IN APRIL 1822, WHEN LUIGI CHERUBINI began work as the new director of the Conservatoire de Paris—then the most esteemed institution of music study in the world—he was shocked to discover there were forty-one women and thirty-two men in the piano performance stream, a combined total that far outweighed students for any other instrument. Cherubini declared the abundance of aspiring virtuosi ‘abusive et pernicieuse’ and enforced a balance of fifteen men and fifteen women.51 Despite his best efforts, women continued to dominate piano studies in many conservatories during the nineteenth century, though for many women this was a professional dead end.
Women weren’t permitted to join professional orchestras, and Clara Schumann’s public performances were the exception that proved the rule that women concert pianists had almost no career prospects. Nor did specialised training guarantee a woman pianist that she would be a good piano teacher, or that she would be paid well enough to support herself.52 The nineteenth-century piano virtuosa was the terrible progeny of Dr Frankenstein’s monster: a previously unimaginable creature with extraordinary powers, for which there was no corresponding social function.
In his Letters to a Young Lady, his ideal piano student, Czerny makes no reference to the idea of her teaching. Nor does he mention solo performance, accompanying, or any other method by which Cecilia could earn income. Czerny assumes that Cecilia has a stable home while she secures her financial future; the art of playing the pianoforte was for domestic cultivation and enjoyment only. Czerny could compose and teach, and perform in public, but not Cecilia—her skills were only ever to be employed indirectly in the securing of income. They would serve as the amusesbouche to the main meal: finding a suitable man to marry.
Musical women without the financial security of a family or a husband were in a much more precarious social and economic position. The one respectable profession available to an unmarried woman was to become a governess. The stories of other fictional nineteenth-century women, such as the orphans Jane Fairfax and Jane Eyre, and Miles Franklin’s Sybella Melvin at the turn of the twentieth, demonstrate how piano skills formed a crucial part of a young woman’s economic value as a governess.
In Emma, before Jane Fairfax’s secret engagement to Frank Churchill is revealed, she is destined to become a governess. In this exchange between Jane and Mrs Churchill about finding a suitable position, Austen makes clear her thoughts on the subject: ‘“I did not mean,’ replied Jane, “I was not thinking of the slave-trade; governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.”’
The heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847, though set earlier in the nineteenth century) has only a basic competence at the keyboard, but this is combined with her French language skills, her embroidery and her minor works on canvas. Her accomplishments paint her, in the words of her former nurse Bessie, as ‘quite a lady’. If Jane were a real lady of her era, she wouldn’t need to travel alone to Thornfield Hall to teach Mr Rochester’s ward Adèle in exchange for a roof over her head. Having come to hope that she might be the object of Mr Rochester’s affection, Jane learns the painful news of her employer’s visit to the Leas estate, where—according to the housekeeper Mrs Fairfax—he sang duets with the beautiful heiress Blanche Ingram. In order to sober up, Jane forces herself to imagine drawing a chalk likeness of what she sees in the mirror. ‘A more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies,’ she concludes of herself, before setting to work on two portraits: one based on the reported loveliness of Miss Ingram, the other an unvarnished self-portrait in crayon. She titles the latter Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.
Charlotte Brontë dedicated Jane Eyre to William Thackeray, whose heroine Becky Sharp, another orphan, makes a giant leap forward for women at the piano by tearing off her velvet gloves. ‘Give me money, and I will teach them,’ declares Becky to Miss Pinkerton in Vanity Fair (1848). In one sentence the enterprising Becky announces herself to be a woman of high ambition and low social standing. In having her teach the aristocratic young ladies among whom she is billeted at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, the headmistress is hoping to save money. Becky’s classmates and teachers cringe at her insistence on being paid, but she doesn’t think twice about using her piano skills to earn money, and in so doing to assert her financial independence. In this respect, Becky Sharp is an important figure in the genealogy of piano-playing literary heroines: she’s the first to reject the servitude of being a governess and embrace her ability to provide a service with economic value.
As a teenager I never understood why becoming a governess was such a terrible misfortune. You could read, write, play the piano and have a secure roof over your head. Jane Eyre was settling in pretty comfortably until she fell in love with her boss. But without choice, the life of a governess is one of vulnerability and shame—most vividly demonstrated in My Brilliant Career, in which Sybella Melvin is forced to become governess to the eight children of Peter M’Swat in order to pay off a debt her father incurred.
Many real musical women across Europe enacted the same small-scale tragedy of market forces suffered by Chekhov’s fictional Ekaterina Ivanovna. The laws of supply and demand applied equally in the concert halls of Vienna and Paris as they did in the small towns of Russia. In the 1881 British Census, 26,000 people counted themselves among the category of ‘Musicians and Music Masters’. The 1911 census records more than 47,000 in the same category.53 Any freelancer can understand the implications.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen’s heroines played the piano while waiting for marriage proposals. By the end of it, when Ekaterina resigns herself to becoming a governess, piano teaching had become a respectable profession for unmarried women. In fact, teaching was the only opportunity available to the dozens of musically gifted women returning home from years of dedicated study on the Continent. The figure of the spinster piano teacher or governess was perhaps a little to be pitied, though far from rare. The invention and mass production of the piano had led, like all technologies do, to unintended consequences. Those who didn’t nab a husband looked to teaching to earn an income while remaining respectable. Kitten and her cohort found themselves valued at a dime a dozen. The excess supply of talented women created a new musical underclass: the overeducated private piano teacher.