Emily Shyr explores how the natural sublime is renegotiated in Part I of Franz Schubert’s (1797–1828) last song cycle, Winterreise. Using the work of Paul Ricœur to modify Immanuel Kant’s “dynamic” sublime, Shyr shows how musical and textual metaphors in Winterreise elide the boundaries between the protagonist’s internal and external worlds, allowing him to assume the sublimity of natural phenomena in order to express the intensity of his grief. By re-evaluating Winterreise through the sublime, this paper shows how metaphors of the natural sublime ultimately reinscribe the natural world through affect. Emily Eubanks delves into the contributions of salonnière and writer Caroline Pichler (1769–1843) to Germanic national identity through her pastoral poem, “Der Sommerabend,” building upon the work of Brian E. Vick and Susan Youens. In “Der Sommerabend,” Pichler idealizes the refuge of the natural world and the home, highlighting the vital role that salons and other domestic sites played as sites of ideological shelter in Biedermeier Vienna. Hester Bell Jordan reevaluates the relationship between the piano maker Nannette Streicher née Stein and Ludwig van Beethoven, exploring how both nineteenth-century ideals concerning gender and labor, and the domestic, motherly image of Streicher-Stein conveyed by the composer’s letters to her have influenced Streicher-Stein’s reception within Beethoven scholarship.

This panel contributes to historical discourses on nineteenth-century re-evaluations of humankind’s relationship to nature and the use of nature as a metaphor for promoting political ideas and aesthetic experiences. It also offers new insights into women’s musical practices, labor, and output, and highlights how women capitalized upon domestic spaces to contribute to political and cultural life in the public realm.