Star of the First Magnitude: Schauroth's Renown as Virtuosa and Musical Genius

Since Schauroth is little known today (and is usually remembered in connection with Felix Mendelssohn), examining her reception and standing as an artist is crucial to grasping the meaningfulness of the comparison to Corinne, that archetype of the feminine artistic genius. As I demonstrate here, Schauroth developed a European renown through her travels to England and France. As early critics noted, she surpassed the musical expectations for a Wunderkind, such that estimations of her genius went beyond remarks on mere precocity. Indeed, reviewers noted her expressivity and creative powers as signs of her genius throughout her career, and critics held her to be equal to (or even above) other nineteenth-century pianists who are far better recognized today. Furthermore, her artistic reputation was sustained through many stages of her life, despite some prolonged absences from public performance.

Schauroth began performing in public as a nine-year-old child in 1822 and was immediately recognized as exceptional, even among Wunderkinder.Footnote ¹⁹ An acrostic poem by an anonymous Darmstadt poet, which spells out her first and last names in the original German, attests to the rarity of her talent and the early revelation of her genius:

In the first three lines of the poem, the young Schauroth's genius is aligned with the sublime and surprisingly masculine imagery of the ascendant eagle.Footnote ²¹ Admired for its command of great heights and associated with Zeus and Pindar (the ‘Theban Eagle’), the eagle was invoked by Romantic poets as a symbol of their artistic powers.Footnote ²² Rather than being carried aloft by the eagle – a Ganymede-figure or servant to the gods – Schauroth's upward-pressing, aquiline genius in this poem situates her in this artistic milieu. She is thus figured, even as a young girl, as an original creative genius.

Schauroth's debut in Germany was soon followed by an excursion to England, where her reception was no less fervent. In 1823, prior to her first public appearances in London, an enthusiastic introduction to Schauroth's talents in which her burgeoning genius was emphasized appeared in The European Magazine and London Review:

The critic further emphasizes her distinction as an artist by declaring that she is ‘richly endowed with intuitive genius’ due to the rare ‘sentiment and expression’ of her playing.Footnote ²⁴ In an account from London appearing later that year in the Zeitung für Theater, Musik, und bildende Künste, the critic reports that Schauroth played ‘not only with all technical precision, but her little fingers also betrayed through a meaningful touch and expressive marking, which often rose to enthusiasm, that within her a promising artist-genius developed with swift steps’ (‘nicht allein mit aller technischen Präcision, sondern ihre kleinen Fingerchen verriethen auch durch einen bedeutungsvollen Anschalg und ausdrucksvolle Markirung, die oft bis zur Begeisterung stieg, daβ sich in ihr ein hoffnungsreiches Künstler-Genie mit schnellen Schritten entwickelt’).Footnote ²⁵ In these and other pieces of reception from this stage of her career, Schauroth's artistic genius is associated with her deep expressivity and musical understanding, which defy the expectations that a child performer's precise technical abilities would render them little more than a musical automaton.Footnote ²⁶

In Paris, too, which was teeming with virtuosi in the 1820s, Schauroth did not fail to make an impression.Footnote ²⁷ In addition to a positive reception in the press – Le Miroir des Spectacles, des Lettres, des Moeurs et des Arts remarked on her ‘very singular precocity’Footnote ²⁸ – her performances in private homes drew remarks from prominent figures. In Stendhal's Vie de Rossini, for instance, the author frequently interrupts his central focus with observations about musical culture in the French capital. Amongst a discussion of the qualities of various opera singers and the status of music as the most powerful of the fine arts, he proclaims in an aside that ‘Mademoiselle de Schauroth, nine years old and a famous pianist, foretells all the madness of genius’.Footnote ²⁹ Stendhal expresses a similar opinion of Schauroth in a note to Victor Jacquemont, though in less romantic terms and perhaps recalling the phrenological interest in young musical geniuses that Schauroth inspired earlier: ‘Come to Mme Pasta's at 10 o'clock … There will be Paer, Mlle Paer, Mme Gilbing and, above all, Mlle Shauraw [sic], a German with a big head like Mozart and who plays the piano at nine years old like Dussek at 40.Footnote ³⁰ In addition to the comparison to Dussek, by measuring her head against Mozart's, Stendhal's alludes to Schauroth's exceptional musical (and perhaps creative) powers.

Schauroth's wide recognition in the Paris of the mid 1820s, beyond the circles that assembled in the homes of artists, is further suggested by a lithograph of the young virtuosa in profile by the Parisian studio of Langlumé (Fig. 2).Footnote ³¹ In response to the vogue for collectible lithographic portrait prints that swept Paris in the 1820s, studios such as Langlumé rapidly produced images of prominent individuals – such as artists, scientists and political figures – who captured the attention of the public.Footnote ³² As such, sitting for a lithographic portrait was somewhat of a rite of passage for celebrated artists in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ³³ The epigraph to the portrait, taken from Tasso's Gerusalemme conquistata, speaks to Schauroth's captivating presence as an artist and suggests her originality. Excerpted from a description of music in the garden of Armida, the lines translate to: ‘The others fell silent to listen intently/And the winds stopped the whispers in the air’ (‘tacquero gli altri ad ascoltare intenti, / e fermaro i susurri in aria i venti’).Footnote ³⁴ By drawing a comparison with Armida, the lithograph places Schauroth within the lineage of women, including the fictional Corinne, who are endowed with powers of creation. In the novel, Corinne is aligned with Armida by her lover to be, Lord Nelvil, for both her genius and her alluring nature.Footnote ³⁵ Armida is also used in the discourse on genius as a figure ‘endowed with the powers of creation ex nihilo’, as Dale Townshend and Angela Wright point out. They note that Edward Young, in his influential treatise on genius Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), writes that, ‘the pen of an Original writer, like Armida's wand, out of a barren waste calls a blooming spring’.Footnote ³⁶ As we shall see, the depiction of Schauroth's pianistic creative powers as magical is also evident in her reception in the late 1820s and early 1830s.

Fig. 2 Lithograph of Delphine von Schauroth by Langlumé

As encountered previously in comments about Schauroth's precocity, throughout her early career comparisons of her abilities to those of the foremost mature performers, in addition to other youthful sensations, were common. In a remark similar to Stendhal's, The European Magazine and London Review reported in 1823 that ‘Paer describes her as a performer equal to Moschelles [sic], although she is only nine years of age!’Footnote ³⁷ Undoubtedly, the artist against whom her abilities were most often measured was Franz Liszt, who was one and a half years her senior and who had made his public Viennese debut in 1822, not long after she had made hers in Mannheim.Footnote ³⁸ A critic from Eos, Zeitschrift aus Bayern, for instance, attempted to capture her robust virtuosity by calling her a ‘golden-locked female Liszt’ (‘goldgelockte weibliche Liszt’), remarking on her ‘strength and perseverance’ (‘Kraft und Ausdauer’), which could not be expected from ‘an earthly ten-year-old girl’ (‘einem irdischen 10jährigen Mädchen’).Footnote ³⁹ However, it was just as common for Schauroth and Liszt to be treated as equally talented contemporaries at this early stage. As a correspondent from Paris for the Abend-Zeitung reports in 1825: ‘since I am writing about music, the wonderful pair, the likes of whom the world has probably never seen, comes to mind. All of the papers speak unanimously of the extraordinary talents of the eleven-and-a-half-year-old Mlle. Schauroth and the thirteen-year-old Lizt [sic]. Both give concerts on the piano and stand almost alongside the greatest masters’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed, such was her reputation as a young virtuosa, that when Franz Liszt was introduced to the Munich public in the journal Flora in 1823, his abilities were compared to hers.Footnote ⁴¹

Schauroth's renown and standing as an artist only flourished to a greater degree as she began to outgrow the label of Wunderkind. In 1825, Schauroth was ranked among the greatest so-called German pianists who were in Paris at the time (including Hummel, Moscheles, Kalkbrenner, Liszt, the Herz brothers and Pixis) by the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.Footnote ⁴² By the late 1820s, various publications, including the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, agreed that she held a place among the most outstanding pianists.Footnote ⁴³

It is even more remarkable that Schauroth's renown flourished in the late 1830s and early 1840s, when her public performance was impeded by class constraints to a greater extent after she had reached womanhood – and possibly further inhibited after her reputation had been damaged by her separation from her first husband.Footnote ⁴⁴ After an apparent hiatus from public performances for several years during her first marriage to Edwin Hill-Handley, she returned to the stage for several concerts in 1837 and performed sporadically thereafter.Footnote ⁴⁵ According to some accounts, her artistry had only improved: in a Munich concert for the Beethoven monument in 1837, Schauroth performed an unnamed Beethoven concerto, and a critic responded that, ‘those who heard Frau v. Hill-Handley-Schauroth play in the past must doubly admire the extraordinary mastery in relation to the enormous difficulties [of the work], and the clarity and feeling of the performance, which this true artist has since then achieved to a much higher degree’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Her reception in the journal Der Bazar für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Geselligkeit for her participation in a benefit concert not only lauds her abilities, but also attests to her wide recognition: ‘where enormous technique is united with deep, eternally beautiful feelings in such a high degree, the highest has been achieved … Mrs. von Hill-Handley, née von Schauroth, has through artistic merit won great respect and a widespread reputation, not only in Munich, but almost in the whole wide world’.Footnote ⁴⁷

At this point, her status as one of the great virtuoso pianists seems to have been firmly established. An 1839 article about contemporary piano playing and composition in the Wiener Zeitung, for instance, speaks to the abundance of exceptional, nearly equally skilled pianists and lists the foremost examples: ‘Thalberg, Liszt, Henselt, Döhler, Taubert – yes, even a number of women artists, at their peak Delphine Handley-Schauroth, who unfortunately made her exit from the public arena a while ago, emblazon this horizon as stars of the first magnitude’ (‘Thalberg, Liszt, Henselt, Döhler, Taubert – ja selbst eine Reihe von Künstlerinen, die leider vom Schauplatze der Oeffentlichkeit abgetretene Delphine Handley-Schauroth noch vor Kurzem an ihrer Spitze, schmücken als Sterne erster Größe diesen Horizont’).Footnote ⁴⁸ In the 1841 edition of the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon, too, she is one of the few women pianists to earn the distinction of being included in the entry on virtuosi, although here, perhaps because she is regarded as having retired from public performance, Clara Wieck Schumann and Marie Pleyel are recognized as the leading women.Footnote ⁴⁹

After two additional short-lived marriages and the withdrawals from public performance that accompanied them, Schauroth re-emerged in 1861, some twenty years after she had last appeared publicly.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although the musical press assumed the task of reintroducing her to the public, it would appear that her strong reputation endured the years of silence. Among musicians, including Ignaz Moscheles, Ferdinand Hiller, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Franz Liszt, her talents were still highly regarded.Footnote ⁵¹

Like Stäel's Corinne, Schauroth experienced wide renown and critical recognition. While the recent surge of research on Clara Schumann around the bicentenary of her birth is most welcome (the author of the present article has contributed to it, to a small extent), we must be careful not to let it obscure other artists who are less well known.Footnote ⁵² Although Schauroth's performance career was certainly not as sustained as Schumann's, nor was she as productive as a published composer, from the late 1820s until the early 1840s her reputation was truly dazzling, and some publications placed her above Schumann. That Schauroth is virtually unknown today speaks more to the workings of history than to her renown in the nineteenth century. From her first public appearances in childhood, Schauroth was an exceptionally highly acclaimed pianist. The remarks by critics explored above invoke genius in relation to her inner engagement with music, her artistic maturity and the sublime power of her artistry as a performer; but only occasionally do they hint at her reception as a creator. As we will see, this aspect of the understanding of Schauroth's character as a pianist flourished in the late 1820s and early 1830s.

Art-Magic: Schauroth as Creator

Although Corinne is a performing artist, she is exceptional as a woman in that she is first and foremost understood as creative, rather than reproductive.Footnote ⁵³ This holds true even as the novel depicts her performing not only her original improvisations, but also the works of others.Footnote ⁵⁴ From the earliest days of her musical career, Schauroth, too, was understood in this way. I begin by examining the most apparent evidence of her reputation as a creative artist: pieces of music criticism that feature comments about Schauroth's performances of her own works or that mention her work as a composer, and the role of composition in her relationship with Felix Mendelssohn. I then turn to the reception of Schauroth as a pianist in the late 1820s and early 1830s and suggest that, at this point in her career, critics often depict her pianism as an active, creative force, even in her performances of works by other composers.

Although many reviews of Schauroth's performances do not note her repertoire at all, thus making it difficult to determine the extent to which she played her own compositions, scattered mentions of such performances throughout her career suggest that she may have featured her own works with some regularity. An early indication that Schauroth was regarded not only as a performer, but also in terms of her own compositional artistry can be seen in a review in The London Magazine from 1823, which reports that Schauroth ‘played some of the most difficult pieces of our masters, as well as her own, in a manner to satisfy the ablest professors’.Footnote ⁵⁵ A review from 1829 again remarks upon the difficulty of her repertoire and notes that in addition to works by Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Herz and Pixis, she performed her own ‘just as difficult as artfully composed variations’ (‘eben so schwierig, als kunstvoll componierte eigne Variationen’).Footnote ⁵⁶

The compositions mentioned in these early reviews have not survived. As only snippets of Schauroth's papers have been preserved, it is difficult to know how much she composed, but sources indicate that she published at least three works: the Sonate brilliante (1834), a Caprice in B flat minor (1836) and Sechs Lieder ohne Worte, Op. 18 (1870).Footnote ⁵⁷ The opus number of the latter collection suggests that she composed quite a few other works prior to 1870. In addition, there are a number of musical autograph album pieces that have been preserved.Footnote ⁵⁸

Since Schauroth was not a prolific composer, her reception requires some context. When she published the Sonate brilliante in 1834, Schauroth joined the small handful of women who had published a piano sonata in the early nineteenth century, an act that must have signalled her serious ambitions as a composer and that flouted gendered expectations to compose in small-scale genres, such as the character piece or Lied.Footnote ⁵⁹ After the publication of her Sonate brilliante (1834) and Caprice (1836), which received favourable reviews, her status as a composer-performer was reinforced and seems to have flourished even years after these publications.Footnote ⁶⁰ A review of a Berlin appearance in 1863, for instance, mentions these pieces in an account of her artistic credentials and calls both of them ‘rich and full of feeling’ (‘gehaltvoll und empfunden’).Footnote ⁶¹ Although it is unclear which of her compositions she performed at a concert in Heidelberg in 1861, the review of this event notes that ‘as a result of sustained storms of applause, she delighted us with another piece of her own composition, which not only attested to the extraordinary pianist, but also to her extremely outstanding talent for composition’ (‘in Folge anhaltenden Beifallssturms erfreute sie uns mit noch einem Stücke eigener Komposition, welches nicht allein die auβerordentlicher Pianistin, sondern auch deren höchst hervorragendes Talent zur Komposition bekundete’).Footnote ⁶² Even in her final years of performance, when her reception as a pianist was more mixed, her compositional work was met with admiration, as in an 1870 review in the Signale für die musikalische Welt that notes the charming quality of some of her Lieder ohne Worte.Footnote ⁶³ Attesting to her standing, the Berliner Tonkünstlerverein included her work in its concert series in the 1868–69 season.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1870 she was made a member of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein for her work as a composer.Footnote ⁶⁵

As her work within the genre of the Lied ohne Worte might suggest, compositional exchange was integral to Schauroth's earlier connection with Felix Mendelssohn. Schauroth and Mendelssohn wrote Lieder ohne Wörte for each other in the early 1830s, and while Mendelssohn's was incorporated into his first published collection in that genre, Schauroth's tarried in its ephemeral status as a musical album-leaf composition, and it was only in 1870 that her Op. 18, a collection of six Lieder ohne Worte, released it into the public.Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition, Mendelssohn's dedication of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 25 to Schauroth may have acknowledged her involvement in the work, beyond her inspiring skills as a pianist: a letter to his family written on 6 October 1831 notes that she contributed a passage to the work that he characterized as ‘ring[ing] out powerfully’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indeed, years later, a critic for Berlinische Nachrichten reported that Mendelssohn used to jokingly referred to Schauroth as ‘my favourite fabricator of passagework’ (‘mein lieb Passaginfabrikantin’), alluding to her facility for creating spectacularly virtuosic piano passages.Footnote ⁶⁸

While Schauroth's strong reputation as a performer-creator is evident in the reception of her compositions and their role in her musical relationships, responses to her pianism, too, ardently depict her as a creative artist. Particularly in her first period of maturity, in the late 1820s and early 1830s, critics responded to her playing by invoking images of creation and magic. While the reception of Schauroth's pianism as magical doubtlessly reflects the tendency of early nineteenth-century music criticism toward fantastic imagery, I am primarily interested in how critics use magic to suggest Schauroth's creative powers.Footnote ⁶⁹ As suggested earlier, figures such as the sorceress Armida were invoked as icons of original genius, rendering magic a particularly fitting image of creation by a woman artist.

Critics also emphasized that Schauroth manifested her own spirit in performance, an equally significant aspect of her representation as a creative artist. Prior to the backlash against virtuoso pianism and the dominance of the Werktreue ideal, critics did not necessarily desire to hear a transparent performance of a work.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, Mary Hunter has shown that, beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the early nineteenth, the aesthetic discourse on performance regarded the interpretive performer ‘as a fully fledged artist on a par with the composer’.Footnote ⁷¹ Within this early romantic ideal of performance, while the artist is expected to reproduce the composer's work, they are also asked to re-create it compellingly by ‘developing and displaying a unitary consciousness that merged [their] own subjectivity with the composer's’.Footnote ⁷²

Alexander Stefaniak has examined how the reception of Clara Schumann as a pianist reflects this ideal, and how critics present Schumann as having achieved an exceptional revelatory power, bringing forth the work's essence or the spirit of the composer through her ‘understanding, sensitivity, memory, and conscious devotion’.Footnote ⁷³ In some cases, commentators go so far as to imagine approving apparitions of eminent composers.Footnote ⁷⁴ The contrast in the reception of Schauroth is striking, though one must recall that the height of her prominence precedes Stefaniak's focal point of the 1840s and beyond.Footnote ⁷⁵ Never is there an emphasis on the composer, the work, or devotion leading to revelation; instead, there is Schauroth herself, her genius in performance, her creative power.Footnote ⁷⁶ While much of the reception of Schauroth is in line with the ideal that Hunter presents, with Schauroth depicted as penetrating deeply into the spirit of the composition, some fervent responses to Schauroth as a performer in the late 1820s and early 1830s accentuate her performance of her own interiority and her perceived remaking of the work to such an extent that the composer is somewhat effaced (or, occasionally, not even mentioned).Footnote ⁷⁷ In some examples, this reception could be regarded as occupying the extreme end of the early Romantic ideal, but in others, Schauroth's perceived creative role seems to surpass the limits of this co-creative model, in which hearing the presence of the composer is crucial.

One such instance of a critic imagining Schauroth's performance as an act of creation appears in an 1833 issue of Der Bazar für München und Bayern. Likely written by noted wit Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, editor of this journal, the review responds to a concert featuring Hummel's Piano Concerto in A minor:

Here, the critic admires that which is ephemeral and created through performance as a reflection of Schauroth herself, instead of seeking an enduring essence of the work. Rather than foregrounding the concerto or the composer, the critic emphasizes how Schauroth's genius penetrates the work, enlivening it, and how her own personality, perfectly displayed in her performance, comprises the substance of what is conveyed to the audience. The critic underscores the transformative power of her pianism, which, for him, essentially creates a new work from the raw material of Hummel's concerto. As Hunter explains, some early nineteenth-century thinkers such as Hegel assert that musicians of genius and virtuosity seem to create the work ‘anew’ in performance, but the vehemence of the critic's claim that Schauroth creates a work that is ‘entirely new, never heard before’ is striking and unexpected even within this context.Footnote ⁷⁹

Just as the previous review spoke of the ‘new magic’ that Schauroth's genius imparted upon the concerto, so too does a response to her performance of Beethoven's ‘Emperor’ Concerto, Op. 73, depict her pianism as an act of enchantment:

Perhaps due to the colossal standing of Beethoven's ‘Emperor’ Concerto, this review makes some acknowledgement of the performed work, most notably through the reverent association with the Iliad, but also in that, here, Schauroth's act of summoning is met by spirits that emerge from the strings, suggesting that she is drawing something enduring out of the piano rather than only suffusing the work with her own genius. Even in the performance of so august a work, though, there remains a marked impression that she is contributing to its creation and transmitting her own presence. Indeed, the question posed to the reviewer – ‘How did you like Schauroth?’ – speaks to her command as a performer. This entwining of her own artistry and personality with the work is further emphasized in the critic's overwhelmed comment that he ‘just saw the Graces dance the Iliad on the piano with [his] own ears!’ Here, the great masculine epic is transformed, remade, such that the critic must invoke the feminine dance of the Graces to encompass his experience of the performance through a multi-sensory image of co-creation.

Addressing Schauroth's creative powers more pianistically, the remark about the soul residing in the fingertips that begins the review might suggest that her performance was understood as having an improvisatory spirit. In George Sand's Consuelo (1842), the title character, an opera singer (herself based on Corinne), enjoins a student to ‘try to improvise something, whether with the violin or the voice. It is thus that the soul manifests itself at the tip of the lips or the fingers’.Footnote ⁸¹ This passage suggests that the expression is linked with the improvisatory and, furthermore, that improvisation involves transmitting one's soul. Indeed, the review continues to develop that imagery with the impression that Schauroth is playing directly on the strings, such that her own soul flows with immediacy from fingers to strings and wakens the secret spirits of the piano and the work. At issue here is not whether Schauroth was actually improvising, but rather that critics heard her performance as though it was created in the moment, a manifestation of her soul.Footnote ⁸²

The emphasis on Schauroth's artistic vision is even more pronounced in a review in Aurora, Zeitschrift aus Bayern from 1829. After proclaiming that Schauroth brought the audience ‘to rapture and enthusiasm through her own art-magic’, the critic develops an image of Schauroth that accentuates her creative powers and the immediacy of her performance:

Although the review concludes with a reference to her attractiveness, an evaluative component that was nearly inescapable for women pianists in the nineteenth century, the critic speaks of Schauroth in near-authorial terms throughout.Footnote ⁸⁴ The work and composer are unstated and, indeed, it is Schauroth's ‘inspired conception’ of the piece that is emphasized, with accounts of her ‘own art-magic’ affecting the audience and analogies to the building of dream-kingdoms. This foregrounding of the pianist as creator culminates in an astonishing reference to Schauroth as ‘the master’ [‘Meisterin’]. As Mary Hunter notes, early-Romantic ‘admonitions to follow the intentions of the composer’ sometimes included figuring him as ‘The Master’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In this context, to apply the title to a performer – and to feminize it – seems doubly astounding.

The critic also emphasizes the inwardness and immediacy of Schauroth's performance style, invoking feeling, dreams and that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century staple, the Aeolian harp.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the review, the critic imagines Schauroth bypassing the tactile keys of the piano in favour of spontaneous song emerging directly from the strings. This paints an image of the direct and improvisatory spirit of her pianism and further suggests, by momentarily turning the piano into a harp, a link to Corinne and the tradition of the poetic improvisor. Indeed, the comparison of Schauroth to the ‘Phantaste’ suggests a further link to the improvisatory through phantasieren.

Although Schauroth largely performed works by other composers, both her contemporaneous reputation as a composer and her reception as a pianist support that she was understood as a creative artist. While she published little, the ambitious and expressive nature of her works made enough of a mark that she was recognized as a composer throughout her career. The reception of Schauroth as a performer, especially in the 1820s and 30s, also depicts her as a creative force through allusions to magical creation, references to her ability to transform a work in performance (or to fashion a seemingly new one), little emphasis on or outright omission of the composer and an understanding of the performed work as an expression of her own spirit.

Corinna-Sister: Schauroth, Improvisation and the Improvisatory

While some of the above reviews of Schauroth's performances suggest that her pianism was understood by critics as having an improvisatory spirit – through allusions to improvisation, depictions of the immediacy of her performances and references to dreams, inspired states and the Aeolian harp – they do not necessarily attest to the inclusion of actual improvised musical content. However, other sources unequivocally bear witness to Schauroth improvising at the piano, the artistic practice that connects her most explicitly with Corinne the improvvisatrice. In this section, I first discuss Schauroth's practice of improvisation in relation to that of Corinne. I suggest that the array of settings, materials and scopes evident in the performances of the improvvisatrice can provide a varied and inclusive model of improvisation that elucidates how Schauroth could have been understood by contemporaries as an improvisor. However, Corinne's improvisations provide no such analogue for Schauroth's compositions. With regard to her compositional work, the second focal point of this section, Corinne is invoked more loosely by Robert Schumann to suggest Schauroth's creative prowess and improvisatory style. I show how multiple reviews of Schauroth's musical works frame her style in relation to the improvisatory and use the critics’ observations as a point of entry for my own examination of Schauroth's compositions.

Musical improvisation became an increasingly marked practice as the nineteenth century progressed; it was doubly so when performed by a woman. Writing of the eighteenth-century discourse on the fantasia genre, Annette Richards remarks that it ‘tends to be gender-specific – the fantasia is considered the music of genius, and as such it is generally the domain of men, both as performers and as listeners’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Kordula Knaus notes that in Vienna around the year 1800 women pianists performed their own compositions, but the improvised free fantasia was overwhelmingly the realm of male virtuosi.Footnote ⁸⁸ By the early nineteenth century, not much had changed: the young Clara Wieck was considered exceptional for her ability to improvise.Footnote ⁸⁹ If early nineteenth-century musical culture was still grappling with the ability of women to compose, then improvisation, an act that shone a spotlight on the act of in-the-moment authorship, would naturally have been arresting. In this context, a woman pianist who improvised – even to a limited extent – would have been noteworthy.

What constitutes improvisation, if Corinne is invoked as a model? Corinne's most discussed improvisations are her three original, extended, public poems (her ‘Last Song’ and the performances at the Capitol and Miseno), which Staël uses to punctuate dramatic moments in the narrative and includes, transformed into prose, in the text. Indeed, it is these performances that most inspired real-life imitators of Corinne. However, throughout the novel Corinne's improvisations and her reflections on this practice encompass a range of improvisatory acts, even extending to include music and dance.Footnote ⁹⁰ For instance, if Corinne's activity as a musical improvisor is considered, then during her extended poetic improvisation at Miseno she engages in preluding and interluding on her lyre, a practice that translates well to the short improvised passages early nineteenth-century pianists sometimes created to introduce or connect works.Footnote ⁹¹ Earlier in the novel, Corinne reflects on her practice of improvisation at a small gathering, presenting it as a ‘lively conversation’ inspired by the interests of friends. On this occasion, she frames improvisation as a pursuit that is neither necessarily purely individual, nor public, but rather one that is potentially collaborative and domestic or semi-public.Footnote ⁹² Furthermore, in conversation with Lord Nelvil, Corinne elucidates the diverse materials of her improvisations, explaining that she sometimes generates them from the inspired interweaving of quotations, her own thoughts and the music of her lyre.Footnote ⁹³

This varied understanding of improvisation – beyond an extended, individual, public performance – allows it to hold its integral looseness, to be something ephemeral and shape-shifting. Furthermore, these multiple facets to Corinne's improvisation are particularly relevant for women's improvisatory practice at the piano in the nineteenth century. It would seem that few nineteenth-century women pianists are known to have consistently engaged in extensive improvisations in public settings.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is possible, then, that holding these characteristics of publicness and substantial length as the epitome of improvisation could further emphasize its masculinity. However, if Corinne's varied practice of improvisation is taken as a model, then we can better understand how women such as Schauroth held reputations as improvisatory artists. After all, Corinne was not only the embodiment of romantic spontaneous authorship, but also represented a concerted attempt by Madame de Staël to create a feminine artistic genius.Footnote ⁹⁵

As a student of Kalkbrenner, Schauroth presumably would have received training in improvisation: he was an advocate for its necessity and wrote a treatise on the subject.Footnote ⁹⁶ Although there is not an extensive record of Schauroth in letters or diaries, in the few extant sources that speak to her private life, there is some suggestion that she practised improvisation in domestic settings. When Fanny Hensel was travelling through Munich in 1839 to embark on her sojourn in Italy, she met Schauroth and described her first impressions in a letter to Felix Mendelssohn: ‘I also want to tell you that I met Delphine Handley, and with great pleasure. She is an enchanting person and a splendid talent. Aside from you, I've never heard anyone play your first Concerto so well. … What especially pleased me about her playing is her elegant preluding, which one finds so seldom in women.’Footnote ⁹⁷ In this letter, Hensel refers to the practice of preluding, which either denotes improvising an introduction for an existing composition or creating a freestanding improvisation in the spirit of a prelude.Footnote ⁹⁸ Whichever practice Hensel refers to here, she makes it evident that Schauroth distinguishes herself through these abilities.

Schauroth's improvisation is also noted in three markedly different reviews of one of her final public concerts, a full recital of solo piano works in honour of the late Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in 1870. Two critics point to her highly ‘mannered’ style of performance, which may have been an indication of changing tastes or of deteriorating abilities.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, the reviews diverge significantly in their understanding of her incorporation of improvisation. In Europa-Chronik, her improvisatory practice is met with bewilderment and derision:

The critic takes a strong stance on her pianism by decrying her ‘corruption’ of the works, but also, in his outrage, provides a fairly detailed account of her practice of improvisation. The description of Schauroth ‘leaping about’ between the selected works and making omissions, additions, changes and adding decorative material or framing indicates that the recital included a significant amount of improvised material, and that Schauroth found opportunities to improvise – beyond the practice of preluding – to the extent that the critic objected to her trespassing on the inviolability of the musical works. From these comments, we can understand that Schauroth took a pronounced improvisatory approach in the recital, even if the result was heretical in the eyes of some critics.

Two other reviewers comment more favourably on the same concert. According to the critic for the Signale für die musikalische Welt:

It is not clear whether the ‘mannerisms and distortions’ here refer to her playing style in general (such as conspicuous use of tempo and dynamic fluctuations), or whether they might also encompass some of the improvisatory practice that struck the other reviewer as so offensive to good taste. However, this reviewer reacts approvingly to the ‘charming’ and ‘sustained’ improvisations that Schauroth incorporated into her performance of short works by Chopin.

Finally, a critic for Die Tonhalle further corroborates that Schauroth's improvised material was quite extensive: ‘the fantasy with which she had to fill in the intervals between the individual pieces testified to a rich education and a deep wealth of ideas’ (‘die Phantasie, womit sie die Intervallen zwischen den einzelnen Piecen ausfüllen mußte, zeugten von reicher Bildung und einem tiefen Ideenschatze’).Footnote ¹⁰² Far from suggesting that Schauroth was flailing haphazardly at the keys due to her deteriorating abilities, like the critic in Europa-Chronik, this reviewer recognizes her performance as falling within the tradition of phantasieren and lauds her skill and inventiveness.

It is possible that these late reviews capture an aspect of Schauroth's earlier public performance practice that was not explicitly commented upon at the time. If an improvisatory relationship to musical works through preludes, interludes, transitional material, and insertions was more acceptable or even commendable in the first half of the nineteenth century, critics might not have found the need to describe, or even mention, an established practice. It may be (though it is impossible to know) that the reviews encountered earlier in this article, which responded so rapturously to her pronounced presence as an artist by summoning up images of creation and magic, were reacting, in part, to her fluency with improvisatory practices such as these. Yet, even from the unambiguous accounts of improvisation from Fanny Hensel and these late reviews, it is evident that, like Corinne's practice, Schauroth's included both public and private performances, and encompassed varied approaches to improvisation.

The responses of critics to Schauroth's work as a composer mirror the reception of her performances: virtuosic, deeply expressive and improvisatory. In examining the reviews of Schauroth's compositions in this section, I focus particularly on critics’ evocations of the improvisatory. This is not to say that Schauroth's works were more improvisatory than those of some of her contemporaries, or that they even necessarily reflect her practice of improvisation (without contemporaneous written accounts on this subject, it is unwise to conjecture), but simply that critics consistently identified this characteristic as integral to her style. While some nineteenth-century reviews of compositions point unambiguously to specific passages, whether due to the inclusion of score examples or to detailed descriptions of musical moments, the shorter reviews of Schauroth's work, while evocative, tend to comment on the piece or movement as a whole. Since my aim in this article is not only to examine Schauroth's reception, but also, through this lens, her artistic character, I use some of the commentary in the reviews as an opening through which to examine Schauroth's compositions further, while being careful not to confuse my observations with those of the critic.

A trace of Schauroth's Caprice (published, but not preserved)Footnote ¹⁰³ remains in Robert Schumann's 1836 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik review, in which it is considered amongst an assortment of contemporaneously released caprices and fantasies:

Schumann begins by addressing Schauroth's work in a fragmentary manner: his turn to her piece in the review (‘But is it bestowed …’) is abruptly disconnected from the ideas in the previous section, perhaps reflecting the fleeting, ephemeral character of Schauroth's reviewed work.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In his review, we hear echoes of the prior reception of her performances through Schumann's allusions to luminosity and deep musical feeling, and to the improvisatory through the reference to dream states.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

A different Caprice in F minor by Schauroth, preserved in the Schumanns's musical autograph album, might provide additional insight about her approach to the genre. Furthermore, her return to the caprice suggests that she felt some affinity for the spontaneous rhetoric of the genre, which was often compared to the free fantasia.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Indeed, the album-leaf Caprice stays true to the spirit of the genre by showcasing evanescent musical ideas. The Maestoso e lento opening section, with its rolled chords suggestive of the improvisor's harp, sparse chordal support and free-flowing melody with occasional dotted rhythms gives way to a con fuoco agitato passage with the right hand primarily playing octaves over a halting and irregular semiquaver left hand part. The improvisatory character of Schauroth's style can be found, in particular, in the acceleration of this section into a short a piacere passage that temporarily abandons the time signature and invites the pianist to perform in a rhythmically free manner (Ex. 1). The fragmentary piece breaks off in the midst of a moderato e languoroso section, with an unexpected D major seventh chord as the final sonority. With multiple changes of character, figuration and tempo within its forty-bar span, the album-leaf provides a sense of Schauroth's improvisatory treatment of the caprice genre.

Ex. 1 Delphine von Schauroth, Caprice in F minor, bars 28–30

Schumann's response to the character of Schauroth's compositional work is made more explicit in his 1835 review of her Sonate brilliante, mentioned at the beginning of this article for its reference to Corinne. In one section of this longer review, Schumann writes:

Although Schumann is patronizing in portions of the review, his description of Schauroth's music as ‘the most feminine that one can imagine’ moves away from the comments that immediately precede it and is better understood in relation to both the Corinne figure and his comment later in the review that Schauroth and Clara Wieck will be two Amazons among the Romantics.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In looking to improvvisatrice and warriors as models of femininity, Schumann seems to comment on the unconventionality and robust physicality of the sonata.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This is also suggested by the gendered genre associations that Schumann raises: by leaving aside the piano miniature and composing a sonata (invoked through their visual counterparts of ‘miniature painting’ and the historical or epic ‘life-sized picture’), Schauroth makes an ambitious move that distinguishes her among contemporary women composers.Footnote ¹¹¹ Indeed, as Matthew Head writes with regard to Fanny Hensel's ‘Scottish’ Sonata in G Minor (1843), ‘The sonata was a liminal genre for women, at once a staple of performance, but not securely within a female compositional orbit’.Footnote ¹¹²

When Schumann calls Schauroth a Corinna-sister, aligning her with that icon of feminine ephemeral authorship, he contextualizes this appellation by emphasizing the moment-by-moment quality of her music: ‘Nothing but the moment, the present sounds forth from it’. As with the caprice genre, in this ‘brilliant’ sonata, Schauroth has selected a style conducive to capturing the spirit of improvisation.Footnote ¹¹³ Although Schumann does not specify what creates this impression for him, another critic, writing for the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode, provides observations about the Sonate brilliante that complement Schumann's statements. Read together, the responses of the two critics suggest how the formal, harmonic, expressive and gestural features of the sonata contribute to its improvisatory character.

Schauroth's atypical approach to formal and harmonic structure is more explicitly noted by the reviewer in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode. Regarding the first movement in C minor, the reviewer observes that it is ‘more a free fantasy than a regulated Allegro in the usual form’ (‘mehr eine freye Phantasie als ein geregeltes Allegro in gewöhnlicher Form’), invoking an improvisatory genre to convey Schauroth's departures from the strictures of sonata form.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Rather than attacking Schauroth for diverging from formal conventions, though, the reviewer admits that Schauroth has other artistic goals.Footnote ¹¹⁵ One marked aspect of Schauroth's approach to structure is her frequent movement between the two main keys of the exposition, C minor and F minor, instead of associating them with their own thematic material. The opening of the movement, indeed, immediately presents the opposing keys, with the C minor material of bars two to five reappearing in F minor in bars six to nine (Ex. 2). Passages such as bars 46–55 showcase Schauroth's fluid movement between the keys, with a brief reference to C minor in bars 50–53 in the midst of the prevailing F minor theme (Ex. 3).

Ex. 2 Delphine von Schauroth, Sonate brilliante, mvt i, bars 1–9

Ex. 3 Delphine von Schauroth, Sonate brilliante, mvt i, bars 46–55

Another departure from convention, following a precedent set by Beethoven, is the placement of the scherzo and trio in the second movement position. Schauroth contrasts the vigorous energy of the scherzo with the lighter trio, which threatens to trip up the pianist with its repeated notes (Ex. 4). Perhaps with reference to the mood and virtuosity of the movement, the reviewer in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode comments that the scherzo is, ‘like the first and last movements of the sonata, full of blazing fire’. (‘gleich dem ersten und letzten Satz der Sonate voll aufsprühenden Feuers’).Footnote ¹¹⁶ As suggested earlier, the virtuosity of the brilliant style is associated with the improvisatory, and is evident especially in the passages of the trio that reference the perpetuum mobile device (albeit with some pauses).Footnote ¹¹⁷

Ex. 4 Delphine von Schauroth, Sonate brilliante, mvt ii, bars 57–72

Schauroth's decision to compose the finale in E flat major, rather than C minor, the assumed prevailing tonic of the sonata, is perhaps her most unexpected move. This work might be, in fact, among the earliest examples of progressive tonality in a sonata cycle, and attests to her innovative approach to composition.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The critic in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode struggled with the striking departures from convention in the Sonate brilliante, writing that, ‘When we remarked above that the talented author (especially in the first and last movements) deviated from the usual form, we should in no way be taken to mean that we wanted to advocate a certain stereotypical manner’ (‘Wenn wir oben bemerkten, daß die talentvolle Verfasserinn (besonders im ersten und letzten Satze) von der gewöhnlichen Form abgewichen sey, so möchten wir keineswegs dafür angesehen seyn, als wollten wir einer gewissen stereotypen Manier’).Footnote ¹¹⁹ However, he continues by remarking that classical models, as a loose basis for imitation, can help to provide ‘an inner necessary connection of the parts and a beneficial symmetrical relationship between them’ (‘ein innerer nothwendiger Zusammenhang der Theile und ein wohlthuendes symmetrisches Verhältniß derselben zu einander’).Footnote ¹²⁰ While Schauroth's Sonate brilliante creates the impression of a free and improvisatory character in part through unexpected harmonic choices, the work as a whole builds its own network of harmonic coherence. Although the reviewer notes that the sonata attests to Schauroth's ‘full knowledge of harmony, which in the first and last movement is almost made too evident through heaps of modulations’, (‘von voller Kenntniß der Harmonie, welche sich im ersten und letzten Satze durch gehäufte Modulationen fast zu sehr kund gibt’),Footnote ¹²¹ he seems to understand these modulations not as creating connections between the movements, but rather as drawing the piece into the conventions of the fantasy genre.Footnote ¹²² However, the key areas of the movements create a chain of third relationships (F minor, A flat major, C minor, E flat major/E flat minor/E major, G major) with an especial saturation point at E flat/E (Table 1). Although the construction of the Sonate brilliante seems governed only by the passing whims of the pianist-composer, then, this surface experience of the work belies its intentional underpinnings.

Table 1. Key areas in Delphine von Schauroth's Sonate brilliante

The third movement, Adagio con molta espressione, provides an occasion to discuss how the expressive and gestural features of the sonata (and not only formal and harmonic concerns) also contribute to its improvisatory character. The reviewer in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode comments that this movement exhibits, ‘a noble song floating through the whole, in whose performance “a lot of expression” can actually be put’ (‘ein edler, durch das Ganze hinschwebender Gesang, in dessen Vortrag sich in der That “viel Ausdruck” legen läßt’).Footnote ¹²³ Accordingly, this movement leaves a lot of expressive space for the performer and might recall the oral poetry of the improvvisatrice more than the other movements. For instance, the opening of the movement, with its halting utterances separated by rests and punctuated by arpeggiated chords, suggests dramatic speech (Ex. 5). Furthermore, when the opening material returns developed in bar 51 it is introduced and interspersed with improvisatory flourishes, gestures that might stem from Schauroth's own improvisatory practice, or that recall the interweaving of Corinne's spoken dramatic statements with short interludes on the lyre (Ex. 6).

Ex. 5 Delphine von Schauroth, Sonate brilliante, mvt iii, bars 1–8

Ex. 6 Delphine von Schauroth, Sonate brilliante, mvt iii, bars 49–54

While the reviewer in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode seems to half-admire the audacious aspects of Schauroth's compositional style by bringing her work into conversation with Beethoven and musical genius, he reveals his preferences for more conventional adherence to form through his aversion to Beethoven's late style: ‘even Beethoven – to whom one does not want to deny the predicate “genius”, by which some understand an absolving of every rule – has observed [classical models of form] in all his works, with the exception of the last products of his imagination, which was sick like himself’.Footnote ¹²⁴ However, his overarching assessment of the work speaks to her superb talents not only as a composer, but also as a pianist:

This last remark about Schauroth's Sonate brilliante unites many elements of her portrait as a virtuosa, creator and improvisor. Critics lauded Delphine von Schauroth as a genius from her early days as a Wunderkind onward and placed her among the great virtuoso pianists. Her compositional abilities and approach to performance led critics to regard her as a creative artist. As a pianist, she could improvise, and as a composer, her style was understood as improvisatory. She was a Corinna-sister, but she was not Corinne; her work as a performer and composer bears the ‘stamp of the individual’ that, for Staël's Corinne, marks the true artist.Footnote ¹²⁶

Although we might wish that Schauroth had created more compositions or that more of them had been preserved, it would seem as though at least the illusion of the improvisatory was an integral aspect of her work, even when it was notated and published. Through Schauroth and her connection to the figure of Corinne, we might build a stronger context for the ways in which nineteenth-century women artists – whether fictional or actual – were understood across disciplines, add to our current understanding of the involvement of women musicians in the nineteenth-century improvisatory and grasp at some of the ephemeral wisps of this vital aspect of music making.