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Five Lives in Music
Women Performers, Composers, and Impresarios from the Baroque to the Present
By CECELIA HOPKINS PORTER
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03701-6
Chapter One
Introduction
In 1792, British author Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, arguing women's right to vote. The book was a small but important part of the numerous waves of feminism that have continued to focus attention on improving the role and status of women in the evolution of civilization. Feminist musicologists and others active in the musical world, especially during the last decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, have focused on issues concerning the place of women in music. These scholars point out that specifically in music, Mrs. Jameson's (see preface) outlook continues to reign in many quarters as proverbial truth—that is, "women's place is in the home." Women's creativity is conceived (though perhaps not with as rigid a bias as in Mrs. Jameson's times) chiefly in terms of gender identification (pairing each sex with certain art forms) and hence of her biological, or specifically domestic, function; as, for example, in the idealized image of the dutiful wife devoted to begetting and raising children or even overseeing an entire household. Women are still seen in some quarters as lacking the mental capacity to compose large-scale musical works or conduct an orchestra. Perhaps worse, a woman pursuing a major professional career is often viewed as "neglecting" her family. Cast in the language of body imagery, this notion of total domesticity has also spawned other ramifications: for example, one hears that women supposedly have little or no time, and therefore less liberty, to follow creative pursuits; their day is too long to include performing, composing, painting, or writing activities because their responsibilities lie chiefly in the realm of "homemaking." Men's creativity, however, has been assumed to be basically an aspect of a male's mental domain and physical brawn unhindered by family responsibilities.
Even now, relatively few names of women in the "classical" music world (as opposed to the arena of pop and jazz) have been part of society's household language. We have heard of divas such as Jenny Lind, Maria Callas, Renée Fleming, and Cecilia Bartoli, all celebrated for their astonishing vocal art. And much notice, though to a lesser extent, has been given to certain "star" women instrumentalists of relatively recent times, such as the pianist Myra Hess, cellist Jacqueline du Pré, or violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. At the same time, only a handful of women composers from the past are familiar to the majority of the public today, and then only modestly: for instance, the composers Hildegard von Bingen, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Amy Beach, and perhaps Alma Mahler. How many members of the music-minded public know the names of today's women composers?
This book is intended to shed light on five women—four of them composers, all of them performers—working in five centuries, who have made distinguished contributions to their art. My purpose has been to expand the perceptions of the general public about the opportunities, restraints, and accomplishments of talented women in music.
For an arts-minded lay audience, I have attempted here to keep music's more abstract technical terms to a minimum without sacrificing the kind of evidence that a scholarly audience demands. I also envision some of my readers as music students (in music history, music theory, performance, and composition classes) who need to widen their perspectives past more traditional music courses emphasizing history's "master" composers and their works. I do recognize, in addition, the contributions made by the many valuable historical surveys of women in music that have appeared in the last several decades, as well as those vital critical studies concerned with a single woman throughout.
In my career as a journalist and musicologist, I have long been drawn to the issue of music in its cultural-historical contexts. In this book, I have portrayed each woman and her musical accomplishments as reflections of the particular time, place, and society in which she lived and worked with the hope of deepening our perspective on the history of music as a whole. Indeed all the arts summon and embody, even internalize, a society's response to itself both in its past and present. This process is a circular one engaging "feedback" in the process of drawing out and playing back the issues and character of its time and place.
I have sought to include areas of music studied by feminist theorists over the last few decades—not least, the issue of "genre-gendering." Accordingly, I have described music written by the four women composers examined here in terms of scale (that is, whether a work is a solo song, cantata, sonata, opera, or allegorical-mythological stage representation, to name a few genres); the size and intended nature of the "performing body," touching on gender if specific; the traditional musical concerns, such as whether a work is vocal, instrumental, or both; the melodic style; the degree of skill shown, for example, by the harmonic and contrapuntal writing; and the reception history of each woman's compositions and performance skill.
In addition, little attention has been paid to the gendering of musical education for women of the past. Institutional musical training for women began to improve only toward the later nineteenth century. By no means less important were a woman's class status and other socioeconomic factors in her particular society, time, and place—an issue additionally encompassing the financial resources available to her pursuit of professional standing in a musical art. There is also the matter of public reception to women's compositions and performance. What type of audience could a pianist or composer, for example, anticipate—a small cluster of listeners in a generally private setting (such as an intimate salon or a royal court chamber), or perhaps a multitude of urban dwellers in a sizable hall or other large public venue. Reception, of course, includes concert reviews of musical performances by professional music critics and assessments of compositions by the daily press and other knowledgeable commentators. For two of the women in this book, I have included reviews by musical journalists, for I have found that they often affect the courses of careers.
In my long search for subjects, I found five women, each worthy of a chapter, who are relatively unknown to the public at large, or to most scholars in the case of three of them—a basic step taken to counteract cultural amnesia. (See p. 4.) Their lives and works in music extend over a broad, diverse scope of sociohistorical periods from the baroque to the present day. Also, the women represent a wide spectrum of cultures ranging from the nobility to the professional ranks of the middle classes. Because my objective has been to expand the arts-minded, general public's perceptions of women in music, I have discussed the work of my five musical artists in the particular environment in which they lived and worked, identifying circumstances and traditions in the sociohistorical milieu of each artist that, to some extent, either allowed her career to flourish or hindered her from realizing her full potential.
Threading through the stories of each of the five women I have chosen from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century are several primary themes affecting her musical pursuits. First, the family history of professional, or at least serious, music making and that family's network of influence and support. Second, the nature of private and/or institutional education these women received, especially in music. Third, the extent and quality of opportunities made available for professional advancement based on the class status and financial situation of each woman's natal and extended family. Fourth, the specific personal challenges and domestic responsibilities—such as marriage and raising children—faced during both youth and adulthood. Fifth, sociopolitical conditions framing each woman's lifetime.
Of the five women I selected for this book, four were published composers, and all five have been recognized as performers to varying degrees. Excellent studies, primarily in German, have been published on Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (chapter 1), Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre (chapter 2), examined and discussed in French and English publications, Josephine Lang (chapter 3) in German and English, and Maria Bach (chapter 4), principally in German. But these studies have been addressed chiefly or even exclusively to musicologists and other professionals in music. The ongoing career of Ann Schein (chapter 5) has yet to be documented thoroughly in a history of performance, though her professional work continues to be remarkable.
The brilliant accomplishments of all five of these women, moreover, need to be introduced to English-speaking lay readers and concert audiences in books, essays, and even program notes; and this information calls for presentation on a broad cultural and sociohistorical basis. Because a relatively extensive amount of material has already been published on Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn- Hensel, and Amy Beach, they are referred to in this book only in passing. With equal regret, I also had to exclude the countless music patronesses, wonderful cultural "agents" without whom musical life as we know it would be sadly bereft. Consider, for example, such benevolent American patronesses as Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge and Gertrude Clark Whittall, both of whom made incomparable contributions to American culture. If they had been included here, each would have required a whole chapter, if only in light of her magnanimous gifts to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
"Cultural Amnesia"
Over the centuries, countless generations of women musical artists have won varying degrees of success in performing and composing even while charged with the responsibilities of marriage, motherhood, and other types of family caregiving. But, on the whole, only a relatively small number of commendable women in music, especially in composing, have won any substantial notice of their accomplishments. They have worked unaware of, and therefore uninspired by, their female precursors' achievements, most of which have gone unrecorded in major, comprehensive historical annals. The resulting absence of role models from the past combined with a lack of any significant public exposure, such as that offered by large concert halls, has left potential women musical performers and composers—generation after generation—unaware of their female forebears' accomplishments.
This "cultural amnesia" regarding the past (as Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson have termed it recently) has also left the musically minded general public—both concert audiences and readers—equally uninformed and thus confined to a warped concept of the past. As a result of this lack of perspective, women in music have toiled alone, living with the assumption that their art, even its sublime heights, has been practiced through past centuries only by men. Such a view is hardly conducive to impelling younger women talents to carry out their creative impulses, such as composing and performing music—most crucially, at the topmost level. Although referring specifically to nineteenth-century women in music (probably including those whom Mrs. Jameson had in mind), Charles Rosen attributes their "harsh exclusion from history"—composers most of all—principally to the lack of chances to develop their compositional potential, to hear these works performed, and to experience the pride in themselves or by contemporaries and successors that would result.
War
Such cultural amnesia can also result, both directly and indirectly, from political and cultural catastrophes caused by nature or by human malice. At times, such events have driven multitudes—including musicians, artists, and millions in all fields—into exile or simply into annihilation. The devastating ravages and deprivations of war have affected artists throughout the ages. World War II forced Maria Bach (chapter 4) into semi-exile, or perhaps one could say self-exile, in the Vienna Woods. She was allowed, however, to continue composing, confined in an isolated, cramped house with an artist companion. Occasionally, she performed as a piano accompanist of her own works in the Austrian capital itself, though she did so under stringent official observation. (Bach was, in fact, one of a dozen women composers allowed by the Nazi regime to continue pursuing their work in and around Vienna. Other select groups of women composers enjoyed similar privileges in Berlin and Munich.) In stark contrast to Bach's circumstances, Ann Schein (chapter 5) was preparing in America for a professional career during that same global conflict. The war "made available" celebrated pianists as her devoted teachers, émigrés who had resettled in New York City and other cultural centers along the American coasts; the Nazi takeover had driven untold numbers of Europeans in the arts into other, safer countries. The Nazi domination of Europe also led to another type of cultural amnesia. Untold numbers of verfolgte (persecuted) composers and performers were denigrated as practicing entartete Kunst (degenerate art). These figures included Europe's highest-ranking composers and performing artists: principally Jewish musicians and composers and others whose works were pronounced "too modern." Tragically, they were either sent en masse to death camps or simply vanished—forgotten souls who remain nameless even today. While Maria Bach was safely secluded in a Vienna suburb, for example, the gifted young violinist and conductor Alma Rosé, daughter of the famed Viennese violinist Arnold Rosé and niece of the composer Gustav Mahler, was sent to Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp in Poland. There she conducted a women's orchestra until her death under mysterious circumstances.
Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth, however, persisted in her musical activities despite living and working in the midst of a conflict, the Thirty Years' War, that stretched through decades. Like this German noblewoman, Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre and Josephine Lang were continually subjected to the political machinations and personal whims of influential courts ruled by sometimes feuding but long-lasting family dynasties that often were even engaged in outright battles.
Five Themes and Variations
Duchess Sophie-Elisabeth (1613–1676) inherited a noble rank with all the privileges and responsibilities that accompanied her seventeenth-century social class, especially the intent of courts on displaying prestige through the arts. On the one hand, the rich musical life of all three of the courts in which she lived provided her with some musical training and the practical knowledge for administering the musical life of her husband's court as an effective impresario. She also acquired the basic skills needed for composition and benefited from a mother and stepmothers who tutored her in other studies that enabled her to pursue literary interests in adulthood. On the other hand, the Thirty Years' War, with all its devastation and miseries, brought critical disruptions in cultural life. This catastrophic conflict forced Sophie-Elisabeth and her family into political exile at Kassel for several years and destroyed her entire inheritance in her home court of Güstrow, leaving Sophie-Elisabeth wholly dependent on her husband's financial resources. The enlightened Duke August, however, supported her musical and literary pursuits. And, while his culturally rich duchy of Wolfenbüttel/Braunschweig also suffered major war damage, his generosity allowed the duchess to spearhead the resuscitation and reorganization of court music there. Primarily because of her noble standing, she acquired the assistance of Dresden's brilliant composer and court Kapellmeister Heinrich Schütz, who also at times mentored her in serious composition. Owing to her background, Sophie-Elisabeth's talents as an impresario, patron, and composer provided the means to create Wolfenbüttel's elaborate court Festspiele, which contributed to the early development of German opera. She composed prodigiously, had her large-scale works performed, and maintained active relationships with many noted performers and composers. Sophie-Elisabeth's life and works remain largely unknown except in a few German scholarly circles.
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Excerpted from Five Lives in Music by CECELIA HOPKINS PORTER Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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