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.