This chapter addresses the significance of Clara Schumann as a composer, focusing specifically on analytical studies of her music that embrace the multiple perspectives of the composer, performer, and listener. I emphasise modes of analysis that are concerned with matters of structure and form. Yet I also cast the analytical net more widely to include studies that explore such parameters as text–music relations, cultural analysis, and hermeneutic analysis. Although Clara’s pianism and interpretations of other composers is a closely related topic, it lies beyond the scope of this chapter, except when the music she performed left a marked imprint on her compositional output. Acknowledging the gendered opposition between performance and composition that Clara herself endorsed, I concentrate on the works she created, as those she recreated receive ample attention elsewhere.

Patrons and Patronage explains the various types of professional support and prestige that both Robert and Clara earned throughout their careers, including: payment from royalty (for Clara’s performances at court); status by association (such as Robert’s pre-approved dedication to Oscar I of Sweden); and backing from fellow musicians (such as Ferdinand Hiller’s job referrals for Robert). Clara and Robert further established themselves and supported their family by balancing payment from these sources alongside public performances (for Clara) and publishing (mostly for Robert). The chapter also presents biographical evidence that neither musician boasted the kind of sustained professional relationships with royal and wealthy benefactors that supported some of their contemporaries and generations of previous artists – a fact that surely affected the genres in which Clara did and did not compose.

The acceptance of the teaching position offered by the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main in 1878 marked a significant turning point in Clara Schumann’s artistic career. For the institution itself, it was no less a momentous decision: this step brought the Conservatory nationwide attention and a significant enhancement of its reputation. Both at the Conservatory and in her private teaching, Clara’s name stood for a tradition of piano playing that was widely acknowledged in the contemporary press as representing the ‘best traditions of an important era in pianoforte playing’ (Musical News 1891) or simply the ‘Schumann tradition’ (Davies 1925). Drawing on a corpus of sources including institutional records, letters, (auto)biographies, diaries, and other ‘ego-’documents, this chapter provides an overview of Clara’s teaching at the Hoch Conservatory, performance techniques, repertoire, modes of interpretation and reception, as well as institutional hierarchies of power.

This chapter addresses Clara Schumann’s engagement with the musical and cultural life of Baden-Baden and Frankfurt, situating her activities and relationships in the context of the institutions, historical events, and atmospheres of these two locations. From 1863 to 1873, Clara spent summers in the spa town of Baden-Baden and nearby Lichtenthal. The area boasted a lively cultural scene and a picturesque countryside, and Clara relished these features in the company of family and friends, including Brahms and Viardot-García. Frankfurt, on the other hand, was a major commercial city with a reputation for musical conservatism and was home to Clara during her final decades. The city was important for Clara’s late career as a pedagogue and pianist: she was a highly respected professor of piano at the Dr Hoch Conservatory from 1878 to 1892, and, aside from London, Frankfurt was where she most often performed after 1875.

Brahms’ first visit to the Schumanns in 1853 marked the beginning of rich friendships with both Robert and Clara. Though Robert’s life would be cut short, Clara and Brahms enjoyed a close personal and professional relationship for over 40 years, one rooted in mutual admiration and in aesthetic convictions they also had shared with Robert. The two pianists studied music and presented concerts together. Clara modelled the life of an artist and assisted in practical and artistic matters, introducing Brahms to her extensive network of professional contacts and offering feedback on new works. She programmed most of the solo pieces and chamber music with piano that Brahms created during the years she was performing publicly, thereby helping to establish these works. The partnership, vital to both artists’ growth, also furthered Robert’s legacy, as it gave Clara an additional, prominent platform from which to promote his music and ideas.

For much of his career, Robert Schumann was better known as a music critic than as a composer. At the age of twenty-one, he began writing for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung with a encomium to the young, unknown Chopin – ‘Hats off, gentlemen – a genius!’ Robert’s final essay ‘Neue Bahnen’ (‘New Paths’), published in 1853, similarly heralded the arrival of the young Brahms. This appeared in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, the music journal Robert had established almost single-handedly in 1833–4 and edited (and managed) from 1835 to 1844. Under his decade-long control, the pages of this journal included dozens of his own essays, editorials, concert reviews, and, most abundantly, reviews of recently published music. ‘Neue Bahnen’ capped the most significant corpus of writing about music from the first half of the nineteenth century.

Anthony Sawoniuk was, in 1999, the first and last man in Britain to be tried under the War Crimes Act of 1991. The role of the Holocaust in the shaping and construction of British memories has been dynamic and continues to be contested in Britain. This chapter touches upon issues specifically relating to the commemoration of the Holocaust, especially in the United Kingdom, with its new permanent exhibition on the Holocaust in the Imperial War Museum, and the controversies generated by Holocaust Memorial Day, first implemented in January 2001. It discusses how the memory of the Holocaust has affected popular and governmental discourses, in response to contemporary affairs, in particular the NATO conflict over Kosovo in spring 1999. The chapter investigates British responses to both the war crimes trials and the Kosovo conflict of 1999, as read through the prism of memories of the Second World War.

The case of the attempted slave insurrection in Charleston, however, is different. It lacks what would seem to be the obvious defining characteristics of catastrophe. The extant legal documents and news accounts from the time suggest that, for the white elite of Charleston, the simple fact that such an insurrection had been planned qualified as a catastrophe, for it dramatically, if not fatally, ripped open the 'Magnolia Curtain', exposing as a charade southern paternalist construction of black-white relations under the institution of slaver. This chapter focuses on the discourse of the supernatural deployed by the white elite in its response to the disiy of the plot and its role in shaping the cultural memory of the Charleston slave insurrection of 1822. It examines a specific discourse feature - the discourse of the supernatural - evident in a number of contemporary texts concerned with the insurrection.

Before the First World War, there were few military psychiatrists in the British Army. Traumatised soldiers presented in a variety of ways during the First World War, though the diagnosis doctors had the greatest difficulty understanding was shell shock. The doctors at greatest personal danger were regimental medical officers attached to fighting units in the front line. They shared the hazards of the infantry and were often casualties themselves. This chapter considers the experience of those British doctors thrown into the front-line treatment of 'shell shock' disorders in the First World War - an experience which produced profound disillusionment in many, and which received little support or recognition from the medical and military establishments. Despite having advanced the understanding of psychiatric disorders, many Royal Army Medical Corps physicians were disillusioned by their experiences.

Binjamin Wilkomirski's camp memoir Fragments was, when it appeared in 1995, acclaimed as one of the most fascinating representations of the Holocaust since Primo Levi's If This Is a Man. This chapter considers the Binjamin Wilkomirski case, in which the apparent memoirs of a Holocaust camp survivor were subsequently revealed to be the fictive product of a non-Jewish Swiss writer. It analyses questions of literary, historical, and ethical authenticity thrown up by the case, and poses the problem of the relationship between the academic critic and the carrier of personal 'memory'. The chapter explore Wilkomirski case in the light of reception and narrative theory, to show why Wilkomirski, by employing certain narrative techniques, was able to invite the kind of reception the book originally received, and to illuminate the way in which Fragments can, despite the fraudulent claims of its author, nevertheless be considered an authentic text.

The Titanic story is an excellent subject for commodification because of its huge cast of heroes and victims who can be contrasted with its villains. Commodification thrives on familiarity, and the Titanic story is a prime example of one of the most popular narrative genres, the disaster story. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 has assumed the status of an iconic disaster. From the immediate aftermath of the event to the present, it has been made to carry symbolic and metaphorical meanings, often embodied in forms of cultural commodification. This chapter analyses several cinematic representations of the disaster as snapshots of changing cultural contexts and dramatic appropriations of collective memory. The sinking of the Titanic might be considered good public relations for plutocracy, since it demonstrated that millionaires could die as unselfishly as members of the other classes, thus showing that conspicuous consumption could be accompanied by conspicuous heroism.

This chapter discusses the impact of the My Lai massacre of 1968 on American consciousness. It examines public reactions from the initial revelation of the massacre to the end of the court martial of Lieutenant William Calley - one of the key perpetrators. The chapter traces the interplay of institutional, social, and cultural forces which led to the erasure of the victims' perspectives from the national debate, allowing a point of apparent 'closure' to be reached. Although American debates about the massacre at My Lai were impassioned and inclusive of much of the national community, they were not sufficient to force the country to conscience. Even as the massacre dominated public discourse within the United States, the sufferings of the victims became neutralised as a source of national anxiety and remorse.

In 1995 a cycle of commemorative activities to memorialise the Great Irish Famine of 1845-50 was initiated in Ireland, North America, Great Britain, and Australia. This chapter focuses on two points, both reflecting the preoccupations of a professional historian who is also engaged with the political contestations for which the Great Irish Famine stands as a metaphor. One focus is on the history of Famine 'memory' over the intervening century and a half; the second on the validity of the truth claims made about the Famine as part of the process of commemoration and the rhetorical forms through which these are articulated. The author employs the theoretical insights of Pierre Nora, and discusses the role of the historian in critiquing or contributing to a process that appears to lie more in the realm of heritage than of academic history.

The most private writing of women who nursed in the Vietnam War is their poetry, most of which remained unpublished until veteran nurse Lynda Van Devanter and Joan Furey edited the anthology Visions of War, Dreams of Peace in 1992. This chapter discusses the parallel experiences of female American nurses in and after the Vietnam War, and how they sought to disrupt official attempts at rationalising and regulating grief, through their memoirs and poetry. While Van Devanter's publication of her war experience and its traumatic aftermath gave many of the returned women veterans permission to speak publicly of their own experiences, the primary sanctioning of these war memories came with the placing of the women's memorial in the context of the other sites of Vietnam commemoration, after years of lobbying by the Vietnam Women's Memorial Project.