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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Today, references to gender issues in accounts of music’s cultural meaning and context are unremarkable, even characteristic of nuanced historical interpretation. As a university student between 1985 and 1995 I could hardly have predicted this state of affairs. When I began reading about music and gender in the early 1990s, as a British graduate student at Yale, gender was at the center of a large, at times acrimonious, controversy over the boundaries and ambitions of musical scholarship. In a relatively conservative institution such as Yale’s department of music it was risky to show too active an interest in the latest enthusiasms. Like many other students at that time, I had been trained to discuss music through the vocabulary of music theory, as a sounding structure, and in terms of the history of compositional style. These approaches were common to both my undergraduate studies at Oxford and the doctoral program at Yale, so much so that, methodologically, I felt at home for most of my time in New Haven, despite my visa status as a “nonresident alien.” Intellectual tensions arose less from national differences than from the then widespread practice among students of shuttling back and forth between two basic approaches, structural analysis and the discussion of “historical” style. At this distance, though, my sense of having been torn between these two subdisciplines seems comical: both approaches, after all, constitute music as unworldly and self-referential in essence. It was their fundamental agreement that sustained the long-standing rivalry between them.

Starting in the mid-1980s, the time of Joseph Kerman’s critique of music analysis and his attendant call for historical criticism, through the disciplinary upheaval of the 1990s (that period of the “new musicology”), it seemed as though the historical approach had triumphed over the abstractions of theory. But this was true only insofar as what passed for music history was itself being rethought. The history of music, as I had learned it, was paradoxically ahistorical. Music was said to be deployed in, even tailored to, social contexts, and to be shaped by changing aesthetic ambitions; but its very nature and essential meaning were largely thought of as self-referential—as, in the parlance of the day, “purely musical.” This ontological assumption served from the outset to set musical material outside of history. The development of musical form and style, we were assured, just happened to take place in scenes from the past, like a favorite actor’s appearing in a series of costume dramas.

Changes in musical scholarship that took place in the 1990s were many and various, but nearly all of them involved finding alternative approaches to writing music history. A good example was feminist criticism and gender studies, hot topics in my North American context in the 1990s and in some ways transformative influences on the discipline. The transformation was not, however, the result of anything as straightforward as breaking musical codes. Musicologists did not simply discover that music in fact contained signs for masculinity and femininity. Rather, there was a shift in academic understanding of what and where the music was: a shift, in other words, in views about the ontology of music. This might be summarized as a movement from text to context, were it not that such vocabulary maintains precisely the boundaries that had partly dissolved. In the North American context particularly, scholars as different in their approaches as Leo Treitler, Gary Tomlinson, and Lawrence Kramer argued that the distinction between music and its worldly contexts, including the context of our understanding, is illusory; for music written before the rise of ideas of aesthetic autonomy in the nineteenth century, it is an anachronistic imposition.

When I returned to England in 1995 I carried these debates in my luggage. They made it through customs, but it was unclear to me whether they would survive in their new habitat. In the United Kingdom there appeared to be an attitude at once less defensive and less excited about the prospects of gender studies in musicology. The battle lines of the North American debate, the quasi-emancipatory struggle over ancient and modern scholarship, appeared not to resonate here as loudly, not to engage academic passions in similar ways. A new colleague put her finger on a characteristic of British musicology in observing that gender issues had a future here but as components of “something else,” not as issues in their own right. The implied contrast between how “they” and “we” approached gender was perhaps illusory, but the point highlighted some perceived differences of musicological tone and rhetoric that required negotiation.

Mediating national differences was only part of the challenge, however. The pioneering and inspirational literature on music, gender, and sexuality that reached a critical mass around 1990 had left my favored period, the late eighteenth century, largely untouched. What place was there in a study of gender and the Enlightenment, I wondered, for the compelling dramas told in millennial musicology about the dangerousness of woman, her imperiled agency, her containment, and her triumph? In late eighteenth-century contexts, was the figure of woman always a figure of Otherness; was she necessarily mad, bad, and dangerous to know? If not, then what remained historically relevant in the scholarly literature to inspire me?

I did not face these challenges alone: my project unfolded as part of a broader disciplinary process of historicizing feminist criticism, a process that is still ongoing. Susan McClary’s groundbreaking Feminine Endings (1991), a text I found particularly inspiring, included issues of historical difference in music and in the sex-gender system, alongside a critical apparatus that linked musical analysis, narrative theory, and semiotics. McClary’s sensitivity to music as an analog of human action, identity, character, feeling, and desire, and her willingness to prioritize those issues in her scholarship represent enduring contributions to the discipline. In subsequent volumes Ruth Solie and Mary Ann Smart responded to McClary’s challenge by setting gender within still broader fields of difference and more specific moments of reception. Consideration of contingencies of staging, performance, and revision revealed that studies of gender and sexuality could help to recover the strangeness of the past. In recent studies of early modern Italy by Wendy Heller and Bonnie Gordon, historical difference in the sex-gender system defamiliarizes musical culture, even to the point that singing is invested with alterity as a release of vital spirit. Both authors discovered that the “woman question” had a long history: that thinking about the nature of woman and her roles in music was not the invention of late twentieth-century musicology. On the contrary, female vocality, affiliated with the body, morality, and sexuality, was a preoccupation of the early modern period with far-reaching implications for the development of musical genres and styles. Inevitably, though, all this talk of women in musicology has caused frustration, not least among those who were doing the talking. Some even abandoned ship. Without subjecting men and masculinity to historical analysis, Thomas Laqueur argued in a special issue of Cambridge Opera Journal (2007), the feminist project is incomplete, the male still set in transcendent remove from the contingencies of history. Coincidentally, my study too turns to male investments in, and identifications with, the female sign, as evidenced in the context of Beethoven’s authorial identification with Joan of Arc and Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s feelings for musical women.

My chosen period, the late eighteenth century, brought additional challenges. Music making, including something approaching a mania for composing, was then so widespread among amateurs of both sexes that a historically oriented study of the period needed to come to terms with this phenomenon. This period also saw the emergence of writing about music as a widespread and professionalized activity, taking the diverse forms of musical theory, pedagogy, criticism, reviewing, aesthetics, and history. Such writing presupposed, and helped to form, a readership in thrall to self-improvement and polite conversation, for whom knowledge about music was as important as its practice. Limiting the scholarly focus to images of women in texted and operatic music would likely fall flat.

This book traces a journey through this challenging and rapidly changing terrain. A collection of relatively self-standing essays written across a decade or more, the book reflects my evolving understanding of what gender studies can contribute to scholarship on a period no longer called classical. There is a cost in presenting my material as a series of related fragments. Unities of style and method are jeopardized, and the book does not proceed as the exhaustive working through of a single argument. But there are benefits, too, in a study that embodies disciplinary history and shows an author’s attempts to do justice to historical materials within the limits of his gradually developing methods and beliefs.

Chapters 2, 3, and 6 were published previously in the academic journals of the University of California Press and appear with light revisions and updating. In their new context here they form aspects of the book’s larger themes: the exalted status often accorded the female sign, and a newly emerging ideal of femininity, in the musical culture of the late German Enlightenment. Chapter 2, focusing on the iconic image of the young lady at music, unpacks the ideal of female musical accomplishment in all its contradictions and ambivalence. The earliest of my essays to make it into this book, it is also the most strenuously critical of the period’s idealizations of musical women. As the project unfolded and my material was tested by (and on) anonymous peer reviewers, colleagues, students, and friends, I realized that it was unnecessary to keep reissuing health warnings about the dangers of female idealization. On the contrary, it seemed to me that it was time to ask if idealization (however problematic) might have had other roles than putting women in their place. Ironically, then, it is as if the project proceeded in reverse, moving from a strenuous deconstruction of the mystique of femininity to a position in which that mystique serves as a “hermeneutic window” into the musical aspirations of the period. One of the problems I had with this book was that I found it difficult to justify that change of approach. Wasn’t I in danger of turning feminist criticism on its head, of betraying precisely the intellectual and political agendas that inspired my turn to gender issues? For a few years I went quiet (at least on gender issues), and the project stalled.

During that time I developed a private pleasure in tracking down female composers of the period. That activity caused concern among some of my colleagues, who reminded me that “gender and sexuality” were hotter themes than “women composers.” I knew what they meant, but I became suspicious of this emphasis on representations, particularly because there were still so few discussions of works composed by women in musicology’s major journals. It seemed that the stigma that used to surround works by female composers now attended research into them, or, at least, research that was framed as “rediscovery.” The challenge as I understood it was to say something about women as composers, or about their music, that would engage a musicological community turning ever more explicitly to issues of musical meaning. An initial answer I came up with, which appeared in an article published in 2004, involved no great innovation, just a shift of emphasis. In an account of the life and works of a then forgotten musician, Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes, I offered the standard kinds of appraisal (her biography and contemporary reception, and some comments on style and text setting) but also sought to render unfamiliar the question of what composing, and being a composer, had meant, culturally, in her lifetime. I sought to redeploy the “recovery” project as part of a history of musical authorship. As part of this I traced the high value placed on her works at the time of her death, when authenticity and naturalness represented cherished ideals and the emotional authenticity and naturalness of her works was attributed above all to her sex. In the course of that discussion I indicated that Minna Brandes was not alone: a vast number of women composed and published their music in the late eighteenth century, a fact that challenges commonly held assumptions that women were prohibited from or chastised for composing. It appears, rather, that in this historical moment there was a desire for female authorship, which reached an intensity not met again until the feminist movement of the 1970s.

Why then not write a book about this repertory and the kinds of musical authorship it demonstrates? Why leave so many interesting stories untold, or no more than hinted at in backnotes? There were several reasons. The first concerns the term “woman,” which in this historical site was broken up by other terms of social difference to such an extent that it would impose a false unity if taken as the fundamental category of research. Distinctions of rank, for example, would mock any attempt to collapse female royalty, professional female musicians, ladies of leisure, and the laboring poor into a single social group. To write a book about women composers in eighteenth-century Germany would risk inscribing and reifying sexual dimorphism at the cost of historical reality. The challenge, as I saw it, was to relate female authorship to the broader feminocentric trends in contemporary musical culture.

Exploring the reception of female composers returned me to the issue of idealization. Idealization of female musicians was popping up again and again, a seemingly productive aspect of the period that served to articulate some of its most cherished and distinctive ideals. My (inevitably partial) reading of feminist criticism had alerted me, however, to idealization as something problematic, something I felt I should resist. Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens often rang in my ears, but I think that Warner insisted too much on the gulf separating the real and symbolic realms. She argued, famously, that the female form is available for allegorical use and invested with symbolic power precisely because such power is not available to women on the ground. But some of her material seems to contradict this. It took time for me to let go of my assumption that idealizations of women, and femininity, were little more than forms of containment, objectification, and disempowerment. Eventually I found I could retain something of that critical perspective and at the same time trace its (in other ways) productive aspects in the rise of major developments in music of the period: the culture of sensibility; the accomplishment ideal; the primacy accorded native, female singing voices over imported castrati; the burgeoning numbers of female composers; androgyny in sound ideals and notions of authorship; the premium placed upon reformed, polite male manners in everything from critical writing to ensemble playing; and the centrality of women in some of the period’s contemporary music-historical narratives.

In that spirit I conceived chapters 1, 4, and 5, in which, without endorsing female idealization, I attempt to show how significant it was to the musical culture of the period. I joined these chapters with revised versions of the texts published earlier, which appear here as chapters 2, 3, and 6. In the long, wide-lens introduction I lay out the theme that unifies the book, that of the “sovereign feminine,” along with the related trope of the “living muse,” using examples from a range of musical, literary, and visual sources. I also explain the historical narrative that is embedded in the sequence of chapters, specifically a blossoming of the female sign in the 1770s and 1780s, which was followed by drastic reversals of fortune in the following two decades.

It is a pleasure to thank the many institutions that contributed to the completion of this project. Progress was facilitated by periods of research leave in 2002 from the University of Southampton and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K. (AHRC), and from King’s College London in 2010. Purchase of microfilms was funded in part by a small grant from the AHRC in 2001. The staff of many libraries helped reduce my carbon footprint by providing reproductions of rare materials, and I am particularly grateful for the assistance of the staff of the Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin (Mecklenburg), the Herzogin Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek (Weimar), the Goethehaus in Frankfurt, the Hamburger Öffentliche Bücherhallen, the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the library of the Universität der Künste (Berlin), the New York Public Library, Yale University Library, the British Library, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Conservatoire Royale in Brussels held many essential sources, some of which were made available to me in legible reproductions.

This book was a long time in the writing, and in the course of its preparation I received assistance from many individuals. Ellen Rosand and Jane Stevens provided sympathetic reading as I transformed materials excised from my dissertation into my first article in Journal of Musicology. In those early days Susan McClary, Philip Brett, and Judith Butler provided me with not just inspiring models but conversation and moral support. Graduate seminars at Yale with Wayne Koestenbaum and Lawrence Kramer offered safe and stimulating environments for my fledgling efforts to link cultural theory and music. Lawrence Kramer continued to offer incisive feedback over the next decade. At Southampton University, Jeanice Brooks provided encouragement, commented on draft material, and opened up conference opportunities. Sterling E. Murray, John Rice, Ric Graebner, Lars Franke, and Hugo Shirley helped me with translations of eighteenth-century German handwriting when my time, and expertise, failed. Over the photocopier, Robynn J. Stilwell told me about her work on film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, piquing my curiosity about representations of the period and reminding me that the eighteenth century is ongoing. Marian Gilbart Read was an inspiration, with her amazing knowledge of eighteenth-century literature and her exquisite feeling for the manners and mores of the period. Through her brilliant example, and the occasional nudge, Julie Brown helped me to focus on ideas, raised the intellectual bar, and was always kind and candid. Toward the end of my time at Southampton, a colleague in English literature, Emma Clery, brought my understanding of the female sign and early capitalism up to speed. Similarly, on arriving at King’s College London in 2007, I drew inspiration from the writings of, and exhibitions curated by another literary colleague, Elizabeth Eger. Two outstanding students, now holding doctorates from King’s College London, provided research assistance: Carlo Cenciarelli undertook the translations of Eximeno at short notice when Italian music theory got the better of me, and Hugo Shirley lent skills in technology and editorial patience to the task of converting earlier publications into editable text. A generous and incisive reader, Suzanne Aspden strengthened my arguments in several chapters and corrected some schoolboy errors concerning Elizabeth Sheridan. At University of California Press, Mary Francis was my expert guide through the trials of proposal, peer review, and revision, while Juliane Brand provided brilliant bilingual copyediting and Jacqueline Volin shepherded my manuscript through production. Ultimately, though, the book owes its existence (though not its faults) to Roger Parker, who gently insisted that it was time to gather my thoughts into a monograph. Without his belief that I could do this I would never have attempted it. In the last three years he has provided constant, sometimes ’round-the-clock support, read and commented on everything, and offered a perspective, at once pragmatic and intellectual, that helped me to finish.