Читать книгу Sovereign Feminine - Matthew Head - Страница 14

2

“If the pretty little hand won’t stretch”

Music for the Fair Sex

There is a moment in Emma Thompson’s brilliant free adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Columbia Pictures, 1995) that allows modern audiences to eavesdrop on music’s living muse in her original, and perhaps most important, habitat: the home. At once powerfully nostalgic for the manners and “look” of the period and historically accurate in its emphasis on female idealization and aestheticization, the scene takes place at the country home of Sir John and Lady Middleton. Marianne Dashwood, played by the youthful Kate Winslet, breaks protocol near the end of dinner with a bold request to play the fortepiano, an intervention that cuts short the intrusive questions of the hosts concerning the identity of her sister’s suitor. Elinor Dashwood’s squirming discomfort, the rambunctious repartee of the matchmaking Middletons, and Marianne’s breach of decorum are soon diffused by music. Framed by a square fortepiano and a large baroque painting of an ambiguous mythological subject, Marianne Dashwood is beheld like a living work of art. Her golden curls and porcelain complexion cast back to the beautiful women of Vermeer’s interiors. “Softly, softly,” she sings in a love song, or perhaps a lullaby, whose text and music, newly composed by Patrick Doyle, artfully evoke the “feminine” character of those simple, heartfelt strophic songs with gentle harplike accompaniments that flourished in domestic music making of the period under the fingers of young, unmarried women.

Marianne’s guileless voice (rendered with appropriate naïveté by Winslet) derives aesthetic force from its quality of naturalness and the authenticity of its expression. Apparently unaware of her power, she personifies music and its myths, a modern-day St. Cecilia, or siren. Not only does she harmonize the social order and calm the troubled breast with gentle song but, sirenlike, she summons a husband. Having arrived on horseback, Colonel Brandon is held spellbound in the darkened doorframe. In a chain of idealizing equivalence Marianne Dashwood is at once music, woman, art, nature, sensibility, and love. Of course, such elevating significance rests on certain conditions: Marianne is young, beautiful, chaste, unselfconscious, single, and—crucially—musically amateur.

How often amateur, domestic, female performances in the late eighteenth century were so unblemished, and how often successful in summoning a husband, is open to debate. The scene above is largely the invention of Emma Thompson and Ang Lee, an exercise in the historical imagination prompted by, but also negating, a couple of ironic sentences by Jane Austen in chapter 7 that highlight the lack of attention paid to Marianne’s performance: “Sir John was loud in his admiration at the end of every song, and as loud in his conversation with the others while every song lasted. Lady Middleton frequently called him to order, wondered how any one’s attention could be diverted from music for a moment, and asked Marianne to sing a particular song which Marianne had just finished.” But before dismissing costume drama as purely fictional and nostalgic, it is worth recalling the period when, say, Elizabeth Sheridan was idealized in Richard Samuel’s Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1777; see figure 2), or Maria Antonia Walpurgis in Eximeno’s Dell’origine e delle regole della musica (published in 1774; see figure 3). However far from Austen’s text, the film scene of Marianne singing “Softly, softly” cannot be dismissed as purely anachronistic. As in the eighteenth-century cases, some notion of “femininity” marks the scene of musical performance as one of bewitching power and significance.

Beyond costume drama, gallery postcards, and book jackets, however, the young lady at music has lost her mystique.¹ In seminar room discussion, and in published scholarship, she is caught in a double bind. On the one hand, her repertory faces charges of musical triviality. On the other, a contextual appraisal of her practice leads almost inevitably to ideas of her containment through music.² This chapter struggles with this dilemma in an account of music published specifically for ladies. The charge of triviality, and the related notion of female containment, is not so much dispelled as referred to a range of more positive, though still ambivalent, ideas of the period: femininity and the musically beautiful; female leisure and luxury as pleasurable and granting status; education and self-improvement; musical commodification and male authorial gallantry; song texts as invitations to subjectivity; and the possibilities for negotiation of apparent constraints in performance.

AMATEURISM, FASHION, AND LUXURY

From the mid-eighteenth century on, a stream of music variously dedicated (as geography and custom dictated) to “ladies,” “the fair sex,” “le beau sexe,” “all’uso delle dame,” or “für das schöne Geschlecht” trickled from European printing presses. In England, arrangements of songs from Handel’s oratorios appeared to the end of the century under such exalted titles as The Lady’s Banquet.³ The prestige of such collections could be enhanced by the confession of an exclusive, aristocratic source: H. Wright issued Handel’s “celebrated vocal duets” as works “composed for the private practice of Her Majesty the late Queen Caroline.”⁴ In the English middle-class home such gestures of aristocratic emulation were largely the task of women, a division of labor that left open possibilities for the official middle-class critique of the aristocracy.⁵

In Germany keyboard sonatas and lieder “for the fair sex” appeared both in collections of printed music and in women’s periodicals. Christoph Nichelmann, a chorister at the Leipzig Thomaskirche during the tenure of J.S. Bach, and subsequently second harpsichordist at the court of Frederick the Great, issued two sets of sonatas with the Nuremberg publisher Balthasar Schmid around 1745: Sei brevi sonate da cembalo massime all’uso delle dame and [Sei] brevi sonate all’uso di chi ama il cembalo massime delle dame.⁶ Nichelmann’s titles (“chiefly for ladies” and “for lovers of the harpsichord, chiefly for ladies”) drew upon a historical association of women with keyboard instruments in amateur and domestic circles. A Frauenzimmer-Lexicon (Ladies’ dictionary) from the beginning of the century included entries for clavier, lute, and voice (among discussions of how to pot ham, darn socks, and make soap) but omitted references to brass, woodwind, and bowed instruments.⁷ These historical associations of particular media and genres with the sexes, along with the assumption (as early as the sixteenth century) that music for women should be “easy,” furnished the basic vocabulary of late eighteenth-century collections for women.⁸

Given the gendered associations of instruments, genres, and styles, some redundancy exists in the dedications to the fair sex. Music so dedicated represents only a fraction of the repertory aimed at and practiced by women.⁹ On one level the dedication was just a marketing device: it targeted the product without significantly reducing the pool of potential purchasers. “For the fair sex,” with its connotation of gallantry, also prettified the act of buying and selling and made a music book more suitable as a courtship gift and a sign of romantic love (the context in which music is given as a gift in Austen).¹⁰ The product’s promise to meet specifically gendered needs rested, however, upon a generalization, the universalizing dedication to “women.” The florid and sentimental excesses of Mme. Herz and Mlle. Silberklang in Mozart’s diva intermezzo Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario; K. 486) of 1786 indicate that quite contrary discourses surrounding professional female music making circulated alongside the stereotypical “easiness” of amateur ladies’ music. Mozart’s divas display precisely that “eruption” of female music making that musical accomplishment sought to ward off.¹¹

Music dedicated to the fair sex epitomized the feminine connotations of amateur domestic music making. The categories of the musical amateur and the feminine intersected in ideals of naturalness, songfulness, instinct, the untutored, and the gently moving rather than the learned. At the same time, music for the fair sex, by inscribing a sex-specific role within the amateur sphere, produced, if only by default, the possibility of masculine involvement in that sphere.¹² Seen in this way, music for the fair sex sought to establish sex-specific boundaries amid musical practices in which distinctions between the sexes were blurred. After all, men enjoyed the freedom of playing their own instruments as well as those, such as the keyboard, to which the fair sex was officially restricted. This masculine freedom to mediate between, and exhibit mastery in, both male and female domains is easily overlooked. So, too, are the implications of this situation for how male and female musical practices were constructed. The female musical realm was not fundamentally different from that of the male, but it represented a segment in a masculine universe of possibilities. This is not to deny the gendered element in the binary oppositions of, say, public/private, professional/amateur, orchestral/solo, and flute/clavier but, rather, to highlight the mobility accorded to men within those oppositions. Music for the fair sex intervened in this complex situation, seeking to clarify a specifically feminine practice in accordance with the broader late eighteenth-century attempt to distinguish the feminine and the masculine as opposite, if complementary, terms and map these onto the categories of private and public, respectively.

As a newly articulated (if not literally new) genre, music for the fair sex arose in the 1740s in response to multiple social and economic stimuli. Such music was a medium of, and commerce in, a new category of gender: femininity. This category (which one might mistakenly assume to have existed throughout history) arose in the eighteenth century alongside the two-sex model and elaborated the premise that men and women were fundamentally different in their biology. Though present in the German lexicon already in the fifteenth century, the word Weiblichkeit (femininity) accrued new meanings in the course of the eighteenth century, in part through the influence of an English discourse on womanhood, a description of female character that yoked together physical, moral, intellectual, and emotional characteristics.¹³ In a way that can now seem peculiar, early eighteenth-century discussions of gender in Germany were focused on men and pivoted on the terms masculinity and effeminacy. Only gradually did femininity emerge as the primary opposing term to masculinity, its inclusion in Johann Christoph Adelung’s Versuch of 1774–1786 a landmark.¹⁴ There, as elsewhere, femininity was a class-based ideal assuming female leisure and lending the figure of woman decorative, moral, and aesthetic significance.

We need not read Karl Marx back into this period to recognize that femininity signified an absence of and unsuitability for physical labor. As such, the rise of femininity accords with the familiar grand narrative of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s history. As Anne McClintock has summarized this narrative, “At some point during the eighteenth century, the story goes, the spindle and loom were pried from her fingers and all the ‘bustling labor’ of the previous century—the candle- and soap-making, the tailoring, millinery, straw-weaving, lace-making, carding and wool-sorting, flax-beating, dairy and poultry work—were removed piecemeal to the manufactories.” The topics of amateurism and domesticity within and around music for the fair sex rhetorically consigned woman to a newly articulated private sphere in which idleness was taken on as, in McClintock’s words, a “character role.”¹⁵ Such withdrawal was the flip side of the utopian but ultimately patriarchal Enlightenment ideal of the “bourgeois public sphere” (influentially if contentiously expounded by Jürgen Habermas) in which individuals—primarily educated men—debated matters of collective civic interest in the public domains of clubs, coffeehouses, and print culture.¹⁶

Music for the fair sex performed a double disciplinary function. On the one hand it invited women to the practice of music as an alternative to the false pleasures of, and moral dangers posed by, the social world. On the other hand it sought to prescribe the nature of that musical practice, to deprofessionalize it, tether it to ideals of female character, and inscribe women’s primary roles within the patriarchal family as wife, mother, and daughter. The disciplinary focus of this music thus moved between the practice of music and questions of women’s character and their place in the world. These metonymic shifts between music and female character were facilitated by a central eighteenth-century metaphor: the body as a strung instrument or clavier.¹⁷ Within song texts this proved an irresistible conceit. The Berlin-based organist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel opened his second set of Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1771) with a rhetorical apostrophe to “Das Clavier” (example 1). In stanza 3 the female narrator eschews unspecified “false pleasure” in preference for “sweet harmony.” The metaphor of the body as clavier is pursued in a play on “rein,” a reference to both moral purity and equal temperament. Music was not simply a means of disciplining the female subject but a metaphor through which femininity was produced as a discursive ideal.

NICHELMANN AND THE RHETORIC OF EASINESS

Reflecting their early date of composition, Nichelmann’s sonatas remained largely unaffected on the level of musical style by assumptions concerning female character and taste. Indeed, his ambiguous dedication (“chiefly for ladies”) leaves open the possibility of male performance and in so doing complicates the rhetoric of separate female and male spheres deployed by subsequent collections aimed exclusively at women.¹⁸ Similarly, in arranging the sonatas in a pedagogic ascent from “easy” to increasingly “difficult,” Nichelmann did not succumb to an essentialized connection between music for women and musical “easiness” (whatever that might be). On the contrary, such arrangement asserts that facility increases with practice. Minor keys (Sonatas Nos. 2, 4, and 6), chromaticism (Sonata No. 4, second movement), and such formal refinements as the elision into the finale of a slow movement in an enharmonically related key (Sonata No. 5, second and third movements) partake of the serious, intellectual realm of the north German Kenner (connoisseur). “Difficult” or unusual keys are cultivated to an eccentric degree in Nichelmann’s Sonata No. 5 in E♭ (example 2). The slow movement is set in B major, an extremely rare key in the mid-eighteenth century. Furthermore, the slow movement ends, or rather does not end, with a transition into the finale in which the E♭ tonic is approached enharmonically through D♯ minor. Such artful harmonic techniques, appealing to the intellect and more at home in the improvised free fantasia than in the sonata for ladies, are far from the aesthetically feminized sphere of the late eighteenth-century amateur.¹⁹ The esoteric enharmony of Nichelmann’s Sonata No. 5 was beyond the range of materials that were later stereotypically associated with the lady at music. When Diderot wrote to C.P.E. Bach and Friedrich Melchior Grimm requesting sonatas for his daughter to play, he specifically requested works in “difficult keys,” explaining that his daughter was genuinely talented. The fact that such comments were necessary suggests an ingrained association of female executants with “easy” works. Diderot also expressed his fears that marriage will bring his daughter’s musical development to a premature conclusion: “I believe that she will be a good player, but I am practically certain that she will be a musician, and that she will learn the theory of this art well, unless some future husband should ruin everything, spoil her figure, and take away her appetite for study.”²⁰

EXAMPLE 1. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel, Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1771), no. 1, “Das Clavier”.

Süß ertönendes Clavier!Welche Freuden schaffst du mir!In der Einsamkeit gebrichtMir es an Ergötzen nicht.Du bist was ich selber will,Bald Erweckung und bald Spiel.	Sweet sounding clavier,What joy you bring me!In lonelinessIt does not fail to delight.You are, what I myself would be,Now rousing and now play[ful].
Scherz ich, so ertönet mir,Ein scherzhaftes Lied von dir.Will ich aber traurig sein,Klagend stimmst du mit mir ein.Heb ich fromme Lieder anWie erhaben klingst du dann!	If I jest, then you sing to meA playful song.But if I want to be sad,Then you join with me dolefully.If I offer devout songs—Then what sublimity in your sound!
Niemals öffne meine BrustSich der Lockung falscher Lust!Meine Freuden müssen rein,So wie deine Saiten sein:Und mein ganzes Leben nieOhne süße Harmonie.	My breast never opensTo the temptation of false pleasure!My joys must be as pure,As your strings are:And my whole life neverWithout sweet harmony.

After Nichelmann, collections of sonatas, keyboard pieces, and songs for women were issued by Johann Nikolaus Tischer, Johann Nikolaus Müller, J.F.W. Wenkel, Ernst Christoph Dreßler, C.P.E. Bach, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, Johann Christian Gottfried Gräser, P.J. von Thonus (perhaps a pseudonym), Carl Wilhelm Müller, and Karl Friedrich Ebers (table 1). These collections addressed themselves to both traditional assumptions about woman’s place and emergent ideas about female character, taste, and physical nature.²¹ The easiness of music for ladies emerges as a prominent thread in these works, the term easy indicating here keys without many sharps and flats, melody-centered styles, and avoidance of both figuration (however easily it might fall under the hands) and thick, reinforced textures.

The English easy embraces several related terms in German musical criticism of the period that denoted, collectively, the naturalness and accessibility of galant, melody-oriented styles. Mattheson’s remarks on the foundations of melody in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) furnish a close to comprehensive inventory of what was musically at stake in “easiness” in music for the fair sex: the avoidance of excessive melodic embellishment and rapid changes of meter, tempo, and register; restriction to diatonic harmonies; uniformity rather than diversity; and cultivation of “noble simplicity.” A rejection of conspicuous compositional artifice underwrites these elements. As Mattheson confessed, “One puts artifice aside, or conceals it well.”²² The pleasures of amateur participation are privileged over the composer’s learned demonstration of art.

EXAMPLE 2. Christoph Nichelmann, Sei breve sonate da cembalo massime all’uso delle dame (ca. 1745), Sonata No. 5, opening measures from the first, second, and third movements.

TABLE 1 A selection of music for the fair sex by eighteenth-century German composers

TABLE 1 (continued)

In this light the “easiness” of collections of ladies’ music involves aesthetic precepts of eighteenth-century composition that were not, in themselves, either negative or gender specific. Nonetheless, an element of concession is undoubtedly present in their gender-specific deployment in this repertory. For women, easiness was officially sanctioned, even compulsory. Music for the fair sex summoned a rhetoric of deprofessionalization of female music making that was in place even prior to the emergence of the repertory. Already in the first decades of the eighteenth century we find a distinction drawn in the compilation of the clavier books for Anna Magdalena and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach between female (nonprofessional) and male (professional) spheres of music making (where “professional” indicates the potential to make money from music). What distinguishes these books is not the degree of difficulty of their contents but their purpose, and thus the futures they envisage for their respective dedicatees. The Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (begun in Cöthen in 1720) evinces not simply a pedagogic purpose, being a combined manual for the study of performance and composition, but, specifically, a trajectory that takes the student from the rudiments of notation, ornamentation, and fingering to that point where fugue, free composition, and thus professional appointment as organist, cantor, and kapellmeister are in sight.²³ The structure of the two books for Anna Magdalena (begun in Cöthen in 1722 and completed in Leipzig in 1725), in contrast, is circular and static: the executant is in the same social position on the first page as when the last page is turned. In the second book, C.P.E. Bach recorded his earliest surviving works—three marches, two polonaises, and a solo movement (H. 1, also listed as BWV Anh. 122–25, 129), a prophecy, perhaps, of his own volume of Sonates à l’usage des dames (1770).

In Anna Magdalena’s books, suites, minuets, miniature marches, and polonaises offered “spiritual refreshment,” to use J.S. Bach’s term from the preface to his solo keyboard partitas, two of which he copied out at the beginning of the book for his second wife.²⁴ This turn of phrase suggests the “aesthetic hedonism” that Eric Reimer associates with the sphere of eighteenth-century amateur music making.²⁵

Personal pleasure is not the only item on the agenda, however, and much of the significance of Anna Magdalena’s music books is missed if they are viewed solely in terms of female deprofessionalization and containment. The appearance of the chorales “Gib dich zufrieden” (13a and 13b) and “Dir, dir, Jehovah, will ich singen” (39a) suggests that Anna Magadalena’s musical practice possessed spiritual significance, perhaps for the entire family.²⁶ The newfangled vogue for galanterie playing mingled in her music books with older traditions of Lutheran Hausmusik, in an apparently harmonious coupling of secular and sacred.²⁷ In addition to their religious aspect, the books probably fostered Anna Magdalena’s activities as teacher and composer: her authorship of some of the anonymous pieces cannot be proved, but it is unfortunate that the possibility is never even mooted in the Neue Bach Ausgabe; and insofar as the books include pieces by children of the Bach household, they suggest, rather paradoxically, that Anna Magdalena fostered the professionalization of her sons and stepsons.²⁸

Later collections published for women recall the Anna Magdalena Bach books in their layering of fashionable dances and piety (an intriguing constellation depending on the complex cultural work undertaken by “the feminine”). Wenkel interspersed his offering of dances with pious odes addressing God and nature, inscribing woman’s role in the home as guardian of morality. The proliferation of what Johann Adam Hiller called galanterie (minuets, rondos, and polonaises) epitomized the lamented ascendance of fashionable, French taste.²⁹ The contents of Wenkel’s first volume of Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1768) were just the sort of thing to make serious-minded north German critics such as Hiller blanch: “Singode; Polonaise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Bußlied; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Singode; Menuet I; Menuet II; Marche; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Singode; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Wiegenlied; Polonaise; Angloise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Fuga [à 2 in 3/8].” Such an inventory attests to the discursive alignment of fashion, luxury, and the feminine in eighteenth-century consumerism. Indeed, in the context of woman’s official withdrawal from production and labor, the terms “woman” and “luxury” achieved a degree of synonymity.³⁰ For Rousseau, it was woman who led man into alienating luxury and ancien régime decadence. Such associations rendered woman a potential threat to nationhood (a point Reichardt specifically addressed in his Wiegenlieder). This threat was not lessened by the cosmopolitan gloss of Wenkel’s collection, which embraced the local color of the polonaise, the angloise, and the ultimately French minuet. Works with German designations (such as Singode, Bußlied, and Wiegenlied) punctuate and frame the collection, so that a north German identification is not completely lost. The concluding fugue, in particular, points toward more serious musical practices, though the two-part texture and 3/8 meter render this more a learned topic or gesture within a diversionary collection than a genuine contrapuntal culmination.

The reception of music “for the fair sex” was not free of dissent about the veracity of these alignments of woman and fashion. In a review of Wenkel’s first collection Hiller undermined the credibility of the dedication to ladies, claiming that as many gentlemen as ladies shared the preference for galanterie. Inquiring why Wenkel had omitted works in difficult keys, Hiller suggested that composers sought to pass off mediocre and insubstantial works with the dedication to ladies.³¹ As an instance of resistant critical reception, Hiller’s remarks (published in a major German journal) should not be underestimated.³²

THE LIMITS OF FEMALE IMPROVEMENT

In a German context, female accomplishments, though undoubtedly signs of gentility and status, were strenuously connected to education. Female art practices were thus linked even more directly than in England to Enlightenment discourses of self-improvement. In fact, there is no equivalent term in German for “accomplishment” in this English sense. Instead, music belonged to a realm of Bildung (improvement or education).

Nonetheless, this “improvement” resembled “accomplishment” in the limits it set upon female development. Richard Leppert’s contention that the principal function of the accomplishments was female “containment” is borne out by music for the fair sex that worked toward the production of “an ideologically correct species of woman.”³³ The primacy of women’s duties in the family is kept in view by song texts that dwell upon courtship, marriage, and mothering, though that emphasis probably made singing not just acceptable but also meaningful in this historical moment, when music for music’s sake was no more an issue than was full female equality. The inclusion of songs and simple keyboard pieces in women’s journals such as Amaliens Erholungsstunden, Frauenzimmer-Almanach, and Leipziger Taschenbuch für Frauenzimmer is indicative of the contradictory role of musical accomplishment in relation to Enlightenment discourses of self- improvement and education as they were hesitantly applied to women. With a few exceptions, these periodicals represented only a superficial application of the rhetoric of personal improvement, since they discouraged education for women as a means of purely personal development. As Sabine Schumann has observed, the new literary genre of women’s journals responded to and propagated the notion of improvement and development for women, and “the literary housewife [became] a favorite image.” But female improvement was policed by the publications that fostered it. As Schumann wrote: “A hostile attitude to women and the Enlightenment is undoubtedly present. . . . ‘Female accomplishment’ (Bildung), an oft heard catch phrase of the period, permitted women only so much development as would transform them from simple housekeepers to cultivated housewives, without their transgressing the domestic sphere. The truly erudite woman, an equal of men, was an extremely odd idea at this time.”³⁴ At worst, the accomplishments were a means of erasing the perceived menace of female nature with a series of predictable and thus manageable behaviors. An essay in the Monatsschrift für Damen of 1787 described women as a menace, a danger, by nature unfathomable. Only through instruction could her God-given positive characteristics be developed, only then would she become “sanftmüthig, furchtsam, gefällig, mitleidig” (gentle, timid, pleasant, sympathetic).³⁵ Paradoxically, if predictably, self-improvement and education were the means to more effective control—a vivid illustration of Foucault’s thesis of education as a disciplinary technology.³⁶

A conduct book by Andreas Meier from 1771 spelled out this highly qualified application of an Enlightenment rhetoric of improvement and related the accomplishments specifically to the class- and status-signifying practices that fell to woman in the home rather than to issues of purely personal development.³⁷ Meier rejected the extremes of a young woman’s either learning nothing but housework or straying into the realm of masculine learning: “If the first is her husband’s maid, the second is a fool who wants to rule him with her knowledge.”³⁸ The balance Meier sought to strike was one in which a wife possessed sufficient education to distinguish her from the lower order of maid but not so much that she would break the frame of female knowledge and start discussing “Wolf or Newton” with her husband.³⁹ Indeed, for those living in the country and small towns he deemed a knowledge of sewing, embroidery, and housekeeping sufficient.⁴⁰ But he saw the need for greater accomplishment for those living in larger towns. Here Meier recommended “Kentnisse der Geschichte und Geographie” (knowledge of history and geography), “Musik [und] Zeichnen” (music and drawing), and “eine zierliche und angenehme Schreibart” (a dainty and pleasant style of handwriting).⁴¹ That is, he recommended those accomplishments that enhance polite society (the writing of invitations, conversation, the entertainment of song).

These broader issues of female cultivation and its limits bear directly upon the practice of music. Meier recommended music to the fair sex with particular warmth, on the grounds of woman’s innate affinity for its expressive and gently moving tones: “Among the galant arts that are expected of a young lady I figure music most of all.—‘Tones’, writes Mr. Batteux, ‘are the organ of the heart: they move, they please, they persuade us, and effortlessly touch the heart.’”⁴² Such views are reflected in the style and characteristic sentiments of music for the fair sex. “Gentle, timid, pleasant, sympathetic,” the qualities imputed to woman (in her civilized, disciplined state) by the Monatsschrift für Damen, furnished the expression and performance directions of this repertory. These “feminine” musical elements were always both aesthetic and social.

The recommendation of music to women went hand in hand with attitudes (contradicted by the realities of eighteenth-century music making) that women could not achieve great things in it—that they lacked “genius.” An anonymous author in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, edited by J.F. Reichardt, saw fit to cite Rousseau’s letter to d’Alembert to this end, despite the fact that both the editor’s wife and daughter were published composers. Rousseau’s description of creative inspiration as a violent ravishment of the heart and soul linked savagery, the irrational, and the uncivilized with masculine genius. Inspiration was off limits for woman, “whose writings or products are cold and pretty like their authors.” The “lightness of spirit, of taste, and of grace” exhibited by the “little works” produced by women connects these assertions about the limits and character of female creativity with the styles and genres of music for the fair sex.⁴³

However patronizing they may be, these remarks also embody the idea that woman was the more intensely civilized of the sexes, a proposition that underwrote moral and spiritual investments in female musical practices in the home. The medical doctor Jacob Fidelis Ackermann pointed to the delicacy of woman’s physique and nervous fibers in demonstrating this point—though Rousseau would have not agreed with his conclusion that woman was better suited to intellectual and academic pursuits, man to physical labor.⁴⁴ This idea informed the spiritual-moral value placed upon women in the late eighteenth-century home, where she stood as a sort of totem warding off the evil she might, in other contexts, be seen to embody. In Goethe’s Elective Affinities, for example, this civilizing function of woman is evident in the effect of Ottilie’s arrival at the hall upon Eduard and the captain: “Both were altogether more sociable . . . they became gentler and generally more communicative.”⁴⁵ The sight of female beauty harmonizes the male viewer, pacifying him, returning him from his alienation to himself: “Whoever looks on beauty is immune against the advent of any evil; he feels in accord with himself and with the world.”⁴⁶ The moralizing piety of songs for the fair sex should be seen in this context; femininity was a form of secular religion, and its rituals, undertaken by women, were felt to safeguard the entire familial congregation.

A COURTLY GENEALOGY

If social status is a less conspicuous concern than education in discourse on female art practices in Germany, it is also clear from Andreas Meier’s remarks that education and status were ultimately inextricable. This intersection of agendas of class and gender helps to explain why the practice of music was so widespread. If music’s disciplinary function in relation to women had not been in some way tied to other social values in which the executants had a personal stake, the popularity of music might be difficult to explain. Indeed, the notion of an intersection of class and gender may fall short of the critical mark: for “femininity” was an ideal posited upon and signifying leisure, a withdrawal from physical work, an absence of labor. Music for the fair sex celebrated this remove from the physical and intellectual effort of professional musical production.

In his preface to the Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (1775), Johann Friedrich Reichardt underlined this absence of labor in a revealing fantasy of the performer’s physique, characterized by physical delicacy and tiny hands. Many of the smaller notes were optional, he assured the executant, and the essential notes were set in large type to help avoid unattractive squinting or a furrowed brow:

With due consideration for the sensitive eyes and small hands of the fair sex, I have written the middle voice that is worked into the texture, in small notes, so that you may more easily distinguish the notes that are to be sung from those that are only for the clavier, and also so that you will be able to determine more readily which notes you can leave out, if the pretty little hand won’t stretch, and you would rather only play the vocal line [with the right hand]. This also applies to the small notes in the bass, so that you can find the real bass line more easily, because I was truly worried about jaundiced [neidische], red, and squinting eyes. Gentlemen, on the other hand, often have hands that can reach three or four notes beyond the octave.⁴⁷

Much is at stake in these gallant concessions to female physical delicacy. The promise of easiness is tied to the premium placed upon the executant’s physical beauty; Reichardt fantasized a face upon which the gentle pursuit of music has left no mark. This unmarked face represents the ideal convergence of female health and beauty, but also a class ideal—recording no physical effort, it bespeaks a withdrawal from labor. Similarly, the “pretty little hands” of the performer, unsuitable even to the effort of reaching to the octave, emulate those of the aristocrat. They testify to the economic success of the husband or father, and their exaggerated tininess magnifies the gentleman an inch or two beyond his natural size. As a class-emulating activity, female music making represented an appropriation of an ultimately Renaissance courtly ideal of natural grace and ease. Just as Baldassare Castiglione, addressing courtiers of both sexes, had advised that all that involves movement (fencing, dancing, singing, drawing) should be performed as if “without the guiding of any studie or art,” so, in the mid-eighteenth century, a male author admonished young ladies to play music “not like a Business but carelessly, like a diversion.”⁴⁸ The untutored naturalness of the lady’s music was her ultimate artifice.

PLEASURES OF (NON)CONFORMITY