The extraordinary growth of scholarship on women composers in recent decades inspires not only female inclusion in traditionally all-male historical narratives but also reappraisal of the period styles that structure those narratives. Does the music of women composers follow patterns of change enshrined in such heirloom categories of music history as Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic? What is the critical potential of women’s work as composers for rewriting music-historical surveys? With the music of around 400 female composers of the eighteenth century now known to survive, the field is established for the appraisal of women composers’ relationship to the Classical period, and the ‘Viennese Classical Style’ associated with it.¹

The formerly dependable terms invoked thus far – period, Classical, Viennese, and style – deserve rethinking. The inherited assumptions that the music of the later eighteenth-century is represented above all in Vienna, and is marked by the rise of autonomous instrumental music, by sonata forms, and by the aesthetic values of coherence, proportion, and moderation captured in the epithet of Classicism, invite us at least to question, rather than simply accept, their validity.

Defining Style

In her Dent Medal Lecture at the conference ‘Rethinking Late Style’, Mary Ann Smart drew attention to the fact that ‘pages and pages have been spent on what is meant by “late”, but with little interrogation of what is meant by the problematic noun “style”’.² Previously, Irving Godt highlighted the paradoxical vagueness and rigidity of musical definitions of ‘style’. Apropos the ‘received notions – Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic’, he observed that ‘each of them carries a double implication … a set of stylistic expectations and a time-frame’, adding that ‘unfortunately the first of these usually appears as an ill-defined and uncatalogued set of notions; the second, a too-precise calendar. Unless these implications reverse their qualities, they can have little value’.³ Godt’s solution, presented in the appendix to his article, consisted of sets of comparative data inspired by Manfred Bukofzer’s Music in the Baroque Era with its table of parallel, contrasting elements in Renaissance and Baroque music.

However, systematic lists of musical elements constituting period norms risk reductionism. In the eighteenth century, style was not a purely compositional matter: it pertained also to performance and modes of response. Styles differed by nation, region, genre, medium, social context, and composer, just as their labels and contemporary definitions were flexible. Reflecting a wider pattern in conceptualizing music, prior to the rise of the ideal of ‘absolute’ music, styles were linked to human sensibilities and identities. We invoke here, correspondingly, familiar categories of style to link music and social values, rather than define purely musical techniques. Chief among them is the ‘galant’ style, through which music in the period was linked to sociable ideals of moderation in such areas as emotional expression, clarity of communication, and avoidance of pedantry or displays of overmuch erudition.⁴ We reframe the ‘empfindsam’ (‘sensitive’) style as involving a human capacity to be moved sympathetically, widening its application beyond the appoggiatura-laden, chromatic, rhythmically restless keyboard music of C. P. E. Bach. Following recent research, we acknowledge the centrality of vocal music to the later eighteenth century, together with the period’s fascination with (notions of) natural, untutored song, and with the ideal of songfulness in instrumental composition and performance.⁵ Those latter two features, like ‘galant’ and ‘empfindsam’ styles, reflect cherished connections between music, human presence, and clarity of communication.⁶

In rethinking later eighteenth-century musical styles apropos women composers, it is helpful to acknowledge the fluid relationship between composing, improvising, and performing, at a time before musical scores acquired binding authority over performance. As an alternative to the preoccupation with sonata forms that has characterized analytical and theoretical studies of Classical repertoire, recent literature on partimento, the improvisatory compositional process governing units of structure in music of the period, proves widely applicable.⁷ Irving Godt and John Rice, in their study of Marianna Martines (1744–1812), show that women, too, used these formulaic constructions, rather than such constructions being the exclusive property of their male contemporaries. Among other such passages in her music, their Example 4.7 from her orchestral overture in C major (with her use of the ‘Romanesca’ formula), demonstrates her processes of composition and revision, the latter process, they suggest, representing ‘changes that Martines made during rehearsals’.⁸

Also with implications for musical structure, and involving the role of improvisation alongside composition, was the art of embellishment, especially as applied to repeats of formal sections (such as sonata form expositions) in performance. The slow movement of the Sonata in E major, Op. 1 no. 3 (1791) by Cecilia Barthelemon (1767–1859),⁹ provides models of this kind, with her written-out additional embellishment of the opening ideas, on their recapitulatory return, forming an exemplar for improvising such material, while her build-up to that movement’s final cadence invites – for the knowing performer – improvised elaboration of the tonic 6/4 chord. The yoking of such embellishment to the sonata style in her work reflects the skills Barthelemon possessed as pianist and composer, while the expansively presented lyricism of her opening theme also reminds us of her prowess as a singer.

In closing this introductory section, we gratefully acknowledge pioneering surveys of repertoire, such as Deborah Hayes’s study of women composers active in later eighteenth-century England. In building on them, we interrogate views including those of Hayes, who found that women composers’ music of the period ‘shows various familiar aspects of Classic composition; it serves Classic functions … it demonstrates familiar characteristics of Classic style; and it is set in the recognizable Classic genres’.¹⁰ The desirability of reassessing such assertions forms a springboard for what follows.

Interrogation of the Classical Style

James Webster’s 1991 study of Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony No. 45 (1772) offered a critique of Classicism that encouraged fresh thinking about its validity. First, he questioned the premise – inherited by Charles Rosen from earlier scholarship – that the Classical style involved a new degree of musical control and coherence. Webster’s evidence comprised an analytical demonstration of Haydn’s through-composed mastery of symphonic form in that work, and of motivic development, qualities manifested therein as early as 1772. Secondly, Webster questioned the aesthetic values attending the Classical epithet, invoking the evidence that, rather than balance and symmetry, daring and originality were attributed to Haydn by his contemporaries. Webster showed the historiography of ‘Classical style’ to be not simply anachronistic but also reactionary – an attempt by Viennese musicologists of the early twentieth century to counter the innovations of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern with an image of stylistic perfection from history. Guido Adler, and his student Wilhelm Fischer, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, established the term and concept of ‘Viennese Classical School/Period’, which shaped the historiography of later eighteenth-century music thenceforward. The ‘Viennese classics’ were made to function as bulwarks against the encroaching downfall represented by modernism and atonality. The notion of the ‘Classical period’ arose as a direct consequence of the conservative agenda.¹¹

Nonetheless, Webster preserved many of the covert values of Classical style that can be seen to have served male hegemony. In writing about Haydn (a great man), a symphony (a large-scale, prestigious genre), and the music’s organic coherence (demonstrated through long-range tonal planning and motivic working), Webster maintained elements of the discourse he appeared to reject. Consistent with traditional notions of Classical style, the ‘Farewell’ symphony is treated here as absolute music, despite functioning famously as a petition on behalf of the homesick musicians serving the aristocratic patron. Webster emphasizes Haydn’s technique of through-composition, rather than the programmatic pantomime of the finale. Haydn thereby gains a Beethovenian upgrade, while other aspects of conventional historiography of the period – the focus on prestigious genres of ‘absolute’ instrumental music, on male genius, and on the score as record of a unique musical work – remain intact. This approach creates obstacles for composers of both sexes, but particularly for women; in this period they rarely composed symphonies and string quartets – the instrumental genres that would come to enshrine ideals of absolute music in the nineteenth-century concert hall.

Recent histories have sought alternatives to the traditional emphasis on the ‘rise of instrumental music’. The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music takes a decentred approach, explicitly eschewing focus on ‘great men’ and ‘musical monuments’. The editor, Simon Keefe, considers composers as ‘down-to-earth providers of music’, not ‘valorized creative artists’.¹² Setting out to map neglected repertoire, and breaking away from Baroque and Classical ‘periods’, contributors to that volume reveal the centrality of texted music throughout the century. Their approach is potentially productive for studies of female composers. In practice, however, the space in their writings that results from the absence of emphasis on great men is largely taken up with reference to other men. Only three female composers are named, in 800 pages: Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar (1739–1807), Corona Schröter (1751–1802), and Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729) – and only the last-named receives significant comment.

In his recent survey, Music in the Eighteenth Century, John Rice develops an approach full of potential for studies of women composers. He includes substantial discussion of Anna Bon (1739/40–after 1769) and Martines.¹³ Rice dispenses with the notion of a Classical period, replacing it with the pragmatic unity of composers born in the eighteenth century, and with the umbrella term ‘galant’. This periodization enables Rice to capture the transformations in musical style emerging in Neapolitan opera and sacred vocal music during the 1720s and 1730s, most influentially with Leonardo Vinci and Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. A key figure in the transfer of Neapolitan music to central Europe was the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresia (b. 1717, ruling from 1740 until her death in 1780), who – like King Frederick II in Berlin – favoured the music of her childhood teacher, the Neapolitan-trained Johann Adolph Hasse. Rice’s commentary suggests the strong appeal of galant music to aristocratic and bourgeois women. Rejecting displays of compositional erudition, galant music enshrined the female singing voice, together with culturally coded ‘feminine’ values of naturalness and simplicity. In similar vein, Daniel Heartz and Bruce Alan Brown note that ‘much galant music was intended to instruct and entertain female amateurs’; they might have added that some of it was composed by professional women.¹⁴

Italian Vocal Music and the Mid-century Galant

In the case of female composers connected to Empress Maria Theresia, the Italian galant idiom of the mid-eighteenth century served explicitly to project a courtly, female identity.¹⁵ Maria Theresia’s reign was epochal for learned and artistic women. Her right to the crown, contested in the war of the Austrian succession (1740–48), was established in her favour. At least two female composers in the Vienna of Haydn and Mozart enjoyed her sustained patronage: Martines and Maria Theresia Paradis (1759–1824).¹⁶ She also received dedications from the sisters Agnesi in Habsburg Lombardy – the composer Maria Teresa (1720–95) and the mathematician Maria Gaetana (1718–99). The excitement surrounding the coronation of an empress is evident in the dedication of Maria Gaetana’s textbook on differential calculus, the Instituzioni analitiche (1750), with its reference to:

Maria Teresa Agnesi also dedicated works to the empress. Robert L. Kendrick notes that the Milanese Agnesi – who in her teens performed her own music in academies organized by her father, at which her sister conversed in Latin – sent presentation copies of her operas La Sofonisba and Il re pastore to Empress Maria Theresia and other rulers, along with a set of Italian arias.¹⁸ One set surviving in Dresden bears a dedication to Maria Antonia Walpurgis (1724–80); this may be identical with the set sent to the empress. A letter of thanks from Walpurgis commends the composer’s ‘good taste’, and recognizes how the music ‘perfectly expresses the natural meaning of the words’ and that ‘everything in [the arias] is new’.¹⁹

By ‘new’ (nouveau) Walpurgis may have referred to the way in which Agnesi’s music, while outwardly observing Baroque da capo form, smuggles in the new techniques of characterization associated with the genres of intermezzo and opera buffa. In the first aria, ‘Son confusa pastorella’ (‘I’m a confused shepherdess’) – to a text by Metastasio – Agnesi employs thematic and textural contrasts within the first (‘A’) section of the da capo form to characterize confusion. The opening ritornello, supplying material for the ‘A’ section, begins with a subtly comedic theme: no sooner does it break into quavers in bar 2 than it gets stuck on the pattern, before fizzling out. A white-note sequential figure follows, projecting a dignified expression, but associated more with bass lines than melodies. As this sequential pattern circles back to its starting point, a new songful motif breaks in, featuring a fragile appoggiatura, hinting at the dominant key, before this is emphatically corrected by running string scales. At the end of the ritornello, a cadential idea traces a melancholy descent of the melody through the flattened second scale degree to the leading note. Taken up by the singer, these finely drawn musical ‘confusions’ vividly portray the shepherdess’s state of mind: ‘I am like a confused shepherdess, | That in the wood at dark of night, | Without a lamp, without a star, | Unhappy, she missed her way.’²⁰ Agnesi employs word-painting, with ‘darkness’ set by the voice moving down to its lowest register (G below middle C), at bars 32–3. Then, breaking off (as if lost), the singer resumes a ninth higher with a glittering, trilled figure to paint the ‘lamp’ and ‘star’. Agnesi’s approach – tinged with chromatic sensibility and a sense of the first person – differs markedly from that of Handel who, seizing on the notion of a shepherdess, based his setting on a pastoral topic, the musette.

Walpurgis, dedicatee of Agnesi’s arias, also composed opera seria. Her more restrained style projected an aristocratic female identity through studied moderation of emotional expression.²¹ Her second opera, Talestri: Regina delle Amazzoni (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1765), was praised in exactly those terms in a treatise dedicated to her by the exiled Spanish Jesuit, Antonio Eximeno. He lauded the feminocentric rhetoric of Walpurgis’s drama, with its libretto, featuring the initially bellicose Amazonians, ultimately affirming absolute female sovereignty as most desirable change for peace and reconciliation between the sexes. His summary elides the principal character – Talestri – with Walpurgis: ‘In this drama she [Walpurgis] demonstrates the generosity of the Amazons towards the men who were their born enemies, and by [their] bringing peace between the two sexes, she takes the most generous revenge on the outrages done to her sex by those philosophers who are more bestial than human.’²²

In discussing the aria in Act 2, scene 6 (‘Io di quel sangue ò sette’), where Tomiri, Amazonian Priestess, ‘vents her hatred against our ungrateful sex’, Eximeno highlights how the melody, rather than sustaining extreme ‘vehemence’, conveys instead an affecting, bittersweet quality:

This anticipates Mozart’s famous letter concerning the representation of Osmin’s rage in Die Entführung aus dem Serail:

However, Walpurgis’s mediation of Tomiri’s rage uses different, less harmonically volatile techniques. Within the triple metre and major-key framework, Walpurgis marshals agitated tremolos, emphatic octave leaps, and word painting – such as the descending diminished fifth for the keyword ‘Odio’ (hatred). Tomiri’s high status, like that of Walpurgis, warranted greater restraint than Mozart accorded the Ottoman servant Osmin.

Eximeno treated Tomiri’s aria as exemplary, with its ‘regular and clear’ (‘regolare e chiara’) harmony –a vocabulary restricted to diatonic chords and their secondary dominants – and the ‘natural sweetness’ (‘naturale soavità’) of the melody ‘which softens and enchants’ (‘che intenerisce ed incanta’).²⁴ The notions of softening and enchantment belong to an early modern concept of music’s sensual and emotional power, here losing their dangerous connotation, assuming instead associations with civility and peaceable manners.²⁵ Finally, Eximeno notes that the viola part, while busy, does not overwhelm or compete with the voice, whose primacy remains unchallenged, thus fulfilling his ideals of clarity and moderation.

Galant Keyboard and Sacred Music at Mid-century

The decorum central to the galant style also necessitated sensitivity to differences of genre and function. If opera seria served to project a discourse of sovereignty, solo keyboard pieces often served to nourish private subjectivity. The first movement of the Sonata in F major, published in 1757 by the then seventeen-year old Anna Bon, illustrates the musical differences this interiority entailed. (Bon trained in one of the Venetian ospedali, the foundling homes serving as musical conservatoires, before joining her artisan parents at the court of Bayreuth, under the patronage of Margravine Wilhelmina.)²⁶

Rice highlights here the two-part texture, accompanimental bass line, slow harmonic rhythm, two-bar phrases with antecedent-consequent relationship, and ‘graceful, triplet-laden melodic line’.²⁷ He notes the alternative title ‘divertimento’ in the dedication to the collection containing this movement, Bon’s Sei sonate per il cembalo, emphasizing the galant purpose of the music as entertainment. Although this interpretation is justified, the divertimento concept did not exclude elements of instruction and practice. In the Allegro in F major, for example, a constantly moving right hand, involving leaps and broken chords that connect implied polyphonic voices, gives the appearance of a practice piece, such as a solfeggio. The variety within the collection, fulfilling the requirement for a galant composer to accommodate a range of tastes and moods, offers an informal summation of current musical styles, or ‘topics’, as dubbed by Leonard Ratner. Among these are untitled dances (the allemande of I/i, bourrée of I/ii, and sarabande of IV/ii); improvisatory figuration suggesting prelude or toccata (IV/i); evocation of French overture (V/i); and a set of variations (VI/iii). Two movements, particularly, relate closely to opera – a slow-tempo aria evoking the opera-seria type as found in works by the popular composer Hasse (III/ii), and a bobtailed comic aria, drawn from the genre of Neapolitan intermezzo (IV/iii). In that last case, Bon begins by all-but quoting the aria for the befuddled Uberto from Act 2 of Pergolesi’s La serva padrona (‘Son imbrogliato io già’).²⁸

In a parallel to the stylistic mixture enriching the galant in instrumental music, composers of sacred vocal works sometimes sought an alliance between the ‘learned’ and the ‘galant’, that is, between the older contrapuntal and the newer melody-based textures. The sacred music composed by Marianna Martines (born in Vienna to a Neapolitan father, who had relocated there in the upheavals caused by the War of Succession) achieved this balance. Three of Martines’s brothers worked in the Imperial bureaucracy, the eldest, Giuseppe, teaching Italian to the young Joseph II. Martines’s education was overseen by Metastasio, court poet in Vienna. Her liturgical music was performed in the Michaelerkirche in central Vienna, and her Italian cantatas were performed at court for Maria Theresia. She also composed solo keyboard music, perhaps inspired by, and inspiring in turn, Joseph Haydn, her teacher from 1751 to 1754.²⁹

Assiduously setting Metastasio’s poetry, Martines was portrayed by the poet, and by Charles Burney, as a symbol of the golden mean, her work representing an ideal union of poetry and music, and a balance between ancient and modern styles (respectively counterpoint and melody-based homophony).³⁰ When Burney visited in 1772, he heard a ‘Latin motet, for a single voice, which was grave and solemn, without languor or heaviness’. Of her Miserere, he observed that she was ‘a most excellent contrapuntist’, and in her ‘psalm for four voices, with instruments’ he detected ‘a mixture of the harmony, and contrivance of old times, with the melody and taste of the present’ – thus mediating what Metastasio (as Burney reported) described as ‘antico e moderno’.³¹

Martines’s correspondence, and her compositional achievements, indicate a sensitivity to genre, performance resources, text setting, and regional differences that characterizes the decorum both of her music, and of galant courtly culture. In her autobiographical letter of 1773 to Padre Martini, Martines described her daily regime: ‘My exercise has been, and still is, to combine the daily practice of composing with the study and scrutiny of that which has been written by the most celebrated of masters.’ She numbered among her models not only ‘the most celebrated [contemporary] masters such as Hasse, Jommelli, [and] Galluppi’ but also ‘the older [generation] such as Handel, Lotti, [and] others’. Haydn instilled ‘the principles of this [art]’, while Giuseppe Bonno taught her counterpoint. Genealogy is implicated here – Bonno had studied with the Neapolitan composers Durante and Leo.³²

Martines’s psalm settings were prompted by a new translation into Italian by another Neapolitan, Mattei, who worked from the Hebrew original, not from versions in Latin and Greek. Her setting of Psalm 42 (‘As the hart panteth after the water brooks’) was part of her submission to Padre Martini in connection with her election to the Accademia Filarmonica. In a covering letter, she offered detail about her approach to setting the text: ‘The variety of the affections of the exiled Hebrews who now lament their oppression, now with faith implore the end of it, now exult in the secure hope that it draws near, provides the composer with opportunities to vary rhythm and harmony.’³³ This concern with mixed feelings is borne out by the music. The first verse, expressing the thirst of the soul for God, conveys the keyword ‘oppressed’ in an adagio chorus, with heavy dotted rhythms in 2/2. The chorus sings in declamatory repeated notes, while the melodic interest shifts to the descending bass line. Chromaticism conveys yearning and longing; frequent pedal notes prompt sensations of captivity. In opening with a mournful chorus, which continues into the first aria (verse 2), itself divested of soloistic display, Martines was probably tapping into the reform operas of the court favourite, Christoph Willibald von Gluck, whose Orfeo opens in similar manner. Like Gluck (setting the myth of Orpheus), Martines in her work responds to the living antiquity of the Hebrew psalms, even introducing an obbligato part for the psaltery in the tenor aria of verse 3. Transferring florid music to this ancient instrument enables Martines to maintain ‘noble simplicity’ in the voice in accordance with contemporary (‘Gluckian’) ideas of the power of ancient music.³⁴

Fantasies of Natural Song

Beyond the Habsburg–Italian axis, in Weimar and Paris, galant music gained a novel twist in fantasies of natural and indigenous song, a trend that enabled women composers and performers to achieve exemplary status in stylistic and conceptual experiments in the genre.

In Weimar, Duchess Anna Amalia – eschewing opera seria – chose the more bourgeois genre of singspiel, reflecting the ethos of the court’s amateur theatre, in which distinctions of rank were reportedly suspended. Her singspiels Erwin und Elmire (1776) and Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern (1778) were based on libretti by the court administrator, Goethe. Two years later, she pioneered the sub-genre of ‘forest drama’, composing Die Zigeuner for nocturnal, fire-lit performance in the landscape gardens of her summer palace in Ettersberg. Here Anna Amalia allied her composing with nature, with the ephemeral, and with the alterity of the eponymous music-making ‘gypsies’ (Roma). In 1782, her employee Corona Schröter (who had played the lead in Die Zigeuner) provided a sequel, Die Fischerinn, also based on a text by Goethe. This drama, premiered at dusk in the parkland of Tiefurt, near Weimar, opens with Schröter’s setting of the traditional lyric ‘Der Erlkönig’.³⁵

As noted in Chapter 3, this first setting of a text later immortalized by Schubert, referred to in various surveys of the period, is not always approached with sensitivity to the composer’s intention to evoke a style of song suggestive of oral or ‘folk’ tradition, the ideal known in the German context as Volkston. Its requirements included a syllabic, strophic setting, its newly composed music aspiring to possess the appearance of both ‘the familiar’ (‘[den] Schein des Bekannten’), and ‘the unsought’ (‘[den] Schein des Ungesuchten’).³⁶ Schröter’s ‘Erlkönig’ succeeded insofar as it suggested an objet trouvé. While preserving a trace of the composer’s own singing voice (Schröter played the fisherwoman Dortchen), her ‘Erlkönig’ portrays Dortchen’s superstitious thoughts as she waits anxiously for the return of her father and fiancé from a day’s fishing. To suggest a music ‘uncomposed’, Schröter employed the traditional dance topic of siciliano. Only the unusual sforzando-piano alternations individualize this ‘timeless’ and collectively owned topos, suggesting Dortchen’s impatient imagining of the text’s galloping horse. The result approaches a picturesque image of song, embedded in the nocturnal landscape.

The fantasy of pristine, natural song was not confined to Germany. As Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson discuss for the French context, with reference to the aesthetics of Rousseau, simple song, composed and performed by women, was a favoured spectacle on the opera stage, promising emotional authenticity and transparent disclosure of feeling. Rousseau’s call for women to renounce urban luxury and artificial manners in preference for a domestic, nurturing role, although constraining, was attractive to some women, partly because it was believed to bring about moral regeneration. In his autobiographical Reflexions d’un solitaire (‘Reflections of a Solitary Man’), André Grétry, who promoted several female composers, rebranded galant simplicity in Rousseau’s terms. He traced the ‘true song’ of opéra comique to the composer’s intuitive sensibility, elevating the artless aria above the learned techniques of harmony and orchestration.³⁷ This was a discourse that women composers could master and deploy strategically, as well as push against. The comic-sentimental plots of opéra comique – pastoral, familial, and focused on the tribulations of young lovers – were favoured by women composers, in part because these subjects were felt to belong to an emerging female domain.³⁸ Letzter and Adelson report that between 1770 and 1820, at least forty-four operas by nineteen women are known to have been composed or performed in Paris.³⁹

Notable success was won by two teenaged daughters of established composers: Lucile Grétry (1772–90) and Florine Dezède (?1766–92). Grétry’s Le mariage d’Antonio (1786), a sequel to her father’s Richard Coeur-de-Lion, was produced under the auspices of Marie Antoinette for the Comédie-Italienne.⁴⁰ The librettist, Robineau, described Le mariage as a ‘divertissement’, a broadly galant term that Adelson links to the simplicity of the plot and its culmination in a rustic wedding.⁴¹ The two solo arias for the character Colette – who eventually marries Antonio – reveal dramatically apt diversity of style, both invoking and shattering the ideal of natural song. The first, ‘Que ce chapeau’ (‘May this hat’), during which Colette places a bridal bonnet on the head of her friend Thérèse, is pastoral and dance-like in character. Set in F major, and duple time, it opens with a tonic pedal across seven of the first eight bars. As Adelson notes, however, the second, in which Colette recognizes her feelings of love for Antonio, is ‘a brilliant coloratura aria’.⁴² If this breaks the stylistic frame of natural song, it nonetheless celebrates the approved emotion of romantic love. Colette’s coloratura is perhaps intended to sound not like vocal display but as the unmediated expression of joy. Here, discussion of the ideal of music-and-nature tips over into the issue of sensibility – the fabled culture of feeling that found in music, and in women, its favoured instruments.

Sensibility

In later eighteenth-century usage, sensibility (in German, Empfindsamkeit) denoted not a type of music but a human capacity to be moved. As a moral ideal, sensibility cherished empathetic responsiveness to the suffering of others, to nature, God, romantic love, the bonds of friendship and family, and the arts. In modern musical scholarship, sensibility is traced back not simply to C. P. E. Bach (who formerly enjoyed something approaching a monopoly on the ‘empfindsamer Styl’) but to Italian opera, and the influence of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela on opera libretti.⁴³

This is not to deny C. P. E. Bach his importance for the music-sensibility nexus, nor his influence. His younger Hamburg contemporary Minna Brandes (1765–88) drew on the harmonic resources of his free fantasias, laid out didactically in his Versuch, to provide astonishing rhetorical intensity in her song ‘Seufzer’ (‘Sigh’). In a bittersweet text by Hölty, a melancholy narrator, observing young couples listening to the whispering stream and nightingales, laments their own anxious solitude. Set in the haunting key of B flat minor – and reaching D flat minor in bars 10–11 via a ‘lament’ bass – the music paints the sounds of nature and the narrator’s melancholic introversion. Sighing figures (b. 1), and a broken, ‘breathless’ melody (b. 2), frame movement through the chromatic labyrinth (bb. 3–11). At bars 13–14, with the dominant chord in place, Brandes presents a horn-fifth figure which – anticipating the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Lebewohl’ Sonata, Op. 81a – employs the submediant chord, not the tonic, to harmonize the last note of this three-note figure. More broadly Beethovenian is the tension between genre and style. Brandes’s use of such complex harmony here breaches the decorum of the strophic lied, which usually attracted less ambitious materials.⁴⁴

The compositional techniques of the culture of sensibility are further exemplified by Maria Theresia Paradis, in her ‘Morgenlied eines armen Mannes’ (‘Morning song of a poor man’, 1784–86). Here they are the means to communicate with intense sympathy the plight of the protagonist, who wakes to face the new day with dread while his wife and children are still sleeping (Example 10.1). Paradis’s setting begins in the keyboard part with a downward-plunging, spiky tonic arpeggiation evoking the desperate mood expressed both in the text, and in its recitative-like, appoggiatura-filled setting for the voice, as the man addresses the day that wakes him to ‘new misery’. The voice’s broken line – as if he can hardly speak or bear the thought of what he describes – is an exemplar of the effective use of silence. Paradis’s dramatic sense imbues the keyboard accompaniment with an intensity worthy of an operatic lament aria, the throbbing repeated chords constituting the musical sign of a troubled heart beating. This approach to melodic and harmonic writing noticeably shares the features of the language used by Mozart, in the opening theme of his Quartet in D minor, K. 421. Extreme melodic leaps in either direction at the start instantly create drama, together with an intensely throbbing chordal accompaniment, heard over a descending stepwise bass of ‘lament’ character. Above these accompanimental elements, Mozart fashions a mercurially changeable rhythmic surface, endowing the uppermost line with bursts of appoggiatura-laden melody. All these factors, contributing to the theme’s impression of densely packed content, together with its unpredictable progress from bar to bar as well as within each bar, combine to produce a highly unsettling effect in the textless music of Mozart’s quartet, equivalent to Paradis’s intensely felt response to the poetic text in her affecting setting of the ‘Morgenlied’.

Example 9.1 Maria Theresia Paradis, ‘Morgenlied eines armen Mannes’, bars 1–10

In Paradis’s music, idioms related to the culture of sensibility were not necessarily restricted to private and domestic genres. Unfortunately, some of the pieces to which we might look for public displays of feeling are lost, including her melodrama Ariadne und Bacchus (c. 1790), and a ‘Grand military opera’. However, two surviving cantatas show the role of sensibility in state-sponsored occasional works: the Trauerkantate auf den Tod Leopolds II (‘Mourning Cantata on the Death of Leopold II’, 1792), and the Deutsche Monument Ludwigs des Unglücklichen (‘German Monument to Louis the Unfortunate’, 1793). The latter cantata, marking the execution of Louis XVI, and written for vocal soloists, four-part choir, and orchestra, begins with a ‘chorus of spirits’, employing an idiom of supernatural music popularized in Vienna by Gluck.⁴⁵ Skeletal accompaniment, in octaves and unisons, supports the chorus as they sing of sounds of mortal ‘howling and wailing’. A terremoto (earthquake) figure in the orchestra, and shuddering tremolos, underscore the singers’ apocalyptic whispers. This intensification of musical means, approaching gothic horror, shows sensibility in political action, with loyal Austrians invited to shudder at the toppling of the ancien regime in France. After the spirit of Louis XVI is crowned in heaven by God, an ‘angel of revenge’ calls for the destruction of the ‘inhuman’ French. Paradis responds with music worthy of Mozart’s Queen of the Night. The piece offers a stark reminder that female composers might not always work at a safe remove from contemporary political events.

Feminocentric Keyboard Culture

The emphasis so far on vocal music reflects both recent research on the later eighteenth century, and (in a happy coincidence) the genre choices of female composers. However, women composers also flourished in solo, and accompanied, keyboard music. This activity has been hidden somewhat behind the image of the amateur female performer, and the related ideal of musical accomplishment. Less well known is that women also composed for keyboard instruments. This phenomenon was particularly widespread in London and Vienna, cities in which keyboard manufacture, music publishing, and concert life were well established. Many of the women active in these cities were on friendly musical terms with the leading professional performer-composers of keyboard music – Mozart, Haydn, Clementi, and Dussek. Among them were, besides Martines (Haydn’s pupil)⁴⁶ and Paradis (Mozart’s friend), the sisters Katherina and Marianna von Auenbrugger (‘highly accomplished keyboardists’, whose home was ‘a centre of musical activity’, and to whom Haydn dedicated his six sonatas Hob. XVI/20, 35–9);⁴⁷ Barbara Ployer⁴⁸ (who studied composition with Mozart); and Josepha Barbara Auernhammer (Mozart’s pupil and co-recitalist, who prepared some of his sonatas for publication).⁴⁹

Leon Plantinga observed that the Italian-born Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), who from his teens was permanently resident in England, would have been aware, as his career developed during the 1780s, of the ‘procession of new pianists’ appearing on the London concert stage and constituting his rivals. Plantinga mentions Miss Parke, Miss Barthelemon, and Miss Reynolds (who became Mrs Park), ‘none of whom, at their debuts, would admit to more than fourteen years’.⁵⁰ All three women composed, as well as playing and singing professionally. Cecilia Barthelemon was closely acquainted with Joseph Haydn, who was a guest of her parents during his London visits, and to whom she dedicated her Sonata in G major, Op. 3. Its first movement, in particular, shows her deploying confidently the new kinds of musical humour from within – rather than prompted by an exterior source – associated particularly with Haydn’s instrumental writing. This operates at a variety of levels, exploiting the witty potential inherent in the elements of ‘sonata form’, notably in her retransitional approach, and involving playful treatment of the movement’s opening, as well as its ending. Though Haydn did not dedicate music to Barthelemon, he did compose for other London-based female keyboardists. Most famously, he dedicated the Sonatas in C major and E-flat major (Hob. XVI:50 and 52) to the Clementi pupil Theresa Jansen Bartolozzi. He also sent the Sonata in D major (Hob. XVI:51) to Maria Hester Park (née Reynolds), promising to visit her soon.⁵¹ Unlike Barthelemon, Park did not (in Susan Wollenberg’s phrase) ‘return the compliment’ of a dedication, but she did teach, and compose, extensively.⁵²

The variation sets, solo sonatas, and accompanied sonatas composed by these women employ the plurality of styles (within and across movements) that scholars have come to recognize in the keyboard music of Haydn and Mozart. The notion of the ‘Viennese Classical Style’ proves too homogenizing to capture this variety. (A bold attempt by Anselm Gerhard to rehabilitate Classical style by displacing it onto Clementi, and grounding it in English taste, did not convince reviewers that the term ‘Classical’ – which Anselm glossed as unity in variety and noble simplicity – was apt to describe Clementi’s music.)⁵³ In keyboard music by women composed in London and Vienna after 1780, comic rhetoric sits alongside topical contrast, a variety of melodic and rhythmic figures, and – in slow movements – poignant sensibility. The music appears less ‘in’ than ‘about’ style itself.

In variation sets, galant simplicity and natural song could offer starting points for virtuosic display of an improvisatory process of stylistic transformation. An example is found in Auernhammer’s VI Variazioni nell’ Aria ‘Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja’ (1792), a set of six variations on Papageno’s first aria from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (1791). Transferred to the fortepiano, its lied-like character sounds all the more rustic, a type that H. C. Koch aptly defined as conveying the occupation of a class of humble people (in this case the bird catcher).⁵⁴ Auernhammer’s variations, however, convey her preferred occupation of composer-pianist. She enhances the theme with horn-fifth figures; in variation 3 she evokes a Hungarian dance (bb. 1–6) – for which the harsh acciaccaturas and repeated notes are fingerprints, following this with ‘brilliant’ arpeggios (bb. 7–8), a horn-fifth set beneath a trill (bb. 9–10), and then rapid (almost Rossinian) slurred pairs of notes. The minore fifth variation is subtly antiqued. Variation 6, majore allegro, is a hunting gigue, a topic Papageno employs in the second part of his aria, where he portrays himself catching a wife. Throughout her variations, Auernhammer seizes on the ‘birdcall’ or ‘whistle’ motif of Mozart’s aria, departing from the pattern of the original to introduce comic uncertainty and harmonic complications. Running rings around a lied in which Papageno shared his wish to catch birds (stanza 1) and women (‘I wish I had a trap for girls | I’d keep them by the dozen’) (stanza two), Auernhammer rattles the cage in her half-dozen variations.

We may hear difference, even resistance, in the keyboard music of Haydn and Mozart’s female contemporaries. In an important article on Maria Hester Park and her Sonata Op. 13, no. 2 (1801), Elizabeth Morgan develops this premise through ideas of sociability and the feminocentric texture of the accompanied sonata.⁵⁵ The genre comprised a fully-fledged piano sonata for a female performer, with an ostentatiously simple part for the violin or flute, to be performed by a gentleman amateur typically far less proficient than his musical partner (as enshrined in Brown on Haydn’s keyboard music). In the ‘conduct’ of the two instruments, portraying their musical identities, Morgan discerns a musical model of ‘the new woman’ at the end of the eighteenth century, influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): ‘This “new woman,” unlike Rousseau’s feminine archetype, relies on her powers of independent reason and individual will, carrying those qualities into marriage. She is not the same as a man, but she is his equal.’⁵⁶ In Morgan’s reading, female agency is mediated by genre and style, not taking the sentimental form of the composer’s personal confession in tones.

There is, however, good reason to turn to the work of women composers should we wish to explore composing as an act of self-fashioning in music of the later eighteenth century. Unlike Mozart and Haydn, women composers rarely had to compose on the demand of a patron, commission, or professional post. Their exclusion from posts within the music profession that made composition a duty, such as Kapellmeister, director of music at a church, in-house opera composer, or celebrity composer commissioned to provide works for a public concert, nudges their authorship into a more personal (we might even say ‘Romantic’) place.

The possibilities for further research on such questions aside, we have sought to show in this chapter the wide range of women’s participation in composition during this period. We have argued that the decorum of the galant, the artlessness prized in the discourse of natural song, and the premium placed on empathetic responsiveness in the culture of sensibility were subtly feminized. Women’s compositional work in these period-defining styles was exemplary rather than marginalized or problematically transgressive. In relation to Auernhammer’s variations, or Barthelemon’s musical wit, we have suggested that through rhetorical mastery of the available techniques and styles, women composers could engage imaginatively with the compositional mainstream, achieving thereby a degree of equality, and a voice, often denied them in other domains.

Introduction

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Lied provided women composers and performers with an important vehicle for self-expression, a means to assert their creativity and agency at a time when larger, more public forms of artistic expression were less accessible to them. Studying the Lied with reference to the contexts in which it was conceived, performed, and received provides crucial insights into the interpersonal relationships fostered by music-making during this period. Equally important, analysing Lieder with these contexts in mind shows how such relationships were refracted through the prism of song. Both lines of enquiry – one historical, the other analytical – unite in an effort to uncover what Aisling Kenny and Susan Wollenberg have described as the ‘personal stamp’ that female composers and performers placed on the nineteenth-century Lied.¹ It is this ‘personal stamp’ – this expression of female creativity and agency – which we understand in this chapter as female subjectivity.

Combining these approaches, we explore two different spaces for the expression of female subjectivity in the nineteenth century: the physical space of cultural practice – salonesque gatherings in private homes, and the creative space of cultural practice – songs that would have been heard in these gatherings. After a brief introductory discussion of nineteenth-century salon culture, we examine female subjectivity in private social gatherings, focusing on three case studies: Elise von Schlik (1792–1855), Johanna Kinkel (1810–58), and Fanny Hensel (1805–47). Then, returning to Hensel and her circle, we look at a particularly rich example of female subjectivity expressed in song: a Lied based on a poem by her sister-in-law about the passivity of women’s lives, in which Hensel seems at once to empathize with the poet’s predicament and to resist it. We focus specifically on spaces in Central Europe between the Vienna Congress (1814–15) and the middle of the century, for two main reasons. First, the geopolitical and socio-cultural circumstances in the nineteenth-century world are so diverse that an in-depth study of a wider geographical and chronological range would be impossible. Secondly, the early nineteenth-century Lied offers fertile soil for the exploration of female subjectivity, with this era seeing a marked rise in the number of female composers, and with art song being naturally suited to the private sphere, where women were especially active.² In choosing three examples based in Berlin (Hensel), Bonn (Kinkel), and Prague (Schlik), we aim to position these women within their own individual circles, and to trace intersections among them. Ultimately we argue that, despite their confined circumstances, these women and others in their circles found ways of expressing themselves and shaping their social environments, both by meeting and exchanging ideas in physical gatherings – the space of the salon – and by communicating subtle messages through words and music – the space of song.

Female Subjectivity and Salon Culture

Private and semi-private social gatherings offered a valuable platform for less formal cultural participation – both professional and amateurish in nature. Two problems arise, however, when examining this cultural phenomenon. First, the organizational structures and expectations associated with such gatherings vary widely and are not fully traceable today, making it challenging to examine the individual gatherings and the artistic output that sprang from them. Most sources for particular gatherings do not provide much detail regarding the music, literature, and other art forms that were conceived and heard there; some sources are missing, inaccessible, or of questionable credibility.³

Secondly, and more significant, there are no airtight definitions and terminology with regard to salon culture. In the 1980s, the term ‘salon’, in light of its French origin, was associated with regular private gatherings hosted by a female salonnière on a jour fixe and attracting a number of regular and occasional visitors.⁴ It has since become more of an umbrella concept covering all manner of regular gatherings in private homes throughout nineteenth-century Europe, even though many other terms were used to describe this idea.⁵ (This is, in part, why some salon researchers have recommended focusing on specific case studies, rather than seeking broad definitions that apply to every situation.)⁶ Just as the names of these gatherings differed, so did their individual components, themes, and artistic priorities, depending upon their location and the socio-cultural circumstances that surrounded them, as well as the financial means, personal interests, and tastes of their hosts and participants. Salons could be intimate meetings featuring conversation and spontaneous artistic performances described only in diaries or letters (if at all), or thoroughly planned performances that were covered extensively in the public media. A review published in the Bohemian magazine Bohemia: ein Unterhaltungsblatt, in mid-December 1838, shows the blurred boundary between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ – between spontaneous get-togethers featuring conversation, laughter, and music on the one hand, and pre-planned events on the other hand. Moreover, it demonstrates that sometimes ‘salons’ could include entry fees, and even be reviewed publicly, while still being intimate and informal:

Like Friedrich Wilhelm Pixis, Elise von Schlik, Johanna Kinkel, and Fanny Hensel added their ‘personal stamp’ to the social gatherings that they initiated in their homes. All three women united in their homes both salonesque conversation and deep musical experience.⁸ All three also hosted gatherings featuring a large variety of music – both Salonmusik and salon music, music for the salon and music in the salon, as differentiated by Andreas Ballstaedt.⁹ Their gatherings hovered somewhere between private and public, spontaneous and organized, ephemeral and permanent. This diversity and heterogeneity enabled women to shape their own spaces, and those they visited, in their own unique way.

Elise von Schlik in Prague

Countess Elise von Schlik’s fascination with music, literature, and art as well as with musical sociability was not unique within her family: her mother Philippine (née von Nostitz, 1766–1843) was an excellent pianist, and was culturally engaged, and the composer Johann Nepomuk von Nostitz, who was both her uncle and her brother-in-law, hosted a musical salon in Prague.¹⁰ The Schlik family estate reveals that Elise was a gifted painter and poet, supporter of the arts, meticulous collector of all things cultural, passionate traveller, and ambitious composer. A lithograph included in the family estate shows her beside a piano with her Lieder Op. 12, dedicated to Julius Schulhoff, and a sheet including text written in verse (see Figure 10.1).¹¹ It testifies to Schlik’s self-perception as performer, composer, musical patroness, and poet.

Figure 10.1 Elise von Schlik beside a piano with her Lieder Op. 12 and a sheet including verse.

Image courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

Elise von Schlik held musical evenings in her home in the centre of Prague, welcoming a number of guests during the first half of the century.¹² Clara and Robert Schumann visited her during their stay in Prague in January–February 1847.¹³ The Schumanns’ commentary on Schlik is sparse, possibly owing to the density of contacts and events during their trip. Robert noted on 24 January 1847 that ‘Clara went with Countess Schlick, many visits with the haute volée [high-society people]’, and ‘in the morning [I went to] Countess Schlick (sic), strange business, but a very friendly woman’.¹⁴ Both Schumanns left an entry in Schlik’s Stammbuch (album), and Schlik dedicated her Lieder Op. 11 to Robert Schumann.¹⁵ The album (started by Elise’s mother Philippine in 1814, and continued by Elise from 1828 to 1852) testifies to the musical and literary haute volée mixing in Schlik’s circle.¹⁶ Among those who signed it are August Wilhelm Ambros, Franz Liszt, Moritz Mildner, Friedrich Wilhelm Pixis, Julius Schulhoff, Louis Spohr, Václav Jan Tomášek, and Václav Jindřich Veit. The album embraces pieces for piano and physharmonica (a keyboard instrument fitted with free reeds), songs, and, to a smaller extent, violin compositions, extended chamber music, vocal works for more than one voice and piano, or guitar, accompaniment, and poetry. The vocal pieces are settings of such leading contemporary poets as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine, but also lesser-known and regional poets, including Schlik herself. The languages are German, French, Italian, and, in one case, Czech. Besides Clara Schumann, Schlik’s album includes contributions by lesser-known female composers and musicians – for example, Rosalie Spohr, Sophie Bohrer, and Theresa Wartel. Some of the contributions were created in Schlik’s country residence in Kopidlno or during her travels to Carlsbad, Brussels, Ischgl, and Munich. The album’s diversity reflects both Philippine and Elise von Schlik’s strong artistic affinities, changes in taste and conventions between 1814 and the 1850s, and the high standing that performers, composers, and poets evidently attributed to this musical space.

The public press did not report on Schlik’s gatherings, although Schlik’s and Pixis’s gatherings had similar priorities – music and conversation – and to some extent attracted the same guests: Pixis himself, Spohr, Veit, and Mildner, for example. Schlik’s home served as an intimate space enabling rich creative inspiration (as seen in numerous original settings in her album), a sophisticated cultural centre for the haute volée, and a metropolitan melting-pot for visitors from different social backgrounds.

Johanna Kinkel and the Maikäferbund in Bonn¹⁷

Johanna Kinkel was born into a bourgeois Catholic family and was financially pressured to make a living from music throughout her adult life. After an unhappy marriage and her conversion to the Protestant faith, Kinkel married the Protestant theologian, poet, writer, and professor Gottfried Kinkel (1815–82) in 1843, with whom she had four children.¹⁸ Already in 1840, Johanna and Gottfried founded the Maikäferbund, whose artistic outputs, discussions, and social activities Johanna recorded in the handwritten journal Maikäfer: Zeitschrift für Nichtphilister (Journal for Non-Philistines).¹⁹ At an artistic level, both Kinkels increased their productivity with the Maikäferbund, as the regular meetings enabled a lively exchange of ideas. It is thus not surprising that during the 1840s Kinkel set many poems which evolved within the context of the Maikäferbund: besides her own and her husband’s poetry, these include texts by Alexander Kaufmann, Sebastian Longard, Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter, Nikolaus Becker, and Wilhelm Seibt.²⁰ Many of the songs to words by Gottfried and Johanna Kinkel conveyed socially critical content; both of them were engaged in the political upheavals during the late 1840s. It was politics that led to the closing down of the Maikäferbund in 1847, the group being divided between different political allegiance.²¹

The only female member of the group, Kinkel oversaw the Maikäfer journal. She contributed to it poetry, novellas, and music-historical writings; she drew vignettes for some of the journal numbers; and she sang, as Willibald Beyschlag’s account reveals: ‘When she [Johanna Kinkel] sang her Lieder, the most beautiful, harmonious songs of Geibel or Kinkel – not with an outstanding voice, but presented in a most thoughtful and soulful recital, then, surrounded by the twilight of the intimate room, she looked youthful and beautiful’.²² The group’s activities embraced the discussion of literary texts, joint poetry and prose writing, puzzles and quizzes, playful literary commentary on current affairs, recitations of poetry, drama, and songs, and joint trips into the countryside. Besides these activities typical of Biedermeier culture, the meeting’s regularity, the mixed artistic interests in literature, social life, art history, and music, and the mutual artistic innovation suggest a salon-like structure. Although the term Bund (association) brings to mind the organizational structures characterizing Vereine rather than salons, and the presence of a journal counters salonesque ephemerality, the fact that the music of Kinkel’s Lieder, as opposed to their poetry, was never documented in the Maikäfer journal, either through musical scores or anecdotal references to performances, adds a salonesque feature to the Maikäferbund: it implies an intimacy among the members witnessing Kinkel’s performances, and makes Kinkel’s salonesque gatherings seem all the more spontaneous, uncertain, and ephemeral.

Fanny Hensel and the Sonntagsmusiken in Berlin

As early as 1821, Fanny Hensel’s mother and father had initiated weekly concerts on Sundays in their Berlin home in Neue Promenade in order to enable their children to practise music with professional musicians. The estate the family moved into at Leipziger Straße 3 in 1825 allowed larger musical gatherings, which (following a brief pause after Felix left home in 1829) Fanny Hensel re-established in 1831 as weekly cultural events, lasting until her death in 1847.²³ These Sonntagsmusiken, in which Kinkel participated frequently during her time in Berlin from 1836 to 1839, were considered salons by earlier scholars.²⁴ However, more recently it has been argued that the activities fostered there exceeded those associated with salonesque gatherings.²⁵ The musical programmes were planned in advance by Hensel, sometimes including meticulous rehearsals, and audience numbers could reach up to 200.²⁶ Hensel’s thorough organization is reminiscent of the institutionalized concerts or chamber music evenings common throughout Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, a journal – titled Gartenzeitung (Garden Journal) and, from 1827 onwards, renamed Schnee- und Theezeitung (Snow and Tea Journal) – recorded activities at the Leipziger Straße residence, thus pushing against the salonesque concept of ephemerality in a similar way to the Kinkels’ Maikäfer journal.²⁷ However, we cannot be certain that Hensel recorded everything that was performed at her Sunday ‘musicales’, and there may perhaps have been room for improvisation, despite all the thorough planning. Furthermore, music was performed beyond the Sunday musicales.²⁸

Regarding the performance of music in different spaces within Leipziger Straße 3, Beatrix Borchard contrasts Hensel’s intimate garden (Garten) with the more institutionalized Garden Hall (Gartensaal):

Borchard suggests that the intense musical experiences in the garden and the Garden House found expression in printed works, such as Fanny Hensel’s four-part Gartenlieder, Op. 3.³⁰ Kinkel performed Hensel’s Gartenlieder privately with her choral association, the Bonner Gesangverein, in November and December 1847.³¹ It is plausible that when performing these pieces in Bonn in 1847, Kinkel remembered her experiences in the garden of Leipziger Straße 3, or the Garden Hall – yet another example of the blurring of boundaries between private and public (the Bonner Gesangverein gave public concerts, whereas Hensel’s Gartenlieder featured in private performances in the Garden Hall), as well as the expressive power of song to convey interpersonal relationships, experiences, and memories.

The repertoire performed at Hensel’s home was diverse. It encompassed contemporary works performed by the composers themselves or by their students, including, besides compositions by Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel, songs by Karl Anton Florian Eckert, and improvisations on works by Charles de Bériot (performed by his student Henri Vieuxtemps), and on works of Ferdinand David (performed by Joseph Joachim). Original works by contemporary and past composers were frequently programmed and performed by regular attendees – for instance, those of J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Hummel, and Moscheles, as well as piano reductions of operas and oratorios (by Gluck, Handel, Mozart, and Weber).³² A few exceptions aside, Lieder were rarely documented in Hensel’s programmes – perhaps they were considered too trivial or intimate to be performed before larger audiences, or, more likely, they were not recorded explicitly because, while they were an inherent part of the Mendelssohns’ musical life, they were not regarded as a main attraction within the context of the Sonntagsmusiken.

Female Subjectivity and Musical Style

If the actual physical spaces of these salonesque gatherings provided Schlik, Kinkel, Hensel, and others with an important venue enabling the expression of their own subjectivity, what kind of abstract creative space did the Lied offer to them? How do the lived experiences of the female composers who participated in these gatherings find expression in their music?

While questions about gender and musical style bear strongly on women’s music from a variety of genres and time periods,³³ nineteenth-century art song is particularly fertile ground for exploring female subjectivity and musical style. Some scholars have approached this by juxtaposing different settings of the same poem by a woman and a man, to explore how a composer’s gender might inform their interpretation of a poetic text. Caitlin Miller, in Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied, compares Clara Schumann’s and Franz Liszt’s settings of Heine’s poem based on the legend of the Lorelei, a supernatural creature who lures sailors to their deaths.³⁴ How, Miller asks, does each composer depict the female character in the poem, and to what extent is she treated as passive object or active subject? Miller focuses on, among other things, each composer’s use of a theme to depict the Lorelei. While Liszt introduces his Lorelei theme in a stanza describing her physical appearance, thereby objectifying her and emphasizing her passivity rather than her agency, Schumann places her Lorelei theme in a piano interlude that comes directly after a line describing her most powerful action – singing the song that leads the boatman into the rocky reefs. In this way, Miller suggests, Schumann’s melody symbolizes not the Lorelei’s image but the thing that gives her agency – her song.³⁵

Other scholars have explored how female song composers have dealt with poetic themes relating to their experiences as women.³⁶ In The Songs of Fanny Hensel, Susan Wollenberg studies Hensel’s songs that deal with the theme of travel.³⁷ What does it mean, Wollenberg asks, for a woman composer to engage with this theme during an era in which ‘the restrictions placed on women with regard to the conditions under which they could travel set up social and cultural barriers to their ability to roam the world’?³⁸ She argues that Hensel used song composition as a way to travel in her mind’s eye, to imagine distant places that she longed to visit, or re-visit. At the age of sixteen, on a family trip to Switzerland in 1822, Hensel wrote a letter to her cousin describing her frustration at the restrictions placed on her on account of her gender; standing on the border between Switzerland and Italy, knowing that if she had been ‘a young lad of sixteen’ she could have ventured over the mountains into the country that was calling to her, she felt destiny crying out, ‘so far, and no further!’³⁹ Wollenberg shows how those sentiments found expression in a song Hensel wrote during her Swiss sojourn, a setting of ‘Kennst du das Land’, Goethe’s famous poem about a young woman who has been kidnapped and longs to return to her native land of Italy.⁴⁰ In this song and others, Hensel not only transported listeners to faraway places but also transported herself to places she could not visit as freely as men.

Wollenberg grounds her observations fruitfully in the concrete details of Hensel’s life; she shows how Hensel used music to express her relationship with the world in which she lived and composed. That world contained not just the places she visited (or longed to visit) but also the people she knew, the spaces she worked in, and the ideas and sentiments she shared with those in her circle. All of these things shaped the kind of music she created – and the same could be said of many other female composers from the nineteenth century. The space of the salon and the space of the song intersect, each casting light on the other.

Fanny Hensel’s ‘Die Sommerrosen blühen’

Hensel’s Lieder demonstrate revealingly how songs can reflect private networks and friendship (and other kinds of relationships); she was personally acquainted with many of the poets whose words she set. Among her songs are twenty-two settings of words by female writers, several of whom operated in spheres that intersected with Hensel’s own – including Fanny Casper (wife of Johann Ludwig Casper, who wrote the librettos for Felix Mendelssohn’s first four operas), the poet and intimate family friend Friederike Robert, and the poet we focus on here: Fanny’s sister-in-law Luise Hensel.

Fanny married Luise’s brother Wilhelm in 1829, but already seven years before that she was beginning to develop a close relationship with her future sister-in-law. Fanny set two of Luise’s poems to music in 1822, a year after she met Wilhelm: ‘Dahin’ (There), which she retitled ‘Die Linde’ (The linden tree), H-U 56, and ‘Will keine Blumen mehr’ (Don’t want any more flowers), retitled ‘Die Sommerrosen blühen’ (Summer roses are blooming), H-U 57.⁴¹ (Because these songs were written before the Mendelssohn family moved to Leipziger Straße 3, they would not have been heard in the fully organized Sonntagsmusiken, but they may have been performed in the gatherings that Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn held at their Berlin home on Neue Promenade.) Both poems are about withering flowers and fading beauty – and indeed, this theme appears throughout Luise Hensel’s poetry. Susan Youens, in Schubert, Müller, and ‘Die schöne Müllerin’, mentions the poet’s ‘transformation of commonplace poetic imagery’, specifically citing ‘Will keine Blumen mehr’, a poem about a woman whose brother is travelling with the army while she is left home with dying roses.⁴² As Youens suggests:

Here once more the theme of travel takes on special meaning for a woman artist who could not explore the world as freely as she would have liked. Luise Hensel wrote the poem in 1814, when her brother was fighting in the Napoleonic wars; we can sense in it her frustration at being rooted to one spot like the fading flower, unable to experience the world as her brother can (see Figure 10.2 for text and translation).

If the poem encapsulates Luise’s frustration with the restrictions of womanhood, it seems to have had personal significance also for Fanny. She set the poem to music (as well as Luise’s ‘Dahin’) in December 1822, just after returning from the family trip to Switzerland mentioned earlier. This was only two months before Wilhelm, with her permission, spoke with her parents about the couple’s intention to marry, and only seven months before Wilhelm was scheduled to leave for Italy, where he would work for five years as a painter in Rome; during that absence he was forbidden from writing letters to Fanny, and thus could only send her drawings, and correspond with her parents. Larry Todd has noted that in setting ‘Will keine Blumen mehr’, Fanny ‘now assumed the poetic persona, just months before Wilhelm’s departure for Italy and the beginning of a new five-year separation’.⁴⁵ She changed the first line of stanza 2, ‘Der Bruder mein that ziehen’ (My brother went journeying), to ‘Der Liebste mein that ziehen’ (My beloved went journeying), making the biographical connection all but explicit.

How does Hensel interpret the poetic persona’s predicament and give voice to her emotions? Depending upon how we read the poem, the poetic persona could sound anywhere from despondent (as though she has given up hope of improving her situation) to decisive (as though she has resolved to renounce a life of passivity). Fanny appears to opt for the second of these: the poetic persona of her song comes across as a woman who actively rejects the ‘passivity’ of her situation – as well as the conventional image of femininity that signifies it – and tries, however futilely, to free herself from her confinement. While the protagonist of the poem is already given agency because it is presented from her point of view, Fanny gives her added agency; in her reading of the poem, the woman does not so much resign herself to her fate as resist it.

This resistance is conveyed above all in the realm of harmony and tonality. Hensel sets the first and last stanzas – those describing the woman’s experience – to music that attempts to break free from the constraints of the tonic. Example 10.1 shows the music associated with the first stanza. The music to the final stanza is a varied repetition of the opening section. Fanny sets stanzas 2 and 3 in D major, with a related melody but different harmonies. She omits stanza 4; we can only surmise as to the reasons, but it is significant that she draws even more attention thereby to the poetic speaker. In the original poem, two stanzas describe her experience and three describe his; in the revised version they each have two stanzas. After a two-bar introduction that secures D minor as forcefully as possible (with back-to-back i–V–i progressions), she immediately touches on the subdominant, G minor. After this, she strongly tonicizes C minor (bb. 5–6), G minor (bb. 7–8), and F major (bb. 9–10). The music pulls away from D minor, not gently (or passively) but determinedly, even with a sense of strain; note especially the harshly dissonant D and C dominant ninth chords in bars 6 and 9. The journey away from D minor, however, is short-lived: the opening section ends with a clear perfect authentic cadence in the tonic and a return of the forceful i–V–i progressions – a sign that for all the poetic persona’s resistance she cannot escape the constraints placed on her.

Example 10.1 Fanny Hensel, ‘Die Sommerrosen blühen’, H-U 57, bars 1–13

Hensel emphasizes the woman’s agency not just with the music she writes but also with her further alterations to her sister-in-law’s poem, besides substituting ‘Der Liebste’ for ‘Der Bruder’ (see Figure 10.3 for the words as she set them, with the most significant changes marked in boldface).⁴⁶ The penultimate line of the poem is not ‘Ich seh’ sie all’ verblühen’ (I see them all withering), as in the original, but ‘Ach laß sie mir verglühen’ (Ah, let them die for me); what was an observation becomes an imperative. And in three of the stanzas she changes the refrain ‘Will keine Blumen mehr’ to ‘Ich will nicht Blumen mehr’. In her revision Fanny makes the subject explicit – she gives voice to the ‘ich’ that was unspoken in Luise’s text, making the ‘lyric I’ an even more active participant, who fully asserts herself.

It is therefore striking that she does not change the refrain in her setting of the second stanza – the first time we hear about the man’s experience in the battlefield.⁴⁷ The significance of her retention of the original line here comes into even sharper relief when we consider the music for this stanza. Example 10.2 shows the middle section, which sets both stanzas 2 and 3. Where the outer sections strive to escape D minor, tonicizing a new key area every couple of bars, the middle section stays more contentedly in D major, opening with a full I–IV–V⁷–I progression that takes up five bars. This is music that sounds more secure and confident altogether than the music of the outer sections, with their sense of anxious striving; like the brother in the poem, and the husband in the song, it sounds happy to be where it is. Even when the music does move away from D major, the move is normative – a modulation to the dominant that prepares for a return of the opening material – rather than unexpected, like the tonal shifts in the opening section. The only real moment of surprise is the brief move to an F major chord in bar 19, which clearly references the F major key in the first section. Fittingly, it occurs when the stanza shifts momentarily to a description of the woman’s state: ‘Läßt einsam mich verblühen’ (He has left me to wither). In this section resounding with the man’s assuredness, the woman’s anxiety creeps in, however briefly – her music intervenes, but is waved aside by his music, in the form of an easy modulation to the dominant. In this context, the line ‘Will keine Blumen mehr’ begins to take on a different meaning than in the original poem; it sounds less like ‘[I] don’t want any more flowers’ and more like ‘[He] doesn’t want any more flowers.’ Listening to the F major hesitation, and the subsequent brusque modulation, it is hard not to sense the woman’s feelings of renunciation – her anxiety about being forgotten.

Example 10.2 Fanny Hensel, ‘Die Sommerrosen blühen’, H-U 57, bars 13–23

Wilhelm forgot neither his sister Luise nor his future wife Fanny. In 1829, one year after Wilhelm’s return from Italy, he and Fanny were married: he was a stalwart and supportive presence throughout her life. Together they hosted and visited social gatherings in Berlin, had their son Sebastian, and inspired each other creatively. Wilhelm was a gifted painter and poet, and his poems were the basis for many of Fanny’s vocal works. Among them is the fourth of her Gartenlieder, Op. 3, mentioned previously, a setting of Wilhelm’s poem ‘Morgengruß’ (Morning greeting). The manuscript is dated 6 July 1846, Wilhelm’s birthday, and adorning the upper left quarter of the first page is a beautiful painting of flowers.⁴⁸ This represents the blooming plant of the poem, which beholds the morning’s radiance – a visual image that supplements the song’s verbal and sonic images. Yet viewed in light of Fanny’s earlier composition about wilting summer roses and the stifling passivity of womanhood they symbolize, the flowers of this later song seem almost like a counter-image, reclaiming floral imagery for a different purpose, and a different meaning. Here the flowers suggest a shared domestic space: the literal space of the Garden Hall, as well as the garden situated adjacent to their home, but also the metaphorical space where their creative spheres (music, poetry, and painting) merged.

In her 1880 memoir, the American pianist Amy Fay described the sheer virtuosity and professional ambition of the numerous young women pianists she encountered. Her account of a Sunday studio class at the Berlin Conservatory is particularly vivid:

Nineteenth-century culture viewed piano-playing as a valuable and respectable accomplishment for a middle-class woman. Most such women made music within private domestic spaces, where pianism could function as an avidly pursued avocation, a mark of genteel accomplishment, and a pleasurable component of social gatherings. Depictions of women playing the piano in such contexts abound in literature (Austen, for example) and painting (Renoir, for example). Engaging with the piano involved navigating the porous boundaries between amateur and professional, and between public and private music-making: many women who did not earn a living from the piano commanded high-calibre performing and compositional skills. Thus Fanny Hensel, through her engagement with her family’s semi-private Sonntagsmusiken, produced a weighty compositional oeuvre and took the spotlight as pianist.

However, many women became concert pianists and published composers. Fay identified several classmates aspiring to such careers who received enthusiastic support from prominent male teachers and colleagues, including Franz Liszt and Carl Tausig. Nancy B. Reich observed that the majority of women who became professional musicians – not only on the concert stage and at the composer’s desk, but also in the teaching studio – came from families of modest means, in which it was taken for granted that women would engage in professional life. Many such families were part of an artist-entrepreneur class. Reich cites Clara Schumann – daughter of a piano teacher father and soprano mother – as a paradigmatic example. By contrast, earning money from musical performance or composition ran counter to notions of female respectability held by socially elite families – Reich cites Hensel as a woman for whom such a career would have been ‘unthinkable’.²

Women seeking recognition as concert pianists navigated barriers, biases, and double-binds, their bodies and performing gestures coming under close scrutiny. Fay described a classmate as one of Tausig’s best students but regretted that her ‘frightfully ugly’ hands made her playing hard to enjoy, while Franz Grillparzer’s poem ‘Clara Wieck und Beethoven’ highlighted the seventeen-year-old pianist’s ‘white fingers’.³ Audiences assessed how women pianists embodied ideals of feminine delicacy and grace; women transgressing these boundaries risked being seen as unfeminine, and yet any hint of coquettishness or girlishness could compromise a woman’s image as a serious artist.⁴

Women faced additional obstacles to publishing their compositions. In a foundational study, Marcia Citron has analysed how the structure of the nineteenth-century musical profession (from conservatory curricula limiting women’s access to theory courses to male domination of music journalism) disadvantaged women, particularly within the process of canon formation.⁵ Nineteenth-century musical aesthetics was explicitly gendered: women were viewed as inherently less capable of composing in large-scale forms or mastering learned counterpoint, being supposedly better suited to shorter songs and character pieces, more capable of making music by way of sentiment than intellect, and more attuned to fine detail than to larger, sweeping structures. One 1848 review of Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio, Op. 17, articulated this stereotype:

The highest praise a woman could gain as a pianist or composer was, as here, for a critic to proclaim that the supposed limitations of femininity did not apply to her. The spectre of sexist aesthetics haunted even the plaudits.

Even so, women pianist-composers found ways of carving out individual career paths and professional profiles. Their activities were as extensive and diverse as the larger panorama of nineteenth-century music; they feature in virtually every part of this story – not only as pianists and composers but also as audiences, consumers, and pedagogues. No history of nineteenth-century pianism is adequate without conveying a vibrant role for women.

In this chapter we offer several case studies that illustrate the range of ways in which women pianist-composers exercised their creative agency, with examples drawn from across the nineteenth century. We aim at an ‘integrated’ history of these cases, emphasizing the extent to which women pianist-composers engaged with their broader musical worlds and highlighting their roles in histories that musicology has for too long rendered as all-male.⁷ We hope our study will invite readers (particularly performers) to immerse themselves in a vital part of nineteenth-century music that tends to remain marginalized in concert life.

From Miniatures to Chamber Genres

Fanny Hensel’s description of her Sonntagsmusiken – exclusive musical gatherings at her family’s home in Berlin – as ‘a wonderful middle ground between a private and public entity’ captures the blurred boundaries between salon genres and the concert stage in nineteenth-century piano culture.⁸ Here we trace this thread outwards from piano miniatures to duets, sonatas, trios, and quintets, demonstrating the ways in which women pianist-composers brought aspects of the public world, particularly virtuosity, into these genres.

The history of piano miniatures has traditionally been framed as an all-male endeavour, foregrounding such names as John Field, Felix Mendelssohn, and Fryderyk Chopin; recent studies have brought attention to women’s rich contributions in this area.⁹ Referring to piano miniatures as ‘salon pieces’ conveys one important aspect: the genre sold well with amateur pianists. At the same time, character pieces could serve the professional needs of touring concert pianists, men and women. For example, during the 1890s Cécile Chaminade turned away from the large-scale forms she had explored earlier and produced a wave of short piano pieces and songs. Citron notes that she may have been dissatisfied with the Parisian reception of her large works – including some patronizingly sexist rhetoric in reviews. But Citron also argues that her shift represented a calculated professional move. After her father’s death, Chaminade and her mother needed income. Chaminade responded by undertaking concert tours and composing in highly marketable genres. As Citron notes, recital performances could stimulate sales of these pieces.¹⁰ Chaminade’s character pieces capture her range as a composer: from the lightweight ‘Scarf Dance’, Op. 37, no. 3, to the multi-layered textures and virtuosic outpourings of ‘Automne’, from 6 Études de concert, Op. 35, no. 2. Chaminade was far from the only woman to contribute to the nineteenth-century efflorescence of etudes for practice-room and concert stage. Like such male contemporaries as Chopin, Liszt, Czerny, and Moscheles, they capitalized on intertwined facets of piano culture: the vogue for systematized piano practice resources bearing the imprimaturs of famous virtuosos, and fascination with pieces creatively exploring the capabilities of the piano and the pianist’s technique. Louise Farrenc’s approach in her Thirty Études, Op. 26, stands out for its interweaving of virtuosity and didacticism; the coverage of all minor and major keys, together with the encyclopaedic treatment of pianistic textures and techniques, recalls J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

Hensel’s Das Jahr, H-U 385, represents an intricate essay in the genre of character-piece cycle. This set of pieces depicting the months of the year exemplifies not only Hensel’s craft, but also her wide-ranging artistic interests. Like all of Hensel’s piano music, Das Jahr went unpublished during her lifetime. The finished set exists as an intriguing manuscript (available in facsimile) in which Hensel coordinated different art forms to create a multifaceted cycle.¹¹ For each piece, Hensel selected a poetic epigraph (ranging from Goethe to chorale texts) and a different colour of manuscript paper, while her husband, the painter Wilhelm Hensel, added illustrations. Subtle thematic and tonal interconnections tie the work together, with citations of chorale melodies marking Easter, Christmas, and the New Year. Within this larger structure, individual pieces conjure a wide range of pianistic figurations and references, from the quasi-improvisational fantasy of January, through the ebullient march of August, to the snow flurries of December.¹²

Women’s creative engagement with the piano extended into music for four hands. Here the blurring of boundaries assumes a visual dimension in which, in the words of Adrian Daub, ‘hands and bodies interlock and interweave’.¹³ Such qualities can be heard (and seen) throughout Hensel’s Drei Stücke zu vier Händen. The first piece, Allegretto, fluctuates between the lyrical style of her ‘songs without words’ and a dynamic exploration of the textural possibilities of four-hand music. Memorable moments range from the passing of the theme from the Primo part to the right hand of the Secondo part (bar 13), as the Primo glides into the upper registers with arpeggiated filigree, to the instances of hand-crossing in the central section, where fragments of the theme in the Primo part overlap with the chordal accompaniment in the Secondo. The second piece, marked Allegro molto, takes the interweaving of hands and bodies to greater extremes, in an idiom capturing the stormy qualities of the mood discussed later in this chapter in connection with Hensel’s C minor Sonata. In contrast to the softer beginnings of the outer pieces, here the opening theme evokes a full orchestra in the parlour through its bold chordal textures, dotted rhythms in overture style, tremolo figurations, octave unisons, and angular melodic lines – creating an impression of magnitude, both aurally and physically. A similar fusion of the intimate and the public permeates Clara Schumann’s March in E flat for Four Hands, one of her last compositions, penned in 1879 as a golden wedding anniversary gift for Julius and Pauline Hübner. ‘There were no good ideas about a gift from them’, Schumann disclosed in a diary entry of May that year, ‘and then it occurred to [her eldest daughter] Marie that I could compose a march for them and weave Robert’s “Grossvater und Grossmutter” duet into it … I went to work on it and after a few days, it succeeded’.¹⁴ As with Hensel’s pieces, so Schumann’s duet slips between contrasting pianistic modes, encapsulating both the intimate and the social aspects of the genre. At one end of the spectrum is a vigorous style foregrounding hands and body equally. The piece begins thus, with the solo statement of the heraldic march, heard first in the Primo part, quickly expanding outwards into a texture of symphonic dimensions. Alongside this are moments striking a more wistful tone, as in the central section, where the march recedes into the background and a lyrical theme moves into the foreground. The mixing of moods recalls the ethos of the song on which the central section is based, ‘Familien Gemälde’ from Robert’s Vier Duette, Op. 34 no. 4, notably its final stanza: ‘Sie sahn uns an und dachten | Der schönen Vergangenheit; | Wir sahn sie an und träumten | Von ferner, künftiger Zeit’ (‘They looked at us and thought of their happy past. We looked at them and thought of distant days to come’).¹⁵ That Schumann weaves this song into the duet imbues it with multiple layers of meaning, not only in celebration of friendship, but also perhaps as a nostalgic reflection on her own circumstances, her connection with Robert, and her return to composition after a long hiatus.

Just as women pianist-composers incorporated a wide-ranging stylistic palette into miniature genres, so the same is true of their approach to large-scale ‘classical’ forms – the solo sonata and multi-movement chamber works. In this context, they not only combined virtuosity with exploration of large-scale form but also situated their music in dialogue with the emerging canon of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘classics’. Hensel’s contributions offer a rich case in point.¹⁶ An early example, composed in February 1824, is her Sonata o Capriccio in F minor, H-U 113, a one-movement piece recalling Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Sonata in F minor. Here, as Angela Mace Christian observes, Hensel ‘reimagined the dark, thickly voiced, theme’ of Beethoven’s first movement in a piece fusing sonata elements with the improvisatory style of the capriccio.¹⁷ Hensel similarly engages with the past while pursuing new pathways in her three-movement Piano Sonata in C minor, H-U 128, composed a few months later. Its web of references includes a ‘C minor mood’ familiar from the works of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven.¹⁸ At the same time, Hensel distinguishes herself through formal innovation and ‘harmonic richness that stamps [the] work as anything but conventional’.¹⁹ Examples range from the ‘imaginative excursion’ to the remote key of G flat major within the secondary theme, to the canonic treatment of the main theme in the coda, which imbues the closing material with a learned aura. Hensel’s fluid approach creates the impression, as a contemporaneous critic observed apropos her Lieder, that ‘here fantasy is permitted a freer reign [sic], the form applied in broader strokes’.²⁰

Like Hensel, Chaminade foregrounded an enterprising approach to formal and generic paradigms in her 1895 Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 21. Though she rarely performed the piece in public,²¹ Chaminade asserted her presence within the world of virtuoso pianists in the dedication to the composer and pianist Moritz Moszkowski (later to become her brother-in-law) and through the piece’s stylistic language.²² The opening thirty-five bars capture in microcosm the pianistic soundworlds encountered throughout. The impassioned theme, first heard in the lower registers, opens out into a display of pianistic brilliance, before giving way to a fugato (see Example 11.1). Chaminade thereby demonstrates, alongside her virtuosity and commitment to the ambitious sonata genre, command of a venerable idiom considered a hallmark of the serious composer. The juxtaposition of the virtuosic and learned permeates much of the movement, especially the coda, bars 195–211, where a fragment of the fugal theme returns amidst scalar passages in octave unisons and arpeggiated figuration. The formal innovation similarly takes its cue from the fusion of ‘old’ and the ‘new’. If the C minor tonality and Allegro Appassionata marking conjure the ghost of Beethoven, Chaminade strikes out on her own pathway in her handling of sonata form. Citron suggests that Chaminade’s approach, particularly in the secondary theme, might be read as ‘resistance’ to nineteenth-century ideas about gendering of themes in sonata form, in that Chaminade presents the secondary theme as ‘a diffuse gesture that will not let itself be a tonal Other’.²³ Much of this freedom stems from Chaminade’s flexible approach to tonality, whereby the secondary theme passes freely through keys, notably the relative major (E flat) and the submediant (A flat), rather than being confined to one region.

Example 11.1 Cécile Chaminade, Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 21, first movement, bars 29–52

Women additionally demonstrated compositional and pianistic enterprise in chamber music with piano. Virtuoso pianist-composers throughout the century found piano trios, quintets, and other such works to be versatile vehicles that were suitable for the salon as well as the concert stage, and that invited engagement with both cutting-edge virtuosity and classical paradigms. One example is Hensel’s D minor Trio, Op. 11, composed during the winter of 1846–47 as a birthday gift for her sister, Rebecka, and premiered on 11 April 1847 at one of her Sunday soirées. This piece, written in the final months of her life, brings together the strands of Hensel’s creative output – the virtuosic, the intimate, and learned – in a novel four-movement framework replacing a scherzo with two inner Lied-like movements. Though her death prevented her from publishing the piece, contemporary critics heralded it as a significant work: ‘We [find] in this trio’, one observed, ‘broad, sweeping foundations that build themselves up through stormy waves into a marvelous edifice. In this respect the first movement is a masterpiece, and the trio most highly original’.²⁴ The metaphor of ‘stormy waves’ is particularly pertinent to the opening movement, which evokes a ‘wave-like motion’ in three distinct ways:²⁵ first, the swirling figuration that emerges from the depths of the piano; secondly, the undulating contours of the main theme, rising and falling in tandem with the left hand of the piano part; and thirdly, the octave doubling between violin and cello, which adds urgency while reinforcing the physicality of the writing. These features situate the movement between the intimacy of chamber music and the awe-inspiring forces of the sublime. In other, contrasting moments, the textures evoke the more intimate ‘song without words’, notably the first movement’s secondary theme and the third movement’s opening. The finale reinstates the virtuosic style of the opening movement, ushered in by a cadenza that draws the concerto genre into the movement’s web of references and evokes Hensel’s ability as an improviser.

Louise Farrenc’s two piano quintets, Opp. 30 and 31, also demonstrate the potential of chamber genres for pianist-composers. Farrenc composed the works in 1839–40, at an important juncture of her career: she had already made a name for herself as a composer of vocal music and virtuoso piano pieces and had given a well-reviewed concert at the Salon Pleyel. Marie Sumner Lott has shown how Farrenc strategically adapted the conventions of the quintet genre to present herself both as a virtuoso pianist and as a serious composer engaging with ‘classical’ paradigms.²⁶ She scored the quintets for piano, violin, viola, cello, and bass: at the time, quintets with this scoring (such as those by Hummel, Ries, and Cramer) tended to have three movements, concluded with rondos, and focused overwhelmingly on brilliant piano passagework. Indeed, Farrenc ends expositions and recapitulations with extended zones of piano passagework resembling what we would find at a similar juncture of a concerto. At the same time, the overall formal designs of her quintets distinguish them from similarly scored works and foreground her compositional engagement with the classical chamber-music tradition. Each includes four movements, and all begin and end with weighty sonata forms. Throughout, Farrenc crafts webs of quasi-conversational motivic exchanges, regarded as a hallmark of the ‘serious’ chamber-music tradition. To cite one example: in the first movement, the pianist begins the second theme alone. Just as he or she rounds off the first phrase, the strings enter to exchange transformations of the theme’s salient motive with the pianist and ultimately yield a texture in which the strings overlay lyrical lines and one-bar snatches of the motive, while the piano provides a flow of arpeggiated accompaniment figuration. Farrenc went on to compose a substantial oeuvre of multi-movement instrumental works, including three symphonies and several chamber works for piano, strings, and/or winds.

Concertos

Women pianist-composers contributed to the most overtly public-facing virtuoso genre, the concerto. Claudia Macdonald, in a study of concertos by Clara Schumann and Amy Beach, interprets these works as expressions of compositional mastery, and shows how contemporary (male) critics tended to underestimate them.²⁷

Schumann composed her Piano Concerto, Op. 7, while touring as the teenage phenomenon Clara Wieck. She began drafting the concerto in 1833, completing the three movements in reverse order. Her father, Friedrich, described the concerto as an important addition to her portfolio. At the time, she had published one set of virtuosic variations and several sets of character and dance pieces; the concerto represented her first multi-movement work.²⁸ Friedrich noted in a letter to his brother-in-law that he hoped it would enhance her reputation among connoisseurs (‘Kenner’).²⁹ She used the concerto as a calling card throughout the mid- and late 1830s. For example, during her 1837–38 Vienna tour – an event that sealed her international reputation – she anchored her second concert with her concerto.

Clara Schumann contributed to a larger trend whereby early and mid-nineteenth-century pianist-composers, including Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Weber, Liszt, and Robert Schumann, developed highly original approaches to the concerto’s formal structure and solo-orchestra interaction. Scholars have identified her concerto as a model for Robert’s Piano Concerto, Op. 54, and speculated that it might have influenced Liszt’s Piano Concerto no. 1.³⁰ Clara Schumann’s particular approach showcases her capacity for thematic invention and tonal surprise, as well as her attention to large-scale structural balance. In many ways, her concerto resembles a form of fantasy improvisation whereby the pianist spins a simple motive into a range of contrasting movements.³¹ In the first movement, Schumann turns the forceful, march-like orchestral motto into the piano’s richly ornamented primary theme. In the second, she chromaticizes the motto’s ascending anacrusic gesture, using it to build a spacious melody in which sparingly deployed ornaments accentuate melodic peaks. In the third, she transforms the motive into a driving polonaise. Other passages of the concerto simulate spontaneous soloistic improvisation. As Macdonald notes, Schumann gives the first movement’s second theme only the briefest tonal preparation, so that the pianist seems suddenly to seize and land upon the second key area. The first movement features an abbreviated sonata form: after the development, Schumann segues into the second movement in the remote key of A flat major. (Macdonald notes how Schumann balances this tonal leap by anticipating it at the start of the first movement’s development.)³² After the orchestra wends its way toward the dominant of A flat, Schumann gives the pianist a moment of time-stopping reverie – an unmetred Eingang that spreads a dominant chord across the keyboard. The transition between second and third movement has the pianist circle three times through the salient motive, repeatedly juxtaposing A flat and the dominant of A minor and suggesting a rumination on tonal contrasts.

Schumann’s evocation of fantasy staged an important part of her pianistic persona: improvisation (then a necessary skill for any professional concert pianist) was one of her trademarks. In 1832, a reviewer described her generating an extended improvisation on a given theme – this feat, he wrote, showed that she was more than a ‘mere’ prodigy with skilled fingers. Other reviews noted that she occasionally performed long improvisations throughout that decade.³³ More frequently, Schumann improvised preludes to and transitions between the character pieces she performed, a practice she continued for the rest of her career. Schumann’s concerto – by evoking her improvisatory practice in a written-out work belongs to a substantial tradition of composed-out fantasies (including Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy and Liszt’s ‘Dante’ Sonata). Within this larger framework, Schumann positions herself on the cutting edge of piano virtuosity, creating numerous opportunities to display facility, expressive nuance, and sheer power. In the first movement she spotlights the intense physicality of the pianist’s virtuosity.³⁴ Schumann matches the martial forcefulness of the orchestra’s opening theme with double octaves that surge from the lowest to the highest ranges of the keyboard, peaking with full-fisted chords and octaves cascading down the piano. Such writing pushes the piano to its sonorous limit. By contrast, the slow movement presents an intimate soundworld unprecedented in the concerto repertoire. Schumann silences the orchestra altogether, evoking a lyrical piano miniature. Only a solo cello joins the piano to carry the melody at the rounding of the movement’s ternary form. Schumann accentuated the movement’s intimate quality by designating it a Romanze, a genre characterized by its wistful, introspective style. Across the concerto, she demonstrated her mastery of contemporary pianistic styles. The polonaise-finale adopts a dance style popular in current piano repertoire, perhaps capitalizing on the splash Chopin was making with his evocations of Polish dances. The extended zones of passagework in the first and third movements reveal her immersion in the post-classical concertos of Hummel, Kalkbrenner, and Chopin. Against chugging, motoric accompaniments she performs the kind of figuration that gave piano showpieces of this time their ‘brilliant’ sound – kaleidoscopically shifting patterns that highlight the piano’s pinging, stratospheric upper reaches.

Like Schumann, Amy Beach composed her Piano Concerto in C sharp minor, Op. 45, to serve her needs at a turning-point in her career. Adrienne Fried Block, detecting biographical resonances, has suggested that the piece ‘embodies the central problem of [Beach’s] life – between her desire for a public career on stage and the desire of those she loves to keep her “at home” or at least working in private rather than in public space’.³⁵ Her husband, Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, was one such figure who urged her to abandon the stage and devote her time to composing. After his death in 1910, Beach returned to the stage, using her concerto as a signature vehicle. She took the piece on tour to Europe, performing in Leipzig, Hamburg, and Berlin (1913), then across the United States, with performances in Los Angeles (1915), Chicago (1916), St. Louis, Boston, and Minneapolis (1917). Reviews of the concerts, particularly in the American press, positioned Beach as a ‘special presence – the foremost woman composer of her day’.³⁶ Edward C. Moore of the Chicago Journal (1916) described it as both a display of compositional mastery and an effective showpiece: ‘the composer evidently gave much care and thought to the construction of the work. Its working out is painstaking, its balance between solo instrument and orchestra is excellent; it is not too long, it is perfectly clear. From a structural point of view it is entirely praiseworthy.’³⁷

At the broadest level, Beach’s formal innovation is demonstrated in the inclusion of four movements, the last two performed attacca – a design recalling the architecture of Brahms’s Concerto no. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83, which similarly includes a scherzo as the second of its four movements. Striking in the first movement is Beach’s distortion of formal boundaries and points of arrival, as in the lack of textural punctuation between the end of the development and the onset of the recapitulation, or the way in which the recapitulation begins not with a clear return to the tonic, but rather with a restatement of the principal theme in the dominant. Yet, as Macdonald suggests, the movement retains an element of ‘accessibility’ through the varied repetition of the ‘easily remembered principal theme’.³⁸ In contrast to Schumann’s Concerto, where the piano takes centre stage throughout, Beach’s first movement presents the piano and orchestra in a tense dialogue – to borrow Beach’s own words, they ‘vie with each other in the development of the two principal themes, of which the second is songlike in character’.³⁹ Beach establishes this dialogic interaction from the outset, where the sombre main theme, first heard in octave unisons in the piano part, is subsequently passed to the orchestra (bars 69–86) while the piano takes up a new countertheme, before it returns to the piano with elaborated chordal accompaniment. These exchanges continue until the soloist moves into the foreground with what Beach called a ‘richly worked out cadenza’ towards the end of the movement.

Hints of a possible narrative in the concerto come not only from Beach’s own commentary on the piece, but also through the allusions to her songs. This cross-fertilization between song and instrumental music – aligning her approach with that of such contemporaries as Gustav Mahler – may suggest layers of quasi-programmatic references for those familiar with the poetic texts. A poignant example occurs in the Scherzo, which takes inspiration from Beach’s ‘Empress of Night’, Op. 2 no. 3 (1891), set to a text by her husband and dedicated to her mother. Beach reworks the vocal line of the song in the orchestral texture and surrounds it with ‘perpetuum mobile’ figuration in the piano part. The Largo, which Beach called a ‘dark tragic lament’, draws another song into the concerto’s frame of reference, her ‘Twilight’, Op. 2 no. 1, also set to a text by her husband. The mood of this poem – with its emphasis on ‘the darkening cloud of mist’, ‘the shadows of the past’ – is mirrored in the movement’s mournful theme that grows in intensity as it is passed between the orchestra and soloist. Not until the Finale does the promise of life, intimated at the end of the song, become a possibility. This movement, described by Beach as ‘a bright vivacious rondo’, foregrounds pianistic virtuosity as it dances along in waltz-like style.

Customizing Their Scripts

Women pianist-composers exercised compositional agency beyond the publication of standalone works. Their musical culture prized performers for reverent, revelatory interpretation: the imagined ability to enter into the mind of the composer or illuminate the supposed inherent essence of the work.⁴⁰ And yet, pianists and audiences saw no conflict between this ideal and practices that allowed (indeed expected) performers to add to and alter other composers’ works. Even within what we might classify as ‘interpretations’ of musical works, pianists routinely acted as composers. They could thereby stage their distinct approaches to pianism and subtly or significantly shape how audiences encountered a composition. When audiences heard women pianists perform works by other composers – most often male contemporaries or forebears – they often heard them in original customized or reworked versions. Some such customizations we can access as published musical scores. Others remain unrecoverable, tantalizingly indicated in written accounts. Collectively, they invite us to recognize a fluid boundary between interpretative performance and compositional reinterpretation, and they complicate our notion of a stable, fixed musical work or authoritative composer.

Original cadenzas for canonical concertos represented one high-profile, richly documented arena for such display. Although Beethoven’s and Mozart’s own cadenzas for their concertos became available during the nineteenth century, pianists continued to compose and publish their own. Amy Beach’s cadenza for the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3, published in 1888, illustrates the power of the cadenza to display a pianist’s approach to virtuosity and to add a daring gloss on the composer’s themes (see Example 11.2). Beach begins within Beethoven’s textural world; as the energy of the cadenza increases, however, she refracts Beethovenian themes through post-Lisztian virtuosic writing, culminating with a shattering presentation of the movement’s primary theme with full chords and double octaves thundering across the keyboard. Beach thereby adds a new virtuosic peak to a performance of the concerto that exceeds the textural boundaries of the original work. The cadenza’s tonal and thematic structure also add a new dimension to the concerto’s larger form. Beach’s treatment of the second theme veers from A flat into a series of sharp tonalities: G sharp minor, E major, A major, and C sharp minor. This section not only introduces a surprising tonal contrast but also an intermovement tonal link. Following the C minor first movement, the E major second movement surprisingly plunges into a distant tonality, un-hinted at thus far in the concerto. By adopting Beach’s cadenza, the performer might enable a tonally sensitive listener to hear in the second movement the blossoming of a key lightly touched on in the final stages of the preceding movement.

Example 11.2 Amy Beach, Cadenza for Beethoven, Piano Concerto no. 3 in C minor, first movement, bars 52–68

The larger body of original cadenzas to canonical concertos presents numerous distinct displays of compositional and pianistic enterprise. Angela Mace Christian notes that Fanny Hensel, in her cadenza for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 1, used figurational patterns drawn from his Piano Concerto no. 5 (the ‘Emperor’). Hensel might thereby have invited the audience to recognize her wide-ranging knowledge of Beethoven’s oeuvre. Her cadenza exists only as a manuscript held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (but accessible in facsimile in Christian’s study). Christian, noting that Hensel reapproaches cadential 6/4 chords five times over the course of the cadenza, suggests that she may have designed these junctures as springboards for improvisation. If so, the manuscript documents only a trace of what Hensel actually performed.⁴¹ Clara Schumann’s cadenza for the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4 invokes themes from the first and second movements, creating a cyclic, summarizing moment new to the finale.⁴²

Pianists often introduced solo pieces with improvised preludes or transitioned between them with improvised modulatory passages. Amy Fay described the practice as widespread among her colleagues, writing of a fellow student’s performance at a group lesson: ‘Tausig called out her name – he scarcely got the words out before she said “Ja”, to the great amusement of the class … and ran to the piano. She sat down with the chair half crooked, and almost on the side of it, but she never stopped to arrange herself, but dashed off a prelude out of her own head, and then played her piece … I think she will make a capital concert player, for she is always excited by an audience, and she has immense power.’⁴³ Fay further identified Teresa Carreño as a masterly improviser of preludes, ‘always striking into the key of the artist who preceded her on the programme, and modulating into the one in which her solo was written. I have never known her to fail, so absolute is her sense of pitch.’⁴⁴ Numerous sources – treatises, as well as published preludes and slow introductions to longer works – offer glimpses of this pianistic practice.⁴⁵ These notated scores, however, do not give us unmediated access to what pianists actually played, as Schumann acknowledged in 1895, when she wrote out a series of model preludes at the request of her children. Schumann cautioned that what she had notated could not fully capture an extemporized art.⁴⁶

Women pianist-composers also made customized versions of solo works by other composers. Alicia Levin argued that Marie Pleyel, in her 1845 Paris concerts, used transcriptions to present herself as a compositionally empowered pianist who could put her own stamp on works by respected forebears and contemporaries. She performed transcriptions of Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ and Meyerbeer’s ‘Le Moine’, as well as her version of the Larghetto e cantabile from Hummel’s Fantasy, Op. 18 (billed as an Andante). Pleyel’s song transcriptions are lost, and she may never have written them down. But the publisher Heugel released her version of the Hummel, ‘as played by Mme. Pleyel at the Théâtre Italien’. Pleyel changed the cadenza-like runs and flourishes that end phrases and sections, taking Hummel’s passagework to new extremes of brilliance. She adds notes so that flourishes move at ever more extreme speeds, span even wider swathes of the keyboard and hit even higher peaks. Pleyel thereby presented herself as a pianist who could surpass a celebrated virtuoso from a previous generation. The notated passagework in the Heugel score might have begun as heat-of-performance improvisation, and it is possible that Pleyel revised them for the publication. Levin shows that Pleyel’s arrangements met with a complex reception. One Parisian critic dismissed her choice to programme them as the ‘whim of a pretty woman’. Another described the arrangements as acts of ‘embroidery’ – a metaphor that feminized Pleyel’s work – but also credited her with realizing the composer’s ‘thoughts’ and the ‘spirit of the work’. Certainly the Heugel publication attests that Pleyel’s name, and the promise of experiencing the work as she played it, would have enticed consumers.⁴⁷

At the opposite end of the period under consideration, Sophie Menter customized other composers’ works to foreground her signature power and verve. One example is her arrangement of the first and second divertimenti from Francesco Durante’s 1747–49 Sei Sonate. Throughout, she retains Durante’s quicksilver flow of figuration while adding octave passagework and layers of sonority that reflect her mastery of Lisztian pianism – Menter emulated Liszt, enjoyed a collegial rapport with the older, legendary pianist, and made his compositions central to her repertory. In her version of the second divertimento, Menter turns Durante’s single-handed arpeggios into rapid hand-crossings and makes his trills drive toward punchy bass octaves. Some of Menter’s high-octane customizations remained unpublished, and she may not have notated them. For example, during her 1882 London concerts, a critic reported that when she performed Chopin’s Waltz, Op. 34, no. 1, she omitted ‘the last beautiful page’ and substituted a ‘loud’ ending.⁴⁸ It is unclear exactly where Menter veered from Chopin’s text; it seems she at least cut the last twenty-nine measures – in which Chopin lets one of the waltz’s themes fragment and fade to a pianissimo – and instead ended with a display of sonorous power.

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While this chapter can only scratch the surface of women’s engagement with the piano in the nineteenth century, we hope to have conveyed the breadth of their creativity as pianist-composers, whether in terms of their engagement with venerable traditions, their foregrounding of virtuosity, or their innovations in both miniature and large-scale genres. Thinking about their contributions to these areas carries wider implications for re-evaluating the history of piano music. To cite two examples: Hensel’s Das Jahr offers an elaborate example of how piano cycles could fuse multiple sources of musical allusion and influences from other art forms, while Farrenc’s piano quintets belong in any account of how composers adapted and reinvigorated classical paradigms within the chamber-music tradition and beyond. Of particular significance is the way all our case studies encourage us to rethink what it meant to be a composer in the nineteenth century, and to embrace an open view of musicianship in which performing, writing, teaching, and improvising are placed on an equal footing. In this spirit we offer an invitation to continue the conversation about women’s multifaceted contributions to nineteenth-century piano culture, private and public.