The ‘Great’ Composer?

At the start of the twentieth century throughout much of the United States and Europe, fuelled by the enduring image of the ‘new woman’, femme nouvelle, and neue Frau, there were widespread media discussions about women’s roles in society and culture – what these roles were and what they should be. The debates took place as more and more women of all classes and nationalities, refusing any longer to accept subservient domestic positions, were moving into many different areas of public life with increasing confidence, independence, and determination.¹

In the British musical press, writers continued a particular debate that had been raging for several decades. Why were there no ‘great’ women composers? The February 1900 edition of The Musical Times, for example, contained a report on a paper, ‘Woman as a Musician’, given by Dr Henry Harding at the fifteenth annual conference of the Incorporated Society of Musicians at Scarborough. Harding (1855–1930), organist and choirmaster at St Paul’s Church in Bedford, was a representative member of the British musical establishment, with qualifications from the Royal College of Organists and Trinity College of Music as well as an Oxford University BMus and doctorate.²

Harding’s views on the position of women as composers were typical of the musical establishment. Many commentators, like Harding, recognised that women had not previously had, and still did not have, equal access to musical education and professional opportunities, but felt that, given the broadening of women’s access to conservatoires and to the music profession, it would not be long before they were recognised as successful, mainstream, maybe even ‘great’, composers.⁴

There were, however, as Harding suggests, still commentators who held firmly to the belief that a woman had never been and could never be a ‘great’ composer. For example, A. L. S., in the Musical News of the same year, 1900, wrote emphatically:

What made a composer ‘great’ was almost never defined in these discussions, although an interesting warning note about the ‘great woman composer’ had been sounded by E. A. C., possibly the composer Elizabeth Amelia Chamberlayne (1869–1919), in a letter to The Musical World back in 1890:

E. A. C. seems to imply that a ‘great’ woman composer’s music would be so different from that of the ‘great’ male composers of the canon, that neither it nor its creator would or could be recognised as ‘great’. The debate about whether women’s music was in some way different from that of men was to be a part of the debate over women’s contributions as composers for many years.

Femininity in Music

Returning to Harding’s paper, what is perhaps most notable about his views, apart from the strangely precise assertion that there were 489 women composers in existence, is his ‘strong exception’ to the idea that the concept of femininity could be applied to music. While A. L. S. was happy to recognise femininity in male composers, for Harding, and increasingly for the generations that followed, femininity was becoming a problematic concept that had all too often been applied to music and its creators. There was a drive instead to promote British music in particular as manly and virile, something that can be seen in much of the reception and promotion of British composers such as Hubert Parry (1848–1918) or Edward Elgar (1857–1934).⁷

Commentators inevitably linked women to femininity, expecting that the music produced by women should and would reflect this essential aspect of their beings, and this would in some way account for its difference. When a woman’s music, expected to take the form of songs or shorter piano pieces, could be described as dainty, graceful, or charming it neatly fulfilled this expectation while at the same time predictably making it a lesser kind of music, never ‘great’. On the other hand, if a woman did produce bold, forthright, complex music, in larger forms such as sonatas or symphonies, she was somehow betraying her essential self in a troubling way. The reception of the music created by various women composers can be seen to reflect this problematic set of expectations from the late nineteenth century and throughout the first forty years of the twentieth century (and indeed beyond).

For example, in the early years of her career Ethel Smyth published and appeared in concert programmes using her initials rather than her full name. George Bernard Shaw’s review of the 1892 premiere of one of her works reveals the audience’s surprise that the ambiguously gendered composer of a powerful orchestral work could turn out to be a woman:

Over forty years later, critics were still unsettled by women composing music which did not reflect prevalent ideas of womanhood. Here are two critical reactions to a 1935 London concert at which avant-garde music by Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83), Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–94), and Grace Williams (1906–77) was heard, providing an interesting example from the period shortly before the Second World War. William McNaught wrote in the Evening News that the concert was ‘an interesting study of the young female mind of today. This organ, when it takes up composition, works in mysterious ways. No lip-stick, silk stocking, or saucily tilted hat adorns the music evolved from its recesses’.⁹ And an advance notice of the concert in the Glasgow Herald claimed: ‘Musicians … are beginning to wonder when a woman composer is going to write some music reminiscent of the sex as it used to be’.¹⁰ As scholars such as Marcia J. Citron have pointed out, these views on women’s essential femininity are just a part of the complicated set of circumstances, including the lack of a thorough musical education for most women, as well as female role models, that served to exclude women from the canon of great composers.¹¹

New Century: Established Composers (Chaminade, White, Smyth, and Le Beau)

The media debates over women’s abilities as composers were doubtless directly prompted by the increasing numbers of women at the turn of the twentieth century who were regarded, by themselves and by others, as composers and who were leading successful and rewarding careers. At the start of the new century, throughout Britain, the United States, and continental Europe, women were publishing and achieving performances of their music in all genres, from symphonies and operas to chamber music and songs. Many of these women were of the same generation as Harding, well-established, middle-aged composers such as Ethel Smyth (1858–1934), Adela Maddison (1862–1929), and Maude Valérie White (1855–1937) from Britain; Louise Adolpha Le Beau (1850–1927) from Germany; Amy Beach (1862–1944) from the United States; or Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944) from France.

In the early twentieth century, Chaminade and her well-crafted music, notably songs and piano pieces, were known and loved throughout Europe and the United States.¹² Chaminade’s varied reception during her lifetime provides more evidence of the conflicted concept of femininity as applied to women composers. She gave her name to an expensive perfume, created by the British company, Morny Frères, and which was advertised in the press as follows:

The association with a female composer must have seemed apt for a ‘light and dainty’ fragrance. Yet in his 1901 book Songs and Songwriters, American critic Henry T. Finck wrote that: ‘Mlle Chaminade’s face is said to have “a boyish look”, and there is no specific feminine tenderness in her songs – a trait which she shares with other female composers, who seem to lack both true femininity and the virile faculty of creating ideas.’¹⁴ A few years later the American writer Arthur Elsen, in his book Woman’s Work in Music, referred to Chaminade as an example of his belief that ‘women’s work in music will always show more of delicate grace and refinement than man’s, and will be to some extent lacking in the broader effects of strong feeling’, claiming that her songs ‘are among the most delightful in the world to-day, yet they charm by delicacy rather than strength’.¹⁵

After 1890, Chaminade, who had produced orchestral and stage works in the 1880s, concentrated on composing and publishing songs and piano pieces.¹⁶ Women who needed to make a living from their musical endeavours were excluded from many of the lucrative music-related positions that their male contemporaries were able to fill, from teaching composition at conservatoires and universities to conducting mainstream symphony orchestras.¹⁷

There were many practical reasons why women working as composers in the early twentieth century would concentrate on smaller genres such as song, including the comparative ease with which they could be performed in a variety of settings, the fact that through publication, songwriting in particular was one of the few potentially financially profitable forms of composition, and the limited access of some women to a thorough training in counterpoint or orchestration. Women were also socialised to communicate feelings and develop their instincts and emotions in ways that many people would have regarded as entirely inappropriate for men. In song, women found a genre which was entirely suited to a direct and crystallised expression in music of feeling, ideas, and emotions.

Maude Valérie White, who had studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music, was primarily a songwriter and reached the height of her fame and critical acclaim in the 1890s.¹⁸ She was an inveterate traveller and set texts in a wide variety of languages, from English and German to French, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. At the start of the twentieth century, in the autumn of 1901, White decided to live in Sicily for the sake of her health and was never again to have a settled home in England. Her songs, such as her hauntingly sensual D’Annunzio setting ‘Isaotta Blanzemano’ (1904), became increasingly inventive and the concerts of her music that she organised continued to be well received and financially successful.¹⁹

Women often played central roles in musical salons throughout Europe, Britain, and the United States and a more nuanced consideration of exactly what is meant by the term ‘salon music’, a term often used in connection with the music created by women such as White or Chaminade, is long overdue.²⁰ At a time when women were just beginning to embrace public life, it is not surprising that many of them found a comfortable and welcoming place in the semi-public world of the salon, as composers, performers, hosts, and audience. The notable Parisian salon host Winnaretta Singer, the Princesse de Polignac (1865–1943), was an important figure in the lives of many early twentieth-century composers, including Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Ethel Smyth, Adela Maddison, and Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983). The Princesse de Polignac commissioned a wide variety of music and, through the concerts at her salon, provided an invaluable performance space in which composers could gain a hearing for their latest works in all genres, from orchestral and choral works to piano pieces and songs.

Many of the women working at the turn of the twentieth century, such as Ethel Smyth or Louise Adolpha Le Beau, were eager to move beyond the world of song. Smyth studied in Leipzig, although privately, after a brief, unsatisfactory period at the conservatorium. She had fought in the late nineteenth century to gain a hearing for her orchestral work and then, nothing daunted, turned to creating one of the most complex and difficult to produce of all musical genres, opera. In 1902 her second opera Der Wald was premiered in Berlin, followed by The Wreckers at Leipzig in 1906,²¹ The Boatswain’s Mate in London in 1916, Fête galante in Birmingham in 1923, and Entente cordiale in London in 1925. The Wreckers, arguably her greatest achievement, is a gripping and poignant work, with a particularly intense and impassioned love duet between the two protagonists in the second act. Smyth was probably most widely performed and recognised in the 1920s, although by this time she was growing increasingly deaf and had turned to writing and broadcasting.²² She produced a remarkable series of memoirs and essays, in which she created a memorable image of herself as a feisty, indomitable woman, raging against the male ‘machine’ in order to find a hearing for her music.²³

As a composer, Le Beau was also known primarily for her large-scale orchestral and vocal works. As a writer, she produced much music criticism as well as an autobiography, Lebenserinnerungen einer Komponistin (Memoirs of a Composer),²⁴ in which, like Smyth, she detailed the problems and discrimination she had faced as a composer who was a woman. Like Smyth, Le Beau studied music privately. As she recounts in her memoirs, after deeming her Violin Sonata to be ‘manly and not sounding as if composed by a woman’, the composer Josef Rheinberger agreed to teach her, despite the fact that he did not usually accept women as students.²⁵ Also like Smyth, Le Beau found it hard to gain a hearing for her two operas Hadumoth (1888–91) and Der verzauberte Kalif (1901–3).

The Cosmopolitan Composer and Difficulties in Germany (Maddison and Poldowski)

The situation for women in Germany, particularly in the most conservative cities such as Berlin, does seem to have been particularly difficult for women who were trying to build careers as composers. Nevertheless, in the later nineteenth century and into the twentieth, studying in Germany, either privately or at a German conservatoire, was regarded as the best career choice for musicians from elsewhere in Europe and the United States, reflecting the high regard in which the Germanic canon was still held. Women from elsewhere followed their male contemporaries to go and study in various German cities, despite the fact that they were not always welcoming to women musicians. As a young woman, Smyth fought with her father to be allowed to study in Leipzig, although she only studied at the conservatorium there for a brief period. In 1902, the American composer Mabel Daniels (1878–1971)²⁶ described the Munich Conservatory, where she was studying, in a letter home:

The British composer Adela Maddison moved from London to Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, arguably to further her compositional career. In Paris she was acquainted with the Princesse de Polignac and found a supportive atmosphere for her music.²⁸ But in 1906, for unknown reasons, she moved to live and work in Germany, from where she wrote to her friend Delius that she could ‘find no sympathetic soul in Berlin – they all have a contempt for anything done by a woman in the composition line!’²⁹

The cosmopolitanism of composers in the first decade of the twentieth century is perhaps particularly striking as far as women are concerned. A good example is the composer Poldowski (1879–1932), pen name of Irene Wieniawska (or after her marriage, Lady Dean Paul). She was born in Belgium, daughter of the famous Polish violinist Henri Wieniawski, studied in Paris, and lived most of her life in London. She was best known, and highly critically admired, for her songs, in turn dissonant, humorous, and languorous, most of which were settings of French texts.

In a fascinating article in the progressive music journal The Sackbut in 1924, journalist Yvonne Pert grappled with ideas of femininity as applied to women composers. She dismissed Smyth as a composer whose work was ‘conceived according to masculine models’ but did discuss specific contemporary composers, including the Welsh composer Morfydd Owen (1891–1918),³⁰ whom she felt were reflecting an undefined femininity in their music. Pert focused on Poldowski, describing her as

For many of these women, the First World War ruptured the ease with which they travelled and worked in different European countries as well as thwarting other aspects of their careers. German productions of Smyth’s operas were cancelled at the outbreak of war, while Maddison was forced to return to England when her German companion and probably lover, Marta Mundt, was dismissed by her employer, the Princesse de Polignac.

The Disruption of the First World War, Conservatoires, and Prizes (Canal, Leleu, Maconchy, and Williams)

The war also curtailed the movements of those composers who additionally worked as performers. Promoting their own music through performance was often a way that women worked around the establishment assumption that their music was not worth hearing. Le Beau, like Chaminade and Beach,³² was a professional pianist, as well as a composer. Many younger women such as the British viola player Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979) or the French pianists Marguerite Canal (1890–1978) and Jeanne Leleu (1898–1979), who began to be known as composers in the years after the First World War, were also in demand as performers and frequently took the opportunity to promote their own work. Both Canal and Leleu were winners of the prestigious French Prix de Rome, in 1920 and 1923 respectively.³³ This prize rewarded the winner with a period working at the Villa Médicis in Rome as well as guaranteed media coverage, both leading to invaluable performance opportunities. The only previous woman to win this prize, in 1913, had been Lili Boulanger (1893–1918),³⁴ a composer who, like Owen, died in her twenties but who nevertheless left a formidable legacy of distinctive and imaginative music in a powerfully individual musical voice.

As the twentieth century progressed, it became more common for women to study composition at conservatoires, and to benefit from the opportunities these institutions provided, from performances to networking. Winning prizes was not always so easy though. As a student at London’s Royal College of Music in the late 1920s, Maconchy was told that the judges had decided not to award her the Mendelssohn Scholarship for composition since she would only get married and never write another note of music.³⁵ Interestingly, White had won the Mendelssohn Scholarship back in 1879 and Maconchy’s daughter Nicola LeFanu (b.1947) was to win it in 1972. The Mendelssohn Scholarship provided money for the holder to travel and study abroad. Maconchy and her close friend, the Welsh composer Williams, were both awarded somewhat less prestigious Octavia Travelling Scholarships by the Royal College of Music and did spend valuable time in Europe – Maconchy in Prague and Williams in Vienna.³⁶

Class Conflict and Struggles with Men (Crawford Seeger, Barraine, Tailleferre, and Mahler)

The radical American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–53) studied at Chicago’s American Conservatory and then privately with Charles Seeger who, in an echo of Le Beau’s experience with her teacher Rheinberger, was initially reluctant to teach a woman. Teacher and pupil were later to be married. Crawford Seeger won a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1930 travelled to Europe, where she spent most of her time in Berlin, a not-altogether-satisfactory experience, despite the opportunity to meet numerous musicians and composers. On her return to the United States Crawford Seeger became increasingly involved in left-wing politics, regarding music as an important part of the class struggle. She was to devote much of the rest of her life to working with American folk song.³⁷ A similar devotion to left-wing politics can be seen in the life and career of Elsa Barraine (1910–99) while Maconchy was active in the Worker’s Musical Association, founded in 1936.

Not all composers travelled beyond their home country. The British composer Dorothy Howell (1898–1982) studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music. She went on to have several works in a somewhat unadventurous late-Romantic idiom performed at the celebrated Promenade Concerts in the 1920s, such as her tone poem Lamia (1919), based on Keats’s poem of the same name.³⁸ The African American composer Florence Price (1887–1953) studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory and eventually settled in Chicago in the late 1920s. In 1932 she won first prize in the prestigious Wanamaker competition for her Symphony and Piano Sonata, both in E minor. In both works, Price deftly introduces melodic and rhythmic elements of African American vernacular music.³⁹

Charles Seeger’s attitude was not one taken by composition teachers elsewhere. At the Royal College of Music, Maconchy and Williams, together with fellow students such as Dorothy Gow (1893–1982), found an endlessly supportive teacher and mentor in Ralph Vaughan Williams.⁴⁰ Paul Dukas, at the Paris Conservatoire, was similarly supportive of his female composition students, such as Barraine, Claude Arrieu (1903–90), and Yvonne Desportes (1907–93).

The careers of many of the women who worked as composers in the first forty years of the twentieth century were affected by the attitudes of the men – fathers and husbands – in their lives. Several decades after Smyth or Chaminade had faced implacable fathers, numerous men still made it difficult for their daughters to study music at a conservatory, including those of Clarke and Tailleferre. While some women, such as Maconchy, had understanding husbands who encouraged and nurtured their careers, others faced considerable resentment or even prohibition. The best-known example from this time is probably Alma Mahler (1879–1964). The young Alma Schindler had thrown herself into composition. But her first husband, Gustav Mahler, famously wrote to her in 1901 before they were married to say ‘The role of “composer”, the “bread-winner”, is mine; yours is that of a loving partner, the sympathetic comrade’.⁴¹ Despite having previously written to a friend ‘He thinks nothing of my art and much of his own. And I think nothing of his art and much of my own’, Alma Mahler capitulated and stopped composing.

Women Organising Together and Embracing New Technologies

Another composer who survived notoriously difficult marriages to two husbands who both tried to stop her composing was Tailleferre.⁴² Tailleferre, however, continued to compose throughout her long life. She had first come to attention as a member of the group of young French composers know as Les Six and was supported and encouraged by both Erik Satie and the Princesse de Polignac. The importance of support networks was invaluable for many of the women working as composers in the period before the Second World War. Some groups were established by women specifically to support women musicians, such as the Union des Femmes Professeurs et Compositeurs de Musique (Union of Women Composers and Music Teachers), founded in 1906 in France,⁴³ and the Society of Women Musicians, founded in 1911 in Britain.⁴⁴

Also notable at a slightly later date in Britain were the Macnaghten–Lemare concerts, an initiative set up by three women (violinist Anne Macnaghten, conductor Iris Lemare, and composer Lutyens) who denied having overt feminist ideals but who nevertheless provided vital performance opportunities for themselves and for their friends, such as Maconchy and Williams.⁴⁵ As scholars such as Martha Vicinus have shown, women have frequently found that by organising together, they have been able to overcome chauvinism and discrimination.⁴⁶

Like so many women of their generation, Maconchy and Williams keenly embraced the opportunities offered by the relatively new technologies of broadcasting and recording. Throughout the 1930s, a decade of growing economic depression and political unrest, they both had numerous works played on the various radio stations of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and began to see their music reproduced as ‘records’, although it was to be many years before either owned a record player.⁴⁷ In the 1930s, Crawford began to work extensively with field recordings of American folk song.⁴⁸

Back in 1900, a report in the Lady’s Pictorial on Henry Harding’s paper noted that he had claimed that ‘there was every hope … that a pioneer woman, a courageous, pure and noble artist, would arise, and compel us to regard her as a composer as well as a musician’.⁴⁹ Nearly forty years later, by the outbreak of the Second World War, Britain, Europe, and the United States had seen many courageous and noble women who had refused to let the prejudices they faced prevent them from working as composers. Often creating their own networks and opportunities, they built on very different educational opportunities and life experiences to compel recognition for their striking and varied musical voices.