Incidentally, it was Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz who was the
first to publicly and explicitly comment on the liaison, as early as
during Chopin’s lifetime. He diminished Chopin’s involvement in
the liaison, viewing George Sand as a “vampire” and her influence on
Chopin’s life detrimental; Chopin was represented as a passive victim
of Sand, with no agency of his own.40 In a similar vein, nineteenth-
century biographies of Mozart focused on his rebellion against the
Archbishop of Salzburg and his conflict with his father, which gave
Mozart the aura of a neglected Romantic genius. The lack of a simi-
lar quality in Haydn’s biography, and his success in his own time,
adversely affected nineteenth-century attitudes to his music.41
The story of how nineteenth-century biographies were constructed
and perpetuated, and how they molded our perception of noted
musical figures, still remains to be told. But it is obvious, at the
present state of knowledge, that biographies are as much documents
of their time and their authors as they are sources of information
about their subjects. Just as with the present, the past is the result
of competing versions of what happened, why it happened, and
with what consequences. This historical contingency implies that
biographies should be looked upon as sources for reception history,
rather than exclusively as sources of the “truth” about their subjects.

38. Winter, “Whose Schubert?,” 98 n. 19.


39. Gramit, “Constructing a Victorian Schubert,” 67.
40. A similar interpretation can be found in William G. Atwood’s The Lioness
and the Little One: The Liaison of George Sand and Frédéric Chopin (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980).
41. Leon Botstein, “The Consequences of Presumed Innocence: The Nineteenth-
Century Reception of Joseph Haydn,” in Haydn Studies, ed. W. Dean Sutcliffe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–34.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 57

BIOGRAPHY AS A CONTROL OF CULTURAL MEMORY


Biography is a form of cultural production and the production
of meaning in biographical form has been a powerful force in
shaping and reshaping cultural memory, as well as a site of struggle
over the control of this memory. The Countess d’Agoult’s and the
Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein’s dramatic efforts to advance their own
competing versions of Franz Liszt’s life are just two of numerous
examples of the high stakes often involved in biography. Alan
Walker gives an account of how the princess saw to it that her old
scores with the countess were settled, interfering with the work of
Lina Ramann, who was commissioned to write Liszt’s biography.42
Ramann resisted some of the princess’s pressure, but on one issue, at
least, Ramann failed to resist—the interpretation of the role of the
Countess d’Agoult in Liszt’s life. The result was a highly negative
picture of d’Agoult in the biography written by Ramann in 1880–
1894—just as Sayn-Wittgenstein had desired. Only the publication of
Correspondance de Liszt et de la Comtesse d’Agoult in 1933–1934 by
Daniel Ollivier, Liszt’s grandson, showed the other side of the picture.
Clara Schumann provides an example of a well-known phenom-
enon in the history of biography of a widow trying to extend her
control over the memory of her famous husband, granting a biographer
access to family papers in return for his or her tact and discretion
in their use.43 Clara’s refusal to help Count Wasielewski—who
undertook writing the first biography of Robert—despite her earlier
promises, and her negative reaction to Wasielewski’s biography
when it appeared in 1858, indicate that Clara was concerned with
what might be considered the less edifying aspects of Robert’s life,
including his problems in Düsseldorf ending with a dismissal (which
was not a dismissal, according to Clara), his late nights and drink-
ing, and his venereal disease.44 In Clara’s case—and perhaps in

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

other widows’ cases as well—the desire to control the memory of


her famous husband could as well be seen as the reaction of a proud
and ambitious woman unwilling to admit that she had married less
than a human ideal. In effect, it was an attempt to create her own
idealized biography, not only of her late husband, but also of herself.
More surprisingly, access to the medical diary of Schumann’s physician
at the Endenich asylum, Dr. Richarz, is still restricted, apparently
because its accuracy cannot be guaranteed; the original can be studied
only by arrangement at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.45
But the paradox wherein the emphasis of modern scholarship
on original sources forces a biographer to enter into a contract with
the guardians of such sources and to produce a biography that
satisfies these guardians is only a part of the issue of the control
of cultural memory through biography. What makes such control
over memory most effective is the attachment of present-day biog-
raphers to nineteenth-century stereotypes and patterns of constructing
musical biography, as well as to traditional disciplinary identity
and politics.
The nineteenth-century near obsession with the greatness and
impeccability of a biographical subject is probably the most difficult
to eradicate. For example, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, in his provok-
ing biographical study of Mozart published in 1982,46 interprets
Mozart’s set of letters to Michael Puchberg written in 1788–1791—
when the composer was under severe financial straits and in a miserable
state of mind—as evidence of Mozart’s deception and manipulation
of Puchberg, rather than of the composer’s desperate situation.
At face value, these letters demonstrate Mozart’s depression and
distress; yet, the way in which Hildesheimer interprets them shows
that he prefers to see Mozart as devious rather than as miserable.47
In The Mozart Myths, William Stafford takes it upon himself to
demonstrate that most of the topoi in earlier interpretations of
Mozart’s life do not stand close scrutiny. There is no room in
Stafford’s account for any doubts about the causes of Mozart’s
death; there is allegedly no evidence supporting the belief that

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

Mozart was childish, sometimes vulgar, irresponsible, a spendthrift,


pleasure loving, and lacking in self-control. Even if Mozart were a
spendthrift and a womanizer, writes Stafford, it was within the
acceptable boundaries of his time (without explaining what they
were) for, after all, the judgment of such things is subjective and
depends on the moral stance of the observer. Thus the author shifts
his discussion from the parameters of eighteenth-century relativity
on ethical matters to the present day’s relativity on such matters in
order to “justify” Mozart’s behavior. With this method, attributing
any characteristics to Mozart’s personality becomes meaningless,
making the reader suspect that, by purging Mozart’s biography from
“myths,” Stafford purges Mozart’s memory and saves his reputation
and good name. This is all about Mozart’s memory and reputation,
as, after all, drinking and womanizing obviously did not adversely
affect the quality of Mozart’s music; in any case, Stafford does not
address the relation between life and music. At the same time, the most
interesting questions for a cultural historian remained unanswered:
What made biographers create these “myths”? What kind of need
did these “myths” satisfy? Why did they survive so long? What was
the relationship between these versions of Mozart’s life and the
times that produced them? Were they indicative of different standards
of biographical “truth”?
Alan Walker assumes a similar approach in his three-volume biog-
raphy of Franz Liszt. When it comes to the issue of Liszt’s amorous
involvement and sexual affairs, and the various “legends” surrounding
these affairs, Walker has no use for speculation. He refers to all these
stories as “absurd assertions” and “foolish character assassinations” and
declares that “the whole topic is pathological.”48 It is simply inconceiv-
able to Walker that Liszt could have been involved in any off-the-record
sexual activity or could have produced illegitimate progeny. The
assumption that all of these allegations are false just because some of
them cannot be substantiated obviously is flawed, but Walker is ready
to sacrifice logic to save Liszt’s reputation.
The desire to control the memory of biographical subjects also
is evident in the attempts by the compatriots of emblematic national
composers to chase off curious biographers, or the efforts of the
guardians of the proprietary of the discipline to keep them away
from other canonic masters. When Philip Brett wrote in 1994 that

48. Walker, Franz Liszt, I, 25–26.


60 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

Johann Sebastian Bach had been appropriated as an instrument


of repressive musical thinking over the last two centuries or so,49
his article was interpreted as “an attack on Bach.”50 When I first pro-
posed that Chopin’s involvement in things Polish during his life in
Paris (1831–1849) was less conspicuous than traditionally assumed,
one outraged, anonymous reviewer of an article I submitted to a
scholarly journal wrote that the picture of Chopin I presented was
not the Chopin he knew; apparently, I was expected to reinforce the
familiar picture in a biographical article.
The extent to which biography is a site of struggle over the control
of cultural memory is obvious from the persistence of nineteenth-
century patterns of constructing musical biography—especially
those embodying politics within the discipline or the formation
of the canon—as demonstrated in the 1993 debate over Schubert’s
sexual identity in 19th-Century Music. The claims that Schubert’s
sexual identity is subject to scholarly scrutiny on an equal footing
with other aspects of his life clashed with attempts to sanitize the
composer’s biography and isolate undesirable elements. But the
issue of whether a composer’s sexuality should be a matter of scholarly
attention is not only about the boundaries of scholarship—a gay or
lesbian sexual identity can potentially be appropriated for political
uses. “A gay Handel,” as one author recently put it, “functions at the
political level to address and legitimate the urgent project of ‘gay
history’ . . . gay Handel responds to the terms in which the struggles
for gay liberation are being waged at this (our) moment in history, in
the courts, in the voting booths, in the clinics, and in the streets. In
these venues, ‘gay Handel’ will be something of political use, a use
inextricably bound up with the struggles, discursive and material, on
two sides of the closet door.”51 The central issue here is thus not the

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

ethical or epistemological problems involved in the appropriation of


an artist’s life for public consumption, but conflicting conceptions
as to what an acceptable purpose of such an appropriation should
be. While appropriating the subject as an edifying moral example
(according to nineteenth-century standards)—even at the cost of
distortions of his life—is generally accepted, appropriating the same
artist for the purpose of gay and lesbian politics is fiercely contested.
This phenomenon is exemplified by the recent example of a biog-
raphy in the style of nineteenth-century hero-worship—Christoph
Wolff’s Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, published
in 2000,52 acclaimed by the musicological establishment in the form
of a major award granted to it by the American Musicological Soci-
ety in 2001, while at the same time substantially criticized by the
reviewers. In his reverence to Bach, Wolff not only follows the
tradition of Bach’s nineteenth-century biographers, such as Forkel
and Spitta, but actually exceeds it, by not allowing for any criticism
of Bach’s music—in contrast to his nineteenth-century biographers.
Wolff also follows nineteenth-century biographers’ footsteps in his
proposition that the hero’s music and life form an inseparable
unity—just as all Bach’s compositions are great and impeccable, so
is his life, because the greatness of his music implies the greatness
of his life. From the late twentieth-century perspective, such an
enterprise strikes one as anachronistic, if not reactionary, for several
reasons: the huge volume of research on Bach, research that compli-
cates rather than simplifies the received picture; epistemological
changes in the humanities that have made scholars skeptical about
neat explanatory schemes; and the fact that biographers have long
come to terms with the idea that superior art does not imply a perfect
life. Not surprisingly, a present-day reader is not likely to take
Wolff’s propositions for granted. More than one reviewer noted that,
in his unlimited reverence to Bach, Wolff simply does not engage in
a discussion with those scholars who depict a more complex and
darker picture of Bach’s personality and views than he is ready to
admit, fencing off his image of Bach as modern, enlightened, and
liberal from any contamination that such critical approaches may
imply. Similarly, according to the reviewers, Wolff downplays
every less edifying and less heroic aspect of Bach’s life, including

52. Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000).
62 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

the controversies in which the composer was involved, his disputes


with his superiors, the petty power politics in which he engaged, and
the scope of Bach’s intellectual interests. For example, according to
one reviewer, Bach does not appear especially learned if judged by
his comments on the margins of his Calov Bible, most of which are
trivial and tedious; nor in view of recent proposition that the study
of counterpoint in the early eighteenth century often was linked with
an interest in alchemy and the occult. Nor does Bach appear polit-
ically progressive, if it is true that he often aligned himself with the
royalist and absolutist camp, as the research of scholars such as
Ulrich Siegele suggests.53 As for Bach’s music, the reviewers claim
that Wolff asserts traditional views with confidence and ignores
controversial interpretations and attributions, as well as the authors
who advance them—a procedure that may be easily discernable
by specialists but not by the general public.54 Ultimately, his edifica-
tion of Bach through the parallel with Newton, and the analogy
between Bach’s humanistic learning and the emerging scientific
method are superficial and hard to sustain solely on the basis of prob-
lematic assumptions: that a skill in composition implies intellectual
interests and disposition; that Bach’s few surviving, dull letters do
not prove his lack of writing skills (Bach was an intellectual, and the
lost ones would undoubtedly provide the missing evidence); that
Bach’s interest in organ-building proves he was a scientist.55
Thus the battle over control of meaning and cultural memory
goes on, and biography plays a vital role in these culture wars. On
the one hand are the traditionalists, who vilify attempts to revise
the “great man” stories; on the other are those who search for
approaches more adequate for our relativist and pluralistic age—
along with underrepresented groups previously unheard by the larger
audience, who are now telling their own versions of well-known life
stories.

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

THE LIMITS OF BIOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE


As stated earlier, the problems surrounding biography cannot be
divorced from the current status of historical writing. The changing
perception of biography in recent decades has been conditioned and
paralleled by the story of the rise and fall of the paradigm of objectivity
in historical writing. New approaches to biography, diversified as
they are, are grounded in the consensus that the scientific paradigm
has lost its footing in historical practice. Further more, they no
longer accept the belief of traditional biography, that the truth about
a human being may be found in the sum of all the facts known about
him or her.
Yet, the belief that an accumulation of “facts” in monumental
biographies advances our understanding of the subject dies hard
among biographers, despite the humiliating experiences of such
prominent authors as Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1971, after two volumes
of Flaubert’s biography, The Family Idiot, had appeared, Sartre
claimed confidently that, in the end, fundamentally everything could
be communicated about the subject and one could arrive at perfect
understanding of another person if one had all the necessary
elements.56 Sartre had laid the theoretical ground in Search for a
Method, the introduction to his Critique of Dialectical Reason, and
he considered The Family Idiot as a continuation of Search for a
Method. His method was an attempt at achieving perfect under-
standing of Flaubert through the meaningful organization of all that
can be known about him. It consisted in “totalizing” all that was
known about Flaubert, which involved constantly coming and
going between the particular circumstances of the subject and the
larger socioeconomic context, and was expected to discover the
“multidimensional unity” of human behavior.57 Not surprisingly,
the most striking characteristic of The Family Idiot is its stupendous
length—nearly 3,000 pages that have earned Sartre charges of self-
indulgence and lack of consideration for his readers. Comprehen-
sive as Flaubert’s biography may appear to be, Sartre’s method was
objected to on the grounds that coherence and unity were achieved
at the cost of ignoring the evidence or fabricating it—that it was not
what necessarily happened, but what Sartre believed must have

56. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations X: Politique et Autobiographie (Paris: Gallimard,


1976), 106.
57. Jean-Paul Sartre, Questions de Méthode (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 188, 155.
64 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

happened in order to lead to the next stage in the dialectical process


through which he saw Flaubert’s life.58
The totalizing approach to biography, such as Sartre’s, has been
severely criticized over the last several years. It has been argued that it
is doomed to fail, not because of empirical shortcomings, but because
no matter how powerful our methods and how sophisticated our theo-
ries, the Other infinitely transcends the theoretical and explanatory nets
that we cast to trap him and bring him into our fold, and so escapes
totalization. Totalization fails to take otherness, particularity, and
difference seriously; it attempts to assimilate and dominate the Other.
No matter how much material is collected, however great the skill and
integrity of the author, the final biography will still be an artificial
and—to some extent—spurious creation, presenting a misleading
impression of order and coherence. It can exist only as a series of snap-
shots, seeking to freeze at a given instant in time the internal as well as
the external forces that are shaping the progress of events.59 The total-
izing approach tends to make conclusions about every aspect of the
subject’s life; it attempts to pull all loose ends together, giving answers
where questions are more appropriate. As somebody put it, all attempts
to nail down the subject in biography must be unsuccessful, for either
the author nails the subject dead or the subject walks off with the nail.
In the field of musicology, this totalizing approach to biography
recently has been associated with Bach scholars. Indeed, the first
scholarly biography of Bach, published by Spitta in 1884–1885, was
an overwhelming oeuvre that effectively muffled prospective biog-
raphers for generations, the paralyzing effect of which can still be
felt among musicologists. Since Spitta, Bach scholars have been
viewed as “obsessed, even oppressed by the enormous weight of
paleographical and graphological apparatus [that was] left over from
the great positivistic enterprise,” and Bach research has been seen as
“poised on the brink of the classic positivistic dilemma: more and
more facts, and less and less confidence in interpreting them.”60

58. Douglas Collins, Sartre as Biographer (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University


Press, 1980), 107–108; also Hazel E. Barnes, Sartre & Flaubert (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. the “Introduction: Approaching The Family
Idiot,” 1–13.
59. See, for example, an argument based on Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et
infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (La Haye: M. Nijhoff, 1961) in David A. Jopling, “At
the Limits of Biographical Knowledge: Sartre and Levinas,” in Shaping Lives, 70–101.
60. Kerman, Contemplating Music, 54.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 65

Accurate as it may be in its diagnosis of Bach scholars’ courage to


synthesize, this statement misses the important point that the positivistic
project had never been as innocent as typically presented. As I noted
earlier, the positivistic approach obscures the agency of the scholar
under the blanket of “objectivity” and adhering to “facts” alone, and by
dazzling the reader with the scholarly apparatus of documentary evi-
dence and “facts”; it provides a cautionary tale for those who believe
that facts speak for themselves.61 Furthermore, the actual problem of
the positivistic project is not the lack of confidence in interpreting the
facts, but the unspoken assumptions and cultural biases behind its
interpretations, assumptions that are presented as “objective.”
In his recent biography of Bach, Wolff demonstrates the limits
of biography conceived in the Spitta tradition through his stated
goal, which has been not to rewrite Bach’s life story but “to update
and adjust the image of Bach [created by Spitta] in order to bring it
in line—as objectively as possible and as subjectively as legitimate—
with the current state of scholarship.”62 The effort of “updating”
and “adjusting” turns into packing Bach’s biography with numerous
details regarding everyday life, jobs, duties, schedules, salaries, and
so on—facts and hypotheses alike—as though the amassment was
indeed supposed to advance our understanding of the composer and
his music. To claim that no rewriting—only updating—is neces-
sary, is to ensure the continuity of Spitta’s manufacturing process,
to bridge the gap between nineteenth-century lacunae in sources
and twentieth-century discoveries. As Edward Said put it, Wolff’s
biography leaves the reader properly impressed but also likely
bored.63 But the totalizing aspect of Wolff’s biography consists not
only in its amount of details but, more importantly, in its one-sided
portrayal of Bach as the perfect and learned musician (and a perfect
human being), achieved at the cost of foreclosing any questions that
61. The need to recognize the presence of a historian in his or her work and
to break with nineteenth-century practice has been particularly emphasized by
ego-historians. As a French historian Pierre Nora noted, “[f]or a century, the scientific
project has compelled historians to disappear behind their work, hide their
personalities under their erudition, barricade themselves behind their note cards, flee
from themselves into another age, express themselves only through others.” Pierre
Nora, “Présentation,” in Essais d’ego-histoire, ed. Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Nora
(Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 5.
62. Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, xv.
63. Edward Said, “Cosmic Ambition,” London Review of Books, July 19, 2001,
11–14.
66 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

may arise, of ignoring those already formulated, and in filling in all


possible lacunae, leaving the reader nothing to doubt or decide. In
this sense, Wolff’s biography provides what Roland Barthes calls a
“readerly text,” in which the biographer has already glossed over
discontinuities of his subject’s life, as opposed to a “writerly text,”
whose lacunae may be filled in by the reader’s rational and imagina-
tive process, and in which the reader is no longer a consumer but
also a producer of the text.64 Despite the image of coherence and closure
of Wolff’s work—or perhaps precisely because of it—one suspects
there is another Bach lurking behind the presented edifice; not the
Bach we already “know” so well, but the Bach we would like to know.

BIOGRAPHY AS A CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY


Albert Camus noted that the interest in other people’s lives is
triggered by our faulty perception of them as a coherent unity. “This
is because,” wrote Camus, “seen from the outside, they form a
whole. While our own life, seen from inside, is all bits and pieces.
Once again, we run after an illusion of unity.”65
Biography in its modern form did not emerge until the notion of an
independent individual developed in the eighteenth century, and the
independence of the subject of biography was figured from the start as
an outpost of individuality.66 As a result, methodologically, traditional
biography has been grounded on a number of assumptions about the
subject’s personality: that there is a coherent, essentially unchanging
and unitary self; that there is a unity and coherence to personality; that
“the child is father of the man.” Further, traditional biography has
assumed that motives of the subject are readable and, when the “real”
personality is understood, motives can be discerned. The biographer is
expected to open the mind of the subject to us and to “make sense of it”
by connecting things and identifying (or creating) patterns of his or
her life by recognizing both linear and horizontal relationships.67 One

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

purpose of traditional biography has been to tell a coherent story


about an identifiably unified individual. One of the consequences of
such an approach was to present the portrait of a hero whose unified
persona has been purged of contradictory or confusing material. Ever
since art began to be viewed as self-expression in the nineteenth cen-
tury, biographers have been looking for a single psychic conflict that
can “unlock” the subject’s life and oeuvre—a core personality that can
be found if only one digs deep and long enough. For example, in the
case of Johann Sebastian Bach, such a marker of identity has been his
religiosity and, most recently, his allegedly intellectual disposition. In
the case of Chopin, it has been his “Polishness” and his suffering
because of his country’s misfortunes and sometimes his illness. In the
case of Schubert, it has been his sexuality. The belief expressed recently
that Schubert’s sexuality “can help us unlock the entire repertory” of his
music68 seems to confirm that the belief in the one psychic conflict that
can “unlock” the subject’s life and oeuvre has not lost its appeal.
This approach has been criticized in recent years on the grounds
that biography cannot aim at constructing a unified individual, because
there is no such thing as one marker of identity. Rather, identities are
viewed as mobile, contested, multiple constructions of the self that
depend as much on context as on any defining traits of character. It has
been argued that the perception of the self as unified and coherent is
a historically and geographically located phenomenon identified with
the emancipatory thrust of what became known as the “Enlightenment
project,” grounded in a belief in a human agent with a sense of inward-
ness, freedom, individuality, and embeddness in nature, which became
a force in politics and culture over the last two centuries. This traditional
concept of the self came to be viewed as the foundation of an extraordin-
ary political reaction all around the West. As one author put it,

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

68. Susan McClary, “Music and Sexuality: On the Steblin/Solomon Debate,”


19th-Century Music 17/1 (1993), 88.
69. George Levine, “Introduction: Constructivism and the Reemergent Self,” in
Constructions of the Self, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univer-
sity Press, 1992), 8–9; see also Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to
Romanticism, ed. Patrick Coleman, Jayne Lewin, and Jill Kowalik (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3.
68 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

Poststructuralism, in particular, emphasizes the need for an


escape from the restrictions of the unitary self and portrays the
self as “decentered.”70 The poststructural “decentered” self is
shaped ideologically by its relationship to significant others—
beginning with the family—and by external forces, such as the
political upheavals and economic depressions surrounding it. The
self became a nexus of floating discourses that enter it from with-
out, yet it is not controlled by any one paradigmatic discourse.71
In this rendition, the unified self becomes one of the myths of
modernity. In less radical epistemological positions, too, the
liberal, humanist view of autonomous individuals is being under-
mined by a concept in which individuals construct their identities
inseparably from the philosophical traditions, social classes,
gender ideologies, language systems, and national cultures in
which they function.72
While the heterogeneous character of the self seems to be
commonly agreed on—as well as the historical origin of the concept
of a unified self as part of a great enterprise of moral and political
renewal—the debate goes on as to the extent to which the self is
predetermined, incapable of innovative action leading to political,
social, or artistic change. In a recent attempt to problematize the
self, Jerrold Seigel proposes to view human selves as “hetero-
geneous entities, more or less stable compounds of elements that
derive from biology, social relations, and their own psychic and
mental activity,”73 and reminds us that the modern intellectual
history of selfhood has suggested three dimensions along which the
self can be conceptualized. The first two dimensions of the self—
material and relational—locate the self in the external world; it is the
third dimension—reflexive or self-positing—that provides whatever
independence human beings may achieve from physical forces
and social relationships, and the way it is theorized has crucial

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,

74. Ibid., 289.


70 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

it is believed that within a particular culture psychic tensions could arise


in individuals—tensions involving relations to their parents, their
bodies, and so on—that can be studied through the historically contin-
gent terms that brought these tensions into being in the first place.75
Furthermore, the recognition that identities are multiple con-
structions of the self means that the biographer must use caution
in using collective categories such as class, race, nationality, and
gender, and in attributing specific identities to these groups—
“packages of identity”—and presenting the biographical subject as
an embodiment of such proscribed categories and packages. “Packages
of identity” are constructed on the assumption that there are essential
identity attributes for socially and culturally constructed categories—
such as class or gender—and that an individual is a mere transmitter
of the attributes of these homogeneous categories. In fact, class, gen-
der, race, nationality, and other such categories of historical analysis
work in conjunction with one another in identity formation in a given
time and place. For example, in hierarchical social orders (such as
Old-Regime France), class identity typically was much stronger than
gender identity, and women in such orders were more likely to iden-
tify themselves with their own social milieu than with the feminine
gender. This is not to say that class affiliation eradicates the estab-
lished gender roles and identities; rather, it is to emphasize multiple
markers of identity as well as the heterogeneity of such categories.
The experience of the practitioners of identity politics since the
1960s teaches us that the attempts to organize people around one
aspect of their identity only make them splinter into factions based on
other, contrasting identities among themselves. Finally, what needs
to be taken into account are connections between the social world
and individual psychic experience, connections that do not—as is
often assumed—follow from social factors.
Hegel’s discussion of self-consciousness offers a particularly
useful point of departure for an analysis of the process of identity
formation. In his reflection on self-consciousness, Hegel maintained
that the creation of self is a process of interaction with others, and
that self-consciousness “is essentially the return from otherness.”76

75. Jo Burr Margadant, “Constructing Selves in Historical Perspective,” intro-


duction to The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century
France, ed. Jo Burr Margadant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 8.
76. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 104–119.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 71

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

77. For example, Lloyd S. Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals


and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1988); Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
78. Ludwik Bronarski, “Stephen Heller i Chopin,” Ruch Muzyczny, nr 20, (1960), 1–3.
79. Wladyslaw Mickiewicz, Pamietniki, 3 vols. (Warszawa: Gebethner & Wolff,
1926), I, 173–174.
72 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

were divided into numerous and often hostile factions based on


various political options, and could hardly serve as a locus of
“Polishness” that all Poles would share. All attempts to gather them
into an umbrella organization for all the Poles proved unsuccessful.
Prince Czartoryski was named an enemy of Polish exiles by one of
the factions in 1834; for others, the Czartoryski’s coterie in Paris—
the only Polish circle where Chopin could be more or less regularly
seen—was the representation of the Polish nation in exile. In fact,
the Czartoryski’s coterie in Paris was as Polish as it was cosmopolitan
and served as a Polish center only in a limited political sense: The
Hôtel Lambert, the Czartoryskis’ residence in Paris, represented
a conservative political orientation among Polish exiles in Paris.
“Polishness” in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s could thus mean a
number of things, sometimes quite contradictory.
Furthermore, Chopin fashioned himself in response to specific
features of the French capital in the 1830s and 1840s—musical,
social, and political. The lack of a fully developed system of public
patronage in music and his preference for private performance were
behind his decision to give up regular public concertizing in favor of
the semi-private concerts he occasionally gave; the popularity of
piano playing in a private setting offered him an opportunity to
make piano lessons a source of income. Because the higher social
classes offered a potentially more substantial income than other
groups, they were targeted by Chopin. These cosmopolitan groups
did not seem to care about Chopin’s Polishness, but appreciated his
image as a fashionable musician, which made an encounter with him
pleasurable and his lessons desirable. Chopin developed a cosmo-
politan image: he rented an apartment in a fashionable quarter; he
wore fashionable but not extravagant clothes and accessories; he had
impeccable manners, inconspicuous political views, and personal
diplomacy, which was necessary to retain affluent pupils and the
connections they could offer. As I suggest elsewhere, Chopin owed
his success in the Parisian salons to his ability to play down his
ethnicity, rather than making it a prominent part of his identity, at
least in the salons of the cosmopolitan Parisian aristocracy and
upper class where he most often appeared.80 This is not to say that
Chopin denied his Polish background, but to counter the essentialist
view of Chopin’s patriotism—as allegedly manifesting itself both in

80. Pekacz, “Deconstructing a ‘National Composer.’”


MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 73

his music and his life—that was established by his nineteenth-


century biographers and perpetuated by subsequent ones, and to
emphasize that “Polishness” was far from being Chopin’s only
marker of identity.
The recognition that identities are multiple constructions of the
self does not necessarily imply that identity is entirely determined
by culture and society. Such a deterministic view has been chal-
lenged recently by anthropology on the grounds that there are
universals in emotional life whose expressions are shaped by culture
and history.81 Cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary
anthropology also demonstrate the importance of narrative, memory,
and time to the sense of self and provide new perspectives for
conceptualizing the self, perspectives that circumvent some trad-
itional dichotomies, such as nature and culture, reason and emotion,
a stable and a decentered self, or individual agency and social
construction.82 These perspectives can further illuminate biographical
explanation.

BIOGRAPHY AND MUSICOLOGICAL PRACTICE


As discussed earlier, the status of musical biography within the
discipline of musicology has been ambiguous, to say the least, and
driven by two contradictory impulses. On the one hand, musicological
study has been largely biographical in approach: interpretation and
editorial work are concerned with such questions as what constitutes a
text, what constitutes its meaning and significance, and what connects
these to authorial intention. Editorial theories are based on the concep-
tion of authorship and the ideal of “realizing”—approximating, recov-
ering, (re)constructing—the author’s intentions in a critical edition.83
Furthermore, biography has played an important role in the cultural

81. William Reddy, “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of


Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (June 1997), 326–351.
82. For examaple, Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason,
and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994); also his The Feeling
of What Happens: Body and Emotions in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego
and New York: Harcourt, 1999). See also Michael L. Fitzhugh and William
H. Leckie, Jr., “Agency, Postmodernism, and the Causes of Change,” History and
Theory 40 (2001), 59–81.
83. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 194–195.
74 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

discourse of musicology, canon formation, and disciplinary gender


politics. The discipline’s focus on individual composers who are
believed to have made a significant contribution to music history dem-
onstrates the extent to which biography has shaped musicology. Music
historians have traditionally identified themselves as specialists in the
music of a particular composer—as Bach scholars, Beethoven scholars,
Berlioz scholars, Brahms scholars, Chopin scholars, Wagner scholars,
and the like. On the other hand, however, biographical knowledge has
been considered largely irrelevant to music criticism and aesthetic—a
position that follows the view of music as an “autonomous” art.
These contradictory impulses can be explained by the specific
philosophical and aesthetic context in which musicology was estab-
lished as a scholarly discipline in the nineteenth century. It was at
that time that the modern notion of author—embodying the idea of
authority as well as autonomy—emerged fully fledged, along with
the concept of art as creation, as opposed to imitation of nature.84
These concepts were possible through philosophical reflection on
the self, such as Immanuel Kant’s assertion that the only world we
know is the world we construct through innate mental categories, a
view that promoted analogies with artistic creativity and imagin-
ation in the aesthetic realm, and was further developed by Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The Romantic
recognition of individual consciousness in the creation of art, which
led to a concept of art as creation and the author as an autonomous
creator who transcends history and ideology, contained two seem-
ingly contradictory impulses—toward subjectivity on the one hand
and impersonality on the other. With the recognition of subjectivity
came an overemphasis on the biographical factor in creativity; the
view of art as creation implied the transcendence of the artist—seen
as imitating the divine act of creation—which carried a concomitant
impersonality. The notion of music as an expression of its composer’s
personality that ultimately transcends this personality dominated criti-
cism in the latter half of the nineteenth century and served to justify
a discourse on music that saw no contradiction in uncovering an
author’s personal life, while at the same time lauding that author’s

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

transcendental genius.85 For scholarly musicology, an unchecked


subjectivity and overemphasis on biographical factors were poten-
tially destabilizing; the “scientific” approach promoted by the
discipline was on much firmer grounds when operating within the
parameters of Enlightenment-disengaged reason and autonomous,
transcendental art, than when speculating on the level of popular psy-
chology. This defense against subjectivity culminated in theories that
viewed artistic creation as transcending self-expression. To attain
one’s “best self,” Matthew Arnold argued in the nineteenth century,
the particularities of one’s class history or stubbornly persistent ethnic
background—coded as a “Hebraic” tendency of culture—were to be
left behind.86 T.S. Eliot put it in an often-quoted dictum that poetry “is
not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.”87
The resistance to admitting biographical knowledge into music
aesthetics and criticism informed the marginalization of biography
by musicology’s founding fathers; the displacement of the autonomy
of the subject into the text itself was later inherent in New Criti-
cism and most recently in a number of anti-authorial theoretical
positions, such as structuralism and deconstruction.88 The way in
which the author is absent may vary in each of these positions.
While in formalism and New Criticism the absence of the author is
a methodological prescription in which the author is incompatible
with immanent analysis, deconstruction not only excludes the
author but also maintains that the author has always been absent,
thus making an ontological statement about the very nature of
85. For example, in his 1870 essay, Wagner arrived at the conclusion about
Beethoven’s genius not on the basis of the inherent musical value of Beethoven’s
late works, but on the basis of Schopenhauer’s ideas concerning music which
allowed him to see Beethoven’s loss of hearing as the disappearance of the last
vestige that prevented the composer to live entirely in his inner world. See K. M.
Knittel, “Wagner, Deafness, and the Reception of Beethoven’s Last Style,” Journal
of the American Musicological Society 51/1 (1998): 49–82.
86. The Seductions of Biography, 2.
87. T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood:
Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 54.
88. This understanding is not limited to music but has been applied to other arts
as well. Clifford Geertz wrote in 1976 that “it is only in the modern age and in the
west that some people . . . have managed to convince themselves that technical talk
about art, however developed, is sufficient to a complete understanding of it; the
whole secret of aesthetic power is located in the formal relations among sounds,
images, volumes, themes or gestures.” Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Inter-
pretative Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
76 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

discourse.89 Close textual analysis informed by this thinking considers


works of music as aesthetic objects filled with meaning, which is not
discernible by the analysis of historical circumstances and authorial
intentions; hence, music can only be understood from the inside out.
The recognition of the limitations of essentialism and formalism
and the developments in literary and historical studies over the last
decades—including the advances of New Historicism, Cultural
Materialism, and Postcolonialism—have led to a renewed interest in
context among musicologists. An extramusical context is believed
to provide a necessary framework for meaning of a musical work,
and “the embeddedness of music in networks of nonmusical forces
is something to be welcomed rather than regretted.”90 Context is
viewed as a condition sine qua non for music to be heard as music
and not as meaningless noise. “It is not enough to say,” the argu-
ment goes, “in contradiction to hard epistemological claims, that the
music may be interpreted in relation to non-musical phenomena.
Rather, music must be so interpreted or it cannot even be heard.”91
Other musicologists, too, stipulate that musical criticism is opened
to the contingent and the historical.92 It has now become essential to
demonstrate that music was part of its context—cultural, political,
social, and so on—and how it was conditioned by this context. For
example, a work of music may be subject to “structuring structures”
that derive from its context—locally general dispositions, tenden-
cies, or cultural tropes, as Lawrence Kramer put it—or, as Karol
Berger suggested, it may structurally related to forms of “historical
consciousness” of the time.93 In New Historicism the work of art is
considered as “the product of negotiation between creator or class of
creators, equipped with a complex communally shared repertoire of

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

conventions, and the institutions and practices of society.”94 And just


as the appropriation and exchange are characteristic of any culture,
they are characteristic of a work of art as well. Musical meaning is
constructed in collective terms—cultural, social, linguistic, and the like.
The contextual approach has been blamed for its often unprob-
lematic approach to history—for merely making a gesture toward
history without really questioning its ontological and epistemological
status; that is, “without paying adequate attention to the ways in
which history itself was constructed and reconstructed both by those
who framed the original documents and those who later interpreted
them.”95 The “context” often becomes a repository of interesting
stories with no or limited connection to the work itself and serves to
make assumptions about the work’s meaning. The critical question
as to how representative such choices are, why one context should
be privileged over another, is not addressed—nor are such funda-
mental questions as to whether the work of music merely reflects or
in some sense reworks, remakes, or even reproduces the ideologies
and social texts it supposedly represents, and whether the social
contexts used to approach a musical work have themselves more
than the status of fictions.96 Similarly, the categories of gender,
class, ethnicity, and so on that are derived from such contexts may
be fictitious or not representative, or have limited applicability for
the given subject. Such constructed contexts can (and do) provide
grounds for any interpretation that the critic may fancy to offer to
the public, interpretations that contradict the promise of a contextual
approach—to demonstrate an “embeddedness” of music in history.
Most importantly, however, despite the acknowledged essential
interrelatedness of the author and his or her work, the contextual
approach largely ignores the issue of the authorial presence and
typically does not frame its premises and arguments within any
94. Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” Southern Review
(Adelaide) 20 (1987), 3–15. See also Greenblatt, “Culture,” Critical Terms for
Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990), 230–231.
95. Lynn Hunt, “History as Gesture: Or, The Scandal of History,” in Conse-
quences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore and London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 96 and 100. See also John Znammito, “Are
We Being Theoretical Yet? The New Historicism, the New Philosophy of History, and
‘Practicing Historians,’” Journal of Modern History 65 (1993), 783–814.
96. Jean Howard, “The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,” English
Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 31.
78 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

authorial lexicon, thus becoming similar to the very tradition it seeks


to defy. The author is absent from the contextual criticism because
there is a conceptual difficulty in making context the locus of mean-
ings of music (which implies decentering the author and an emphasis
on the unconscious, political, and cultural forces) and, at the same
time, accommodating an authorial presence (which implies restoring
the author—that is, the conscious and the intentional). It has been
argued that contextual criticism fails to recognize that the author is the
one category that clearly overlaps or conjoins text and context, and
passes from the text to its histories without properly acknowledging
that an authorial life and its work allow such a passage to be made.97
The proclamations of “the death of the author” and the ensuing
theoretical and philosophical debates made it all too obvious that the
author cannot simply be disposed of.98 As one writer put it, we may
see “the death of the author” as “a crisis within the impersonalizing
tradition, as the point where impersonality so oversteps the mark in
the direction of the reductio ad absurdum as to force its own breach
and to beckon something other than itself into being.”99 The decision
as to whether we listen to a piece of music with or without the
author, to paraphrase Seán Burke, remains an act of critical choice
governed by the protocols of a certain way of reading, rather than
any “truth of writing.” Consequently, authorial absence can never be
a cognitive statement about music and discourse in general, but
“only an intra-critical statement and one which has little to say about
authors themselves except in so far as the idea of authorship reflects
on the activity and status of the critic.”100 By the same token, the dif-
ficulty of incorporating biographical knowledge into music criticism
does not imply that such knowledge is irrelevant.101

97. Burke, The Death and Return of the Author, 203–204.


98. Directly related to biography are, for example, Burke, The Death and
Return of the Author; Dominick LaCapra, “Sartre and the Question of Biography,”
in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1983), 184–233; Stanley Fish, “Biography and Intention,” in Con-
testing the Subject, 9–15.
99. Burke, “Introduction,” xxiv.
100. Burke, The Death and Return of the Author, 176.
101. For example, the insistence that Schubert’s homosexuality is irrelevant
unless we can “translate” it into musical analysis. See James Webster, “Music,
Pathology, Sexuality, Beethoven, Schubert,” 19th-Century Music 17/1 (1993), 83–93;
Kofi Agawu, “Commentary: Schubert’s Sexuality: A Prescription for Analysis?”
19th-Century Music 17/1 (1993), 79–82.
MUSICAL BIOGRAPHY AND ITS DISCONTENTS 79

The recognition of authorial presence has implications for


contextual criticism: It can direct and focus such criticism and rectify
some of its unsettling elements. Eventually, biography can help to
establish the point of cohesion between the text and the context if
biography is understood not in terms of defining individual achieve-
ments or personality but as the participation in, and articulation of,
the discourses of a culture.102 The author becomes part of the
cultural system—just as does his or her work—and the author’s
subjectivity becomes inseparable from socially and culturally
constructed categories of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality, as
well as of the predominant concept of authorship and related
concepts of the self and of the art.

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

102. Ira B. Nadel, “Biography as a Cultural Discourse,” in Biography and


Source Studies, 74. See also Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 12.
103. For an insightful analysis of how language and narrative alter biography
from a fact-neutral to value-interpretative text, see, for example, Nadel, Biography:
Fiction, Fact and Form.
104. James Grier, The Critical Editing of Music: History, Method, and Practice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5.
80 JOLANTA T. PEKACZ

correcting errors in earlier biographical accounts, new studies are


needed as each age redefines itself and new questions come to be
asked of biography. Our moral and epistemological beliefs shift,
and our assessment of personality and behavior follow suit. So too
should our ideas about what biography can and should do. Just as
the concept and the purpose of biography have fluctuated over
time, rewriting biography from our own perspective appears as a
legitimate proposition.105
Recognizing the limits of the biographical undertaking also
enables us to recognize its potential. We no longer view the present
as the end point of an agreed-upon narrative of progress—a view of
history that fueled traditional biography’s emphasis on great men
and great deeds. With new methodological and cultural develop-
ments comes an insistence that biography has limited the fullness
of our culture’s memory.106 But biography can also be a means of
challenging and recasting that memory, and it is our challenge
to apply these new tools of biographical analysis to our writings in
musicology—to reassess the truth of our “truths.”
Perhaps what biography can do most successfully at this stage
of epistemological upheaval is, first, to reconsider its traditional
premises and, second, to historicize radically the subject through
analyzing the cultural web in which he or she functioned, viewing
the work of art as the product of the interaction between the com-
poser and the institutions and practices of society. Biography
conceived in this way may not unlock the mystery of the creative
process, but it can help us understand the roots of taste and success
in the various periods of history, and it can alter the content of the
master narratives we create in writing music history.

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.

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