Читать книгу Sovereign Feminine - Matthew Head - Страница 12
ОглавлениеIntroduction
Fictions of Female Ascendance
Beautiful, rich, and orphaned, Lady Sophia Sternheim, the eponymous musical heroine of Sophie von La Roche’s epistolary novel of 1771, was destined to be hunted by libertines and suffer the torments of stolen reputation. Packed off to court by her ambitious guardians, Count and Countess Löbau, who hope to make her a royal mistress, her pristine virtue is prematurely desecrated by a sham marriage to Lord Derby, a rake. Undone, fleeing her seducer, her conscience embraces death, and she hovers between heaven and earth. Unlike many of her type, however, she does not die: she struggles against the temptations of the grave and, didactically renouncing even that morbid luxury, discovers an enduring moral heroism and social conscience. Exalted by her disgrace, she resolves to dedicate her life to acts of benevolence, the appreciation of nature, the education of girls, the cultivation of friendship, and the solace of music.
With this heroine, who sings and accompanies herself on the lute, improvises, and plays extensively from memory, La Roche struck a resounding chord in the culture of sensibility. On the basis of Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim she emerged almost overnight as one of the most celebrated authors of her age.1 For a year or two the future of German literature seemed to lie partly in her hands. Critics discerned a moral and emotional authenticity linking author and heroine, one that, for a brief historical moment, they desired above all other artistic values. That the author was female contributed to the critics’ sense that the prose bypassed the mediation of learning and artifice. La Roche’s fiction, as the product of (or some ideal of) female nature, was felt to offer glimpses of her heroine’s invisible interiority, and of the operations of her heart and mind. The young Goethe, whose Werther of 1774 was directly inspired by and soon eclipsed Sternheim, published a review in 1772 that discovered in the novel “a portrait of the human soul.” His friend and future Weimar colleague Johann Herder used similar language, speaking of “glimpses of the inner workings of the soul.”
These reviews came in response to prompts from La Roche’s editor, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), the foremost German-language novelist of his day. Wieland provided an ostensibly apologetic preface and footnotes for the work of his female acquaintance, who (as the conceit went) knew nothing about the publication of her manuscript. Wieland’s interventions acted as insurance for La Roche’s modesty, as well as offering the endorsement of a literary authority. Perhaps even more important, they provided cues to the work’s aesthetic context. Wieland attributed to the novelist an intuitive knowledge of human nature, acquired through experience and superior to the more prestigious and almost exclusively male “dry philosophy” of those, such as himself, engaged in the “long study of humanity”; the same point is made in the novel when Sophia Sternheim asserts that “women’s feelings are frequently more accurate than the reasonings of men.”2 The author, like her heroine, emerges in Wieland’s preface as an exquisitely sensitive and unclouded instrument of moral insight. In a fantasy of art springing unmediated from nature, La Roche is said by Wieland to write without “authorial art” (8). In acknowledging that stern or misguided critics might censure the work for ungrammatical or naive stylistic aspects, by overstating the presence of certain “faults” and announcing them to be evidence of superior merit, Wieland effectively silenced such criticism. Prefiguring the terms in which Herder would idealize traditional and popular poetry in his Volkslieder (1779), and echoing contemporary discourse about “the noble savage,” Wieland praised the “originality of image and expression . . . [and] felicitous energy and aptness. . . . [F]or each original thought she immediately invents a singular expression, whose vigorous strength and truth are perfectly adequate to the intuitive ideas which are the well-spring of her reflections” (8).
From the comments of Wieland, Goethe, and Herder about Sternheim it appears that a novel by and about a woman helped to trigger a fantasy that literature could overcome problems endemic to writing and the aesthetic principle of mimesis. As a mediation of thought, writing was felt to jeopardize truthful self-representation; it was, as Derrida observed in his famous commentary on Rousseau, the trace of a voice, always secondhand and at one step removed from speech. (In the courtroom one does not write, one speaks the truth.) A clue that La Roche’s epistolary novel of female virtue and seduction came to stand for a new literary authenticity is found in Goethe’s description of the writing as a “portrait,” for at that time the visual arts were enjoying the enviable status of (purportedly) representing nature through its own natural signs of light, line, and shape. The fantasy that La Roche’s writing was natural and unmediated is of course difficult to reconcile with the text itself, and Wieland seems to be acknowledging this when, toward the end of his preface, he folds the novel back into the conventional literary category of satire, suggesting that it should be understood as “a satire on court life and the great world in general” (9). The beautiful fallacy according to which La Roche created the novel purely out of herself and her firsthand experience of the world might also have struck some readers as tenuous, given the direct relationship between Sophia Sternheim and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), as well as the indebtedness of La Roche’s vision of woman to Rousseau’s Emile (1762). But what is important in Wieland’s preface, and in the novel, is that at this historical moment the idealism that saw literature as a natural language of the passions and instrument of moral instruction found an intense, influential focus both in a fictional heroine and in the first German-language novel by a woman. As a result, the figure of woman (as both author and invented character) was granted elevated significance to mediate the realms of nature and art.
What contemporary critics (and modern editors) did not observe was that La Roche in the novel granted letters and song the very qualities that the critics attributed to her authorship. In her confessional and sternly analytical letters, as in her songs, Sophia Sternheim shows herself unwilling to dissemble. Her writing and singing voice cannot lie. Soon after her sham wedding, still unaware that her presumed husband is nothing of the sort, she discloses to him her love for another. “I had brought her a lute,” her seducer recalls:
She had the complaisance to sing a pretty Italian air of her composing, in which she besought Venus to make her a present of her [Venus’s] girdle, that she might retain the object of her tenderness. The thoughts were happy and well expressed, the music well adapted, and her voice so pathetic, that I heard her with the sweetest transport. But this pleasing dream vanished, when I observed that, during the most tender passages, which she sang the best, she did not cast her eyes on me, but declining her head, cast them on the floor, and uttered sighs, which certainly had not me for their object. (121)
In this scene, which privileges music as a medium of love, Sophia’s singing and composing are—to recall Wieland’s comment—without “authorial art.” This does not mean that they lack technical skill, but they are without falsity. Within that severe strand of bourgeois Protestant morality that she personifies, Sophie is “above” the deceit of art. Her morality and music possess the transparency of tears. She renounces the theatrical and sets standards for representation that no representation, strictly speaking, can achieve.
It comes as no surprise that Sophia is critical of opera: she regards its musically laced fictions to be lacking in truth, and declares that the entwining of music, dance, costume, song, and scenery inflames sensibility without directing it to a higher moral goal (55–56). This critique, derived directly from Addison and Rousseau, is part of Sophia’s pietistic renunciation of appearances. She disapproves not just of opera but of the culture of display that links stage fictions to the vain performances of aristocratic viewers. Her own dress and toilette are plain, her manners muted. When Sophia sheds tears, the reader is invited to regard them not as stylized, theatrical displays of sensibility but as “glimpses [of the] inner workings of the human soul”—an invitation that many modern readers may find difficult to accept. Indeed, the taste for La Roche’s moralizing was soon challenged, not least by those who had championed her cause. To tether art to the didactic end of refining sentiment is to limit its power, Goethe asserted in his 1772 review of Johann George Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774).3 Only three years after The History of Sophia Sternheim was published, Goethe’s Werther blows his brains out for love. But for a short historical moment, La Roche was imaginatively fused with her heroine and assumed the privilege conventionally accorded to only the best male writers: at once the exemplar of her sex and given sex-transcending, quasi-universal significance. Briefly the figure of woman assumed a leadership role in the development of German literature.
THE FEMALE SIGN IN THE LATE ENLIGHTENMENT
La Roche’s overnight fortune is an example of a largely forgotten aspect of eighteenth-century culture, when figures of womanhood enjoyed exalted status as signs of reform, progress, morality, and civilization. Counterintuitive though it may appear today, woman featured in the historiography, political theory, aesthetics, and artistic practices of this period less as a subordinate term, still more rarely as “Other,” than as an emblem of social, moral, and artistic ideals. “The view that woman civilizes, that she cultivates,” Sylvana Tomaselli has written in an incisive analysis of Enlightenment historiography, “is as recurrent as the view that she is nature’s most dutiful and untouched daughter.”4
In this book, taking my lead from Tomaselli, I excavate the rhetorical and symbolic feminine, finding in images and practices of late eighteenth-century women arguments in favor of emerging modernity: these include the reform of despotism; the positive value of commerce and luxury; stimuli to politeness and refinement, and evidence of the educative and moral utility of the arts, music included. The elevation of “the fair sex”—what Jean Starobinski, writing of male gallantry and the visual arts in Paris before the French Revolution, quizzically styled the “fictitious ascendancy of woman”—elided the real and the imaginary, affording some women cultural capital and symbolic power, tantalizing others with discursive illusions of the same.5 Although rarely a matter of political and legal equality, this fictitious ascendance of woman was neither entirely fictitious nor entirely “about” women. Female and feminine authority in the arts and letters was part of the semiotic and rhetorical apparatus of those broader historical reforms often discussed by historians under the label “Enlightenment.”6
Such elevated significance depended on a reinvention of woman herself against the backdrop of what were styled classical and religious superstitions, those old prejudices that women have no soul, are the offspring of wolves, or, in the one-sex system of anatomy and medicine that continued until the end of the seventeenth century, represent a less perfect form of the male.7 In the eighteenth century hierarchically arranged similarity between man and woman (the one-sex model) was challenged by a metaphysics of difference (the two-sex model) in which hierarchy is unstable. The (notion of the) opposite sex was born and the female body could now achieve perfection according to its own ideal. Between the 1730s and 1790s careful drawings of the female skeleton first appeared, expressing a desire to discover sexual differences in every part of the body, even if that desire was frustrated by apparent similarity.8 With biblical, classical, and Renaissance texts still circulating, and with the outcome of the search for sexual difference still unclear, the thinking about sex and gender was contradictory. No one possessed a single scientific truth about sex through which to enforce a sexual difference of labor, or, as modern thinking puts it, keep women in their place. Conclusions were at once provisional and unfamiliar.
The leading German physiologist of the period, J.F. Ackermann, affirmed in his influential treatise on sexual difference of 1788 that women were better suited than men to intellectual activity because of their weaker bones and finer nerves.9 He asserted that the female brain weighs more than the male as a proportion of total body mass, and he agreed with Descartes’s idea that the pineal gland is the seat of the soul and origin of ideas, observing that in absolute terms the female version of this gland is larger than that of the male.10 Within a prevailing “nerve theory” that conceptualized the human body as a corded framework of nerves whose excitement constitutes feelings, sensations, and, ultimately, cognitions, Ackermann asserted that women are the more civilized of the sexes—and further removed from the realm of beasts, more sensitive, and quicker of mind than men.11 Ackermann’s comments put an entirely different complexion on all those portraits of the period—familiar now from postcards and costume dramas—that show literary and musical ladies at their desks and claviers. Seen through Ackermann’s eyes, such images banish superstition about female nature and install women, at least women of a certain class, in provocatively contemporary iconography.
FEMINOCENTRIC INNOVATIONS IN THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
La Roche’s newness inspired the new. A series of inclusive, often gynocentric genres and practices sprang up around her: daily letter writing; the novel; strophic lieder that set contemporary poetry; keyboard playing; and comic opera and bourgeois tragedy featuring tensions between fathers and daughters. All of these practices provided opportunities for female identification, fantasy, pleasure, performance, and authorship. In the second half of the century, the first German-born divas took to the stage, fulfilling desires for a singing voice that should be both national and (in preference to castrati) natural. Nor, at this stage in the history of German opera, did women demur from composing the works in which they themselves would appear. In 1756 Gottlieb Immanuel Breitkopf announced the invention of his new method of printing music by movable type with the publication of the Dowager Duchess Maria Antonia Walpurgis’s opera seria Il trionfo della fedeltà; at around the same time composing, already a widespread practice, became a favorite female pastime. Between 1756 and 1806 about fifty women in north German states—musical amateurs and professionals—published music under their own names. The occasional prefatory demur aside, they did so without embarrassment, and chiding reviews did not inevitably follow. The terms of female participation in musical culture differed markedly from what we might expect to have been the case.
Only occasionally was the “ascendance” of women in composition and performance framed as a battle of the sexes or Amazonian challenge to male prerogatives. More often associated with personal cultivation and the progress of national culture than with untrammelled agency, female participation was rarely discussed as a threat to the social order. Undoubtedly there was a concern, in publication of female-authored music, to maintain notions of modesty and virtue, usually achieved through a male editorial chaperone. Such framing devices, dramatizing the entry of woman into print, can strike us as constraining; in this context, though, they tended to render the publication more enticing and meaningful, not least as a glimpse of the private, intimate realm of family, home, and the female heart.
The terms through which the female sign was eclipsed at the beginning of the German-speaking nineteenth century are familiar. The rise of aesthetic autonomy, associated particularly (though not exclusively) with large-scale, publicly performed works of instrumental music, downgraded the aesthetic status, if not the social significance, of private, domestic, and vocal music; sexual polarization reached a new intensity of essentialism and, with it, something approaching a conceptual scandal between “serious” composition and “female” identity. The feminine now achieved significance more readily as a component of male creative genius (creative androgyny) or as a stimulating object of romantic desire within artistic fiction—a stylized musical topos (loving, heavenly song). Woman continued as a cherished sign, but signs themselves lost ground, becoming objects of nostalgia in a philosophical and aesthetic culture that ultimately valued the unsignifiable, the invisible, the otherworldly, the sublime.
FEMALE SOVEREIGNTY AND THE NOTION OF ENLIGHTENMENT
My emphasis on the positive status both of women and of the feminine in a particular moment of German cultural history goes against the grain of much of the current thinking about gender in this period. My position is not, though, as contrary as it might appear: women were not, in any straightforward sense, empowered by feminocentric aesthetic frameworks, nor did they enjoy anything like full agency in musical culture. Female idealization and aestheticization were and are powerful modes of control. Nonetheless, in highlighting a discourse—an ideology—of female sovereignty in polite culture and the fine arts one could argue that (some) women achieved symbolic power, and cultural capital, both of which are overlooked if one doggedly persists with assumptions about female subordination. Put another way, older patterns of criticism that seek to uncover in artistic practices the same inequality that characterized women’s contemporary legal status potentially underestimate female cultural power.
That power came with strings attached. It followed elevated social position and represented class interests more than a form of individual female empowerment. For aristocracy, female sovereignty was a favorite image for noncoercive, “Enlightened” despotism, a way of imagining absolute power in a gentle frame. For the middling strata, facts and fictions of literary and musical women were bound up with emerging capitalist markets, educational values, and social self-conceptions, not least those concerning leisure, virtue, and refinement. These class interests, both aristocratic and bourgeois, help to explain why “woman” was not presented solely, or even often, as an abject or inferior term.
This line of argument does not contradict, although it does complicate, prevailing understanding of both gender politics in general and musical culture of the late eighteenth century in particular. With regard to gender politics, an emphasis on female sovereignty complicates the now conventional critique of the Enlightenment as having hypocritically denied women the equality it preached as a universal right. In an excellent scholarly primer Dorinda Outram explains that critique, as well as suggesting some of the limitations of it. She uses “enlightenment thinking about gender” as an example of fundamental tensions and contradictions at the heart of a project that often styled itself as libratory and progressive. On the one hand, ideas of “universal human nature” and “a single universal human form of rationality” empowered critiques of inequalities of social class and institutions. On the other, “gender, like the exotic, was an area of difference,” one that “challenged” universality and was often invoked to justify the exclusion of women and other Others from the vision of equality. The contradiction, Outram argues, was not ultimately resolvable but managed discursively through quasi-positivist appeals to the “evidence” of anatomy, nature, and history. With prejudice and superstition out of fashion, traditional misogynist motifs were replaced with quasi-scientific “facts”: “images powerful in former times of women as shrews, harlots or Amazons retreated, and were replaced by numerous medical and scientific attempts to define social and cultural differences between men and women [and existing social inequalities] as ‘natural’ and therefore right and inevitable.”12
This notion of the later eighteenth century as a time when talk of the freedom and autonomy of the (white, male, educated, politically enfranchised) subject was coupled with new techniques of subjugation and exclusion of Others is a widespread critical orthodoxy. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century writers seeking to explain the moral paradoxes of modernity—the origin of totalitarianism and fascism, the social and intellectual rationales for discrimination and exploitation, the basis for inequalities in human value, and so on—turned to the Enlightenment for answers. Indeed, the very idea of “Enlightenment” as a project is now generally approached through such critiques: students are likely to know of the sexual double standard, rise of empire, racism of anthropology, fetishizing of the primitive, internalization of discipline and surveillance, degradation of knowledge into a commodity, irrational deployment of rationality, and disenchantment of the world before they have read texts whose utopianism made them vulnerable to critique. The idea that this period developed new ways of disciplining the human subject to justify and maintain oppression of the many by the few is as much an orthodoxy of current understanding as was the earlier emphasis on mottos of progress, freedom, and ideals of shared humanity.13
Depending on one’s political position, the contradiction will be more or less contained within specific contexts. Outram, for example, represents a middle point that is characteristic (loosely speaking) of liberal, humanistic scholarship. She passes over any Marxist-inspired critique of emerging capitalism as a source of inequality, or as representing the interests of specific social levels; differences attaching to class, social position, and wealth are noted but not accorded separate treatment or structural status in this vision of Enlightenment and its discontents. However, she affirms the feminist critique of sexual inequality in a chapter of its own. Singling women and ethnic minorities out as the “losers” (in chapters 6 and 7, respectively), Outram leaves one with the impression that white men were the “winners.” It is notable that she does not address Foucault’s critique of the disciplining of the human subject through the internalization and self-administration of intrinsically oppressive norms of “the human”: to do so would have jeopardized her overall plot.14 Arguably, then, even Outram’s penetrating critique of the Enlightenment does not proceed far enough, leaving intact the illusion that, for the chosen few, freedom was real.
With regard to the subordination of women, Outram’s emphasis on the insidiously constraining role of medical views of the female body is perhaps overstated, at least from the perspective of my particular German context. The assertion that Enlightenment medicine and science insidiously naturalized female inequality by pointing to the “evidence” of female mental and physical weakness makes for easy reading today because it is broadly familiar from second-wave feminist theory. Indeed, modern readers are regularly encouraged to think in such terms about the “woman question” in Western culture, and to resist biological essentialism in debates about female destiny. But the situation in late eighteenth-century Germany cannot be so easily summarized; to deem medical science at that time as uniform in its conclusions about the nature of the sexes, or particularly authoritative beyond its own domain, is misleading. The biological turn, in Outram’s report, was bleakly dominating and uniform: “anatomical studies on women’s brains argued that they were of smaller size, and thus conclusively demonstrated women’s unfitness for intellectual pursuits.”15 A problem hidden in that summary is that there were very few medical and anatomical discussions of women before 1800. The most influential in German, by Ackermann, came to the opposite conclusion, as discussed above.
There was no grand theory, based in scientific thinking, about female inferiority, nor any stable association between physical and mental weakness. If there had been it would be difficult, even impossible, to explain why this period witnessed the blossoming of women intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians. The emerging bourgeois public sphere, as Habermas terms it, offered not just prohibitions against but opportunities for female participation, creativity, and leadership even as it furnished some demeaning and stereotyping images.16
GENDER AND THE IDEA OF GERMAN MUSIC
Not surprisingly, the musical culture of the period is marked by these complexities, granting ambiguous prestige to the female sign. But in emphasizing the obstacles women faced, musicological studies of the period may have overestimated female exclusion and subordination. For example, in a prefatory gesture to his excellent account of the attitudes and aspirations of serious German musical culture circa 1770–1848, David Gramit diagnosed female exclusion as a defining feature, albeit one overcome by spirited female exceptions:
Ultimately, the status of German musical culture rested on a precariously double-edged claim: serious (and most often German) music was held to be universally valid, even though, at the same time, maintaining its prestige demanded limiting access to it along the lines of existing social divisions, prominent among them class, gender, education, and nationality. To ignore the significance of the claim to universality would not only obscure the ways in which the equally significant exclusions operated, but it would also distort the motivations of the advocates of serious music. To overlook those exclusions, however, as musicology all too frequently has, is to mistake the ideals of a culture for its admittedly less flattering but considerably more complex social dynamics.17
The difference between my emphasis on female sovereignty and Gramit’s emphasis on female exclusion arises in part from Gramit’s interest in continuity in public musical culture across a century and a half. I confine my study to a shorter period and am as much concerned with private and court contexts as with public venues. At least until the period of the Napoleonic wars, I argue, female participation and “feminine” values in German-speaking lands were ways of positively signaling bourgeois and aristocratic musical identity and taste, even amounting to arguments in favor of music as a fine art. Addressing the origins of nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutions of classical music, and the hegemony of German music, Gramit understandably treats public venues and large genres as the most prestigious and, on this basis, understands the amateur and domestic realms as relatively lacking in aesthetic significance. Focusing particularly on the 1770s and 1780s, however, I argue that public and private operated differently: the “private,” with its connotations of authenticity and its closeness to individual feeling and morality was, paradoxically, of intense public interest. Nor did the private and the amateur always coincide: Corona Schröter, for example, was a professional actress and singer who moved from private and semipublic performances in Leipzig to a career at the court of Anna Amalia of Weimar, appearing in circles that were either entirely closed or open only to select townspeople. The notion of separate male and female spheres, and of their hierarchy of value, is particularly difficult to maintain in this historical context.
This is not to deny that, even before 1810, German music served male interests and linked (a version of) masculinity with particular artistic values in ways that were potentially alienating to women. In the famous preface to his Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek (three volumes, 1778–1779) Johann Nicolaus Forkel marshaled a classical Republican rhetoric of modern degeneracy and decline to inveigh against the loss of manliness, or “Männlichkeit” (virility) in contemporary German music:
Throughout the first half of the present century the art of music stood indisputably and in every regard in its finest and most virile maturity. Seriousness, dignity, grandeur, and sublimity in its inner nature,—order and correctness in its grammatical and rhetorical structure,—outwardly brilliant but authentic and appropriate performance were characteristics of its true perfection, and, taken together, these exemplary qualities of those former, happy times cannot be denied. . . . Admittedly, the theory of music, or at least some aspects of it, has been developed admirably in recent times; but how rarely theory and practice coincide. . . . Indeed, more than ever people now hold forth about the great, the sublime, the beautiful, and a manly and powerful expression, but when have we ever had less of the great, the sublime, the truly beautiful, and of manly power in expression?18
If Forkel’s sense of a loss of manliness in contemporary music covertly acknowledged the ascendance of feminine values, his rhetoric of current decline constituted a powerful rejection of such a development.
For this reason it is useful to gain a sense of what Forkel meant by the musically “manly.” The term männlich had a range of compositional and musical associations for Forkel, from God-like perfection, at one extreme, to competent craftsmanship at the other. In his preface to Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek he used the term to intensify references to musical seriousness, strength, inventiveness, integrity, and Germanness rather than as a word with its own clear meaning. The “manly” also validated the powerful emotions that Forkel imputed to, and admired in, music of the high baroque. The remedy to present decline, Forkel argued, was to return to and develop the music theory of music’s manly maturity: that is, to revive the music-rhetorical thinking of the first half of the eighteenth century.
Forkel’s posthumous canonization as one of the first German musicologists could mislead modern readers into thinking that his views in the 1770s were more representative and influential than in fact they were. Musicology has been kind to Forkel because he wrote the first full-length biography of J.S. Bach (published in 1802) and one of the first histories of music in German.19 For these achievements alone he features prominently in studies of Bach reception, accounts of the development of German musical nationalism, and musicology’s construction of its past. This is not to deny all currency in the 1770s to his notion of music’s decline and loss of manliness. A conventional historiography was at work here, a well-worn inheritance from classical antiquity that pitted a manly past against an effeminate present. Such terms were often employed by German critics in the second half of the century, both before and after Forkel’s famous preface.20 In the 1752 edition of J.S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge Marpurg lamented that the “manly character” of music, exemplified by Bach’s fugal counterpoint, had given way to “womanish song.” The popularity of lighter styles (which Marpurg also called the “galant”) is attributed “to the tender ears of our time,” an admission, perhaps, that the manly, as Marpurg understood it, had lost ground.21 In an oft-cited review from 1766, of a set of six symphonies by Giovanni Gabriel Meder, Johann Adam Hiller took exception to the inclusion of “Frenchified” and courtly minuets. In symphonic contexts, he asserted, such dances “always seem to us like beauty spots on the face of a man: they give the music a foppish appearance, and weaken the manly impression made by the uninterrupted sequence of three well-matched, serious movements.”22 Subsequent critics reported that Teutonic musical seriousness was under siege not so much from French habits as from the incursions of Italian comic opera into instrumental music. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, for example, assuming the role of a military general, ordered that “since the comic taste has caused so much devastation among us, our first endeavor must be to confine this taste as much as possible and make room once more for the serious, heroic, and tragic, for pathos and the sublime.”23 By the end of the century, and particularly in centennial retrospectives of German music, the conceit of German manliness was fused with (elusive and exclusive) notions of the musically “true,” ideas of progress, and the canonization of Bach as a law giver and musical patriarch. In these developments from around 1800, and particularly in Forkel’s Bach biography, John Deathridge has discovered “the first real step towards the fake Teutonic musical universalism first promoted in the middle of the nineteenth century.”24
EXEMPLARY WOMEN IN THE FORKEL–REICHARDT CONTROVERSY
Back in the early 1780s, however, Forkel’s rhetoric did not go uncontested. The Berlin kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt developed an alternative vision: patriotic but also cosmopolitan, and acknowledging male excellence but celebrating female achievements and influence. Perhaps empowered by the distinction of a royal appointment, Reichardt framed his representations of contemporary musical culture as both parodies of and serious alternatives to Forkel’s musical almanacs of 1782–1784. These writings by Reichardt are barely remembered today, and so it will be useful to review them here in some detail. They established a critical counterpoint (Reichardt contra Forkel) in which the character of contemporary music was personified through contrasting relationships to the figure of woman.
The trigger and parodic target for Reichardt’s publications was Forkel’s generically innovative but somber Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland auf das Jahr 1782, with its sequels for 1783 and 1784.25 The precise chronology of Reichardt’s rejoinders is uncertain, but he was clearly piqued by Forkel’s prefatory claim in 1782 to be the first musical author to introduce this format of publication in Germany.26 In publishing his own volume with the same title (Musikalischer Almanach auf das Jahr 1782) Reichardt announced a competition in the formation of public taste. In 1783 he extended his remit to both music and the visual arts in his Musikalischer- und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783. This double focus spoke both to aesthetic theory (then concerned with the relationship between the arts) and to the interests of a broad readership. Not without polemical implication, it highlighted Forkel’s stern focus on music (and music alone) in the institutional contexts of court and church. Reichardt’s final installment, in readily portable, pocketbook format, was the Musikalisches Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1784. Almost obsessively concerned with praising contemporary female musicians, professional and amateur, the Taschenbuch can be read as Reichardt’s most pointed rebuff to Forkel’s retrospective vision of German music led by a divinely ordained hierarchy of (almost exclusively male) kapellmeister, konzertmeister, and subsidiary instrumental and vocal employees of state and church. Not for the last time, the professional identities and intellectual frameworks of male critics were organized around a polarized relationship to the figure of woman, whose presence or absence organizes disagreements that are not only “about” sex and gender.
In his almanacs Forkel proved an advocate of the list. Largely avoiding evaluative comments, he assembled the names of the personnel in courts and churches throughout Germany, as if institutional affiliation were itself proof of value and quality. Women appear only under the list of “male and female singers,” and sparingly even there. This approach is particularly marked in the Almanach of 1782, which resembles a reference work rather than a volume to stimulate conversation or self-improvement. Forkel began with reports on inventions and improvements to instruments (6–38) and proceeded through lists of musical journalists, composers, singers, instrumentalists, musical courts, publishers, engravers, societies, and instrument makers. The Almanach resembled precisely what it was not: an official document of and for a court or church. Perhaps Forkel intended to constitute the nation by describing it as an imaginary institution writ large. But, that speculation aside, his account of German music is notable in passing over domestic and amateur music making—and so, by default, the greater part of female practice.
Reichardt’s Musikalischer Almanach auf das Jahr 1782 provided a broadly based alternative to Forkel through a focus on music as part of the culture of sensibility. Sensibility was a general marker of bourgeois artistic practices and, as Reichardt’s overarching theme suggests an entirely different set of musical values. Subsequent issues of the Almanach would usher in the figure of woman as sovereign in this realm, although this is only hinted at in 1782. This almanac offered a musical calendar, listing every day of the year in tabular form, alongside the name and sphere of activity of a living or deceased musician. These musical name days are accompanied by poetic evocations of the character of the months. In prose portraits Reichardt personified the seasons and the natural world in terms of emotional and creative personality, breathing the spirit of Klopstock, Ossian, and Goethe’s Werther into the musical imaginations of his readers. These “portraits” suggested a fusion of visual art, physiognomy, poetry, and music under the higher concept of feeling. Music took its place among the sister arts.
This is not to suggest that Reichardt was blandly sentimental. Irony was an elevating component in the culture of sensibility, sometimes acting as an insurance against the merely mawkish, sometimes providing a critical tool to direct at enemies of the feminized empire of feeling. The first role is evident in Reichardt’s authorial performance: for all his talk of mists and moonlight, freezing rain and winter tears, there is a subtle irony in the stylized, self-conscious deployment of emotive language and the imitation of then modish poetic conceits. The impression is of a stylish, gallant address to the readership: one that seeks to move, amuse, and impress. The second, more pointedly critical, role is evident in the frontispiece to the volume, which lampoons a scene of amateur music making (figure 1). An engraving shows four male musicians in cramped domestic quarters. In the lower right-hand corner a small dog howls. The incompetent players are afflicted with various infirmities. The diminutive, hunched double bassist is too short for his goliath instrument and plays standing on a chair; a gawping, emaciated, and bespectacled keyboardist strains to read his music; a string player turns his oversized instrument on its side and bows the wooden body; a pained singer looks heavenward in desperation. This witty image signals the entertainment value of Reichardt’s publication, as well as the reader’s domestic context. It can also be read as a deflation of male musical authority, a critique of “manliness” that prepares the reader for the realm of sensibility within the volume—for the (not entirely fictitious) authority of the heart. At the very least, it paints a poor image of men who make music without female influence and participation.
FIGURE 1. Frontispiece of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Musikalischer Almanach (1782).
Reichardt’s next installment, the Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, found in the language of feeling a vocabulary to evoke an ideal mingling of hearts and artistic media in domestic mixed-sex contexts.27 If for Forkel true music inspired wonder and astonishment, for Reichardt of the Almanach of 1783 it was something with which to fall in love. A key term in Reichardt’s praise of music, painting, and women was that they provide “Entzücken” (enchantment), a term that suggests the power to seduce the senses and heart. Reichardt elides images of beautiful women in painting and engraving with those of beautiful female performers, so much so that the female sign crosses boundaries of art and life, the real and the represented. For example, referring to the painter Sintzenich and his images of a range of contemporary literary and mythological heroines, Reichardt sighed, “What enchantment filled our heart when we saw your Emilia, your Zemire, your Cecilia, your Vestal Virgins in brightly colored prints.”28
Young ladies singing and playing brought forth similar effusions. For example, Reichardt, playing the peeping Tom in a novelist’s moment, describes eavesdropping and gazing upon Rosa Cannabich as she played Sterkel’s Frühlingsstücke at the piano. (Cannabich, the daughter of the Mannheim konzertmeister Christian Cannabich, is known today chiefly as a pupil of Mozart during the composer’s stay in Mannheim in 1777 and, according to one of Mozart’s letters home, the subject of musical portraiture in the slow movement of the Sonata K. 309/284b).29 Employing neoclassical motifs through which “the fair sex” were often elevated at this time, Reichardt described her as a “die Grazie sich mit der spielenden Muse vereiniget” (the graces united with the [clavier]-playing muse).30 At once “a girl” of seventeen and a “female virtuoso,” she combines a personal timidity proper to her youth and sex with emerging keyboard mastery. This, Reichardt declared, is an intoxicating combination.
More is at stake in Reichardt’s performance of sensibility than a claim to Werther-like susceptibility to female, and musical, beauty. The now familiar idea of a male critic’s being inspired to strong feelings by the sight of female performance goes hand in hand with something less obvious: Reichardt’s feelings for women were also demonstrations of a capacity to feel as a woman, at least within the dominion of sensibility and the fine arts. Laced through Reichardt’s almanacs is a figure of exchange—poetically styled, an exchange of souls—through which men and women find an ideal, sex-transcending union in the hallowed realms of love, music, and sensibility. One of the roles of the arts, it seems, was to furnish common ground where different artistic media, and newly polarized sexes, might meet on something fantasized as being equal terms. In that not-entirely imaginary space, some aspects of male authority could be suspended; the figure of refined and refining womanhood is ushered in as a symbolic sovereign, and the capacity to be moved, and to love, is the condition of belonging—an altogether different basis for membership from the institutional affiliations and professional pedigrees recorded by Forkel.
This largely forgotten moment in the history of music and male identity was self-conscious and the subject of some contemporary theorization. Reichardt himself offered a formulation and reflection in two concluding essays of the Almanach for 1783.31 The first essay is on the education of taste, the second on the use of images of suffering heroes in the arts. Both essays directed German youth to female influences. In “Vom Geschmack und der Wichtigkeit einer frühzeitgen Bildung” (On the taste and importance of early cultivation) Reichardt recommended that the young should be spared harsh moralizing and allowed simply to spend time in the company of cultivated women.32 This, he argued, is the surest means to acquire taste, which is the ability to recognize and be moved by the morally good. A “Gefühl des Schönen” (feeling for the beautiful), which unites the domains of aesthetics and ethics, is nurtured through the elevating example of (the right kind of) women. At the opposite pole to exemplary womanhood stands “Der kalte lieblose Mann, oder noch mehr, der Bösewicht” (the cold, loveless man, or, still worse, the scoundrel), the army of rakes, libertines, villains, and unmovable fathers, indifferent to the torments they inflict.33 The reader is persuaded of this cause through felicitous semantic duplication, the use of schön to designate both women (“das schöne Geschlecht”) and the morally beautiful (“das Schöne”).
In the second essay, “Vom Interesse des leidenden Helden für die Kunst” (On the interest of suffering heroes for the arts), Reichardt provided an art-theoretical rationale for the idea of an exchange of souls. Suffering heroes are ideal material for artistic representation, he argued, because they arouse sympathetic identification: “As soon as we see someone suffering . . . our imagination places us with them in an identical situation; it seems as though we were in their place.”34 He then elaborated this principle in terms that both impose and dissolve sexual difference. Women, he asserted, are more readily and deeply moved than men, for which reason they make better “suffering heroes.”35 Indeed, elsewhere in this almanac Reichardt described the celebrity painter Angelica Kauffman in just these terms, as a sorrowing artist, burdened by a secret, suffering from love.36 What could be more moving than a virtuous woman in distress, Reichardt pondered at length. Where we might expect images of the male rescuer to enter the text Reichardt simply dwells, sympathetically, as if experiencing himself in the position of a suffering heroine.
The exchange of souls as an aesthetic and moral ideal, though more readily articulated through the visual arts and literature, also haunted Reichardt’s ideals of sound. The charms of Rosa Cannabich notwithstanding, Reichardt often attributed not narrowly gendered characteristics to performances but an androgynous mixture of forcefulness and delicacy that both entice and command. In the voice of Josepha Hellmuth, a court singer in Mainz, Reichardt discovered a mixture of tenderness and power that could be understood as encompassing extremes of manliness and femininity: “None can deny their astonishment at her richly toned, powerful, tender, touching, voice.”37 Not just expressive range but harmonious balance of contrasting elements is conveyed in this description. Far from representing a transgressive aspect, this androgynous balance of antithetical elements was a neoclassical ideal in art theory of the period, theory with which Reichardt seems to be working. Androgyny, as a golden mean and principle of balance, was influentially propounded by the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his reappraisal of classical statuary and epitomized by his celebration of the equilibrium of masculine and feminine, adult and youthful, characteristics of the Apollo Belvedere.38 Along these lines, Reichardt admired the antithesis between ingratiating “performance” and “manly” tone in the (male) violinist Schick: “Pleasingness, sweetness of performance perfects his glory; this performance is unsurpassable because it ‘speaks’ and is full of soul. . . . The tone that he produces from his violin is powerful, manly, profound.”39
However, there was an emphasis in Reichardt, alien to Winckelmann, on the female exemplification of aesthetic ideals that has implications for the political coloring of the realm of the arts. Reichardt began the Almanach for 1783 with a twenty-year-old violinist, one “Baier,” the daughter of a court trumpeter. The “Stärke und Werth” (power and integrity) of her playing, Reichardt affirmed, were recognized when Frederick the Great condescended to accompany her on his flute. This musical inversion of social hierarchy (the king as servant) hints at the notion of woman’s musical sovereignty. Reichardt also perceived aristocratic sprezzatura in Baier’s playing, even though she was not of aristocratic rank. Specifically, he praised her as the exception not only to her own sex but to male violinists in preserving in her playing a “decorum and artful negligence in execution.”40 Praise of female musical excellence is coupled here with some notion that the power of the sovereign is fleetingly usurped or checked. In this emphasis on an individual’s musical skill and, related to this, the unique character of her sound, Reichardt’s sense of music, and of writing about it, appears more modern, if impressionistic, than Forkel’s lists of institutional musicians, ordered according to the authority of clergy, aristocracy, and God.
SCOPE, ARGUMENTS, AND DRAMATIS PERSONAE
If Reichardt is so revealing a witness to this period, why is he so little known, or valued, in Anglophone musicology? One reason, already hinted at, is his colorful style, which seeks to capture (musical and individual) character rather than to proceed in a primarily documentary and positivist manner. His music, like his writing, also lost out to historical change. As the composer of around 1,500 mostly strophic songs, his musical output, though admired by contemporaries, was eclipsed by the Schubertian revolution. Specifically, Reichardt’s obedience to the form of the poetry he set revealed too little of that compositional rewriting, and subjectivity, admired in the romantic metaphysics of music that was emerging at the end of his life. As the preferred composer of major poets of the day, particularly Goethe, Reichardt appeared to modern eyes too devout (too Lutheran, perhaps) in his relationship to the word. Similarly, in instrumental music, Reichardt’s adherence to ideas of unity of style and affect, though typical of his Prussian context, was also a matter of regret within the discourse of Viennese classical style, as it developed in the twentieth century.
A pattern of Othering Reichardt as reportedly uncharacteristic of his period persists to this day. Symptomatic is the omission from the New Bach Reader of his important essay on J.S. Bach, first published in the Musikalisches Kunstmagazin (1782). The omission may reflect positivistic difficulty with Reichardt’s social and literary frameworks for musical meaning. His stigmatization began early, with his dismissal from the post of court kapellmeister in Berlin for his publication in 1794 of a relatively positive account of the French Revolution in the Vetraute Briefe über Frankreich. This disgrace, along with Schiller’s (presumably related) personal dislike of him, probably influenced Reichardt’s reputation in the canon-building and patriotic Prussian nineteenth century, and though the details of that scandal are not remembered now, it seems to have cast a long shadow.
In selecting Reichardt as a companion to this study I hope to highlight some of his novel modes of writing and thinking about music, and to place them within wider feminocentric aspects of the late eighteenth century. His life spans the entire period covered by this study. Born in the east Prussian city of Königsberg four years before the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), he was a witness to all but the last battles of the Napoleonic wars, dying in June 1814, three months before the Congress of Vienna. Understandably, given the focus of Reichardt’s enthusiasms, scholars working in the former East Germany with a class-based and materialist historiography have often regarded him as a chief representative of an emerging bourgeois consciousness in German music. In focusing on Reichardt’s investments in female music making, I highlight an aspect of that consciousness.
I became aware of Reichardt’s women near the beginning of my research through his publications of songs, concerti, and lullabies “for the fair sex.” Like many modern readers of the preface to the Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (1775) I was struck by the composer’s condescension (his reference to the “pretty little hand” of the performer and its unwillingness to “stretch” to the octave), though I was keen from the start to discover more about the cultural work and meaning of that condescension, in relation to the business of selling music, the social status of the purchasers, and Reichardt’s own identity as a composer. With time, it became clear that Reichardt’s attitudes were not straightforwardly trivializing. Unusually for a German kapellmeister, he fostered the composing of his wife (Juliane) and daughter (Louise), wrote enthusiastically of women performers, and, more broadly, was enamored of contemporary ideas of female sensibility and the femininity of aesthetic beauty. Sometimes Reichardt addressed the activities of female performers and composers on sex-specific terms (as when he eavesdropped on Rosa Cannabich) and sometimes without apparent reference to sex (as in his balanced reviews of the works of the Schwerin court musician Sophie Westenholz, which I explore in chapter 5). Overall, Reichardt’s relationship to musical women frustrated my own interpretive categories and so warranted further work. Coming to terms with Reichardt involved a wide-ranging study of feminocentric aspects of his central and north German contexts. Although he appears in every chapter, he serves as a witness to concepts and practices, not as the focus of the study.
Among the intellectual sources of Reichardt’s feminocentric criticism were the musical travel diaries of the English music historian Charles Burney; I explore this connection in chapter 1. Burney (1726–1814) was a generation older than Reichardt (1752–1814), but both men undertook musical tours in Germany in the early 1770s. Burney’s unflattering comments on Prussian music, on the one hand, and his innovative way of writing about music, on the other, inspired Reichardt to a work of patriotic defense, and authorial emulation, in the Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend.41 Burney’s The Present State of Music in Germany (1773) was reported in the German press, immediately translated into German, and read closely as an account of German music through the eyes of a visiting foreigner (a favorite perspective of critical “Enlightenment” letters). One of the distinctive aspects of Burney’s writing was the prominence he granted female musicians. Not simply a question of occasional flattery of wealthy women and royalty of his acquaintance, or gallant appeals to his female readers, Burney accorded women a wide range of significance, praising their achievements in performance and composition using vocabulary that ranged across the natural and the expressive to touch on technical prowess, knowledge, and genius. Among his tropes of the female musician is that of the living muse, whose practice embodies specific aesthetic ideals and who functions, abstractly, as an exemplar. The living muse is related to the conventions of visual allegory but brings allegory to bear on historically concrete individuals with names, biographies, and even published music. Such idealizations were no doubt constraining as well as elevating; they nevertheless represent one of the ways in which the female sign became meaningful in this historical site.
Burney’s praise of women was honed on the works of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, where the figure of woman was marshaled in favor of emerging bourgeois and capitalist interests. In the 1740s, when Hume published his Essays Moral and Political, such arguments were not yet won, and the historical associations of commerce, luxury, pleasure, leisure, and the arts with effeminacy and decadence were still marked. Burney’s simplified, even simplistic, deployment of Hume’s rhetoric may indicate that the argument was largely won by the 1770s, at least in London. It also reflected his ambition to include music within the domain of polite taste, refinement, and luxury (in a positive sense) that had been outlined by Hume. In other words, the ascendance of woman in Burney’s writing is bound up with the ascent of music as a fine art, and it is in this context that Burney’s praise of “civilized” and “feminized” aspects of musical style and performance can be read.
This constellation of luxury, the feminine, and the civilized indicates that female musical ascendance was bound up not just with ideas about art but with bourgeois patronage and the rise of capitalist modes of musical production and exchange. This commercial aspect informs chapter 2, where I focus on the proliferation of accessible collections of German songs and keyboard music with dedications “to the fair sex” that were published from midcentury on. Reichardt’s collections of this type stand out for their fascinating prefaces, illustrative material, and, sometimes, contradictory messages. The appearance of gender-specific musical commodities is likely to strike modern readers as constraining for the women originally targeted by the dedication and as jeopardizing intrinsic musical value. Without denying these interpretations, I seek nuance in this chapter by imagining the performance of this music within the broad context of female accomplishment: an ideal of the period whose boundaries and implications were contested.
Music “for the fair sex” was marked by the contradictions and tensions of contemporary thinking about the sexes: it did not constitute a unified, disciplinary statement about the nature and limits of female musical practice. Some of the essential musical, moral, and aesthetic ideals of the repertory were not gender specific, despite the market’s promise to meet such needs. Both for and about women, this generically varied repertory invited diverse performance resources and practices, just as it styled a significant segment of contemporary music as feminine. The ladies of the dedications colonize music as much as they are colonized by it. Although possessing disciplinary potential, such music was not a reliable means of female containment. The mixture of generic motifs and styles in individual pieces, the pedagogic aspect that allowed for ever increasing proficiency, the seductive and imaginative elements contained in poetic texts that often brought elements of novelistic fantasy into musical practice: all these aspects complicate the assumption that the women of the dedications music were so many songbirds in a gilded cage.
However, precisely because they attempt to loosen the grip of a bourgeois feminine stereotype, these observations tend still to invoke that stereotype. Put another way, an understanding of female accomplishment as a dynamic of containment and resistance, although marking an aspect of musical practice, is incomplete. How, then, might it be understood? One answer is that female accomplishment served as a sign of social status in which the executant was positively invested. Seen in this way, the amateurism and naturalness prized in musical accomplishment appropriated aristocratic grace, rebranding Renaissance sprezzatura as bourgeois femininity. Another answer is that accomplishment offered a context for female subjectivity and pleasure. This last aspect, subjectivity, was fostered by analogies between the keyboard and the body as “strung” and “touch-sensitive” instruments. Such analogies help explain why domestic keyboard playing was not only a means to produce (in Richard Leppert’s words) “an ideologically correct species of woman” but also an exemplary phenomenon of the period, a medium of autobiography and fantasy.
The boundaries between musical performance and composition were fluid; for keyboardists, in particular, there was no conceptual gulf between playing and improvising, or even notating, music. C.P.E. Bach’s widely disseminated treatise on playing keyboard instruments guided the reader from initial study of fingering through embellishments, interpretation, accompaniment, and figured bass to improvisation and the free fantasia. Indeed, instruction in composition, as C.P.E. Bach knew from his childhood, took place in no small part at the keyboard. The fact that keyboards in the home were strongly (though not exclusively) associated with women set improvisation and composition within reach. Indeed, one of the most startling aspects of the period is the explosion in numbers of published female composers; I explore this in chapters 3–5 through three case studies.
The first of these three female composers is Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes (chapter 3), a keyboardist and opera singer whom the itinerant Reichardt probably knew from the Hamburg salon of Margaretha Augusta Büsch and her husband, Johann Georg Büsch. Based in Hamburg during C.P.E. Bach’s residence in that city, Brandes died in 1788 at the age of twenty-three, shortly before Bach’s death that same year. On her death her father, the playwright Johann Christian Brandes, and her close friend and teacher Johann Friedrich Hönicke prepared two memorials to her memory, a biography and a collection of her music, the latter titled Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes and published in Hamburg in 1788. (Bach was a subscriber to that posthumous collection.) These memorials situated her authorship in the contexts of pedagogy and education, the composition of occasional works for the home, and the solace offered by music amid bereavement and illness. The principal discourse was of death itself: Brandes’s memorialization shared with the novels of Goethe a topos of the female dead in which the corpse (or its representation) is exhibited as a beautiful artifact. Death turned Brandes from an active composer into a passive, aestheticized object of male authorship. These discursive contexts figured her activities as a composer within a framework of bourgeois femininity. Both Brandes’s father and her teacher were at pains to stress that she sought neither fame nor fortune from her compositions. However, such representations were misleading. Her collected works suggest that she was working toward a published collection of strophic German songs and the composition of operatic music for her own performance. The idealizing tropes of the memorials are also challenged by Johann Christian Brandes’s later memoirs, in which his daughter’s turn to composition is situated in what he described as her multiple breaches of deferential daughterly conduct. Brandes’s reported profligacy during her final illness may have stimulated the posthumous publication of her music, which was possibly a form of fund-raising for her multiply bereaved father, a corrective to both his emotional and his financial loss. The healthy list of 518 subscribers indicates that youthful female death was marketable as a topos occasioning the pleasures of melancholy. From the contradictory evidence that survives, Brandes’s authorship was subject to multiple interpretation by contemporaries as evidence of virtue and vice; it was apparently prompted by personal creative volition and economic need, and it was at once freely undertaken and constrained through conventions of genre, market forces, and the availability of instruction. For these reasons Brandes’s composing, and its contemporary interpretation, prefigured neither romanticism’s and modernism’s black-and-white narratives of female authorial weakness nor women’s heroic self-determination but rather an unresolvable play between presence and absence, self-assertion and self-effacement, conformity to and the refashioning of her world.
I continue this archaeology of authorship and what it meant to compose in the late eighteenth century in chapter 4, exploring the complexities of the familiar association of female composers with nature and the natural. The focus is on a nocturnal, woodland singspiel composed and performed by one of the better-known women of the period, the singer and actress Corona Schröter, one of Reichardt’s youthful infatuations during his time in Leipzig, where Schröter trained and worked with the so-called father of the singspiel, Johann Adam Hiller. The libretto was written for the occasion by Goethe (who preferred his lyrics to be set by Reichardt but turned to his Weimar colleague Schröter for this home-grown theatrical). In describing the landscape setting and garden aesthetics that informed the piece I attempt to re-create the atmosphere of Die Fischerin, which was performed in a forest clearing in the rustic grounds of the summer residence of Anna Amalia of Weimar on the evening of 22 July 1782. As if a farewell not just to Schröter but to the symbolism of Anna Amalia’s artistic projects at court, the plot concerns the attempt of the young fisherwoman, Dortchen, to reform the rough, unsocial manners of her father and fiancé. To this end she stages her own death as punishment for their habitually late return from fishing, a strategy that fails, however, to influence them. The female sign, associated here with both reform and the agency of the individual, appears to lose its power, and Dortchen is folded back into a world of (imaginary) tradition and superstition on the eve of her marriage. Goethe drew the lyrics of several of the stage songs that dominate this piece from Herder’s Volkslieder, a collection morbidly concerned with the topos of death and the maiden, even though, as Herder’s preface makes clear, he shared his period’s investment in the singing voice as a sign of human presence. Schröter’s music for Die Fischerin, which has remained unpublished and undiscussed, is perfectly matched to these discursive contexts, not restricted just to “folksy” settings of lieder. The generic and ephemeral aspects of her music, as notated, correspond to the aesthetics of landscape gardening, specifically to the idea of invisible and absent authorship, or, to refer back to the reception of Sophia Sternheim, of art without “authorial art.”
Schröter’s contributions to Die Fischerin, like the work itself, resonated with the English-derived theory of “vegetable genius” common to music aesthetics and the contemporary theory of “Gartenkunst” (garden art). Writers on aesthetics such as Johann Georg Sulzer and Carl Friedrich Cramer invoked this English-derived theory in descriptions of the state of creative inspiration in general, and of the effusions of genius in C.P.E. Bach’s improvisations in particular. Although stylistically opposed to those eruptions of invention, Schröter’s songs (and to some extent the composer herself) represented versions of the same theory of natural and national artistic production, differing more in degree than in kind. No essential antithesis of male and female creativity, no grand metaphysics of sexual difference, were at stake, even in a singspiel concerned with sex-specific roles in a fishing village.
The last of the three case studies (chapter 5), although it concerns a largely forgotten figure, returns to more familiar musical territory: solo keyboard music. Sophie Westenholz occasionally appears in modern music histories as a composer of German songs—she is included in a couple of collections of lieder by women—and, in the annals of music at the court of Ludwigslust in Schwerin, Mecklenburg, as a singer, fortepianist, and wife of the kapellmeister Carl Westenholz. There is much more to be said about her, however, not least because of a body of unknown keyboard music, the most substantial and ambitious of which remains unpublished, and archival documents concerning her activities and the circumstances of her eclipse as a musical director at court. Putting this material to work, her career can become an example of the ascendance and eventual eclipse of the female sign in music culture of the late eighteenth century, marking the rapid change of atmosphere during the Napoleonic wars. Within this broad account of historical change, the chapter focuses on the intellectual history of the category of the “woman composer” that crystallized in reviews of her published music in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of 1806. Perhaps for the first time in these reviews, and not to Westenholz’s advantage, the domains of sex, music, and composing were linked in a strenuously disciplinary manner. Sex, in particular, emerged as a master category, not inflecting but forming the horizon of possibility for musical production and meaning within a bourgeois masculine discourse of the musically serious and transcendent. In this context Reichardt’s balanced, supportive reviews, according no interpretive weight to Westenholz’s sex, are more sunset than dawn.
Westenholz was caught out by historical change. Her career was founded on the earlier feminocentric and aristocratic values of the era of sensibility. Born to a family of musician artisans, Westenholz was raised for a musical career at court expense, owing to the desire for local female singers. Early keyboard instruction, reportedly after the precepts of C.P.E. Bach, further equipped her to teach the royal children and compose. At court she established a culture of Mozart’s fortepiano music, regularly appearing as soloist in his concerti and chamber music. Authorizing her own compositions in terms of Mozartian discipleship, she programmed Mozart alongside her own: if the fortepiano and Mozart are subject to a feminizing reception, Westenholz gained symbolic membership of an emerging male canon of Viennese instrumental music, as formulated in the criticism and reviews of E.T.A. Hoffmann.
Arguably, the context of the Napoleonic wars not only triggered Westenholz’s decision to publish but also encouraged the tone of the review, as if contemporary political chaos inspired a corrective disciplinary vision of musical sex and gender roles: an illusory clarity. Inevitably, this newly imagined tradition of female subordination dealt a blow to the practices and discourses of female ascendance. There were other signs, too, that the dark clouds of Virginia Woolf’s nineteenth century were gathering: in a letter of resignation from 1811 Westenholz referred to her humiliation by the new konzertmeister, who had struck her with his violin bow when she gave the musicians the tempo with her hand. In emphasizing this affront to her person and, by extension, to his Highness Frederick Francis I, Westenholz offers a fitting envoi to the sovereign feminine of the previous century.
Traces of that sovereignty were not simply wiped away in 1800, of course. In the concluding chapter I explore Goethe’s tragedy Egmont, set by Reichardt as well as Beethoven, which illustrates the continuing currency of female musical ascendance on the Viennese stage as late as 1810. The genesis and publication of this work spans almost four decades, beginning in 1774 (when Goethe set to work), through 1787 (when the poet completed and published his text), 1796 (when Reichardt’s setting premiered in Weimar), and 1809–1810 (when Beethoven composed his music), to 1812 (when Breitkopf published it). This lengthy genesis encompasses most of the period covered by the book, from the last years of Goethe’s so-called Sturm und Drang phase and Beethoven’s infancy to the end of the literature of “Weimar classicism” and the beginning of Beethoven’s “late” style. In other words, Egmont’s genesis begins when Germany was still recovering from the Seven Years’ War and continues through the French Revolution, the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars (the context in which Beethoven’s setting was commissioned). Such shifting political contexts, along with the differing views of poet and composer on the status and role of music in relation to literature, free the modern reader of any obligation to discover a single message or essential unity of content in the piece. If there is anything to the notion that works embody their historical moment we would expect to discover fracture and contradiction here. Without denying these aspects of disunity, one can nonetheless find in Egmont a relatively coherent projection, even a summation, of the discourse of female ascendance in, as, and through music that characterized the period of its genesis.
Music plays an unusually prominent role in Egmont and is associated primarily with the mistress of the eponymous hero, Klärchen, a burgher’s daughter and military maiden. Goethe’s stage directions call for two stage songs for Klärchen (in acts 1 and 3), as well as music signifying her death (in act 5) and a victory symphony to end the work. In Beethoven’s setting an additional melodrama and pantomime in act 5 create an almost unbroken musical culmination and conclusion to the drama, something in excess of (though not necessarily at odds with) Goethe’s specifications. As part of this musical complex Klärchen appears to imprisoned Egmont as a disembodied spirit, hovering above the stage to the accompaniment of shimmering and pictorial orchestral music. These additions to Goethe’s text, along with Beethoven’s setting of Klärchen’s stage songs not as simple strophic melodies but as epic, through-composed arias with heavy orchestral accompaniment, exalt her musically and, more abstractly, compositionally as a figurehead of Beethovenian (and more broadly romantic) preoccupations: breach of generic decorum, heroic overcoming, music as spirit and ideal. If Goethe drew on the strong association between music and exemplary womanhood in his original conception of Klärchen as driven by strong emotions to the defense of her lover and her country, Beethoven’s setting (emphasizing Klärchen’s self-transcending androgyny) can extend that association into musical-aesthetic and compositional realms far removed from Goethe’s original. Arguably, Beethoven’s emphasis on Klärchen as a boundary breaker rewrites the poet’s more equivocal construction of her as a girl inspired by love to brief political agency. But if Beethoven’s Klärchen appears as a far more potent figure than she is in Goethe’s play, Beethoven’s version of Klärchen is not so much “about” female empowerment as it is about male compositional and musical transcendence.
In turn, Beethoven’s use, in this and other stage works, of female androgyny (a mixture of masculine and feminine elements in characterization of lead female characters) to signify a universal vision of the heroic as morally righteous transgression of established boundaries, raises issues of difference between his conceptions of music’s relationship to gender and those of (some of) his modern admirers. Beethoven’s reading of the dramas of Schiller and Goethe is often summoned by biographers as evidence of the composer’s attachment to male heroes and the political visions those heroes are said to embody. But his stage works, most obviously Fidelio, paint a far more complicated picture, one explicable in part by their textual sources and genesis in the vanishing culture of female musical ascendance. That said, Egmont, particularly in Beethoven’s setting, reveals a shift in register from the eighteenth century’s aesthetic and moral elevation of (approved) female musical practices to more formal allegorical figurations of both women and music that refer to, and even celebrate, male creativity.
In an afterword I seek to write small the conceptual core of this study through a reading of Schiller’s poem Würde der Frauen (1795) and two settings of it, one by Reichardt and the other by the little-known composer Amalia Thierry. Schiller’s poem reveals an intense investment in the two-sex model, tracing in quasi- philosophical manner the implications of male and female character in all domains of life. Unsurprisingly, given Schiller’s reputation, women are pictured as loving, domestic, flower-weaving mothers and daughters, whereas men roam and strive heroically in unbounded, hostile spaces. There is a contradiction, however, that confounds current convictions about the function of a stereotyped “femininity” in relation to artistic production. Specifically, Schiller locates knowledge and poetry within the peaceable female domain, aligning the elevated women of his text with the production and consumption of the arts and letters. In doing so he sends a tremor through the system of sex and gender as we have come to analyze and understand it and hints at those different conceptual structures that form the objects of history.
