Musical Narratives as Pedagogical Instruments: Gendered Subjectivity and the Bildung of the Nineteenth Century Listener in Clara Schumann's and Franz Liszt's "Lorelei"

Resumen

The Lorelei myth, as mediated through Heinrich Heine's 1824 poem, became a quintessential canvas for projecting nineteenthcentury anxieties about feminine power. This article reframes the comparative analysis of Franz Liszt's (1841) and Clara Schumann's (1843) musical settings of "Lorelei" as a study in the history of musical education and cultural pedagogy. Moving beyond purely aesthetic or musicological critique, I argue that these compositions functioned as powerful, albeit informal, pedagogical instruments that shaped the moral and aesthetic subjectivities of their contemporary listeners within the German Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle class). Drawing on Ute Frevert's social history and expanding it with the history of Bildung, this study demonstrates that Liszt's setting constructs a pedagogical model of spectacular containment, teaching the listener to perceive feminine power as an external, dangerous threat to be framed and neutralized. Clara Schumann's setting, by contrast, offers a model of tragic interiority, educating the listener in psychological continuity and empathetic identification. By analysing how each work was situated within nineteenthcentury educational practices—from domestic piano instruction to conservatory training—this article concludes that these divergent musical narratives represent opposing "educational paths" for the formation of gendered subjects in Romanticism, contributing a novel, historically grounded perspective to the field of music education history.