Notes from the silence

This book is a celebration of the achievements of a handful of women over four centuries of Western European history. Neither angels nor sorceresses, merely formidably talented human beings, these female composers demonstrate, again and again, their ‘high intellectual gifts’; they express, again and again, ‘powerful feeling drawn from deep conviction’. They created their music in societies that made certain places off-limits for a woman, from the opera house to the university, from the conductor’s podium to the music publisher – societies where certain jobs, whether in cathedral, court or conservatoire, were ones for which they could not even apply.

But it is the cultures of belief within which they lived that made their task all the harder. From seventeenth-century Florence to twentieth-century London, women creating music triggered some profound and enduring fears. The Book of Samuel states that ‘listening to a woman’s voice is sexual enticement’, and that was enough to silence women, in church and synagogue, if not beyond. It is a fairly straightforward step from the Book of Samuel to the recommendation made by an early Christian Father that nuns should sing their prayers, but make no sound, ‘so that their lips move, but the ears of others do not hear’. These prohibitions upon woman’s expression may have taken less draconian forms as the years passed, but the fear underlying them, of the sexualized threat of the creative woman, remained. This is why each composer in this book composed her music in the shadow of the courtesan, her sexual life scrutinized, her virtue questioned, simply because of her trade.

Every female composer knew that her work would always be understood in terms of her sex, or, rather, what her society believed her sex was capable of achieving. When, in 1919, a violin sonata by British-born American Rebecca Clarke won an important prize, questions were asked. Had the work actually been submitted by the male composers Ernest Bloch or Maurice Ravel under a pseudonym? How could a woman have created such a formally rigorous yet powerful work? Rebecca Clarke could and did do just that in 1919, but her career was not to be sustained. Clarke was not the first, nor would she be the last, woman to give up composing, worn down by her society’s ability to silence her, succumbing to her own self-doubts. Because women, just as much as men, believed the stories we tell ourselves about genius, so often an exclusive men-only club. Clara Wieck, soon to be married to (the tortured genius) Robert Schumann, wrote: ‘I once thought that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?’ The world-renowned teacher of composition, Nadia Boulanger, knew what she had to sacrifice in order to pursue her successful career in music: ‘Artists think only of their art, and they consider it is totally incompatible with the joys of family life. From the day a woman wants to play her one true role – that of mother and wife – it is impossible for her to be an artist as well.’

How to exorcize the ghost of Clara’s despair? How to challenge Nadia’s definition of the ‘impossible’? The pioneering efforts of feminist musicologists offer one response to Clara Schumann. These scholars were, and remain, determined to show that women were ‘able to do it’ (the International Encyclopedia of Women Composers alone has more than six thousand entries) and it is both revelatory and humbling to read of the experiences of some of the early feminist researchers. Back in 1979, Professor Marcia Citron, seeking to find out more about Fanny Hensel’s music, first started work in the Mendelssohn Archiv at the Stattsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz (West Berlin). There was no library catalogue of Hensel holdings. Instead, the director Rudolf Elvers informed scholars as to what they were, or were not, allowed to see. Professor Citron battled on, often desperately copying out scores by hand in the justified fear that she would not be allowed to see the same manuscript again on her next visit. She was therefore surprised, in 1986, when the director, Rudolf Elvers, said that there had been no ‘qualified musicologists’ interested in the Hensel manuscripts. He was, in his own words, ‘waiting for the right man to come along’, and, in the meantime, expressed his irritation with ‘all these piano-playing girls who are just in love with Fanny’. Elvers’s verdict on Hensel? ‘She was nothing. She was just a wife.’

Marcia Citron, and her fellow recuperative scholars, believed that their work would not only reveal hidden music, but inspire women of today to claim their place as equals in the world of composition, and encourage orchestras to put female composers on their programmes. They, along with many other commentators, are bemused that neither of these things has quite happened. It ‘is difficult to understand the hesitancy to explore and promote music composed by women that persists today’, write the editors of a major study of women composers, whilst the music writer Fiona Maddocks admits that ‘it seems baffling, if not shocking, that even now we still use the two words woman and composer together as a collective noun, whereas it has long been out of date to refer to Barbara Hepworth or Tracey Emin as women artists’.

Perhaps the ghost of Clara’s despair will not be laid to rest by yet another recuperative scholarly exercise. Perhaps it is not enough simply to, in the words of one scholar, ‘rewrite music history on the principle of add women and stir’, although those women do need to be added to the mix. As the composer Rhian Samuel, born in 1944, remarks: ‘I have always been aware of women composers . . . Not that they were considered normal; they were considered absolute freaks, but they did exist.’ It is not only that we need to think again about what constitutes ‘greatness’. Above all, we need to find new ways of telling stories about creative, powerful women.

Take, for example, Kassia, probably the earliest female composer for whom there is surviving music. Her hymn to Mary Magdalene, written in the mid-800s, is still sung in Greek Orthodox churches in the early hours of Holy Wednesday. Kassia’s music, written on the seventh hill of Constantinople, the Xerolophos, in a now vanished Byzantine world, has therefore lived on, astonishingly, for twelve centuries. But, if Kassia is remembered at all, she is not remembered for breaking new ground, nor for her concise, syllabic settings of text, or her groundbreaking use of musical motifs ‘to symbolize and mirror the words’ (word painting avant la lettre). No: the story goes that her beauty and wisdom led to her being offered, amongst others, as a wife to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilus. The wise and cautious emperor questioned his prospective brides before he saw them, in order not to be blinded by their appearance. Kassia’s witty responses, however, apparently humbled, perhaps humiliated, the mighty Theophilus, who therefore rejected her. The convent swiftly followed, from where Kassia was said to have written her penitential hymn on Mary Magdalene because she felt shamed by her desire for the emperor.

These kinds of stories provide the pegs upon which to hang the woman’s life, whether the nun taken from the world, the sacrificial wife or the courtesan composer. Love, marriage, motherhood and (proper and improper) sex: these can all be lovely things, but they are not the only things to define the lives of the women in this book, and they certainly do not define their compositions. A quick glance at pre-Romantic ideas about marriage and motherhood acts as a reminder that love had very little to do with the former, whilst, for centuries, carrying and bearing a child was simply something one tried to survive, rather than the event that defined one as a woman. Love (and loved children) exist alongside rape and prostitution, madness, despair, illness and loneliness in death.

Then again, the romanticization and sexualization of women’s lives at least offers an alternative to catalogues of injustice and despair. Take the composer Johanna Kinkel. Born in Bonn in July 1810, she was mentored by Felix Mendelssohn, taught by some of the great figures in German music, praised by Robert Schumann for her songs, and walked out of an abusive first marriage. Kinkel responded to the life imprisonment of her politically radical second husband by fleeing with him and their four children to England, where she earned her living teaching music and writing, holding the family together both financially and emotionally while her husband continued on his revolutionary path, now in America. Once in England, she did not compose again. Before she died, Kinkel wrote a novel, with a struggling, desperate composer for a hero: the fact that the hero is a man does little to conceal the work’s status as misery memoir. A visiting friend noted that she ‘accepted her lot, but not without serious dejection’. Her health was deteriorating, ‘conditions of nervousness’ began to appear, the news from America ‘did not suffice to cheer the darkened soul of the lonely woman’. Kinkel’s life ended on the pavement below her home in St John’s Wood, north-west London. She fell, or threw herself, from an upper window. The composer’s posthumous life is just as dispiriting. An enemy, one Karl Marx (also exiled in London), viewed her as an ‘old harridan’ and was disgusted that her husband, his political opponent, received sympathy merely because his wife had ‘broken her neck’. Mr Kinkel, for his part, never realized his plan to publish his wife’s compositions.

It would have been all too easy to find a bookful of Kinkels, to represent every female composer’s life as a futile struggle against impossible odds. Instead, I want to celebrate the achievements of the eight composers here – Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Marianna Martines, Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger and Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Maconchy – to show how they overcame the obstacles in their path, to glory in the songs and sonatas that they did write, rather than grieve for the operas and symphonies that they could not. In doing so, I am working within what has been described as a narrative of ‘overcoming’, exemplified in music history by Beethoven, the composer who decided to grab fate by the throat and – instead of killing himself over the loss of his hearing – continued to compose. In recent years, scholars of disability have shown that these kinds of narratives, in which a person such as Beethoven overcomes his impairment, work primarily to reassure the able-bodied in their anxieties about experiencing similar fates, whilst at the same time diminishing the lived experience of the person who has the disability. Here, if each woman in this book is seen to overcome the obstacles in her path and still make her music, not only are those obstacles and struggles minimized but we might well be comforted and reassured to the point of complacency.

An image of Kinkel’s broken body on a pavement in St John’s Wood is one way to challenge complacency, but a less stark, but perhaps more profound, way of understanding what it was, what it is, to be a woman and composer is to explore the often complex experiences of individuals. Looking across the Atlantic, for example, at first sight the beliefs that informed and controlled the lives of women in Europe transferred effortlessly into the New World, proving powerful enough to ensure that, a generation after Kinkel, the virtuoso composer Amy Beach, able to hold a tune at the age of one and to pick out melodies on the piano by the age of two, would receive only the scantiest of educations in composition; would be married at eighteen and then have her public performances limited to one recital a year, for charity of course. A closer look at Beach’s career suggests, however, a constant give and take between the social forces and cultural beliefs that were designed to stop a woman in her tracks and those that enabled her to move forward as a composer. Sometimes, paradoxically, a single belief – about ‘women’s intuition’, for example – could work both ways, to stifle and to inspire. On the one hand, the teenage Amy was denied lessons in composition because her husband believed that instruction would spoil his wife’s ‘natural’ ability: ‘unspoken, but obvious, is Dr Beach’s assumption that his wife’s musical competency is intuitive; a gift, not a learned skill; received, not achieved’, as the scholar A.F. Block explains. Beach, as a woman, is ill-equipped by biology or temperament to benefit from intellectually rigorous training, a new quasi-scientific take on the old idea of talented women as gifted angels, not professional human beings. On the other hand, precisely because her society valued her ‘instinctual’ ability, Beach was permitted, indeed encouraged, by her family and social circle to compose music, to publish that music and to have her music performed (by others). Her special gift needed to be used, not wasted, and Beach promptly broke new ground for women by writing large-scale orchestral works, such as her Gaelic Symphony premiered in 1896. A member of the extremely privileged artistic and social New England set in which Beach moved was fulsome in his praise:

 

I always feel a thrill of pride myself whenever I hear a fine new work by any one of us, and as such you will have to be counted in, whether you will or not – one of the boys.

Her prize may have been to be ‘one of the boys’; she may only have had the opportunity to compose because she was ‘one of us’; she may not have been permitted to engage in a professional career as a pianist; and her hard work and professionalism might have been overlooked – but Beach, like all the women in this book, had found her own unique way to be a woman and composer. She was not yet thirty.

As the following chapters will show, again and again, individual women evaded, confronted and ignored the ideologies and practices that sought to exclude them from the world of composition. Again and again, a woman made her choice, took her chances, whether in the private, female sphere, or the public, male world. Many did this despite subscribing to their society’s beliefs as to what they were capable of as a woman, how they should live as a woman, and, crucially, what they could (and could not) compose as a woman. Perhaps the overcoming of their own mind-forged manacles is where their true courage lies.

Often they worked in communities where to be a woman and a composer was a part of ordinary life – the Medici court in Italy, the city of Venice, a salon in Berlin, the court of the Sun King in France – for in these communities, virtuoso female musicians were expected to write music to display their own virtuosity, whether as a servant of the Church (and thus to the ultimate glory of God) or a servant to a prince (and thus to the ultimate glory of the patron) or a precocious daughter (and thus to the ultimate glory of the family). They wrote their music in cultures where performance and composition were inextricably linked, virtuoso performers and composers who cut their teeth on, and made their name by, writing works that only they would, sometimes only they could, perform. Others worked quietly but effectively to create environments in which they, and their successors, would find it just that bit easier to be both composer and woman.

Above all, these composers were pragmatic. They did not seek out, or seek to create, a female tradition, nor did they wait for a female teacher or mentor. They invariably worked with, and within, a male-dominated musical culture. They countered, over and over again, the attacks on their reputations. They wrote what they could, when they could. If they were permitted to only write sacred music, then sacred music it was. If only lieder, then lieder by the dozen. If it is, and remains, against the odds to be a woman composer, then the ways in which individual women have beaten those odds bears telling.

Working in landscapes of belief that would silence the vast majority of women, these eight composers each found a way to express their exceptional talent, often within an exceptional community. Brought together, their stories provide a complex and inspirational picture of artistic endeavour and achievement across the centuries, which deserves to be, but is not currently, part of our cultural heritage. We are the poorer for it.