Gender and Domesticity in Beethoven’s Letters to Nannette Streicher-Stein

The piano maker Nannette Streicher-Stein (1769–1833) is typically remembered today as a close friend of Beethoven. They exchanged more than sixty letters on domestic issues between 1817 and 1818, while in the same period Beethoven addressed piano-related issues to Streicher-Stein’s husband. The quotidian subject matter of the first group of letters has repeatedly led Beethoven scholars to refer to Streicher-Stein as a motherly figure (e.g. Sterba and Sterba 1971, Solomon 1998, Kinderman 2009). Meanwhile, her central position within her company and her work as a piano maker—which included supplying instruments to Beethoven and his circle—is viewed as secondary to her homely support of the composer.

This paper reexamines Streicher-Stein’s relationship with Beethoven by applying a feminist perspective and historical understandings of gender to their correspondence. The paper considers how Streicher-Stein’s gender and labour are constructed in the letters and how this collection of sources has shaped her scholarly reception as a feminized carer and housewife (Hoffmann 2003, Wiesbauer 2010, Gaboriaud 2019). I argue that the image of Streicher-Stein presented by the letters reveals more about Beethoven’s views of gender roles than it does about her life. Yet rather than dismissing her domestic labour in favour of her public occupation as an instrument maker, I argue that these roles cannot be neatly separated; rather, they were mutually constitutive. Furthermore, I argue that cultivating a care relationship with Beethoven had obvious benefits for Streicher-Stein: through it she accrued prestige and cultural capital for herself and her company that she and her family members communicated through anecdotes (Keefe 2020, Fine 2023). By reframing Streicher-Stein as both piano maker and friend to Beethoven, this paper presents Streicher-Stein as a significant musical figure in her own right; more broadly, it poses questions about the role of women and gender in Beethoven scholarship.