Analysis of Creative Styles from a Female Perspective in German Women Composers: Taking Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto as an Example

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_16How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Clara Schumann; Romanticism; Women composers; Fanny Mendelssohn; Musical example analysis

Abstract

In the 19th century, German Romantic music thrived, but women composers were constrained by the gender power structure, confined to domestic spheres, and their creations long remained on the margins. Clara Schumann broke through the limitations of female musical creation, integrating classical structures with Romantic lyricism. This study aims to analyze the Romantic compositional techniques of two women composers, explore how work structures, harmonies, and emotional expressions blend classical rigor with Romantic poetry and reposition Clara Schumann’s historical role through the intervention of a gender perspective. Using musical example analysis and documentary methods, this research takes her Piano Concerto as the research object to analyze the creative styles of early Romantic German women composers. The study finds that Clara’s creations technically break through classical paradigms; in emotional expression, they reconstruct the Romantic emotional expression paradigm through female private narratives, and they challenge the male-centered framework, reconstructing the historical positioning of women composers.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyi Dai
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - Analysis of Creative Styles from a Female Perspective in German Women Composers: Taking Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto as an Example
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 148
EP  - 155
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_16
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_16
ID  - Dai2025
ER  -