ABSTRACT
New knowledge about the composer, pianist, and writer Stephanie Wurmbrand-Stuppach, née Vrabély (1849–1919), enables us, in a more comprehensive way, to analyse and assess her musical output. Exceptionally musically gifted, she was a brilliant piano player and she had excellent improvisation skills. She acquired her music-theoretical education from Johannes Brahms and later from Gustav Nottebohm and Hermann Graedener in Vienna. Having married Count Ernst von Wurmbrand-Stuppach (1869), she lived in Vienna from 1873 and, being the wife of a nobleman, she respected the social customs of the era and ended her career of a concert pianist. Her contacts within Czech society are documented by her summer stays in Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad) and by her Fest-Marsch for four-hand piano written on the occasion of the wedding of Marie Wilczek and Rudolf Kinsky. The crucial position of the piano in her music results doubtlessly from her thorough knowledge of the technical and expressive possibilities of the instrument. Moreover, she perceived the piano as an essential part of her artistic self. Her lyrical piano works encompass both poetical music and virtuoso works and include a wide range of genres: character pieces, stylized dances (mostly waltzes), fantasias, and etudes. In her piano cycle Die schöne Melusine Op. 33, for instance, she imaginatively applies music symbolism inspired by the watercolours by Moritz von Schwind. She was also active as a writer—in her literary work she addressed various current musical, cultural, and social topics. This chapter explores Stephanie Wurmbrand-Stuppach’s piano music more closely by identifying characteristic features of her musical style within the context of both nineteenth-century Romanticism and Wurmbrand-Stuppach’s cross-cultural and cross-artistic connections.
