Endnote

How to be a great composer? Genius is essential, of course. So too is a sustained education in composition. Usually the great composer needs a professional position, whether court musician, conservatoire professor or kapellmeister, and the authority, income and opportunities provided by that position. A great composer needs access to the places where music is performed and circulated, whether cathedral, court, printing house or opera house. And most, if not all, require wives, mistresses and muses to support, stimulate and inspire their great achievements. There is, of course, a simpler answer: be born a man.

And yet while many, perhaps all, of the composers in this book are great composers, they do not stand alone amongst their sex. And note they are great despite the fact that for centuries the idea of genius has remained a male preserve; they are great despite working in cultures that systematically denied almost all women access to advanced education in composition; they are great even though they could not, by virtue of their sex, take up a professional position, control their own money, publish their own music, enter certain public spaces; they are great despite having their music reduced to simplistic formulas about male and female music (‘all the graces of her sex in her melodies, and all the vigour of ours in her knowledge of counterpoint’, they wrote of Louise Farrenc); and they are great despite having to operate in the shadow of the courtesan, forced to enact proper, virtuous femininity, or pay the price.

Many, perhaps all, of the composers in this book were enabled to become great composers because an individual recognized a girl’s latent ability, and then ensured that she received the advanced education and public (or semi-private) platform necessary to make her a composer, an opportunity that was denied to most women in her society. The motives of individuals such as Giulio Caccini, Giulio Strozzi, Metastasio, Friedrick Wieck, Raïssa Boulanger and Ralph Vaughan Williams might be very different, but the result is the same: a highly trained female composer.

What of the ‘wife, mistress, and muse’? Let’s hear it for the magnificent husbands. Wilhelm Hensel and William LeFanu, most obviously, Giovanni Battista Signorini and Marin La Guerre, quite probably, to name but four, are unsung heroes, every one, quietly challenging their respective society’s assumptions about creative women and their partners, assumptions that endure to this day. Other supportive, perhaps even inspirational, figures remain shadowy, because of the nature of the records: in what ways did Antonia von Martines, Marianna’s sister, support her composition? Was Miki Piré a muse to Lili Boulanger? These individuals matter, terribly. So does luck. Simply to survive childbirth is a statistical break for the mothers in this book.

But something else is needed for a great female composer to flourish. It was Virginia Woolf who wrote, famously and contentiously, that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’. But for a composing woman, even more is needed, as expressed by one present-day musician and musicologist, Suzanne Cusick: ‘because music is fundamentally about movement, sociability and change, women musicians do not so much need rooms of our own, within which we can retreat from the world, as we need ways of being in the world that allow us to engage with the often immobilizing and silencing effects of gender norms’. The female composer needs to be working in a community that not only values her art, but enables it to be heard beyond the traditional spaces for women’s music, such as the nunnery or the home. From the Medici princesses and the court of the Sun King in the early and late seventeenth century, through to the world of the Paris Conservatoire or London’s RCM in the early twentieth century, this book shows that particular communities enabled individual female composers to be heard in traditionally masculine spaces, from palace to concert hall.

We have come a long way. There is so much to celebrate, for example, in the life and work of Elizabeth Maconchy. A documentary about the composer, filmed in 1984, shows an articulate, if physically frail, woman still actively engaged in composition: ‘age and illness have forced Elizabeth Maconchy to slow down a little’, the voice-over tells the viewer, ‘but the score she is currently working on is always to be seen, open at the piano, the notes inscribed in a clear, firm hand. More resting, more gardening, less time in London. But composing is still her way of life.’ In the documentary, Maconchy is honest about the periods of depression, the ‘moments of silence’ that had afflicted her over the years, but her commitment remains unshakeable: ‘I cannot imagine life without being engaged in composition.’

Dame Elizabeth Maconchy may not have been able to imagine it in 1984, but when the moment came to stop, she recognized it for what it was. The ‘ideas weren’t coming any more’; she could have gone on writing ‘on technique’, but where was the satisfaction in that? Her final years were silent ones, as her body finally succumbed to the damage done by TB all those years before. She died on 11 November 1994 in a nursing home in Norwich. Five months later, Billy LeFanu was buried beside his wife. Whereas so many of the composers in this book were silenced, whether by circumstance, illness, or the ideas held about women and music by their society, their family or, most painfully, the composer herself, only Maconchy chose when to stop composing, and that at the end of a long and rich career.

In so many ways, Maconchy ticks (almost) all the boxes for a ‘great composer’ which I list. She received a superb education in composition. She had access, sometimes after a struggle, to the institutions that would enable her music to be heard whether it be the Proms, the BBC or publishing houses, and Dame Elizabeth would be decorated precisely for her contributions to the classical music profession. She composed large-scale works for large-scale forces. She had the support of a devoted husband. She was admired and loved by her colleagues, and kept them strong. As the composer Jeremy Dale Robertson wrote in the programme for Maconchy’s seventieth birthday concert:

 

Betty’s self is in her music, and I love in her what I love in her music: ardour; warmth; energy; gentle humour; youth – (futile and clumsy to try to list all the things that draw so many to her). But I cannot forget her practical wisdom, and grace; and a certain obstinacy and courage which have put spirit into a lot of us when we were low.

 

And there is absolutely no doubt of her talent, indeed, whisper it, her genius.

On a more mundane level, Maconchy did everything that her predecessor, the American composer Amy Beach, suggested needed to be done to create a world in which the public would ‘regard writers of music’ and estimate ‘the actual value of their works without reference to their nativity, their colour, or their sex’. Get your work out there, advised Beach, compose ‘solid practical work that can be printed, played, or sung’, and eventually the world will forget that you are a woman and simply hear your music. Maconchy herself wanted to be called ‘a composer’, insisting on the absurdity of the term ‘woman composer’ and reminding us, if we needed reminding, that if you listen to an unknown piece of music, it is impossible to tell the sex of its creator.

And yet, every generation, the same cry is heard. Thirty years ago, we were told that Maconchy had written ‘one of the finest quartet cycles of the century’, that their neglect is ‘a national scandal’, and were told that their ‘time will come’. In the new millennium, Maconchy is still being called ‘our finest lost composer’. Why? Because, despite the desire of women composers to take their sex out of the equation, music does not exist in abstraction from the circumstances in which it is created, performed, received and heard. This is why I disagree with those, such as the conductor Christian Thiellemann, who, in making a weary defence of his favourite composer Wagner, insists that music cannot be politicized. Thiellemann argues that you ‘cannot win over D major or C major for a certain political cause. That’s the good thing about it.’ Of course, on one level, that is correct because the chord of C major is the same whether written down by a woman or a man, and Maconchy is a composer, not a woman composer. But the questions remain. If the chord of C major is the same regardless of the sex of the person who wrote it, why are there so few women composers? If the chord of C major is the same whether in a quartet by Maconchy or in a quartet by Shostakovich, why are there as many performances of the latter in the space of one week (I just counted seven on Bachtrack) as there are of the former over the last five years? The answer is simple and runs like a seam through this book. Women, traditionally, have not been permitted access to the education and materials necessary to place that chord of C major on a score. If they do receive enough education, and are permitted sufficient access to materials, then that chord of C major is only permitted to appear in genres suitable to their sex, rather than the genres most valued by their society. If and when that chord is placed on the score, the sex of its author becomes part of the response to the chord, despite the pleas of composers such as Beach and Maconchy. Thiellemann’s favoured Wagner, who chose to be an anti-Semite, had the opportunity to write the chord, when countless women, who, after all, did not choose to be women, did not. Wagner’s music was then performed, in public, and continues to be performed and recorded every week of the year. Whether loved or hated, Wagner’s music is heard, when the music of countless women is not. Yes, the chord of C major is not, in itself, political, but who is allowed to use it, and how they are allowed to use it, and where we can hear it when they have used it, is.

Words, however, can take one only so far. I was reminded of this when I heard the sheer excitement in the voice of the composer Judith Weir, the first female Master of the Queen’s Music, speaking on BBC Radio Three’s Composer of the Week in 2015. Weir was describing the way in which she rushed from venue to venue, from rehearsal to rehearsal, during the London Barbican’s celebration of her work a few years earlier. Even for the composer, perhaps most of all for the composer, music exists most fully in ever-changing performance, and in the hearing. As Maconchy said, to write about a piece of music is as if one sought to paint a smell. Take, for example, the final phrases of that composer’s late work My Dark Heart, which, for Maconchy herself, conveys ‘serene anticipation’; for her daughter, the phrases are ‘haunting’; whilst for musicologist Rhiannon Mathias the mood is ‘sombre’. As ever, the only way truly to engage with My Dark Heart, and all the other works written about in this book, is to listen to the music itself, and experience your own response. I believe you will find much that is not currently, but could be gloriously, part of our musical heritage.