‘I don’t think you intend to be discouraging in your book. I think you have merely overlooked those who are routinely overlooked, that is to say half the world’s population.’¹

The words of Reta, in Carol Shields’s Unless, are applicable to the analysis of women composers’ works. Among areas forming a musical canon, the sub-discipline of musical analysis has only recently displayed awareness of the attention to women composers and their music that has taken root in the practice and productions of musicology over the past few decades. Yet at the time from the 1980s onwards when literature on women composers began to present a significant challenge to the pedagogical canon, a new wave of interest in analysis was sparking the publication of textbooks and journals that could have offered an opportunity to include women’s works as valid subjects for analytical interpretation.²

In the 1990s, Marcia Citron declared: ‘Given the makeup of the current canon, I believe it is especially vital to place women’s works into analytical discourse’.³ This prefaced Citron’s analysis of the first movement of Cécile Chaminade’s Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 21 (1895) with reference to nineteenth-century ‘gendered’ sonata form theory. Citron’s suggestion that Chaminade’s sonata movement ‘may reconceptualise the ideologies of masculine and feminine as encoded in gendered readings of sonata form’, signalled her feminist approach. While Citron acknowledged that an interrogation of gendered sonata form could be equally applicable to music composed by men, the application of this approach to women’s music has special significance. The status of the ‘feminine’ second theme in relation to the ‘masculine’ first theme, entrenched in nineteenth-century sonata theory, invites consideration of how far women composers might subvert its theoretical formulation in their works.⁴

Among notions clinging to the evaluation of women’s works, and underlying the lack of serious attention to them, are assumptions of superficial attractiveness rather than depth. These are belied by analytical findings such as emerge from studying Fanny Hensel’s setting of ‘Der Abendstern’, H-U 70 (1823): see Example 2.1. Motif ‘x’, the descent from 3̂ to 1̂, appears in an intricate variety of forms. (Its use as a pervasive motif with programmatic intent is familiar in horn-call guise from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in E flat major, Op. 81a, ‘Les Adieux’.) Hensel could have learned her motivic technique from other Lied repertoire, including Schubert’s songs; additionally, she could have absorbed it from the motivic intensity in Bach’s chorale harmonizations, which she studied and performed. It became a personal ‘fingerprint’ of her style. The closely woven fabric it creates in ‘Der Abendstern’ bespeaks an integrity and a profundity in her music beyond purely decorative surface or simple ‘word-painting’, pleasing though the effect of those can be.

Example 2.1 Fanny Hensel, ‘Der Abendstern’ (Mailáth), H-U 70, bars 1–15

If feminism is, as Ruth Solie put it, ‘the commitment to the well-being of women and to the importance of their creative participation in culture and history’, then focusing on women’s music as the object of close analytical scrutiny is a feminist act, whatever analytical approach is involved.⁵ In what follows, I explore some specific approaches within that broader category, by means of four case-studies from among published analyses of women’s works. Two feature solo piano music: Fanny Hensel’s Piano Sonata in G minor, discussed by Matthew Head, and Amy Beach’s ‘Phantoms’, Op. 15 no. 2, analysed by Edward D. Latham. The third is from the Lied repertoire: Kadja Grönke’s study of Alma Mahler’s ‘Ich wandle unter Blumen’, and the fourth focuses on chamber music, in Liane Curtis’s analysis of the first movement from the Sonata for Viola and Piano by Rebecca Clarke.⁶ Collectively they raise issues sparked by the emergence of women composers, including the value of comparison with their male contemporaries, the ramifications of their choice of genre, and the significance of the contexts that not only influenced their compositional aspirations but also might inform our analytical readings of their music.

Genre is prominent in both the first case-study, where Matthew Head assesses the status of the sonata genre in Hensel’s time in relation to gender, and the second, apropos Beach’s ‘Phantoms’, a piece based on a poetic source, thus belonging to programmatic music. A comparative approach is central to Grönke’s reading of the differing attitudes to love reflected in Lieder by Alma Schindler and Gustav Mahler. Contextual information constitutes a special feature of the analytical methods adopted by Liane Curtis regarding Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata movement. Grönke on Schindler, and Curtis on Clarke, particularly espouse novel approaches to analysis inspired by their choice of subject.

We can sense in these readings a flexibility with regard to analytical method, eschewing a narrowly formalist approach in favour of an empathetic effort to discern what, and how, the composers sought to communicate through their music. In all four cases, the composers’ biographical contexts, and their aims (expressed or inferred), feature alongside discussion of their compositional technique, and inform that discussion.

Fanny Hensel: Sonata for Piano Solo in G Minor, H-U 394 (Autumn 1843)

The structure underpinning Matthew Head’s analysis of Hensel’s sonata resembles a frame around a landscape painting. Head views the two prime materials of his framework, gender and genre, in the context of Hensel’s life and German musical culture in the 1840s. The year spent in Italy with her husband and son (1839–40), was for Hensel a time of increased confidence in her compositional abilities. She now harboured professional aspirations. Applying for membership of a learned society in a letter of 24 November 1843 to the family friend and singing teacher Frank Hauser, she submitted a work ‘in support of what she described as a “daring” application’.⁷ That work, Head suggests, may have been the G minor Sonata.

As Head notes, the 1840s was a time of renewal for the genre: ‘No sooner was the trope of the sonata’s decline in place, than critics noted signs of revival’.⁸ The combination of the challenge this represented, and Hensel’s impulse towards professional status, produced in her G minor Sonata, one of her few large-scale compositions, a substantial result that may have felt hard-won. Entering into sonata territory in the nineteenth century could engender for women composers a feeling of trespassing on quasi-sacred ground. As Head observes, with Hensel’s G minor Piano Sonata, ‘she tackled a genre largely off-limits to earlier female composers in northern Germany’ with mixed feelings, ‘alternately confident and full of doubts about her abilities in this area’.⁹

Conveying the impact of the deprecatory messages routinely directed at aspiring women composers, Hensel, writing to her brother, compared his handling of Beethoven’s influence with her own: ‘I’ve reflected how I … came to write pieces in a tender style. I believe it derives from the fact that we were young during Beethoven’s last years and absorbed his style to a considerable degree … You’ve progressed beyond it in your composing, and I’ve remained stuck in it.’¹⁰ I would suggest, however, that the Beethovenian qualities of her opening gesture in her G minor Sonata resemble Franz Schubert’s procedure in his C minor Piano Sonata, D 958 (1828), whereby the unmistakable echo of Beethoven at the start (specifically the theme of Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations in C minor, WOO80) throws into relief the Schubertian qualities of what follows. Hensel’s similarly confident opening gambit in her sonata recalls Beethoven’s in his last piano sonata, Op. 111 in C minor; she places a comparable emphasis on diminished sevenths deployed to dramatic effect.

Among the overarching features Head identifies in Hensel’s sonata is its topical zone: he finds the ‘Scottish’ style in evidence throughout the work, forming one of the many links between the music of the siblings. Hensel adopts the key of Felix’s ‘Hebrides’ overture, B minor, for her sonata Scherzo, lending an exotic aspect to the inter-movement key scheme (predicted in the first movement). Within individual movements, she treats key imaginatively. The first movement’s second theme, rather than mild and passive in character, as would conform to socially constructed notions of femininity, is urgent and active. As Head notes, Hensel accords ‘perceptual primacy’ to the second theme in the recapitulation, where, in conventional feminist readings, it would be suppressed, relegated to the tonic key reasserted by the first theme. In Hensel’s sonata movement, the second theme ‘returns at the moment of harmonic recapitulation (in place of the primary theme)’; after serving as closing idea to the recapitulation, it ‘haunts the coda as if it were the movement’s idée fixe’. In its closing role prior to the coda it ‘wistfully mixes G major and minor with the Neapolitan’, suggesting that the theme’s ‘picturesque wandering could carry on unendingly’.¹¹

The work’s topical associations, reflecting the prominent role of Scotland in Romantic artistic culture, allied to the freedom with which Hensel roams the tonal landscape, contribute to the project of renewal. The music, housed in the four-movement ‘symphonic’ form strongly associated with the sonata after Beethoven, derives further energy from a variety of sources, including dance topics. Hensel’s sonata structure features the kinds of inter-movement connections, which she forges both directly and more discretely, characteristic of Romantic formal experimentation. Symphonic and programmatic connotations in her textural choices range from vigorous orchestral-style tremolo in the first movement’s opening bars, to otherworldly tremolo in the Scherzo’s untitled trio, evoking Ossian’s harp – that Romantic trope representing ‘the single most persistent image of Scots music in the Teutonic imagination’.¹² Altogether the work, in Head’s words, ‘disrupt[s] the assumption that a woman was not capable of such high-powered dialectical authorship’.¹³

Amy Beach: ‘Phantoms’, Op. 15 no. 2 (1892)

Edward Latham’s analytical essay on Beach’s ‘Phantoms’, together with the biographical sketch that prefaces it, combine to introduce the composer and her work with a series of pronouncements establishing her status before the analysis unfolds. The biographical sketch begins by presenting Beach (then Amy Marcy Cheney) as ‘unquestionably a musical genius, composing lengthy, two-hand piano waltzes by the age of five’, attracting attention as a performer at the age of seven, and achieving publication of her work by the age of sixteen. After noting the success of ‘her first large-scale work’, the Mass in E flat, Op. 5 (1892), which led to important commissions, it singles out her ‘Gaelic’ Symphony, Op. 32. This made her, at the age of twenty-nine, ‘the first American woman to compose a symphony’, prompting the Boston composer George Whitfield Chadwick to declare her entitled to the epithet ‘one of the boys’.¹⁴ Latham begins his analysis with the declaration that, ‘with “Phantoms,” … the groundbreaking American composer stakes her claim for the consideration of her music alongside the works of nineteenth-century icons such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Frédéric Chopin’.¹⁵ (This statement invites debate that is beyond the scope of the present chapter.) While the grouping of Beach among other composers continues to feature in the first few pages of his analysis, Latham’s focus thereafter is largely on the intensive study of her compositional processes in ‘Phantoms’.

Beach’s piece derives its inspiration from the line of poetry by Victor Hugo quoted beneath its title: ‘Toutes fragiles fleurs, sitôt mortes que nées’ (Such fragile flowers, dead as soon as they are born.)¹⁶ In the course of his analysis, Latham illuminates the subtle programmatic effects Beach creates musically. His analysis has the effect of inviting the reader to focus closely (as he does) on the intricacies of the piece. He shows how Beach exploits a variety of parameters in the music to paint the evanescence of Hugo’s phantasmal flowers. Her techniques include the fashioning of a melody that is ‘indeed fragile, floating … over inverted augmented-sixth chords, extended dominant ninth and thirteenth chords and the like, and including not one but two gaps in its descent from 5̂ to the tonic’; and the manipulation of ‘standard phrase types’ to accentuate ‘the transient nature of her “Phantoms”’.¹⁷ Among the analytical methods he applies to the piece, which include Schenkerian theory, he examines the form and period structure of “Phantoms”, showing how ‘a tightly woven web of keys is deployed’. In the distinctively fashioned phrase-structure of the recurrent ‘A’ section he finds an arc from start to finish, privileging harmonies ‘suspended halfway between tonic and dominant’, and helping to underline the unstable state of the phantasmal flowers that ‘become fragile “as soon as they are born”’.¹⁸ He notes the unusual hovering towards the mediant key, C sharp minor, at the end of every 8-bar antecedent unit of the phrase-structure. This, coupled with the effect of the consequent’s starting each time on the ambiguous augmented sixth chord with which the piece began (and which Beach placed in a meaningfully unstable choice of inversion, rather than the standard root position), creates a harmonic subtlety evoking a realm other than that of the straightforward ‘call-and-response’ possibly suggested by the melodic repetition.

In the light of Latham’s commentary, we might wonder if Beach took inspiration also from the experimental harmonic language developed by Chopin, for example, in his mazurkas. Her ‘Phantoms’, too, is a dance-piece: it speaks the language of ballroom waltz, here imagined in particularly delicate formation. The coupling of dance and fantasy forms a powerful trope in nineteenth-century music: Berlioz’s ball scene in the Symphonie fantastique, and Schubert’s ‘Frühlingstraum’ (Dream of Spring) and ‘Täuschung’ (Illusion) in his Winterreise cycle come to mind. We might regard song, also, as implicated in ‘Phantoms’, as is suggested indirectly through Latham’s analysis. His demonstration of the ways that the various layers in the musical fabric of Beach’s ‘Phantoms’ are involved in representing the poetic idea resembles strategies used in the analysis of song, with reference to text–music relationships.

Latham implicitly makes the case for women composers’ works not only challenging the canon but also potentially unsettling hierarchies of genre linked to the canon, with the shifting ideas of value accorded to miniature versus more extended forms, absolute versus programmatic music, and instrumental music versus song, during the nineteenth century. It proves possible to link the apparently disparate approaches shown in the introductory biographical section and the central analytical argument of Latham’s essay. By illuminating the methods employed in ‘Phantoms’, Latham alerts us to the qualities that make Beach’s miniature work an example of ‘multum in parvo’, much in a small space. This places her alongside women composers of previous generations – Fanny Hensel is one example – who similarly conveyed a largesse transcending the conventionally assumed limits of Lied and piano miniature, those small-scale genres considered (for spurious reasons) their ‘proper’ territory.¹⁹

Alma Schindler(-Mahler): ‘Ich wandle unter Blumen’ (1899)

In her diary entry for 7 January 1899, the nineteen-year old Alma Schindler (who had not yet met Gustav Mahler – it would be another three years before their engagement) noted: ‘Just composed in 5 minutes a little song. Whether it’s any good, I don’t know. I only know there’s enough amorous passion [Liebesleidenschaft] in it’.²⁰ Schindler’s words convey a sense not only of the fluency with which she composed, but also the emotional intensity in her setting of Heine’s poem. She noted further that she felt ‘a strong urge to write songs that fit my mood’.²¹ In her commentary, Grönke evokes the atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, including societal attitudes to the role of women. She notes the presence of such influential figures as Sigmund Freud (whom Gustav Mahler consulted during the marriage to Alma) and Gustav Klimt, to whom Alma Schindler was strongly attracted in the period her song dates from.²² As her chapter unfolds, Grönke produces an effect almost of interviewing Schindler and Mahler in order to understand their feelings towards the love objects in their lives. It is, though, their compositions that Grönke primarily interrogates for this purpose, drawing on biographical sources to complement her analysis. She conveys sympathetically and with a measure of objectivity not only Schindler’s difficult family situation (from which the ‘prestigious marriage’ to Mahler offered an escape) but also her vulnerable emotional and psychological state. Grönke’s reference to the ban Mahler placed on Alma’s composing is potentially a disturbing revelation to readers unaware of this deprivation.

Before comparing their respective settings, Grönke considers each separately. In ‘Ich wandle unter Blumen’, the poet, Heine, conjures the mood as the protagonist wanders through the blossom. Heine’s final lines make clear that it is the public exhibition of amorous feeling that is considered improper, according to conventional attitudes, and is feared by the protagonist (ll. 5–8): ‘Oh hold me tight, beloved, / Else drunken with love [Liebestrunkenheit] / I fall at your feet / and the garden is full of people!’²³ Schindler demonstrates music’s power to make an imagined event seem real. She conveys musically the overwhelming emotion leading to the sudden fall, by a combination of increasing speed (‘Plötzlich sehr schnell’, bars 9–10, then ‘Prestissimo’, bars 11–12³), with the vocal part, marked f, rising in a chromatic scalar line, declaiming ll. 5–7 syllabically, together with an abrupt scalar gesture in the piano part, marked cresc. to ff, its culmination coinciding with the voice’s downward octave leap on the word ‘Füßen’ (feet). The syllabic setting of the final line returns to the opening ‘Langsam’, and piano dynamic, for a hushed, subdued monotone in the voice with minimal accompaniment, followed by a tiny cadential arpeggiation marked ppp, forming the piano’s postlude gesture (which Grönke sees as possibly representing ‘a hurried exit’).²⁴ The association of amorous intensity with danger and risk formed a component, as Grönke notes, of the troubling attraction Schindler experienced towards Klimt.

Gustav Mahler’s setting of ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ (with its text by Rückert) is imbued with intimations of marital love. The song was ‘conceived as a gift of love for his wife, Alma … immediately prior to the birth of their first child’.²⁵ Rückert’s protagonist rehearses a series of potential love objects in verses 1–3, beginning with ‘If you love for’ – beauty, youth, then treasure – and following up with ‘Then do not love me’. The alternatives belong to the natural cycle (‘Love the sun, for its golden hair’, ‘the Spring, who is young every year’); and the supernatural (‘Love the mermaid for her many bright pearls’). The final verse substitutes for the recurrent negative, the hopeful, ‘If you love for love – oh then love me!’ (‘o ja mich liebe!’), concluding: ‘Love me always, as I will always love you!’ Grönke notes that Mahler introduced an additional repetition of the word ‘immer’ (always) to that exhortation; his piano postlude, rather than confirming the tonic in positive terms, slides chromatically and ambivalently into its closing plagal cadence. She discerns in his setting that ‘however sure the text’s speaker is about his own love, the musical “Ich” remains correspondingly unsure of the feelings of the beloved “Du”’, and she sees Mahler’s move towards the minor on the word ‘Jugend’ (youth) ‘perhaps as a reflection of the age difference’ between the spouses. This is supported by her quotation from a letter early in his acquaintance with Alma, where he doubted whether ‘a man … in the grip of becoming old has the right to take so much youth, and vitality into his overripe state – linking the spring to the autumn’.²⁶

Grönke uses the contrast between the two songs to illuminate the nature of their composers’ incompatibility. Her analysis of their marriage, like her assessment of the psychological makeup of each partner, is expressed at a level of objectivity beyond the sensationalism that she notes has tended to colour accounts of Mahler’s and Schindler’s lives. That her psychological findings emerge from her analysis of the music, in tandem with the poetry, takes her interpretation to a new level of discourse, going beyond the application of analytical method, by yoking to it the composer’s lived experience.

Rebecca Clarke: Sonata for Viola and Piano (1919), First Movement

Liane Curtis structures her search for an appropriate analytical approach to Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata movement as a multi-faceted enquiry, lining up three possible candidates. She performs in the main portions of her article the equivalent to a series of interviews, sharing with us in advance her fundamental questions: ‘What was Clarke’s purpose in writing this work? What cultural or social agenda might we expect to find her – consciously or unconsciously – communicating?’²⁷ The first candidate consists of ‘a conventional descriptive analysis’. We would be misguided in assuming this to be drastically limited in its capacity to bring the notes on paper (or as heard in sound) to life. Nevertheless, as a procedure it risks bearing some relation to reading aloud a piece of prose or poetry in a monotone, avoiding inflections and minimizing any variation in pitch, articulation, or volume. Curtis here goes beyond colourless factual description, and indeed writes quite rhapsodically, reflecting in her prose the vividness of Clarke’s writing: ‘The opening gesture … is bold, with the trumpet call of the leaping fifths evoking a martial feeling: the dotted rhythms are charged with energy. This outward assertiveness seizes the listener’s attention in a striking manner.’²⁸ The style resembles those concert programme notes that take the listener through the music, predicting their response to hearing it. Descriptions such as ‘The second theme contrasts dramatically with the previous material, with hushed dynamics, restricted range, and chromatic motion’ create a link to the section that follows (‘A Coded Sonata-Form Analysis’). In concluding this first portion of her analytical commentary, Curtis acknowledges that, in its ‘reliance on descriptive adjectives’, her ‘road map through a vivid movement’ foregrounds subjectivity but also accessibility: ‘it depends neither on the jargon of music theory nor on critical theory’. More crucially, ‘it also lacks any attempt to understand the work as having cultural meaning – as composed by someone for a particular goal, with a certain audience and set of cultural referents in mind’.²⁹

Gendered sonata form, characterizing the two main themes as masculine and feminine, seems a promising candidate, in view of the theoretical tradition that had developed by the time Clarke was writing. Curtis’s commentary in the preceding section on the recapitulation’s reversal of character in Clarke’s movement provides support for a gendered approach, particularly in view of Marcia Citron’s suggestion that women composers may have resisted ‘the conventional [recapitulatory] procedure of oppressing [the] second theme’.³⁰ Curtis formulates her purpose cautiously, in advance of her summary of gender-related theory (drawing on the work of both Citron and Susan McClary): ‘This understanding of the form may have contributed to Clarke’s musical consciousness … thus, its possible relevance deserves exploration.’³¹ After experimenting with it, she concludes that ‘the anthropomorphizing of themes as masculine and feminine can certainly enliven an analysis, but the results remain a completely individual reading. Any number of other interpretations encoding different gender stereotypes or narrative perspectives could be made with equal validity.’ She goes on to observe:

The final approach supplies a missing link to Clarke’s professional aspirations. With this third approach, focusing on factors that impact directly on Clarke’s work, Curtis finds the best match between the music and the interpretative apparatus she applies to it. Under the heading ‘Music for the Coolidge Competitions’, she notes that the 1919 composition competition featuring the viola (which Coolidge encouraged Clarke to enter) ‘represented an unusual situation for Clarke’; and that ‘in the context of her musical output as a whole, Clarke’s use of sonata form is also unusual’. Curtis proposes that ‘the authority of a patron, together with the institutional event of a competition, served to authorize, perhaps even compel, Clarke to write large-scale, multimovement works employing sonata form’.³³ This brings us back in a circle to Hensel’s piano sonata with Curtis’s proposition that ‘for Clarke, the sonata as a genre (with sonata form as a necessary component …) was seen as a masculine domain and thus for her basically a foreign one’.³⁴ In her commentary on a selection of critical reviews, Curtis notes that ‘Pervasive among the critics of Clarke’s sonata is a sense of wonder at the exceptional nature of a woman acting outside the realm of orthodox “feminine” behavior.’³⁵ Curtis’s generously developed and nuanced exegesis around Clarke’s Viola Sonata pays due consideration to the ramifications of this bold venture.

Concluding Remarks

Examining these case-studies has highlighted the ways their authors link the music under discussion to its cultural context and the circumstances of the composers’ lives. In considering the composers’ personal situations and their compositional projects with a holistic approach to suit each case, the authors endow their analytical interpretations with feminist values, providing a thought-provoking quality of argument. Such endeavours enrich and inspire analytical discourse. The Belgian-born composer Irène Wieniawska entreated shortly before her death in 1932, ‘Do look after my music!’³⁶ By devoting careful, searching analytical attention to women’s works we contribute towards the process of embedding these erstwhile neglected composers and their music rightfully, not only in the current consciousness but also in the musical heritage we can hope to pass on to posterity.