Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany 9780520954762

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Sovereign Feminine

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by the Hibberd Endowment and the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society.

Sovereign Feminine Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Matthew Head

UNIVERSIT Y OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. Examples 1, 3, and 4 are reproduced with permission from Journal of the American Musicological Society 52, no. 2 (1999): 211, 225, and 229. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Head, Matthew William. Sovereign feminine : music and gender in eighteenth-century Germany / Matthew Head. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-27384-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Gender identity in music. 2. Women musicians—Germany— History—18th century. 3. Music—Social aspects—Germany— History—18th century. 4. Music—Germany—18th century—History and criticism. I. Title. ML82.H44 2013 780.82'0943—dc2 2012043355

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For my mother, Carol Ann Head (née Scott), and her feeling for beauty

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What better can temper manly rudeness, or strengthen and support the weakness of man, what so soon can assuage the rapid blaze of wrath, what more charm masculine power, what so quickly dissipate peevishness and ill-temper, what so well can while away the insipid tedious hours of life, as the near and affectionate look of a noble, beautiful woman? What is so strong as her soft delicate hand? What so persuasive as her tears restrained? Who but beholding her must cease to sin? j. c. lavater, physiognomy (1775–1777)

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Fictions of Female Ascendance

xi xv 1

1. Europe’s Living Muses: Women, Music, and Modernity in Burney’s History and Tours

27

2. “If the pretty little hand won’t stretch”: Music for the Fair Sex

48

3. Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes and the Beautiful Dead

84

4. An Evening in Tiefurt: Corona Schröter’s Die Fischerin and Vegetable Genius

123

5. Sophie Westenholz and the Eclipse of the Female Sign

158

6. Beethoven Heroine: A Female Allegory of Music and Authorship in Egmont

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Conclusion Appendix: Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Two Prefaces to the Fair Sex Notes Bibliography Index

233 243 247 301 321

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Illustrations

F IG U R E S

1. Frontispiece of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Musicalischer Almanach 14 2. Richard Samuel, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo 37 3. Maria Antonia Walpurgis, title page of Antonio Eximeno, Dell’origine e delle regole della musica 46 4. Title-page engraving of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Six Concertos pour le Clavecin à l’usage du beaux Sexe 72 5. Title-page engraving of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter 78 6. Silhouette of Minna Brandes, in Operetten von C. F. Bretzner 89 7. Engraving by Heinrich Sintzenich of a portrait of Minna Brandes by Rudolph Christian Schade 90 8. Title page of Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes 96 9. Title page of Juliane Reichardt, Lieder und Klaviersonaten 120 10. Plan of Park Tiefurt, from Friedrich Menzel, Schloss Tiefurt 124 11. Melchior Kraus, Felsen-Treppe bey der Stern Brücke im Herzl. Park bey Weimar 131 12. Melchior Kraus, Performance of Die Fischerin 136 13. Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People 192 14. Anon., untitled [Eleonore Prohaska wounded in battle], from Wilhelm Oertel von Horn, Vier deutsche Heldinnen aus der Zeit der Befreiungskriege 204 xi

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1. A selection of music for the fair sex by eighteenth-century German composers 56 2. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter, contents 75 3. Musical numbers in Corona Schröter’s Die Fischerin 129 4. Compositions by Sophie Westenholz 164 5. Beethoven’s music for Goethe’s Egmont, op. 84 208 6. “Die Trommel gerühret”: text and translation 209 7. “Die Trommel gerühret”: musical and poetic form 211 8. Friedrich Schiller, “Würde der Frauen” 234 M U SIC A L E X A M P L E S

1. J. F. W. Wenkel, Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer, no. 1, “Das Clavier” 53 2. C. Nichelmann, Sei breve sonate da cembalo massime all’uso delle dame, Sonata No. 5, first, second, and third movements 55 3. E. C. Dreßler, Melodische Lieder, no. 1, “Die Zufriedenheit” 65 4. J. F. Reichardt, Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht, no. 1, “Vergnüget mich” 69 5. J. F. Reichardt, Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter, no. 1, “So schlafe nun, du Kleine” 77 6. M. Brandes, untitled allegro in D major for solo keyboard (a) mm. 1–41; (b) mm. 84–93 103 7. M. Brandes, “Seufzer,” for voice and keyboard 106 8. M. Brandes, “Seufzer,” harmonic framework expressed as figured bass 107 9. M. Brandes, “Das Traumbild,” for voice and keyboard 109 10. C. Schröter, Die Fischerin, no. 1, “Der Erlkönig” 127 11. C. Schröter, Die Fischerin, no. 3, “Wenn der Fischer’s Netz auswirft” 135 12. C. Schröter, Die Fischerin, no. 10, “Ich hab’s gesagt” 140 13. C. Schröter, Die Fischerin, no. 6, “Helft! Helft sie retten!” 143 14. S. Westenholz, Theme with Variations in A major (SW II/2), theme 170 15. S. Westenholz, Theme with Variations in A major (SW II/2), variation 9 171 16. S. Westenholz, Sonate à quatre mains in F major (SW II/3), first movement, mm. 1–13 172 17. S. Westenholz, Sonate à quatre mains in F major (SW II/3), first movement, mm. 57–67 173 18. S. Westenholz, Theme with Variations in A major (SW II/2), variation 11 176 19. S. Westenholz, Theme with Variations in A major (SW II/2), variation 12, second episode, mm. 34–52 177

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20. S. Westenholz, Sonate aller Sonaten in C minor (SW I/5), third movement, mm. 1–84 183 21. Beethoven, Egmont, “Die Trommel gerühret” (Klärchen), mm. 27–30 212 22. Beethoven, Egmont, “Die Trommel gerühret” (Klärchen), mm. 36–44 213 23. Beethoven, Egmont, “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (Klärchen), mm. 16–21 217 24. Beethoven, Egmont, melodrama, Egmont’s monologue, mm. 1–14 219 25. Beethoven, Egmont, melodrama, Liberty’s apparition, mm. 15–25 220 26. Beethoven, Egmont, melodrama, Liberty’s pantomime, mm. 35–51 224 27. Beethoven, Egmont, Victory Symphony, mm. 9–15 228 28. J. F. Reichardt, “Würde der Frauen,” setting of stanzas 1 and 2 238 29. A. Thierry, “Würde der Frauen,” setting of stanza 1 239 30. A. Thierry, “Würde der Frauen,” setting of stanza 6 240

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Preface and Acknowled gments

Today, references to gender issues in accounts of music’s cultural meaning and context are unremarkable, even characteristic of nuanced historical interpretation. As a university student between 1985 and 1995 I could hardly have predicted this state of affairs. When I began reading about music and gender in the early 1990s, as a British graduate student at Yale, gender was at the center of a large, at times acrimonious, controversy over the boundaries and ambitions of musical scholarship. In a relatively conservative institution such as Yale’s department of music it was risky to show too active an interest in the latest enthusiasms. Like many other students at that time, I had been trained to discuss music through the vocabulary of music theory, as a sounding structure, and in terms of the history of compositional style. These approaches were common to both my undergraduate studies at Oxford and the doctoral program at Yale, so much so that, methodologically, I felt at home for most of my time in New Haven, despite my visa status as a “nonresident alien.” Intellectual tensions arose less from national differences than from the then widespread practice among students of shuttling back and forth between two basic approaches, structural analysis and the discussion of “historical” style. At this distance, though, my sense of having been torn between these two subdisciplines seems comical: both approaches, after all, constitute music as unworldly and self-referential in essence. It was their fundamental agreement that sustained the long-standing rivalry between them. Starting in the mid-1980s, the time of Joseph Kerman’s critique of music analysis and his attendant call for historical criticism, through the disciplinary upheaval of the 1990s (that period of the “new musicology”), it seemed as though the historical approach had triumphed over the abstractions of theory. But this xv

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was true only insofar as what passed for music history was itself being rethought. The history of music, as I had learned it, was paradoxically ahistorical. Music was said to be deployed in, even tailored to, social contexts, and to be shaped by changing aesthetic ambitions; but its very nature and essential meaning were largely thought of as self-referential—as, in the parlance of the day, “purely musical.” This ontological assumption served from the outset to set musical material outside of history. The development of musical form and style, we were assured, just happened to take place in scenes from the past, like a favorite actor’s appearing in a series of costume dramas. Changes in musical scholarship that took place in the 1990s were many and various, but nearly all of them involved finding alternative approaches to writing music history. A good example was feminist criticism and gender studies, hot topics in my North American context in the 1990s and in some ways transformative influences on the discipline. The transformation was not, however, the result of anything as straightforward as breaking musical codes. Musicologists did not simply discover that music in fact contained signs for masculinity and femininity. Rather, there was a shift in academic understanding of what and where the music was: a shift, in other words, in views about the ontology of music. This might be summarized as a movement from text to context, were it not that such vocabulary maintains precisely the boundaries that had partly dissolved. In the North American context particularly, scholars as different in their approaches as Leo Treitler, Gary Tomlinson, and Lawrence Kramer argued that the distinction between music and its worldly contexts, including the context of our understanding, is illusory; for music written before the rise of ideas of aesthetic autonomy in the nineteenth century, it is an anachronistic imposition. When I returned to England in 1995 I carried these debates in my luggage. They made it through customs, but it was unclear to me whether they would survive in their new habitat. In the United Kingdom there appeared to be an attitude at once less defensive and less excited about the prospects of gender studies in musicology. The battle lines of the North American debate, the quasi-emancipatory struggle over ancient and modern scholarship, appeared not to resonate here as loudly, not to engage academic passions in similar ways. A new colleague put her finger on a characteristic of British musicology in observing that gender issues had a future here but as components of “something else,” not as issues in their own right. The implied contrast between how “they” and “we” approached gender was perhaps illusory, but the point highlighted some perceived differences of musicological tone and rhetoric that required negotiation. Mediating national differences was only part of the challenge, however. The pioneering and inspirational literature on music, gender, and sexuality that reached a critical mass around 1990 had left my favored period, the late eighteenth century, largely untouched. What place was there in a study of gender and the

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Enlightenment, I wondered, for the compelling dramas told in millennial musicology about the dangerousness of woman, her imperiled agency, her containment, and her triumph? In late eighteenth-century contexts, was the figure of woman always a figure of Otherness; was she necessarily mad, bad, and dangerous to know? If not, then what remained historically relevant in the scholarly literature to inspire me? I did not face these challenges alone: my project unfolded as part of a broader disciplinary process of historicizing feminist criticism, a process that is still ongoing. Susan McClary’s groundbreaking Feminine Endings (1991), a text I found particularly inspiring, included issues of historical difference in music and in the sex-gender system, alongside a critical apparatus that linked musical analysis, narrative theory, and semiotics. McClary’s sensitivity to music as an analog of human action, identity, character, feeling, and desire, and her willingness to prioritize those issues in her scholarship represent enduring contributions to the discipline. In subsequent volumes Ruth Solie and Mary Ann Smart responded to McClary’s challenge by setting gender within still broader fields of difference and more specific moments of reception. Consideration of contingencies of staging, performance, and revision revealed that studies of gender and sexuality could help to recover the strangeness of the past. In recent studies of early modern Italy by Wendy Heller and Bonnie Gordon, historical difference in the sex-gender system defamiliarizes musical culture, even to the point that singing is invested with alterity as a release of vital spirit. Both authors discovered that the “woman question” had a long history: that thinking about the nature of woman and her roles in music was not the invention of late twentieth-century musicology. On the contrary, female vocality, affiliated with the body, morality, and sexuality, was a preoccupation of the early modern period with far-reaching implications for the development of musical genres and styles. Inevitably, though, all this talk of women in musicology has caused frustration, not least among those who were doing the talking. Some even abandoned ship. Without subjecting men and masculinity to historical analysis, Thomas Laqueur argued in a special issue of Cambridge Opera Journal (2007), the feminist project is incomplete, the male still set in transcendent remove from the contingencies of history. Coincidentally, my study too turns to male investments in, and identifications with, the female sign, as evidenced in the context of Beethoven’s authorial identification with Joan of Arc and Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s feelings for musical women. My chosen period, the late eighteenth century, brought additional challenges. Music making, including something approaching a mania for composing, was then so widespread among amateurs of both sexes that a historically oriented study of the period needed to come to terms with this phenomenon. This period also saw the emergence of writing about music as a widespread and professionalized activity, taking the diverse forms of musical theory, pedagogy, criticism,

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reviewing, aesthetics, and history. Such writing presupposed, and helped to form, a readership in thrall to self-improvement and polite conversation, for whom knowledge about music was as important as its practice. Limiting the scholarly focus to images of women in texted and operatic music would likely fall flat. This book traces a journey through this challenging and rapidly changing terrain. A collection of relatively self-standing essays written across a decade or more, the book reflects my evolving understanding of what gender studies can contribute to scholarship on a period no longer called classical. There is a cost in presenting my material as a series of related fragments. Unities of style and method are jeopardized, and the book does not proceed as the exhaustive working through of a single argument. But there are benefits, too, in a study that embodies disciplinary history and shows an author’s attempts to do justice to historical materials within the limits of his gradually developing methods and beliefs. Chapters 2, 3, and 6 were published previously in the academic journals of the University of California Press and appear with light revisions and updating. In their new context here they form aspects of the book’s larger themes: the exalted status often accorded the female sign, and a newly emerging ideal of femininity, in the musical culture of the late German Enlightenment. Chapter 2, focusing on the iconic image of the young lady at music, unpacks the ideal of female musical accomplishment in all its contradictions and ambivalence. The earliest of my essays to make it into this book, it is also the most strenuously critical of the period’s idealizations of musical women. As the project unfolded and my material was tested by (and on) anonymous peer reviewers, colleagues, students, and friends, I realized that it was unnecessary to keep reissuing health warnings about the dangers of female idealization. On the contrary, it seemed to me that it was time to ask if idealization (however problematic) might have had other roles than putting women in their place. Ironically, then, it is as if the project proceeded in reverse, moving from a strenuous deconstruction of the mystique of femininity to a position in which that mystique serves as a “hermeneutic window” into the musical aspirations of the period. One of the problems I had with this book was that I found it difficult to justify that change of approach. Wasn’t I in danger of turning feminist criticism on its head, of betraying precisely the intellectual and political agendas that inspired my turn to gender issues? For a few years I went quiet (at least on gender issues), and the project stalled. During that time I developed a private pleasure in tracking down female composers of the period. That activity caused concern among some of my colleagues, who reminded me that “gender and sexuality” were hotter themes than “women composers.” I knew what they meant, but I became suspicious of this emphasis on representations, particularly because there were still so few discussions of works composed by women in musicology’s major journals. It seemed that the stigma that used to surround works by female composers now attended research into

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them, or, at least, research that was framed as “rediscovery.” The challenge as I understood it was to say something about women as composers, or about their music, that would engage a musicological community turning ever more explicitly to issues of musical meaning. An initial answer I came up with, which appeared in an article published in 2004, involved no great innovation, just a shift of emphasis. In an account of the life and works of a then forgotten musician, Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes, I offered the standard kinds of appraisal (her biography and contemporary reception, and some comments on style and text setting) but also sought to render unfamiliar the question of what composing, and being a composer, had meant, culturally, in her lifetime. I sought to redeploy the “recovery” project as part of a history of musical authorship. As part of this I traced the high value placed on her works at the time of her death, when authenticity and naturalness represented cherished ideals and the emotional authenticity and naturalness of her works was attributed above all to her sex. In the course of that discussion I indicated that Minna Brandes was not alone: a vast number of women composed and published their music in the late eighteenth century, a fact that challenges commonly held assumptions that women were prohibited from or chastised for composing. It appears, rather, that in this historical moment there was a desire for female authorship, which reached an intensity not met again until the feminist movement of the 1970s. Why then not write a book about this repertory and the kinds of musical authorship it demonstrates? Why leave so many interesting stories untold, or no more than hinted at in backnotes? There were several reasons. The first concerns the term “woman,” which in this historical site was broken up by other terms of social difference to such an extent that it would impose a false unity if taken as the fundamental category of research. Distinctions of rank, for example, would mock any attempt to collapse female royalty, professional female musicians, ladies of leisure, and the laboring poor into a single social group. To write a book about women composers in eighteenth-century Germany would risk inscribing and reifying sexual dimorphism at the cost of historical reality. The challenge, as I saw it, was to relate female authorship to the broader feminocentric trends in contemporary musical culture. Exploring the reception of female composers returned me to the issue of idealization. Idealization of female musicians was popping up again and again, a seemingly productive aspect of the period that served to articulate some of its most cherished and distinctive ideals. My (inevitably partial) reading of feminist criticism had alerted me, however, to idealization as something problematic, something I felt I should resist. Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens often rang in my ears, but I think that Warner insisted too much on the gulf separating the real and symbolic realms. She argued, famously, that the female form is available for allegorical use and invested with symbolic power precisely because such

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power is not available to women on the ground. But some of her material seems to contradict this. It took time for me to let go of my assumption that idealizations of women, and femininity, were little more than forms of containment, objectification, and disempowerment. Eventually I found I could retain something of that critical perspective and at the same time trace its (in other ways) productive aspects in the rise of major developments in music of the period: the culture of sensibility; the accomplishment ideal; the primacy accorded native, female singing voices over imported castrati; the burgeoning numbers of female composers; androgyny in sound ideals and notions of authorship; the premium placed upon reformed, polite male manners in everything from critical writing to ensemble playing; and the centrality of women in some of the period’s contemporary musichistorical narratives. In that spirit I conceived chapters 1, 4, and 5, in which, without endorsing female idealization, I attempt to show how significant it was to the musical culture of the period. I joined these chapters with revised versions of the texts published earlier, which appear here as chapters 2, 3, and 6. In the long, wide-lens introduction I lay out the theme that unifies the book, that of the “sovereign feminine,” along with the related trope of the “living muse,” using examples from a range of musical, literary, and visual sources. I also explain the historical narrative that is embedded in the sequence of chapters, specifically a blossoming of the female sign in the 1770s and 1780s, which was followed by drastic reversals of fortune in the following two decades. It is a pleasure to thank the many institutions that contributed to the completion of this project. Progress was facilitated by periods of research leave in 2002 from the University of Southampton and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K. (AHRC), and from King’s College London in 2010. Purchase of microfilms was funded in part by a small grant from the AHRC in 2001. The staff of many libraries helped reduce my carbon footprint by providing reproductions of rare materials, and I am particularly grateful for the assistance of the staff of the Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin (Mecklenburg), the Herzogin Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek (Weimar), the Goethehaus in Frankfurt, the Hamburger Öffentliche Bücherhallen, the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the library of the Universität der Künste (Berlin), the New York Public Library, Yale University Library, the British Library, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Conservatoire Royale in Brussels held many essential sources, some of which were made available to me in legible reproductions. This book was a long time in the writing, and in the course of its preparation I received assistance from many individuals. Ellen Rosand and Jane Stevens provided sympathetic reading as I transformed materials excised from my dissertation into my first article in Journal of Musicology. In those early days Susan

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

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Introduction 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 1

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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

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3

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

4

Introduction

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. T H E F E M A L E SIG N I N T H E L AT E E N L IG H T E N M E N T

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

Introduction

5

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. F E M I N O C E N T R IC I N N OVAT IO N S I N T H E L AT E R E IG H T E E N T H C E N T U RY

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

6

Introduction

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 Germanborn 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.

Introduction

7

F E M A L E S OV E R E IG N T Y A N D T H E N O T IO N O F E N L IG H T E N M E N T

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

8

Introduction

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

Introduction

9

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 G E N D E R A N D T H E I D E A O F G E R M A N M U SIC

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

10

Introduction

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.

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11

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

12

Introduction

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 E X E M P L A RY WOM E N I N T H E F O R K E L – R E IC HA R D T C O N T R OV E R SY

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.

Introduction

13

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

figure 1 . Frontispiece of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Musikalischer Almanach (1782).

Introduction

15

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. 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

16

Introduction

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.

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17

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.

18

Introduction S C O P E , A R G UM E N T S , A N D D R A M AT I S P E R S O NA E

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

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19

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

20

Introduction

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

Introduction

21

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 “touchsensitive” 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

22

Introduction

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 betterknown 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

Introduction

23

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

24

Introduction

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

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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

26

Introduction

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 quasiphilosophical 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.

1

Europe’s Living Muses Women, Music, and Modernity in Burney’s History and Tours

Burney’s women summon superlatives. In Naples Mrs. Hamilton is the best performer on the harpsichord; in Mannheim Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Dowager Electress of Saxony, brings about “a reconciliation between poetry and music” in her operas; in Munich “Signora Mingotti” holds forth on music “with as much intelligence as any maestro di cappella.”1 There is barely a negative comment about the fair sex in The Present State of Music in France and Italy, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, or A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. Admittedly, Burney was underwhelmed by the performance of the girls of the Ospidale della Pietà in Venice (“the composition and performance I heard to-night did not exceed mediocrity”). There was also a hiccup in Burney’s regime of praise when he congratulated Mrs. Hamilton for the “expression and meaning in her playing” given that “ladies . . . though frequently neat in execution, seldom aim at expression.”2 But this aside, Burney’s books are lined with accomplished women, heirs to history, and embodiments of its present. Just as striking is what Burney praised women for: knowledge, expertise, education. Such terms were far removed from Rousseau’s influential idealization of women in terms of the natural and the naive.3 In Passy Burney met Madame Brillon, “one of the greatest lady-players on the harpsichord in Europe. This lady not only plays the most difficult pieces with great precision, taste, and feeling, but is an excellent sight’s-woman; . . . she likewise composes; and was so obliging as to play several of her own sonatas, both on the harpsichord and piano forte. . . . But her application and talents are not confined to the harpsichord; she plays on several instruments; knows the genius of all that are in common use, which she said it was 27

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necessary for her to do, in order to avoid composing for them such things as were either impracticable or unnatural.”4 If Burney concluded with a generic notion of female accomplishment (“she likewise draws well and engraves, and is a most accomplished and agreeable woman”), this is less to contain her achievements than to assuage suspicions that such an erudite woman must be in some ways masculine or confusing—a gender monster—or, in terms used by Brillon herself, “impracticable and unnatural.”5 Even scientific erudition did not exceed Burney’s conception of female nature. Of the scientist “Dottoressa Madame Laura Bassi,” whom he visited in Bologna, he assured his readers that “though learned, and a genius, [she] is not at all masculine or assuming.”6 Such emphasis on female rationality and educability does not indicate reluctance on Burney’s part to acknowledge raw talent. In Madame Karsch, the Berlin poet, Burney discovered an “original genius” that he ranked next to Klopstock: “This lady is quite a meteor, and surprises more by the elevation of her poems, on account of her low origin, she being descended from parents who were unable to afford her a liberal education, and married very young to a serjeant [sic], in a regiment quartered at Glogau.” Having bestowed on Karsch the often sex-specific accolade of original genius, Burney went on to endorse her productivity and profile in the literary marketplace: “When she first arrived at Berlin, a few of her verses were handed about, which were so much approved, that a subscription was opened for printing a collection of them: since that time she has supported herself with dignity, by the productions of her pen.”7 In this story of upward mobility Karsch’s career is founded on genius, promoted by subscription, and sustained by commerce. Burney’s reference to “dignity” invites the reader to embrace this vertiginous combination of woman, authorship, and commerce. Not all Burney’s European women survived the voyage from travel diary to A General History, but in the final chapter 12 of the final volume of the General History (1789) Burney included numerous native female musicians.8 This created the patriotic and decidedly modern impression that the history of music culminated in the full participation of both sexes in the public concert life and theaters of contemporary London. On a mission not just to inform but to reform, Burney described the historical prejudice against theatrical singers, particularly women (4:631). In the following paragraphs, in tracing the rise of concerts and musical theater, women appear equally alongside men in the historical record, as if, in modern England, personal liberty and industry replaced earlier superstitious prohibitions. Women featured not just as jewels in male-authored crowns but as motors of historical change: In 1703 “Mrs. Champion, the singer, performed a piece upon the harpsichord at her benefit in Lincoln’s-Inn play-house; the first feat of the kind that was announced in the newspapers” (4:633). Presumably Burney meant the fact of a benefit concert, though he may have intended to highlight the novelty of a solo harpsichord recital. At times Burney almost taunted the English readers of his

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General History with the image of cash flowing into a household from well-trained female singers: In 1730 “Miss Caecilia Young, a scholar of Signor Geminiani, who now sang in public for the first time, had a benefit concert at Drury-Lane playhouse, pit and boxes laid together at half a guinea. This lady, afterwards the wife of Dr. Arne, with a good natural voice and fine shake, had been so well taught, that her style of singing was infinitely superior to that of any other English woman of her time” (4:653–54). If Burney was particularly explicit about commerce in this last chapter, he nonetheless concluded his history with an image of sheer female excellence. As if arranging a piece of statuary, Burney granted an “honourable niche” to Mrs. Elizabeth Billington (née Weichsel) in his final paragraphs: “No song seems too high or too rapid for her execution. But besides these powers, . . . the natural tone of her voice is so exquisitely sweet, her knowledge of Music so considerable, her shake so true, her closes and embellishments so various, and her expression so grateful, that nothing but envy or apathy can hear her without delight” (4:681). This is to my knowledge the only occasion on which Elizabeth Billington served as the culmination to a history of Western music. Billington’s talents notwithstanding, her significance in Burney’s A General History warrants reflection: what is going on here, discursively? Tempting as it might be to figure Burney as a champion of female achievement in its own right, such a reading fails to account for the ways praise is bound up with—even a way of making—broader points about the arts and society, music, and Burney as a writer. Commonsense explanations have some value. Burney’s praise probably helped to endear him to his female readership. But there is more to consider. Even from this rapid survey it is apparent that Burney employed women didactically to exemplify particular aspects of contemporary and recent musical culture. Praised not just for their musical excellence but for meanings that excellence held for critical and historical writing, Burney’s women are sometimes constrained and essentialized both as female ideals and as ciphers of modernity. His lavish, if on occasions generic, praise of female musicians is of interest to feminist criticism but unlikely to satisfy feminist desire. T H E I N D E X IC A L T H E O RY O F WOM A N

Burney’s historiography was informed by the then fashionable but contentious view that the history of a civilization is, in essence, a history of its women, or rather, a history of how its women were treated by men. In an article from 1985 on Enlightenment historiography Sylvana Tomaselli styled this the “indexical theory of woman.”9 Tomaselli found in the indexical theory an equation of women with culture and order. This was at odds with what she reported as a dominant assumption of twentieth-century feminism, that women are associated with irrationality

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and cultural chaos. The “indexical theory” of the Enlightenment, she argued, enshrined the opposite view, not woman as Other but as the civilized and civilizing center. The idea was that the position of women in society provides an absolute measure of its degree of progress: simply put, the further a society travels from the primitive, the more freedom it accords women to develop their intellectual and artistic potential. In his History of Women (1779) William Alexander observed: “Women among savages [are] condemned to every species of servile, or rather, of slavish drudgery; [we] shall as constantly find them emerging from this state, in the same proportion as we find the men emerging from ignorance and brutality, and approaching to knowledge and refinement; the rank, therefore, and condition, in which we find women in any country, mark out to us with the greatest precision, the exact point in the scale of civil society.”10 The conceit circulated well beyond Britain. In an article from 1789 one W. de la Bossiere Chambor expounded patriotically on “the respect and esteem of ancient Germans for the women of their nation.” To treat women as slaves is a sign of barbarism, he affirmed, marshaling the evidence of classical writers to demonstrate that German women had long enjoyed admiration at home. And rightly so, for they refine and cultivate men, even converting wildness and barbarism into military bravery, as well as presiding over peacetime and home life. Invoking what would later become a racial ideal but functions here as a marker of exalted womanhood, Bossiere Chambor appealed to the physical beauty of German women, their blond hair, blue eyes, fair complexions, and long limbs. Employing a neoclassical motif, he likened them to the goddesses and heroines of antiquity, as if modern Germany were peopled with the women of classical mythology and art.11 His source was presumably the Germania of Tacitus (ca. 98 a.d.).12 Though a historiographical principle, the indexical theory traveled well beyond history books. It was dramatized, for example, in “abduction” or seraglio operas. In Mozart and Stephanie’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (K. 384) Osmin, who believes that women require incarceration to keep them faithful, attempts to force himself on the cheeky maid Blonde, who, despite her occupation, counters proudly that she is “an Englishwoman, born to freedom.” If not personifying she at least lays claim to the exalted state of free womanhood and quickly turns didactic, instructing Osmin in the fine art of coaxing and flirtation—a saucy twist on the notion that women reform male manners (see her aria “Durch Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln,” act 2).13 For the Burney of the Tours and General History the “indexical theory” was cutting edge. Although the idea of female exemplification of civility stretched back to the beginning of the century, a more systematic “theory of feminization” linking incipient capitalism, female ascendance, and a notion of progress first appeared with Adam Smith at midcentury.14 As Emma Clery has encapsulated the arguments, the indexical theory opposed (even if, initially, from within) elements

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of a civic humanist tradition in England that took the classical republic as its model. Anticommerce, often misogynist, and equating virtue with (a version of) manliness and public service, civic humanism summoned the imagery of the male warrior citizen as the defender against decadence and decline. An alternative model of history was characterized, in Clery’s words, by a “linear, historical narrative, involving a gendered account of progress, a positive feminization, [and] a triumphant movement towards increased civility and refinement.”15 Burney’s General History, with its overlapping celebrations of modernity, women, and commerce, offered such an alternative. Burney’s women are integral to his historiography. Had his story concerned the triumph of pure music over its historical fetters of church, court, and text, he might have needed to develop different rhetorical strategies. But that story about music’s discovery of its autonomy was not yet central to the emerging business of music-historical writing. LU X U RY

The definition of music in the preface to A General History as an “innocent luxury,” a phrase Burney silently borrowed from the Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume, provocatively situated music within celebrations of modernity (something Hume had not attempted). More was at stake than borrowing an elegant turn of phrase. Luxury was a key term in competing ideologies of political economy, history, Britishness, and morality. Hume, in arguments that express a positive excitement about the emergence of capitalism and consumption, sought to reinstate luxury as both civilized and civilizing. According to earlier civichumanist rhetoric, luxury erodes manliness, weakens the body politic, and causes decline into decadence. Acknowledging that some Latin authors attributed the fall of the Roman republic to the influx of “Asiatic luxury,” Hume critically reviewed the evidence and concluded that uncontrolled territorial expansion and poor government were more likely causes of the loss of (some version of) democracy in Rome.16 Situating luxury not in superfluous goods and leisure but in the elevated pleasures they afford, Hume redefined it as a “great refinement in the gratification of the senses.”17 As such, luxury was morally neutral prior to its use toward good or bad ends: “Any degree of it may be innocent or blameable.”18 At the heart of Hume’s argument was the contention that luxury, even as private pleasure, could serve the collective good and thus, implicitly, fulfill the civic humanist requirement of public virtue. It could do so because it was a stimulant to personal as well as economic growth, at once a school for private manners and a means by which the laboring poor are enriched through manufacture and trade. Part of the power of Hume’s account of luxury was the flexibility he granted the term to stand, metonymically, for other key words of the period—not only such words as pleasure and virtue but also art, woman, and liberty. If luxury consists

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in “great refinement in the gratification of the senses” it is at home in artistic practices and the discourse of aesthetics. If luxury is pursued in leisure and in private, if it suspends (even as it enjoys the fruits of) trade and the professions, it exists in the kind of purposeless and polite realm enjoyed, presumably, by women. (Indeed, “woman” in Hume is herself luxurious insofar as she is leisured and well read.) And if luxury provides the male citizen with necessary reenergizing recuperation, if it stimulates the production of consumer commodities, increases the flow of wealth, and empowers the serf to trade in goods and labor, it emerges as something close in meaning to national liberty: “The liberties of England, so far from decaying since the improvements in the arts [that is, manufacture as well as the fine arts], have never flourished so much as during that period [of commerce actuated by aspirations to luxury].”19 Burney was already using Hume’s arguments in the preface to his first tour (France and Italy). Indeed, with a mission to make space for music, and writing about it, in the luxurious world, he not only described it as “a charming resource, in an idle hour, to the rich and luxurious part of the world” but made a detailed claim for music as a form of public virtue. In so doing he retraced the movement from private pleasure to public virtue at stake in the luxury debate. Playing wittily against the fabled power of ancient music, he emphasized the “assistance” music gives “to open the purses of the affluent for the support of the distressed.” In the most explicit of his arguments for music as a moral force, a means of reform and refinement, he highlighted charitable uses in London, detailing benefit concerts for orphans, the maternity hospital in Brownlow Street, the Lock Hospital (where syphilis was treated), and the Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians and Their Families.20 Not everyone was convinced by Burney’s arguments, or by the man himself. A contemporary satire of Burney’s Tours by one Joel Collier (the pseudonym of John Bicknell) seized on the comic potential of Burney’s modish critical framework, an indication of how contentious Burney’s framework could still appear in the 1770s. Bicknell’s Musical Travels through England (1774) lampooned Burney’s use of music and femininity as measures of national refinement and progress. Marshaling every possible slur on Burney’s manliness, the parody engineered the traveling musician’s castration by a cuckolded barber, a turn of events that the musicological capon embraces, since he had long doubted “whether the characters of a man and a musician were at all compatible.”21 The parody, though gleefully spilling over into the absurd, involves a severe rejoinder from a civic-humanist position, so pointed that the rejoinder itself did not escape caricature. In response to Burney’s contentions that music serves the public good, and that his project is of national interest, Bicknell in his preface extolled a ludicrous initiative in which a hundred orphans are to be trained to become “Doctors, and Doctoresses of music” at public expense, despite some prejudiced reservations that training in the areas of

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agriculture or navigation would be of greater benefit to the students and the nation.22 Burney’s own manliness (that key term of civic-humanist value) is the next target. At the start of his travels, an organist (Burney’s representative in the text) abandons his family to beg his way around the north of England under the less than exalted Italian name Collioni (colloquially, “bollocks”). Utterly lacking in manly responsibility, he leaves his family destitute and imposes himself on the reluctant hospitality of a series of musical madmen—and their wives and daughters. The notion of music as a refining force finds a grotesque counterpoint near the end of Bicknell’s Musical Tours when the reader finds Collioni in the moist embrace of a C. P. E. Bach surrogate, one Signor Manselli. Manselli’s improvisations on the fiddle, accompanied by “harmonious” farts, burps, hiccups, coughs, sneezes, squeaks, and whistles, give both the performer and his visitor hope that Manselli might yet “polish this brutal nation.”23 The pains of castration cannot match those inflicted by this erudite lampoon of Burney’s tropes. THE REFORM OF MALE MANNERS

The “indexical theory” formalized for historical writing a widespread—even foundational—trope of the period, according to which leisured, educated women acted as a refining force within what Hume in his “Of Essay Writing” called the “conversable realm.”24 Hume’s conversable realm presumably included coffeehouses, private parties, theaters, concerts, clubs, societies, academies, and salons as contexts for exchange, but, employing a broad brush, he styled it the “republic of letters.” That republican metaphor figured the conversable realm as a relatively free zone for exchange in which protocols of rank were partly and temporarily set aside in the interests of rationality, wit, and pleasure. But within the same paragraph from “Of Essay Writing” Hume also characterized this republic as an empire governed by a female monarch. Specifically, he installed “women of sense and education” as “sovereigns of the empire of conversation” and claimed to address them in his published work “with reverence.” The mixed political metaphors do not necessarily reveal a text spinning out of authorial control. They enabled Hume to characterize the conversable realm as being at once relatively free and tightly organized, a place in which despotism (here another name for sovereignty) is softened by female embodiment and acts less as a source of severe legislation than as a template for emulation. The political system enacted, in miniature, in the salon is what Hume called “civilised monarchy”—his description of the then current British system of monarchic despotism reformed by (some degree of) democratic government and Enlightenment legal reform.25 Male gallantry toward women resembles that “inclination to please superiors” that characterizes the gentle hierarchy of “civilised monarchy [in which] there is a long train of dependence from the prince to the peasant, which is not great enough to render property

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precarious, or depress the minds of the people; but is sufficient to beget in every one an inclination to please his superiors, and to form himself upon those models which are most acceptable to people of condition and education.”26 A context for intellectual exchange, undoubtedly, Hume’s vision of salon culture also rehearsed deference and emulation as responses to inequality. Indeed, the desire to please united the politics and literary production of the salon. Hume bestowed the sovereign’s crown on women because they are “better judges of all polite writing than men of the same degree of understanding.” This superior critical faculty, however, involves and valorizes conventional notions of female weakness and closeness to nature. Women, Hume asserted, possess more “delicacy of taste” and a greater sensitivity, all the more authentic for being “unguided by rules” (that is, by knowledge of literary-critical theory). These characteristics are not valued in isolation but through their transformative power over men, who, without female influence, pursue knowledge in the dark, dank cell of isolated rumination, ensnared in pedantry, pursuing intellectual chimeras.27 Of the instrumental function of women Hume observed that “both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace.” Elsewhere he spelled things out: “What better school for manners than the company of virtuous women, where the mutual endeavour to please must insensibly polish the mind, where the example of the female softness and modesty must communicate itself to their admirers, and where the delicacy of that sex puts everyone on his guard, lest he give offence by any breach of decency.”28 Such accounts of positive feminization aside, women serve more broadly in Hume to measure distance from barbarism and antiquity, in which, he insists, women were hidden from view in virtual slavery. The sovereignty of women in Hume’s conversable realm feminized that space not to reduce its value, nor to imply a literal female rule, but rather as a way of characterizing its fascinating and transformative modernity: sociable, peaceful, animated, intellectual, polite, improving, luxurious, unprejudiced. The female sovereign stands metonymically for the ideal citizen (or subject) of the republic (or empire) who deals not in literal, legislative power but in discursive authority and persuasion. She is an aspect of the (male) author’s voice, as much as a critic and reader of his work.29 The trope of refining womanhood is felt in Burney’s frequent and approving references to the mixed company and elegant manners of musical salons and soirées. For example, in Florence Burney attended the salon, or, as he called it, conversatione, of Signora Madalena Morelli, “which is much frequented by the foreigners, and men of letters, at Florence.” He described Morelli as a figure of broad accomplishment able to foster a range of artistic activities: “Besides her wonderful talent of speaking verses extempore upon any given subject, and being able to play a ripieno part, on the violin, in concert, she sings with a great deal of expression, and has a considerable share of execution.”30 Such scenes are

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formalized in A General History where, women (so to speak) break into the last chapter, their very presence a distinguishing feature of music history’s most recent chapter. Not just the presence but the absence of women is given explanatory power in Burney’s Tours. Much of Burney’s famous criticism of music at the Berlin court of Frederick the Great of Prussia turns on the reported absence of women and, related to this, the persistence of rough, unreformed male manners. Dismissing a flute concerto by M. Reidt as “ancient and coarse,” Burney likened Berlin musicians to a gang of sailors shoving each other in “the old naval sport of running the hoop.”31 That is, they compete by force, playing in a constant forte, without dynamic nuance or coordinated ensemble. The notion that unreformed masculinity belongs to the past comes through in Burney’s comments on the historically fixed military parade at Potsdam that takes place “in a field, enclosed by a wall. . . . With respect to music, the same stability of style, and of taste, is observable here as at court; and I did not find that the Prussians, in their marches, had advanced a single step towards novelty, or refinement, since the first years of his present majesty’s reign.” Apollo and his muses still inhabit Berlin, but the former is constrained in his movements, Burney advised, and his muses are not daughters but “sons.” There is a telling exception to the banishment of women from Berlin in the figure of Gertrud Schmeling, the prima donna at the Berlin court, who appears in Burney’s narrative as a sort of Germania enchained. Although her compass and coloratura are “truly astonishing” and her powers are perhaps unrivalled anywhere in the world, she at the same time is unable to complete her development—to become perfect, a living muse. Constrained to sing airs “in which she has passages, that degrade the voice into an instrument . . . [s]he does not seem, at present, to be placed in the best school for advancement in taste, expression, high finishing.” Were she to spend time in Italy she would return, in Burney’s analogy, “like the Venus of Apelles . . . an aggregate of all that is exquisite and beautiful.”32 The Venus of the Greek painter Apelles (mentioned by Pliny and said to have inspired Botticelli’s iconic Birth of Venus) did not survive antiquity but served in critical discourse as a reference to both perfect mimesis and feminine gracefulness. Burney compared Schmeling not to the painter but to this painted image, even as he set that image out of reach, awaiting a period of greater liberty. For the time being Schmeling is just a brilliant singer; before she can become perfect, an ideal aesthetic construct, male manners must reform and despotism withdraw from the temple of the muses. Burney often figured modern musical style as (in a positive sense) feminized, largely equating feminization with progress from barbarism to civility. Although he was alive to differences connected to compositional genre, function, and locale, and occasionally nostalgic for the rough sublimity of earlier styles, Burney nonetheless projected an understanding of music history as a movement from the

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rough to the smooth, the confused to the crystalline, the pedantic to the pleasing, and the inflexible to the insinuating. In speaking of Telemann’s “first and second manners” Burney came close to a parody of his own historiography: “This author, like the painter Raphael, had a first and second manner, which were extremely different from each other. In the first, he was hard, stiff, dry, and inelegant; in the second, all that was pleasing, graceful, and refined.”33 Such bald binary oppositions also attend Burney’s conceptualizations of performance and organology; writing about a “M. Spandau,” in the Hague, who had brought new elegance to the French horn, Burney wrote: “He has contrived, by his delicacy, taste, and expression, to render an instrument, which, from its coarseness, could formerly be only supported in the open air, or in a spacious building, equally soft and pleasing with the sweetest human voice.”34 Music, then, could embody (and disembody) the sovereign feminine. L I V I N G M U SE S

Hume’s female sovereigns illuminate Burney’s ideas of history, music, and gender, but the women of the Tours and General History differ in a crucial regard from the anonymous abstractions of Hume’s essays: they are named individuals with contexts and biographies. Burney’s women exist simultaneously in empirical and allegorical domains, at once material and mythical. Some are distinguished from the men with whom they share the historical stage by a peculiarly intense doubleness. Concrete details about appearance, character, and context take on an abstract, almost generic, quality, as if these portraits sought to project not the individuality of the sitter but something from the realm of the ideal. However, two case studies (of Marianne Martinez and Maria Antonia Walpurgis) will illustrate how those ideals fold back into the historically concrete situation of their author, projecting political affiliations and (related) aesthetic ideals all the more forcefully for their apparent abstraction and constraining idealization. That dynamic is not unique to Burney; indeed, it seems more exemplary than exceptional. It is apparent in two images by Burney’s London contemporary Richard Samuel (recently discussed by Elizabeth Eger), from which I have borrowed the term “living muse.” Samuel’s engraving titled The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain was printed in a now rare ladies’ pocket book, an illustrated diary, of 1778 (there is no known copy in the United Kingdom). A related but not identical painting, probably produced subsequently, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1779 with the title Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London; figure 2). A convergence of luxury, patriotism, and female accomplishment is evident in the images, both of which identify and at the same time conceal the actual appearance and context of the sitters (who, moreover, probably did not “sit” specifically for the works). Although even the

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figure 2 . Richard Samuel, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1779). Reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

sitters struggled to recognize themselves in Samuel’s painting, the earlier engraving provides the key, for their names are emblazoned across the bottom of the print (in left to right reversal) for the edification and emulation of readers of the Ladies Pocket Book of 1778: Miss Carter, Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Angelica Kauffman on the right hand; Mrs. Sheridan, in the middle; and Mrs. Lennox, Mrs. Macaulay, Miss More, Mrs. Montague, and Mrs. Griffith on the left hand. This naming aside, a neoclassical composition, emphasizing harmonious coexistence and similarity, appears more important than individuality. The women’s radically different ages, politics, and social positions are smoothed over in favor of a politely gynosocial community.35 Similarly, differences between artistic media are downplayed in an image of peaceful accord and unity that can be read as both a reference to “the sister arts” and, with reference to character (national and personal), as an antonym of the martial and the bellicose so commonly (as in Burney’s Berlin) identified with masculine artistic strivings.36

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The ambiguous topos of the living muse may represent public acknowledgement of female achievement in the arts, even an early form of female celebrity, in the Republic of Letters, but female empowerment (as the “indexical theory” predicts) is a rich political signifier.37 In Samuel’s The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain the title already announces the national interest at stake in images of female excellence. Specifically, Britain is figured as heir to the cultural authority of classical antiquity: Apollo crowns Britannia. The timeless dignity of classical costume, the “fantasy of continuity” between antiquity and the present, do not conceal the images’ celebration of their historical moment.38 Now conversing, now absorbed in thought, at once audience and author, these refined subjects develop their artistic and intellectual gifts without the fetters of tyranny. An element of fashion—in the decorative motif of the living muses, employed by Josiah Wedgewood’s jasperware in the same decade—hints at the broader discursive context of luxury and trade.39 M A R IA N N E M A RT I N E Z A S ST. C E C I L IA

The singer and actress Mrs. Sheridan occupies the center of Samuel’s images, arguably setting music at the heart of British culture. Her lyre and heavenward gaze variously suggest Terpsichore, Orpheus, and (in the painted version Portraits in the Character of the Muses) Apollo himself, who occupies an analogous position in the canvas and holds the same instrument. Perhaps, through Mrs. Sheridan’s placement, music is subtly accorded a special status, a medium mediating the realms of the ideal and the worldly; paradoxically it is not painting but (musical) performance that Samuel privileges in images that hover between portraits of celebrities and allegories of art. Elizabeth Sheridan introduced into Samuel’s apparently unruffled imagery one of the most romantic and adventuresome biographies of the period. Elizabeth was about twenty-four when Portraits in the Character of the Muses was hung at the Royal Academy and already then retired from the stage. She was born in 1754 to the composer Thomas Linley, who trained her from childhood for a musicaltheatrical career. Her celebrity rested in part on the mirroring of her life in the works in which she appeared, both unfolding according to fashionable romantic plots. In 1771 a play in the Haymarket, The Maid of Bath, dramatized her reluctant engagement to Walter Long (a strategic alliance engineered by her father). The onstage action, highlighting her predicament, preceded the real theater, when, in 1772, the year she was painted by Gainsborough with her sister Mary (as The Linley Sisters), she eloped to France with Richard Sheridan. Elizabeth Sheridan received a vivid mention in the fourth volume of Burney’s General History, where she is described as a “charming” and “talented” singer who knew a trick by which she could sing up to an octave beyond her natural compass—

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as far as B♭ above “top” C. There is also a reference to “Miss Linley” (meaning Elizabeth) in connection with extremely high remuneration from concerts.40 But it was Marianne von Martinez (1744–1812), an orphan of Spanish ancestry, whom Burney mythologized in his Tours as an embodiment of music, a “young lady . . . well dressed, and [of] very elegant appearance.” She pursued her art under the guidance of Metastasio, the “divine poet,” in the rarefied atmosphere of an upper story of the librettist’s house, Kohlmarkt 11, in Vienna’s first district, a setting that stimulated Burney’s imagination.41 It took Burney over a hundred pages of toing and froing in Vienna before he finally declared Martinez to be “St. Cecilia,” but he worked toward that from the moment he introduced his readers to the imperial poet and his ward.42 Kohlmarkt 11 entered music-historical lore at the turn of the century with the earliest biographies of Haydn by Georg August Griesinger and Albert Christoph Dies, and through Michael Kelly’s Reminiscences, published in 1826.43 Kelly described Martinez’s salons in the 1780s, evening soirées attended by Mozart, with whom Marianna performed Wolfgang’s four-hand sonatas.44 But the mythologization of Metastasio’s house began already with Burney’s Tours, where the (now familiar) connection to Apollo and his muses is hammered home: residing “up no less than four flights of stairs,” Metastasio is said to live “somewhat on a level with Mount Parnassus, nearer [his] sire Apollo.”45 If in England such heights are “thought only fit for domestics to sleep in, [Metastasio] has, nevertheless, an exceeding good and elegant apartment, in which an imperial laureate may, with all due dignity, hold dalliance with the Muses.”46 Marianne Martinez was chief among those muses—one who did not invisibly inspire the poet but musically realized his creations. The notion of the sister arts is fundamental to understanding the relationship. In the German Tours Burney introduced Metastasio as a refining force in music, not as a lyric poet alone: “[His] writings have perhaps more contributed to the refinement of vocal melody, and, consequently, of music in general, than the joint efforts of all great composers in Europe.”47 Soon after, Burney introduced Martinez as Metastasio’s protégé and the greatest living musician in the world.48 Whether or not Burney believed her to be so is irrelevant; the statement functions to remove all constraints on what is presented as an experiment. For the encounter with Metastasio and Martinez answers a question about which theorists could only speculate—how does the ideal union of poetry and music sound? Burney framed the crucial visit to Kohlmarkt 11 like a chemist writing a paper on the mixture of elements: “I was extremely curious to know what kind of music would best fulfil [sic] the ideas of Metastasio, when applied to his own poetry; and imagined that this young lady, with all the advantages of his instructions, counsel, and approbation, combined with her own genius, must be an alter idem, and that her productions would include every musical embellishment which could be superadded to this poetry, without destroying or diminishing its native beauty.”49

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In ordinary circumstances Burney looked to the Metastasio settings of Hasse for worldly models of that perfection, but Martinez offered a glimpse of a higher synthesis of words and music, of ancient and modern idioms, comprising not fully fledged operas, written for particular occasions, tailored to specific personnel, but miscellaneous arias and psalms (translated by Metastasio), conceived and, crucially for Burney, performed in the neutral, aesthetic laboratory of Kohlmarkt 11. Here Burney found in Martinez’s music a neoclassical principle of harmonious reconciliation. After pondering the schism between the operatic factions of Hasse– Metastasio and Gluck–Calsabigi, between the old and the new, Burney found in one of Martinez’s psalm settings (a suitably timeless and spiritually elevated context) the perfect reconciliation of antico e moderno: Mademoiselle Martinez was at her musical studies, and writing; she directly complied with my request, of sitting down to the harpsichord. Metastasio desired her to shew me some of her best studies; and she produced a psalm for four voices, with instruments. It was a most agreeable Mescolanza, as Metastasio called it, of antico e moderno; a mixture of the harmony, and contrivance of old times, with the melody and taste of the present. It was an admirable composition, and she played and sung it in a very masterly manner, contriving so well to fill up all the parts, that though it was a full piece, nothing seemed wanting. The words of this psalm were Italian, and of Metastasio’s translation.50

Burney praised Martinez as a composer in a range of genres, including sacred counterpoint, but praise turned to veneration when the topic turned to Italian opera. In this context Martinez emerged as a singing monument to the aesthetic ideals of midcentury opera seria with which Burney was preoccupied during his Tours, perhaps because of the prestige and significance of that genre in London, and perhaps because of Burney’s sense that the tradition was dying out. In her Italian arias Martinez displayed the authorial restraint Burney felt that composers owed to the voice, and, here again, she found the middle course between convention and novelty: the arias were “very well written, in a modern style; but neither common, nor unnaturally new. The words were well set, the melody was simple, and great room was left for expression and embellishment.”51 But what really captured Burney’s imagination was her manner of singing, “which no longer subsists elsewhere.” Burney recorded the elements of this vanishing vocal tradition with particular precision: Her voice and manner of singing, both delighted and astonished me! I can readily subscribe to what Metastasio says, that it is a style of singing which no longer subsists elsewhere, as it requires too much pains and patience for modern professors. . . . I should suppose that Pistocco, Bernacchi, and the old school of singing, in the time of cantatas, sustained, divided the voice by minute intervals, and expressed words in this manner, which is not to be described: common language cannot express

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uncommon effects. To say that her voice was naturally well-toned and sweet, that she had an excellent shake, a perfect intonation, a facility of executing the most rapid and difficult passages, and a touching expression, would be to say no more than I have already said, and with truth, of others; but here I want words that would still encrease [sic] the significance and energy of these expressions. The Italian augmentatives would, perhaps, gratify my wish, if I were writing in that language; but as this is not the case, let me only add, that in the portamento, and divisions of tones and semitones into infinitely minute parts, and yet always stopping upon the exact fundamental, Signora Martinez was more perfect than any singer I had ever heard: her cadences too, of this kind, were very learned, and truly pathetic and pleasing.52

The precision of Martinez’s intonation called forth Burney’s: he is unusually explicit here about pitch even as he claims language inadequate to praise her sufficiently. Martinez’s voice is exactly organized, dealing in fractions of ever diminishing proportion. Connecting notes seamlessly through portamento, Martinez always comes to rest on the “exact fundamental,” as if (like Dottoressa Laura Bassi) she had mastered an invisible physics, able to divide “tones and semitones into infinitely minute parts.” Prized in its own right, this “perfect intonation” also enabled Martinez to “express words [in a way] which is not to be described.”53 Uniting the domains of expression and virtuosity, the learned and the pathetic, Martinez’s voice testified to the possibility of wholeness, of uniting opposites in a harmonious balance. Not simply exemplary, she demonstrated the possibility of achieving perfection—a living muse. Burney’s description of Martinez’s voice is ambiguous: he may be evoking a notion of the singer’s quasi-scientific mastery of pitch and ornamentation, or he may be implying that she is (as a correspondent put it) “some kind of automaton, an alter idem of Metastasio, indeed, in a Pygmalionesque relationship [with the poet].”54 Burney’s comments on Martinez’s composition are similarly ambiguous— even ambivalent. In treating them as exemplars of a middle path, a principle of moderation, he at once elevates and neutralizes them. Ultimately it remains unclear if Burney understood Martinez as a narrowly feminine figure or as rising above gendered differences: arguably he describes her as both of these, and thus as both an exemplary woman and androgynous. These uncertainties notwithstanding, it is clear that Martinez’s agency and individuality vanished into a generic neoclassical ideal, one that recalls Samuel’s similarly conventionalized images of the living muses of Great Britain. Neoclassicism was a well-worn mode of both celebrating and containing female achievement in the arts by the time Burney embarked on his Tours. Already at midcentury, writings on the nature of the beautiful often invoked some notion of androgyny—a gendered middle course—as part of a neoclassical aesthetic of the golden mean.55 In his chapter on Vienna Burney described the golden age of opera seria as an aesthetic coupling, a search for wholeness, with reference to

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Plato’s notion of the androgyne, the mythical creature, doubly sexed, which, severed from itself, seeks wholeness in its missing half: This poet and musician are the two halves of what, like Plato’s Androgyne, once constituted a whole; for as they are equally possessed of the same characteristic marks of true genius, taste, and judgment; so propriety, consistency, clearness, and precision, are alike the inseparable companions of both. When the voice was more respected than the servile herd of imitative instruments, and at a time when a different degree, and better judged kind of study rendered it, perhaps, more worthy of attention than at present, the airs of Signor Hasse, particularly those of the pathetic kind, were such as charmed every hearer, and fixed the reputation of the first singers in Europe. [Here Burney inserted an unnumbered footnote:] Such as Farinelli, Faustina, Mingotti, etc.56

Acknowledging the efforts of “Dr. [John] Brown . . . to prove, the separation of music and poetry,” Burney finds in the neoclassical aesthetic of midcentury Italian opera an imaginary unity that overcomes modern fragmentation and peacefully reconciles the sister arts.57 As the companion of Metastasio, Martinez was well placed to represent this aesthetic, but because she was not herself a poet, her mythologization could proceed only so far. Martinez’s Catholicism may also have limited her potential significance for Burney, who passed over her liturgical music, preferring to treat even her psalm settings abstractly as studies in style. In the Protestant Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Dowager Electress of Saxony, Burney discovered not only another monument to midcentury opera seria but, through her connection to the British throne, and through notions of shared Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, a way of rendering Italian opera seria a national, quasi-British repertory. This was not something easily achieved back in London.58 M A R IA A N T O N IA WA L P U R G I S

Many of the terms with which Burney praised Walpurgis, whom he encountered in Munich, are by now familiar. He found in her an amalgam of the living muses of Samuel’s imagination: “A poetess, a paintress, and so able a musician, that she plays, sings, and composes, in a manner Dilettanti seldom arrive at.” As the librettist and composer of the opere serie Il trionfo della fedeltà (ca. 1754) and Talestri regina delle amazzoni (ca. 1763), works shaped by the examples (and even the assistance) of Metastasio and Hasse, Walpurgis was a figurehead for Burney’s ideal of the indivisibility of poetry and music. Burney’s tone in his Germany book is again didactic and theoretical: Walpurgis’s complete authorship of opera “is bringing about a reconciliation between music and poetry, which have so long been at variance, and separated.” Reminding his readers that “among the ancients, the poet and musician were constantly united in the same person,” Burney made the unlikely comparison between Walpurgis and “M. Rousseau, who was not only

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the author of the poetry, but of the music of his little drama, the Devin du village” (Germany, 1:125–26). Signs of a patriotic element in Burney’s encounter with Walpurgis and her milieu are immediately apparent with his arrival in Munich. An expatriate atmosphere is suggested, as Burney is reacquainted with “Signor Guadagni and Signora Mingotti . . . performers of such high rank . . . by whose great abilities, in their profession, I have been so frequently delighted in England” (Germany, 1:123). Indeed, Mingotti professed that she would have lived out her days in England were it not possible to “live much cheaper here” (Germany, 1:126). A few days later Burney was introduced to Walpurgis at her summer residence in Nymphenburg, three miles from Munich, during rehearsals for her opera Talestri. The conversation flowed easily, as Walpurgis was fluent in English (“she both read and wrote English constantly everyday, and had great pleasure in the perusal of our authors”) and Burney was familiar with Talestri, which he had “seen . . . in England” and praised as “a great work, both in poetry and music” (Germany, 1:134). These intimate Anglophone exchanges were the prelude to formal hand kissing that evening and something like an operatic recognition scene. Burney arrived in the grande sale while the court was still at dinner, but he did not have to wait to be greeted by the elector, who promptly rose from the table. Meanwhile “his sister of Saxony treated me as one descended from the Saxon Race” (Germany, 1:136). Whether this notion of a shared ethnicity came from Walpurgis or from Burney is unclear, but it appears to refer to the then commonly held belief that the English (and by extension Englishness) was Teutonic in character and specifically “Saxon” in origin. The term Saxon encompassed miscellaneous German, north European, and Danish territories but excluded the Celts, who were understood to be the original, indigenous inhabitants of Britain. This myth of national ethnicity coincided with, and has been read as an apology for, the Hanoverian dynasty, beginning with George I, which was (in a sense) a foreign rule; it also sat well with recent British history, particularly the revolution of 1688 when the British Parliament imposed the rule of William of Orange, a German Protestant, in preference to that of James II, a Catholic sympathizer. In this context, could Handel’s nickname while in England of “Il Sassone” have helped to connect this German-born composer to national culture? Certainly Handel helped Burney to link Walpurgis to midcentury London. For that evening, Burney continues, the Dowager Electress of Saxony “sung a whole scene in her own opera of Talestri. . . . The recitative was as well written as it was well expressed; the air was an Andante, rich in harmony, somewhat in the way of Handel’s best opera songs in that time [that is, of Andante tempo].”59 Burney’s gentle qualification—Walpurgis’s arias resembled Handel’s best airs—hints at ambivalence about Handel’s melodies and reminds us of Burney’s preference, in the 1770s at least, for another Saxon, Hasse (with whom Walpurgis studied and later collaborated).60 Conversation with Hasse and his

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spouse, the soprano Faustina Bordoni (then in her seventies), discovered in Handel’s music traces of unreformed male manners: his accompaniments asserted too much learning, and his melodies sometimes lacked refinement.61 In Walpurgis, Burney encountered a living muse already fully established in that exalted guise through her reception and self-fashioning. Her reception ranged as far as Germany and Italy and involved the celebration of numerous aspects of modernity: innovations in music printing; patriotic celebration of female achievement; neoclassical aesthetics, and arguments in favor of despotism. What better work than Walpurgis’s Il trionfo della Fedeltà to announce a new, more commercially viable method of music printing? With the edition of her opera published in 1756 by G. I. Breitkopf (“inventore di questa nuova maniera di stampar la Musica”) Walpurgis stimulated and authorized an explosion in composing and publishing music in German-speaking territory.62 Her mythologization had begun a decade earlier, on the occasion of her marriage in Leipzig (on 10 October 1747) to the elector of Bavaria, Friedrich Christian. In his eulogy, subsequently printed by Breitkopf, Johann Christoph Gottsched, the self-appointed reformer of German language and letters, likened Walpurgis to Minerva and reminded his audience that the ancients chose (female) muses to inspire the arts, just as they chose a goddess, not a god, to oversee the realms of “Wissenschaft und Weisheit” (knowledge and science).63 Gottsched prefaced a flattering note to the first edition of Walpurgis’s Talestri.64 Later he translated the libretti of both of Walpurgis’s operas into German as a homage to their author and, presumably, as models for native poets.65 Gottsched’s celebration of Walpurgis was just as stylized and programmatic as his earlier support of Bach’s Leipzig librettist Marianne von Ziegler had been. Both women were to serve as signs that German letters could achieve the kinds of modern refinement associated with the “femmes forte,” or “précieuse,” of the Parisian salons of the late seventeenth century. As Goodman has discussed, Gottsched’s initial promotion of and collaboration with von Ziegler (whose salon took place in a controversially grand, French-style residence in Leipzig) projected her as a literary Amazon who usurps male privilege and reforms male manners in literary print culture. However, the French-inspired model of the literary Amazon proved untenable in Leipzig, and by 1734, Goodman reported, Gottsched “was tiring of this role.”66 After his marriage to Louise Kulmus he switched to a different model of female literary activity, informed by the structure of guilds and preserving the traditional hierarchy of husband and wife. Kulmus endorsed this model, working as her husband’s “Gehülfin” (apprentice) and critical of von Ziegler’s strategy. At this point the story breaks off, and Goodman leaves us with the impression that the guild-like and native model of the female apprentice achieved permanent hegemony. But Gottsched’s promotion of Walpurgis reveals that something of the Amazonian model continued, at least in relation to a sovereign, whom Gottsched figured as an autonomous leader in German letters.

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Walpurgis also cultivated this identity, most obviously in her opera Talestri on the theme of the Amazon queen. Here Walpurgis deployed the often decorative notion of sovereign femininity to precise political ends. Within a plot that offers (conventionally for the genre) an argument for reformed or enlightened despotism, Walpurgis employed the figure of woman (in the guise of the Amazon queen Talestri) as a reforming, moralizing force.67 A brief digression into the plot shows how this is worked out. The three-act opera seria opens on the day of Talestri’s coronation as queen of the Amazons, a bellicose, man-hating tribe at war with the neighboring Scythians. As part of her investiture Talestri must join her people in swearing hatred of all men, but, secretly, she is in love with Oronte, a Scythian prince. Oronte, returning Talestri’s love, is captured, and the high priestess Tomiri orders him to be sacrificed as part of the coronation celebrations. In a politically eloquent twist to the plot Talestri asserts her absolute power—only she can decide if Oronte is to die, thus elevating the throne over the church (act 2, sc. 5). Nonetheless, the message and Oronte’s fate are softened when it is revealed that Oronte was born to an Amazon mother (in fact, to the high priestess). The love of Talestri and Oronte inaugurates a reconciliation of the Amazons and Scythians and an era of peace. Without amounting to an entirely unambiguous celebration of female sovereignty—after all, this is a love story as well as political tract—the plot intimates that reform and progress arise from Talestri’s exemplary character. The old order, characterized by hostility between the sexes, gives way to a feminized but still absolutist social order. Nowhere else in Burney’s Tours was the notion of female sovereignty deployed with such ideological force. That force is felt in an enduring monument to Walpurgis, female ascendance, neoclassicism, and (not least) fawning praise of aristocrats, published in Italian by the Spanish theorist Antonio Eximeno. In the preface to his treatise Dell’origine e delle regole della musica, published in 1774, one year after Burney’s German tour, Eximeno found in the plot of Talestri an example of female virtue, a rebuff to critics of the female sex, and evidence that Walpurgis herself, his dedicatee, brought about peace by uniting countries and languages. Not for the last time, a female emblem elevated the art of music. Eximeno’s praise of Walpurgis, though taking the generic form of flattery of a social superior, includes a broader program: the vindication of the fair sex against old-fashioned prejudices. Already in the preface Eximeno states that Walpurgis dispelled superstitious beliefs about innate female inferiority: “Your Sovereign Parents, completely free from the usual vulgar prejudice about female upbringing, gave you full liberty to cultivate your soul with the study of science and the arts of taste: and You, without neglecting the duties of a wise Sovereign, have thus acquired these skills to perfection, so that the most discerning Professors have no choice but to consider you a rare wonder of your sex.”68

figure 3 . Maria Antonia Walpurgis, title page of Antonio Eximeno, Dell’origine e delle regole della musica (1774). Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

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More than just a dedicatee, Walpurgis appears in Eximeno’s treatise as the author’s second self. A title-page engraving depicted Walpurgis as the goddess Minerva, surrounded by various props associated with the twelve muses of Apollo—musical instruments, a painter’s palette with brushes, and a compass. She is also shown with the scores of her operas and a copy of Eximeno’s treatise (figure 3). This living muse possesses even the work in which she is celebrated. She does so, perhaps, because she is a perfected version of the human, a whole uniting all perfections: “Now, your highness, allow me to lament with You the too great humiliation that You give to our sex: all the virtues, that when unevenly distributed among men make them intolerant and arrogant, in You alone are re-united, and accompanied by that modest and Regal affability for which the Roman citizens loved You when You honoured them with your presence.”69 In Talestri Eximeno discovered both political and music-theoretical ideals that ultimately ennobled his writing and his chosen art of music. He read the plot of the opera as an argument in favor of both female sovereignty and the institution of reformed absolutism: “[Y]ou attain respect and admiration not just for the vastness of your intellect but also for the greatness of your heart: in the drama of Talestri, which takes as its topic the eternal conflict between the Amazons and men, after the most ingenious criticism of the tyrannical arrogance exercised by men over females, you generously forgive us and bring together the two sexes in peaceful agreement.”70 He also included an aria from Talestri as an example of the eternal beauty and affective power of the “fundamental bass,” a theoretical construct derived from Rameau that he portrayed as the culmination of musichistorical progress and a sign of modern perfection: We should listen to the Aria together with the rest of the Dramma, in order to understand the majestic control that this princess has over music and over the affect of our hearts. . . . Nevertheless, just by looking at the music it is possible to see that, even in absence of other proofs, the aria alone would prove the validity of the basso fondamentale that I have previously explained. The fundamental bass [which Eximeno adds beneath the actual bass line] never departs from the fundamental notes of the key: because of this, the harmony is regular and clear and the melody full of a natural, touching and enchanting delicacy.71

Through the figure of a German princess and her Italian opera the Spaniard Eximeno (like the Englishman Burney before him) was able to capture, and communicate even to readers today, the sensuous appeal and delusive delicacy of a sound world allied to aristocratic power. Refined but not fragile, natural without blandness, moving but still rational, this aristocratic music, for all its claims to modernity, would soon be sidelined by composers and audiences in search of less complaisant, more passionate sounds.

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“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 48

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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. A M AT E U R I SM , FA SH IO N , A N D LU X U RY

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

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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

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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

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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. N IC H E L M A N N A N D T H E R H E T O R IC O F E A SI N E S S

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

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

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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 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

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. I.

Allegro

1

II.

Andante

3

3

3

3

3

3

III.

Allegro

3

2

table 1 A selection of music for the fair sex by eighteenth-century German composers Published collections of instrumental and vocal music Christoph Nichelmann

Sei brevi sonate da cembalo massime all’uso delle dame (Nuremberg: Balthasar Schmid, 1745) Christoph Nichelmann [Sei] brevi sonate all’uso di chi ama il cembalo massime delle dame, op. 2 (Nuremberg: Balthasar Schmid, 1745) Johann Nikolaus Tischer Das vergnügte Ohr und der erquickte Geist in Sechs GalanterieParthien zür Clavier-Übung für das Frauenzimmer, in einer leichten und applicablen Composition dargestellet (Nuremberg: J. U. Haffners, 1748) Johann Nikolaus Müller Des Musikalischen Frauenzimmers Musicalisches Divertissement, bestehend Aus III leichten vor das Clavier gesetzten Partien . . . (Nuremberg: Balthasar Schmid, n.d. [by 1749]) Johann Nikolaus Müller Fortsetzung des Musicalischen Frauenzimmers Musicalisches Divertissement, bestehend Aus noch III leichten vor das Clavier gesetzten Partien . . . (Nuremberg: Balthasar Schmid, n.d. [by 1749]) Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (Leipzig: Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf und Sohn, 1768) Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel Fortsetzung der Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (Hamburg: Michael Christian Bock, 1771) Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Sonates à l’usage des dames (Amsterdam: Johann Julius Hummel, 1770) Ernst Christoph Dreßler Melodische Lieder für das schöne Geschlecht (Frankfurt am Main: W. N. Haueisen, 1771) Johann Friedrich Reichardt Six Concerts pour le Clavecin à l’usage du beaux Sexe (Amsterdam: Hummel, 1774)a Johann Friedrich Reichardt Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (Berlin: Friedrich Wilhelm Birnstiel, 1775)b Johann Friedrich Reichardt Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer the Younger, 1798)c Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg Sammlung neuer Klavierstücke mit Gesang, für das deutsche Frauenzimmer (Kassel: Waisenhaus-Buchdrukkerei, 1783)d Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg Zweite Sammlung neuer Klavierstücke mit Gesang, für das deutsche Frauenzimmer (Dessau and Leipzig: WaisenhausBuchdruckerei, 1784) Johann Christian Gottfried Gräser Gesänge mit Clavier-Begleitung für Frauenzimmer componirt (Leipzig: Carl Ludolph Hoffmann, 1785) P. J. von Thonus 25 leichte Lieder beym Klavier, vorzüglich für das schöne Geschlecht (Leipzig: F. G. Baumgärtner, 1792) Carl Wilhelm Müller Musikalisches Toilettengeschenk für Damen; eine Unterhaltung am Piano Forte (Braunschweig: J. P. Spehr, n.d.) Karl Friedrich Ebers Schwärmereien am Clavier zur Begleitung des ToilettenGeschenks für Damen (Leipzig: G. Voss, 1807)

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table 1 (continued) Songs for girls Christian Friedrich Schale Anonymous Johann Friedrich Reichardt

Neue Melodien zu G. W. Burmanns kleinen Liedern für kleine Mägdchen (Berlin: C. F. Matzdorf, 1774) Lieder eines Mägdchens beym Singen und Claviere [sic] (Münster: Philipp Heinrich Perrenon, 1774) “Seht, Gespielen, seht,” in Landlied für Mädchen (Hamburg: J. S. Böhme, n.d.)

a Date from Reichardt, “Chronologisches Verzeichnis der öffentlich im Druck und Kupferstich erschienenen musikalischen Werke von Johann Friedrich Reichardt,” in Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, ed. Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1782–1791; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), 207. b

Date from Reichardt, “Chronologisches Verzeichnis,” 208.

c

Date from title-page engraving.

d

Two songs reproduced in Friedlaender, Das deutsche Lied 1, no. 2, items 205 and 207.

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. 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).

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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,

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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 T H E L I M I T S O F F E M A L E I M P R OV E M E N T

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 selfimprovement 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

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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

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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 spiritualmoral 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 C OU RT LY G E N E A L O G Y

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

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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 classemulating 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. P L E A SU R E S O F ( N O N ) C O N F O R M I T Y

Such analysis, by considering gender in relation to labor and class, is able to raise issues of female pleasure and women’s historical investments in practices of music. In so doing, it can supplement the containment hypothesis. “There are pleasures,”

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wrote the authors of a book on women who read magazines, “which confirm personal identity and integrity rather than challenge. Familiarity, comfort, affirmation, integration . . . are pleasurable.”49 Such affirmation corresponds to what Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text, defined as ego-confirming “plaisir”—a pleasure “linked to cultural enjoyment and identity, to the cultural enjoyment of identity, to a homogenizing movement of the ego.”50 At the same time, this enjoyment is not an escape from ideological pressures but is in fact constituted by them. Terry Eagleton has argued that within the emergent bourgeois society of eighteenth-century Germany, power operated in precisely this way through its internalization as a paradigm of pleasure, one linked to rituals of piety and sentiment: “The ultimate binding force of the bourgeois social order, in contrast to the coercive apparatus of absolutism, will be habits, pieties, sentiments and affections. And this is equivalent to saying that power in such an order has become aestheticized. It is at one with the body’s spontaneous impulses, entwined with sensibility and the affections, lived out in unreflective custom. Power is now inscribed in the minutiae of subjective experience, and the fissure between abstract duty and pleasurable inclination is accordingly healed.”51 Eagleton’s remarks are particularly suggestive for the female practice of music because they identify an aestheticization of power and its operations. Eagleton may be underestimating the possibilities for resistance, however, in noting that, insofar as the law is identified “with the human subject’s own pleasurable well-being,” its transgressions “would signify a deep self-violation.” In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels (Austen, Goethe, Choderlos de Laclos), female music making is associated more with outward than inward conformity. Music was a respectable employment that, because of its link to subjectivity and emotion, was put to unconventional, secretive, and transgressive uses in discourses of romantic love. Music was thus a means to both the pleasures of conformity (“sheer unthinking habit” in Eagleton’s formulation) and the “self-violation” that Eagleton puts off-limits for any but the most defiant. In her novels Austen makes a distinction between the practice of music as a sign of status and as a mediation of female subjectivity. In chapter 2 of Mansfield Park she sharply criticizes the snob value that music holds for Fanny Price’s cousins. In accordance with Austen’s radical feminist proposition that men and women be held to the same standards of conduct, the whole idea of female accomplishment is thrown into doubt—it is seen to impede the development “of the less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility.” “In everything but disposition,” the narrator remarks savagely of Fanny’s cousins, “they were admirably taught.” With Marianne Dashwood (in Sense and Sensibility) and Jane Fairfax (in Emma), however, music is not an accomplishment in this same sense but rather an index, or “expression,” of character. It is no coincidence, for example, that Marianne Dashwood cultivates music (a sign not simply of status

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but of sensibility), while her more self-possessed sister Elinor draws: the opposition is one of hearing and emotion versus sight and reason. The role of music in the new discourses and experiences of romantic love is symptomatic of an only outward compliance attached to musical accomplishment, for romantic love granted new kinds of freedom to women in the choice of partners and admitted a degree of authority and responsibility to women’s decisions in determining their future happiness. The idea that music was a means of polite courtship, of acquiring a husband, is more familiar than the fact, underlined by both Austen and Goethe, that it may mediate, foster, and serve to conceal attachments deemed inappropriate or transgressive, in which women (in complicity with music and their partners) act at once inside and outside of the social convention such musical activity is thought to secure. In the unwitting presence of Emma Woodhouse, Jane Fairfax’s secret engagement is spoken of through music. From Willoughby, Marianne receives the gift of printed music, a musical object that becomes a fragment of their intimate discourse.52 In Goethe the links between music and female nonconformity are more marked. When in Elective Affinities Ottilie and Eduard perform a duet, she at the piano, he playing the flute, we might seem to be dealing with an image of conventional social music making. But Ottilie, Eduard’s stepdaughter, has secretly practiced her part in preparation for such an opportunity. Her facility, skill, and sympathy in accompanying his less expert solo line prefigure, in a disquieting, subliminal manner that registers with the company, the future of an attachment between the performers that leads to the break-up of his marriage.53 Some of the social values preached in the texts of songs for the fair sex, particularly that of female virtue, become less secure as the role of music in romantic love is explored. An innocuous example of this is found in the first song of E. C. Dreßler’s Melodische Lieder (1771), “Die Zufriedenheit” (example 3). Here the narrator piously chooses God, virtue, and the clavier over mixed assemblies and the social world. The clavier, at once a renunciation of pleasure and a form of solitary enjoyment, is the true path to contentment. The doleful largo tempo, however, makes this retreat into music (here a metamusical conceit) potentially less attractive than the gay assembly the song eschews. Or does not eschew: for every enjoyment is detailed and thus made available to fantasy. The clavier cannot conceal its enthusiasm at the mention of tablecloths, boy-girl seating, and games of cards (stanza 3, lines 2 and 4), here breaking into a more animated, pungent bass accompaniment. The last four measures of the song (mm. 9–12), enclosed in a binary repeat, form a highly equivocal affirmation of the greater joys afforded by the clavier. The vocal line employs the animated sixteenths of the clavier accompaniment in measures 5–6, seeming thereby to confirm the sentiment that virtue is its own reward. But within the withdrawal signaled by the largo tempo, the phrase, with its 2/4 meter, eighth-note upbeat, and repeated-note melody, conjures up the

example 3. Ernst Christoph Dreßler, Melodische Lieder (1771), no. 1, “Die Zufriedenheit.”

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contredanse, the most popular social dance of the period. Such topical reference undermines the courage of the narrator’s conviction. Perhaps going to the ball would be fun after all. As Vivien Jones has remarked of conduct literature, the “moral discourse of chaste conduct evokes precisely the desires and fantasies it claims to police.”54 Not all the discourses surrounding and threatening virtue in this repertory are as innocuous as Dreßler’s wishful renunciation of social entertainment. More menacing elements complicate the accomplishment ideal and bring the novelistic figure of the rake or seducer into the orbit of the lady at music. Reichardt invoked that perennial threat to eighteenth-century female virtue in a cautionary moment in the preface to his Gesänge: Regarding the conversation between father and son [“Vater und Sohn,” 19–20]—this can also have an excellent use for you, my dears! Only sing the penultimate line— [“Darum, Zwang lehret, boshaft seyn” (therefore, force teaches malice)]—every time mother is present—it may pierce her heart really forcefully—the notes that accompany it are not without feeling—perhaps she will then allow you to go with your friends and acquaintances to the ball, so that you will not in subsequent winters entrust yourself to a seducer in order to go to the ball in secret, whose pleasures you would otherwise be able to enjoy without being secretive and with a good conscience. Then the song “An Hermenfried” [25]. Ha! Should the fair sex not know as well as we that human beings are as malicious and dangerous as thorns?

The figure of the seducer does not remain safely outside the collection. In the second song of Dreßler’s Melodische Lieder, “An einem gefrornen Bach” (To a frozen brook), references to Philomele and Daphne (figures of classical mythology, one of whom suffered sexual enslavement, the other narrowly escaped it) usher in the seducer in antique disguise.55 Since classical mythology fell within the boundaries of female erudition, it is reasonable to assume that such references brought with them subtexts—or rather intertexts—that could be decoded by the executant. Such allusions reverberated in the underworlds of Enlightenment sexuality: “Purity,” Angela Carter observes, “is always in danger.”56 Injunctions to virtue in this music were part of complex and contradictory fantasies. As in the novel, such injunctions were not the plain-speaking voice of a transgeneric eighteenthcentury moral authority unquestioningly heeded by the executant. Rather they were part of an imaginative world that could be opened, savored, and closed like any other book. B EYO N D C O N TA I N M E N T

Many complications to the accomplishment ideal and the disciplinary rhetoric of music for the fair sex have already been admitted, and it is the purpose of the remainder of this chapter to identify a range of further problems that attend

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containment as a critical term. This involves a consideration of several related issues, broadly classified as internal contradictions in the musical text; the mediating processes of performance and reception, and the existence of counterdiscourses and dissent in the culture in which this music circulated. Together, these three levels of critique point up historically concrete possibilities for resistance to the disciplinary rhetoric of music for the fair sex and, more broadly, resist the notion that amateur female music making was primarily a disciplinary (rather than, more broadly, a meaningful) practice. These interpretative moves are in part inspired by literary theory, even as they involve the much discussed “performance turn” in musicology.57 They also reveal (if only through the example of their own circularity) the limits of thinking about female music making in terms of containment and resistance, an interpretive game that it was important to play in a particular moment of the history of musicology, but which need not be pursued indefinitely, or to the exclusion of other types of reading. Disciplinary rhetoric, be it from the conduct book or from music for the fair sex, needs to be read like any other primary source, because the relationship between rhetoric, sociological “reality,” and the subjectivity of historical readers is not self-evident. As Jones has argued, disciplinary rhetoric must be scrutinized in terms of generic motifs and narrative strategies. If, for example, it partakes of the strategies of fiction and the novel, this has implications for reading practice and reception.58 Taking the disciplinary rhetoric of conduct literature at face value is often well intentioned; it reflects laudable attempts to lay bare structures of inequality and is part of a broader effort to understand artistic practices as socially embedded. But it risks overestimating, and so reinscribing, inequality under the guise of an exposé. How effective was music for the fair sex as a disciplinary instrument? Music, poetry, prefatory matter, and engraved frontispieces were not always persuasively and uniformly coordinated. Indeed, a degree of incoherence often attended the marshaling of disparate media, involving three different authors (composer, poet, engraver) and the publisher. Volumes are not always focused in their content, instead appearing haphazard and inconsistent.59 Individual songs and keyboard pieces also send mixed messages. Text and music do not always support each other. In the case of music there is a need to consider the mediating roles of performance and reception. Admittedly, performance practices in late eighteenthcentury Germany, particularly in the amateur context, are less well documented and researched than those surrounding public performances in, say, Vienna, or, for that matter, in court and church in Germany during the time of J. S. Bach. Proposals in this area are provisional and likely to be subject to immediate disagreement and qualification by the reader. But it is precisely the possibilities for such disagreement between text and reader upon which such proposals insist. In the case of music for the fair sex, each and every condescension and prescription

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about women making music inscribed in the text is vulnerable to negation in performance. A skillful performance, with varied repetitions of notated melody in a strophic song or varied reprises of movements possessing binary repeats, would leave the imputed lack of art in a trail of dust and transcend “easiness.” A disaffected, bored, or indifferent performance would trouble the presumed female willingness to be put on show, as well as the assumption that finding a husband was an all-consuming preoccupation. An ironic, playful, or flirtatious performance, perhaps inspired by the cheeky maid of opera buffa, would wrinkle ideals of female sincerity, modesty, and naturalness. Mozart’s remarks to his father about Margarethe Marchand’s “arch and coy” manner of singing and the need to discipline her into a more direct and sincere performance style can be seen in this context.60 A range of performance styles associated with various genres and social contexts were available for imitation. Vocal style and physical gesture were not necessarily restricted to the most obviously “appropriate” choice. In any case, what was the “appropriate” choice? Wenkel’s second collection of songs and solo keyboard pieces, Fortsetzung der Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1771), ends with a fugue (26–27) and contains a recitative and arioso, “Der Greis” (11), that (like the chorales in the clavier book for Anna Magdalena Bach) require a figured-bass realization. The discursive alignment of female taste with naturalness, easiness, and untutored melody-centered styles ultimately belongs to this repertory as part of its fiction or topical universe: it is not an absolute feature of the music “itself,” nor should it restrict performance practice. In his texts Reichardt invokes untutored and natural female performance, but the musical setting sometimes undermines this aspect. “Vergnüget mich” from Reichardt’s Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (example 4) begins with a conventional apostrophe to the art, invoking music’s mythical power over the emotions, its ability to restore, calm, and drive away sorrow. The last two lines of text (mm. 17–22), with their incongruous slip of register from the mythologization of female song to a condescending reassurance about its assumed deficiencies, encapsulate the patronizing untutored aesthetic surrounding the female amateur: “And if you cannot sing with art, / a pretty mouth always sings prettily.”61 This epigram need not, however, be taken at face value. The musical setting of the imputed artlessness (mm. 17–18) is paradoxically artful; leaps of an octave, sixth, and seventh put the agility of the voice on show at the song’s climax. The composer has chosen here to paint the word “artful,” rather than the imputed artlessness, which is located in the level of textual fiction, its truth value undermined by the style of delivery. Reichardt’s subtitle to this collection, Kleine Cantaten, bears upon the baroque melodic style, the long-breathed continuity of phrasing, and thus the “appropriate” manner of performance. In measures 13–16, sequential melismatic figures reminiscent of late baroque vocal writing impart formality and dignity: the harmonic rhythm is slowed to a repeated

example 4. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (1775), no. 1, “Vergnüget mich.”

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bass-note pulse, above which the voice paints “Spring” and “praise” in intricate, artful neighbors and consonant skips. At such points it is easy to hear the support of the continuo and string-accompaniment that Reichardt advertised on the flyleaf of the volume.62 Generically mixed, and treating characteristics imputed to female music making as fictional conceits to be savored and enjoyed, Reichardt’s “Vergnüget mich” warns us not to read rhetoric as the direct disclosure of eighteenth-century attitudes. As Reichardt’s subtitle Kleine Cantaten further suggests, the context of performance for this repertory was flexible, with uncertain consequences for the status of the performance as public or private—whether undertaken for purely personal enjoyment, for the entertainment of family, or, with more or less formality, for a wider group of acquaintances. The metaphor of the domestic “sphere” (long subject to feminist critique) fails to account for the inevitable range of performance contexts and the varying constitution, experience, insights, and priorities of the audience.63 The status of social female music making as “performance” must similarly have been unstable: now a more or less formal and featured event, now simply one of many ongoing social activities, now something in between, like playacting or storytelling. Relating directly to the question of reception, these variables determine the register occupied by musical activity and thus the range of pleasures and significances attached to it. Reichardt’s Six Concerts pour le Clavecin à l’usage du beaux Sexe (1774) attests these ambiguities. At the fundamental level of genre these works complicate, without blatantly contradicting, the central narratives of the repertory: the nonprofessional cultivation of music, the domestic sphere, and the feminine taste for light keyboard works and songs. The concerto was a concert genre—whether at court, in music societies, or in public concerts—and it possessed masculine stylistic connotations, particularly in the north German circles in which Reichardt was active.64 Violinistic figuration and pulsing eighth-note bass lines in the allegro first movements of Reichardt’s concertos evoke something of the “bold élan,” the “power and vigor,” and the “agitation” of which Heinrich Christoph Koch spoke in the definition of “masculine music.”65 These works are certainly scaled down from the Berlin concertos of C. P. E. Bach and Nichelmann in terms of keyboard figuration and formal complexity, and in this sense the concerto is domesticated. But the two- and three-part melody-bass textures are not themselves exceptional in the north German concerto of the 1770s, and there is no reason to assume that we are dealing here with a concession to the dedicatees. The north German keyboard concerto of the 1770s differed from that of Mozart in Vienna in the 1780s in the greater extent to which it mediated between public and private realms.66 Flexibility of performance resources was literally written into the notated parts.67 Reichardt wrote the chamber accompaniment for two violins and violoncello into the keyboard part, permitting the soloist to play along in the

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tutti sections or to be her own accompaniment in the absence of an ensemble. The directions “solo” and “tutti” in the keyboard part could serve either as cues to the coordination of an ensemble or as invitations to fantasy. As the latter, these directions suggest that the works offered the jouissance of an imaginary concertizing performance. (Jouissance, to refer back to Barthes’s Image, Music, Text, is that transgressive thrill that, in Stephen Heath’s words, “shatters—dissipates, loses— cultural identity, ego.”)68 In this sense, the promise of a concertizing performance is an escapist or utopian element (and thus typical of luxury commodities). But Reichardt and his publisher would not have printed instrumental parts if they had not anticipated sales. Far from confirming the confinement of female music making to the amateur/domestic sphere, these works testify to the problems in defining and delimiting that “sphere.” The frontispiece of Reichardt’s Six Concerts, a detail from an earlier publication of keyboard music by Gottlieb Muffat, engages with these ambiguities through an image of the female muse (figure 4).69 The mythologization of the mother and her cherubic infants is a conventional gesture. As Leppert has noted, mythologization was a prevalent and highly equivocal form of representational escapism in the eighteenth century, and it did not necessarily challenge official discourses of woman’s place.70 The engraving accompanying Reichardt’s concertos is a thinly disguised invocation of the composer’s bürgerliche Muse (middleclass muse), who sits at (or rather turned away from) the keyboard with quill in hand. Her face—heaven-turned, transfixed, inspired—taps into Renaissance and baroque representations of religious ecstasy. As an allegory of music in the domestic sphere, the engraving promises an escape from the dysphoria of that sphere: in place of routine, inspiration; in place of strained discipline, harmony; in place of shrieking infants, a cherubic ensemble. In this light, the engraving has a critical element only insofar as it implies the topics of domestic dysphoria obliquely, through the medium of a corrective fantasy directly mapped onto (and thus assuming) these topics.71 In a couple of details, however, the engraving could be seen to question the mythologies of the female amateur in a more profound way. The most significant of these is that the keyboardist pens the music in which she performs. Though explicable in terms of her personification as muse, this image resonates both with the presence of female composers in Reichardt’s immediate family and with his acknowledgment in his songs for the fair sex published in the following year (1775) that women do compose and write poetry, and that they thus transgress the narrowly defined boundaries of musicianship this repertory ascribed to them: “Does one not know of women and girls who love solitude and who in their solitary cell have a desk and a piano and compose and sing? Do we not have Amalia, Gräfin Stolberg [sic], Benda?”72 By “Amalia” Reichardt may have referred to Anna Amalia, Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, whose

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figure 4 . Title-page engraving of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Six Concertos pour le Clavecin à l’usage du beaux Sexe (Amsterdam: Hummel, 1774). Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

composition and patronage of the singspiel is explored in chapter 4, or, perhaps Anna Amalie of Prussia (1723–1787), younger sister of Frederick the Great in Berlin (where Reichardt served as kapellmeister). Agnes Gräfin zu Stollberg, a now obscure poet and letter writer, is one of the poets set in Reichardt’s Wiegenlieder. Additionally, she may have written the verse “Sie an ihn,” which possesses

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a female narrator and is generally attributed to her husband.73 The reference to “Benda” is to Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s wife, Juliane, née Benda, who published songs in a three-volume collection edited by her husband, titled Oden und Lieder . . . mit Melodien beym Klavier zu singen (Berlin: J. Pauli, 1779–1781); she also issued her Lieder und Klaviersonaten in 1782 with the publisher Bohn in Hamburg.74 The genres cultivated by Juliane Benda indicate that stylistic and generic conventions of female amateur performance could, by extension, also authorize female composition. It is significant, then, that Reichardt acknowledged the existence of female composers and poets, but he located their activity at a point of furthest remove from public light—the “solitary cell.” Composition is thus described as carceral, a form of virtuous self-discipline. Reichardt’s description resonates with the ascendance of the enclosed disciplinary space, the prison and asylum, in late eighteenth-century society.75 This fantasy of female creative withdrawal, in which authorship and isolation are rendered virtually synonymous, could be understood as an attempt to distance and control an activity that was threatening from the standpoints of both male identity and business. But the withdrawal Reichardt fantasized is not so much sociologically reliable as it is a way of imagining authorship. This idea of reclusive female authorship is not borne out by the musical life of Reichardt’s daughter, Louise. She organized and rehearsed public concerts in Hamburg, taught voice, and was extensively published as a composer of songs.76 The sociology of female music making imagined in collections of music for the fair sex was rather faux naive even for its day; it belonged to commerce in femininity, offering an idealized and simplified “lifestyle image” and enhancing the commodity character of the music. Collections from the last quarter of the century, in particular, were situated in an emergent contestation over sexual character and roles that rendered some of their content quaint.77 In 1790 Marianne Ehrmann founded an initially outspoken periodical, Amaliens Erholungsstunden, “dedicated to Germany’s daughters,” early issues of which questioned ideas about woman’s nature and place in a sharp, satirical tone.78 The year 1792 saw the publication of Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber, a direct challenge to Kant’s anthropology of the sexes and Rousseau’s ideas on female education.79 Hippel highlighted the paradox whereby rhetoric of emancipation through education was applied only to men; he questioned the notion of an innate difference between men and women, and described official views of female character not only as means of oppression but as products of class consciousness. In the following year, 1793, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was issued in German translation.80 By the time of Reichardt’s Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter (1798) the inscription of woman’s role as mother had taken a self-conscious and provocative turn.

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If the pretty little hand won’t stretch LU L L A B I E S A N D T H E NAT IO NA L B R E A ST

The artifice of the composed, notated lullaby is easily overlooked. Lullabies intervene in the mother-infant relationship and compositionally script the maternal voice, but they portray this voice and relationship as natural and unmediated. Reichardt’s lullabies are particularly persuasive in this regard. In the preface to his Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter the composer appealed to the singer’s sense of herself as a mother—under the guise of an appeal to self-evident maternal instinct—to specify the appropriate delivery with unusual precision: Nor will it seem strange, that the songs possess no tempo, dynamic, or other performance markings. The singer will quickly sense that all these songs, to be just what they should be, must be sung in a moderate indeed slow tempo and with a soft, halfvoice. . . . A good tender mother, who feels and knows well that only soft emotions and gentle tones pacify a gentle child; who is able to lend not only salutary sleep but also a well-ordered future life; she will never overlook the softness of tone that she (with eyes looking down upon the tender child) feels only too well in herself.81

Contributing to this sense of a natural and instinctive maternity, the songs present images of mothering as immutable, timeless, outside the boundaries of historical progress (table 2). They range over soothing invocations to sleep (nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, and 9), incitements to the baby’s laughter (no. 3), a series of directives to the growing boy espousing manly civic virtues (no. 8), an allegory of pregnancy in the long-awaited unfolding of the rosebud (no. 19), laments of deserted or otherwise cheated mothers (nos. 10, 14, 15, and 16—the latter three declared as translations of Scottish and French lyrics), and a husband’s pledge of eternal devotion (no. 17, by Herder, significantly “from the old Prussian”). Getting the baby off to sleep—the conceit of functionality through which Reichardt marketed the volume—emerges not as the purpose so much as the topic (or fiction) of the songs, which paint the rocking of the soporific cradle in broken-chord accompaniment. This soothing motion occasions the mother-narrator’s reflection, her mind wandering over maternity past, present, and future; fate, hope, and tragedy; love, health, and sickness; and the inconstancy of men. The scope of these reflections within the strophic framework of the songs produces an intimate and hypnotic atmosphere. References to prayer, God in heaven, birdsong, and spring flowers build up a paradisiacal nature-Christianity complex that reassuringly enfolds both mother and child (and problematically equates the two). Night, the moon, and stars are subjects of devotion and prayer, offering a glint of folk superstition. But these imaginary landscapes are contained within the miniature dimensions of Reichardt’s syllabic, strophic melodies, analogues of the “stilles, beschirmtes Kämmerlein” (quiet, protected little room) of the seventh song, “Schlaf, Kindlein, schlafe sanft und süß.” It is precisely in the peaceful immutability of their imagery that the songs reveal their rhetoric, however, for this was a time of flux and instability in the discourses

table 2 Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter (1798), list of contents (Includes title, if given—only songs 10–12 and 14–20 have titles; first lines of text in quotation marks; author, as identified by Reichardt; meter, key, and form) 1. “So schlafe nun, du Kleine!” Matthias Claudius 2/4, F major, strophic 2. “Schlummre, Bübchen, schlummr’ im Schoß”; text by Agnes Gräfin zu Stollberg 2/4, G major, strophic 3. “Lieblicher Knab’, ich wiege”; text by Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stollberg 6/8, F major, strophic 4. “Schließ die Äuglein, holder Kleiner!”; text by Johann Georg Jacobi 4/4, E♭ major, strophic 5. “Schlafe, süßer Knabe”; text by Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stollberg 4/4, F major, strophic 6. “Schlummre Liebchen, bist noch klein”; text by Johann Georg Jacobi 3/8, G major, strophic 7. “Schlaf, Kindlein, schlafe sanft und süß”; text by Friederike Brun 2/4, F major, strophic 8. “Lieber kleiner Engel schlaf ”; text by Gottlob Wilhelm Burmann 4/4, G major, strophic 9. “Schlaf, süßer Knabe, süß und mild”; text by Matthias Claudius 2/4, F major, strophic 10. Wiegenlied einer unglücklichen Mutter, “Schlaf süß und hold, mein trautes Kind!”; text by K. Schmidt [perhaps Konrad Arnold Schmid] 2/4, G minor, strophic 11. Für Sophie ihrer Puppe vorzusingen, “Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf ”; text by Joachim Heinrich Campe 4/4, F major, strophic 12. Das Kind in der Wiege, “Glücklicher Jüngling”; text by Friedrich Schiller 2/3, B♭ major, through-composed Spruch (proverbial phrase) 13. “Lieblicher Abendstern.” Johann Gottfried Herder, after Sappho 4/4, A major, single through-composed verse 14. Wiegenlied einer unglücklichen Mutter, “Schlaf sanft, mein Kind, schlaf sanft und schön!”; text by Johann Gottfried Herder, after the old Scottish 4/4, F minor, strophic 15. Chanson d’une malheureuse mere, “Dors mon enfant, clos ta paupiere”; text by Arnaud Berquin, after the Scottish 4/4, E minor, single verse set as an ABA form 16. Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament: A Scottisch Song, “Balow, my babe, ly stil and sleipe!”; text by Anne Bothwell (old Scottish) 3/8, F minor, strophic 17. Ännchen von Tharau, “Annchen von Tharau ist die mir gefällt”; text by Johann Gottfried Herder, from the old Prussian 3/4, F major, strophic 18. Landlied, “Meine Schäfchen, Morgens früh.” Johann Gottfried Herder, after the Scottish 4/4, F major, strophic 19. Das Röschen, “Noch nicht entblüht zur Rose”; text by Jens Baggesen 2/4, F major, strophic 20. Hoffnung, “Es reden und träumen die Menschen viel”; text by Anonymous 6/8, F major, strophic

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surrounding the mother. The instability lay not in a basic questioning of the duty of women to bear children. Rather, dissent focused on the specific practices of nursing and child rearing in the wake of Rousseau’s highly influential treatise on education and child development. Emile offered a complete program for the production of the healthy citizen—a program devoted to the common, civic good—and Rousseau’s rejection of the practice of wet-nursing was fundamental to the project he outlined.82 The use of wet-nurses was prevalent in Germany at this time; breastfeeding and the physical work of child rearing were deemed inappropriate for leisured women. Emile acted as a catalyst in an attempt to reassign these tasks to the biological mother. In this context, the breast was figured symbolically in relation to nationhood, as well as to the family and the role of woman as mother.83 Reichardt’s lullabies were situated within and addressed themselves to this debate, and they exemplify Marilyn Yalom’s contention that “at no time in history—barring our own age—have breasts been more contested than in the eighteenth century.”84 Reichardt’s lullabies speak in some detail to Rousseau’s complaints and admonishments. Rousseau inveighed against the way in which (in his derisive use of the term) “bourgeois” women rejected their role as mother and turned instead to the sterile and corrupting entertainments of the city.85 Presumably at issue here are the carnivals, masked balls, and coffeehouses eschewed by the pious narrator of Dreßler’s “Die Zufriedenheit” (see example 3) in favor of music. Women, Rousseau charged, neglected their first duty; they handed their children to careless wetnurses, who fed them a foreign milk, bound them in swaddling, and suspended them from coat hooks, so constricting their chests that their faces turned violet and they were unable to cry out. The potential results of this neglect, Rousseau asserted, were the alienation of children and parents, the depopulation of Europe, and the degeneration of moral order. Under such conditions of mothering, everything militated against moral health, strength and vigor, and the preservation of natural instincts.86 Against this backdrop, with characteristically vivid visual and affective realism, Reichardt conjured musical-poetic images of a rustic and eternal motherinfant bond, images that answer to every deficiency identified by Rousseau. Reichardt was familiar with Rousseau’s published writings at first hand,87 but Rousseau’s ideas also circulated in Germany through translations, commentaries, and practical application. There the reform of child rearing along the lines of Rousseau was advocated in the 1780s by a group of pedagogues known as the Philanthropists, centered around Joachim Heinrich Campe in Hamburg. Together they formed the Society of Practical Pedagogues, which published the sixteenvolume Allgemeine Revision des gesamten Schul- und Erziehungswesens (Universal revision of the entire school and educational system) between 1785 and 1791.88 As Simon Richter has noted, “The philosophical pillars of this undertaking were German translations of John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education in volume 9 and Rousseau’s Emile in volumes 12–15, both accompanied by extensive dialogic

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example 5. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter (1798), no. 1, “So schlafe nun, du Kleine.”

So

ist

schla

im

fe

Mond

nun, du

en

Klei

schei

ne! Was

ne

und

wei

süß

nest

die

du?

Sanft

Ruh.

commentary by more than ten scholars.”89 Breast-feeding by the biological mother was advocated in this work, in essays that dealt both with the salutary effects of maternal lactation and with the “vice” of childhood masturbation—topics that were considered closely tied.90 The German infant suckling at its mother’s breast became a cherished image. Foreign milk was shunned. “Holy! Holy! Is the mother who breast-feeds her own children! . . . Let fashion say what it will: mother is mother,” exclaimed an anonymous author in the women’s periodical Idas Blumenkörbchen of 1793.91 In 1794 it became Prussian law that women should breast-feed their own infants. But, as Yalom notes, this legislation was resisted: “If records from Hamburg are indicative of wider German practices, few ladies took to nursing their young.”92 Reichardt’s preface to the Wiegenlieder takes up a position in this contestation, advocating breast-feeding in its first sentence and bolstering the injunction with an appeal to both nationhood and morality: “Good German mothers breast-feed and look after their infants themselves, and they gladly sing them to sleep.”93 Nationhood was itself an emergent ideal at this point in German history. The Napoleonic occupation of parts of Prussia in the late 1790s had a galvanizing effect on German nationalism, in which context the possibility Rousseau held out for the production of healthy, national citizens through breast-feeding by the biological mother proved particularly tempting (despite the theory’s French source). The title-page engraving to Reichardt’s Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter (figure 5) is illuminated by both the preface and the first song of the collection, which begins with the words “So schlafe nun, du Kleine!” (example 5). In the engraving a woman in a moonlit valley holds a baby in her lap. The infant’s loose garments and the mother’s open dress speak to Rousseau’s recommendations, and though breastfeeding is not explicitly illustrated, it is implied in the infant’s sated sleep and the proximity of the baby’s puckered mouth to the mother’s barely concealed nipple. The picture implies a story, and this is precisely what the first song provides.

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figure 5. Title-page engraving of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer the Younger, 1798). Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

In “So schlafe nun, du Kleine!” on a text by Matthias Claudius, a mother talks to her infant about the moon, recalling her infancy in her own mother’s arms. Breast-feeding, implied in the engraving, is here made explicit. The mother and her moonlit breast replace the urban wet-nurse with her swaddling and foreign milk, the infant’s garments loosening the constriction endured by Rousseau’s violet-faced swaddling-bound baby on a hook. The text of the song runs as follows: So schlafe nun, du Kleine! Was weinest du? Sanft ist im Mondenscheine Und süß die Ruh.

Sleep now, little one! Why are you crying? In the moonlight all is gentle And rest is sweet.

If the pretty little hand won’t stretch Auch kommt der Schlaf geschwinder Und sonder Müh; Der Mond freut sich der Kinder, Und liebet sie.

Sleep too comes more quickly And without trouble; The moon delights in children, And loves you.

Er liebt zwar auch die Knaben, Doch Mädchen mehr; Giesst freundlich schöne Gaben Von oben her.

The moon also loves boys, But little girls even more; Diffusing kind and lovely gifts From up above.

Bescheint sie, wenn sie saugen, Recht wunderbar; Schenkt ihnen blaue Augen Und blondes Haar.

If you suckle, the moon shines on you Truly wondrously; It gives you blue eyes And blond hair.

Alt ist er wie ein Rabe, Sieht manches Land, Mein Vater hat als Knabe Ihn schon gekannt.

It is as old as a raven, It sees many a land, As a boy, my father Already knew it.

Und bald nach ihren Wochen Hat Mutter ’mal Mit ihm von mir gesprochen: Sie saß im Thal.

And soon after her confinement [My] mother once, Talked to it about me: She sat in the valley.

In einer Abendstunde, Den Busen bloss, Ich lag mit offnem Munde In ihrem Schoss;

At eventide, Against her breast, I lay in her lap With open mouth;

Sie sah mich an, für Freude Ein Thränchen lief, Der Mond beschien uns beide, Ich lag und schlief;

She looked down at me with joy A little tear escaped, The moon shone on both of us I lay and slept.

Da sprach sie: “Mond, o scheine, Ich hab sie lieb, Schein Glück für meine Kleine!” Ihr Auge blieb,

Then said she: “Moon, oh light, I love her, Shine luck for my little one!” Her gaze dwelt

Blieb lang am Monde kleben, Und flehte mehr. Der Mond fing an zu beben Als hörte er;

Dwelt long upon the moon, And pleaded more. The moon began to tremble As if it heard her;

Und denkt nun immer wieder An diesen Blick, Und scheint von hoch hernieder Mir lauter Glück.

And now the moon always thinks Of this look And down from high shines Good luck on me.

Er schien mir unterm Kranze

It shone for me, under the wedding crown

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If the pretty little hand won’t stretch Ins Brautgesicht, Und bei dem Ehrentanze, Du warst noch nicht.

In the face of my betrothed, And in the marriage dance Before you were conceived.

In this poem maternity is located at the edge of the sanctioned limits of Enlightened rationality. Superstition is deployed in an attempt to situate the mother in a timeless realm of folk experience and wisdom. The moon, a sort of patron saint, is the mother’s wishing well, capable of granting her child coveted “blue eyes and blond hair.” Ancient and all seeing (stanza 5), the pale moon, itself a breast to the mother and her child, lights a perpetual circle of maternity, for “soon after her confinement / [my] mother once / talked to it about me” (stanza 6). The revolving generations are matched in the twelve strophic repetitions of the melody. The Volkstümlichkeit of Reichardt’s songs, their “folk song” simplicity, is deployed in the Wiegenlieder with a particular significance to the topic of maternity. Just as Rousseau attributed the abandonment of woman’s maternal role to the blandishments of the city, Reichardt chooses a pastoral scene. The key of F major (which has pastoral connotations), horn fifths, and the 2/4 contredanse are further reassurance of a return to nature. By this date strophic settings bore connotations of nature, instinct, and untutored musicality.94 As a form of rhetorical multiplicatio, such settings possessed the power of insistence; in performance they persuade as to the naturalness of the images they convey. Strophic form also conveys something of the temporality of the scenes described, a large-scale formal echo of the gently rocking cradle illustrated in the accompaniment to several songs. But the new ideal of the mother—as expounded by Reichardt, his poets, and the engraver—ignited fears and fantasies that further destabilized the authority and disciplinary efficacy of the collection. Inspired by Heinrich Leopold Wagner’s tragedy Die Kindermörderin (The child murderess; 1776), a literary discourse of child murderesses sprang up around the image of the “good German mother.” Ottilie’s slip in Elective Affinities, by which Eduard and Charlotte’s baby is lost to the dark pond, is just one of numerous cautionary melodramas.95 The sociological truth value of Reichardt’s lullabies is no more secure than that of the contrary fantasies that surrounded them, and the efficacy of his songs as instruments of containment is compromised by the contradictory and unstable social and discursive context. In Reichardt’s lullabies the composer’s personal emotional needs are as much at stake as the exercise of power, the attempt at broad sociopolitical control. There emerges here a psychologized investment in the maternal voice, which is scripted in accordance with not only a disciplinary agenda but masculine psychological needs, the two levels closely linked. Reichardt’s prescriptions about the quality of voice with which his lullabies should be sung relate to maternal tenderness as a topic of male sensibility and nostalgia. The maternal voice as something remem-

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bered, lost, an object of mourning, appears (not coincidentally) in a text by Rousseau, though one that Reichardt could not have known: the Confessions. Rousseau’s tearful and fragmentary recollections of his nanny’s lullabies and folk songs bespoke a sentimental and psychologized investment in the mother, in which the recollection of the maternal voice signals at once presence and loss.96 In such moments of masculine investment Reichardt’s lullabies for good German mothers, like the repertory for the fair sex as a whole, reveal the fact of a misdedication: this was music for women in only the most fragile sense. In the larger picture it served masculine needs, desires, and (to some problematic extent) power. These masculine investments are of critical importance because, as I have suggested, such music may well have proven ineffective as a purely disciplinary tool. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that Reichardt confessed to playing his Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht to none other than himself.97 VA LU E S

Music associated with female amateur practices is almost invariably judged to be of inferior or at best mediocre quality. In the twentieth century an otherwise sympathetic study of women in German music passed over the eighteenth-century repertory for the fair sex with the apparently self-evident assertion that this music “hardly possesses inner worth.”98 Hiller’s review of Wenkel’s Clavierstücke similarly worked from the assumption that this music is mediocre and trivial. Reichardt spoke with embarrassment about the works he published in his Six Concerts. Transplanting into the realm of composition the ideology of untutored pleasure surrounding the female practice of music, he described these works as “juvenilia . . . composed for the sheer pleasure of it [aus Lieb und Lust geschrieben], without deep insight into art, and barely with knowledge of common rules.”99 In the preface to his Gesänge he left it to the executants to determine if the collection was “entirely inconsequential.”100 The denigration of ladies’ music in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was closely linked to discourses of the artist-composer as genius and the emergent aesthetic of the artwork. As Jeffrey Kallberg has discussed with reference to the nocturne, the amateur female practice of music continued to inspire ideas that some genres and styles were intrinsically “feminine”—the salon and the drawing room extended the eighteenth-century practices (both critical and musical) of accomplishment. But this continuity notwithstanding, the Tonkünstler (literally, the sound artist) might rhetorically renounce the lady at music—her death the sacrifice through which the composer was born. The female amateur came to personify the intolerable restrictions of bourgeois taste upon masculine genius, inspiration, and creativity. Charles Rosen, discussing Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata (1817–1818), reports a remark Czerny made to this effect: “The decision to

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continue with the more purely classical forms was, in its way, heroic. . . . By contemporary standards, [the sonata] was monstrously long and scandalously difficult: Czerny wrote in Beethoven’s conversational scrapbook that a lady in Vienna who had been practicing for months complained that she still could not play the beginning of the sonata.”101 In this century biographies of Reichardt, seeking to assess his development as a composer, have redeployed this renunciation of the lady at music to plot a course of compositional maturation. Hanns Dennerlein, picking up on Reichardt’s remark, described the composer’s turning his back on his concertos for the fair sex (those “fashionable and foreign” works) as he came under the spell of the Berlin School and C. P. E. Bach’s treatise On the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments.102 From the present vantage point, in which systems of valuation surrounding female music making and female composers have been scrutinized, the selfevidence of negative judgments of musical quality is no longer clear.103 The repertory can be seen to stress or resist contemporary systems of valuation, rather than to serve as their victim.104 Music for the fair sex exemplifies an eighteenth-century alignment of the aesthetic category of the beautiful with women and the feminine.105 Edmund Burke’s sense- and perception-based account of beauty is particularly suggestive of the stylistic and affective characteristics of the repertory. For Burke, aesthetic beauty lay in smallness, smoothness, gradual (not sudden) variation, delicacy, and softness.106 Beauty in sounds consists in these qualities and, additionally, in the avoidance of “loudness and strength . . . notes which are shrill, or harsh, or deep; [beauty] agrees best with such as are clear, even, smooth, and weak.”107 The pertinence of such characterizations to the physique, character, and voice of women was largely self-evident: “I need here say little of the fair sex, where I believe the point will be easily allowed me. The beauty of women is considerably owing to their weakness, or delicacy, and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous to it.”108 Burke’s remarks on the avoidance of dynamic and registral extremes are echoed in Reichardt’s directions on how to sing the Wiegenlieder.109 Directions regarding expression in the Gesänge also locate the music in the affective sphere of the beautiful: “süß und lieblich,” “mäßig geschwind,” “angenehm und etwas lebhaft.” The courtship function of music for the fair sex is relevant here because, in Burke’s definition, beauty “is that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it.”110 Despite the ongoing vogue in musicology for discovering the sublime in the eighteenth century, the beautiful—a relatively neglected category—was central to the period’s conception of music.111 The alignment of beauty and the feminine was not, however, entirely positive: it could involve a dissatisfaction with the limits of the beautiful as a category of aesthetic experience and an increased fascination with masculinist theories of artistic creativity (genius, inspiration) and forms of artistic experience and

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enjoyment that partake of pain, disorder, and chaos. By the first decade of the nineteenth century music for ladies was not just subject to occasional swipes but officially and systematically downgraded into an intrinsically limited, middlebrow type of music, unsuited to disinterested contemplation within a Kantian framework of aesthetic judgment. This development affected the value attaching to both female performance and composition. Within its late eighteenth-century context, however, music for the fair sex participated in (rather than falling foul of) an aesthetic of the musically beautiful in which the boundaries of music and the body were blurred. Thus it was not only a moment of condescension that led Reichardt in the preface to the Gesänge to attribute any beauty the songs might possess to the performance, or rather, to the performer, whose physical beauty is carried on the composer’s melodies like perfume on a breeze: Whether or not, dear ladies, I submit to you here an entirely inconsequential collection of songs, you and your admirers must decide. Not without reason do I hide behind this, since you will certainly be for me the most advantageous judges of my work. Sung from your sweet lips, the songs will seem all the more—perhaps even a thousand times more beautiful to your admirers. Oh! If only every reviewer had his conquering beauty! But in all seriousness, I count upon the beauty that you will bring to the songs.112

This reference to the performer’s pretty mouth (troping the final couplet of the first song of the collection; see example 4), along with references at the end of the preface to the performer’s “pretty little hands,” bring corporeal and visual elements to the fore, the female body rather than the music “itself ” the locus and subject of aesthetic valuation. The boundaries of “woman” and “music” dissolve as femininity achieves an abstract equivalence with musical-aesthetic beauty. This disembodiment of femininity arises paradoxically in a discourse focused on the female body. Economically disempowered in her amateur musical practices, aesthetically enervated in the leisured, purposeless sphere of the home, the executant of Reichardt’s preface (whose mouth is so vividly fantasized) becomes an aphrodisiacal alchemy in his Pygmalion imagination. Situated at the boundary of flesh and the ideal, the lady at music was a fantasy of the music dedicated to her— a living muse.

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Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes and the Beautiful Dead

The young lady’s domestic practice of music inspired gallant homage from composers and critics, but her death triggered more intense idealization. Occasionally even her corpse was subject to aestheticizing glances—historians have noted a fascination in the late eighteenth century with beautiful female cadavers—but the perfection afforded by permanent stillness was more often expressed via literary, visual, and musical representation. These consoling, hygienic representations sought to conserve beauty, forestall physical corruption, and achieve an illusion of eternal life. Ambivalently, they also celebrated death as the most complete expression of feminine passivity.1 An early literary example is met in Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady (1748). In a letter to Robert Lovelace, Mr. Belford describes how he, the colonel, Mrs. Lovick, and Mrs. Smith visited Clarissa in her bedchamber the morning after her death: “We could not help taking a view of the lovely corpse, and admiring the charming serenity of her noble aspect. The women declared they never saw death so lovely before; and that she looked as if in an easy slumber, the colour having not quite left her cheeks and lips.”2 The cult of the beautiful dead focused primarily on women and belongs as much to the history of gender as to the history of death. Compulsory beauty haunts Clarissa and her female readers from beyond the grave, as if the ideal of beautiful woman were stronger than death itself. Goethe’s oft-cited reference to “das Ewig-Weibliche” (the eternal feminine) belongs to this trope of a female essence escaping death and thus historical change.3 But a broader intersection between death and aesthetics rendered the deceased of both sexes available to the aestheticizing gaze of the living. As Elisabeth Bronfen has summarized, the 84

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deathbed and the morgue were “visited like picture galleries while the wax museum conflated the fascination for the preserved dead body with aesthetic pleasure.”4 The intrinsically aesthetic character of femininity (beautiful, purposeless, and pleasurable to behold) made young women particularly favored objects of display. Peter McIssac, writing of the German context, has described the appeal of the welldisplayed female corpse in a culture newly dedicated to curating and exhibiting the beautiful.5 Having fretted herself to death after the accidental drowning of Otto, the baby in her charge, Ottilie in Goethe’s Elective Affinities is described as a “virtuous corpse.”6 She is displayed, wearing bridal finery, in a glass coffin in a chapel, at once an idealized image of woman (the bride) and a sort of museum piece; around her coffin, Goethe writes, was “a stout enclosure of oak” and above a “hanging lamp.”7 Ottilie’s death is prefigured by her tableaux vivants, those motionless theatricals in which her body had assumed the stillness of painting.8 Correspondingly, Eduard demands that in death “she must be tended, cared for, treated like a living woman.”9 Goethe’s model here may have been Rousseau’s Julie (1761), in which the heroine, when close to death, was “never before more tender, more true, more caressing, more loveable, in a word more herself.”10 Woman, as beautiful object, crossed the boundary between life and death. Death perfected her femininity, ensuring complete passivity, fixing beauty, restoring virtue; it enhanced her resemblance to the artwork. McIssac has spoken tellingly of a “freezing of the feminine” and “the aesthetic of female paralyzation.”11 The perfecting of female passivity through death was only part of the story, however. If death ultimately turned woman into an artifact, it could also sanction and inspire her to write and compose as death closed in around her. Toward the end of her life, for example, Richardson’s Clarissa wrote biographical letters to be published posthumously. Such acts of deathbed authorship sought to refute or ameliorate loss through the production of a duplicate or metonym of the vanishing person. Texts issuing from the soon-to-be-deceased were ideal commemorative artifacts. After death, exceptionally, female authorship, far from threatening the social order, helped to maintain it by alleviating the disruption arising from loss. If death occasioned female authorship, it also curtailed it. As both a facilitating context and a form of containment for female authorship, death is difficult to beat. If, as Walter Benjamin argued, death is the sanction and authority for writing, a woman was accorded the “freedom”—or better, the occasion—to write as her death approached.12 After the death of the baby, Otto, Ottilie broke off her relationship with Eduard and—like a good Christian, Goethe is said to have observed ironically—purified herself through starvation and silence.13 As her own death approached, her vow of silence unbroken, she nonetheless took to the writing desk to explain her situation to her friends: “Do not call in anyone to negotiate with me,” she wrote in noble, elegiac tones. “Do not press me to speak or to take more

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food and drink than I absolutely need.”14 By writing she granted her vocal silence rhetorical and moral significance. Ottilie’s spectral epistle, while suggestive of death’s link to female authorship, is not ambitious or substantial as a piece of writing. Elsewhere in Goethe’s novels female authorship and death are subject to fuller exchange. Indeed, for Goethe, the dead female artist could be not so much a tragedy as an ideal. (I explore his funereal tribute to the Weimar actress Corona Schröter, published some twenty years before the death it commemorated, in chapter 4.) In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) Mignon personifies creative androgyny, authoring and performing songs. Death turns her from an unruly androgyne into a feminine object. As Catriona MacLeod has described, “Mignon is entombed within a marble sarcophagus, her body fixed by the embalmer’s skills in the artificial appearance of eternal youth.” In this state Mignon, the author, becomes the subject of male authorial ambition. “The Abbé displays Mignon . . . as his own aesthetic construct” in a room “guarded by two Egyptian sphinxes.”15 Such orientalist framing of Mignon’s corpse intensifies voyeuristic curiosity and objectifies the recently deceased musician-poet. These interwoven histories of death, gender, and authorship are also met in the musical culture of the late German Enlightenment. The life and works of Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes (1765–1788) offer a case study of these discourses as they were applied to a female singer and composer of the late eighteenth century. Following her death at the age of twenty-three, Minna’s biography and music were disseminated as memorials by her father, Johann Christian Brandes, and her teacher, colleague, and close friend Johann Friedrich Hönicke. Posthumous publication insulated all concerned from criticism. The female composer was beyond reproach because her death ensured the passivity that composing might otherwise have jeopardized; the male editors ushered her into print “from the socially acceptable public position of mourning.”16 Death not only occasioned Minna’s entrance into print (as published music and biography) but, in one official account, fostered her authorship in the last year of her life. At this level the story of Minna Brandes resonated with such literary narratives as Richardson’s Clarissa, whose eponymous heroine wrote from her deathbed. More broadly, Minna was preserved and perfected by her memorialization as part of the cult of the beautiful female dead. Death was just one of several tropes that contemporaries brought to bear on Minna Brandes as a musician. These included the idea of composing occasional works for her family and her own enjoyment; the idea of composing in a pedagogic context to learn the craft of composition; and the idea of a virtuous retreat from the world. In this last context Minna was described as not just a practitioner of music but its personification, a living muse. These tropes reveal that female composition was not always considered transgressive or inappropriate. There was, however, concern over the social “correctness” of Minna’s composition. In the memoirs of her father, Minna’s activities as a composer are embedded in what

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Johann Christian Brandes described as multiple breaches of his daughter’s social role. This comes as no surprise, given historical reservations about female authorship; though welcomed in some contexts and genres, it was chastised as a sign of vice in others.17 But Minna’s father does not clarify the place of composition in the continuum of female virtue and vice. In his autobiography, although he situates Minna’s authorship in a period in which she broke out of her role as dutiful daughter, he does not ultimately clarify whether her composing epitomized or ameliorated that breach of social role. This ambiguity is descriptive of the period and its ambivalent attitude toward women’s authorship. OU T L I N E B IO G R A P H Y

When set in biographical context, Minna’s composing appears to be an extension of her training and professional practice as a singer, keyboardist, and actress. Born in Berlin on 21 May 1765 to the playwright and theater director Johann Christian Brandes and the celebrated actress Esther Charlotte Brandes, née Koch, Minna was raised for a musical-theatrical career in a family of theater artisans.18 Her social position and role were thus utterly different from those of leisured girls and young women of the middling strata of society, for whom public display and paid employment were considered inappropriate and (just as important) unnecessary. Minna first appeared onstage in Leipzig at the age of three as the youngest child in her father’s comedy Der Schein betrügt.19 At this time the Brandes family was part of the troupe led by Heinrich Gottfried Koch, a pioneer of German-language opera after the Seven Years’ War. Subsequently, attached to Abel Seyler’s troupe, the family traveled extensively through Europe, appearing at courts and on public stages. They worked for extended periods at the courts of Weimar, Gotha, and Dresden and at the estate of Otto Hermann von Vietinghof in Riga (East Prussia). Minna performed for the Duke of Curland in Mietau, Frederick II (“The Great”) in Berlin, and the Countess von Kaiserling in Königsberg. As part of the Seyler troupe the family performed on public stages in Leipzig, Mannheim, and Hamburg. Additionally, and independently of the troupe, the family appeared in concerts and plays all over Germany as they traveled between posts. At her death Minna was recognized as the prima donna of the Hamburg Theater and a concert fortepianist in that city. Moving in the most elevated social and cultural circles from an early age, Minna was surrounded by literary and musical authorship and innovation. She received the nickname Minna from her godfather, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), who is often described as the founder of modern German drama.20 Perhaps Lessing was thinking of his own play, Minna von Barnhelm (1763–1767), a favored comedy of the period, set in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. The title role was played by Minna’s mother, Esther Charlotte Brandes, in Mannheim, in

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1778–1779—and possibly before then.21 The Brandes family, though not well remembered today, were an artistically distinguished entourage among the artisans of the late eighteenth century. The fashion for antique Grecian costume on the German stage is attributed to Esther Charlotte Brandes.22 Minna Brandes’s father, Johann Christian, is best known to musicologists as the author of the libretto to Georg Benda’s first melodrama, Ariadne auf Naxos, performed in 1775 at the Gotha court where Benda was kapellmeister and the Brandes family employed in the theatrical troupe.23 Minna’s mother was the first Ariadne in this melodrama.24 As a keyboardist Minna won the praise of C. P. E. Bach (though her own favorite keyboard composer was Joseph Haydn, who later owned a copy of her posthumously published music).25 The circumstances of Minna’s acquaintance with Bach are not known, but the Brandes family were periodically resident in Hamburg in the 1780s, where Bach held the post of director of sacred music. Minna may have met Bach at the salon of Margaretha Augusta Büsch, née Schwalb. This Hamburg salon, described by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in his autobiography, and frequently visited by Bach, was held at the home of Frau Büsch and her husband, Johann Georg Büsch, a mathematician and director of the Handelsakademie (College of trade or commerce). Reichardt, who was also a resident in the Büsch household, described the circle of “fine, educated young people, together with men and women of taste and sensitivity, [who] used to gather [there].” Frau Büsch and C. P. E. Bach were among the members of the salon who purchased Minna’s music by subscription in advance of its publication. Another was Christoph Daniel Ebeling. A professor of Greek, he had, along with J. J. C. Bode, translated Burney’s Travels into German.26 Bach’s estate contained a miniature silhouette of Minna Brandes, quite possibly the same image reproduced here as figure 6, which appeared on the title page of Christoph F. Bretzner’s libretto Das wütende Herr, oder, Das Mädgen im Thurme in C. F. Bretzner’s Operetten of 1779.27 A stipple engraving of a portrait showing Minna Brandes at about twenty years of age offers another likeness and is reproduced as figure 7.28 In 1772–1774, between the ages of seven and nine, Minna was a favorite of Anna Amalia at the Weimar court.29 This was the period leading up to the fire that destroyed the court theater in 1774 and, following that loss, the dismissal of the troupe of Abel Seyler to which the Brandes family belonged. (Goethe and Corona Schröter did not arrive in Weimar until 1775–1776, as part of a newly formed troupe of coutiers and select townspeople.) In 1772 Anna Amalia took Minna under her wing and commissioned the court poet Anton Schweitzer and the kapellmeister Ernst Wilhelm Wolf to compose songs for her protégé that were incorporated into opera performances at court. After the fire the Brandes family moved with the Seyler troupe to the nearby court of Gotha (1774–1775), under Duke Ernst II, and from there to the Dresden court, where they remained from the end of 1775 to early 1778. Here the child star Minna again attracted attention, and

figure 6 . Silhouette of Minna Brandes, age 13–14, by an anonymous artist, in Operetten von C. F. Bretzner (Leipzig: G. C. Fleischer, 1779), 1:99. Reproduced with permission of the Goethe Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

figure 7. Engraving by Heinrich Sintzenich of a portrait of Minna Brandes by Rudolph Christian Schade. Reproduced with permission of the New York Public Library.

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authorship, when she appeared as Gustel in Joseph Schuster’s opera Der Alchymist, a trouser role written for her by the librettist August Gottlieb Meissner. Schuster composed the aria “Wie durch meine kleinste Nerven” for Minna.30 In Dresden (1775–1778), and in Leipzig during the summer fairs, Minna, now between the ages of ten and thirteen, studied keyboard and vocal performance, as well as performing in the Seyler troupe. According to her father’s memoirs she studied keyboard in Dresden with Christoph Transchel (1721–1800), a private keyboard teacher and former pupil of J. S. Bach, and with one of Transchel’s pupils, Mlle. Anek; she also studied singing with the court singer Muriottini and (in Leipzig, during the summer fairs) with Gertrud Elisabeth Mara, née Schmeling (La Mara).31 Schmeling was among the first generation of native-born divas (figures of nature, national culture, and art) who gradually replaced the imported castrati, even at the court of Frederick the Great, where she was employed from 1771 to 1779. When Burney visited Berlin in 1772 he admired her in performances of Hasse and Graun operas. Schmeling provided Minna with an introduction to the Berlin court, where Minna held a private concert for Frederick the Great and his consort in the autumn of 1778.32 In Berlin the Brandes family were also on friendly terms with Johann Friedrich Reichardt, the court kapellmeister.33 In 1779, with the Seyler troupe based at the newly founded Mannheim National Theater, Minna, now aged fourteen, began to appear in more substantial roles: Rosina in Friedrich Ludwig Benda’s setting of Der Barbier von Sevilla (1776); Rosamunde in the opera of that name by the librettist Christoph Martin Wieland and composer Anton Schweitzer (1777); Luise in Monsigny-Sedaine’s Le Déserteur (1799); Bärbchen in Georg Benda’s setting of Gotter’s Der Jahrmarkt (1775); and Zemire in Zemire und Azor (probably the version by Christian Gottlob Neefe from 1776).34 According to Herr Brandes this early blossoming of Minna’s career was, however, cut short by illness. The family were struck down with fever and, on doctor’s orders, left Mannheim for the Hamburg Theater in April 1781.35 Presumably the disbanding of the Seyler troupe also influenced their decision. An unsettled period ensued, even by the standards of the flood-, fire-, and wartorn times in which the Brandes family made their precarious living. From spring 1781 to 1782 they worked in Hamburg, but Minna encountered significant competition from the soprano “Madame Benda” (presumably Felicitas, the wife of Friedrich Ludwig Benda and daughter-in-law of Georg Benda), and intrigue and disputes between Herr Brandes and the management of the Hamburg Theater led the family to quit the city within a year of their return. They then toured the towns of East Prussia, were employed in 1782–1784 by Otto Hermann von Vietinghof for his theater in Riga, and enjoyed an informal stint at the residence of the Duke von Curland in Warsaw (March to June 1784).36 From this point on the family depended increasingly on the income derived from Minna’s public concerts of song and keyboard music, with tours of Königsberg, Elbing, and Danzig in 1784, and

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concerts in Hamburg from the end of that year to spring 1785.37 Another troubled year of employment at the Hamburg Theater saw them through to March of the following year, but this employment was seasonal. Their annus horribilis was 1786, bringing the death of Minna’s brother (in April) and her mother (in May).38 A contagious ailment is suggested by this pattern; perhaps the fever reported by Herr Brandes that had struck all the family in 1780 was tuberculosis. Following these bereavements Herr Brandes and Minna remained in Hamburg. Minna’s father pursued his literary interests, while Minna performed as actress and singer at the public theater. In his memoirs Herr Brandes recalled her, at home in the evenings, improvising at the keyboard to cheer him up and assuage his cares: in so doing Minna was demonstrating that “natural musical creativity” identified by C. P. E. Bach as being the basis of both improvisation and composition.39 For his part, Johann Christian Brandes called this effective tonic her “Universalmedicin” (allpurpose medicine).40 Unfortunately Minna’s own health declined rapidly starting in autumn 1787, and she died on 13 June 1788. According to her father, Minna studied composition in the last year of her life with her former teacher Johann Friedrich Hönicke.41 Minna’s access to education, her frequent appearances at court and on the public stage, her artisanal standing and parentage, and the advanced cultural circles in which she moved provided a rich context for her development as a performer and facilitated her turn to composition as an extension of her professional activity. In presenting the life and music of Minna to the public, however, Brandes and Hönicke did not invoke this context. Rather, they invoked tropes that would make her composing both more meaningful and more acceptable to a readership who typically pursued artistic practices as pastimes without professional aspirations. J O HA N N C H R I ST IA N B R A N D E S’ S B IO G R A P H IC A L M E M O R IA L T O H I S DAU G H T E R

Johann Christian’s biography of his daughter, published anonymously in the Annalen des Theaters in the year following her death (1789), engages the trope of the beautiful deceased female with which this chapter began. Minna’s physical beauty is vividly evoked, as if, statuelike, she were still before the author (and us). Her appearance, as her father described it, exemplifies a white, classical aesthetic he surely derived from Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Mahlerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755) and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764): “In body and soul Minna Brandes was an incomparably perfect young woman! A Grecian figure, large blue eyes that never sought to enchant but, without her knowledge, drew one in as if by magic. Blonde hair, a fine, white complexion without blemish, and every part of her face and body in perfect proportion with the whole.”42 This physical perfection describes Minna not simply as a

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beauty but as an artwork: the surface of her face is, like marble, smooth, white, and unbroken; her eyes do not seek to control but are rather, like those of a statue, subject to an aestheticizing gaze; her figure casts the viewer back to (a version of) classical antiquity and so, in the realm of visual arts, to the source of artistic standards still current in late eighteenth-century Germany. (A similar semiotic code, linking woman, beauty, whiteness, and antiquity was marshaled in Richard Samuel’s Portraits of the Muses.)43 Through this image of Minna as classical statuary Johann Christian Brandes narrowed the gap between the real and the ideal and tapped into the Winckelmannian discourse of antique art as a pinnacle of civilized culture (and one “uncontaminated” by all Asiatic, Egyptian, and African elements).44 In his biography of her, Brandes links Minna’s compositional activity to her final illness and impending death. Such a close connection between female authorship and death recalls Clarissa’s deathbed letters and Ottilie’s elegiac epistles: For a long time Minna complained of ear- and toothache and a sore throat: the pain died down only to return twice as severely. Through all this suffering she displayed an amazing patience; if she had only a few hours respite she devoted them to her art, the only thing for which she appeared to possess interest and passion. In the last year of her life she composed the majority of those songs that were published, after her death, as Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes and that were deservedly well received.45

This description of Minna’s industry during her illness probably inspired Gerber to attribute her death to an excessive devotion to her art: “But in the most lovely blossoming of her life, she was offered up for her all-too-great enthusiasm for art and died in Hamburg on 13 June 1788.”46 Gerber’s idea that Minna worked herself to death reflects not only his lay medical knowledge but also, perhaps, a conception of the female body as weak. His comment thus strikes a cautionary note for young ladies considering a career in music.47 Brandes takes the link between authorship and death still further. Before Minna’s decline, death had closed around her and fostered her art. In the spring of 1786, when her brother and mother died within a month of each other, Minna “sought consolation at her clavier, redoubling her industry” and improving her playing so much that she won the praise of C. P. E. Bach. Then, according to Brandes’s chronology, she explored composition during her own illness, working from her sickbed (just as Mozart would work on his requiem only three years later). Such imagery recalls not just the myth of the swan song but specifically Lutheran practices of composition, in which music was used to promote contemplation of mortality and even written from the deathbed.48 Fostered by virtue and by death, Minna’s composing is set beyond reproach by her grieving father. Just as death inspired Minna’s turn inward to the clavier and composition, so her death offered a context for the publication of her life and music.

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As the ruling trope for Minna’s composing, death did not just reinscribe the passivity that was jeopardized by authorship but individualized and ennobled the composer. Although Minna’s memorialization does not necessarily strike us as notable today, the practice was relatively new, and sometimes controversial, among the middling strata of society, appropriating for one of lower rank an aristocratic convention (itself inspired by classical antiquity). In England a critic complained that even tradesmen’s widows presumed to get about in black as if on their way to court, a comment that reminds us that the dress and manners of mourning accorded significance to the deceased and their relatives.49 But more than this, memorial artifacts granted individuality to the deceased through the recognition of personal character and achievement. In this way they supplemented memento mori, those captions and artifacts that assert the transience of life and universality of death.50 Bronfen finds here an instance of Foucault’s contention that, in the late eighteenth century, dying could focus and individualize the self, not just efface it. The trope of death as the great leveler of social distinction, and as the destroyer of individual difference, is supplemented by an idea of death’s being, in Foucault’s words, “constitutive of singularity and offering an escape from a dull, average life. Death emerges as that moment in a person’s life where individuality and absolute rarity could finally be attained.”51 Brandes assumed authorial control over Minna not just by writing her life after her death but by presenting himself as the prime mover in her career and development: though framed as a biography of a daughter, it is as much a father’s autobiography. Brandes presents Minna as the jewel in the family’s crown, embodying female and musical virtues but lacking professional self-determination. Underplaying Minna’s agency, he overstates his own influence and autonomy as head of the household, describing the family’s travels through Germany as almost entirely orchestrated by himself. This is misleading, however, because the Brandes family was closely tied to the theatrical troupe of Abel Seyler.52 Johann Christian Brandes presents the artisanal family as an autonomous economic/professional unit, governed by himself, whereas the facts suggest that Seyler’s troupe was the basic unit of organization and the driving force in their travels. The family as a unit, and gender roles within it, are at stake in Brandes’s self-inscription in his biography of Minna. Those roles were challenged, however, in the last years of Minna’s life, again through death. When his wife, Esther Charlotte, died in May 1786, Brandes for the first time acknowledged and assented to Minna’s preference for staying in Hamburg rather than moving on again. Doubly bereaved of wife and son, he appears to have experienced a weakening of agency, whereas Minna, now by default the lady of the household, began to exert her own control over her professional activities. Minna’s study of composition with Hönicke dates to this same period. A change in Minna’s behavior following the death of her mother is only hinted at in the biography, but Minna’s sense of self seems to have altered markedly—a trans-

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formation that her father lamented at length in his memoirs. Her new status as the lady of the house provided a context for musical authorship that was apparently lacking while she was the artistically precocious daughter of the Brandes family.53 HÖ N IC K E’ S M U SIC A L M E M O R IA L T O M I N NA B R A N D E S

When Minna died in 1788 her former teacher Hönicke, musical director of the Hamburg Theater, prepared a collection of her compositions as a type of memorial.54 Hönicke offered Minna’s music to subscribers as an opportunity to “renew their remembrance of the artist.”55 In this way he connected her works to other mourning and memorial artifacts, graves and grave stones, spoons, rings, swords, fans, and brooches that proliferated at this time in the middle classes. Nigel Llewellyn has noted that such artifacts were “designed to release a palliative emotional response.”56 Hönicke’s collection, titled Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes (Musical estate of Minna Brandes), was published with Hönicke’s preface by the Hamburg printer Johann Heinrich Herold in 1788 (the title page is shown in figure 8). It was sold by subscription; that is, purchasers paid in advance for their copies, and their names, classified by region, were printed in the first pages of the book. With 518 subscribers from all over north Germany, the volume was widely disseminated. C. P. E. Bach owned a copy, as did Joseph Haydn—a fact obscured in the recent catalogues of the latter’s music library because of current unfamiliarity with female composers of this period.57 The unusual title of the collection may have suggested, and in any event is suggestive of, the catalogue of C. P. E. Bach’s estate published in Hamburg two years later under the title Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses des verstorbenen Capellmeisters Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.58 The large subscription list published with Minna’s music illustrates not only the extent of her reputation but, like the funeral description in Richardson’s Clarissa, a fascination with youthful female death as an occasion for sentiment and melancholy. Minna’s death was a public event, and crowds of subscribers turned out to view her musical remains. Minna’s posthumous life as a composer was in part a commercial project that commodified death and marketed pathos. But this aspect of the venture reflected need, not greed. For reasons of his multiple bereavement, as well as professional intrigue at the Hamburg Theater, Minna’s father had fallen on relatively hard times; the publication of his daughter’s music may have been intended in part to raise funds. The German burghers indulged without scruple in the pleasures of charity and doing good.59 Even before readers can turn to Hönicke’s preface, Minna’s authorship is interpreted in the title page engraving, which shows an imaginary garden in the then current picturesque style, with a classical temple on a hill and in the foreground a

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figure 8. Title page of Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes (Hamburg: Johann Heinrich Herold, 1788). Reproduced with permission of the Conservatoire Royale, Brussels.

memorial topped with an urn. The urn bears Minna’s initials and is adorned with the mask of tragedy, signaling both her theatrical profession and her death. The inscription on Minna’s memorial reads, “Ihr Gesang riss die Herzen hin und Kenner schaezten [sic] ihre Kunst” (Her song enraptured the heart, and connoisseurs esteemed her art). The statue of a grieving woman in classical dress, holding a lyre, could be a representation of genius—the artist’s muse. The twentiethcentury critic Nigel Llewellyn thought that a similar figure on the invitation card to the funeral of Joshua Reynolds was meant to represent genius.60 Minna’s compositions at the base of the memorial seem to be part of that memorial and, at the same time, to have fallen like petals from the fl owering bush directly above them. Such ambiguous placement grants them the permanence of stone and the transience of flowers returning to earth, the artificiality of the carved monument and the naturalness of petals. Minna’s musical production—her scores—are embedded in an image that is all about authorship: the flowering of a

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camellia (perhaps), the fashioning of monuments, the contrived naturalness of the English garden, the production of a title-page engraving. The conceit of the female composer as flowering plant is a topos of the period, found two years earlier in the opéra comique Toinette et Louis (1787) by Lucile Grétry, who was thirteen at the time. In the concluding vaudeville the librettist Joseph Patrat analogized “a young author of thirteen” to “a new-born rosebush.”61 In accordance with the conventional prefatory rhetoric of both male and female composers, Hönicke’s preface makes only modest claims for the artistic value of the collection and begs the audience’s indulgence: Minna Brandes composed all the pieces in this collection for specific reasons or occasions, whereby each is unique, as the connoisseur [Kenner] will easily see. However, she composed them solely for her own diversion, and was too modest to have entertained their public dissemination through the press. The pieces always pleased me, and though it may appear biased, coming from the warmest admirer of the deceased young lady, I still assert that they have made an excellent impression on connoisseurs, through whose initiative they now appear in print. I have altered nothing in them, to show as much the correct feelings and the delicate ear of the composer even in those places that contravene the grammar of music, in which her knowledge was most wanting. If the friends of music, who were acquainted with the deceased, renew their remembrance of the artist through these trifles—as she passed many pleasant hours through her likable voice and her charming keyboard playing; then one of the principal reasons why I present her unpublished compositions will be fulfilled. Hamburg, September 1788. Hoenicke.62

Hönicke’s assurance that Minna never sought to disseminate her music through the press was the stock-in-trade of authors’ prefaces, even if, in the case of women, this rhetoric was at a premium. Minna was a professional actress and singer who also gave public concerts at the fortepiano, and the comment seems aimed more at the expectations of the leisured female audience and their sense of bourgeois feminine propriety than Minna’s own life and character. Three years earlier, in 1785, Corona Schröter, the celebrated actress, singer, and composer, announced the impending publication of her Fünf und zwanzig Lieder with an elaborate display of feminine reticence that spoke specifically to the expectations of potential purchasers that a woman’s place was in the home: I have had to overcome much hesitation before I seriously made the decision to publish a collection of short poems that I have provided with melodies. A certain feeling towards propriety and morality is stamped upon our sex, which does not allow us to appear alone in public and without an escort: Thus, how can I otherwise present this, my musical work, to the public, than with timidity? For the complimentary opinions and the encouragement of a few persons . . . can easily be biased out of pity. The work of any lady, however, will indeed arouse similar pity to some extent in the eyes of other experts.63

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Schröter’s preface is not only a compensatory display of reticence on the eve of publication but also an appeal to the gallantry of critics who, in dealing with the works of a lady, are invited to set aside their usual harshness. The decision to publish was the hot potato of eighteenth-century prefaces, and even Hönicke hesitated to acknowledge his agency, stating that the music was appearing in print on the “initiative” of various “connoisseurs”—the decision to publish thus subject to multiple deferment and demur. This rhetoric was conventional and did not always reflect authors’ reasons for going to press, or their feelings about doing so. Hönicke never published his own compositions, but this may have been because they were occasional works with relatively little commercial potential.64 The authorization of Minna’s publication ultimately comes from the subscription list, which indexes a desire to see the music in print, and from the dedicatee, Duchess Dorothee von Curland, who, in accepting the dedication, sanctioned publication of the volume with a royal authority that rendered the Nachlass unassailable. Hönicke’s assessment of Minna’s music requires careful evaluation, since both his vocabulary and the musical values of the period are remote from those of more recent times. The musical-aesthetic character that Hönicke imputed to the collection in his preface is that of a natural and untutored genius: Minna’s music is “pleasing” and evinces the composer’s “correct feelings” and “delicate ear.” These comments sound, to modern ears, like put-downs of a woman composer. They are, indeed, marked by gendered concepts: feeling and instinct versus technical mastery and rationality. But they also impute to Minna’s music, and her authorship, a naturalness and uncorrupted quality that represented a musical-aesthetic ideal in the middle-class culture of northern Germany, an aesthetic that found strong reinforcement in Herder’s Volkslieder (1779) and Rousseau’s “Essai sur l’origine des langues” (written in the 1750s and published in 1781).65 Hönicke’s description of Minna’s compositions as “Kleinigkeiten” (trifles) might seem to suggest that he was dismissing the works of a woman as compositionally inconsequential or unambitious. But this interpretation is misleading, and prefatory rhetoric, along with the musical-social ideals of the period, are probably more at issue than sexism. Not until the first decade of the nineteenth century were ideas of insubstantial and recreational music aligned strongly with female composers. A hierarchy of genre, based on genre size and complexity, was not in place in the 1780s, where different genres and styles aspired more to achieve perfection according to type than to compete with each other for absolute and abstract supremacy.66 Musical values were broadly shared with artistic and social practices such as sensibility, as Dahlhaus recognized in his remark that “the musical esthetics of Empfindsamkeit—as opposed to the doctrine of the affections in the baroque and the philosophy of art in the classical and romantic periods—tended towards an esthetic of music as natural sound, not as work of art.”67

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The compositions of Minna’s Hamburg contemporary Juliane Reichardt, née Benda, were also described as Kleinigkeiten by Johann Adam Hiller, but he offered the term positively and coupled it with the adjective “artige,” meaning artful or skillful.68 Kleinigkeiten, with its connotations of smallness, luxury, and accessibility, may have rendered the music more attractive to amateur musicians, for it implied a lack of substantial difficulty in performance. In his preface Hönicke uses the word Kleinigkeiten to to describe Minna’s musical Nachlass as suitable lifestyle music for the middle classes. As a marketing device, Kleinigkeiten relates to but is less obviously gendered than the labeling of songs and keyboard pieces as suitable “for the fair sex.” Paradoxically, the inclusion of orchestral music in Minna’s collection renders Hönicke’s reference to Kleinigkeiten rather misleading, though the orchestral works are, admittedly, small in scale. Also significant with respect to value is Hönicke’s comment that Minna possessed “richtige Empfindungen” (correct feelings) and that these are evident in her music. The German Enlightenment sought not just the cultivation and application of rationality but also emotional refinement.69 As Johann Georg Sulzer wrote in the article “Empfindung” (Sentiment) for the Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774): “Just as philosophy and science have knowledge as their ultimate goal, so the fine arts have the goal of sentiment. Their immediate aim is to arouse sentiments in a psychological sense. Their final goal, however, is a moral sentiment by which man can achieve his ethical value. If the fine arts are ever to become the sister of philosophy, and not just a gaggle of loose wenches one calls upon for diversion, they must be guided by reason and wisdom in their stimulation of sentiment.”70 Sulzer’s sexing of the fine arts as female (“sister” to philosophy), his according leadership to woman in the realm of sentiment, and his call for art to move out of the brothel into the drawing room illuminate Hönicke’s praise of Minna’s compositions and the cultural climate in which music by female composers was embraced. Hönicke’s comment that Minna’s knowledge of musical grammar was wanting also requires careful interpretation. The remark comes as a surprise, given the sophistication of Minna’s harmony in the lieder and her skillful handling of the thematic-tonal structure of sonata form in her keyboard allegro. Although Hönicke seems to suggest that there are passages in her music that contravene the period’s conventions of harmony and voice leading, this is not borne out by the works themselves. So what precisely did Hönicke mean? Perhaps he intended to indicate a lack, not of compositional expertise, but rather of familiarity with the terminology of contemporary music theory. Since Minna was an actress and singer, it is quite possible that she was not well versed in the theoretical writings of, say, Marpurg, Sorge, Sulzer, and Kirnberger. Another possibility is that Hönicke’s sense of musical-grammatical correctness was more limited than Minna’s and did not extend to those harmonic progressions in her lieder that are redolent of C. P. E.

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Bach’s figured-bass-oriented techniques of modulation, employing distant keys and enharmonic equivalents. Even contemporaries disagreed about the extent of Minna’s theoretical knowledge of music. If in his preface to her published music Hönicke found that knowledge wanting, Gerber, in his short biography of her, found it considerable, especially, he remarked wryly, for a female singer.71 (The gender specificity of that swipe is impossible to establish, since the German language required him to specify that the singer was female.) The discrepancy suggests that Gerber’s information was derived not from Hönicke or his preface but perhaps from Minna’s father, Johann Christian Brandes. Indeed, Gerber’s comment seems to exist to correct Hönicke’s prefatory slight. Whatever its origins, the divergence in opinion is indicative of tensions in accounts of female creativity between ideas of natural, untutored production and those of technical skill and mastery. Hönicke’s statement that Minna composed works for specific occasions is not corroborated by the evidence of the collection itself or her father’s memoirs. Reflecting the interplay of market forces, gender, ideals of authorship, and concepts of the purpose of music, Hönicke’s preface exaggerated the extent to which Minna’s authorship was embedded in family life. The German songs, all (pace Max Friedländer) to texts by Ludwig Hölty, address the seasons, present a farmer’s advice to his son, and reflect a lover’s haunting vision of his beloved; they are not occasional works in the sense of explicitly addressing specific friends and events in the author’s life.72 The two settings of Italian texts—one a duet, the other a solo, both with orchestral accompaniment—suggest polished exercises in composition rather than fully fledged “works.” Though perfectly executed, they are implausibly short for public performance. Minna’s Nachlass is arranged less as a succession of occasional works than as a practical course in free composition that covers, and even seeks to touch upon, a wide range of textures and genres: solo keyboard music (item 1), strophic German lieder (items 2–8), orchestration and orchestral movements (item 11), Italian aria with orchestral accompaniment (item 9), and operatic duet with orchestral accompaniment (item 10). These are not arranged strictly by degree of difficulty, although there is a progression from solo keyboard works through strophic German song at the keyboard to the more “advanced” texture of Italian song with orchestral accompaniment. The range of genres in the Nachlass, uncharacteristic of publications at this time, demonstrates the breadth of compositional experience that Minna was acquiring under Hönicke’s tutelage—tutelage that was not disclosed in the preface but discussed years later in the memoirs of Minna’s father. The quasi-systematic and pedagogic character of the volume ties in with Enlightenment ideas of the educability and perfectibility of humankind through selfimprovement, instruction, and learning. Indeed, the collection could be seen as an advertisement for the pedagogic Enlightenment itself.

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Understood in these terms, Minna’s Nachlass represents a practical outcome of the initiatives in the German Enlightenment to disseminate knowledge of composition beyond the confines of professional composers. As part of this initiative, musical authorship was dispersed throughout the middle classes of society. A new printing technology—divisible and movable type—facilitated the dissemination of keyboard music and songs, and this was the preferred means of printing works published by subscription, particularly if, as with Minna’s Nachlass, more than three hundred copies were required.73 Indeed, as if to announce not just the prestige attaching to this innovation but its consequences for authorship, Breitkopf issued Il trionfo della fedeltà, a dramma pastorale by Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Electress of Saxony (1756).74 From the mid-1770s on, music was published by professional performers of both sexes, by men of the nonmusical professions and by leisured women and girls. It is unclear whether the main sources of instruction were composition primers or private lessons, but certainly the period saw the publication of numerous treatises.75 The relative novelty of female students of composition may have granted their music a special status, not just for its curiosity value but as a paradigm of the educative process itself. Already in his Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule (1778–1781) Georg Joseph Vogler had published an accompanied keyboard sonata by his noble pupil Caroline von Brandenstein. The title of this sonata highlighted the pedagogic situation in which it was composed by figuring the work as that of “a female pupil of Vogler”: Clavier Sonate einer Voglerischen Schülerin der Reichsfrei Fräulein Caroline von Brandenstein in Ludwigsbourg.76 Vogler’s claim to paternity may represent an unwillingness to allow women their own independent authorship, or it may reflect Caroline’s wishes not to appear in print unchaperoned (or both of these). Vogler’s publication of the sonata might even be construed as a type of advertising for his pedagogic services, particularly given the high social position of his pupil. But these speculations aside, Vogler located Caroline’s authorship in the process of (her) self-development, a gesture that gave the work not less but more meaning and significance than if it had been published independently. Thus far we have considered Minna Brandes solely in the role of pupil, but in turning to composition she may have hoped to boost her profile as a teacher by expanding the scope of the instruction she could provide and establishing a reputation through publication. Ernst Suchalla reported that Minna acted as a teacher for Julius August Fehre (1745–1812), organist in the Reformierten Kirche in Riga, though the nature of his studies is not known.77 Minna was probably not intending to publish music in the format taken by her Nachlass. The orchestrally accompanied cavatina and duet, and the short movement for orchestra alone, suggest that she may have had her sights on composing stage music. Since composers and librettists had often written roles and arias

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specifically for her (Gustel in Kapellmeister Schuster’s Der Alchymist was her first such tailor-made part), it would have been quite natural for her to try her own hand. There were precedents for this nearby. In Weimar, in 1782, Corona Schröter had composed the music for Goethe’s singspiel Die Fischerin, in which Schröter appeared in the title role and then published some of the stage songs in her widely circulated 1786 collection of twenty-five lieder. The presence of six lieder in the Nachlass suggests that Minna may have been working toward her own collection of German songs, of the type that filled the pages of publishers’ catalogues at this time. Such collections were highly marketable because they reflected the kind of music performed in the home. Their marketability was further enhanced when they were composed by a “big name,” a professional performer of high repute—for example, Maria Adelheid Eichner, the seconda donna of the court opera in Berlin, who published a volume of twelve lieder in 1780.78 Despite the strong association of keyboard music with women in the amateur and domestic contexts, it was rare for women to publish solo keyboard music; the vast majority of their output in late eighteenth-century Germany comprised strophic song. Thus the untitled keyboard allegro in D major that opens Minna’s collection is in itself remarkable (example 6a). The movement has a double character and double function as, on the one hand, a sonata-form movement with some conventional thematic signposting and a standard harmonic plan and, on the other hand, a prelude for the first song, “Erndte-Lied” (Harvest song). The movement’s key, D major, prepares that of the song, G major, by means of an ambiguous final tonic pedal (example 6b). Through modal mixture (borrowing B♭ and E♭ from the subdominant minor, G minor), the final tonic pedal, dying away through p to pp, sounds like the dominant chord of G minor, the tonic minor key of the following song. Though Minna is said to have idealized Haydn, there is little stylistic evidence of this in her keyboard allegro, which employs distinctively north German textures of two-part melody-bass and the types of “brilliant” figuration, fitting easily under the hands, that saturate C. P. E. Bach’s sonatas, rondos, and fantasias für Kenner und Liebhaber (for connoisseurs and amateurs; published in six volumes between 1779 and 1787). If Minna was indeed working toward publishing a collection of German lieder, perhaps she planned to incorporate some solo keyboard music as well. This would have been unconventional in a volume of songs, but a precedent, probably known to her, was close at hand in the collection Lieder und Klaviersonaten by Juliane Reichardt, née Benda, published in Hamburg by Carl Ernst Bohn in 1782. That both Minna and Juliane composed solo keyboard music suggests that Hamburg had a distinctive orientation toward keyboard music: it was, after all, home to C. P. E. Bach. Minna’s compositional and performance skills at the keyboard informed her approach to the strophic lied, for which she wrote keyboard parts that sometimes possess a degree of independence from the voice.

example 6. Minna Brandes, untitled allegro in D major for solo keyboard (Nachlass, item 1): (a) mm. 1–41. Allegro

5

9

12

16

19

(continued)

example 6. (a) mm. 1–41 (continued). 22

25

28

31

*

34

38

*The original bass note reads C in error.

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example 6. (b) mm. 84–93. 84

87

90

*

*Presumably A, not F , was intended.

M I N NA’ S HÖ LT Y L I E D E R

Analysis of individual works might appear unnecessary in a study of concepts of authorship, but Minna’s German songs invite consideration because they thematize both death and song. In Hölty’s poetry, pastoral settings are shot through with melancholy. Death is a pervasive but obliquely referenced presence, evoked through such images as winter, melancholy, lost love, grief, leave-taking, and even the nightingale’s lament. Philippe Ariès’s comments on the ontology of death in the eighteenth century are relevant here. He has written that “the moment of death became diffused over the whole length of a life and diluted into a melancholy sense of the brevity of this same life.”79 Foucault grounded this sense of death’s presence in life in medical thinking: “In eighteenth-century medical thought death was both the absolute fact and the most relative of phenomena. It was the end of life and, if it was in its nature to be fatal, it was also the end of the disease; with death, the limit had been reached and truth fulfilled, and by the same breach: in death, disease reached the end of its course, fell silent, and became a thing of memory.”80 “Seufzer” In “Seufzer” (example 7) the narrator of the song is bereaved or abandoned; he or she is alone. Nightingale song intensifies feelings of loneliness amid the togetherness of oth-

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example 7. Minna Brandes, “Seufzer,” for voice and keyboard (Nachlass, item 8). [Klavier

Die

[Kl.

Nach

ti gall

]

]

5

singt

ü

ber all

auf

grü

nen

9

Rei

13

sen

die be

sten

Wei

sen

daß rings um Wald

und

ten.

U

fer

schallt

Manch

ten.

ers. To the “young couples [who] go where the streamlet bubbles clear” the nightingale “sings its finest songs.” But the narrator listens sadly and alone “on the dark path.” A horn-fifth motif in minor mode signals loss and leave-taking. It filters through the song like those morbid mists in Watteau’s L’embarquement pour Cythère (1720–1721). Die Nachtigall Singt überall Auf grünen Reisen Die besten Weisen, Dass ringsum Wald Und Ufer schallt.

All around, the nightingale sings its finest songs on green bows, and woods and banks resound.

Manch junges Paar Geht dort, wo klaar [sic]

Many a young couple goes there, where

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example 8. Minna Brandes, “Seufzer,” harmonic framework expressed as figured bass. 1

6

7

7

8

7

6 5

9

6 4 3

10

11

7 6

7 [ ]

6

12

13

7

6 4

14

5

15 16

6 5

6 4

17

7

= Chromatic fourth

(D minor)

enharmony

Das Bächlein rauschet, Und steht, und lauschet Mit frohem Sinn Der Sängerin.

the little stream whispers, and stand and listen happily To the songster.

Ich höre bang’ Im düstern Gang Der Nachtigallen Gesänge schallen; Denn ach! allein Irr’ ich im Hain.

I listen anxiously on the dark path to the nightingales’ resounding songs; for I, alas, wander alone in the grove.

The complex harmonic syntax of the song describes the narrator’s melancholic introversion and evokes memories of the French baroque tombeau and those mortal calamities—now explicit, now implied—in the fantasias of the Bach family. Indeed, those fantasias often suggest death, grief, and mourning through their intense emotionalism and gestures of lament and despair derived from the modulatory and enharmonic vocabulary of accompanied recitative. These features are stylistic expressive topoi endemic to the genre and do not necessarily represent programmatic responses to specific bereavements.81 Minna would have known C. P. E. Bach’s fantasias through the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (1753 and 1762) and the free fantasias included in volumes 4–6 of the Clavier-Sonaten und freie Fantasien nebst einigen Rondos . . . für Kenner und Liebhaber (1783, 1785, and 1787). Within the miniature framework of strophic song Minna effectively employs the chromatic and modulatory resources of the north German Empfindsamkeit and demonstrates a mastery of musical rhetoric (example 8). She integrates harmonic structure and text-illustrative rhetoric by employing the descending, chromatic tetrachord of the baroque lament as the structural principle of the song. The progression in measures 9–12 evokes C. P. E. Bach’s fantasias and his discussion of the harmonic-modulatory techniques of the genre in the last chapter of part 2 of his Versuch (1762). The tonicization of D♭ minor in measures 10–11 suggests a moment of intense inwardness.

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Nothing in this song is routine, even if its surface rhetorical gestures—the broken sobs and sighs—are, as rhetoric demands, conventional. The gravely solemn but miniature prelude establishes the keyboard as a distinctive voice that can enter into dialogue with the singer (as in the echoes of mm. 5 and 7), granting textural interest within a song of Lilliputian dimensions. This music-rhetorical richness within Minna’s strophic songs suggests authorial intensity in an outwardly unambitious genre. Her artfulness in strophic song amounts to a breach of generic decorum and threatens to replace a volkstümlich musical setting of text with something more like a reading. Strophic repetition is here employed not just as a neutral formal framework but as a musical analogue of the type of subjectivity evoked in Hölty’s poetry: subjectivity by turns explicitly and implicitly female, inescapably bounded by time, fate, and circumstance but exquisitely intricate within these limits. Hönicke’s reference to Minna’s composition of Kleinigkeiten is possibly a response to this intricacy within small dimensions. Her songs adumbrate romanticism’s feminization of artistic detail and the miniature. “Das Traumbild” Johann Christian Brandes’s description of Minna as possessing perfect but evanescent femininity (a woman not really destined for this world) is a trope met in Minna’s setting of “Das Traumbild” (a text also set by Mozart, as K. 530). An implicitly male narrator recalls how, while dreaming in a garden, he beheld the image of a beautiful woman (stanza 1; example 9). As he slept she looked into his soul and stroked his cheek. She was the very image of nature, clad in the garments of a shepherdess, with rosemary wound in her hair and a bouquet of violets. This nocturnal visitation set up a sense of both loss and desire—“Where are you, image, that appeared to me,” the song begins. The narrator seems to seek this image more for self-completion or worship than for purposes of seduction or marriage. Minna’s setting stresses the distress of loss—the narrator’s basic predicament—and the anxiety of searching. The climax of the song arrives with the second half of stanza 1, triggered by the repetition of “where are you.” By contrast, Mozart’s setting from 1787 (coincidentally in the same key and possibly from the same year as Minna’s) reserves its greatest intensity for the last two lines of stanza 1—the stroke of the maiden’s hand on the narrator’s face. Wo bist du, Bild, das vor mir stand, Als ich im Garten träumte, Ins Haar den Rosmarin mir wand, Der um mein Lager keimte? Wo bist du, Bild, das[s] vor mir stand,

Where are you, image, that appeared to me as I was dreaming in the garden, who wound in my hair the rosemary that grew where I slept? Where are you, image, that appeared to me,

example 9. Minna Brandes, “Das Traumbild,” for voice and keyboard (Nachlass, item 5). 3

3

Wo

4

bist

du,

Bild,

das

vor

mir stand,

als ich

im Gar

ten

7

träum

te,

ins Haar

den

Ros

ma

rin

mir wand,

3 3

10

um

3

der

3

3

mein La

ger keim *

te?

3 3

13

cresc.

Wo cresc. 16

bist

du, Bild,

das

vor

mir stand,

mir

in

die See

le

*Score reads E , presumably in error.

(continued)

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example 9 (continued) 3

19

blick

te,

und ei

3

22

an

die Wan 3

ne war

3

me Mäd chen hand

3

3

gen drück

mir

3 3

te?

3

25

Mir in die Seele blickte, Und eine warme Mädchenhand Mir an die Wangen drückte?

that looked into my soul, and with a maiden’s warm hand stroked my cheeks?

Nun such ich dich, mit Harm erfüllt, Bald bei des Dorfes Linden, Bald in der Stadt, geliebtes Bild, Und kann dich nirgends finden.

Now, full of distress, I search for you, now by the village lime trees, now in the town, dear image, but I cannot find you.

Nach jeden Fenster blick’ ich hin, Wo nur ein Schleier wehet, Und habe meine Lieblingin Noch nirgends ausgespähet.

I look through every window where only a veil hangs, but have spied my darling nowhere.

Komm selber, süsses Bild der Nacht, Komm mit den Engelsmienen, Und in der leichten Schäfertracht, Worin du mir erschienen!

Come, sweet image of the night, come with the look of an angel, and wearing the light garments of a shepherdess, in which you appeared to me!

Bring mit die schwanenweisse Hand,

Bring with you the swan-white hand,

Charlotte Brandes and the Beautiful Dead Die mir das Herz gestolen, Das purpurrothe Busenband, Das Sträusschen von Violen.

that stole my heart, the crimson breastband, the little bouquet of violets.

Dein grosses blaues Augenpaar, Woraus ein Engel blickte; Die Stirne, die so freundlich war, Und guten Abend nickte;

Your pair of large blue eyes, through which an angel looks; the brow, that was so friendly, and nodded good night;

Den Mund, der Liebe Paradies, Die kleinen Wangengrübchen, Wo sich der Himmel offen wies, Bring alles mit, mein Liebchen!

the mouth, the paradise of love, the little cheek dimples, where heaven was revealed: bring everything, my darling!

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When the song is sung by a woman, the narrator’s search for the lost feminine is musically cloaked in the female voice. Femininity is an absence in the narrator’s world, but it is a sensuous, vocal presence in the audience’s world. In performance the song makes a feminine ideal both absent and present, and in doing so conveys not only the narrator’s dilemma (the ideal maiden as inhabiting only his dreams) but also the biographical situation of the composer. Woman as absent presence (woman as death) links the circumstances of this music’s publication to its musical-poetic content. This may be a coincidence arising from the shared tropology employed by Johann Christian Brandes as biographer and Hölty as poet. But it may also reflect a grain of truth in Brandes’s account of Minna’s turn to composition when death began to close in around her. Set in this biographical context, the song—like C. P. E. Bach’s free Fantasia in F♯ minor, H. 300/536 (also from 1787)—is a presentiment of the author’s death. What is the sex of the narrator of the poem? If the narrator is female, then her relationship to the lost female image evokes a range of possible scenarios, some reflexive (in which the narrator searches for some lost element of self such as youth, beauty, or [metaphorically] pastoral tranquility), others familial (the loss of a daughter, sister, or other relative) or homosocial (the loss of a friend or lover). Minna’s mother is credited with having introduced classical Grecian costume on the German stage. Such garments are evoked (though not precisely specified) by the narrator of “Traumbild,” who refers to “the light garments of a shepherdess.” It was Minna’s bereavement at her mother’s death in 1786, her father tells us, as well as Minna’s own illness, that triggered her turn to composition.

T H E M E M O I R S O F J O HA N N C H R I S T IA N B R A N D E S

In most cases of female musical authorship before the nineteenth century, this is where the story would likely have ended. But another source of information exists about Minna Brandes and her compositional activities, which significantly

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challenges the accounts provided in her father’s biography of her and Hönicke’s preface. Her father also wrote voluminous memoirs, published in 1799–1800, that offer glimpses of day-to-day life in the Brandes household, and in the third and final volume he devoted more than fifty pages to the time leading up to Minna’s final illness, dwelling particularly on what he describes as a dramatic change in her behavior following her mother’s death. Brandes eventually restates his earlier eulogy of Minna’s character. But this angelic image is arrived at after an extensive critique of Minna’s conduct, in which he details shockingly undaughterly behavior and raises grave doubts over Minna’s chastity. In her father’s estimation, Minna’s identity moved vertiginously between angel and prostitute. In volume 3, chapter 5, he describes an anonymous letter, purportedly from the father of a suitor, that described Minna as “the whore of Curland” and accused Brandes of acting as her pimp to entrap a young man into marriage.82 Minna’s own views do not survive, and her father’s memoirs are not a neutral source. They were offered to the public as a way both of documenting injustices done to him by Minna’s friends and colleagues and of clearing his name from charges, circulating as gossip and lore, that he was uncommonly harsh toward his daughter. Nonetheless, the level of detail in Johann Christian Brandes’s narration of Minna’s conversation and conduct toward himself and others provides as accurate a glimpse as we are ever likely to have of her life, and to some extent it is possible to distinguish between her father’s interpretations and the neutral factual layer of his narrative. Brandes’s memoirs shed light on the meaning of Minna’s memorialization and on her compositional output in three principal areas. First, they describe the context in which Minna turned to composition, specifically, the perceived breach of her role as a deferential daughter. Second, they describe so deep a hostility between Hönicke and Johann Christian Brandes, particularly after Minna’s death, that Hönicke’s publication of her compositions required her father to offer further interpretation. Third, they describe Minna’s illness as a profligate period during which she gifted the larger part of her estate to friends, leaving her father impoverished. This situation may itself have stimulated the publication of her music by subscription, which proved rewarding economically. Johann Christian Brandes acknowledged that the death of his wife led to a change in Minna, who, he says, now understood herself to be no longer the daughter but the lady of the house. Brandes was stunned by the transformation, even though such changes in the wake of death were (and still are) commonplace. Indeed, one of the functions of the memorials and mementos that proliferated in the late eighteenth century was to minimize death’s disruption of the social fabric by maintaining the deceased, and his or her social identity, as an absent presence. Minna’s considerable professional success and income at this time no doubt supported her sense that her place in the world was changing and that it was no longer appropriate for her to continue the role of dutiful daughter toward her widowed father.

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Minna was also entering her marriageable years and sought independence in the choice of a husband, even if she outwardly accepted her father’s ultimate authority to approve, or disapprove, of her choice. I say “outwardly accepted” because it seems likely that Minna’s heart was hardened against her father when he prevented her marriage to a certain “Spl—r,” whose identity is not disclosed. Johann Christian Brandes was not the only obstacle to this marriage—indeed, he was prepared to grant his blessing once Spl—r received his own father’s permission to wed. The young couple appears to have clung to the hope of marriage until Minna’s death, but this permission never came. Minna’s resentment toward her father could have arisen from his proscriptive involvement in this matter.83 Although Brandes attributed his daughter’s coldness toward him to her manipulation by false friends, we probably need look no further than this affair to find a significant source of her frustration with him. Minna turned away from her father and chose instead the company of friends and theatrical colleagues; she resented his constant presence and refused to accord him the deference in social gatherings that he expected. The receipt of the letter accusing Minna of whoring may have led Johann Christian to exercise excessive vigilance about his daughter’s reputation, or at least a degree of vigilance that she found unacceptable. Brandes clearly expected that Minna should behave at home with affectionate deference toward him, refrain from pursuing an independent, unchaperoned social life, and defer matters of expenditure and housekeeping to him and the servants under his control. He wrote of the conflict with his daughter in sentimental terms as so many inexplicable emotional wounds inflicted by an undaughterly daughter, and as harm done against a father by a daughter whose disregard he could not understand. Such tribulations testify to the centrality and fragility of father-daughter relationships in this period. (The plot of Corona Schröter’s singspiel Die Fischerin also turns on a volatile father-daughter relationship.) As Edward McInnes has stated in a study of such relationships in German drama by Lessing, Lenz, and Schiller, “The tie between father and daughter was widely hailed as the most sensitive, tender bond within the family unit, but also at the same time as the most exposed, the most vulnerable to insidious pressures of misunderstanding and mutual estrangement.”84 The dangerous affair with Spl—r was repeated, in Brandes’s mind, in a close friendship that developed (sometime during or after 1785, with the family’s return to Hamburg from Riga) between Minna and Hönicke, her former music teacher, current employer as the director of the Hamburg Theater, and eventual publisher of her music. It is remarkable to learn, through the memoirs, of a violent rift between Hönicke and Johann Christian Brandes in the last year of Minna’s life. Hönicke’s return to Minna’s life is narrated with something approaching faux naïveté. Brandes recounts his initial pleasure at the keen musical interest Hönicke showed in Minna and even tells us that he relied on Hönicke to keep Minna

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company, and usefully employed, at home during his absences.85 During these absences Hönicke and Minna spent time together in her room engaged, it was believed, in music practice. These lessons were not to be interrupted by visitors, Brandes ordained, especially young male visitors. Brandes’s innocent account of Minna’s music lessons as retreats from the dangers of mixed company is difficult to take at face value. Given his vigilance about his daughter’s chastity, it seems implausible that he was unaware of the possibility that a relationship might develop between Minna and Hönicke. Hönicke’s daily visits to her must have suggested at least the possibility of an attachment. From Brandes’s perspective, Hönicke would have been a desirable match for Minna: he was a well-established theater director and an esteemed figure in Hamburg’s cultural life. Indeed, in an attempt to gain insight into her feelings, Brandes at one point informed Minna that he would have no objection to her marrying Hönicke. The arrangements that Brandes put in place for Minna’s music lessons seem almost contrived to allow a relationship to develop. Certainly their servant, Johann, had his suspicions. Brandes reports in the memoirs that one morning, as he was on his way out, Johann took him aside: “I could be wrong,” he started quietly, “but it seems to me, that Mlle. Minna is carrying on a secret liaison with H[önicke], since I’ve often noticed that, in your presence, they sit there as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, but the moment your back’s turned, they whisper in one another’s ears, give one another all kinds of signs, and occasionally look at one another as if by and by they wanted to be together. If you go out, then the door gets locked, under the pretext that they don’t want to be disturbed in their music. But we hear neither playing nor singing. And as soon as they hear, from the sound of the stairs or your poodle barking, that you’re back, the door’s unlocked, and singing and playing echo through the whole house. I could be wrong, as I said, but . . . !”86

Horrified but not about to lose face to his servant, Brandes attempted to explain away the suspicious silence: “My horror at this entirely unexpected report can be readily imagined. I sought as best as possible to compose myself, and replied that this supposed secret familiarity between them was youthful dilly-dallying, which concerned not a secret love but other circumstances that they dared not disclose to me. I had expressly urged Minna to lock the door, and if no instrument were heard, then it was a sign that compositional, or some other verbal instruction was taking place.”87 “My faithful Johann,” Brandes reported, “shook his head and went.”88 This account of his daughter’s authorship differs from that in Brandes’s biography of her. There Minna composes in sickness and sorrow as a kind of sacrifice to art and an aesthetic-musical apotheosis. In the memoirs Brandes states that Minna was already composing prior to her illness and that her intensive composition lessons were supervised by Hönicke. In the biography Minna works by herself, communing only with her art: “In the last year of her life she composed the majority of those

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songs that were published, after her death, as Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes.” In the later memoirs the passage that paraphrases the biography is altered to draw attention to Hönicke’s role: “During this time [of her illness] she composed, under H[önicke]’s guidance, the majority of the songs that were published after her death as Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes.”89 These differences suggest that Johann Christian’s earlier account of Minna’s authorship was shaped by the discourse of the beautiful dead and the desire to perfect the virtue of the deceased. The cultural meaning that Brandes accorded Minna’s authorship in his memoirs is (perhaps intentionally and irreducibly) ambiguous. The explanation of Minna’s silent music lessons that he offers his servant lends itself to more than one interpretation. Brandes refers to “youthful dilly-dallying [jugendliche Tändelei], which concerned not a secret love but other circumstances that they dared not disclose to me.” His reference to “composition” in the next sentence can be read as that same “dilly-dallying,” which they might have felt the need to keep secret. This reading renders composition transgressive and describes Minna’s studies of composition as part of her breach of social role, an interpretation that would fit well with modern assumptions that women’s authorship was dangerous, even prohibited. It is also possible to read Brandes’s suggestion of composition behind closed doors as unrelated to his reference, in the preceding sentence, to “youthful dillydallying.” In this reading Brandes simply notes composition in passing without implying transgression. Such a reading is just as valid but disappoints a desire for images of women breaking the mold defined for them by men. In its own way radical, this reading tells us that female composition was not necessarily a remarkable or dangerous activity, at least in Brandes’s mind.90 This difficulty about how to read Brandes’s memoirs may itself offer a solution: Brandes does not commit himself to a specific view of his daughter’s activities as a composer. Throughout this episode of his memoirs he subjects his daughter to moral evaluation, thus inviting the reader to form a view of her activities as a composer. But at precisely the point that composition enters this drama of virtue and vice, Brandes withholds judgment. In the structure of Brandes’s account of his daughter, composition mediates between proper and improper conduct. Compositional instruction explains away the suspicious silence but, if only by association, is colored with the transgressive character of sexual activity. Emblematizing Minna’s professional accomplishments and ambition, compositional instruction is at the same time her alibi. The evil curse, the good fairy of this story seems to say, can only be mitigated, not entirely vanquished: your daughter will not be a whore, but she will be a composer. Brandes’s memoirs reveal profound distrust of Hönicke and a struggle between them for Minna’s affections. This changes our perception of Hönicke’s publication of Minna’s Nachlass. His memorial to her may after all not have arisen from a harmonious patriarchal collaboration around the idealized memory of the

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deceased; rather, it may have been an initiative, quite possibly Hönicke’s in the first instance, embedded in a tussle of love and a struggle for ownership.91 In publishing Minna’s works, Hönicke may have been inspired by her independent spirit and achievements as a professional musician. This is not to deny that her memorialization through the trope of the beautiful dead contained her authorship: male framing, the passivity ensured by her death, and Hönicke’s own prefatory fiction of Minna’s composing occasional works all upheld “correct” versions of woman and femininity. But we need to enrich this reading through knowledge, uniquely available in the case of Minna Brandes, of microcontext. Set in the context of Brandes’s memoirs, Hönicke’s memorial testified to Minna’s at least partial autonomy. The relationship between Hönicke and Brandes reached a melodramatic dénouement over the corpse of Minna Brandes. Overcome with grief and seeking solace in Hönicke’s arms, Brandes was met with a threat of violence and the accusation that he had murdered his daughter by overworking her: My grief so overwhelmed me that I sank down against H[önicke], exhausted, to seek comfort in his arms. But he pulled away from me abruptly, with a furious expression, and raised fists, shouting: “Say nothing—not a syllable—you, your daughter’s murderer, or I’ll strangle you!” Those standing close by held the madman by the arms and kept him back. I stood there stunned, cast down with the deepest pain [but also] roused to fury by this excruciating turn of events. I wanted to speak, but my tongue stuck to my palate; I wanted to hit the inhuman creature to the floor, but my limbs were frozen and my chest rose so forcefully that I could hardly breathe. I feared a sudden seizure, and so staggered limply to my room.92

If they were at loggerheads, why did Brandes allow Hönicke to publish Minna’s music and appear on the title page of the Nachlass with a dedication to Dorothee, Duchess of Curland? Neither Hönicke’s preface to Minna’s Nachlass nor Brandes’s memoirs answer this question, and we can only speculate whether grief over Minna’s death perhaps reconciled the two men and allowed them to collaborate in preparing a memorial. Money may also have played a significant part in Brandes’s decision to recognize Minna’s authorship and join Hönicke in disseminating the memory of his daughter in a musical memorial. Brandes describes Minna’s dying explicitly as a profligate period and implicitly as the opposite of a “good death” marked by order and abstemiousness. During her illness Minna gave away many precious objects to friends— Hönicke, in particular—and ordered, so Brandes tells us, that visitors and friends be lavishly hosted. For Brandes, this lack of economy seems to have duplicated Minna’s loss (death as debit and loss of precious things): “Almost every day valuables went missing from my daughter’s room, among other things a precious diamond ring. This latter theft I announced to the Jews, goldsmiths, and in the published press, but this was an unnecessary expense, since the ring remained lost.”93 Brandes had clearly expected Minna’s estate to fall to him, and her gift giving broke the

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economic loop of the artisan family. He was shocked to learn from her suitor Schulz “that the invalid did not only almost daily give handsome presents to her favorite male and female friends, but promised—in the event she did not recover—to divide her entire, very extensive wardrobe among the latter.”94 But just as she gave away her estate to friends—rather than keeping it in the family—she rejected her father’s tokens of affection. He reports that the fruit and flowers that he brought her each morning were received with indifference and given to friends as gifts.95 On the day after Minna’s death Hönicke informed Brandes of a notarized bequest, prepared secretly by Minna and her friends, that left her remaining estate to Hönicke, who explained: During Minna’s illness, I had often had to make considerable advances of money; and since Minna still remembered, near her death, the many unremunerated efforts I had made with respect to her instruction in music, but, at the same time, feared that, after her death, I would be denied payment for these debts . . . so she entrusted me for the time being with her large diamond ring and a golden box, in addition to promising me her fortepiano, and prepared a notarized statement about these three items. I would receive an exact copy of the statement upon request. To be even more certain, she had given me her diamond necklace and several broaches as security.96

Hönicke could shed no light on the other vanished treasures—“the golden boxes, rings, clocks, medallions, etc.”—but suggested that Minna had “sold [them] out of a lack of money.”97 Brandes took further offence at this hypothesis, which again accused him of financially using, and abusing, his daughter. Even Minna’s lavish funeral and interment were tinged with hurt and waste for Brandes. Minna left instructions not with her father but with Hönicke, and these stipulated an expensive burial in Niensteden, a village two miles from Hamburg, after a period of eight days (in which, presumably, Minna’s corpse would be laid out for visitors). In a footnote in his memoirs Brandes clarified, with pride and a sigh of relief, that a local businessman, a friend of Minna, covered the expenses of the church service and grave.98 Despite these disagreements Hönicke may have prepared the collection of Minna’s music as a charitable enterprise for Brandes’s benefit. The bereaved father had withdrawn from his work for the Hamburg Theater and was emotionally and financially drained. With a subscription list of 518 copies, Minna’s Nachlass was an exceptionally lucrative publication for this period in Germany.99 The title of the collection, Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes, describes her music as an “estate.” In the absence of gold and diamonds, this estate appears to have been all that Minna left within her father’s legal domain. The profits are impossible to calculate precisely because the price of the subscription is not known. But they were likely considerable if the collection sold for a standard price of 1.5 reichsthaler (rt). After deducting the expenses of publication and distribution this would

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have provided a profit of around 697 rt or 139.4 louis d’or (according to Hamburg exchange rates in the 1780s). This would have been about eight months’ salary for C. P. E. Bach as kantor in Hamburg, and three and a half times the annual stipend he sent his son in Leipzig, where the latter was a student of painting.100 Publication not only created a memorial sign of Minna in her absence but helped to compensate her father for the multiple material losses that accompanied his daughter’s death, losses he seems to have experienced metaphorically as so many proliferating bereavements. This commingling of economic and emotional issues is generally characteristic of the period. Stephen Clark has noted how C. P. E. Bach “mingles his grief and his receipts” when writing to Breitkopf shortly after the death of his son, Johann Sebastian the Younger.101 Alongside this financial consolation, the emotional richness of the texts and music of Minna’s German songs brought at least some sentiment, emanating from the deceased, into the present of the bereaved father, perhaps in part compensating for that aberrant coldness that so terrified him in Minna’s last year of life. And, as with all memorials, Minna’s music and biography provided for those left behind a symbolic representation of the deceased, a presence in absence. M E A N I N G S F O R F E M A L E M U SIC A L AU T HO R SH I P

Minna’s debut as a deceased composer had multiple meanings and significance: it was a corrective to her loss, a public celebration of her achievements, a means of generating income, a way to locate her in the discourse of the beautiful dead, and a form of containment. Who could be threatened by an authoress whose opus 1 was her memorial? Posthumous publication enabled Hönicke and Minna’s father to author the authoress, that is, to write her life, edit her music, and interpret the meaning of both for posterity. At a higher level of abstraction, however, Minna’s entrance into print culture with her death points up something intrinsic to printed texts: they grant a presence to their absent authors. Feminist criticism has sensitized us to men’s attempts to control female-authored works, but, at the same time, poststructuralist criticism invites us to question the possibility of authorial agency. In this context Minna’s Nachlass epitomizes the passivity of composers in relation to the meanings that posterity ascribes to them and their work. Minna’s story is not simply about gendered double standards. We do not need to accede to Barthes’s patricidal call for the death of the author (as a figure of authority guiding our reading) to admit that eighteenth-century music is “authored” in part by our discourse about it.102 Mozart’s Requiem, to choose a random example, is no more capable of speaking to us on the composer’s terms than Minna’s Musikalischer Nachlass can speak on hers. Hönicke’s impulse to mitigate a premature death with a musical memorial may strike us as entirely natural, but it was relatively novel in his day. Dedicated to a

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female musician and composer, it was all the more unusual and presumably stimulated by the dramatic increase in published women composers in the immediately preceding years. As a monument in the form of complete works it was possibly unprecedented in its day. Minna’s memorialization anticipated the memorials to C. P. E. Bach, Haydn, and Mozart that were produced in both stone and paper around 1800. But whereas the memorialization of male composers tended to stress their production of beautiful music and was tied to emerging discourses of the musical canon and German musical history, Minna’s memorialization by Hönicke stressed the composer herself as beautiful object, as artifact. Minna’s story recalls, but differs from, C. P. E. Bach’s self-memorialization through subscription publications in his later Hamburg years, a project that was more pointedly didactic in compositional matters and sought to highlight his mastery of expression and his fertile genius, as is evident in the following letters to his publisher, Breitkopf: If I can hope for 100 subscribers, which will become apparent within 4 weeks, I want to come out with my [sacred cantata of 1776] Heilig; this Heilig is an attempt to inspire far greater attention and sentiment through entirely natural and ordinary harmonic progressions than one can attain with any amount of nervous chromaticism. It is to be my swan song of this type, and thereby serve the purpose that I may not be forgotten too soon after my death. My friends positively wanted 2 fantasias included [in the fourth volume of keyboard music “for connoisseurs and amateurs,” 1783], so that after my death one could see what a Fantast I was.103

Ideas of separate male and female spheres, and of the contrasting characteristics of the sexes, may have encouraged women to subscribe to Minna’s Nachlass. In Hamburg women formed the slim majority of the 159 subscribers: eighty-four were female (52.8 percent) and seventy-two male (45.3 percent); of the remaining three subscribers, two were commercial booksellers (1.3 percent) and one was anonymous (0.6 percent). The discourse of the beautiful female dead, although male authored, captured women’s imaginations. Among the female subscribers appear forty-two unmarried women whose names do not appear in any subscription lists to the music of C. P. E. Bach, Minna’s Hamburg contemporary and acquaintance. Perhaps these ladies were emboldened to appear unchaperoned in print because of the curious, melancholic circumstances of the collection and because Minna was an unmarried female author with whom they could identify.104 Professional colleagues of Minna and the Brandes family are largely absent from the list. There is scant evidence of subscriptions coming from former colleagues and acquaintances from the family’s travels prior to their residence in Hamburg. For example, none from the courts in Weimar, Gotha, Königsberg, and Mannheim subscribed. Nor does it appear that audiences of Minna’s public concerts outside of Hamburg signed up for the Nachlass: Mannheim provided only three subscriptions, even though,

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figure 9. Title page of Juliane Reichardt, née Benda, Lieder und Klaviersonaten (Hamburg: C. E. Bohn, 1782). Reproduced with permission of the Conservatoire Royale, Brussels.

according to Brandes, Minna had concertized there extensively and with great success in 1779–1780.105 Is Minna Brandes unique among women composers of the period? The title page of Juliane Reichardt’s Lieder und Klaviersonaten (1782) includes a quote, in free German translation, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (figure 9). In the quoted passage Laertes advises Ophelia on the brevity of love, invoking, in so doing, death and Ophelia’s subsequent flower-bedecked drowning: A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward not permanent, sweet not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.106

What Juliane Reichardt intended this epigram to signify is unclear: the reader must author its meaning. Perhaps it was meant to grant the cover of the otherwise plainly titled collection of songs and piano sonatas a fashionably morbid depth, as part of the cult of feeling, or it may have invited consumers to connect the publication to the cult of Shakespeare and taste for “northern” or “gothic” art. This appeal

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to the gothic on the part of a female composer could even be understood as a strategy of self-inclusion in an emerging cultural “Germanness.”107 But at face value the epigram evokes death through reference to the transience of flowers, which colors Juliane Reichardt’s entrance into print with a sense of loss or mourning. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that she died in May of the following year. Or is it possible that she gathered these works together, as a self-fashioned memorial, when her health began to fail, or at least in preparation for death, whenever it might come? The collection seems to be more a “complete works” (and thus a musical monument) than a publication of music for a target audience: not only is it unusually large, including seventeen songs and two keyboard sonatas, but its mixing of songs and keyboard pieces is exceptional. Shakespeare’s image of the brief flowering and perfume of the violet (like those weeping camellia bushes on the title page of Minna Brandes’s Nachlass) seems to describe the female composer as beautiful but transient nature—a flower soon to blossom and die. The case of Minna Brandes was not, then, entirely unprecedented in this period. Nor did the metonymy of her memorialization—the chain of equivalence between death, music, woman, and authorship—die with her. Minna’s story adumbrated early romantic figurations of musical authorship as feminine and linked to death, figurations that were part of the idealist conception of music as sacred in character, divine in origin. A death-tinged or ghostly female composer was an ideal vessel through which music, as divine and otherworldly, could pass into the world. In her novel Florentin (1801) Dorothea Schlegel included a mysteriously absent royal female composer, Clementine, who communicates with other characters, mostly Juliane, through letters but makes ongoing excuses for not joining them in their world. Clementine, possibly based on Anna Amalie of Prussia, lives a life of seclusion, fostering sacred music through her own compositions and those of old masters and undertaking charitable projects for improving the lot of the local poor.108 The effect of her choral and contrapuntal music on the musician Florentin is similar to the effects of music described in W. H. Wackenroder’s Herzenergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Confessions of an art-loving monk; 1797). In part because sacred music gives access to the divine and the infinite, it is experienced by both Clementine and Florentin as a death of the worldly, mundane realm. Music threatens to overpower, to extinguish life, with its own superhuman power. Thus, during a choral performance of her own music at the end of the novel, Clementine meets Florentin’s eyes: “Bending far forward, she remained in the same position for several moments, her eyes firmly fixed on him in visible amazement. A quick flush fled over the marble of her face, then she turned pale again; her eyes closed, and she sank back in a faint.” Wandering in the garden after the performance Florentin declares, “My spirit was relieved from all concerns of this life. As if on angelic wings, I felt removed from the earth by the all-powerful tones and saw a new world opening before my eyes.”109

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I noted at the beginning of this chapter that Goethe’s novels share with the story of Minna Brandes an interest in female death as an occasion for the exhibition and curatorship of the beautiful. But the deceased female author was not just evidence of lamentable female disempowerment: she was an image of “the aesthetic,” connecting the human and the artificial, the animate and inanimate, flesh and the ideal, life and death. As a context for female authorship, death is evidence of double standards, but in this period the very means of containing female authorship also facilitated it and made it meaningful. The absence of documents attesting to Minna’s motivations for and conceptions of her authorship is frustrating. But this dilemma is not exclusive to women artists of the period, and Minna’s posthumous publication and interpretation by Hönicke and Johann Christian Brandes exemplify the passivity of not just female artists but all artists in regard to the meanings granted them by posterity. Though Minna’s own views are not accessible, we learn enough from the representations of her in surviving sources to conclude that female creativity in the late German Enlightenment was interpreted in complex ways—according to the context, author, and genre of the interpretation—and that it emblematized not so much the achieved “freedom” from tutelage enshrined in Kant’s definition of “Enlightenment” as a negotiation of the tension between tutelage and the quest for an autonomous self.110 Minna’s composing and contemporary interpretations of it—linked discursively, and factually, to her death, her vanishing, but providing a record of the self; situated ambiguously on the continuum of female virtue and vice; prompted by personal creative volition and by economic need; freely undertaken but constrained through conventions of genre, market forces, and the availability of instruction—prefigure the nuanced interpretations of authorship in current cultural theory as involving an unresolvable play between presence and absence, self-assertion and self-effacement, and conformity to and refashioning of our world.111

4

An Evening in Tiefurt Corona Schröter’s Die Fischerin and Vegetable Genius

2 2 J U LY 1 7 8 2

Anna Amalia, Dowager Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, walked to the opera house that evening.1 The premiere of Die Fischerin (The Fisherwoman) took place deep in the rustic parkland that extended from her summer residence in the village of Tiefurt near Weimar to encompass the river Ilm, gently meandering in its meadow course and forming a natural boundary between ducal parkland and the neighboring countryside.2 On this evening, after sunset, the banks of the Ilm formed a natural stage, illuminated with bonfires and torches, for the performance of the one-act singspiel. The duchess and her guests were housed in the Mooshütte (Moss Cottage), as the court poet and royal tutor Christoph Martin Wieland had christened the rustic outbuilding.3 The wall that faced the Ilm was removed, allowing the audience an uninterrupted view of a clearing, framed by tall alders, a few fishermen’s huts contrived from branches and straw, the river, and the inkblack countryside beyond. To take a carriage would have been impractical.4 Park Tiefurt was a wild and rustic affair, far removed in style from the more formal parkland around the neighboring Weimar Castle, or, for that matter, the midcentury landscapes of Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–1783), familiar to English readers, then and now. Accessible only through the Webicht Forest, Tiefurt offered a rustic retreat for the duchess, more secluded than Ettersberg, where she had spent previous summers. The park was formed around a felicitous natural feature, a semicircle traced by the Ilm. In a recent enlargement, perhaps directed by the previous residents (Prince Constantin and his tutor, Karl Ludwig von Knebel), this arc was 123

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figure 10. Plan of Park Tiefurt, from Friedrich Menzel, Schloss Tiefurt (1966). Reproduced with permission of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

artistically encompassed within the park (figure 10).5 A network of new curving paths on the far side of the river echoed its sinuous contour. There was only one straight path from the “castle” (Schloss Tiefurt, no more than a converted farmhouse) into the grounds, and this led to a bridge (the Schafbrücke), far from the forest clearing where Die Fischerin was to be performed.6 A smaller, wooded path offered a shorter route. It was a midsummer evening, and Anna Amalia was not the sort of royal personage to stand on ceremony or arrive with undue pomp. Part of the enlightened ethos of the amateur troupe, which she had formed in January 1776, after fire destroyed the court theater in 1774, was the suspension of distinctions of rank. With the professional troupe of Abel Seyler disbanded, and no dedicated space for performance, royalty, courtiers, and townspeople from Weimar rubbed shoulders in ad hoc, German-language theatricals.7 Anna Amalia appeared onstage and composed. She wrote the music for the often performed singspiel Erwin und Elmire (premiered 24 May 1776), on a libretto by the then newly appointed Goethe, and, two years later, for Goethe’s Das Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern

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(The annual fair in Trashville).8 In summer 1780 she composed an unusual work that she designated as “ein Walddrama” (a forest drama), which brought together theater, landscape, and music.9 Die Zigeuner (The gypsies) was performed outdoors, and at night, in a wooded area of Anna Amalia’s (then) summer palace of Ettersberg.10 The libretto was based on a text by Friedrich Hildebrand von Einsiedel, entitled Adolar und Hilaria, “ein Schauspiel mit Gesang.” Anna Amalia’s title highlighted the music-making “gypsies” at the heart of the piece, whose affinity (in late eighteenth-century thought) for nature, music, and dance may have lent plausibility to this fire-lit, quasi-ethnographic spectacle. The piece barely registers in the annals of singspiel (it is absent, for example, from Thomas Bauman’s foundational and fairly exhaustive survey of the north German repertoire), but it achieved brief fame beyond Weimar in the 1780s through its mention by Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld (1742–1792), a professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel and the premier garden theorist and historian of the period. The fact that Die Zigeuner endures in a discussion of the art of gardening, rather than in modern historical narratives about the rise of German opera, is fortunate, as we are able to encounter the piece in its original aesthetic context, which it shared with Die Fischerin: Imagine a woodland through which paths are hewn in the manner of the English park—then you will have an idea of the whole [of the Ettersberg Park], and of the diversity of ever new, ever varied scenes and beauties that, in such a layout, spring directly from nature, not from the legislation of art. For the most part the paths are like arbors, impenetrable to the rays of the sun and to rain. Everywhere, benches, or old tree stumps fashioned into seats, beckon the rambler to shadowy places, or focus his attention on beautiful views. . . . If one follows the paths, one comes here to a pool, cool like the pools of nymphs, there to [bird] baths in the shrubbery; here one is surprised by a trellis-work gazebo, there one stands before a table of white marble made in the antique style, its feet entwined with snakes. The master who made it is Oeser. Not far from here is the bust of this great man, made by Klauer in Weimar, an artist of great promise, carved in as lifelike a manner as possible, and on a stone medallion one read’s Jacobi’s plea: Oh! Let us pass through life Smiling to the sound of sweet songs, And when the last day begins to dim, Stay calm, with this same smile.

In one of the forest’s romantic wildernesses lies a cottage, or bark house, furnished inside with as much simplicity as its exterior, with wooden tools and rush matting. Not far from here, there is a large semicircular clearing that serves as a stage for many a festivity. In a chamber of the duchess I saw a painting by [Georg Melchior] Kraus that depicts a scene from the production Die Zigeuner by Einsiedel, which was performed here at nighttime.11

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In Hirschfeld’s narrative the woodland is a place at the boundary of art and nature. Even a highly artificial feature like the antique table built by Friedrich Adam Oeser showcases the natural beauty of white marble, and every beautiful vista of nature is framed and focused by a bench or carved tree stump from which to view it. Like a museum or sculpture gallery, the woodland is experienced by moving through it in a route whose lack of any other purpose than that of moving through landscape is the mark of an appropriately disinterested (aesthetic) orientation. Through this aesthetic attitude the woodland is transfigured into an ideal form of itself, of “woodlandness.” As an aesthetic construct the woodland is experienced as a living artwork. Human presence is everywhere marked in paths, buildings, and sculpture, but the woodland is also self-generating. Human authorship is subsumed within organic growth. Oeser, a contributing author, is represented in stone, as if the garden itself were paying tribute to him. The signs of human presence in the woodland are variously didactic, humorous, uncanny, and phantasmic. Oeser’s bust is a memento mori work, reminding, ordaining even, that every viewer will die, and enjoining them to a life of happiness and song. Architectural exotica, fragments of the antique, and rustic cottages suspend unities of time and place, suggesting that the woodland was, or still is, home to strangers. The visitor is invited to discover the original inhabitants and civilizations of these eerily empty buildings. The woodland itself, covered with a roof of branches, is both outside and inside, affording within the landscape a dimly lit interior in which might live the native tribes of Germany, as described by Tacitus, or bathing nymphs—or “gypsies.” Die Zigeuner is an apparitional moment at the end of Hirschfeld’s wondering, a performance that he never witnessed but that serves nonetheless as the culmination of a series of strange encounters with culture. Unconstrained by any description of its content, Die Zigeuner flares up in the reader’s imagination. Few would have seen Kraus’s painting depicting a group of gypsy musicians in a forest clearing, lit by the dancing flames of a bonfire. At the boundary of the real and imaginary, Die Zigeuner is phantasmic: the singspiel that isn’t there.12 DI E F I S C H E R I N

Die Fischerin was Tiefurt’s answer to Die Zigeuner, a sequel in which the arts of landscape, song, and theater would again be united under the signs of nature and the ephemeral. The composer was Corona Schröter (1751–1802), who had played the female lead Hilaria in Die Zigeuner, which allows the suspicion that Anna Amalia was passing the mantle of female authorship to this favored actress and singer of her amateur theater.13 As in the earlier work, Schröter played the lead character, Dortchen, a fisherman’s daughter. The drama opens with her voice, in a strophic setting of the supernatural ballad “Der Erlkönig” (example 10). This was

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example 10. Corona Schröter, “Der Erlkönig,” opening number, Dortchen’s ballad, from Die Fischerin. Feierlich, langsam

Wer reit’t so spät durch

hat den Kna ben wohl

Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit sei nem Kind; Er

in

dem Arm, Er faßt ihn si cher, er

hält ihn warm.

the first setting of the traditional Danish poem that Goethe had adapted for the occasion from the collection of folk songs published a few years before by his Weimar colleague Johann Gottfried Herder. A tale set at night, about the abduction of a child by a malevolent, predatory spirit, which the child’s father fails to understand or prevent, “Der Erlkönig” is a chilling opening to a nocturnal singspiel. It was also a response to the setting—what better way to begin a drama set in woodland, where art and nature blur in dreamlike (un)reality, than with a stage song that seems to belong as much to the landscape, and Dortchen, as to the artificial realm of opera, which is barely referenced in a sparse accompaniment. No great leap of the imagination was required for the audience in the dismantled Moss Cottage to believe that they had just happened upon a superstitious fisherwoman, singing to herself near the banks of the Ilm, her face strangely flickering by the light of a small fire, her voice disappearing into the night. Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind; Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm, Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

Who rides so late through the night and wind? It is the father with his child; He has the boy safely under his arm, He holds him tight and keeps him warm.

An ideal occasion for the display of Schröter’s diverse talents as composer, singer, and actress, Die Fischerin incorporated an element of homage. This leading light

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of the amateur theater had arrived in Weimar in 1776 on Goethe’s initiative. A protégé of the “father of singspiel” Johann Adam Hiller in Leipzig, she premiered a series of epochal works and roles, including the eponymous heroine of Goethe’s prose tragedy Iphigenia auf Tauris (1779). She soon emerged, and was subsequently mythologized by Goethe, as the embodiment of the aesthetic ideals of the amateur theater: a living muse.14 Though Anna Amalia’s amateur theater was not formally replaced by a professional troupe until 1783, it appears that, already in the summer of the previous year, the amateur company was aware of its impending dissolution—a context that invites us to imagine Die Fischerin as a kind of farewell performance for the leading actress. The unusual characterization and plot also suggest that the performance was (among other things) a vehicle for Schröter. Dortchen is a complex, rounded character surrounded by flattened, generic character types, which makes her not just an individual but a representative of individualism. Her father, bluntly called “Vater,” is a thick-skinned authoritarian, apparently oblivious to his daughter’s discontent. His lack of humanizing sensibility situates him in a world not entirely distinct from that of “Der Erlkönig.” (In the emotional heat of the culture of sensibility, coldness was a sign of the supernatural and the inhuman.) Dortchen’s fiancé, Niklas, mediates between father and daughter. The other characters are simply “neighbors,” who spend most of the play asleep, then act as torchbearers in a search scene, as if they were merely instruments of lighting, or, at a subliminal level, the living dead. In Goethe’s thinking the search scene relates back to “Der Erlkönig”: both, as he put it to Caroline Herder, concern a “lost child.”15 In this respect Goethe’s sense of his work differs from that of Thomas Bauman, who has declared the song “on a dramatic theme unconnected with the opera’s.”16 If Die Fischerin honored Schröter, it also, at the level of plot, threatened her annihilation. Superstition and fate haunt the characters, and death hovers over the figure of Dortchen, the bride. Even a basic summary of the plot shows how intensively death is figured, both in comic and serious ways (often together), and how it lingers at the end of the performance. At the opening of the piece Dortchen is anxious and impatient, waiting for her father and her fiancé, Niklas, to return for dinner from a day’s fishing. To pass the time she sings to herself (nos. 1 and 2 in table 3). With dinner ruined by the men’s late arrival, Dortchen determines to teach them a lesson, arranging things so as to imply she has fallen into the river. This metatheatrical “plot” is both a punishment and an attempt to reform men’s manners and make them more sociable. This rings a familiar tune, invoking in miniature, as it does, the trope of woman’s civilizing mission. In Die Fischerin this trope may have been read as a compliment to Schröter, perhaps even to Anna Amalia, as leading figures of the amateur theater. But the sovereign feminine does not ultimately hold sway in the superstitious, tradition-bound fishing village of the plot. As Dortchen hears her father and Niklas returning (no. 3) she hides. On their return with a good catch, the men speculate casually on where Dortchen may be;

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table 3 Musical numbers in Corona Schröter’s Die Fischerin (Lyrics from Herder’s Volkslieder appear in bold; cues to the plot are in italics) Dortchen sings as she waits for Niklas and her father (Vater) to return no. 1 “Wer reitet so spät” (Der Erlkönig) (Dortchen); strophic song no. 2 “Für Männer uns zu plagen” (Dortchen); strophic song Deciding to punish the men, Dortchen hides. The men return, singing as they work. no. 3 “Wenn der Fischers Netz auswirft” (Vater und Niklas); strophic song no. 4 “Auf dem Fluß” (Vater); strophic song Finding Dortchen absent, Niklas sings a scary song no. 5 “O Mutter, guten Rat mir leiht” (Der Wassermann) (Niklas); strophic song The search scene: the men fear Dortchen drowned no. 6 “Helft! Helft sie retten!” (Vater, Niklas, Chorus); choral scene with orchestral accompaniment and solo voices The confrontation scene: Dortchen confesses her deception, her father reacts angrily [no. 7] “Es ist mir der Streich” (Dortchen); two-tempo arietta [no. 8] “Du Bösewicht!” (Vater and Dortchen); continuous, orchestrally accompanied scene moving from recitative to duet Marriage celebrations and Dortchen’s mixed feelings [no. 9] “Es war ein Ritter” (Die drei Fragen) (Vater, Niklas, Dortchen); strophic song [no. 10] “Ich hab’s gesagt” (Brautlied ) (Dortchen); strophic song [no. 11] “Wer soll Braut sein?” (Niklas, Dortchen, Vater, Chorus of Neighbors); strophic song

then, with only minimal reservations, they tuck into dinner, open some wine, and sing (no. 4). After a while Dortchen’s failure to return begins to spook them. Ostensibly unconcerned, but inadvertently disclosing his fear, Niklas sings a ballad (no. 5) about a young woman drowned by a spirit bridegroom. This unleashes the father’s terror, and he begins to shout out to Niklas and to the sleeping neighbors, commanding a search for Dortchen. This search takes the form of an extended, orchestrally accompanied number, with a chorus of initially sluggish neighbors who are gradually roused to action (no. 6). As the search continues offstage, Dortchen emerges from her hiding place, remorseful at the fright she has caused and calling out to make herself known (no. 7). A further orchestrally accompanied number (no. 8) involves her confrontation with her father, whose joy turns rapidly to anger when Dortchen confesses her deception. Neither the father nor Niklas, who soon arrives, are chastened by Dortchen’s experiment in reforming them. Niklas declares that he and Dortchen will marry tomorrow; Dortchen ambivalently accepts but sends Niklas away. In the final phase of the piece, with the impending marriage anticipated, Dortchen, her father, and her (returning) fiancé entertain the neighbors with a stage

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song (no. 9) about a knight who chooses a young bride after she solves a complex riddle. Dortchen, however, remains reluctant to wed, expressing her reservations in a sweetly melancholy stage song (no. 10) that tells of a young bride leaving her mother’s home. In the final chorus (no. 11) everyone sings a curious song in which a series of animals are asked, and decline, to be the bride. Dortchen’s reluctance is never dispelled. If scenes of village life, the difficulties besetting young lovers, and stage songs were the stuff of singspiel, these conventions are darkly transfigured here. Conventional reassurances—the banishment of lovers’ doubts, the joyful union of hearts, an eternity of love—are revealed as the illusions of plush, candlelit theaters. D E AT H A N D T H E M A I D E N

The melancholy publication of Minna Brandes’s music on the occasion of her death in 1788 indicates the broad currency of the constellation woman–music– death in German culture. The libretto of Die Fischerin remembers a death from a decade earlier, which was known to the audience. In 1778 the Weimar courtier Christel von Laßberg, alone in the parkland around Weimar Castle, had thrown herself into the Ilm and drowned. The event shook Goethe, who lived nearby. With the assistance of the head gardener, Gentzsch, he designed a memorial grotto with steps down to the river. In 1794 this morbid feature of the landscape was itself memorialized in a colored etching by Melchior Kraus, in a collection of images of the ducal parkland, including one titled Felsen-Treppe bey der Stern Brücke im Herzl. Park bey Weimar (Stone steps by the Star Bridge in the ducal park in Weimar; figure 11). During the performance of Die Fischerin the audience in Moss Cottage would have resonated both to Laßberg’s suicide and to the transformation of that event into landscape. The memorial grotto, with its broken stonework, fixed an idea of mortality, providing an enduring monument to the ephemeral. But it also fostered denial. Goethe’s grotto aestheticized Laßberg’s death to the point that it appeared fictional. An individual’s pain is smoothed over with a generic, fashionable feature of garden art. The memorial seems to protect the visitor from the death it commemorated, hastening the process through which something real recedes into lore. As living memory faded, the drowning may have come to seem more and more like an old ghost story. Surely it never happened? As we witness in Die Fischerin, Dortchen’s drowning is a ruse.17 The characters in Die Fischerin entertain similar doubts about the reality of the stories in their old songs. Don’t be frightened by the song “Der Wassermann” (The waterman), Niklas tells Dortchen’s father, it’s made up, just a song (no. 5). But what if there were something true about it, the father replies, not wanting Niklas to sing the tale of the bride abducted by the water spirit. Was it based on a real story, he asks? Up to this point the audience has been provided with rationalizations: the father is superstitious, and Dortchen’s absence is weighing on his mind. But by the

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figure 11. Melchior Kraus, Felsen-Treppe bey der Stern Brücke im Herzl. Park bey Weimar (1794). Color etching. Reproduced with permission of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

end of the tale of the bride abducted by a water spirit, terror has been unleashed in the father’s mind, and he now believes Dortchen drowned or drowning. In the commotion of the search scene it can appear that the song has somehow “come true,” even though the audience knows that it hasn’t. For the characters, however, the song is invested with an ambiguous truth; it hovers between fiction and reality, history and prophecy, seeming to possess knowledge of death in excess of the singer’s consciousness and rationality. Both that enchanted conception of song and the theme of death and the maiden characterize the main textual source of the libretto, Herder’s Volkslieder. Of the five lyrics from Herder embedded in Die Fischerin, three address bridal death or absence (nos. 5, 10, and 11). In Volkslieder this is a dominant, even obsessive, topos, though the secondary literature appears to have overlooked it, perhaps because the collection is almost exclusively seen as crucial to the development of anthropology and ethnomusicology rather than being read as poetry. A closer look at the topos in Herder is warranted but too digressive to undertake here.18 More relevant is the way in which the topos resonates with Herder’s prefatory evocation of the volkslied as a form of imperiled, vanishing human presence. This aspect, too, of Herder’s project appears not to register with scholars because of the author’s emphasis on qualities of spontaneity, aliveness, and expressive immediacy

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in the (stylistically and geographically diverse) traditional and old poetry he collected. But at the heart of Herder’s fantasy of the volkslied is the paradox of a human presence/absence that is not simply an intellectual contradiction (though it certainly is one) but also a meaningful part of the discourse.19 H E R D E R’ S FA N TA SY O F S O N G

Herder’s publication of old poetry was not in itself innovative. A substantial portion was drawn from existing anthologies, some of it traditional and anonymous, some recent and attributed to known authors. It was the meaning Herder gave the volkslied that was startling: his celebration of the mystery, superstition, and raw expressivity of literature.20 Volkslieder, he asserted, sprang spontaneously from collective experience of a community; like a spring, they flowed “unendlich und unermüdet” (eternally and inexhaustibly).21 Authentic, unmediated, they captured the unique character and mentality of a people. The process of their creation was as miraculous as the happenings they recorded: “[Poetry] lived in the ear of the people, on the lips and the harp of living singers: it sang history, event, mystery, wonder and omen: poetry was the flower of the distinctiveness of a people, their language and their soil, their occupations and opinions, their passions and presumptions, their music and soul.”22 Doing to literature what the noble savage did to civilization, the volkslied shamed modern artificiality and alienation. Resonant, expressive, alive, it gave the lie to poetry written according to rules, read from printed pages, burdened with editorial matter: Homer “sang what he heard, presented what he had seen and had grasped at first hand: his rhapsodies were not stuck in bookshops and on ragged pages but [existed] in the ear and heart of living singers and listeners, from whom they were later collected and finally came to us, weighed down with glossaries and prefaces.”23 The truth of the voice is placed above writing as a medium of human presence.24 In the voice rests a sense of the body of the speaker, even the possibility of a sustaining love. “Pagan poetry” is like a maternal song, in turn caressing, soothing, and rousing.25 The democratic muse of the volkslied attended even the humble and illiterate; it was intelligible to “dem Geringsten und gleichsam jedem Kinde” (the most lowly and every child).26 Simplicity was its name. Without linguistic artifice “the simple singer” knows nothing of “artificial constraints and labyrinthine constructions[;] . . . he is always audible and thus always intelligible.”27 There were of course precedents in German letters for the praise of traditional poetry. In the preface to the first volume of the two-volume Volkslieder collection Herder was able to present a series of approving quotations from earlier and contemporary writers concerning the elevated worth of this lowly form. One of the novelties of Herder’s project lay in his exclamatory, oracular tone, which lent urgency, a sense of pressing relevance, to the aesthetic and political ideals

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represented by the volkslied. Even more distinctive, however, was Herder’s sense of the impossibility of his project. The experience of human presence in the volkslied, Herder argued, was an effect of the singing voice, but, he acknowledged, the voice could not be recovered. The oppositions he establishes between singing and writing, listening and reading, the oral practices of volkslieder and poetry on the printed page, are barely established before they become self-contradictory, for Herder’s Volkslieder consists of just such printed poetry, to be read from the page, complete with editorial apparatus. He offered a limited solution of sorts by figuring “the musical” as already belonging to the domain of literature, inhering in the rhythmic and sonorous properties of language.28 But there is evidence that he was not entirely satisfied with this move. In an advertisement for the collection, Herder, presumably aware of the paradox, promised that the poetry would be issued with melodies. But such melodies never appeared. Nor would they necessarily have solved the problem. What melodies would be appropriate and how should they be sung? Would their addition turn volkslieder into fakes or tawdry reproductions? In the preface to his second volume Herder’s strategy was to stylize the loss of his ideal through the elevated accents of elegy (somewhat paradoxically given the talk of the renunciation of artifice). The volkslied is characterized by absence: by the music that isn’t there. Phantasmic, always out of reach, it occasions fashionably sweet melancholy: “Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, I see your shadows before me among the crowd on the Isle of the Blest and hear the reverberation of your songs; but there is no ship from you to my land and my language. The waves on the sea-of-return silence the harp, and the wind blows back your songs, where they will never die away amidst amaranth grapes, eternal dances and celebrations.”29 The volkslied is recovered only to the point that it becomes the subject of reverie and remembrance. It is like the songs mentioned in Jacobi’s poem on the bust of Oeser in Ettersberg—or, indeed, like Hirschfeld’s reference to Die Zigeuner solely through a painting that represented it. Herder’s elegiac tone was a response to an intellectual problem, but it was also an intrinsic part of the literary character of the project and intended to prepare the reader for the collections to follow: the dying, absent, or in some ambiguous way departing bride. H E R D E R A N D DI E F I S C H E R I N : V I STA S O F S O N G

This is not the only way in which Herder’s fantasy of song purchased meaning from its own incompleteness. In his preface Herder presented his readers with a (verbal) picture of song, a series of snapshots. The lack of notation is an essential feature, since the purpose is not to restore the vanished voice of the volkslied so much as to frame that music in the mind’s eye. There were venerable precedents

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for this technique in classical rhetoric, including Homer’s celebrated description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. Herder adapted the figure of ekphrasis, the verbal description of visual art, to offer pictures of music in prose. (As a means of enlivening a discourse, rhetorical figures such as ekphrasis were apt to convey the “aliveness,” the same energy that Herder discovered in the volkslied.) A more immediate connection, however, was that with “malerisch” (picturesque) views, those coveted vistas and prospects in the landscape that might, by extension, include views of music and song en plein air. Comparing landscape painting and garden art, Hirschfeld praised the greater variety of viewpoints available in the latter: “The composition of a landscape painting is always the same, from whichever side you view it. . . . Only the garden artist can vary his composition through the viewpoints from which it may be observed.” A succession of vistas not only appeals to the imagination but “elicits a sequence of emotions.” This effect links gardening to the other fine arts, not least to music: “Music in a woodland grove is quite delightful, and the enrapturing tones of a French horn give a new magic to a summer’s evening. Music pavilions can also enhance the scene.”30 Through a succession of strophic stage songs Die Fischerin offered such vistas of song within the woodland.31 The vistas involve internal movement, but their aliveness is fixed or framed, and the audience dwells on them, as if gazing at music. For example, the audience first hears the voices of Niklas and the father returning by boat along the Ilm. They are singing “Wenn der Fischer’s Netz auswirft” (When the fisherman’s net is cast), a song about the mixed fortunes of fishermen (no. 3; example 11). The lyrics, resembling a Spruch, or wise saying, convey a sense of timeless knowledge, as though the culture of the fisherman were laid down, distilled in a traditional song. As the tableau forms, fishing and singing entwine. A static bass pedal and the lilting siciliano capture the scene. Two voices rise and fall, their melody doubled in thirds. Again and again the melody returns to its beginning, like fishermen casting their song. Wenn der Fischer’s Netz auswirft, Die Fischlein aufzufangen, Spannt er still und hoffnungsvoll, Viel Beute zu Erlangen. Rasch wirft er die Garn’ hinaus, Kehrt betrübt und leer nach Haus.

When the fishermen’s nets are cast To trap the little fishes, He tightens them silently, Hoping for a big catch. If he throws his nets hastily, He goes home sad and empty handed.

Fähret denn den andern Tag Mit seinem Schifflein wieder, Und von schönem, reichem Fang Sinkt das Schiff fast nieder; So wir fuhren heut hinaus, Kehren vergnügt und reich nach Haus.

If another day he sets off again In his little boat, He almost sinks it With a beautiful, great catch; So today we headed out, Returning home content and rich.

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example 11. Corona Schröter, “Wenn der Fischer’s Netz auswirft,” no. 3, song for the father and Niklas, from Die Fischerin. Siciliano

Wenn der Fisch er’s Nez aus wirft, Die Fisch lein auf Spannt er still und hoff nungs voll, Viel Beu te zu

Rasch wirft er

die

Garn’ hin aus,

zu Er

fan lan

Kehrt be trübt und leer

gen. gen.

nach Haus.

Kraus recorded this moment in a painting of the first performance of Die Fischerin (figure 12). On the left, Nikas and the father approach the fishing village in their boat. On the right, Dortchen, hearing voices, rushes to hide. The stage is a small clearing in dense woodland, framed by the sinuous trunks of alders. No sky is visible through their dense branches; feathery leaves gather the darkness. The clearing is backlit by a large, brilliant bonfire on the far bank, though Kraus’s coloring is not true to the intense chiaroscuro of fire and black night. Two fisherman’s huts thatched in straw, nets hung out to dry, and (what appear to be) fish traps strewn about provide all the props required for a fisherman’s village. Little attempt at naturalism is evident in Dortchen’s costume (is the painting accurate in this regard?); she retains dated courtly panniers beneath her dress. Their winglike breadth exaggerates a tightly fitted bodice and an insect-narrow waist. (Do the lowly wear courtiers’ cast-offs?) The ribboned bonnet she has hung on a bush near the river is a vivid, dramatically telling detail in the picture. More than just offering vistas of song, Die Fischerin is structured like a collection of such views, along the lines of an ongoing project by Kraus to document the beauties of the ducal parks. Kraus (who was a witness to the performances of Die Zigeuner and Die Fischerin) published a series of engravings of the parkland around Weimar Castle (as distinct from Park Tiefurt). Taken together, his sixteen images, each framing a vista, display the spectacle of nature from (implied) resting or viewing places. Representing not just the landscape but a series of moments of stillness in which it was beheld as an aesthetic construct, the procession of Aussichten

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figure 12. Melchior Kraus, Performance of Die Fischerin (ca. 1782). Watercolor. Reproduced with permission of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

(views) offers a narrative in images, a virtual walk through the landscape.32 This is not to imply that Kraus’s Aussichten were only invitations to the reader’s imaginative wondering. They also served official roles as exemplars of landscape painting, on the one hand, and documentation of ducal property and its modernization, on the other.33 Part of Kraus’s achievement was to harmonize these modes—the sentimental, didactic, and proprietorial—so that the landscape could appear, without apparent contradiction, as an occasion for the reader’s sentiment, the artist’s formal virtuosity, and a flatteringly fashionable possession of Duke Carl August. Die Fischerin offers a similar succession of musical Aussichten through an unorthodox aspect of form: the basic musical unit is a strophic stage song, during which the unfolding of drama gives way to a moving picture that, though framed by strophic repetition, is, within that, alive with movement. Hirschfeld similarly recommended vues mouvantes (animated views) that feature “restrained movement”: his examples range over fishermen on lakes, farm laborers, grazing animals, birds, rivers, and waterfalls.34 It was conventional in singspiel to have one or two stage songs, particularly as opening and closing numbers. Drawing on but far exceeding this convention, Die Fischerin employs stage songs intensively (nos. 1–5 and 9–11), almost to the exclusion of nondiegetic singing (which is confined to nos. 6, 7, and 8). This amounts to an attempt to naturalize singing within the

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fictional world of the characters and their landscape, as if song were a native medium and not an artifice that must be accepted as part of an evening at the opera. Various naturalizing pretexts are provided, in addition to the artifice of Dortchen’s singing to pass the time at the opening of the piece. The father and Niklas sing as they work (nos. 3 and 4) and drink (no. 5). Dortchen, her father, and Niklas sing to entertain the neighbors, again in the presence of alcohol, after Dortchen reappears unscathed (no. 9). She sings, again to herself, expressing reluctance to marry (no. 10), before the final chorus, a “Schlußgesang” (no. 11), in which everyone sings about marriage in anticipation of the next day’s ceremony. Collectively all these stage songs imply that song is a natural mode of expression in a fishing village. True to Herder, Die Fischerin argues that singing is embedded in the everyday life of the lowly. In general, Goethe does not employ intrusive cues in the dialogue for singing (such as “let me sing a song that I’ve written about my beloved,” or “gutting fish is tedious, let’s sing to keep our spirits up”). Instead, scenes of singing seem simply to happen. With solos (nos. 1, 2, 4, 5, and 10), a duet (no. 3), a trio (no. 9), and a chorus (no. 11), singing mediates all relationships— those of individuals with themselves, those between members of a family, and those within a community as a whole. In these ways Die Fischerin parts company with the usual types of role accorded music on the stage. Neither a play with a musical supplement, nor a continuous music drama inspired by opera buffa, Die Fischerin offers an unorthodox answer, at the level of form, to the still unsettled question of the role of music in dramatic fictions.35 In her strophic stage songs Schröter (like Dortchen) hides from view in music of such striking simplicity and familiarity that it can be captured in a single glance. Each song projects a type of dance—the siciliano, the contredanse, the bourée— less as a topic of discourse (something to play with) than as the horizon of possibility for all musical elements (melodic profile, rhythmic gesture, harmonic rhythm).36 This amounts to compositional self-annihilation, a drastic measure, but one that chimes with Hirschfeld’s injunction that in the new style of gardens “the hand of the gardener is invisible.” The brevity of the songs, comprising just a few phrases, the largely syllabic text setting, extremely simple accompaniments and dominance of dance rhythms within the melody render them, to all intents and purposes, dance songs. For one contemporary witness, Heinrich Christoph Koch, the dance song was the oldest kind of music, found among the Israelites and Egyptians, and the most primitive kind of music still in existence.37 Hirschfeld, citing Captain James Cook “on his most recent trip to uncivilized nations,” revealed a similar covert fascination with the exotic and primitive as components of modern taste. He likened the “plantings” of the natives to “the English manner,” that is, to the new art of natural gardening, and he included an engraving of an imaginary scene by Johann Heinrich Brandt of a river flowing through a woodland that in subject and composition resembles Kraus’s painting of Die Fischerin.38

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There is more than a touch of condescension in Schröter’s courtly, if dramatically apt, dispatch of the fisherfolk using extremely rudimentary musical material. Of all the different levels of social and musical sophistication within the lied genre, she chose the most rustic idiom available.39 Particularly apt to describe her songs are those striking turns of phrase employed by Johann Abraham Peter Schulz in his famous preface to the second edition of his Lieder im Volkston: the music of the lied should possess “[den] Schein des Bekannten” (an appearance of the familiar) and “[den] Schein des Ungesuchten” (the appearance of the unsought).40 In other words, it should be like a found object, not the product of an individual composer. The connection to Schulz’s aesthetics notwithstanding, the stage songs of Die Fischerin efface their composer to an extent rarely achieved by Schulz himself, or by other followers of the rigorous simplicity of the German lied such as Johann Friedrich Reichardt. That said, as one’s ears grow accustomed to the low definition, some subtle distinctions appear between songs based on the same dance types. These differences yield readily to the normal interpretations—they represent attempts at characterization and respond to the particular dramatic context of the song. Put another way, generic images of music making contain subtle portraits. This is apparent in comparing three numbers on a siciliano topic (nos. 1, 3, and 10). Although one might speak of features “visible” in the score, this is only an explanatory device. The singing voice, capable of great variety of expression, is the true vehicle of the features described. Nonetheless, the enterprise proves productive, not least for the new light it shines on Schröter’s initially underwhelming setting of Dortchen’s “Der Erlkönig.” The ballad “Erlkönig” (see example 10) begins with the classic siciliano motif, the rising third between scale degrees 3 and 5 (C♯ to E). Mozart used an embellished form of this figure at the beginning of his own siciliano in A major from the following year (K. 331, first movement, m. 1). But in other respects Schröter’s setting is unusually agitated for a dance that Koch described as “sehr zärtlich” (very tender, a description that fits Mozart’s example perfectly).41 In Schröter’s song it is as if the story of the erlking were ruffling feathers. The sforzando–piano alternations on each successive note in measure 1, combined with the alternation of tonic and dominant harmony, are probably pictorial—painting the father’s galloping horse—but also convey Dortchen’s state of mind—vexed, impatient, and anxious. The question posed in the first line of text (“Who rides so late through the night and wind?”) seems to inspire the unsettled harmony—it is not clear in measures 1–2 that the key is A major—and the reassurance of the father’s strong embrace in the fourth and final line of the first stanza is aptly conveyed with a tonic chord sustained, in essence, across the last two measures. The gentle lilt of the siciliano’s generic rhythm of dotted eighth note, followed by a sixteenth note, is undercut by contrast (sforzando–piano) and acciaccaturas onto the already metrically accented dotted notes (mm. 2 and 5).

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One way of making sense of these oddities is through the expression direction “abentheuerlich.” In modern German this means something like “adventurous,” but here it probably conveyed a sense closer to bathos. Koch described the term in this way in a musical dictionary of 1807, citing a singspiel by Schröter’s teacher, Hiller, as an example. Koch acknowledged that “abentheuerlich” could refer to a fault of style, in which attempts at “the exalted” (an elevated register of discourse) are overdone and become “das Unnnatürliche oder Übertriebene” (something unnatural and overwrought).42 However, in musical contexts, he reported, “What is usually meant is an intentional misuse of the exalted in dealing with small matters, in order to rouse a feeling of the comic.”43 Given Koch’s example from Hiller (in which “a young and naive peasant” expresses himself in a melody that “in a serious opera [would be] sung by a hero”) it appears that the ruffled feathers of Dortchen’s siciliano were bathetically at odds with her character as a fisherman’s daughter.44 The comic effect, if achieved, would have complicated the sinister tale of nocturnal abduction as gothic horror and humor joined in a macabre dance. In these ways Schröter’s “Der Erlkönig” differs from the serenely composed siciliano for Niklas and the father (no. 3; see example 11). This fatalistic and consoling text is set in the opposite way, with the conventionally tender gestures of the siciliano quietened into something approaching stasis. The third siciliano (no. 10), like the first, is for Dortchen alone (example 12). Followed only by the closing chorus, it occupies an outer edge, where it mirrors the opening number. In its expressive character it falls somewhere between the extremes represented by numbers 1 and 3. Grace notes on the beat and forte–piano contrasts lend it some of Dortchen’s pluck; but its opening, firmly in the tonic, and the largely conjunct melody suggest that Dortchen now occupies a less agitated state than she had in “Der Erlkönig.” Perhaps in performance Schröter lent this song a wistful character, in response to the poetry’s evocation of a bride’s reluctant departure from her childhood home. The thinness of the score sets no limit on the song’s emotional resonance. Ich hab’s gesagt schon meiner Mutter, Schon aufgesagt vor Sommers Mitte:

I’ve already told you mother-mine, Before midsummer I announced:

Such, liebe Mutter, dir nur ein Mädchen, Ein Spinnermädchen, ein Webermädchen.

Look, dear mother, for another skivvy,

Ich hab gesponnen genug weißes Flächschen, Hab genug gewirket das feine Linnchen,

I’ve spun enough white thread,

Hab genug gescheuert die weißen Tischchen,

Had enough of scouring the little white table,

Another spinning-and weaving-maid.

Worked enough fine linen,

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example 12. Corona Schröter, “Ich hab’s gesagt,” no. 10, Dortchen’s siciliano, from Die Fischerin. Andante

Ich hab’s ge

sagt

vor

Som

Mäd

chen, ein

sagt

schon

mers Mit

Spin

ner

mei

ner

te: Such, lie

mäd

chen, ein

Mut

be

We

ter, Schon auf

Mut

ge

ter, dir nur ein

ber

mäd

chen.

Hab genug gefeget die grünen Höfchen,

Had enough of sweeping the little green yard,

Hab genug gehorchet der lieben Mutter,

Had enough of listening to my dear mother, And now must listen to the dear in-laws,

Muß nun auch horchen der lieben Schwieger, . . . . . . . . . . .

Ihr meine Ringchen, ihr goldnen Ringchen, Ihr werdet liegen, im Kasten rosten!

You my dear little ring, you little golden ring, You will stay in the rusty box!

At the center of Die Fischerin are three elided musical numbers (nos. 6, 7, and 8) that employ nondiegetic singing and orchestral music. Thus at something

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like the midpoint of a series of sung prospects there emerges an operatic core, containing chorus, aria, duet, and recitative. How could this possibly work, in the context of the surrounding landscape and musical vistas, and how does Schröter’s recourse to “opera” belong, if at all, to characterization? One answer comes from Goethe, who highlighted the affiliation of the search scene (no. 6) with visual art in a footnote to an edition of his libretto. Specifically, he described this scene as a “tableau.” The intense chiaroscuro created by torches—now close by, now in the distance—was a painterly effect that transformed the landscape into an oscillating picture, as Goethe recalled long after the premiere: The effect of the whole piece turned on this moment. The audience, not suspecting what was to come, were seated with the prospect of the meandering river before them. In this moment, torches flickered, first close by, then, amidst diverse cries [from the characters], the torches appeared in the distance. Next flickering flames sprang up in a blaze from little bonfires, their light and their reflection brightly illuminated nearby objects, while all around the landscape lay in deep night. Rarely was there such a beautiful effect! It lasted amidst several changes until the end of the piece, when the entire tableau was again ablaze.45

In another context Wieland referred to the “Rembrandt magic” of lighting in Weimar gardens at night;46 the allusion is to Rembrandt’s Nightpieces, which also seem to color Goethe’s evocation of the search scene.47 In her setting of Goethe’s vestigial text for the search scene Schröter used extensive, but not static, repetition of music and words to provide (something like) a realistic span: about five minutes of pure panic (example 13).48 “Rembrandt magic” finds corollaries in Schröter’s music, not least in the intensive forte–piano contrasts, crescendi, and sforzandi of the (presumably string) orchestral accompaniment. This essay in dynamics can suggest the oxymoronic contrast of light and dark, heat and cold, as well as, more literally, the crackling of fire. Although this is one of those passages at the heart of Die Fischerin in which Schröter employs nondiegetic music (nos. 6–8), the materials (as Dahlhaus has suggested of the period of sensibility as a whole) aspire to the condition of the natural.49 The search for Dortchen begins with the father’s musicalized shouts (mm. 2–16 and 39–49) to wake the neighbors. Niklas stands frozen and trembling in vividly pictorial music (mm. 17–31). There is probably a touch of physical comedy in that moment, as when the neighbors are roused from a groggy andante (mm. 50–55) to a purposeful allegro vivace. The chorus of neighbors, together with Niklas and the father, calls out instructions (“Hurry, hurry . . . get the ropes . . . she may well still depend on you . . . run to the fish traps”); the music is a peculiar combination of harmonic stasis and agitation, repetition and forward movement, as if, suggested by Goethe’s remarks, the ambition was to create a tableau vivant, a painting in the landscape. The effect can also suggest the characters’ frozen haste, as if they were unable to move with sufficient speed—the anxious flight of nightmares. (In Henry Füseli’s painting The Nightmare

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an incubus weighs down on the chest of a fainting virgin.) The stylized disorder of the so-called Sturm und Drang erupts around the vocal lines: rapidly repeated notes, syncopation, scales and arpeggios in the minor mode drive the voices on. Far from representing a turn to instrumental music, this breach of the lyrical decorum of the stage song is a means of conveying urgent alarm and confusion. It is largely without the motivic working and other processes that a modern audience might associate with the late eighteenth-century symphony. Violently agitated, this orchestral music is addressed to the nervous fibers of the listener’s body, to those chords within (as Herder imagined them). The audience, plunged into a scene of gothic horror, is invited to the thrilling pleasures of terror. The search scene (no. 6) does not end but recedes from view with a musical fade-out, during which Dortchen appears from her hiding place. In her miniature two-tempo aria (no. 7) she first expresses regret at having caused such commotion (allegretto), then calls out to announce that she is alive and well (presto). Although arguments for the naturalism of operatic forms can be self-fulfilling and naive (they are, after all, formal conventions, however suggestive of human experience), there is little sense that opera has suddenly gate-crashed Dortchen’s world. The tiny proportions of the number, and the absence of any recapitulatory component within or across sections, afford naturalistic pacing to Dortchen’s unfolding thoughts. The urgency of the faster second section matches Dortchen’s action, her repeated cries in octave leaps over a repeating bass line that scrambles for the tonic but, again and again at the point of closure, finds the submediant. The artifice of the two-tempo aria is naturalized. Schröter’s “recourse to opera” at this point in Die Fischerin is dramatically apt. After all, this is the moment when Dortchen’s attempts to effect change come up against paternal authority. Strophic song, associated with stasis and eternity, gives way to musical idioms that conventionally enabled theatrical characters to alter and influence their fictional worlds. A free-form duet ensues between Dortchen and her father that takes the iconic form of a confrontation, a struggle for love, acceptance, and power. (Such confrontations appear to have freely crossed between the stage and the drawing room, as we saw in the memoirs of Johann Christian Brandes.) The father’s joy at finding Dortchen alive gives way to anger when she confesses to her prank. His anger and authority are aptly figured in gestures evoking accompanied recitative, which in turn give way, as convention demands, to an aria, albeit a small, dancelike one that incorporates Dortchen’s defense. Just as singspiel appears for the scene of confrontation between father and daughter, so it vanishes again as the status quo returns. Dortchen’s failure to reform male manners is perhaps suggested as three strophic lieder close in around her (nos. 9–11), which seem to seal her in the forms and ceremonies of (imaginary) tradition. Die Fischerin was too ephemeral a project to inspire much by way of critical reception and contemporary commentary, and it is risky to stake too much about

example 13. Corona Schröter, “Helft! Helft sie retten!” no. 6, search scene for the father, Niklas, and chorus, from Die Fischerin. Allegro vivace

Vater Helft!

helft sie re

tten! Helft sie re

tten! Sie ist er

Ist un vor sich

tig in Fluss ge

unis.

5

trun ken! Sie ist er

trun ken!

9

sun

ken!

Um Got tes wil

len um Got tes

13

wil

len was stehst du

da?

Was

stehst du

da?

cresc.

17

Andante Niklas Es lähmt

der Schre cken

Mir al le Glie der.

Ich steh

ver

(continued)

example 13 (continued) 22

worr en,

ver worr en,

sin

ke

nie

der;

27

Ich kann nicht

32

Allegro vivace

schah.

wiss

en

wie

mir, ge

Vater Die Nach barn schla

fen,

Ich will sie

36

we

cken.

Auf!

40

Auf!

cresc.

example 13 (continued) 44

Hört

uns,

hör[e]t!

Ver

nehmet

das

il

47

Schre

51

cken!

Andante Niklas Helft! Helft!

Nachbarn

re ttet!

Wer ruft, was gibt’s wer ruft was gibt’s wer ruft was gibt’s

Allegro vivace

56

Hö

durch die

Nacht.

ret!

Wer

ruft

uns

Vater und Niklas

Hö

Wer ruft was gibt’s?

ret ver nehmt das Schre cken ver nehmt das

Wer ruft was

(continued)

example 13 (continued)

60

Schre

cken

gibt’s?

Hör

Was gibt’s wer

et ver nehmt das

ruft, wer ruft und durch die Nacht?

63

Schre cken

sie ist

Wer ruft, wer ruft?

er trun ken

Wer?

sie ist

er trun

ken

Wer?

67

Um Got tes

Wil len, was steht ihr da!

Was steht ihr da!

Helft sie

71

ret ten!

Eilt nur ge schwin de, eilt nur ge

example 13 (continued) 75

schwin de Her bei die Stang en! Her bei die Stang en! Wohl bleib sie hang en Lauft nach den

79

Reu sen! Eilt nur ge schwin de und zün det Schlei ssen und bren net Fack ein und zün det

und zün

83

Feu er an. Eilt nur ge schwind zün

det

Feu

er an.

det Feu

er an.

87

Eilt

Ei

eilt nur ge schwind

let eilt nur ge

schwin

de und zün det

Feu

zün det

er an

(continued)

example 13 (continued) 90

Feu

er an

ge schwind

Eilt nur ge schwin

de eilt nur ge schwind

94

Lauft nach den Reu

sen!

Her bei die Stang en!

Bren net

cresc.

98

Eilt nur ge schwind

Lich ter an!

cresc.

zün det Feu

er an!

Eilt,

eilt nur ge

example 13 (continued) 102

schwind, ge schwind

Her bei die Stang

en

Eilt nur ge

106

Eilt nur ge schwin de

schwin de

Eilt,

eilt nur ge schwind

1st time 2nd time

110

Ge schwind zu

(continued)

example 13 (continued) 114

Schi

ffe!

Ge schwind zu

Schi

ffe! Her bei die Stan

Ge schwind zu

Schi

ffe!

gen sie auf zu

Her bei die

118

such

en sie auf zu fang en den Strom hin

Stan

gen!

un

ter den Strom hin

un

ter!

Den Strom hin

un

ter!

[unclear] cresc.

122

Habt Acht!

Habt Acht!

cresc.

(h)

example 13 (continued) 126

Habt Acht!

Habt Acht! Habt Acht!

Habt Acht!

Habt Acht!

unis.

131

Habt

136

Acht!

Habt Acht!

Habt Acht!

Habt

Habt Acht!

140

Acht!

Habt

Habt Acht!

(continued)

example 13 (continued) 143

Acht

Habt Acht!

Habt Acht!

Habt

Habt Acht!

Habt

146

Acht!

Acht! 3

150 3

3

decresc.

154

decresc.

3

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cultural meaning on the evidence of the score. Nonetheless, to continue this line of argument, it seems that Dortchen’s project of reforming male manners, though it flared up briefly, did not belong in her world. Within this work of fiction, at least, the sovereign feminine ultimately cedes to the law of the father, superstition, and fate. In a piece that honored Schröter, the notion of a positive feminization of society was both mooted and questioned. Different meanings for the female sign are explored, and appear to win out, at least within the world of the play, which proceeds, romantically, through a metonymic logic linking woman, song, death, nature—and nation. T E U T O N IC I D E N T I T Y A N D V E G E TA B L E G E N I U S

If the female reform of men lost currency in Die Fischerin, other roles were assumed by the female sign. As the composer of music that appeared native to Tiefurt Park, a setter of volkslieder, and a German singing voice, Schröter was anything but Other or marginal: she virtually embodied the emerging discourse of north European art. Both Hirschfeld’s celebration of the natural garden and Herder’s Volkslieder project included culturally patriotic and national elements. For Hirschfeld, born in Danish-ruled Holstein, gardens rendered visible the political systems of their royal owners, which in turn shaped national character. The style of the French baroque variety, with what Hirschfeld called its “restriction, uniformity, precision, and symmetry,” was testament to courtly affectation and tyrannical rule under absolute despotism. The freer rein accorded “nature” in the “English” garden, and in its German relatives, testified to greater personal liberty accorded by more enlightened rulers: “Should I not commend here, with deep admiration, the reigning princes of Gotha, Dessau, and Karlsruhe. For the charitable spirit that they have lavished on their people they have also turned to the improvement of nature, shaping with their own hands, as it were, the venerable, shady arbors.”50 Mingling aesthetic and political reference, Hirschfeld praised the gardens of the Prince of Dessau as the work of a benign ruler and author: “The garden at Wörlitz near Dessau is, on the whole, one of the noblest in Germany, just as its owner is one of the finest princes, a father to his subjects, a friend of mankind, and a person knowledgeable in art.”51 As Hirschfeld’s translator and commentator Linda B. Parshall puts it: “The freedom of nature becomes a paradigm for human relations, and the maintenance of this freedom through the proportional restraint of a gardener’s design becomes a paradigm for benevolent government.”52 Herder similarly discovered the character of a people in (a version of) nature: the volkslied. His belief that such poetry had sprung spontaneously from collective experience was enshrined in his favorite metaphor of lieder as “die gute Feldblume” (honest wild flower), native to their national or regional soil. As enunciated in Herder’s preface to his Volkslieder collections, that loosely national spirit

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was bound up with a celebration of aliveness in art, of expressive immediacy. It is no surprise, then, that the image of the “wild flower” appeared as part of a critique of silent reading, ponderous analysis, and poetry in its written forms. Adverse criticism of the first volume of Volkslieder arose, Herder asserted, because his “honest wild flowers [were] presented in the raised beds of white paper . . . [and] spied, plucked, and analyzed . . . like cultivated species blooms.”53 What critics and readers did not appreciate, he argued, was the delicate emotional perfume of volkslieder, an expressive character that smells “melancholischsüß” (sweetly melancholic) and could be sensed in the air, like “Lilienduft” (the scent of lilies).54 More than synaesthesia was at stake here. Wild flowers are (almost by definition) native to their environment. In wild flowers and volkslieder Herder discovered a national, vegetative genius. The latter were “the first blossoms of a poet crown” for the “Volk” (the people), an artistic product possessing Teutonic character and virtue: “straightforwardness, honesty, and an aptitude for learning.”55 These geographically diffuse notions of German, Teutonic, and northern European cultural identity were bound up with organicist, sometimes specifically horticultural, theories of creativity. These are worth revisiting because they provide a context for and way of conceptualizing Schröter’s authorship. The idea of “German art and style,” as Herder and Goethe styled it in their polemical essays of 1773, published in a collection titled “Von deutscher Art und Kunst” is familiar today as a context for rule-breaking “original genius”—creative individuality in works appearing to transcend all models and precedents.56 But this is an incomplete account of a wide-ranging discourse on authorship. “Von deutscher Art und Kunst” also espoused a notion of spontaneous, nonvolitional artistic production in which culture springs organically from the soil of nature and culture. In this sense culture is produced collectively, not through an act of individual will. Herder’s image of the volkslied as a wild flower, the vistas of music embedded in everyday life presented in Die Fischerin, and Hirschfeld’s gently nationalist conception of the new style of garden belong to this notion of what was sometimes called “vegetable genius.” In his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), a work immediately translated into German and inspiring the youthful work of Herder and Goethe, Edward Young observed that “an Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made.”57 Young pitted this organic creativity against theories of the mechanical and laboriously imitative production of art. The “original” of his title refers as much, if not more, to this notion of an organic, horticultural process (the original as that which comes first and out of the soil) as to the untrammelled originality of texts in the modernist sense enshrined in later, great-man-celebrating theories of artistic production such as that of Harold Bloom.58 Young, a romantic, established a hierarchy within the domain of authorship between the organic and the mechanical, not between “strong” and “weak”

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authors in the modernist, Bloomian sense of individuals who compete with the precedents of literary father figures and emerge victorious or defeated. In their German reception Young’s horticultural metaphors were transformed into a theory of creativity that linked the simplest and most complex productions of German culture. If the lied, in Herder’s metaphor, was a “wild flower,” Sulzer asserted that the mind of the genius was a richly planted soil. In his article “Erfindung” (Invention) in Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste Sulzer evoked the effusions of genius and inspiration as the growth and blossoming of plants: thoughts “will present themselves in the greatest clarity of their own accord, where we are not in search of them, so that it seems as though in the interim they had grown unnoticed, like a plant, and now suddenly stood before us in their full development and bloom.”59 In this theory ideas ripen in their own time without the assistance of the artist’s intention or awareness. Die Fischerin is based on such propositions and can be understood to dramatize theories of Teutonic vegetable genius: it sprang up in the Tiefurt woodland, took the soil as its stage, and offered a bouquet of lieder seemingly without a composer. Fashioned naturalistically, fleeting and phantasmic, Die Fischerin needs no longer disappoint, as it disappointed Bauman, as a work “limited” by local circumstances and Schröter’s abilities.60 A F T E R DI E F I S C H E R I N

If they are indeed organic, living things, the products of vegetable genius must eventually wither. A wild flower was an image of the volkslied but also a symbol of transience. One day after the premiere of Die Fischerin nothing of its beauty remained. Moss Cottage was empty, the singing was over, and damp ashes littered a forest clearing. “Of my piece, from yesterday, which went off very well,” Goethe wrote to Charlotte von Stein, “nothing remains, alas, but the regret that you did not see it.”61 This was not literally true. Presumably to coincide with the premiere, Anna Amalia ordered 150 printed copies of Goethe’s libretto. But Goethe was not being literal. He was highlighting Die Fischerin’s evanescence as an intrinsic component of its aesthetic character. The living work of art must die. No art is closer to death than music, which vanishes with every breath and bow stroke. In such a case some kind of memorial is required—a score, a historical narrative, a revival, a statue of the composer. A score of Die Fischerin was carefully prepared for the press in the format preferred for published singspiele, a score for keyboard and voices. But for reasons that remain unclear, the composer of Die Fischerin, or her colleagues, decided to hold back. When four of the stage songs were later published in Schröter’s Fünf und zwanzig Lieder of 1786, their original context was not disclosed. Nonetheless, these and ten further settings from Herder, hinting as they do at the composer’s (eventual) death, form part of a

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memorial. The unusually large number of songs (six was normal, twelve acceptable if they were short), along with the enormous subscription list (providing a significant sum for the composer, who was close to retirement from her position at court), imply a summative, swansong collection.62 Shortly before the premiere of Die Fischerin, and anticipating Schröter’s death by some twenty years, Goethe provided a poetic memorial to her in the Journal von Tiefurt (March 1782). In what was ostensibly a eulogy for Johann Martin Mieding, the general handyman who had built the sets and stages for the amateur theater, Goethe veered off into a tribute to Schröter. She is summoned as Weimar’s living muse, mediating the realms of the living and the dead, art and nature: “The Muses send her. . . . The Muses granted her every favour, and in her created art.” Mixing his aesthetic metaphors, Goethe also describes her, in vegetable terms, as “a flower . . . [that] grew towards the ideal,” such that she is at once a construct of his organicist and idealist thinking. Though herself “a flower,” she brings a wreath of wild flowers, a funeral garland for Mieding, a duplication that seems to usher her into the realm of death. The passage in which she appears is often quoted as evidence of Goethe’s regard for her but might equally be seen as an expression of both confused idealization and hostility.63 The poem as a whole warrants a closer look for the light it shines on emerging aesthetic hierarchies within the theater and rapidly changing ideas of authorship. The poem begins with the noisy construction of a set: tradesmen rush around hammering nails into wood, painting, attaching ropes and pulleys. But one is missing—Mieding—and activity stops as the workers gather around his coffin. Weimar has suffered a small but great loss, and the muses call out the name of Mieding. Death, we learn through his example, comes to all. So far, then, Mieding functions as a reminder of universal mortality, a memento mori. Much genuine praise is offered the brave, hard-working, long suffering, and ingenious craftsman. But what captures Goethe’s imagination seems to be not so much Mieding’s individual achievements as the backstage activity of building a set, an activity that is described, through the opening stanza, as metatheatrical. There is some merit in claiming that in this poem Goethe elevates “the common man.” But his elevation is limited by hierarchies and division of labor. Mieding excels in concrete forms of representation—in mimesis, understood as the literal and crafty imitation of nature. He is the “Direktor der Natur” (manager of nature). His “wise hand” turns “wire” into “feathers,” he can create the illusion of “green grass, of the river’s silvery fall, of bird song, the roar of thunder, the shadowy clouds and moon light.” At the same time, he is not taken in by theatrical fictions, does not experience their magic: “Even the [onstage] heathen does not frighten him.”64 Schröter occupies an entirely different position in the imaginary creative hierarchy of the poem. Virginal, carrying a coronet of flowers, she is sent directly by the muses to honor lowly Mieding in his rough-hewn coffin. In an oft-quoted, if

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virtually untranslatable passage, expertly rendered into prose by Marcia Citron, the narrator heralds Schröter’s arrival: Friends, attention! Retreat a small step! See there who comes and splendidly draws near! It is she herself, goodness never fails us; our plea is heard, the Muses send her. You know her well; she it is who continually pleases. As a flower she appears to the world: upwards the beautiful image grew towards the ideal; now completed, it is she in all her beauty. The Muses granted her every favour, and in her created art. Thus she freely attracts every charm upon herself, and even your name, Corona, graces you. She steps hither. See her pleasing stance! Unintentionally, yet as if with beautiful intent. And greatly astonished you see in her united an ideal that only appears in the artist.65

In this exalted guise Schröter answers the narrator’s call for a suitably elevated acknowledgment of Mieding’s work. She confers the blessing of the muses with a floral crown, but it is her presence, ideal beauty, perfected talents, and grace that honor Mieding most. As Mieding made feathers from wire, so the muses made Schröter. She is ethereal, an aesthetic being, and a living muse. (Reichardt’s confession of his aching infatuation with Schröter similarly elevated her to the status of artwork.)66 Even the stage, it would seem, is too worldly, too material, for her spirit nature. In vocabulary drawn directly from aesthetic theory she is “without design—yet, as if with design, beautiful.”67 Or, in Kant’s famous definition of the judgment of the beautiful, she appears purposeful without purpose.68 In these ways Goethe’s poem establishes opposing domains of making and being, craft and aesthetic essence, labor and the beautiful. Death comes to Mieding as an ending. For Schröter, death is a persistent presence. The crown she places on Mieding’s coffin entwines symbols of life and death, capturing them in a single image—“the merry, open countenance of the rose, the faithful violet, the narcissus’s light, the carnations more varied, the pride of the vain tulip . . . [and] quietly, through the black, softly knotted crape appears a laurel crown.”69 But Schröter too must die. She is sent by the muses, but “like a bright flower she blossoms to the world!” If Mieding and Schröter are opposing extremes, the one below, the other above the writing and directing of works for the theater, that authorial middle ground is occupied by the writer of the poem, Goethe. Laying out the resources available to him, his craftsman on the one hand, his actress muse on the other, Goethe pays tribute to the scope of his own creativity in a memorial to the soon vanishing amateur theater and to himself. But the story does not quite end there. In the final lines of the poem Mieding is interred. Or rather, not interred. He is planted like a seed: “Cover him gently in light earth.”70 What new art might spring from Mieding’s grave?

5

Sophie Westenholz and the Eclipse of the Female Sign

The (ambivalent) idealization of the professional performers and composers Minna Brandes and Corona Schröter may come as a surprise to readers familiar with the difficulties and internal doubts experienced by female composers in the nineteenth century. Moving from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century it can seem that history goes into reverse. Such an impression would be simplistic, of course; there was no abrupt reversal of fortunes. In 1782 Goethe praised Schröter as an ethereal muse of the Weimar theater, not as a strong author. In 1843, when Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel deprecated herself as “the most frightening creature imaginable” because she was both “a dilettante” and “a female author,” she was deftly negotiating prejudices with humor.1 Nonetheless, there was a shift of emphasis in the reception of women composers around 1800. It took the form of increased essentialism, a hardening of the categories “woman” and “composer.” The phrase “woman composer” was invoked in a new way as a conceptual scandal, a self-evident absurdity. This change in fortunes, which did not happen overnight or go unchallenged, signaled the end of that phase of musical history that I have traced under the heading of the sovereign feminine. In this chapter I tell the story of the ascendance and eclipse of the female sign through the life and works of a single female performer composer, Eleonore Sophie Marie Westenholz, née Fritzscher (1758–1838).2 Arguably she was the most adventurous and prolific female composer of the German eighteenth century, but she is barely known today, and she is not known at all as a composer of keyboard music, which forms the most challenging aspect of her legacy. Employing a plainer, documentary tone in this chapter, I seek to capture and make available a wide range of new archival documents concerning her life and introduce several lost 158

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works. I seek to install her not as a “great” composer but as an interesting one. The story I tell is not one of unjust neglect, be it in her lifetime or posthumously. Rather, I use her life to write small a broader trend in music history from relatively feminocentric ideology to a more assertively and exclusively masculinist tone after 1800. Westenholz’s life is well suited to tell that story. Her remarkable career, which saw her assume the position of a musical director at the court of Ludwigslust in Schwerin, Mecklenburg, was founded on and initially flourished in an aristocratic, feminized culture of song and keyboard music. In this context she was idealized by male contemporaries such as the Weimar kapellmeister Ernst Wilhelm Wolf and Carl Friedrich Cramer. Single-handedly fostering a Mozartian fortepiano culture at court, she directed ensembles from the keyboard and programmed her own works alongside those of her Viennese idol. In 1806, however, during the period of the Napoleonic wars in Germany, when a cash-strapped court failed to pay its staff, she tried her fortunes as a composer in works published for the public. At that point, and at her expense, bourgeois masculinist voices asserted their economic interests through the kinds of musical-aesthetic hierarchy that would come to distinguish the ideas and practices of German music. The (sometimes justifiably) mixed reviews of Westenholz’s works capture a moment of transition not just in the symbolic meaning attaching to the figure of the musical woman but, bound up with this, from relatively woman-friendly (if patronizing and ambivalent) frameworks of reception to the newly vehement articulation of hierarchies of authorship, musical genre, and context for which sexual polarization served as (arguably) the organizing duality. These winds of change were also felt at court, where Westenholz’s leadership (always confined to specific genres) was challenged with the appointment of the concertmaster Louis Massonneau. His preference for conducting larger ensembles from the front, cultivating monumental orchestral and choral works, and, even in smaller ensembles, leading from the violin created tension and led to blows against Westenholz, both symbolic and physical. By the time of her retirement in 1821 her prominent status had passed into lore. Moving from the real into the imaginary, she was remembered, if remembered at all, as an embodiment of the nineteenth century’s decorative, feminized eighteenth century. W E ST E N HO L Z ’ S C A R E E R

It appears, though the evidence for this is scant, that Westenholz was destined from childhood for a career at court in fulfillment of a then emerging desire for native female singing voices in church and chapel to replace aging and imported castrati. Friedrich Brüssow, a Ludwigslust courtier who wrote Westenholz’s obituary notice, reported that her talents for music and poetry caught the attention of Prince Ludwig while she was still a child, and that the prince arranged for her to study, at royal expense, with the court kapellmeister, Johann Wilhelm Hertel

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(1727–1789).3 Perhaps because Westenholz, by the time of her death, had been known for about three decades exclusively as a keyboardist, Brüssow stated that her instruction with Hertel was in keyboard playing. There is reason to doubt this, however. According to Brüssow, Westenholz’s father, Fritzscher, was an organist in Schwerin. As such, he would have been well placed to provide his daughter with keyboard lessons. Her appointment at court in 1777 is conclusive about her primary role: she was a “Kammersängerin” (chamber singer), and presumably Hertel’s lessons had prepared her for this role. Over fifty years later, in 1819, an anonymous writer in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, commenting on the state of music in Mecklenburg, praised the standards of church music at court and beyond, referring back to the era inaugurated with such singers as “Felicitas Benda, Heine, and E. S. M. Westenholz.” Implicitly celebrating the Protestant experiment in opening the choir stalls to women, in preference to the practice of castrating boys, the writer declared sacred vocal music in Ludwigslust to be the equal of that in “mancher südlichen Residenz” (many southern institutions). In referring to the virtuosity and excellent direction of the court orchestra, capable of realizing Beethoven symphonies in powerful and elevated performances, he also alluded to the shift in repertoire and aesthetic values that had recently seen Westenholz’s disappearance as a soloist from court ensembles.4 She arrived at court in 1777 as a singer and that same year married the recently widowed kapellmeister (and composer of sober sacred music) Carl Friedrich August Westenholz (1736–1789).5 Her transformation from court singer to keyboardist and musical director was formalized, contractually, following the precipitate deaths and chronic illnesses of successive Ludwigslust kapellmeisters. First to fall was her husband, Carl Friedrich August, in 1789. His oft-ailing replacement, Antonio Rosetti, survived only three years and died in 1792. Perhaps tiring of this crisis of succession, the duke opted to replace Rosetti with an internal candidate, Eligio Celestino, an Italian violinist and composer who had led the court orchestra since 1778. According to a letter Westenholz wrote in September 1811, this was also the moment when she officially took her place at the keyboard as, in her word, “Directeur” (director). The exact reasons for her appointment are not known. Perhaps Celestino lacked expertise in keyboard instruments, or preferred to continue as first violin; perhaps Westenholz’s new role reflected the rapid expansion in solo and chamber keyboard repertory in this period, which required new types of appointment. Whatever the reasons, Westenholz’s new role registered with her contemporaries as a significant change in her status. The musical encyclopedist Ludwig Gerber revised his brief entry for her accordingly. In the first edition of his Historisch-Biographisches Lexicon (1790–1792) he described her as a “court singer” who also happened to play keyboard instruments: “Westenholtz (Elenora [sic] Sophia [sic] Maria) widow, still living, of the above [C. A. Westenholtz], née

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Fritzscher, in 1782 a court singer in Ludwigslust; celebrated not only as a singer but as great keyboardist, and what’s more in the manner of Emanuel Bach. On this account, Kapellmeister Wolf dedicated to her six of his published keyboard sonatinas.”6 The revised edition, published two decades later as the Neues historisch-biographisches Lexicon, omitted all reference to singing: “Westenholtz (Eleonora Sophia [sic] Maria), composer and virtuoso not only on the keyboard but also on the glass harmonica; after the death of Kapellmesiter Rosetti in 1792, she accompanied the concerts of the Schwerin court at the fortepiano.”7 To modern readers Gerber’s term “accompanied” might suggest a purely subsidiary role, but the implications for contemporaries were more wide ranging and would have involved a sense of leading the ensemble as well as simply supporting it. That Westenholz assumed leadership responsibilities on the keyboard was not a secret. In 1818 a report in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung noted that Westenholz led portions of a festival performance of Haydn’s Creation, held at Ludwigslust and drawing musicians and listeners from the entire region. As if aware of the ambiguity of Westenholz’s place in the musical hierarchy, however, the anonymous critic began with the reassuring assertion that “the performance . . . took place under the direction of the able kapellmeister, Massonneau.”8 Not every keyboard-playing singer at court would have been able or willing to assume the responsibilities shouldered by Westenholz: something in her character, and her musicianship, must have equipped her for the task. But of her character little is known, and to reflect, as I will in a moment, on the tense scenes of female ascendance in Ludwigslust is to reflect less on individual personalities than on the rise of the keyboard in late eighteenth-century music. For Westenholz, the keyboard was like a Trojan horse. When she learned to play it as a child in the 1760s few could have predicted the cultural currency it would soon enjoy in the German states and free cities as a medium of expression and display, object of technical advancement, and musical symbol of individualism and autonomy. Presumably, instruction began with her organist father (if he was indeed an organist), but Herr Fritzscher could not have known that he was equipping his daughter to participate in some of the most exciting and novel developments in contemporary music of the 1790s and 1800s: the solo and four-hand keyboard sonata, the piano trio and quartet, the keyboard concerto, solo variations, rondos, and character pieces, all of which displayed the resources of a rapidly evolving instrument and of musical style. The solo keyboard’s unexpected rise to prominence went hand in hand with the emergence of its female executants. Critical strategies for representing and evaluating their unexpected centrality were developed by critics such as Carl Friedrich Cramer, who located his praise of Westenholz’s performance in patterns of male excellence. That is, he did not feel that female ascendance at the keyboard necessarily challenged male authority. In the course of reviewing a set of sonatinas by

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the Weimar kapellmeister Ernst Wilhelm Wolf, Cramer doubly validated Westenholz’s performance in the names of C. P. E. Bach (as chief patriarch of keyboard technique) and Wolf, whose unyielding requirements she was, it seems, uniquely able to fulfill: Sonatinas? Yes; but they possess more worth than the whole lot of sonatas that plague us these days, particularly from the realm of hurdy-gurdy music, that is, South Germany and the Rhine. . . . Delicacy, subtlety, tenderness of ideas are their principal feature, and the correct harmonic treatment is to be noted, and not for the first time with this composer. [Cramer then states he would like to hear Wolf play them.] From the score of keyboard works one derives a more accurate sense of the composer’s own ability as a performer than one might gain about a poet’s declamatory talent from their writing. Furthermore, he has dedicated them to a virtuosa who is capable of realizing his most stubborn requirements. Rarely can one boast this of the fair sex. However much technique and dexterity ladies’ fingers possess, they usually lack the [strong] nerves and the power necessary for the striking, characteristic presentation of excellent keyboard ideas; they almost always release keys too quickly, as if they were red hot; their [musical] utterance lacks light and shade. Frau Kapellmeister Westenholz (whom I happened to hear last summer) is the exception; to all the nuanced feeling for expression that belongs to female performance, she joins a manly, solid decisiveness; a genuine female student of the one true Bachian performance, she knows how to unite as much power as shimmer and charm. I describe her talents all the more gladly in a public announcement because I can do so with complete honesty and without suspicion of engaging in mere flattery.9

Some of Cramer’s strategies here are unremarkable. The notion of the female exception was particularly commonplace at this time and allowed Westenholz to appear as an honorary man. But other aspects of his review are more striking. He claims that Westenholz’s performance united gendered extremes and sexual differences within a single perfect whole (a variant of the motif of the living muse that Burney discovered in Marianna Martinez), and that this androgynous completeness is also characteristic of Wolf ’s music. Specifically, the sonatinas possess “delicacy, subtlety, tenderness” but are, at the same time, supported by “correct harmonic treatment”—so much so that outwardly diminutive pieces (sonatinas) embody a kapellmeister’s “stubborn requirements.” If female ascendance at the keyboard is initially contained by a notion of a unique and exceptional woman, Westenholz’s prowess seems to both reflect and heighten androgynous aspects of musical style and (male) creativity. Cramer’s review also sends a mixed message about the relationship between composing and performing. On the one hand these roles are starkly distinguished, not least through sex, with the male composer served by the female performer. But on the other hand Cramer narrows the gap, by asserting that keyboard works (scores) give special insight into how their composers play—and thus, more

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abstractly, into composers themselves. This blurring of composer and performer was hardly surprising, given that, in the north German territories particularly, learning to compose was often one and the same with learning to perform keyboard music. Westenholz’s early instruction (and success) in keyboard performance thus went some way to equip her to compose, even if, in Cramer’s review, she appeared destined solely to perform. W E ST E N HO L Z ’ S C OM P O SI T IO N S

Compose she did. Her works list (compiled here as table 4), which contains many newly uncovered pieces, represents one of the most substantial bodies of music of any female composer of the eighteenth century. To provide an overview, and as a reference for future commentary, I have catalogued her opus with “SW” numbers, organized by conventional genre categories. As far as I have been able to establish, her output comprises eleven keyboard pieces (including five solo sonatas), thirtytwo German songs (mostly with keyboard accompaniment but two existing in versions with string orchestra), along with miscellaneous and lost pieces, including one for glass harmonica. This output is dominated by the keyboard, as both a solo instrument and, in the songs, an often elaborate, loquacious, even intrusive participant. (Westenholz did not follow the older convention of Reichardt and J. A. P. Schulz for unobtrusive accompaniments.) Although there is a small literature on Westenholz as a composer of songs, there is nothing on her keyboard music, which was at the center of her activity. This chapter seeks clarity, where it is available, about her career, her music, and the aesthetic debates triggered by both. Much of the biographical and source information reported in the twentieth century is inconsistent and unreliable.10 For example, Dieter Härtwig’s entry on the composer in The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers states that “a manuscript chronicle of the Westenholz family, letters and other documents are held at the Wissenschaftliche Allgemeinbibliothek (formerly Mecklenburgische Landesbibliothek),” an institution now called the Landesbibliothek MecklenburgVorpommern; in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, however, the same writer gave a different location for the chronicle, specifically “im Mecklenburgischen Staatsarchiv Schwerin,” an archive now called the Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin.11 But these confusions conceal another: the chronicle never existed.12 What do survive are court records containing contractual information, receipts, and petitions, which I use here to help set Westenholz’s biography on a more secure footing.13 Although firm evidence is lacking, much of Westenholz’s music appears to date from between around 1797 to about 1811: that is, the period of her most intense activity at court as the chief representative of keyboard culture and of her concerts beyond Ludwigslust. Some of the German songs were probably written for a short-lived musical society that linked court and town in the late 1790s; the piano

table 4 Compositions by Sophie Westenholz (with SW numbers) I. Solo keyboard sonatas, ca. 1790–1804a SW I/1 I/2 I/3 I/4 I/5a I/5b

Title Sonate pour le Clavecin [in C major] Sonatina [in B♭ major] [Sonatina in F major]b Sonate in F minor pour P-f Sonate en ut moll pour le P-f (dedicated to her son, Charles Westenholz) Earlier version of I/5a with alternate title: Sonate aller Sonaten

Source B-Bc 6278 D-Hs ND VI 388 v D-Hs ND VI 388 v D-Hs ND VI 388 t B-Bc 6279 D-SW1Mus 5691/1

II. Other keyboard pieces SW II/1 II/2 II/3 II/4 II/5 II/6

Title Rondo [in B♭ major] Thème avec X [sic XII] Variations [in A major] Sonate à quatre mains [in F major] Capriccio [in C major] Walzer [in E♭ major] Walzer [in D major]

Source/Date of Publication Berlin, 1806, as op. 1 Berlin, 1806, as op. 2 Berlin, 1806, as op. 3 Ms., n.d.; D-Hs ND VI 388 w Ms., n.d.; D-Hs ND VI 388 w Ms., n.d.; D-Hs ND VI 388 w

III. Solo songs in German, ca. 1790–ca. 1811c SW III/1

III/2 III/3

Title Resignation (“Also willst du treulos von mir scheiden”); based on “Die Ideale,” by Friedrich Schillerd Der Mensch (“Was ist der Mensch”); text by Joachim Lorenz Evers [Untitled] (“Nenne mir das schmerzlich-süße Sterben”); text by unidentified poet

Source/Date of Publication Ms., n.d.; D-Hs ND VI 388 x

Ms., n.d., D-Hs ND VI 388 x Ms., n.d., D-Hs ND VI 388 x

a This speculative date range identifies the period of the composer’s tours and of relatively intense activity at court as a keyboard teacher and solo recitalist. 1790 is suggested on the basis of stylistic evidence (the absence of the types of virtuosity that characterize keyboard music after 1800 in SWI/1–3), and the fact that the title of SWI/1 designates “Clavecin” alone, not “Clavecin or pianoforte.” I have chosen 1804 as a terminal date on similarly lightweight evidence: in this year Westenholz appeared for the last time in Massonneau’s diary of court concerts as a soloist performing a sonata of her own composition, and there is no evidence that she toured after 1804. In 1806 she published for the first and last time. However, the implied chronological order for the sonatas is to be taken extremely lightly: the order from I/1–5 may appear to trace a movement from relatively simple to more complex idioms and so represent the composer’s evolving style, but this is pure conjecture. Another explanation of the stylistic range of these pieces is that they were composed for different purposes, such as teaching pieces for royal children, or recital pieces. b The editorial title takes its cue from the fact that this piece is a companion piece to the Sonatina in B♭, appearing on the same page of the same manuscript. c

All for soprano with keyboard unless otherwise noted.

d

RISM suggests ca. 1790 for the manuscript containing SW III/1–3. However, this does not take into consideration the poetry. The first song is a setting of Friedrich Schiller’s “Die Ideale,” published in 1796. The third song is on a Masonic text by Joachim Lorenz Evers, a poet of formidable obscurity who, according to Hans Werner Engels, became a Mason and founded a lodge in 1795 or 1796 (see www.collasius.org/ENGELS/4-HTML/evers.htm). I have not traced the first publication of this lyric, but it may date from around that time.

table 4 (continued) SW III/4e III/5 III/6 III/7 III/8 III/9 III/10 III/11 III/12 III/13

III/14

III/15 III/16 III/17

III/18 III/19 III/20 III/21a

Title Peters Klagen über den Tod seines Hannchen (“Das ganze Dorf ”); text by Johann Martin Miller Die Kaffeeschwester (“Kaffeechen”); text by unidentified poet Der Freier (“Wenn ich nur ein Mädchen hätte”); text by unidentified poet Todtengräberlied (“Grabe, Spaten, grabe”); text by Ludwig Hölty Freudenlied (“Ich habe freien frohen Sinn”); text by unidentified poet Die Geschichte von Goliath und David (“War einst ein Riese Goliath”); text by Matthius Claudius Der Dorfschulmeister (“Ich frage nicht”); text by Johann Baptist von Alxinger Lied eines alten Juden (“Wer bist du denn”) [text by J. B. von Alxinger] Lied am Geburtstage eines guten Vaters (“Für diesen frohen Morgen”); text by unidentified poet Lied am Geburtstage eines guten Vaters (“Bey Kindern, die ihre Eltern ehren”); text by unidentified poet Lied in der Haushaltung zu singen, wenn ein Wechselzahn soll ausgezogen warden (“Wir ziehn nun”); text by Matthius Claudius [Untitled] (“Treue Bruderliebe üben”); text by unidentified poet Heinrich und Sophie (“Mir ist noch nie so wohl zu Mut”); text by J. M. Miller [Untitled, for soprano with keyboard and obbligato flute] (“Der Freundschaft Nektar fließet aus edlen Herzen”); text by unidentified poet Der Gottesacker (“Wie sie so sanft ruhn”); text by Cornelius August Stockmann Lied aus der Ferne (“Wann in des Abends letztem Scheine”); text by Friedrich von Matthisson Meine Wünsche (“Die Erde ist so groß und hehr”); text by Johann Aloys Blumauer Das Glück der Liebe (“Meines Lebens Wonnetage”); text by Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten

Source/Date of Publication Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413

Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413

Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413

Ms., [1797–1800?],f B-Bc 413 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4

e III/4–20 are preserved in a manuscript titled Lieder, Gesänge und Chöre in Musik gesetzt (Ms. B-Bc 413); if a genre distinction between a Lied and Gesang is implied by this title, it is not clarified, however, within the collection. f The speculative earliest date of 1797 is based on Hans Rentzow, Die mecklenburgischen Liederkomponisten des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Triltsch and Huther, 1938), 156. Rentzow notes that the first song in B-Bc 413 (SW III/4) sets a poem by J. M. Miller that was first published in 1773, but that the title (“Peters Klagen”) first appeared in a Berlin edition of 1797, in the Berliner Gesangbuch für Resourcen (Berlin songbook for musical societies). Rentzow reports that this collection contains other poems set by Westenholz, and, on this basis, he suggested a date of not before 1797 for all the lieder. (Rentzow does not, however, detail which songs were also in the Berliner Gesangbuch, and the inaccessibility of that source prevented my verifying his conclusion). Rentzow also suggests that these pieces served as material for a short-lived musical society formed in Mecklenberg in 1799.

(continued)

table 4 (continued) III. Solo songs in German, ca. 1790–ca. 1811 (continued) SW III/21b III/22 III/23 III/24 III/25 III/26 III/27 III/28 III/29 III/30a III/30b III/31

III/32

Title Version of 21a for soprano and string orchestra Das Grab (“Das Grab ist tief und stille”); text by Johann Gaudenz von Salis-Seewis [Untitled] (“Weine nicht, es ist vergebens”); text by unidentified poet Die Erscheinung (“Ich lag auf grünen Matten”); text by L. G. Kosegarten Trost der Hoffnung (“Wenn auf meines Lebens Wegen”); text by Johann Friedrich Schink Morgenlied (“Wie lieblich winkt sie mir”); text by Johann Timotheus Hermes Lied der Liebe (“Durch Fichten am Hügel”); text by Friedrich von Matthisson Huldigung (“Gar verlohren”); text by L. G. Kosegarten Frühlingsreigen (“Freude jubelt”); text by Friedrich von Matthisson Der Bund: Sie an ihn (“Hast du’s in meinem Auge nicht gelesen”); text by Friedrich von Matthisson Version of 30a scored for soprano with string orchestra [Untitled, for bass with string orchestra] (“Wo des Mondes bleicher Schimmer”); text by Friedrich von Matthisson [Untitled] (“Liebe, nur Liebe erwärmt das Herz”); text by unidentified poet

Source/Date of Publication Ms., n.d., B-Bc 5508 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Publ. Berlin, 1806, as op. 4 Ms., ca. 1800, B-Bc 413 Ms., n.d., B-Bc5508; performance, 8 Dec. 1808[?]g Ms., dated 10 Oct. 1811; in private ownershiph

IV. Miscellaneous SW IV/1 IV/2

Title Marsch—Chor—Chor mit Instrumentalschluß Die Schwalbe (“Die Schwalbe was will sie wohl”); text by Leopold Graf zu Stollberg

Source/Date of Publication Ms., ca. 1800, B-Bc 413i Ms., n.d., B-Br Ms II 3959 Mus Fétis 2489j

g An “Arie” by Mad. Westenholz was performed in the “Goldener Saal” at Ludwigslust by Hr. Wahnschafft in a concert of 3 December 1808 for the Duke of Strelitz. (See the diary of court concerts kept by Massonneau, transcribed in Clemens Meyer, Geschichte der Mecklenburg-Schweriner Hofkapelle (Schwerin: Ludwig Davids, 1913), 280. h

Available as a copy by Clemens Meyer, D-SW1Mus 5691/2, dated 9 January 1914.

i

The instrumentation of the March is “Turkish,” incorporating bass drum, cymbals, triangle, and piccolo, alongside the usual strings and winds. The chorus comprises two sopranos, tenor, and bass parts. On the basis of the text, which refers to the passing of time and celebrates a new year, Rentzow suggests that this is a festival piece for the new year, 1800 (Die mecklenburgischen Liederkomponisten, 164–65). j A short, very simple canon for four singing voices in a manuscript collection of canons compiled by FrançoisJoseph Fétis.

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table 4 (continued) V. Lost and/or of uncertain attribution SW V/1 V/2 V/3 V/4

Title Compositions for the glass harmonica (lost) Concertino fürs Clavier, mit 4 Händen, nebst Begleitung v. 8 Blasinstrumente (lost, uncertain) Clavier Sonate, mit obl. Clarinett (lost, uncertain) [Untitled, for soprano and guitar] (“Ich liebe dich sprach oft mein tränend’ Auge”) (uncertain)

Source/Date of Publication Performance, Berlin 29 Jan. 1804k Performance, Ludwigslust 25 Oct. 1804l Performance, Ludwigslust 31 Oct. 1804m Ms., n.d., PL-WRu 60440 Muz, with attribution to “Westenholz”

k

“Berlin . . . Den 29sten gab die ruhmlich bekannte Mad. Westenholz . . . ein Konzert [im Theatersaal]. . . . Sie selbst spielte einige von ihr selbst gesetzte Stück auf der Harmonika.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 21 (22 February 1804).

l The composer is not identified in Massonneau’s diary, transcribed in Meyer, Geschichte, 276, but a work by Westenholz, or arranged by her, is plausible—the performers were Westenholz and her royal pupil, Princess Charlotte. Was this perhaps an arrangement of Westenholz’s sonata for four hands, SW II/3? Other works performed by Westenholz and appearing in the diary without attribution are: “1 Trio für Clavier, gespielt v. Mad. Westenholz” (28 September 1809; Meyer, Geschichte, 281)—likely the same Haydn trio that she played on 13 October 1809; “1 Clavier Sonate mit Violin, gespielt von Mad. Westenholz” (9 November 1809; Meyer, Geschichte, 281); “Mad. Westenholz 1 Clavier Duett mit Violin” (17 July 1810; Meyer, Geschichte, 283)—likely the Mozart “Duett mit Violin” performed on 10 October 1810 (Meyer, Geschichte, 283). An ambiguous entry in the diary for 1 September 1811 hints at a chamber piece with clarinet: “Vollbrecht 1 Quartett v. Pleyel, Hammerle [a clarinettist] 1 Quartett v. Mad. Westenholtz” (Meyer, Geschichte, 286). m

An entry in Massonneau’s diary reads: “Den 31. Oct., Concert in der Herzogin Vorzimmer . . . Clavier Sonate, mit obl. Clarinett, comp. u. Gespielt v. Mad. Westenholtz u. Hr. Hammerle”; see Meyer, Geschichte, 276. Whether or not this was a collaborative composition, or an arrangement of another of Westenholz’s keyboard sonatas, is unclear.

sonatas appear to encompass easy, pedagogically oriented pieces, perhaps for royal children, and more ambitious works written (in C. P. E. Bach’s phrase about works of his own) “in complete freedom and for my own use.”14 A single choral work, with orchestral passages employing “Turkish,” or Janissary, instruments, probably formed a festival piece for the celebration of a new year.15 Among the lost works are those for glass harmonica, of which Westenholz was a major exponent. A report in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of 1804 refers to her playing her own pieces for that instrument in Berlin. All that survives of her involvement with the harmonica, however, is a poem published in a Mecklenburg periodical of 1789 in praise of her performance on this otherwordly instrument. The poet L. Fr. L. Riesenberg offered readers an empfindsam apostrophe to the apparitional qualities of the musical glasses’ fleeting, eerie tones.16 At least until around 1810, when the musical politics of court life changed— and not in her favor—the Ludwigslust court offered Westenholz a protected and prestigious environment. She was even able to “author” the keyboard culture of the court, which, in one of the earliest instances of a posthumous Mozart cult, she did primarily through the performance of his concerti and chamber music.

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Something approaching a personal identification with Mozart gradually emerged. Records of court concerts show that in the early years of the century she performed Mozart alongside Haydn and a range of younger composers such as Ignaz Pleyel. However, by 1810 she was playing Mozart almost exclusively (at least when she appeared not as an accompanist but as a soloist or in a small chamber ensemble). Westenholz’s cultivation of Mozart can be seen as an early example of the formation of a historical canon in German music but—in her concentration on Mozart’s essentially aristocratic pianism—it evaded some of the more pointedly bourgeois, masculinist, and patriarchal aspects of that process.17 The centennial year, 1800, witnessed a proliferation of celebratory, historicizing, and canonbuilding accounts of German music, not least in the pages of the newly founded journal the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, dedicated to the cause of “serious” music and advertising the wares of its publisher, Breitkopf and Härtel, which included “complete” works of Haydn and Mozart, and a projected history of music in (musical) monuments. In the pages of this periodical, high art was served by the aesthetics of the sublime and, more broadly, by the philosophy of idealism; courting contradiction, it boasted status as both transcendent (or otherwordly) and intrinsically German. As many musicologists have highlighted, the claim to the universality of German music was bound up with a conviction that not all music and musicians were of equal value; patterns of exclusion and hierarchy served the economic interest and cultural capital of a professional, male elite. Exceptions and ambivalence notwithstanding, there were clear losers, among them women, amateurs, dilettantes, and non-Germans. In 1806, amid this volatile context, and with a composer’s sex becoming central to the evaluation and meaning of music, Westenholz issued four collections, styled “opp. 1–4,” with the Berlin publisher Werckmeister. The music was reviewed in 1806 by Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a veteran of gallantry and long-serving champion of the female sign in German music. Comparison of Reichardt’s evaluation with that of anonymous reviews in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung highlights rapidly changing critical terrain. What emerges is not a battle between negative and positive evaluation of Westenholz as a composer—Reichardt himself offered a clouded verdict on the success of her music—but a shift of critical paradigm, in which the sex of the composer became a fundamental preoccupation. Westenholz’s motivation for publishing music in 1806 was probably financial. Owing to the Napoleonic wars, court musicians at Ludwigslust were not paid in this or the following year.18 Under normal circumstances she would have had no need to publish and probably would not have been permitted to do so; the exceptional dispensations granted Joseph Haydn by Prince Nikolaus Esterházy notwithstanding, works composed by court musicians were the property of their royal employers. Perhaps such ownership was temporarily suspended when funds be-

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came restricted; or perhaps, finding herself in straitened circumstances, Westenholz took matters into her own hands. Either way, the confident announcement of her music under her own name, with opus numbers and without prefatory apology, suggests that Westenholz was relatively unconcerned about bourgeois displays of female authorial reticence: deep into widowhood and a leading musician at a major court, she may have felt no need of chaperone or apology. Nor would she necessarily have deemed publication a breakthrough into the public sphere, or an emancipatory move, as it was understood some forty years later by Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel.19 Westenholz’s career was so closely tied to court and to the authority of the sovereign that bourgeois print culture may have seemed a rather grubby affair. That said, it is difficult to believe that she was entirely innocent of the pleasures of publication, even if she savored them amid wartime austerity. The four opuses comprised three solo keyboard works and a collection of songs. The Rondo pour le piano-forte, op. 1, is an independent rondo in B♭ major, whose refrain is an untitled polonaise. Opus 2, in A major, was entitled Thème avec X Variations pour le piano-forte, though this sold Westenholz short, as the work comprised twelve variations. An additional pair of hands joins for opus 3, a threemovement Sonate à quatre mains pour le piano-forte in F major. The final opus, Zwölf deutsche Lieder mit Begleitung des Piano-Forte, contained eleven songs on three staves and one in the older, two-stave format; all but the last song (“Der Bund, Sie an ihn”) are strophic, although as Reichardt noted in his unsigned review, “Many are not lieder as such, but rather have the character and style of larger vocal works.” He also detected the hand of the keyboard virtuosa in the songs, which possess lengthy introductions and postludes, as well as, he complained, some “harsh modulations” that belong more properly to solo keyboard music.20 The dates, contexts, and original purpose (if any) of these compositions are not known. The rondo and set of variations are the sort of music Westenholz played at court and in concerts elsewhere, featuring the resources of the fortepiano as perhaps their primary musical feature. This focus on the instrument is particularly marked in opus 2, where the variation theme offers an effective framework for embellishment but has few aspirations to melodic and harmonic interest. On the contrary, the theme appears purposefully blank at its initial presentation—a domino mask—and takes on memorable features only through each successive variation (example 14). The process of investing a preexisting or even hollow theme with character was sometimes understood and valued at this time as an opportunity for the composer/improviser to express his or her individuality: four years later, in 1810, Eucharius Florschütz, an organist in nearby Rostock, wrote to Breitkopf und Härtel that a set of variations he sought to publish is “ein reines Gemählde meiner Individualité” (a true portrait of my individuality).21 Such autobiographical investments in variation sets may seem idealized or exaggerated; but, at the least, they invite us to understand the keyboard textures employed in

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example 14. Sophie Westenholz, Theme with Variations in A major (SW II/2, published in 1806 as opus 2), variation theme. Thema Poco andante

Westenholz’s opus 2 as illustrating her particular brand of pianism. Arguably, the theme itself—despite its apparent neutrality—possesses a mischievous element characteristic of her music, specifically in the expectation-rousing fermata in measure 8, which seems to feign uncertainty over the music’s next step (a sort of narrative amnesia or indecisiveness). Westenholz’s variations are not bravura showpieces; nor is her idiomatic use of the fortepiano particularly remarkable for the date of composition. Indeed, for all the diverse textures she employs there are precedents in the keyboard works of Haydn and Mozart. Nonetheless, some passages would have taxed many contemporary amateurs, and both opuses 1 and 2 offer glimpses of advanced, professional pianism for the drawing room. The technical difficulties are not always obvious and tend to involve independence of the fingers: the ninth variation of opus 2, for example, requires the right hand to project the variation theme beneath a trill in the fourth and fifth fingers. Even here, though, the passage falls relatively easily into place if the trill is played as sixteenth- and not as thirtysecond notes (example 15). The four-hand sonata, Sonate à quatre mains, op. 3, is a work that seems to betray a courtly, pedagogic scene: perhaps it served Westenholz when teaching the royal children and princesses. There is little attempt to render the two players

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example 15. Sophie Westenholz, Theme with Variations in A major (SW II/2, published in 1806 as opus 2), variation 9. Var. IX

equal and equivalent in the manner of the contemporary duo sonata. Rather, the secondo part is largely accompanimental, whereas the primo projects the main thematic material. Westenholz’s performances of Mozart concerti echo through this sonata, which at times suggests Mozart pastiche and a miniaturization of the concerto genre. The broadly conceived unisono opening of the first movement (mm. 1–4) is orchestral in character, rather than sonatalike, and the primo enters as a contrasting soloistic “voice” in measure 5 in a simulation of tutti–solo alternation (example 16). Particularly evocative of Mozart’s concerti is the way in which the primo employs (in Leonard Ratner’s terms) a “brilliant” topos of rapid scales and broken chords as part of the closing material from measure 45 onward.22 The climax at measures 58–62 seals the alliance with the concerto, presenting a written-out cadenza, and after the cadence, in measure 64, the four hands unite in a simulation of a closing ritornello (example 17). Perhaps Westenholz thought the relatively elevated generic register of the concerto appropriate to court, and to the social position of a fledgling princess? (As composers, and as patrons, German female royalty often availed themselves of more elevated genres than their artisanal and bourgeois female contemporaries.) The four-hand texture of this piece also permitted a relatively inexperienced player on the primo to create a favorable impression, accompanied by a teacher who could maintain a regular

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example 16. Sophie Westenholz, Sonate à quatre mains in F major (SW II/3, published in 1806 as opus 3), first movement, mm. 1–13.

6

10

3

3

tempo, moderate the volume of accompanimental figuration, and provide an accurate reading of harmony and modulatory accidentals. There is even a diplomatic aspect to the division of labor between primo and secondo: with little dialogue between the two performers there were few opportunities for the audience to compare the relative proficiency of the royal personage and her teacher.

example 17. Sophie Westenholz, Sonate à quatre mains in F major (SW II/3, published in 1806 as opus 3), first movement, mm. 57–67. 57

60

63

65

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the Eclipse of the Female Sign R EV I EWS A N D C R I T IC A L S T R AT E G Y

Diplomacy also played a part in Reichardt’s reviews of opuses 1–4. These appeared in the short-lived Berlinische musikalische Zeitung, edited by Reichardt and serving as the house journal of Westenholz’s Berlin publisher, Rodolphe Werckmeister. Reichardt appears to give his honest opinion of the music’s strengths and weaknesses, but it is unlikely that he would have found no value in music published by his own publisher or, indeed, composed by a woman. The tone of his second review (of the four-hand sonata, op. 3) is gallant. Moreover, he weaves criticism through flattery in a manner unusual in contemporary reviewing. He manages to signal significant concerns about harmonic correctness and stylistic decorum while offering praise about how often the composer gets such things right: Our capable composer might easily have avoided the small, oft-returning carelessness of harmony in the sixth and seventh bars. In compositions of this type, where the four voices are widely spaced, it is necessary to pay close attention to the arrangement of the harmony; in many passages of this piece, the composer has indeed arranged the two parts successfully. The very lively rondo finale should be played with great lightness, without any ponderous articulation, and, played in this way, it is certainly of a very pleasing, cheerful, mischievous character, even if the bold modulations and quick returns in the middle are not entirely becoming. Surely, all accomplished keyboardists will await with pleasure the immanent continuation of this auspicious work.23

Reichardt’s gently chiding tone raised, in decorous terms, a challenging aspect of the finale of opus 3. To put matters in technical, and rather anachronistic, terms Reichardt seems to be perturbed by the second episode, which is indeed idiosyncratic. Within a conventional, five-part rondo (ABACA) on a favorite Viennese topic, la chasse (the hunt), a topic that attracts regular phrase lengths and diatonic harmony, the second episode is extravagantly long: it is spun out as a succession of tunes and generic improvisatory figuration and modulates from the subdominant (B♭) through, among other keys, the mediant major (A) and the remote key of the subtonic (E♭). High degrees of dissociation between rondo refrains and episodes were more the rule than the exception in late eighteenth-century practice, with precedents in C. P. E. Bach and Mozart for widely modulating, polythematic episodes within composite forms characterized by elided, contrasting sections. Westenholz’s second episode, however, is different. It has no internal symmetry, no pattern of thematic contrast and return—it goes, quite literally, from one idea to the next. A succession of themes and figures, loosely related to the refrain, projects neither high degrees of contrast to, nor the types of covert similarity with, the refrain that often feature in late eighteenth-century music. Modulations are associated with “new” material, but the pacing and duration of thematic-tonal events do not follow a classical pattern. For example, a new theme (or rather somewhat new

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theme) appears, dolce, in the dominant, close to the end of the episode, as if unconcerned with the formal niceties of closure of the episode or return to the beginning of the refrain. But was this what Reichardt was criticizing? In attempting to unpack his reference to “unbecoming” modulations in the middle of the movement, I have imposed the terms of (something like) Viennese classical style. All Reichardt says is that the “harsh modulations and quick returns” are incongruous with the lightness of the movement as a whole. Nor is his criticism entirely clear: what did he mean by “quick returns”? The refrain proper does not return in the modulatory passages or in the tonic key. Is this a careless turn of phrase, or did Reichardt understand some of the themes that possess a family likeness to the refrain as representatives of it? Whatever his meaning, it may be that the apparently anticlassical, even middlebrow technique of Westenholz’s second episode was not as problematical to Reichardt as it might be to a modern listener, whose expectations have been formed on canonic works and the literature about them. Reichardt’s objection becomes clearer in reading his reviews of Westenholz’s opuses 1 and 2, where he raises similar concerns in broader terms. He speaks there of a problematic “Unruhe” (restlessness) in formal and generic contexts where “greater calm” and repose would be appropriate: Overall, the inner character of these pieces needs to possess greater calm, because the constant restlessness, reigning in the variations especially, does not arise from a wild, unrestrained imagination but from a more ordinary dexterity [or “volubility”]. At least this restlessness needs to be supported by richer and more significant harmony that would give greater substance to the inner life of the whole. It’s strange enough that in both pieces the composer saves the remote and bold modulations until near the end, thereby robbing the close of its appropriate repose. Even the eleventh variation, the only one marked adagio, is full of movement, whereas here, particularly, a simple, songful melody would have served better. Such rapid movement in adagios was first employed, very boldly, by Haydn, to enliven long adagios, and, in that context, often with the desired effect.24

Reichardt’s term Unruhe (restlessnesss) appears to encompass all elements of musical movement, from modulation to melodic contour, rhythm, and texture. To some extent the complaint expresses a regional, even a personal, attachment to Gluckian noble simplicity. For example, Reichardt objects in principle to the penultimate variation of opus 2, an adagio projecting a lavishly ornate coloratura, reminiscent of the slow movements of Mozart’s keyboard sonatas and concerti (example 18). Here, he felt “a simple, songful melody” would be more appropriate. Lingering ideals of unity also informed his objection to the final variation, which he does not appear to recognize as a fully fledged rondo with contrasting episodes. His discomfort is understandable, since Westenholz’s approach is provocative, perhaps even misjudged. Although the previous variations proceed according to

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example 18. Sophie Westenholz, Theme with Variations in A major (SW II/2, published in 1806 as opus 2), variation 11. Var. XI

Adagio

dolce

the phrase structure and harmony of the theme, the final variation is expanded into a fully fledged rondo movement. The second episode erupts in jagged C-minor arpeggios, over thickly gripped, pounding triads, as if the Pathétique Sonata were gate-crashing a set of much more polite variations (example 19). If her intention had been to rouse feelings of the sublime and offer a contrast with the witty and beautiful refrain, the execution comes across as relatively crude. At the beginning and end of this review Reichardt sums up opuses 1 and 2 as pieces primarily “about” keyboard performance: they are both an expression of the composer’s virtuosity and invite performers to raise their level of dexterity through practice. His attitude to pieces of this kind was both relativistic and hierarchic: he affirmed the value of music that is primarily concerned with its medium of production (without denying such music aesthetic significance), and at the same time seems to assume the reader’s knowledge of other, more serious and authentic forms of composition. Predictably enough, given the special status of Haydn in north Germany, Reichardt distinguishes Westenholz’s restlessness from Haydn’s use of “rapid movement” in adagios “to enliven long [movements].” Generalizing this distinction, Reichardt distinguishes the restlessness of Westenholz’s music from genuine inspiration: “The constant restlessness, reigning in the variations especially, arises not from a wild, unrestrained imagination but from a more ordinary dexterity.”

example 19. Sophie Westenholz, Theme with Variations in A major (SW II/2, published in 1806 as opus 2), variation 12 (a rondo), second episode, mm. 34–52. 34

38

41

44

47

50

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In this thinking, the performer’s creativity lies in her fingers—as a sort of nervousness—and falls short of original genius: it could even be understood to simulate genius through the imitation of external features. This can seem sexist to modern eyes, but I believe it rested on musical grounds. As Reichardt explains, the restless character of Westenholz’s music is coupled with ordinary melodicharmonic material. He makes the point through a culinary analogy, itself conventional: “This spicing of ordinary melodies becomes unpleasant, or even dull and deadening in the end, when [spices are] sprinkled by the handful.” Genuine originality and imaginativeness, Reichardt implies, involve “richer and more significant harmony that would give greater substance to the inner life of the whole.”25 Reichardt implies that Westenholz’s music simulates genius rather than manifesting it, that it is the copy of an original manner, rather than being genuinely visionary. However, he offers this appraisal on the basis of the music, not that of Westenholz’s sex. He regards her as an inexperienced composer, not primarily as a female one, in need of, and capable of, “further artistic development.” In describing her as “a very great keyboardist” with an “agreeable talent for composition” he offers—in short—a realistic appraisal of her opuses 1–4, and although he invokes a realm of genius that she has not yet achieved he does not exclude her from Parnassus permanently or in principle.26 The implicit hierarchies of authorship and genre are not underwritten by sex. In this way his reviews differ from those published anonymously in the same year in the Allgemeine musikalishe Zeitung (AMZ), the first of opuses 1 and 2, the second (ostensibly by a different reviewer) of opus 3. Sex moves center stage in the AMZ reviews. Here the reviewer believes that being a woman imposes limits on composing that are doubly authorized by nature and culture. Music written primarily for performance (rather than for being listened to in rapt awe) comes under more severe censure than was the case with Reichardt; indeed, it is regarded as degenerate and equated with the figures of woman and the dilettante or amateur. What Reichardt called “restlessness” and questioned on the basis of musical decorum, the AMZ reviewer of opuses 1 and 2 summoned as evidence of female hubris and inevitable failure, as an unnatural and ill-fated attempt to enter a realm of masculine erudition and expressive power: It is often said that women in the arts lack the gift of invention, even if they perform (particularly the details) with refinement and grace. These little works, with which a lady makes her debut, confirm both parts of the statement. Perhaps only in nos. 9 and 10 do the variations rise above commonplace figures. That said, they are cheerful, pleasing, and fluent throughout (at least until the coda, of which more later); they are more than sufficient to keep ear and hands occupied, are entirely appropriate—in short, this is definitely music to recommend to dilettantes who possess little rigor and dexterity. It’s largely the same with the rondo. No one could hear the pretty little theme without pleasure, even if it’s too close for comfort to that in the finale of Rode’s first

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quartet in E♭. However, as the coda of the variations and several passages of the rondo reveal, the authoress is not satisfied with the narrow, friendly circle that she occupies so well but emerges as passionate, original, even learned; to this end, she lapses suddenly into very harsh harmonic progressions and such like. Patently this would not be the right place, even if she were successful. We only want to touch on this; surely, her own feelings, or a more experienced friend of art will tell her what needs to be added. Both little works are printed well.27

The reviewer’s certainty about the nature of female authorship testifies to that “hardening of identity categories” often noted in cultural histories of the period around 1800. To trivialize female artistic activity was hardly new. What is distinctive in this review is the regulative role assumed by sex, which functions in a disciplinary way. This discipline operates under the double authority of both nature and culture: of how things are and how they should be. For this reason it is not only an external force but a set of standards that an individual is invited to internalize. For the female composer of the nineteenth century, this amounted to a dissonance in the domain of “being”: being a woman and being a composer were not (substantially) compatible. It is hardly necessary to cite Michel Foucault’s controversial account of bourgeois identities after 1800 as tyrannies of normativity maintained by self-surveillance to understand the reviewer’s insidious exhortation that the composer consult “her own feelings” to discover the truths of female nature that she has (through her transgression) compelled him to state. But in one particular Foucault’s analysis of what he described as the “hermeneutic episteme” proves illuminating: compared with Reichardt’s reviews, those in the AMZ grant sex new epistemological significance within the domain of authorship. Specifically, the distinction “man/woman” acts as a master category: it does not just inflect composing but forms its ground. A comparison of Reichardt’s reviews and those of the AMZ reveals a turn away from the flexibility accorded (some) women in late eighteenth-century discourses of cultural production to biological essentialism. The “biological essentialism” of the latter does not comprise a (possibly unpalatable) scientific truth but a cultural imperative framed in quasi-scientific terms. Arguably, it seeks to render the distinction between nature and culture irrelevant through a single “truth” of human nature that enjoys the double status of scientific truth and moral imperative. This doubleness explains the apparent inconsistencies in the review, which may not have appeared as such within the reviewer’s epistemology. Specifically, triviality both robs and rewards: as Westenholz’s proper domain, it diminishes her ultimate significance but, insofar as she takes her place there, she is to be praised. For the “female composer” of the review, triviality is not something she should seek to overcome but rather something to which she must aspire. Reading into the stylistic incongruities of opuses 1 and 2 a dissatisfaction—resistance, if one likes—to that “narrow, friendly circle that she occupies so well,” the reviewer summons the

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prospect of a female composer as “passionate, original, even learned” as selfevident nonsense. In Reichardt’s review Westenholz’s “restlessness” breaches musical decorum; in the AMZ reviews it breaches a decorum of both music and sex. Some of the terms employed by the anonymous reviewer to characterize the compositions, and to evoke the appropriate context and manner of performance, strongly suggest the discourse of female accomplishment. The variations “are cheerful, pleasing, and fluent . . . sufficient to keep ear and hands occupied . . . music to recommend to dilettantes who possess little rigor and dexterity.” More precisely, the terms suggest the more ungenerous aspects of the accomplishment ideal, robbed of the potential for the executant’s gradual ascent to high levels of proficiency. It is as if some notion of domestic, private, female practice, associated with an earlier period, had crystallized into a stereotype and been robbed of its inner complexity. One of the effects of this stereotype was to contain the notion of music as a socially embedded, leisured activity within a specific, negative case, a move that held out the possibility of a more elevated, even socially transcendent, musical practice overseen by (presumably) professional male musicians. What has changed here from Reichardt’s critical practice is the extent to which sex/gender serves as the foundation for judgments about musical value. Within this new reality, statements or just hints at essential relationships between musical character and the sex of the author become unremarkable. The music of the female composer comes, inevitably, to bear the mark of her sex: “No one could hear the pretty little theme [of the Rondo, op. 1] without pleasure,” the reviewer observed, as if speaking of a pretty face; the variations “are cheerful, pleasing, and fluent,” he observes, as if characterizing female conversation. The situation is rendered poignant by the possibility that the anonymous reviewer was in some respects “right”: cast in the fashionable genres of rondo and variation, Westenholz’s opuses 1 and 2 may well have been aimed at an audience who would employ music as part of other social activities, even to the extent of talking through it. As pieces distinguished by their enjoyment and exploration of the fortepiano, they also belong to a then burgeoning type of virtuoso and instrumentspecific music that was always at the boundary of aesthetic respectability and would soon attract strenuous disavowals in the name of high musical art.28 The point, then, is not that the reviewer denied the status of masterworks to these pieces, but that some emerging notion of the masterwork is articulated, in sexually specific terms, through the negative image of the female composer. Westenholz’s music “itself ” appears unapologetic in its affiliations with the pleasures of playing the keyboard, with the popular end of contemporary art music, and with the marketplace, even, in its (variously) improvisatory and passionate eruptions raising questions about the stability of the categories on which such assessments rest. Ironically, the economic interests of professional male musicians register in the reviewer’s attempts to distinguish the compliant, market-driven character of

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Westenholz’s music from serious art: ironic because serious art was itself a marketoriented category. The hegemonic ambitions of professional male musicians register in the review, not just in the hierarchies of male–female, professional– dilettante, serious music–music for entertainment, but in a sense of possessiveness over musical material. The charge of plagiarism from Pierre Rode’s quartets appears to be malicious, or in error, and can be understood as expressing the idea, theorized by Schiller and Goethe at this time, that female authors are always and necessarily plagiarists because (as this reviewer put it) they “lack invention” or (as Schiller and Goethe conceived it) they mistake their receptivity to art for an ability to create it.29 The issue comes to the fore in the second review in the AMZ, addressing the four-hand sonata, op. 3, which is described as a sort of lost property item awaiting the return of its rightful owner: What was criticized by another reviewer in the two earlier little works of this virtuosa (see issue no. 31) is all the more in evidence here, and what was praised, all the more scarce. It’s not as easy to write for four hands as the authoress assumes and as she has set about it. Furthermore, she has done more than just made use of other composers. It’s to be hoped that they will be polite in dealing with a lady and not reclaim their property. Otherwise, I would take away, for example from the rondo the entire Kozeluch-ish theme, except for a single, small alteration in a transition. (Specifically, it also belongs to a four-hand sonata, likewise in F major, in Kozeluch’s earliest works.) Still, so much is bought now and raced through, not without conversation, just for the sake of some flowing melodies and amenable figurations: since just these things are met here, a similar fate is to be expected for this little work.30

Women, like men, are capable of plagiarism, but the charge is not borne out on this occasion. Commonplace topics are at stake rather than highly individual themes, and the accusation that the opening of the finale of the four-hand sonata has the same theme as a four-hand sonata by Kozeluch is, as far as I can determine, untrue.31 (The confusion may have arisen because Kozeluch often employed the topic of la chasse in finales, including in the finale of his Sonata for four hands in F major, op. 19.) Whatever its origin, the charge seems to convey a sense of male ownership of music, as if music composed by a woman were always actually composed by a man, and female authorship necessarily a form of mimicry. Imitation and emulation are downgraded, appearing in the degenerate form of dilettantish and female copying, a perspective (at once aesthetic and legalistic) that holds out the possibility (not itself a foregone conclusion) that substantial originality and individuality are expressed in the masterworks of elite male professionals. In this way the reviews of Westenholz’s music in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung simplified contemporary thinking about originality. Commenting on how products of genius might stimulate others not to imitation but to their own originality is to walk a discursive tightrope. Christopher Reynolds, exploring the tension between ideas of originality and practices of allusion and quotation, traces

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discussion of this tension back at least to Kant, for whom “the product of genius . . . is an example, not for imitation (for that would mean the loss of the element of genius, and just the very soul of the work), but to be followed by another genius—one whom it arouses to a sense of his own originality.”32 Musical critics did not agree, however, on when composers might have pilfered and when they had been “aroused” to originality. A piece that Westenholz appears to have known, Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata, op. 13 (1799), was initially embroiled in just such controversy.33 The first reviewer, writing in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1800, felt that he had heard the theme of the rondo finale before but could not recall where. The remark inadvertently raised the larger issue not just of precedents for Beethoven’s moody, C-minor keyboard writing in, among others, C. P. E. Bach’s Free Fantasia in C minor, H. 75 (1753; from the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen), Mozart’s Fantasia and Sonata in C minor (K. 475 and K. 457, both from 1785), and Dussek’s Sonata in C minor, op. 35, no. 3 (1795), but commonplace aspects of the pathétique as an expressive topos that were already expounded in Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste in the 1770s.34 Westenholz, for one, seems to have assumed that apparently unique aspects of Beethoven’s opus 13 were common property. “S O NATA T O E N D A L L S O NATA S”

This assumption is also evident in Westenholz’s C- minor sonata, a puzzle-of-a-piece ideal for those who wish to dwell longer, and with uncertainty, at the boundary between imitation and originality. Not only does her work evoke Beethoven’s opus 13 but she also quotes Mozart. In one of the two surviving autographs the sonata is alternatively titled Sonate aller Sonaten, a richly ambiguous epithet, meaning at one extreme “sonata to end all sonatas” and, at the other, “sonata made up entirely of other sonatas.” The first movement includes a parade of topics, some of which may be quotations that have yet to be identified; in the rondo finale Westenholz quotes the opening theme of the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major, K. 467 (1785), as the basis of the first episode, the theme transformed from the serenely floating arabesques of Mozart’s expansive, alla breve movement to a jaunty Viennese waltz (see m. 48 in example 20). The fact that the refrain (from m. 1) has a familial relationship with the finale of Mozart’s Sonata in C minor, K. 457, suggests elements of allusion, affiliation, intertextual belonging, homage, and (given Westenholz’s characteristically adventurous modulations) competition. But however tempting it would be to read the Sonate aller Sonaten as a female plea for inclusion in an emerging discourse of high musical art, Westenholz’s intentions, like the meaning of her alternative title, remain unclear. Perhaps this was a piece written to strike back at the AMZ reviewer of her published music, to resist her symbolic exclusion from the domain of high musical art, to join the conversation. But, given that such readings,

example 20. Sophie Westenholz, Sonate aller Sonaten in C minor (SW I/5), third movement, mm. 1–84.

9

17

23

29

36

(continued)

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example 20 (continued) 45

dolce

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63

72

79

based around notions of female exclusion and resistance, are now the conventional ones, it is worth considering alternatives. One alternative lies in the architectural and decorative practices of emulation and display at Ludwigslust, practices that turned on pastiche in a variety of senses. It would be difficult to imagine a piece more suited to its environment than a “sonata made up of other sonatas,” for among the distinctions of court culture in Schwerin-Mecklenburg in the late eighteenth century was the practice of

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recycling. Wastepaper was gathered not just from the palace of Ludwigslust but also from the neighboring town and beyond. How far beyond is unclear, but restoration of papier-mâché artifacts reveals shreds of printed newspapers in several European languages. Outwardly gilded and lacquered, these artifacts were produced inexpensively in the dedicated Ludwigsluster Carton Fabrique (Ludwigslust board manufactory), where wastepaper was transformed into moldable, hard-setting material. Far exceeding the customary use of papier-mâché for small decorative objects, the manufactory supplied statues, cornicing, columns, even doors and walls for instillation throughout the palace. The secret recipe, thought to involve ethanol and the sticky residue of boiled bones, produced a durable, versatile, insect-resistant substance that was cast into replicas of classical statuary, sanded and painted into the appearance of carved stone, or festooned in golden classical garlands draped over balustrades and ceilings. The centerpiece of the palace of Ludwigslust was the Goldener Saal (gilded hall), an emulation of Versailles’ Galerie des glaces (hall of mirrors). Fashioned almost entirely from papier-mâché, the seemingly lavish interior was constructed at a fraction of the expense incurred by Louis XIV. Arched, full-length windows and chandeliers provided sufficient light and glitter, without the costly mirrors of the French model, and the bronze statues and silver tables of Versailles were simulated in the boiled records of court bureaucracy and discarded broadsheets of an emerging Republic of Letters.35 Westenholz’s Sonate aller Sonaten can be understood in similar terms as an act of homage to several prestigious authorities (in this case, not Louis XIV and Versailles but Mozart, Beethoven, and C. P. E. Bach), at home in the courtly practices of display, imitation, citation, and pastiche. Whether heard as a form of recycling, imitation (in a negative sense), or, in a more supernatural spirit, dancing with the ghost of Mozart, Westenholz’s Sonata in C minor was a work she held dear. The alternative title itself may be taken to mean that among all her works this was the one she felt most strongly about, and this understanding chimes with the next clause of the annotation (SW 1/5b), which records that the piece was “gespielt mit der Seele in den Fingern” (played with soul in the fingers). Presumably this means that it was performed by the composer herself, perhaps at the court concert of 25 October 1804, during which she presented a solo sonata of her own composition. That nugget of performance information survives in a detailed list of all the concerts at Ludwigslust compiled by Westenholz’s younger colleague, Louis Massonneau (1766–1848). M A S S O N N E AU A N D M U SIC A L V IO L E N C E

Massonneau’s arrival at court in 1803—where, until 1812, he acted as kapellmeister, under the title of assistant—signals the final and most remarkable phase of Westenholz’s career, which involved a physical confrontation with the kinds of

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professional male authority that had already flexed their might in the reviews of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. A German-born violinist from a French family, Massonneau acted as assistant to the indisposed kapellmeister Eligio Celestino (1739–1812) from 1803 until the latter’s death. As a young man Massonneau had, in the late 1780s, served as violinist in the orchestra of the University of Göttingen directed by Johann Nicolaus Forkel. As if ambitious to establish his authority in Ludwigslust, despite, or because of, the uncertainty of his long-term prospects, Massonneau kept detailed records of all court concerts from the time of his arrival, in a document now referred to as the Diarium.36 As it turned out, he was a success, and he replaced Celestino as kapellmeister on the latter’s death in 1812. In his first decade at Ludwigslust, however, he was not the only musical “general” (in Charles Burney’s turn of phrase), because of Westenholz’s position as keyboardist and Celestino’s absent presence.37 Conflict was perhaps inevitable, and it is recorded in a newly discovered letter from Westenholz, preserved in the court archives now held in the Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin, written to her employer and sovereign, Duke Friedrich Franz I (1746–1837), and dated 14 September 1811. This long letter, cited in full below, is significant for recording Westenholz’s experience of the historical changes that had first brought her into a position of leadership in the court’s music making and then subsequently uncrowned and demoted her. The letter, like her career, writes in miniature the story of female sovereignty and shows how the broad patterns of history came to bear upon a single life. The letter illuminates the structures of authority and value that underwrote female ascendance, as well as the ways in which those structures were challenged. And yet the letter was written within the constraints of the courtier’s petition; factual, and pragmatic, it requests a change in duties. The addressee is not the author’s confidante but her employer. Westenholz begins by reminding Duke Friedrich Franz I that she had been placed at the keyboard on the death of the preceding kapellmeister, Antonio Rosetti, on his Highness’s authority, and, by extension, as his representative. She also implicitly linked the importance of her musical role as keyboardist to ducal authority. That musical analogy notwithstanding, the letter then proceeds as if it were self-evident that her leadership in court music making was not only authorized by absolutism but also a way of signifying it. By “signifying” I do not mean that Westenholz’s musical performances, or composing, were marked, stylistically, by despotism, but that her activities could be understood as authored by, the property of, and representing her royal employer. It is now full nineteen years, following the death of the blessed Kapellmeister Rosetti, that I received the command from your ducal Highness to take my place at the clavier for the performance of vocal chamber music. Everyone knows that your Highness possesses a correct understanding of music, and of the authority

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necessarily bound up with the position of a musical director at the keyboard, such that none could entertain the idea that your Highness would regard me as a supernumerary at the keyboard, or a mere nonentity. Still less credible is the idea that your ducal Highness would be forced to tolerate unauthorized interference in the execution of my duties—on the part of the concertmaster no less—or indeed for me to suffer an open “prostitution” [that is, humiliation] by the same.

Westenholz goes on to report the impertinence and violence that Massonneau had meted out to her, though she had been installed as the sovereign’s representative. Although he had been undermining her for some time, she states, things had come to a head during a rehearsal of the cantata Das Lied von der Glocke (Song of the bell), a hugely popular setting of Friedrich Schiller’s poem by Andreas Jakob Romberg (1767–1821), published as opus 25 in 1809. She frames Massonneau’s hostility not primarily in terms of gender politics but of the authority and body of her employer. Massonneau’s attack on her, she implies, was potentially an attack on sovereignty itself, and certainly a breach of protocol. Nonetheless, gender plays a rhetorical role in her argument. Summoning the trope of rough, unreformed male manners, she describes what happened when she gave the beat to the ensemble during a duet passage without keyboard accompaniment: On the occasion that his most serene Highness the hereditary Prince wished to hear the music by Romberg (entitled “Die Glocke” by Schiller), I strove, as ever, to perform this music to the best of my ability and with the correct feeling—[but] I have to say that at the rehearsal of that music I heard a public impertinence from Massonneau. Nonetheless, I remained true to my duty during the performance. In a particular duet, accompanied only by 2 horns and 2 bassoons, I just wanted to give the correct tempo with my hand, when Massonneau, forgetting due reverence even for the high ducal persons present, did not shy from publicly insulting me once more. Specifically, he struck me on the arm with his violin bow, and warned me with a malicious mien not to give the tempo.

The assistant kapellmeister’s (alleged) behavior, eliding musical authority and physical violence, hints at the more pervasive relationships between violence and classical music that would come to characterize (aspects of) nineteenth-century culture.38 Westenholz’s letter testifies to the early stages in the development of this relationship between artistic seriousness and the assault on women. The physically gentle, if ultimately sovereign, authority of Westenholz’s hand, gesturing in air, coaxing the ensemble into the appropriate tempo, invokes a code of delicacy in the culture of sensibility that lost status around the turn of the century.39 To recall just one earlier example: in his Physiognomy of 1775–1777—a quasi-scientific guide to reading human character from the appearance of the body—Johann Kaspar Lavater captured the power signified by women’s delicate limbs in a strikingly paradoxical turn of phrase. Addressing his readers rhetorically, he inquired: “What is

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so strong as her soft, delicate hand?”40 The question was meant to remain unanswered but found a stinging rejoinder in the scene Westenholz described with such indignation in her letter. Massonneau’s bow struck a blow for a set of images that authorized high bourgeois musical culture through quasi-military manly assertiveness and force. Needless to say, those images were not entirely new, but they were marshaled with renewed vigor around 1800. A brief comparison with the heyday of the sovereign feminine in the 1770s proves instructive. Charles Burney evoked “rough” male manners, and quasimilitary rigidity as self-evident signs of musical inferiority in Berlin during his German tour. In specific contexts he was not averse to approving military analogy— he famously described the orchestra of the Mannheim court as “an army of generals”—but this analogy denied precisely the rigorous hierarchy, the strategic inequality, that military metaphors would come to convey: for how could an army of generals actually operate when all its personnel were of the same, elevated rank? In linking music and the military, Burney’s analogy also measured the gulf that separated them. The terms on which Burney praised music were similar to those that underwrote Westenholz’s career: a feminized culture of sensibility, the (fictitious) ascendance of woman as arbiter of taste, and (aristocratic) arguments in favor of Enlightened despotism that drew, strategically, on images of feminine leadership. These images gradually ceded to others celebrating bourgeois masculinity: the physical force of Beethoven’s pianism; the vogue of orchestral works on military and battle themes during the Napoleonic wars; the heroic verve and struggle of absolute music; and the stigmatization of sentiment and feeling as peripheral even degraded aspects of music. If the sting of Massonneau’s bow was prophetic of historical change, it can also engender déjà vu. In linking violence and seriousness of artistic purpose, his assault echoed the reviews of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung some five years earlier, which had similarly struck a blow for male bourgeois authority in bluntly wielded categories of musical authorship and practice. There, the “woman composer” was born as a discursive category always serving to humiliate representatives of that category, or, in Westenholz’s own (now obsolete) use of the term, to “prostitute” them. It seems, in light of Westenholz’s reference to impertinences too numerous to list, that Massonneau must have brought just these unfriendly winds of change to Ludwigslust with his arrival in 1803. Taken together, Massonneau’s slap and the reviews of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reveal how rapidly the female sign in German music lost status. If in the 1770s and 1780s a (stylized) reverence for musical women demonstrated a progressive masculinity, intolerance of female sovereignty in the fine arts (though hardly new) was now emerging as a viable, even necessary, career move. Westenholz sought a practical solution—a compromise. Specifically, she requested that she need no longer appear in ensemble vocal music, where she

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would have to face Massonneau at close quarters, and appear only in large orchestral contexts or for the performance of small instrumental works: Already since last Easter, I have enjoyed the good fortune of serving a most serene ducal house for 38 years, and of doing so indeed according to the best of my abilities. I have acquired, through much study, the knowledge that belongs to my sphere of activity and the strength for its execution; so one might anticipate that I would not be hindered in my duties by Massonneau, still less that I deserved to be publically “prostituted” by him. (To quote all the many insults I have suffered from him would be too long-winded here.) For these reasons, could your ducal Highness reproach me if, from a true sense of honor, I can no longer place myself at the keyboard? Rather, I must humbly request that your Highness graciously excuse me from the clavier during vocal chamber music. I would recognize this as a high favor. At your most high command, I would use the small talent that I still possess to serve your ducal Highness all the more happily in the usual concerts, or in quartet-music; [the] less [I am] disturbed by subterfuge, the more I would enjoy a calmer existence! In the consoling hope that my plea will be heard with favor, I remain forever in deepest reverence, your sovereign ducal Highness’s most humble servant, Sophie Westenholz. Ludwigslust, 16 September 1811.41

The duke’s subsequent decision and action (if any) are not known, but the period of Westenholz’s ascendance ended with Massonneau’s promotion to kapellmeister in 1812. From this date forward, Westenholz, and the keyboard as solo and chamber instrument, rapidly disappeared from the Diarium and court concerts. The sovereign feminine and the keyboard were eclipsed together. Orchestral symphonies and concerti were now led by Massonneau’s bow; there was a new emphasis on string chamber music, alongside symphonies and concerti for winds or brass. The oratorio and other sacred vocal genres assumed renewed importance, recalling their earlier domination in the reign of Pietist, cash-strapped Frederick II (who reigned 1756–1785). As for Westenholz, she continued to serve as keyboardist, presumably under the rule of Massonneau’s bow, when such accompaniment was required for vocal music. (A report in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1818 notes her involvement in a performance of Haydn’s Creation.)42 Presumably, she also continued to instruct the ducal children and female royalty, a pedagogic role reported in her obituary notice of 1838. Despite the tensions with Massonneau and the end to chamber music with keyboard, she continued on at Ludwigslust until 1821, when she retired with a pension, after forty-four years of service.43

6

Beethoven Heroine A Female Allegory of Music and Authorship in Egmont

In 1810 Beethoven acquired Schiller’s play Die Jungfrau von Orleans (Joan of Arc), and though he never set the drama of France’s transvestite military heroine to music, she left a strong impression. “Without my banner I dare not go,” he wrote to Bettina Brentano in 1811, analogizing his musical sketchbook to the national banner carried into battle by Joan of Arc. In the same letter Beethoven referred to the frustration of his marriage plans through another reference to Schiller’s play: “ ‘Pity my fate,’ I cry with Johanna.”1 Beethoven’s (perhaps humorous and flirtatious) self-characterizations as Joan of Arc employed a conventional mode of female allegory, in which the image of woman embodies abstract aesthetic-moral ideals. In Schiller’s play, Joan of Arc’s motivations remain clouded and ambiguous, but, nonetheless, she is readily identified with such abstractions as heroism, patriotism, epoch-shaping achievement, geniuslike inspiration, professed divine calling, transcendence of traditional social role, acute suffering for impossible, even taboo love, self-doubt, and personal sacrifice. If the reception of Beethoven has sometimes proceeded as if these ideals and dilemmas were unique to this composer, Beethoven’s letter highlights their broad contemporary currency. In this chapter I explore how Beethoven’s epistolary identification with a female heroine made sense culturally in his own day and highlight how twentieth-century thinking about the composer and his period have made this particular aspect of his imagination, and his works, difficult to understand—to the point, even, of seeming nonsensical and irrelevant. Beyond this excursion into the gender politics of Beethoven scholarship, the chapter traces an inward movement of the sovereign feminine that was increasingly available to authors as a component of self-imagery. The symbolic sovereignty of woman was 190

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not only eclipsed (as described in the previous chapter) but internalized, becoming in the course of the early nineteenth century a way of representing and imagining (elevated versions of) music and composition. Female ascendance was not just replaced with new and more aggressively masculinist ideologies, it was made part of them. Heroism in the late German Enlightenment was frequently subject to female embodiment and involved motifs of transvestism and androgyny.2 Female embodiment and androgyny, however, were not themselves “the point” of the heroic so much as the means through which the heroic was linked to a range of other ideas. Some of these come as no surprise to students of the period and Beethoven scholars. At the level of the state, heroines served as figureheads of nation and patriotism, particularly during the Napoleonic wars.3 An example appears in Beethoven’s unfinished incidental music (WoO 96, 1815) to Leonore Prohaska, a play by Friedrich Dunker celebrating the life, and death in battle, of Marie Christiane Eleonore Prohaska and glamorizing conjugal fidelity through the figure of the heroically faithful or constant wife.4 Beethoven’s Fidelio (1814) is the best known of a number of operatic and dramatic works on this theme.5 The theme was also supported in the contemporary press by “real-life” examples of conjugal constancy. Toward the end of the Napoleonic wars in Germany the editor Jacobi reported the apparently true story of Caroline Weiß, née Eichner, who rescued her typhoid-stricken husband from his military camp. Under the banner heading “Weiblicher Heroismus” (female heroism), Jacobi reported how Caroline dodged shells and gunfire as she brought her invalid husband on a cart to a nearby village, extinguished a roof fire, secured her husband lodgings, and nursed him back to health after others deemed his case hopeless. But Jacobi stresses not Caroline’s agency in the abstract but her fidelity to her husband: her story exemplifies the “heldmüthige Treue [einer] Gattin” (heroic constancy of a wife).6 These versions of the female heroic inscribed conventional female roles at precisely the point where heroines went beyond the private and domestic spheres and acted with apparent autonomy. The relationship between female heroism and female emancipation was contradictory. On the one hand, the heroic was a sign of exceptional and exemplary individual achievement that transgressed the bounds of normative femininity and female domesticity.7 On the other hand, the heroic served a desire to fold such transgression back into the then heteropatriarchal institution of marriage. Female heroism is of interest to feminist scholarship without necessarily fulfilling feminist desire. Just as earlier periods had attached the heroic sign to women’s “defense” of their chastity, the late Enlightenment marshaled heroic images of women’s defense of their husbands, their marriages, and their fatherland.8 Late Enlightenment constructions of female heroism were not limited, however, to displays of conjugal fidelity. Heroines were also employed as allegories

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figure 13. Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830). Reproduced with permission of The Arts and History Picture Library.

of art and authorship. As paradoxical as it may seem today, heroines served as emblems of the (male) artist as a self-transcending, boundary-crossing individual. A late example of this trope, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) (figure 13), concerns the July Revolution of 1830 against the absolutism of the French king Charles X. Delacroix uses the female form as an allegory of patriotism, heroism, and France itself. But more than this, the figure of Liberty is also a symbol of the artist and art. Delacroix offered the painting in lieu of direct involvement in the uprising, writing to his brother, Charles, that “I have undertaken a modern subject, A Barricade . . . and if I have not fought for the country, at least I will paint for her.”9 Alexandre Dumas related that during Delacroix’s lifetime the musket bearer to the viewer’s left was considered a self-portrait, a reading that persists to this day, and understandably so, for there is a significant resemblance. However, toward the end of the nineteenth century the musketeer in a top hat was identified as Etienne Arago, a Republican active in the July Revolution. This identification is now accepted as

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definitive and the earlier conceit of Delacroix’s self-interpolation in the canvas deemed a matter of “mistaken identity.”10 However, the “mistake” on the part of Delacroix’s contemporaries—which Delacroix did not feel moved to correct—is significant as part of the reception of the painting and illustrates the transference of battlefield heroism to the discourses of art and the artist. The idea of Delacroix as a musket bearer in Liberty’s wake analogizes the canvas and the battlefield, the paintbrush and the musket, the artist and the soldier, but it does so under the higher symbol of the female heroine in whose exalted wake the masculine figure trails. Liberty can be read, conventionally, as Delacroix’s muse, but her centrality and agency suggest another reading: that she is the artist’s double, his higher self. Beethoven’s trans-sexualizing identification with Joan of Arc, a woman who was a transvestite, is invoked here not simply to destabilize his unassailably masculine image as “the man who freed music” from service to state, church, commerce, and musical convention.11 His epistolary trans-sexuality formed part of a widespread discourse on the nature of composers and of music. Cross-dressed and military heroines functioned as representations of artists in the late Enlightenment because such heroines appeared to transcend earthly or mundane categories. Their transcendence of one of the fundamental categories of identity—sex—and their multiple transgressions of gendered norms could serve as epitomes of “freedom” and “transcendence” in the aesthetic sphere.12 The warrior maiden herself was a venerable literary type. Cross-dressed female soldiers are so common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature that one twentieth-century critic, Dianne Dugaw, has called them “an imaginative preoccupation of the early modern era, appearing not only in popular ballads but in . . . epic, romance, biography, comedy, tragedy, opera, and ballad opera.”13 The cultural meaning of warrior maidens has been contested in recent literature and is substantially colored by scholars’ theoretical agendas, as well as by the time and place that form the focus of their research. Dugaw reads the military heroines of early-modern popular balladry as a critique of heroism itself, the discourse of which enforced gender stereotypes and sex roles. She sees heroines as combining “both sides of the traditionally bifurcated ideal of Western heroism: female Love and male Glory, Venus and Mars.”14 Emma Donoghue, reviewing the work of Dugaw, Randolph Trumbach, and Julie Wheelwright, has criticized the lack of attention to lesbianism in the stories of warrior maidens. “Exclusive heterosexuality,” she asserted, “could only be maintained by rigid costume codes,” a point borne out by the frequent incidents of female same-sex flirtation and courtship that appear in memoirs of female cross-dressed soldiers.15 But Donoghue’s insistence on a lesbian element to female cross-dressing before the end of the eighteenth century is itself subject to caution, as Judith Halberstram has pointed out in Female Masculinity, where she warns that it is all too easy to read female masculinities of the past as evidence of female same-sex desire.16

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Amid these disputes about the meaning of female cross-dressing, the use of transvestite heroines as allegories of the transcendent (male) artist appears to have gone unnoticed. This lack of critical literature is not the only reason why my argument may at first appear far-fetched. Music composed by women was often treated with condescension in the early nineteenth century, so the use of the female heroine to represent transcendent male authorship appears illogical. In the context of bourgeois women’s social roles and their “feminine” character, female heroism— particularly when it involved the assumption of a male military role in the public sphere—amounted to a conceptual scandal. But the discourse of the great male author as heroine possesses its own internal logic. Precisely because women were subject to severe constraints on their public actions, heroines who “broke through” those constraints emblematized freedom from prescribed roles and identities. What better image to represent an author’s movement from servant to “free” artist than that of a woman acting with heroic self-determination? Beethoven’s identification with Joan of Arc was more than an isolated epistolary whim. B E E T HOV E N : H E R O O R H E R O I N E ?

The allegorical meaning of the heroine as transcendent author/composer contributes to our understanding of Beethoven in his cultural context because it shifts attention to the late Enlightenment’s discourse of heroism—which differs from the heroic as it figures in Beethoven studies. One of the fundamental differences between contemporary and posthumous discourses of the heroic around Beethoven concerns the latter’s attempts to figure the heroic as a distinctively Beethovenian province. Since Beethoven’s death, scholarship and criticism have tended to figure the heroic as an intrinsic, and near exclusive, aspect of Beethoven the man and Beethoven the composer. But discourses of the heroic were everywhere in Beethoven’s world, and the treatment of German poets and composers as heroes was common even prior to Beethoven’s “heroic decade.”17 Hannelore Schlaffer has traced the discourse of the artist as hero to the 1780s and finds this trope in a range of texts connected with Goethe, from J. H. W. Tischbein’s Goethe portrait, Goethe in der Campagna (1786–1788), to Goethe’s own Torquato Tasso (published 1790), a drama that represents Tasso as a poet who strives not for the praise of his contemporaries but for immortality.18 Schiller’s drama Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1800–1801) sets the poet next to mortal kings at the pinnacle of humanity, whereas he affirmed the poet’s place in Olympus in his earlier poem Die Theilung der Erde (1795).19 By analogy to the heroes of classical antiquity, who assumed their place among the immortal gods of Olympus, poets and composers were honored with marble busts. Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria (subsequently Ludwig I), for example, constructed a pantheon to famous German-speaking men, including artists. Although named Walhalla, Ludwig’s marble temple was modeled

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on the Parthenon. The structure was not completed until 1846, but Ludwig had collected his first busts of famous Germans by 1807.20 Scholarship on Beethoven is sometimes less about the heroic than of the heroic; it possesses a ceremonial character. The fact that heroes are produced within and for culture; that they are honored not simply for their achievements but by the meaning given to their achievements; and that they are created through a ritual of recognition within which they are largely passive—these facts are off-limits when we “discover” heroism as being unique to Beethoven’s life and music.21 In tracing the differences between the heroic of modern Beethoven studies and the heroic of the late Enlightenment, my argument returns to issues of gender raised by Scott Burnham and Sanna Pederson. In reviving the debate between Burnham and Pederson, I do not offer a corrective but wish simply to supplement their work with a more historicist and empirical level of analysis. Burnham’s characterization of the heroic in Beethoven studies as a trope of “overcoming” is persuasive, and it is corroborated by earlier reception studies.22 A less convincing element of Burnham’s argument, however, concerns the relationship between the posthumous trope of Beethoven’s music as an enactment of heroic “overcoming” and notions of the heroic in Beethoven’s own cultural context. In my reading, Burnham elides these posthumous and contemporary discourses. The trope of “overcoming” as the essence of the heroic is reported as foundational to what Burnham calls the “Goethezeit” (age of Goethe). Specifically, he grants “overcoming” a central place in discourses of male identity and male subject formation. This area of Burnham’s Beethoven Hero is very lightly annotated. The designation Goethezeit is borrowed from Nicholas Boyle’s Goethe biography, despite Burnham’s acknowledgment that Boyle ironized the term.23 I find the term unhelpful in this context because it incorporates the very discourse of the male artist as hero of history that it seeks to examine. Beethoven Hero involves a paradox of simultaneous inscription and deconstruction of the heroic. Burnham lays bare the institutional and critical production of Beethoven’s music as an aesthetically and ethically exalted paradigm of Western music and at the same time deems such heroics intrinsic to the music. Thus in his introduction Burnham wrote: “I ultimately argue that it is Beethoven who sounds [the Goethezeit’s] deepest and yet most vivid keynote, joining, in the élan terrible of his heroic style, the Goethean dynamic of contemplation and deed with the Hegelian dialectical trajectory of the self and its consciousness.”24 The comments in which Beethoven usurps Goethe as the chief representative of a (constructed) historical era are ceremonial: they create and celebrate the hero in the guise of recognizing him. Beethoven’s own representations of heroism, along with the discourses of the heroic in the late Enlightenment, certainly include an idea of “overcoming,” specifically that of self-transcendence. But it is too reductive to deal with the Enlightenment’s heroic through this term alone, and it is factually inaccurate to

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deem “overcoming” an exclusively male province. Beethoven’s representations of heroism are frequently subject to female embodiment and characterized by an androgynous mixture of masculine and feminine signs. I endorse Pederson’s feminist analysis of the posthumous discourse of Beethoven Hero as an opportunistic celebration of Beethoven’s music and character as exclusively and normatively masculine. “The German tradition that valorizes Beethoven’s narrative of overcoming has,” she concludes, “a tradition of viewing woman as an unchanging, eternal essence, as the polar opposite of the dynamically striving and achieving man.” Here Pederson refers primarily to nineteenth-century German philosophy; she notes that novelistic representations of the sexes are “more complex” and acknowledges that “whether [or not] one can speak of a female Bildungsroman is currently a subject of vigorous debate.”25 These complexities, I suggest, are present within Beethoven’s own representations of the heroic, in which sex and gender are subject to mixture and exchange.26 Beethoven’s discourses of the heroic are creatively flexible in precisely the realm of sex and gender that ossified in the composer’s posthumous reception. Beethoven’s representations of male heroism do not uphold obviously “masculine” characteristics of the hero. For example, the overture to Beethoven’s incidental music (1807) for Heinrich von Collin’s drama Coriolan dwells on the pathos of the hero’s death. A technique of thematic disintegration at the end of the piece (also used in the funeral march of the Eroica Symphony) analogizes the musical and physical body and reveals the vulnerability and fragility of the hero.27 The injured, expiring body of the hero is the occasion for sentiment. More broadly, en route to its pathetic close, the overture transforms its opposition of conventionally “masculine” and “feminine” themes into the basis of what Lawrence Kramer has described as “not a Coriolanus narrative but a Coriolanean subject-position, the fatality, but also perhaps the redemption, of which lies in its deep identification with ‘woman’s tenderness.’ ”28 This emphasis on death, emotion, and the violated body recalls the complex gendering of male heroism in the visual arts of the contemporary French Republic, particularly Jacques-Louis David’s paintings L’intervention des Sabines (The Intervention of the Sabine Women; 1795–1799) and La Mort du jeune Bara (The Death of Young Bara; 1794).29 As exemplified in the article on Beethoven in the revised second edition of the New Grove Dictionary (2001), Beethoven’s life and music still attract low-grade metaphors of military masculinity that are dissonant with the heroic as Beethoven himself constructed it. The authors see Beethoven engaged in his “early Vienna period” with “a deliberate campaign to annex all current musical genres.”30 Barry Cooper, too, in his 2000 biography, appropriated Beethoven for a politics of force when he spoke of the composer’s “conquest of Vienna.”31 As Michael Broyles has noted, discussions of Beethoven’s compositional process based on the sketchbooks have viewed this process “almost in military terms, with scholars speaking of

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compositional strategy, of deployment, of defensive postures, of conflict and resolution—the entire concept of the compositional process being seen in terms of Beethoven’s struggle to conquer and mold notes into some sort of acceptable pattern.”32 Such vocabulary recalls Romain Rolland’s Beethoven: Les grandes époques créatrices of 1928 (translated by Ernest Newman as Beethoven the Creator) which describes Beethoven as “the Ego of the period of combat” and continues: “For anyone who can survey these campaigns of the soul from which stand out the victories of the Eroica and the ‘Appassionata’, the most striking thing is not the vastness of the armies, the floods of tone, the masses flung into the assault, but the spirit in command, the imperial reason.”33 Constructions of heroism by Beethoven, his contemporaries, and his collaborators focused as much on women as on men and involved ambiguous gendering. That ambiguity is already glimpsed in Lewis Lockwood’s topos of the heroics of resignation personified by the imprisoned Florestan in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.34 Lockwood’s account of the varieties of heroism in Beethoven’s music is a major step forward in our understanding of heroic discourse in Beethoven’s world and opens up the issues explored in this chapter. I suggest that gender issues help to elaborate the meaning of the specific variety of heroism that Lockwood identifies. In Fidelio the topos of heroic resignation is part of a reversal of sex roles. In an exchange between the sexes, the lead female (Leonore, cross-dressed as Fidelio) takes up the cause of masculine heroic action (albeit, ultimately, within the framework of being an excellent wife) while her husband, Florestan, is an absent presence in the first act and spends almost the entire opera in a dungeon. If the conventionally masculine role of liberator passes to Leonore, Florestan himself exhibits the—by convention—feminine virtues of endurance, resignation, and patience. There is more at stake than a simple reversal of roles, however. The double gendering of Florestan as at once passively enduring his incarceration and, prior to the start of the opera’s plot, an active opponent of political tyranny, is further complicated by his Christ-like qualities (his higher cause, arrest, imprisonment as a kind of entombment). We first see and hear Florestan at the opening of act 2 in his recitative (“Gott! Welch Dunkel hier”) and aria (“In des Lebens Frühlingstagen”). Here he declares his Christian belief and refers to Christ’s example and God’s will as the foundations of his acceptance of his ordeal and fate. The recitative runs as follows: “O God! How dark it is! How terrible this silence! Here in this void no living thing comes near. O cruel ordeal! But God’s will is just. I’ll not complain; for He has decreed the measure of my suffering.” The first part of the two-tempo aria expresses something approaching the antithesis of Burnham’s heroic overcoming: the “sweet solace” (süsser Trost) that sustains the imprisoned hero. Florestan attributes this comforting sentiment to a sense of doing his duty (Pflicht), presumably to God. What Lockwood called Florestan’s “heroism of endurance” involves a

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belief system (not unique to Christianity) that trades physical strength for spiritual fortitude. Florestan’s imprisonment is not only the condition of possibility for his display of heroic endurance but a metaphor for the interiorization of the heroic itself: its containment within the spiritual-emotional life of the individual. The slow first section of Florestan’s aria “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen” marshals musical signs of exaltation (associated specifically with Florestan’s sense of fulfilling his duty) within the prevailing and framing topos of sweet, Christianized solace—the hero’s “süsser Trost.” The latter is constructed through the adagio tempo, triple meter, diatonicism, legato articulation, and a predominantly conjunct melody interspersed with appoggiaturas. The scoring for a reduced, quiet orchestra of strings and woodwinds is inwardly strengthened with the sustained, binding notes of French horns. Florestan’s reference to having done his duty (“meine Pflicht hab’ ich gethan!”) forms a climax, a moment of internal exaltation, within this overarching topos of sweet solace. Crucially, however, Beethoven does not allow the more animated music actually to break through or “overcome” the topos of passive endurance. In approaching the cadence at the end of the first part of the aria, Florestan’s voice reaches up modestly to a high G♭ appoggiatura (m. 29). This gesture of sensibility, highlighting the word “Pflicht,” does not at all threaten to break the frame, and Florestan’s voice falls back resignedly into an understated cadence. Beethoven, responsive to the libretto, resists any temptation to inscribe heroic striving when Florestan’s aria approaches the boundary between its adagio and poco allegro sections. As a two-tempo aria, “In des Lebens Frühlingstagen” was well placed to offer a musical version of a hero’s striving for freedom. Florestan might have moved, for example, from the sweet solace of his faith to a more vigorous anticipation of escape and subsequent reengagement with his political cause of resisting despotism. But there is no compositional enactment of “overcoming.” The adagio closes gently and is followed immediately by an animated poco allegro in which Leonore appears to Florestan as an apparition. Thus the “freedom” displayed in the second section of the aria is the freedom of the imagination, fired by love, within a static acceptance of imprisonment. The fact that Florestan’s vision of Leonore is also a prophecy—for in the next scene Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, begins her search for her husband’s underground cell—further distances Florestan from rationality and action. His imprisonment involves a loss of masculinity; it brings him under the control of such signs as darkness, death, passivity, “mother earth,” water, faith, spirit, and visions. The topos of sweet solace exists at a point of furthest remove from the discourse of “the dynamically striving and achieving man” (to recall Pederson’s words). This discourse could be theatrically enacted through an attempt at escape, but Florestan does not pursue his liberation. He embodies the “eternal essence” that the aged Goethe personified in the figure of “the feminine,” just as, through a similar

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exchange, Fidelio takes up the mantle of heroic self-endangerment and actively rescues her spouse. These motifs of transvestism do not exist simply to disrupt the sex/gender system. Instead they serve as signs of both Florestan’s and Leonore/ Fidelio’s transcendence of the mundane. The transvestite motifs grant the heroic couple access to a “higher” transcendental realm of ideals. The practice of crossdressing, broadly conceived not just as the exchange of clothing between men and women but also as the exchange of dramatic roles and characters, is linked here to moral and political idealism and not (primarily or exclusively) to downward travesty and farce. Cross-dressing is marshaled in defense not just of marriage but of the period’s rhetoric of humanity and freedom. Christianity wrought havoc with the masculine gendering of the classical heroic by celebrating what were by “pagan” standards the passive, effeminate virtues of forgiveness and cheek turning over physical action, opposition, and struggle. Despite the evidence of the Crusades, battlefield gore and slaughter are not easily reconciled with Christian ethics. If love and peace are parts of the Christian message, then significant elements of the classical heroic are sinful. This problem was spelled out in an English text of the mid-eighteenth century.35 Employing a common authorial conceit, the “editor” claims to have discovered a collection of letters from the mid-seventeenth century in which warlike heroism is deemed the proper province of God alone in the context of his wrath at sin and disobedience. Christians must therefore “abstain from War and Fighting.” They must follow the example of Christ, in whom heroism took the form of “fortitude,” “patience,” and “forbearance.” Christian heroism “conquers by continual Forbearance, and subdues the Malice of its Enemies by the divine Power and Force of invincible Love.”36 This notion of Christian forbearance is similar to the trope of resignation that Lockwood identified in Fidelio, and which appears again in Egmont when the eponymous hero is imprisoned and then executed. Men became heroes by enduring the enforced passivity of unjust incarceration and even sacrifice. This physical passivity extinguished “masculine force” and set heroism on a more exalted ethical plane. The mixture of materials suggesting, on the one hand resignation (and its analogues: reflection, acceptance, passivity, lament) and, on the other hand, struggle (wrestling energy, force, forward drive, physical strength) in Beethoven’s music from all periods of his career warrants further investigation in this light.37 The relationship between Christian heroism and gender was richly complex. A late nineteenth-century text, for example, sets out to deconstruct the superficial dichotomy between classical warlike heroism as masculine and Christian fortitude as effeminate or feminine. John Coleman Adams argued in 1891 that all forms of the heroic are in essence androgynous because they involve a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics: The charge is frequently brought against Christianity that it bestows a special patronage upon the passive virtues, reversing the honors men have usually paid to

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those of the heroic type, and claiming for meekness the praise which once went to courage, and for self-sacrifice what used to be bestowed on personal force. Christian ethics, it is said, do not encourage the active and aggressive qualities. . . . [However,] the strength which bears down opposition, which upsets and resists and encroaches and carries by storm, must be supplemented by the strength which can control self, endure, submit, concede, and bid the turning of the tide. In the very field in which the martial and the patriotic virtues shine most brilliantly, underlying personal prowess, bold generalship, defiance of danger, is a strength knit up of implicit obedience, the abnegation of self, the submission of the subordinate to the superior will. The glory of the conqueror’s crown shines with the mild luster of the passive virtues.38

This heroization of submission resonates with biographical narratives of Beethoven that stress his resignation in the face of personal suffering and his acceptance of harsh fates (such as deafness and unrequited love). In his autobiography Aus meinem Leben (1861) Ludwig Rellstab evoked this Christian-heroic tropology in recounting a meeting with Beethoven in 1825. Beethoven had been subjected in life to “cruel renunciatory tests,” Rellstab reported. Through them Beethoven emerged as a “sacred presence”; in Rellstab’s imagination the biographical trope of Christian heroism opened a doorway to an ideology of art as religion.39 The rhetorical conceits of the composer’s Heiligenstadt Testament suggest that the Christian heroization of mortal suffering was available to Beethoven not just as a way of expressing pain but as a mode of self-representation. Rellstab’s comments, though far removed from Beethoven’s Viennese context, shed light on why the composer and his contemporaries so frequently subjected the heroic to an androgynous female embodiment. “Woman,” with her purported weakness of body, distances the heroic from a crude “pagan” display of physical force: she brings a morally elevating touch even to the battlefield. As for androgyny, this involves the complex mixture of “passive” and “active” virtues identified above. The stage is now set for an exploration of Beethoven’s own representations of heroism. H E R O I SM A N D T H E L AT E E N L IG H T E N M E N T

Beethoven only once used the word “hero” in a title: not for the Symphony No. 3 (1804), a “Sinfonia Eroica” (heroic symphony) initially titled “Bonaparte,” but for the slow third movement of the Piano Sonata, op. 26, “Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe” (funeral march on the death of a hero).40 The hero is not specified, suggesting that this is a generic funeral march, not an occasional piece. The generic register of this honoring of the hero gives the lie to the specificity, the uniqueness, that attends the heroic epithet as applied to Beethoven. Audiences are invited to make their own specific attribution, to supply their own hero. As far as gender is concerned, “Eroe” is the masculine form of the noun, while the context of the piano sonata sets the piece equivocally in the private sphere and implies a female

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performer (though of course men played the piano at home, too). The piece gently sexes the fallen hero as male, the performer/mourner as female, though any number of personal inscriptions by the performer and audience are possible. The mobility of sex and gender in the heroic is evident in the subsequent history of this movement. In 1815 Beethoven orchestrated the march as part of his incidental music for Leonore Prohaska. As Hans-Günther Klein has explained, the drama “tells the true story of a young woman from Potsdam who disguised herself as a man, took the name of Renz and enlisted with the Volunteer Rifles in the Wars of Liberation [against Napoleonic France], receiving a fatal wound in a skirmish in 1813.”41 In its orchestrated form the funeral march projects one of the central allegorical images of the Revolutionary era: woman as a figurehead of nation and a template of masculine heroism. The female allegory of nation and national unity was long established—Britannia dates back to the Roman conquest of Britain— but such images proliferated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the period that inaugurated Marianne as the image of the French Republic.42 This music was also played at Beethoven’s funeral, which hints at an association of the composer/artist with female heroism.43 Beethoven’s music for Leonore Prohaska disrupts male monopolies on heroic military action. This is not the same, however, as a feminist intervention into patriarchy; the disruptions of sexual norms in Leonore Prohaska are of interest to, but not fully compatible with, modern feminist politics of women’s equality to men. As the commemoration of a named heroine, Prohaska’s funeral march belongs among those feminine allegories of nation in which Marina Warner saw the ironic negation of women’s public role.44 The disruptive effect of the public celebration of Prohaska as a military heroine is limited by the overarching category of military masculinity that is temporarily stabilized in the figure of the fallen woman soldier. A melodrama for Prohaska, however, destabilizes this link between heroism and masculinity. Prohaska’s dying monologue (prior to the funeral march) is a call for love and loyalty, implicitly to the fatherland: Oh you for whom [my flowers] were entwined, Two flowers were yours, [one] for love and [one for] loyalty: Now I can dedicate only funeral flowers to you, But on my tombstone Lilies and roses grow anew.45

Beethoven set this speech to the accompaniment of the glass harmonica, whose ethereal tones were associated with femininity and the female body.46 This feminization of the heroic reflects a civilizing impulse to refine heroism and purge it of its blood and gore, at least in public representation, if not battlefield practice.47 An attempt to refine earlier notions of heroism—to improve the heroic—is an almost

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universal element of the discourse of the heroic through the centuries, and we can detect in the memorialization of Prohaska a use of “woman” and “the feminine” not just to sentimentalize but morally to refine battlefield gore. As seen in Fidelio, the category “woman” was so closely tied to ideas of affectionate loyalty to men that Leonore Prohaska also served, by analogy, as an image of male loyalty to the fatherland. The heroine was a way of imagining patriotism. The biography of Eleonore Prohaska reveals that music played an important part in articulating, even fostering, her transformations from young woman to crossdressed soldier, martyr, and, finally, memorialized heroine. Music, androgyny, and heroism were intimately connected in her life, at least as that has come down to us. Prohaska (1785–1813) was the daughter of a military musician who taught her to play the flute, an instrument rarely cultivated by women in this period. Placed in an orphanage when her father was in active service (1794–1797) because of a reportedly “neglectful” mother, Leonore subsequently worked as a cook and kept house for her father and two sisters.48 A further measure of her distance from bourgeois femininity is her appearance on the public stage in Berlin as a flutist alongside her father, probably sometime between 1810 and 1813. As if with an eye to dramatic symbolism, Prohaska exchanged her flute for a rifle in 1813 when she enlisted, under the name August Renz, in the volunteer corps of General Adolf Freiherr von Lützow. She gave her age as eighteen to explain her lack of a beard. Tall and slim, and with powerful limbs, she cut a fine figure in uniform, but she was still teased for her delicate voice. Her role in camp was ambiguous. Although a great success with a rifle (“I hit the target 150 times!”), she nonetheless assumed the conventionally female tasks of cooking and sewing. Her persona was androgynous, not definitely masculine, and she was relieved to share quarters with a fifteen-year-old boy, “little Arnold.”49 This mixture of masculine and feminine signs recalls Beethoven’s music for Leonore Prohaska: the androgynous wholeness of its mixture of military and lyrical topics, the somber funeral march following Leonore’s sacred and feminine monologue with glass harmonica, her strophic Romance following the Soldiers’ Chorus, and the libretto’s references to battle and flowers, love and war. In a letter to her brother, the real-life Eleonore presented herself as a template for masculine courage: “Dear good brother, once you said that I must not turn your heart into that of a woman, but must try to rouse great courage in you. See, then, my dear, I’m thinking of you now. . . . I go to war decisively and full of courage.”50 This self-representation is not unlike Delacroix’s representation of Liberty. In both cases “woman” functions as an emblem of the “manly virtue” of military courage. Also like Delacroix’s Liberty, Eleonore rallied her comrades and led them into battle. Though no painted allegory, she was nonetheless a symbolic focal point during combat, providing the signal through her drumming. This percussive role extended the gender transgression of her flute playing prior to enlisting and lends a distinctively musical thread to her story. Eleonore died on 5 October 1813 from

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wounds sustained in a battle of 16 September in the forest area of Göhrede, in present-day Lüchnow-Dannenberg. Shortly before her fatal wounding she had taken up the military signal drum because the drummer, Friedrich Förster, was unable to continue after a minor injury. In this capacity, Förster stated, Eleonore rallied the troops and led them into combat.51 His description lends Eleonore a quasi-authorial role: she orchestrated the battle with her drumbeats. Female masculinity, heroism, and music were closely linked not only as representational conceits but also in the biography of the heroines of Beethoven’s era. Beethoven’s music for Dunker’s Leonore Prohaska remained unfinished not because of any obscurity of subject matter but, on the contrary, because of the subject’s wide popularity. Beethoven and Dunker were narrowly beaten to it on 23 February 1814 by what the AMZ reported as a “musical Academy, with recitation and exhibition of paintings” that celebrated the liberation of Vienna from Napoleonic occupation. In this academy two items were dedicated to Eleonore: a poem by Fr. Pichler, recited by Dem. Adamberger, and a tableau vivant thought to be conceived by Friedrich Tremel, a stage designer and painter at the court theater, depicting “Leonore Prohaska, as royal, Prussian soldier August Renz, surrounded by comrades, after receiving a wound.”52 A late nineteenth-century engraving of the wounded Eleonore surrounded by her comrades gives us some idea of what the tableau might have looked like (figure 14). E G MON T

Although Beethoven’s Leonore Prohaska remained incomplete, the triangulation there of female masculinity, heroism, and music provides a new understanding of one of his better-known works, the incidental music to Goethe’s Egmont. Beethoven’s incidental music (op. 84, 1809–1810) for Goethe’s five-act tragic drama Egmont (1774–1787) was commissioned by the director of the Imperial Theater in Vienna, Joseph Hartl Edlen von Büchsenstein, in the wake of the occupation of the city by Napoleonic troops in May 1809.53 Egmont was topical because it deals with national resistance to foreign occupation. Unlike Beethoven’s works of the Congress period celebrating the defeat of Napoléon, which are generally deprecated for what Adorno described as their “bombastic rhetoric and ‘patriotic’ excess,” the composer’s incidental music for Egmont is almost always praised as a positive example of his “heroic” style. (Adorno’s criticisms of the heroics of the Egmont overture are an exception to which I will return). Maynard Solomon groups Egmont with Fidelio and the Third and Fifth Symphonies as works that sublimate “the ‘ideological/heroic’ manner . . . into a subtle and profound form of expression.”54 The basis of these distinctions between “good” and “bad” versions of the heroic are rarely made explicit but seem to involve aesthetic distaste for music that makes its ideological engagement explicit.55

figure 14. Anon., untitled [Eleonore Prohaska wounded in battle], from Wilhelm Oertel von Horn, Vier deutsche Heldinnen aus der Zeit der Befreiungskriege (1864). Reproduced with permission of the British Library.

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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. Solomon aligns Beethoven’s political thinking with the messages of a “German drama” that he understands to be peopled by aristocratic male heroes who “dissolve the tangled problems of the relations between masters and men.”56 But these easy appeals to “German drama” and its self-evident meanings are problematic both methodologically and factually. In 1983 Julie Prandi noted the prominence of what she called “the spirited woman hero” in dramas of Kleist, Schiller, and Goethe written between the late 1780s and 1810—for example, the eponymous heroines of Kleist’s Pentheselia and Das Kätchen von Heilbronn, Schiller’s Maria Stuart and Jungfrau von Orleans, and Goethe’s Iphigenie and Die näturliche Tochter. These women “occupy center stage” and “try to assert . . . political influence” and their own will against other characters’ presumption of their deference to male authority and/or the domestic identity of mother and wife.57 Though retaining components of femininity as then defined, these women differ from the virtuous and passive female characters of more conspicuously bourgeois dramas concerned with family conflicts like Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson, or secondary female characters in dramas about male heroes, like Marie in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. In Goethe’s Egmont, which Solomon offers as an example of male heroism gripping the Beethovenian imagination, the lead female character, Klärchen, Egmont’s mistress, purchases her power from, and even borrows from the wardrobe of, the titular hero, who, in W. Daniel Wilson’s words, is “passive and inert” for most of the play.58 Prandi sets the heroines of late eighteenth-century German drama in the context of the period’s contestation over the nature of women and their place in the world: the debate between figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft and von Hippel, who sought a thorough application of Enlightenment rhetorics of equality to women, and Humboldt and Fichte, who employed the evidence of biology and tradition to diagnose women as passive and dependent by both nature and nurture. In their battle against their own sex and the expectations of other characters the heroines of the era’s German drama exemplify the self-determination and attempt to free themselves from tutelage (as internally and externally imposed constraints on one’s self) that Kant set at the heart of Enlightenment. Kant implicitly figured the use of reason as heroic because it involves daring and courage; it is a kind of action, it grants autonomy, and it is a force that opposes and challenges irrational authority.59 Female heroism is central to Goethe’s five-act tragedy Egmont. This aspect of the drama is overlooked in the musicological literature, understandably perhaps, as the female heroic is not obvious from a summary of the plot. Loosely based on historical fact and set in Brussels in 1568, the play is among other things a love story between Egmont and Klärchen. Both are natives of the Netherlands (encompassing Belgium at that time), Egmont a nobleman and local governor, Klärchen a burgher’s

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daughter. Against the backdrop of Spanish occupation, Egmont is imprisoned and Klärchen takes her own life with poison. In a final scene in Egmont’s dungeon, Klärchen appears to him in his sleep as the allegorical figure Liberty. In a musical pantomime she reveals that through his impending execution the Netherlands will be freed. Even at the level of plot summary, however, musicologists have tended to offer excessively normalizing and male-biased précis. William Kinderman omits all reference to Klärchen, providing a summary of the play as if it were about an active, heroic Egmont: “In Goethe’s play, the Flemish count Egmont faces execution by the Spaniards, against whom he has led an uprising. He accepts his fate proudly, predicting liberation of his country.”60 A couple of problems here: there is no reference to Egmont’s leading an uprising, and it is not Egmont but the figure of Liberty, endowed with Klärchen’s features, who predicts the liberation of his country. In a complex exchange, Goethe purchases heroism for Klärchen from the lead male character. Indeed, Egmont sidelines male heroism. At the time of the opening dialogue between Dutch burghers, Egmont’s heroic military feats have already passed into fable; during the play he does next to nothing. Since her childhood Klärchen has possessed a woodcut print of one of Egmont’s famous battles—the first of the means by which Egmont is transformed from an active male hero into a static signifier of heroism. When Klärchen posthumously appears to the imprisoned Egmont in the exalted guise of Liberty, the hero’s passivity intensifies. Asleep and about to be sacrificed, Egmont is every bit the victim. His symbolic crowning acts like the medium of the wood-block print to render him a sign of heroism, but he is not the embodiment of the thing itself. By honoring the hero, culture feminizes him. He is rendered passive, becomes an ideal, and is initiated into precisely that allegorical realm already inhabited by woman.61 Egmont’s own ideas on liberty are briefly explored in his conversation with Alba at the end of act 4. Egmont espouses a version of sovereign rule in which the relationship between subjects and hereditary monarch is softened by quasi-familial bonds. According to this political-social ideal, the people of the Netherlands will be the loving brothers of the hereditary nobles and kings who rule over them. Egmont objects to foreign tyranny because it is foreign and, as such, disrupts the familial model of sovereignty: Egmont: And it is just as natural that the citizen should wish to be ruled by those who were born and bred where he was, who were imbued with the same ideas of right and wrong, whom he can look upon as brothers. Alba: And yet the aristocracy can hardly be said to have shared equally with these brothers. Egmont: This occurred centuries ago and is now accepted without envy.62

In this exchange Alba highlights the shortcomings of Egmont’s familial ideal: if society is bound by fraternal bonds, how is social inequality to be understood and

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justified? Alba casts doubt on the metaphor of brotherhood, and it is unclear whether Egmont’s riposte, an appeal to tradition and history, resolves this doubt. The dialogue raises more questions than it answers. Goethe does not provide easy solutions or naively celebrate every aspect of Egmont. Gender confusion is not brought to this play by the critic; it preoccupies the characters, who disagree with each other about how to explain departures from sexual norms. For example, Egmont describes the Spanish regent Margarete as a mustachioed virago in an attempt to stabilize a distinction in his own mind between good and bad versions of woman: “She has a little moustache too, on her upper lip, and occasional attacks of gout. A real Amazon!” But Klärchen immediately counters this description of Margarete as some kind of gender monster with the ejaculation “a majestic woman!”63 Margarete, for her part, voices criticism of the old men at court who demean her as a woman, a comment that rises above Egmont’s attempt at ridicule. Through the gentler tyranny of her rule, which eschews force, Margarete comes to embody just the type of benign despotism to which Goethe generally subscribed. M U SIC A N D T H E F E M A L E H E R O IC I N E G MON T

Female heroism in Egmont is closely associated with music not least because most of the music in the play is connected with Klärchen. As summarized in table 5, Beethoven supplied stage music to Goethe’s cues: two stage songs for Klärchen (acts 1 and 3); music signifying her death in act 5; a musical pantomime during Egmont’s sleep; and a “Victory Symphony” that ends the play, an unusual musical culmination but one consistent with Goethe’s conception of the final scene. Egmont’s invocation of sleep, which precedes the pantomime, is set as a melodrama; the decision to do so was not Goethe’s and may rest with Beethoven or someone connected with the first production. The effect is that the whole final scene unfolds musically, with only a brief rallying cry from Egmont to the nation and family as he makes his way to the scaffold. Beethoven scholarship has missed this musical culmination of the play and instead focused discussion almost exclusively on the overture, with passing reference to the entr’actes.64 As a play, Egmont thematizes music and establishes it as part of its fiction. Music binds to Klärchen, articulating her movement from domesticity through androgyny to a personification of Liberty. She is the only character with access to music. Her proximity to song is conveyed by her two stage songs in acts 1 and 3, “Die Trommel gerühret” and “Freudvoll und leidvoll,” respectively. As the play unfolds, her proximity to music narrows to equivalence. The earliest sign of this is easily missed. Although she says that her first song is a standard, the authorship of her second song is left undisclosed and so can be understood as hers (within the fiction of the play). Goethe’s cue for music “signifying Klärchen’s death” could be

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Musical Number Overture “Die Trommel gerühret!” (Klärchen) Entr’acte 1 Entr’acte 2 “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (Klärchen) Entr’acte 3 Entr’acte 4 Music signifying Klärchen’s death Melodrama (Egmont) Musical pantomime (Klärchen) Victory Symphony

seen to invite nothing more than music for a scene change, or music to add solemnity to her death. But at this point Beethoven’s setting becomes highly suggestive. A technique of thematic disintegration at the end of the piece, also used in the funeral march of the Eroica and at the end of the overture to Coriolan, analogizes the musical and physical bodies. Klärchen’s death permits her disembodied return as “Music.” Out of Egmont’s sleep, itself presented as and through music, Klärchen appears not simply to an orchestral accompaniment but as the orchestra personified. Suspended in a cloud, she is suffused by the music that issues from in front of the stage; she has quitted the material world for the ideal. At her appearance, Beethoven projects her as a block of orchestral sound, a bright A-major-seventh chord in pulsing sixteenths and sixteenth triplets. He uses the scoring of woodwinds and horns established previously as her scoring: the scoring with which her Trauermusik opened. From this point on she communicates with Egmont solely through music in a pantomime that consists entirely of physical gestures matched to pictorial orchestral figures. “D I E T R OM M E L G E RÜ H R E T ”

With that larger picture in place I turn to the construction of heroism in Klärchen’s stage song “Die Trommel gerühret” (The drums start up). On the face of it this is an innocent lyric in which a female narrator fantasizes about joining her military sweetheart by dressing as a soldier (see table 6). Love inspires Klärchen’s fantasy of military life but cannot explain away that fantasy. As Wilson put it, the song expresses “Clärchen’s yearning for freedom from the narrow confines of her conventional life.”65 The song culminates with Klärchen’s wish not just to be with Egmont but to be like him: “The enemy is

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table 6 “Die Trommel gerühret”: text and translation Rhyme

Translationa

Line

Goethe’s Lyric

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

Die Trommel gerühret! Das Pfeifchen gespielt! Mein Liebster gewaffnet Dem Haufen befiehlt, Die Lanze hoch führet, Die Leute regieret. Wie klopft mir das Herze! Wie wallt mir das Blut! O hätt’ ich ein Wämslein Und Hosen und Hut!

a b a b a a c d e d

The drum beats, The fife squeals, My lover, fully armed, Leads on his troop; Lance held high, He rules the people. How my heart beats! How my blood races! Oh had I but a doublet, Breeches and helmet!

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]b

Ich folgt’ ihm zum Tor ’naus Mit mutigem Schritt, Ging’ durch die Provinzen, Ging’ überall mit. Die Feinde schon weichen, Wir schießen hinterdrein! Welch Glück sondergleichen, Ein Mannsbild zu sein!

f g h g h e h e

I’d follow him with bold steps Through the city gates And go through the provinces, Go everywhere with him. The enemy is retreating, We shoot into them! What fortune beyond compare To be a man!

a Translation by Lionel Salter, in Beethoven, Orchestral Works: Music for the Stage, vol. 3 of Complete Beethoven Edition (Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 1997), 131. b

Beethoven’s repetition of lines 7 and 8 in stanza 2 yields ten lines.

retreating, / We shoot into them! / What fortune beyond compare / To be a man.” Klärchen’s love for Egmont involves emulation and so differs from the then current ideal of women as providing a complementary and opposite sex for men. There is even a hint of male homoeroticism in Klärchen’s fantasy of being Egmont’s comrade in arms—his lover and his fellow soldier. Klärchen is held up as a template for male heroism. Subject to female embodiment, the venerable trope of military heroism is projected vividly; it is defamiliarized. Klärchen enables the audience to visualize the movement out of bourgeois private interest (the world of the home) into the defense of the state (the battlefield), a movement made by all civilian men called to enlist and so broadly relevant to Bürgertum.66 The song represents this potentially disorienting movement as a thrilling liberation from domesticity and femininity. This recruiting rhetoric is backed up with the implicit caution that if the men of the audience fall short of such heroic ideals, their womenfolk may shame them by taking the initiative.67 At a more abstract level, however, “Die Trommel” is not about military heroism specifically but about the heroism of self-realization. It represents a moment of “breakthrough” in which Klärchen overcomes, if only in fantasy, the category of woman as fragile and passive, as constructed in the contemporary discourse on

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the characteristics of the sexes. Klärchen’s name, a diminutive of Klara, becomes ironic. Burnham has read the “struggle to create one’s own destiny” as a central preoccupation of German dramas of the Goethezeit. This struggle, he continued, is “usually expressed as the heroic quest for freedom.”68 What he doesn’t mention is that the heroines of German drama offer vivid instances of this quest for autonomy because they are more conspicuously the subject of social discipline than the male characters with whom they share the stage. In the dramatic context there is an economy to Klärchen’s masculinization that is purchased at the price of another character’s feminization. Brackenburg, a plausible bourgeois suitor, for whom Klärchen has no romantic inclination, attempts unsuccessfully to join in the song. As Klärchen’s fantasy of battle intensifies he is left holding her thread, and even this he drops as he moves to the window, tears welling in his eyes.69 Brackenburg is more like Gretchen than like Faust. In her documentary commentary on Egmont Irmgard Wagener has noted the mythic reference in this scene to Queen Omphale, who enslaved Hercules and, having crossdressed him, made him spin thread for her clothes. Later in the play Egmont invokes this scenario in describing Margarete: “She is a woman . . . and women always wish that everyone will meekly creep under their gentle yoke, that every Hercules will doff his lion’s skin and join their knitting group.”70 Brackenburg laments out loud the antiheroic attachments to love and Klärchen that have rendered him unable to act in defense of his country. He recalls his school days, when he had spoken passionately in defense of freedom: “How very different I was when I was a schoolboy! When they set us a piece called “Brutus’s Speech on Liberty, an Exercise in Oratory,” it was always Fritz who came first, and the headmaster said: ‘If only it were more tidy, not such a jumble of enthusiasms.’ I was all drive and ferment then! Now I drag myself along, hanging on that girl’s eyes. . . . When the bugle sounds, when a shot rings out it pierces me to the marrow. Yet it doesn’t provoke me, doesn’t challenge me to enter the fray, to save and dare with the rest.”71 B E E T HOV E N H E R O I N E

By rewriting the poetic form of “Die Trommel gerühret” Beethoven thematized the “overcoming” that Klärchen narrates. He transformed the poet’s lyric into a mini-epic that breaks through the domestic setting of the stage song. He overwrote the poet’s strophic design with a through-composed setting (see table 7), with different music for strophes 1 and 2, creating an AB form. This form is then repeated, creating an ABAB design that nests the two strophes of poetry within a musically conceived structure. This “nesting” of poetic form within a broader compositional pattern was not unusual in orchestral song of the period, but it takes on additional meaning in this dramatic context, not least because of the way in which Beethoven handles the boundary between the first two strophes of poetry as a moment of heroic overcoming.

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table 7 “Die Trommel gerühret”: musical and poetic form Poetry (Stanza/Line) 1/1–10, 1/9–10 None 2/1–8, 2/9–10, 2/10 None 2/10 None

Musical Length 1–27 27–36 36–66 66–74 75–79 79–93

Musical Form ||:

A B (orch.) Cont. (orch. + voice) First time mm. (orch.) :|| Second time mm. (orch. + voice) Coda (orch.)

This epic overwriting of the strophic lied, a genre associated with the female domestic practice of music, is an apt musical metaphor for Klärchen’s movement beyond the home and the bourgeois category “woman.” Both music and Klärchen “overcome” their given, inherited positions in the world, positions that had threatened to delimit their sphere of action and significance.72 Given Goethe’s strong views on the necessity of musical settings to respect poetic (especially his poetic) forms, it would be underinterpretive to ignore the power issues at stake here. Beethoven resisted the authority of the poetic form and the poet—an authority that held associations of service and servility to the composition of strophic lieder. Within the fiction of “Die Trommel gerühret” he fused a discourse of musicauthorial autonomy with (some idea of) female emancipation. This discourse is not robustly woman-centered or feminist in a modern sense; Klärchen’s “emancipation” is one and the same with her masculinization and her “liberation” is wedded to patriarchy. Female masculinization functions as a sign of overcoming in general, not as a sign of women’s equality to men in particular. This overcoming is depicted musically through the contrast between a nervously expectant A section in F minor employing relatively modest instrumental resources, and a more expansive, heroic B section employing the full ensemble fortissimo in the tonic major. The change from tonic minor to major (example 21, mm. 27–28) and the bold triplets that sweep through the orchestra (example 21, mm. 28–29) construct the movement from A to B as exhilarating breakthrough. The movement from F minor to F major replicates the pattern of the overture and draws on the meaning of modal change in that opening piece. The F-major coda of the overture is one and the same with the Victory Symphony that concludes the work; it predicts or imagines a time when the Netherlands would be liberated from Spanish tyranny. Thus an idea of freedom and overcoming attaches to the celebratory F-major passages of both the overture and Klärchen’s “Die Trommel.” Throughout the song, the cross-dressing that Klärchen fantasizes is musically inscribed through a melody that imitates a trumpet fanfare. This instrumentalized melody fuses the voice and the orchestra, a fusion that resists the conventional

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example 21. Beethoven, Egmont, “Die Trommel gerühret” (Klärchen’s song), mm. 27–30. 27

Fl. Picc.

3

cresc.

Ob. 3

cresc.

Cl. in B

3

Bsn. 3

Hn. in F cresc.

Trp. in F cresc. 3

Timp.

3

cresc. 3

3

Vn. I 3

cresc.

3

Vn. II cresc. 3

3

Va. 3

cresc.

Klärchen Ho sen und

Hut!

Vc. & Cb. cresc.

3

3

objectification of the female voice as (some version of) “nature.” This instrumentalization of the female voice is particularly marked in the B section at measures 36–44, where Klärchen’s “song” evokes regimental marching through the alternation of the pitches A and G (example 22). A more lyrical presentation of the last line of text in the song (“ein Mannsbild zu sein”), particularly at the repetition in measures

example 22. Beethoven, Egmont, “Die Trommel gerühret” (Klärchen’s song), mm. 36–44. 36

3 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

Ich folgt’

3

3

3

ihm zum Tor

aus mit mu

3

3

ti gem

(continued)

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example 22 (continued) 41

Schritt,

ging durch

die Pro vin

zen, ging

ü

ber

all mit.

67b–70b, is sufficient to remind the audience that this is still for Klärchen a fantasy, a wish; lyrical closure reinscribes femininity amid this fantasy of being a man. E. T. A. Hoffmann, in his review of Beethoven’s music for Egmont, completely rejected Klärchen’s stage songs on the grounds that they were “much too elaborate”: “In a play . . . songs should actually be songs, just as they are sung in

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everyday life, and so any orchestral accompaniment, being a totally extraneous accretion, nullifies the general effect intended. . . . It is as though we are suddenly wrenched from the little room . . . and deposited on an open plain with Brackenburg and Klärchen disappearing in the far distance.”73 This criticism turns on the issue of theatrical plausibility and naturalness at the point where characters move from speech to song. But Hoffmann’s sense of the excess of Klärchen’s musical discourse, one and the same with an excess of compositional input, resonates with precisely the drama that the song unfolds: Klärchen’s wish to step beyond her socially determined role as woman. Hoffmann’s reference to being wrenched from a “little room” (the private sphere) into a wide, agoraphobic space vividly suggests Klärchen’s being catapulted from domesticity into political action. In his reviews of Beethoven’s instrumental music Hoffmann argued for the special achievement of the composer in accessing the musical ideal, the otherworldly. The critic might well have invoked this notion in discussing Klärchen’s “Die Trommel” because, as Catriona MacLeod has argued in a reading of the numerous cross-dressed women in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister, Goethe employs female androgyny as a sign of transcendent art.74 Though MacLeod didn’t put it quite like this, female androgyny is a sign of transcendence because it overcomes determination by given social categories (male/female, masculine/ feminine). Thus the compounding of contrary gendered signs was a means through which the “otherworldly” could be signified. Klärchen’s musical excess is, like her fantasy of cross-dressing, a discourse of transcendence that opens out onto idealist aesthetics in which art is beyond the mundane. Klärchen’s masculine womanhood is a sign of art’s ability to transcend mimesis. Goethe made a related point about cross-dressed men in his article “Frauenrollen auf dem römischen Theater durch Männer gespielt” (Women’s roles played by men on the Roman stage; 1788). Here Goethe argues that the visible artifice of crossdressing exemplifies the very condition of art as irreducible to mimesis. He is not thinking of the drag act that manages to pull the wool entirely over one’s eyes. The cross-dressed actor makes visible the fact of make-believe. As Goethe put it, the actor doesn’t play himself, nor is he a woman; he possesses “a third and entirely strange Nature.”75 MacLeod connected this third nature “to the androgynous aesthetic proposed by writers such as Friedrich Schlegel”: it is an image of the creative soul, an emblem of the artist.76 Not just the artwork but also the artist possesses an androgynous character. “Die Trommel” enacts for women, and for the artist, a discourse of overcoming the private, amateur, and feminine spheres. An identical discourse is met at this time in reviews of works by Beethoven and others.77 Indeed, “Die Trommel” fulfills the fantasy of grandiose creation in Goethe’s unpublished treatise on dilettantism, which relegates private, amateur, and female artistic production of art to a lesser and flawed type of authorship.78

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In his review of the Egmont music Hoffmann does not come to terms with Klärchen’s “Die Trommel,” and he leaves unresolved, or uninterpreted, his own paradoxical censure and praise. On the one hand he chastises Beethoven for a song that is “far too elaborate,” and on the other he concludes by praising music that “without in the least attempting to shine by itself, . . . follows exactly the spirit of the poet and conforms closely to his objectives.”79 These paradoxes of the composer as autonomous and subservient, as emancipated from and in service to the male poet, as freely inventive musically and yet receptive to words, are precisely the paradoxes acted out onstage by the cross-dressed military heroine. Like “Die Trommel,” Klärchen’s second stage song, “Freudvoll und leidvoll,” receives a compositionally ambitious setting. Beethoven’s music breaks the decorum not only of the text’s generic title, “Lied,” and of its domestic context within the drama, but also exceeds Goethe’s own conception of this number (example 23). In the play Klärchen remarks that “more than once I’ve lulled a big child to sleep with [this song].” The remark, referring to Klärchen’s nocturnal intimacy with Egmont, suggests Goethe’s conception of the song as something like a lullaby. He may have anticipated a strophic lied in “folksy” (volkstümlich) style, something along the lines of Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s setting of this lyric. Beethoven’s setting, however, breaks this frame, again as a sign of Klärchen’s—and music’s—transcendental character. Eschewing a contained, circular strophic structure in favor of a twotempo aria, an open-ended sequential form associated with opera buffa, Beethoven sets the styles of the strophic lied, opera buffa, and opera seria side by side. The breach of generic decorum again figures Klärchen as being beyond normal, mundane categories. “Freudvoll und leidvoll” moves from a domestic lied topic in measures 1–17 to the public idiom of opera, thus retracing the trajectory out of the home and out of Klärchen’s modest social position that was already traced in “Die Trommel.” The lied topic ends abruptly at measure 18 with the introduction of accompanied recitative, a texture belonging more to opera seria than to the lied (example 23). It is dramatically apt that Klärchen’s words here are stylistically at once high-flown and down to earth: “himmelhoch jauchzend, zum Tode betrübt.” Literally this means “rejoicing heaven high, cast down to death,” but the phrase is also a commonplace idiom translated as “up one moment, down the next.” The stylistic paradox is expressive of Klärchen’s doubleness as lowly burgher’s daughter and heroine; she encompasses extremes. The second section of the aria, measures 21–46, is based around the textual idea of the happiness of one in love and shifts the musical topic to that of an opera buffa aria. In its evocation of three different types of singing, “Freudvoll and leidvoll” is a meta-aria, a song about song. Its topical-generic mixture does not function as a type of humorous play with signs or a compositional joke. Rather, it reveals Klärchen’s transcendence of those categories by which female singers, music, and

example 23. Beethoven, Egmont, “Freudvoll und leidvoll” (Klärchen’s song), mm. 16–21. 16

Fl. Ob. Cl. in A Bsn. arco

Vn. II cresc.

arco

Vn. II cresc.

arco

Va.

Klärchen him mel hoch jauch zend, arco

Vc. & Cb. Allegro assai vivace

20

Vn. II cresc.

Vn. II cresc.

Va. cresc.

Klärchen To

de

be trübt;

glück pizz.

Vc. & Cb.

zum

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composers are elsewhere constrained. Although ultimately dependent on categories, the aria nonetheless breaks with the rule of adherence to one category at a time. As part of the dramatic action, this song can be understood as Klärchen’s own, though no reference is made to its provenance or authorship, and in this it differs from “Die Trommel,” which Klärchen describes as a standard. When her mother tells her to leave off with the singing, Klärchen defends the song as if a composer were dismissing a critic: “No, don’t say anything against it. It’s a powerful song.” E. T. A. Hoffmann did not take the hint: “[I find] this song too protracted and operatically treated even in its melody. Reichardt has set it much better, with the utmost simplicity yet deepest feeling. At the end Beethoven’s composition almost completely degenerates into an aria.”80 T H E D U N G E O N S C E N E : A M U SIC A L C U L M I NAT IO N

The topos of transcendence in Klärchen’s songs informs the entire final scene of the drama, in excess of Goethe’s own conception of it. Aside from the domination of the scene by music, the close of the whole with the Victory Symphony is especially telling. Not only does the entire last scene unfold to music but the play concludes not with words, as one might expect of a five-act tragedy, but with a frenetic musical outburst. The conclusion of Egmont decenters words and jeopardizes their prestige.81 Already at the beginning of the final scene Beethoven’s setting of Egmont’s soliloquy as a melodrama engages this trope of the emancipation of music from words (example 24, mm. 1–14). As the melodrama unfolds the string accompaniment eases Egmont from waking words into sleep. This rather antiheroic transition is projected at measure 7, where the texture changes from broken to sustained chords. Egmont himself draws an analogy between music and sleep at this point: in sleep “ungehindert fließt der Kreis innerer Harmonien” (freely flows the circle of inner harmonies). Beethoven doesn’t miss the chance of a “circle” progression here (V7–I–IV in B major, mm. 7–9), and the four-part string texture, a string quartet writ large, suggests inwardness and depth. Just as Leonore appears to the imprisoned Florestan as an angelic vision leading him to freedom, Klärchen appears in Egmont’s sleep “shining,” and “on a cloud,” as “Liberty in heavenly raiment” (example 25, mm. 15–35).82 Beethoven responds to the apparition of Liberty at the poco vivace (m. 15) with a bright A-major seventh chord (D/V7) sustained for five measures. This dominant seventh quivers in sixteenth notes and triplets like the strings of a harp. The scoring for high winds and brass perhaps refers to musical purity and the sacred. Beethoven takes seriously, and musically points up, Goethe’s elision of Klärchen and Liberty by using for Liberty the woodwinds and horns that had begun Klärchen’s Trauermusik. Through this textural connection the topos of mourning is transformed into

example 24. Beethoven, Egmont, melodrama, Egmont’s monologue, mm. 1–14. Poco sostenuto Vn. I sempre

sotto voce

Vn. II sempre sotto voce

Va. sempre

sotto voce

Vc. & Cb.

5

[Egmont.] Süßer Schlaf! Du kommst wie ein ungebeten, unerfleht reines Glück am willigsten.

sotto voce

Vivace

sempre

Tempo I

Più moto

Du lösest die Knoten und des ungehindert fließt und eingehüllt versinken wir der stengen Gedanken, Schmerzes; der Kreis innerer in gefälligen und hören auf vermischest alle Bilder Harmonien, Wahnsin, zu sein. der Freude

10

[Er entschläft, die Musik begleitet Vc. seinen Schlummer.] Cb.

Vc. divisi

unis.

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example 25. Beethoven, Egmont, melodrama, Liberty’s apparition, mm. 15–25. Beim Anfange dieses Stücks erblickt man die Erscheinung, welche nach und nach aus den Poco vivace 15

Fl.

Ob. Cl. in A 1.

Bsn.

Hn. in D

Vn. I

Vn. II

Va.

Vc.

Cb.

Klärchen’s rebirth as spirit. Her apparition on a weightlessly hovering cloud offers the audience a glimpse of the musical otherworldly. Beethoven and Goethe thus use the visual realm as a way of signifying a musical “beyond.” At the Andante con moto, measure 20, Liberty (in Goethe’s stage directions) “bows down towards the sleeping hero” and “expresses a feeling of compassion; she seems to commiserate with him” (example 25, mm. 20–35). Beethoven projects this affectively and visually by overlaying the slumbering motif in the strings

example 25 (continued) Wolken hervordringt. 3

3

Andante con moto Von hier an geht molto

18 3

3

3

3

3

3

3

3

molto

3 3

molto 3

molto

pochi Vn. con sordino

3

sempre ligato

con sordino 3

[Vc. I]

sempre ligato con sordino 3

[Vc. II e Basso] pizz.

(continued)

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example 25 (continued) die Musik mit den von dem Dichter vorgeschriebenen Gebärden und Ausdrücken 22

molto

molto

molto

3

3

3

[Vc. II arco]

(representing Egmont) with a tender, even regretful complement of woodwind and horns (representing Liberty/Klärchen). The melody of the flute in measures 21–25 (D, F♯, G, F♯) traces, so to speak, the profile of the slumbering hero without literally doubling his melody in the first violin. The scene recalls Wright of Derby’s Corinthian Maid, or, The Origins of Painting (1782–1784), an image that recounts the Greek story of the invention of painting by the Corinthian maiden who, about to be separated from her soldier lover, traced his silhouette on a wall

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where the image had been thrown by candle light. This conceit of a woman’s effort to trace the lineaments of a sleeping hero is similarly evoked by Beethoven as Liberty/Klärchen bows down and traces the string contour of slumbering Egmont. Coupled with the onstage spectacle, Beethoven’s music similarly projects an image of heroic tranquility, heroism in repose. The fusion of music and sight, sound and vision, again enacts the transcendence of categories, and it is appropriate that Liberty/Klärchen—the original boundary crosser of the play—should oversee this scene. Situated in the realm of spirit, she communicates with Egmont through musical pictorialisms; these constitute her (otherwise missing) voice, at least in dealing with mortals. This, perhaps, is why Beethoven closely matches his score to Liberty’s mime as specified by Goethe. Liberty’s musical pantomime begins with “an enlivening gesture” (example 26, Allegro ma non troppo, dotted figure for clarinet, horns, and viola, mm. 35–41), after which she shows Egmont her quiver of arrows, staff, and helmet, which Beethoven matches with “arrow-flight” pictorialism, the strings picking out an ascending pizzicato arpeggio in measures 44–51. The pantomime culminates with Liberty’s message that the liberation of the Netherlands from the Spanish will follow Egmont’s death. To represent that death, Beethoven provides a scalar “chopping motif ” on bowed, unison strings and follows it with a trumpet fanfare. The fanfare is coupled with the textual sign of Klärchen/Liberty—woodwinds and horns—such that Egmont’s death, the liberation of the Netherlands, and Klärchen/ Liberty are all connected in a metonymic chain. At the first distant rumble of Spanish drums, signaling Egmont’s impending execution, Liberty vanishes, as if repelled by this slippage from the musical ideal to the mundane. Beethoven’s matching of gesture and music establishes Klärchen/Liberty as a musically authorial figure. Phenomenologically, in the lived experience of performance, Beethoven’s musical pictorialisms appear to be orchestrated by her and issue from her. The orchestral music we hear is her voice, not background music or underscoring. As we know, during her pantomime she hovers above the stage on a cloud. This distance from the orchestra (qua her voice) purifies her bodily expression and downplays the physical production of sound.83 This Liberty is an image of music’s otherworldly source that belongs as much to early idealist as to late Enlightenment aesthetics of music.84 The literary scholar W. Daniel Wilson has stated that Klärchen’s appearance in this scene belongs to Egmont’s dream. Indeed, Wilson sees this as a disciplinary move on Egmont’s part, an effort to rehabilitate Klärchen as a correct version of woman, disembodied allegory in place of a freedom-loving Amazon. Feminist criticism, especially Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens, has alerted us to the paradoxical use of the female form in statues of Liberty, Justice, and the Nation in historical eras when real women enjoyed few public privileges.85 In dramatic and musical contexts, however, the meanings accruing to allegories of woman are

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example 26. Beethoven, Egmont, melodrama, Liberty’s pantomime, mm. 35–51. Allegro ma non troppo 36 Aufmunternd etc.

Fl. Cl. in A

dolce

Bsn.

Hn. in D

sempre dolce

sempre dolce [senza sordino]

Vn. I [senza sordino]

Vn. II [senza sordino]

Va. dolce [senza sordino]

Vc. [senza sordino]

Cb.

not always so constrained. Liberty, who in Egmont might equally be called “Music,” blurs the distinction between woman as a muse for the male composer and an early idealist or romantic experiment with the male composer cast as woman. With the snoozing Egmont operating as a hidden signature of male authorship, Klärchen/Liberty emerges as a visual symbol of the composer as artist. Strongly associated with music throughout the play; slipping into and out of music with her death; communicating nonverbally with Egmont in a musical pantomime that she appears to author, Klärchen is persistently aligned with music as its allegorical figurehead as well as with its practice and even its composition.

example 26 (continued) 42

dolce

dolce

pizz.

pizz.

pizz.

pizz.

pizz.

(continued)

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example 26 (continued)

47

Tutti arco

arco

arco

arco

arco

This connection with music is only part of why I read Klärchen/Liberty as a symbol of the composer. Her cross-dressing and masculine behavior are images of overcoming a prescriptive identity, a social role, that resonates with the changing status of the composer and of music. Posthumously, Beethoven’s name grew synonymous with these changes. The musical excess of Klärchen’s stage songs, with their disruption of the fictional world onstage, speaks to the extremely unusual way in which the play (partly on Goethe’s authority) moves toward and culminates in music. The Victory Symphony, which has no source within the world of the play but issues from Klärchen and the musical ideal, takes the last word from Egmont and the playwright. Whatever Goethe’s intention may have been, this culmination

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resonates with the championing of music over words in the aesthetics of idealism that filled the gap between Goethe’s writing of the play and Beethoven’s setting of it.86 In Egmont music overcomes—words, literary form, the authority of the poet, and the mortal life of the eponymous hero, sending him first to sleep and then to his death. T H E V IC T O RY SYM P HO N Y A N D T H E L I M I T S O F T H E H E R O IC SIG N

The famous Victory Symphony (example 27) that concludes both the overture to and final act of Egmont has been subject to contradictory valuation by twentiethcentury critics. This uncertainty reveals critics’ conceptions of the heroic as a discourse—conceptions that are useful to tease out from under often arbitraryseeming censure and praise. The issue of value is almost always on the cards in discussions of music, but this issue intensifies in writing about those pieces by Beethoven that are deemed heroic in idiom or subject. As Nicholas Cook has shown, this can be explained in part by canonic discourse that values some types of music over others. Canonic discourse has tended to denigrate those works by Beethoven that engage too explicitly with the celebration of specific military and political victories of the Napoleonic era. The aesthetics of musical autonomy and organicism have demurred at the primarily celebratory character of such works for which, as Cook has noted, there are no recognized terms of value and standards of excellence.87 The denigration of this topically heroic music is rhetorically required if other heroic pieces are to be canonized and praised. In simple terms, a “good” version of the musical heroic is made possible by a contrary “bad” version. These binary oppositions operate throughout the critical literature but are brought into crisis when writers, perhaps unwittingly, place the same piece on both sides of the canonic divide. This is the case with the Victory Symphony of Egmont. Analytical attempts to relate the Victory Symphony motivically to the overture (it is first heard as the coda to this movement) register, albeit in the guise of analytical corrective, its stylistic and affective incongruity. Ultimately, the attempt analytically to render the Victory Symphony integral only adds to the underlying anxiety that it is tacked on and unmotivated. I say “anxiety” because if it were agreed that the Victory Symphony is a noisy and mechanically added curtain call, it must therefore, according to the pervasive aesthetic standards, be judged to lack persuasiveness and seriousness as utterance about the heroic. Ultimately, then, it is the nature and value of the heroic that is at stake in discussions of whether a piece is “good” or “bad.” A reader alive to the contradictory valuations of the Victory Symphony is left with the impression that critics would prefer the heroic to be something more than a topic or sign. Heroic triumph, it seems, must justify itself

example 27. Beethoven, Egmont, Victory Symphony, mm. 9–15. [Allegro con brio] 9

Fl.

Picc.

Ob. Cl. in B

Bsn.

Hn. in F Hn. in E Trp. in F

Vn. I

Vn. II Va. Vc. Cb.

example 27 (continued) 12

a2

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through a journey, a process of which it should be the desired and naturalized outcome. To relate this to the Victory Symphony in greater detail, I place the positive assessments of this conclusion by Solomon and Kinderman next to Burnham’s characterization of it as a monumentalizing of the banal.88 Burnham’s memorable description of “the brutish cheer of a banal cadential progression” encapsulates the symphony’s celebratory use of cadential commonplaces, something already flagged by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Intending to praise, Hoffmann found the symphony an effective conclusion because it is “fashioned almost entirely from cadential figures.”89 Although we cannot rule out the possibility that Beethoven’s music critiques the more obvious (and possibly male-centered) aspects of heroism by presenting them as hollow, such a reading remains hypothetical. Wilson has noted that Egmont’s little rallying cry to family and nation on his way to execution is not entirely convincing—more whimper than compelling proclamation—and an argument could be made that Beethoven’s musical banalities similarly undermine the notion of male heroic Victory through compositional bathos. But this line of argument is difficult to substantiate. Adorno’s negative comments on the overtures to Egmont and Coriolan, which he styled “symphonies for children,” bring us back to the issue of critics’ expectations about heroic discourse. Adorno is not alone in his objections to Beethoven’s “sacrifice” of musical processes for music as the sign of a political ideal. Such distaste underlay the reception of Beethoven’s reportedly bombastic “failures” of the Congress period, Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria, op. 91 (1813), and Der glorreiche Augenblick, op. 136 (1814). What Adorno disliked about the Victory Symphony of Egmont was its presentation of triumph without preceding conflict, such that triumph does not arise from a musical process (from “dialectical development” as Adorno termed it) but is imposed from without. Such a process can naturalize and so justify triumph by rendering it compelling, desired, seemingly inevitable. Adorno was asking that the ideology of the heroic remain invisible; that, through advanced musical technique, triumph appear both pleasurable and just.90 Evoking the terms of his critique of the Enlightenment, Adorno spoke of “something brutal, Germanic, triumphalist” in the Victory Symphony; its musical simplification “results in the crudity of fanfare.”91 Adorno was unsettled here by the fantasy of Germanic hegemony that he hears in the celebratory, militaristic noise.92 One of the reasons why the Victory Symphony appears an unmotivated, topical conclusion to the overture is that the overture, like the play, focuses on the love story between Klärchen and Egmont. The political ideals of freedom and humanity are attached to this love story, but they do not arise from it. Rhetorics of freedom and humanity are made concrete through Klärchen’s emancipation from the categories “woman” and the “feminine” (even admitting that this emancipation is

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partial, tropological, and male authored). Thus it is not a slip from compositional greatness, but deeply appropriate, that these rhetorics are rather bluntly reattached at the end of the overture, just as they are at the end of the drama when Egmont is led to the scaffold. Admittedly, Beethoven does provide an eight-measure buildup to the fortissimo victory motif, a sort of struggle and overcoming in miniature. But this buildup comprises highly conventionalized sequences that rise in pitch and volume over a timpani roll. It points to little more than the conventionalized nature of heroic overcoming itself. Crucially, for Beethoven this does not seem to have been a problem. He treated the heroic as a topic, just as, along with his contemporaries, he treated it as an occasion for gender trouble and subjected it to female as well as male embodiment. That Beethoven in other contexts embedded heroic victory in a narrative of struggle and overcoming represents nothing more or less than a compositionally sophisticated naturalization of the ideology of the heroic—as if victory were the necessary and willed outcome of a dialectical, conflict- and music-based process. This was an option that Beethoven explored particularly in his symphonies. In Klärchen’s stage songs, overcoming is signified differently, through the breach of generic and stylistic decorum.93 In the Egmont Overture Beethoven rendered the heroic through a set of signs that function in a highly compressed, even shorthand, way. As part of this topical treatment he linked music to other discourses through association, though without actually incorporating those discourses “into” the music in the sense of their being compositionally and formally immanent in it. Indeed, the Victory Symphony signifies future triumph—national freedom—through materials that are, in Burnham’s word, banal. This way of creating meaning, in which music is a signifier that does not resemble the signified beyond an affinity of affect or expression, may underlie the distrust that critics schooled in German romantic aesthetics display toward some of Beethoven’s occasional music. The heroic does not offer guarantees of authenticity. The Victory Symphony discloses that the heroic is essentially nothing more or less than noise—a round of applause—through which culture honors one person or idea above others. In celebrating our grandest and highest aspirations and achievements through the discourse of the heroic, we forget that the heroic itself is ceremonial, the award of a medal or laurel, and thus inherently in danger of becoming hollow, banal. What we choose to honor as heroic may set a temporary gold standard, but the fact that we honor something as being heroic is a matter of convention. People have always looked askance at their heirloom heroes and heroines, have found fault with the ideals of the past, and the heroic, as ceremonial, has remained relatively insulated from critique. For example, although early Christians rejected the blood and gore of classical military heroes, they remained sufficiently attached to the heroic as a discourse to install Christ as a newer, better heroic paradigm. The idea of progress,

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particularly of moral and spiritual progress, is endemic to the rapid changes in the subjects venerated as heroic. The criticism surrounding Beethoven’s Egmont notwithstanding, the principal type of heroism explored in Egmont is a woman’s overcoming of nothing less than herself and her sexual character. Egmont shares this theme of heroic womanhood with Fidelio. In both dramas female heroism is seen to spring from female love of a largely passive male hero. But whereas in Fidelio Leonore’s rescue of her husband celebrates the conjugal fidelity of the good wife, in Egmont Klärchen acts without that institutional support. She is the hero’s mistress, and Beethoven’s representation of her heroism focuses on the process of her overcoming herself. At the same time, it appears, Klärchen’s womanhood functions as a moral and patriotic insurance policy within a discourse of the heroic that could no longer unreservedly champion men and masculinity. In Egmont female heroism and androgyny are stepping stones to the ideals of liberty and freedom that informed both the formation of bourgeois identity and concepts of authorship. In Klärchen’s trajectory from burgher’s daughter to allegory of music, authorship, and liberty, female heroism occupies a middle station, at once overcoming the worldly and mundane and beginning an “ascent” into the otherworldly and the ideal. Through Klärchen, Egmont achieves its distinctive doubleness as a text engaged at once with Enlightenment themes of society and the individual, identity and freedom, despotism and democracy; and at the same time with early idealist topics of an otherworldly realm in which liberty, heroism, and music find their most intense and purest expression. The oscillation between these registers simultaneously connects Egmont with and distinguishes it from the contemporary musical supernaturalism of Hoffmann, Wackenroder, and Tieck—what Dahlhaus has called the “romantic metaphysics” of music.94 Klärchen breaches not only the decorum of the lied and the category of “woman” but also the historical periodization that claims Beethoven for the Enlightenment over early romantic idealism.

Conclusion

Friedrich Schiller, the Weimar colleague of Goethe and Corona Schröter, has earned a reputation as one of the more misogynistic figures in late eighteenthcentury German literature. The ideal of universal brotherhood in the “Ode to Joy” of 1785, which Beethoven set in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, appears to many commentators exclusively and problematically male.1 In the allegedly humorous 1789 poem “Die berühmte Frau” (The celebrated woman) Schiller portrayed a conversation between two husbands, the first, the luckier of the two, cuckolded by his wife, the other, more profoundly humiliated by his bride’s success as a published writer and consequent perception as a public whore.2 In a projected joint treatise on dilettantism Schiller and Goethe in 1799 drafted a theoretical system in which amateur and female writers do not proceed beyond a middle step in the authorial pantheon, not least because they mistake their receptivity to art for an ability to produce it.3 For these reasons alone Schiller’s poem “Würde der Frauen” (Dignity of women) of 1795 would appear an unpromising, even self-defeating end point to a study that argues that elevated aesthetic and moral value was accorded the female sign, and real women, in late eighteenth-century German musical culture (table 8). Nor are these the only reasons for steering clear of Schiller’s poem, which was problematically celebrated in the 1990s in the pages of Fidelio magazine and the related “Schiller Institute” website as (purported) evidence of intellectual problems with “feminism” and “gay rights.”4 That troubling political appropriation aside, Schiller’s nine stanzas, which affirm fundamental differences between men and women in their characters, social roles, and spheres of activity may leave many modern readers annoyed, queasy, or just bored. In an apostrophe to the fair sex the poetic voice 233

table 8 Friedrich Schiller, “Würde der Frauen” (1795; revised ca. 1800) [1/1] Ehret die Frauen! Sie flechten und weben [1/2] Himmlische Rosen ins irdische Leben, [1/3] Flechten der Liebe beglückendes Band, [1/4] Und, in der Grazie züchtigem Schleier, [1/5] Nähren sie wachsam das ewige Feuer [1/6] Schöner Gefühle mit heiliger Hand. [2/1] Ewig aus der Wahrheit Schranken [2/2] Schweift des Mannes wilde Kraft, [2/3] Unstät treiben die Gedanken [2/4] Auf dem Meer der Leidenschaft. [2/5] Gierig greift er in die Ferne, [2/6] Nimmer wird sein Herz gestillt, [2/7] Rastlos durch entleg’ne Sterne [2/8] Jagt er seines Traumes Bild. [3/1] Aber mit zauberisch fesselndem Blicke [3/2] Winken die Frauen den Flüchtling zurücke, [3/3] Warnend zurück in der Gegenwart Spur. [3/4] In der Mutter bescheidener Hütte [3/5] Sind sie geblieben mit schaamhafter Sitte, [3/6] Treue Töchter der frommen Natur. [4/1] Feindlich ist des Mannes Streben, [4/2] Mit zermalmender Gewalt [4/3] Geht der wilde durch das Leben, [4/4] Ohne Rast und Aufenthalt. [4/5] Was er schuf, zerstört er wieder, [4/6] Nimmer ruht der Wünsche Streit, [4/7] Nimmer, wie das Haupt der Hyder [4/8] Ewig fällt und sich erneut. [5/1] Aber, zufrieden mit stillerem Ruhme, [5/2] Brechen die Frauen des Augenblicks Blume, [5/3] Nähren sie sorgsam mit liebendem Fleiß, [5/4] Freier in ihrem gebundenen Wirken, [5/5] Reicher als er in des Wissens Bezirken [5/6] Und in der Dichtung unendlichem Kreis. [6/1] Streng und stolz sich selbst genügend, [6/2] Kennt des Mannes kalte Brust, [6/3] Herzlich an ein Herz sich schmiegend, [6/4] Nicht der Liebe Götterlust, [6/5] Kennet nicht den Tausch der Seelen, [6/6] Nicht in Thränen schmilzt er hin, [6/7] Selbst des Lebens Kämpfe stählen [6/8] Härter seinen harten Sinn.

Honor women! They braid and weave Heavenly roses in earthly life, Plait ribbon for happiness in love, And in the grace of a chaste veil Watchfully they approach the eternal fire Of beautiful feelings with blessed hand. Eternally beyond the limits of truth Roams the wild power of man, Thoughts drift restlessly On the sea of passion. Greedily, he grabs at the distance, His heart never at peace, Without rest, through far-off stars He pursues the image of his dream. But with magically restrained glances Women beckon the refugee to return Warning [him] back to the present’s track. In the mother’s modest hut, Modest in manners, they remain True daughters of meek Nature. Hostile is the striving of man, With crushing power He goes wild through life, Without rest and abode. What he creates he destroys again, Never ceases the conflict of desires, Never, as the head of Hydra Ever falls and renews itself. But, content with more tranquil Glory, Women pluck the moment’s flower, They draw near carefully, with loving skill, Freer in their bounded actions, Richer than he in the realm of knowledge And in the infinite sphere of poetry. Strict and proud, a law unto itself, The cold breast of man Nestling affectionately with another Knows not the divine joy of love, Knows not the exchange of souls, Nor melts in tears, Even life’s battles harden His hard mind harder.

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table 8 (continued) [7/1] Aber, wie leise vom Zephyr erschüttert [7/2] Schnell die äolische Harfe erzittert, [7/3] Also die fühlende Seele der Frau. [7/4] Zärtlich geängstigt vom Bilde der Qualen [7/5] Wallet der liebende Busen, es strahlen [7/6] Perlend die Augen von himmlischem Thau. [8/1] In der Männer Herrschgebiete [8/2] Gilt der Stärke trotzig Recht, [8/3] Mit dem Schwert beweist der Scythe, [8/4] Und der Perser wird zum Knecht. [8/5] Es befehden sich im Grimme [8/6] Die Begierden wild und roh, [8/7] Und der Eris rauhe Stimme [8/8] Waltet wo die Charis floh. [9/1] Aber mit sanft überredender Bitte [9/2] Führen die Frauen den Scepter der Sitte, [9/3] Löschen die Zwietracht, die tobend entglüht, [9/4] Lehren die Kräfte, die feindlich sich hassen, [9/5] Sich in der lieblichen Form zu umfassen, [9/6] Und vereinen was ewig sich flieht.

But, as the Aeolian harp, shaken by Zephyr, quickly trembles, So too woman’s sensitive soul. Tenderly perturbed by images of suffering The loving breast heaves, eyes Gleam with heavenly dew. In the ruling realm of men Reigns the defiant law of force, The Scythian proves himself with the sword, And the Persian is enslaved. In fury feuds Desire, wild and raw, And the rough voice of Eris Prevails where Charis flees. But with soft persuading plea Women carry the scepter of civility, Extinguish discord, that burns madly, Teach the power that hates with enmity, To fold itself into charming form, And unite what forever flees.

celebrates women as domestic goddesses, priestesses of the hearth, and mothers and daughters, sensitive, loving, and chaste: “In the mother’s modest hut, / Modest in manners, they remain / True daughters of meek Nature.” All Schiller’s talk of nature, beauty, feeling, flowers, ribbons, veils, the sacred, love, trembling, and tears seems to epitomize the constraining idealization of woman that twentieth-century feminisms sought to unveil as modes of containment. Certainly the poem reveals an intense investment in the two-sex model, in a metaphysics of sexual difference attending body, mind, social role, and destiny. In this way it shows the influence of Alexander von Humboldt’s fledgling “anthropology” of the sexes (published a year earlier in Schiller’s journal Die Horen), which sought to establish a binary opposition of male and female natures throughout the created world.5 Schiller, seemingly unresponsive, at least in this poem, to Humboldt’s call for transcendent, androgynous humanity and artworks, proceeds through the rigid alternation of odd-numbered stanzas in triple meter describing the female character, and even-numbered stanzas in duple meter describing the male character. A cursory reading confirms all the customary stereotypes: man is

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action, he roams, is restless, “he grabs at the distance,” “he pursues the image of his dream.” His sphere is granted a sublime, heroic, and unbounded quality. Women are sources and objects of love, peacemakers, and they achieve their ends by gentle persuasion, not force and violence.6 Reference to force and violence, however, highlights a contradiction in this poem, at least as I have described it so far. The idealization of women is not (only) a means of their domestic containment but signals that they are the figureheads of peaceable culture and stand in opposition to the agents of war and conflict. In the final stanza of his poem Schiller clarifies the central trope of the poem: women “carry the scepter of civility,” they are agents of culture “teach[ing] the power that hates with enmity, / To fold itself into charming form.” This is undoubtedly a symbolic role, but it is more than symbolic. In stanza 5 Schiller accords women superiority in the realm of knowledge and poetry—“[Woman is] richer than he in the realm of knowledge / And in the infinite sphere of poetry.” These lines are not grammatically ambiguous, but they constitute a conceptual scandal sufficient to explain their published mistranslation in a late nineteenth-century English edition.7 Schiller’s admission can be explained, even explained away, as belonging to the poem’s genre—works in praise of the fair sex—and so familiar from prefaces and dedications of publications of poetry and music for female amateurs. But in this book I have argued that such praise was endemic to the musical culture of the late German Enlightenment. Such praise, as reflected also in Schiller’s text, focused on the idea of woman as more civilized and civilizing than man, and as remote from the era of barbarism, feudalism, even war. Sensibility—a capacity to be moved, stimulated, and touched to both emotion and empathy—was a key term in this discourse of women as bearing “the scepter of civility.” That idea of women’s quicker sensibility was often related to their thinner nervous fibers, that is, to an idea of physical refinement discussed in the introduction to this book via the anatomist Ackermann. Schiller, too, invoked that delicacy, linking women and music in his reference to her “sensitive soul” that, “as the Aeolian harp / —shaken by Zephyr—quickly trembles.” If this seems to speak of emotional receptivity rather than strong authorship, it nonetheless helps us to understand the desire for, and flourishing of, female musical creativity in this period, under the signs of feeling, nature, love, and poetry. Ultimately, Schiller’s poem suggests a different conceptual order, in which the relationship between sex/gender and artistic production is ordered differently than some current critical habits might assume. Specifically, female domesticity, the arts, and knowledge are closely linked, not severed. That metonymic chain—however problematic to modern eyes and however ambivalently entertained by Schiller—establishes a peculiar conceptual gulf between Schiller’s context and my own. Some of the musical implications of the tropes I have explored here can be summarized through two of the many settings of Schiller’s poem. The first was

Conclusion

237

provided on Schiller’s request by that veteran of gallantry, Johann Friedrich Reichardt. The fact that Schiller sought a musical setting reminds us of the desire for sensuous completion of national poetry through the singing voice (a desire that fostered the work of Minna Brandes, Corona Schröter, and Sophie Westenholz). Schiller dispatched the poem to Reichardt for a musical setting that appeared— appropriately enough—in the former’s Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1796 (the trope of the living muse would not die easily, even at century’s end).8 Setting just the first two stanzas, Reichardt marshaled strong contrast but, in doing so, seemed to equate female character with then prevailing ideals of music itself, while setting male character in an almost unsingably barbaric domain approaching nonmusic (example 28). Employing the alterity of the minor mode, raw unison, marchlike rhythm, and ungainly changes of melodic direction, Reichardt’s “manly” is fit only for war. (Clearly, the minor mode was not necessarily a marker of the “feminine.”)9 Civilizing influences stream from the Gluckian, neoclassical melody for the odd-numbered stanzas—a bel canto tune in a noble, sarabande rhythm with longbreathed, elided phrases reflecting the enjambment of lines 1 and 2. Reichardt’s performance direction for this music, “mit Würde und Anmuth” (with dignity and grace), cleverly refers to Schiller’s treatise Anmut und Würde of 1793, a tract of moral philosophy in which the poet aligned the quality of “grace” with women, that of “dignity” with men. The content of the treatise is less important here than the fact that Reichardt summoned both terms for the female character, and set the men of the poem beyond the reach of either. (Incidentally, in Schiller’s treatise, grace was a quality of moral action based upon feeling and empathy, whereas dignity was a sterner, Kantian morality based upon reason alone.) An implication of Reichardt’s performance direction is that (the right types of) women are figures of a higher humanity beyond sexual dimorphism, and that “music”—in the form of beautiful, neoclassical song—marks that perfection and completeness. For Reichardt, arguments in favor of women were often synonymous with arguments in favor of music as a fine art. Not everyone was impressed with the feminocentric outcome of Reichardt’s composition. Christian Gottfried Körner, sensing more creative potential and musical interest in manliness than the composer had realized, observed that Reichardt’s music for the even-numbered stanzas revealed “Unvermögen” (impotence) and was marked by “Armuth und Trockenheit” (poverty and dryness).10 Schiller (like Humboldt) was less inclined than Reichardt to rediscover human wholeness in music and female song. Instead, he looked to the Greek statues of antiquity, particularly the Apollo Belvedere and the Juno Ludowico for his models of a perfect, harmoniously balanced humanity. But Reichardt was not alone in discovering something complete and eternal in contemporary female music making. In his setting of “Würde der Frauen,” as in Richard Samuel’s Portraits in the Characters of the Muses, Johann Christian Brandes’s obituary of his daughter, and

example 28. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, “Würde der Frauen,” Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1796, setting of stanzas 1 and 2 of Schiller’s poem of that name. Mit Würde und Anmuth

Eh ret

irr

die Frau en! sie flech ten und we ben

di sche Le ben,

Und, in der Gra

e

flech ten der Lie

zi e züch ti

wi ge Feu er

himm li

be be

gem Schley er,

schö ner Ge

sche Ro sen ins

glü cken des Band,

näh ren sie wach

füh

sam das

le mit hei li ger Hand.

Stark E wig aus der Wahr heit Schran ken schweift des Man nes wil de Kraft, un stät

trei ben die

greift er

durch ent

in

leg

Ge dan ken auf

die

Fer

ne

ne, nim

Ster

ne

dem Meer der Lei den schaft.

Gie

mer wird sein Herz ge

rast

jagt

er

sei

nes

stillt,

Trau

mes Bild.

rig

los

example 29. Amalia Thierry, “Würde der Frauen in Musik gesetzt” (Hamburg: Französische Musikhandlung, ca. 1805), setting of stanza 1 of Schiller’s poem. Andante cantabile Eh ret die Frau en! sie flech

ir

di

sche Le

glü

cken

Schlei er,

ner

ben,

ten und we

flech

ten

des Band,

füh

le

der

Lie

be

und in der Gra

näh ren sie wach sam das

Ge

ben himm li sche Ro sen ins

mit hei

e

wi ge

li

Feu

be

zie

züch ti gem

er

schö

ger Hand.

example 30. Amalia Thierry, “Würde der Frauen in Musik gesetzt” (Hamburg: Französische Musikhandlung, ca. 1805), setting of stanza 6 of Schiller’s poem. Maestoso

Streng

Brust,

und stolz sich selbst ge

herz lich an

lust,

nü gend,

ein Herz

ken net nicht

kennt des Man

sich schmie gend,

den Tausch

nes kal

te

nicht der Lie be Göt

der See

len,

ter

nicht in

3

Thrä

stäh

nen schmilz

len

här

ter

ter

hin,

sei

selbst des Le

nen har

bens Käm

ten Sinn.

pfe

Conclusion

241

Goethe’s poetic invocation of Corona Schröter as the muse of the Weimar theater, neoclassical motifs lent transcendent qualities to female musicians. These were not emancipatory motifs urging sexual equality, but they did offer terms on which women, and music, could be meaningful. In dwelling on them in this book, I hope to have dispelled any lingering assumption that the late eighteenth century necessarily figured musical women as dangerous, “Other,” or in need of containment. A second setting of “Würde der Frauen” enshrining the sovereign feminine can serve as an envoi. Here Reichardt’s modest treatment must cede to an altogether more ambitious—and beautiful—interpretation by a composer of whom nothing is known: Amalie Thierry. Whether she ever existed is unclear, for the only traces of her are three settings of Schiller; she was perhaps a pseudonym for another composer, male or female.11 Thierry, composing, whatever her actual sex, under the exalted sign of woman, set “Würde der Frauen” as a rondo. Providing a compositional analogue for the poem’s idea that women “fold . . . into charming form, / And unite what forever flees,” the varied, transposed returns of the refrain unify the female, odd-numbered verses and lend the piece a circular, bounded form. Like Reichardt, Thierry employed a stately triple dance for the female stanzas (here, perhaps, a minuet), her musical construction of the feminine approaching a romantic topos of “music,” in its diatonic purity and harplike accompaniment for fortepiano (example 29). (The effect is similar to that of some of the nocturnes of John Field and the Lieder ohne Worte of the Mendelssohn siblings.) For the men’s stanzas Thierry provided a mixture of seemingly primitive march, recitative, and agitato topics, situating unalloyed and normative masculinity at the margins of the musical. She does so in accordance with the text’s rather misandrist conception of men as lacking feeling and therefore, within the culture of sensibility, bordering on the inhuman. In stanza 6, a simulated accompagnato projects the idea that “Strict and proud, a law unto itself / The cold breast of man [even when] / Nestling affectionately with another / Knows not the divine joy of love” (example 30). Here, in a gesture that writes small the theme of this study, Thierry ushers in the music of the female stanzas, tailored now to fit the rigid duple meter of the men’s stanzas. The effect is that Schiller’s vision of male lack is cloaked in “feminine” music that makes good that deficiency. The figures of woman, and music, are lent utopian value in an imaginary “Tausch der Seelen” (exchange of souls).

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Appendix

Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Two Prefaces to the Fair Sex

Preface to Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer the Younger, 1798), ii–vi. Gute deutsche Mütter stillen und pflegen ihre Kindlein selbst und singen sie wohl gerne selbst in den Schlaf. Darum hab’ ich bei der Wahl dieser Wiegenlieder [ii] eben so viel an die zärtlichen und verständigen Mütter, als an die Kindlein gedacht. Die kleinen Schreier und Gaukler in der Wiege bedürfen nur einer sanften einlullenden Melodie, und die muß ein Wiegenlied immer haben, was Inhalts die Verse auch sein mögen. Die Sängerinn an der Wiege will aber auch zugleich wach dabei bleiben und angenehm unterhalten sein. Für diese ist manches Lied in der kleinen Sammlung, das mancher Leser eben nicht für ein eigentliches Wiegenlied halten möchte, das die Sängerinn [iii] aber gerne auch dafür annehmen wird. Diese wird es auch nicht befremden, daß die Lieder keine Ueberschriften zur Bezeichnung der Bewegungen und keine Anleitung zu Abänderung der Stärke und Schwäche im Vortrage enthalten. Sie wird bald fühlen, daß alle diese Lieder, um ganz das zu sein, was sie sein sollen, in mäßiger, auch wohl langsamer Bewegung und mit sanfter halber Stimme gesungen sein wollen. Mit raschen rumpelnden Bewegungen und lauter schreiender Stimme kann eine unverständige [iv] leidenschaftliche Amme ein unruhiges Kind wohl betäuben und zum Schlaf zwingen wollen. Eine gute zärtliche Mutter, die wohl fühlt und weiß, daß nur sanfte Bewegungen und milde Töne einem zarten Kinde die Ruhe geben, die nicht nur gedeihlichen Schlaf, sondern auch einen wohlthätigen Ton dem künftigen Leben verleihen können, die wird nie den sanften Ton verfehlen, in welchem sie sich, den Blick aufs zarte Kind geheftet, selbst nur wohl fühlt. [v] Freilich kann man auch bei dem aufmerksamen Kinde, das sich schon gerne mit seiner Puppe unterhält, durch ein angenehmes Lied, womit das Kind seine Puppe einsingt, manches gute Gefühl erwecken, manche gute Lehre eindringender machen, und ich denke es fehlet dieser Sammlung auch an solchen Liedern nicht.

243

244

Appendix

Alle diese Lieder aber können auch sehr wohl beim ersten Clavier- und Singunterricht benutzt werden, zu dem mir für Kinder überall nichts zweckmäßiger [vi] scheinet, als leichte faßliche Lieder, deren Weisen dem Charakter und Bau der Verse ganz angemessen sind, und für sich eine gute Melodie mit reiner harmonischer Begleitung haben. Preface to Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (Berlin: Friedrich Wilhelm Birnstiel, 1775), iii–v. [iii] An die Schönen. Ob ich Ihnen, meine Schönen, hiemit keine ganz gleichgültige Sammlung von Gesängen überreiche, das mögen Sie und Ihre Verehrer entscheiden. Nicht ohne Ursache stecke ich mich hinter diese: denn sie werden gewiß für mich die vortheilhaftesten Beurtheiler meiner Stücke sein. Von Ihrem schönen Munde gesungen, würden Ihre Bewunderer die Lieder noch einmal, vielleicht noch tausendmal so schön finden, als sie wirklich sind. O hätte doch jeder Recensent seine siegende Schöne! Aber im Ernst, ich rechne viel auf die Verschönerung, die Sie diesen Liedern geben werden, und ich glaube gewiß, daß sie deshalb mir selbst gefallen, weil sie mir meine schöne Freundinnen, oder meine liebe Schwester, oder—ich selbst vorgesungen. [iv] Da blättert mir eben mein ernster und bescheidener Freund die Sammlung durch und ruft: Auch Stücke von mir? Die passen ja gar nicht in die Sammlung. Was soll da das ernste Gespräch des Vaters und Sohns, und das Lied an Hermenfried und das Revier? Und dann, wie haben sie das Lied eines Kindes, voller Gemählde, wie haben sie das componiren können?—Ich streite nicht mit meinen Freunden, deshalb gebe ich ihm keine Antwort, aber Ihnen will ich doch ein paar Worte darüber sagen. Was das Gespräch des Vaters und Sohns anbelangt: so kann das auch wohl seinen [sic; “feinen”] Nutzen für Sie haben, meine Schönen! Singen Sie nur die vorletzte Zeile— [“]Zwang lehret boshaft, seyn[”]—so oft die Mutter dabei ist recht laut vielleicht dringt es ihr durchs Herz—die Töne die drauf gehen sind ja auch nicht ganz kalt—vielleicht erlaubt sie Ihnen morgen mit Ihren Freunden und Anverwandten auf die Redoute zu gehen, damit Sie sich künftigen Winter nicht einem Verführer anvertrauen mögen, um nur die Redoute heimlich zu besuchen, deren Vergnügungen Sie sonst ohne Scheu und gutes Gewissens genießen könnten. Dann das Lied an Hermenfried? Ei, sollen es denn die Schönen nicht so gut wissen [v] wie wir, daß die Menschen boshaft und gefährlich wie Dornen sind? Kennt man denn nicht Frauen und Mädchen, die die Einsamkeit lieben, und die in ihrer einsamen Zelle Pult und Clavier haben und Lieder dichten und componiren und singen können? Haben wir denn keine Amalien, keine Gräfin Stolberg, keine Benda?—Und haben die Schönen nicht auch Ihren Hermenfried bey Namen zu rufen? oder flieht der Graam nicht aus Ihrer Seele wenn sie ihn rufen? Denn sollen da noch zwei Stücke sein; das Revier, und Lied eines Kindes—Wer will mir da wohl behaupten, daß den Schönen ein Gemählde, ein schönes, feines melancholisches Nachtstück nicht gefallen sollte? daß Ihnen eine schöne Winterlandschaft nicht gefallen sollte? daß ich dieses componirte?—Nicht die Gemählde componirte ich daran sondern die geschäftige Einbildungskraft und die daraus entstehende Lebhaftigkeit und Fröhlichkeit des Kindes. Und dann, meine Schönen! gesetzt auch, sie gehörten nicht in diese Sammlung, würden sie es nicht bedauren, diese feinen Stücke nicht gelesen zu haben? Mir ist es außer dem Lesen, wahres Vergnügen gewesen, sie hier einzurücken. Der wunderliche Mann will mit alle seinen Fähigkeiten und Kenntnissen

Appendix

245

in einer eigensinnigen Verschwiegenheit verborgen bleiben; es kennt ihn keiner, als die kleine Zahl seiner Freunde, die glücklichen Seelen, die er den Weg der Tugend und der Wissenschaften führet, und die Lerchen auf ’m Felde. Von Liebe—Liebe als Leidenschaft— da will er sich nun gar nicht bequemen zu singen. Der heitere Himmel, Lerchengesang, die grüne bunt beblumte Flur, oder auch die beschweiste, Flur und sein Freund sind ihm alles. Ich schwöre’s Ihnen aber, meine Schönen! sollte ihn eine von Ihnen so recht in Bewegung setzen können, er wird Ihnen trefliche Sachen vorsingen. Hätte ich Ihnen doch auch solche vorgesungen! Nachricht Der zarten Augen, und der kleinen Hände der Schönen wegen, hab’ ich die Mittelstimme, die ich zuweilen mit hingesetzt, in kleine Noten geschrieben, damit sie die Noten, die blos fürs Clavier da stehen, von denen zu singenden Noten desto leichter unterscheiden können, oder auch, damit sie, wenn die kleine schöne Hand nicht hinreichen will, die Singstimme nur allein spielen mögen, und also um so viel leichter erkennen, welche Noten sie auslassen können. Eben dieses gilt auch von den kleinen Noten in Baß; wozu mich aber noch gewisse neidische, rothe, schielende Augen bewogen haben, damit diese den Grundbaß desto leichter finden mögen. Uebrigens haben die Herren oft Hände die 3 bis 4 Töne über die Octaven reichen.

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Note s

I N T R O DU C T IO N

1. The references to Goethe and Herder in this paragraph, along with my emphasis on the literary values of naturalness and authenticity attributed by contemporaries to the novel, are drawn from the excellent editorial introduction to Sophie von La Roche, The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, ed. James Lynn (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1991), vii–xxix; hereafter La Roche, Sophia Sternheim. Although Lynn does not highlight the role of music and letter writing in the novel, I am indebted to his analysis of “set-piece situations of heightened pathos” and the novel’s “portrayal of exemplary womanhood” (xvii–xviii and xix). Lynn’s edition reprints the translation by Joseph Collyer (d. 1776) and follows its punctuation and spelling. 2. Christoph Martin Wieland, preface to La Roche, Sophia Sternheim, 6; and La Roche, Sophia Sternheim, 47. For the quotations from Sophia Sternheim that follow in the text I have indicated the relevant page numbers in parentheses following the quotations. Throughout, all italicized words in quoted passages reflect italics in the original sources. 3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, review of Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, ed. Johann George Sulzer, in Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 13 (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1954), 26–32. 4. Sylvana Tomaselli, “The Enlightenment Debate on Women,” History Workshop Journal 20 (1985): 101–24, esp. 105. 5. Jean Starobinski, The Invention of Liberty 1700–1789, trans. Bernhard C. Swift (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 55–58, esp. 55. 6. For an overview see Paul Hyland et al., eds., The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). 7. Thomas Lacqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 8. My understanding of the science of anatomy, in relation to sex, is deeply indebted to, though different in emphasis from, Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the 247

248

NOTES

Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). I also follow Schiebinger in my emphasis on J. F. Ackermann in the text that follows. 9. “Das weibliche Geschlecht führt nun größtentheils eine sitzende Lebensart, und beschäftigt sich nicht mit solchen Arbeiten, die anhaltende Körperskräfte und Muskelstärke fordern. Ihre Knochen (§8) und Muskeln sind überdas schwächer (§50) und die Nervenanfänge dünner; (§67) daher es denn auch kein Wunder ist, wenn sie im Durchschnitt genommen zu wissenschaftlichen Unternehmungen tauglicher sind als die Männer; deren größten Theile ohnstreitig körperliche Arbeiten zum Loose geworden.” Jacob Fidelis Ackermann, Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mannes vom Weibe, trans. Joseph Wenzel (Coblenz: Johann Kaspar Huber, 1788), 148–49. As this passage and its context suggest, Ackermann did not distinguish strenuously between anatomical features that are innate and those that are acquired, that is, he was not particularly concerned with the differences of nature and nurture. 10. “Das weibliche Hirn, verglichen mit dem ganzen übrigen Körper [ist] schwerer . . . als das männliche. Der Zirbel endlich (glandula pinealis) ist bei dem weiblichen Geschlechte im Durchschnitt größer, als bei dem männlichen.” Ackermann, Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mannes vom Weibe, 142. 11. On music and “nerve theory” see James Kennaway, “From Sensibility to Pathology: The Origins of the Idea of Nervous Music Around 1800,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65, no. 3 (2010): 396–426; and Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort, “‘Das Vornehmste . . . in der Musik ist eine gute, fliessende, bewegliche Melodie’: Johann Mattheson und die Empfindsamkeit,” in Aspekte der Musik des Barocks: Aufführungspraxis und Stil: Bericht über die Symposien der internationalen Händel-Akademie Karlsruhe 2001–2004, ed. Siegfried Schmalzriedt (Karlsruhe: Laaber-Verlag, 2006), 227–50. Literary studies have long worked with the period’s nervousness. See also G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 1, “Sensibility and the Nervous System.” 12. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, New Approaches to European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 80–81. 13. “Modern critical reflections” on the Enlightenment are briefly excerpted and introduced in Hyland, ed., The Enlightenment, 375–410. See also Outram, The Enlightenment, 1–13. 14. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989). 15. Outram, The Enlightenment, 85. The misunderstanding may be mine, but I sense that Outram’s chapter on gender contains contradictions of its own, even as it lays bare those of the late eighteenth century. Initially insistent on female disempowerment in this period, Outram proceeds to note, but not explain or reconcile, the flourishing, feminocentric literary culture of the period and the positive statements about female ability issued by Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot. 16. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 17. David Gramit, Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 21. 18. “Die erste Hälfte unsers gegenwärtigen Jahrhunderts hindurch, war die Tonkunst unstreitig in allen Betracht in ihrer schönsten und männlichsten Reife. Ernst, Würde,

NOTES

249

Größe und Erhabenheit des innern Charakters,—Ordnung und Richtigkeit des grammatischen und rhetorischen Baues,—äußerer glänzender, aber wahrer und passender Vortrag sind Merkmaale ihrer wahren Vollkommenheit, und insgesammt lassen sich diese vortreflichen Eigenschaften der Tonkunst jener glücklichen Zeiten nicht absprechen. . . . Es ist wahr, die Theorie der Tonkunst, wenigstens einiger Fächer derselben, ist seit einiger Zeit vortreflich bearbeitet worden; aber, wie mag es kommen, daß Theorie und Praxis so selten miteinander gehen. . . . Ferner: niemals ist wohl mehr von Größe, vom Erhabenen, vom Schönen, vom Ausdruck eines männlichen und starken Gefühls deklamiert worden als jetzt, und wenn hatten wir wohl weniger Ausdruck des Großen, des Erhabenen, des wahren Schönen, und des männlich-starken Gefühls?” From the preface to Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek, 3 vols. (Gotha: Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1778–1779), 1:iii– xxv; esp. v–vii. This and all translations not otherwise identified are mine. 19. Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Über Johann Sebastian Bachs Leben, Kunst und Kunstwerke: Für patriotische Verehrer echter musikalischer Kunst (Leipzig: Hoffmeister und Kühnel, 1802); and Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Schwickert, 1788–1801). 20. This paragraph draws on material from my article “ ‘Like Beauty Spots on the Face of a Man’: Gender in 18th-Century North-German Discourse on Genre,” Journal of Musicology 13, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 143–67. See also Suzanne Aspden, “Bach and the Feminised Galant,” Understanding Bach 5 (2010): 9–22, www.bachnetwork.co.uk/ub5/aspden.pdf. 21. Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg, preface to Die Kunst der Fuge durch Herrn Johann Sebastian Bach, in The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents, ed. Hans T. David, Arthur Mendel, and Christoph Wolff (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 375–77, esp. 377. 22. “Menuetten bei Sinfonien kommen uns immer vor, wie Schminkpflästerchen auf dem Angesichte einer Mannsperson; sie geben dem Stück ein stutzerhaftes Ansehen, und verhindern den männlichen Eindruck, den die ununterbrochene Folge drei aufeinander sich beziehender ernsthaften Sätze allemal macht, und worinnen eine der vornehmsten Schönheiten des Vortrags besteht.” Johann Adam Hiller, Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend, 4 vols. (1766–1770; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), 1:243. 23. “Weil der Geschmack am Komischen große Verheerungen unter uns anrichtet, so müßte unsere erste Bemühung dahin gehen, diesen Geschmack so viel [wie] möglich einzuschränken und dem Ernsten, Heroischen und Tragischen, dem Pathos und dem Erhabenen wieder Platz zu machen.” Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (1806; Leipzig: Reclam, 1977), 212. 24. John Deathridge, “The Invention of German Music, c. 1800,” Proceedings of the British Academy 134 (2006): 35–60, esp. 56. 25. Forkel, Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland auf das Jahr 1782 (Leipzig: Schwickert, ca. 1781); Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland auf das Jahr 1783 (Leipzig: Schwickert, ca. 1782); and Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland auf das Jahr 1784 (Leipzig: Schwickert, ca. 1783). 26. Forkel, “Vorerinnerung,” in Musikalischer Almanach . . . 1782, [i]; cf. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, “Vorbericht,” in Musikalischer Almanach auf das Jahr 1782 (Alethinopel, ca. 1782), A2.

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NOTES

27. Again Reichardt withheld the date and place of publication. Presumably the Musikalischer- und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, published by Alethinople, was issued in late 1782 or early 1783. 28. “Zinzenich [oder] . . . Sintzenich. . . . Welch Entzücken empfand unser Herz, als wir deine Emilia, deine Zemire, deine Cecilia, deine Vestalen im buntfarbigen Abdruck sahen!” Reichardt, Musikalischer- und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, 80. 29. See Mozart’s letter to his father, of 6 December 1777, in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Letters of Mozart and His Family, ed. and trans. Emily Anderson, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1997), 407–8, esp. 408. On K. 309 see Thomas Irvine, “Mozart, Mannheim, and Musical Performance,” Mozart Jahrbuch (2006): 163–76. 30. Reichardt, Musikalischer- und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, 27. 31. Reichardt, “Vom Geschmack und der Wichtigkeit seiner frühzeitgen Bildung” and “Vom Interesse des leidenden Helden für die Kunst,” in Musikalischer- und KünstlerAlmanach auf das Jahr 1783, 81–100 and 101–34. 32. Reichardt, “Vom Geschmack,” 99. 33. “Vom Geschmack,” 85 and 82, respectively. 34. “So bald wir einen Leidenden sehen . . . unsere Einbildungskraft versetzt uns ganz mit ihm in einerlei Lage, es ist uns, als wenn wir an seine Stelle träten.” Reichardt, “Vom Interesse des leidenden Helden,” 101. 35. “Never forget the principle of dignity and strength in men, that of softer beauty and weakness in women,” Reichardt advised the fledgling artist. (“Verliere den Begrif der Würde und Stärke beym Mann, und den, sanfter Schönheit und Schwäche beym Weib, nie aus den Augen.”) Reichardt, “Vom Interesse des leidenden Helden,” 122. 36. Reichardt, Musikalischer- und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, 41–47. 37. “Niemand kann ihrem volltönnigten, starken, zärtlichen, empfindungsvollen Gesang seine Bewunderung versagen.” Reichardt, Musikalischer- und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, 37. 38. On Winckelmann and classical androgyny see Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 39. “Gefälligkeit, Douçeur des Vortrags hilft seinen Ruhm vollenden; dieser Vortrag ist überhaupt unverbesserlich, weil er sprechend, seelenvoll ist. Der Ton, den er aus seiner Geige zieht, ist stark, männlich, kernhaft.” Reichardt, Musikalischer- und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, 58. 40. “Sie besitzt noch was, das oft selbst männlichen Geigern so oft fehlt, und das also noch weniger von ihrem Geschlecht zu erwarten wäre; nemlich Anstand und ungezwungene Nachläßigkeit im Spiel, und Bewegung.” Reichardt, Musikalischer- und KünstlerAlmanach auf das Jahr 1783, 25. 41. Reichardt, Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend, 2 vols. (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1774–1776). 1 . E U R O P E’ S L I V I N G M U SE S

1. Reference to Mrs. [Catherine] Hamilton in Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy, or, The Journal of a Tour through those Countries, Undertaken

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to Collect Materials for a General History of Music (London: T. Becket, 1771), 321; hereafter Burney, France and Italy. References to Maria Antonia Walpurgis and Signora Mingotti in Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, or, The Journal of a Tour through those Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for a General History of Music, 2 vols. (London: T. Becket, 1773), 1:125–26 and 1:160; hereafter Burney, Germany. Collectively I shall hereafter refer to both books as Burney, Tours. 2. Burney, France and Italy, 139, 321. Mrs. [Catherine] Hamilton, née Barlow, was the first wife of the British ambassador to Sicily, Sir William Hamilton. She is easily confused with Emma Hamilton, Sir William’s second wife, who achieved immortality as Nelson’s mistress. Of Catherine little is known, but there is a black-and-white reproduction of an unattributed picture of her at a small square keyboard instrument in Percy A. Scholes, The Great Dr. Burney: His Life, His Travels, His Works, His Family and His Friends, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), vol. 1, plate 14. Vesuvius smokes lightly in the background. She also features in Susan Sontag’s novel The Volcano Lover (London: Vintage, 1993) as a talented musician of failing health who links the domains of woman, music, and death. 3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), stressed female unsuitability to intellectual activity. Burney’s views on women differed, but he was in other regards a Rousseau admirer. In 1766 Burney produced his adaption of Rousseau’s Le Devin du Village as The Cunning-Man: A Musical Entertainment, in Two Acts (London: T. Becket, 1766); in the preface he extolled the original author. Burney helped himself to Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique, 2 vols. (1768; Paris: Duchesene, 1779), for his music articles for Abraham Rees, The Cyclopaedia, or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819–1820). Rousseau and Burney shared many musical-aesthetic convictions, summarized by Rousseau in his “Lettre à M. Burney sur la musique, avec fragments d’observations sur l’Alceste italien de M. Le chevalier Gluck,” in Traités sur la musique (Geneva, 1781), 375–427. 4. Burney, France and Italy, 42. For more on Madame [Anne Louise] Brillon (1744–1824) see Grove Music Online, s.v. “Brillon de Jouy,” by Bruce Gustafson, www .oxfordmusiconline.com, which includes information on her salons, which were attended by Benjamin Franklin; the works dedicated to her by Schobert, Boccherini, Eichner, and Riegel; and her own compositions. 5. Burney, France and Italy, 42. 6. Ibid., 218. Bassi (1711–1778) was Laura’s maiden name, and she kept it after her marriage to Giuseppe Veratti in 1738. Coincidentally, Benjamin Franklin, a member of the Brillon salon in Passy in the years 1777–1785, appears again in Burney’s account of Laura Bassi in connection with the science of electricity and, specifically, Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod, a device Bassi’s husband had (unsuccessfully) attempted to introduce in Bologna (ibid., 218–19). 7. Burney, Germany, 2:330–31. 8. Charles Burney, A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, to which Is Prefixed, a Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, 4 vols. (London, 1776–1789). The last chapter of volume 4 is titled “General State of Music in England in the

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Present Century” (4:631–90). In the discussion that follows page references to the quotations and paraphrases are given in the text in parentheses. 9. Sylvana Tomaselli, “The Enlightenment Debate on Women,” History Workshop Journal 20 (1985): 101–24, esp. 105. 10. William Alexander, The History of Women: From the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell), 1:107; cited in Emma J. Clery, The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3. I am grateful to Emma Clery for introducing me to many of the debates addressed here: my understanding is deeply indebted to her book. 11. W. de la Bossiere Chambor, “Von der Achtung und Wertschätzung, welche die alten Teutschen für die Weiber ihrer Nation hatten,” Magazin für die Philosophie und ihre Geschichte 7 (1789): 94–103. The Magazin was published in Göttingen by Meier. 12. See Cornelius Tacitus, Agricola and Germania, trans. and ed. H. Mattingly (London: Penguin, 2010), 33–57. Bossiere Chambor referred to a collection of classical writings on Germany prepared by “Hert [sic] von Chambort” that I have not been able to identify. See Bossiere Chambor, “Von der Achtung und Wertschätzung,” 95. 13. See also Berta Joncus, “ ‘Ich bin eine Engländerin, zur Freiheit geboren’: Blonde and the Enlightened Female in Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail,” Opera Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2010): 552–87. 14. Clery, The Feminization Debate, 3. 15. Ibid., 6. The term “civic humanism” is usually traced to J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Republican Thought and the Atlantic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). An influential application to art history is John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). 16. Quotations from David Hume in this chapter are from his Essays Moral and Political published in two volumes in 1741 and 1742. Although available through Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), I have chosen to quote from a standard modern edition, David Hume, Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Hume’s essay “Of Luxury” appeared in some contemporary editions as “Of Refinement in the Arts,” and it appears as such in Hume, Selected Essays, 167–77; for Hume’s conclusions about the reasons for the fall of Rome see esp. 173. 17. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 167. 18. Ibid., 167. For luxury’s transformative and provocative power in the material and discursive practices of eighteenth-century England see Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) was the catalyst for pamphlet wars over luxury and the argument that luxury was a public good, as well as the source of Hume’s definition of luxury as “a refinement in the gratification of the senses.” 19. Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 174. 20. Burney, introduction to France and Italy, 4–5. 21. Bicknell, John [Joel Collier, pseud.], Musical Travels through England (London: G. Kearsley, 1774), 43. 22. Bicknell, preface to Musical Tours through England, v–vi.

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23. Bicknell, Musical Tours through England, 41. After writing this passage on Bicknell I discovered the excellent, far more comprehensive reading of his satire in Vanessa Agnew, Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 144–65. Happily, Agnew does not explore the issue of musical manliness, so my comments may stand as a tiny supplement to her account. 24. Hume, “Of Essay Writing,” 1–5, esp. 1 and 3. See also “The Reformation of Male Manners,” in G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch.2. 25. Hume, “Of the Rise of the Arts and Sciences,” 69. 26. Ibid. 27. Hume, “Of Essay Writing,” 1–2. 28. Hume, “Of the Rise of the Arts and Sciences,” 74. 29. Hume’s writings were almost all translated into German by 1770, and so Burney’s travel writings were not the only or even principal source for his ideas in musical circles. See Manfred Kuehn, “The Reception of Hume in Germany,” in The Reception of David Hume in Europe, ed. Peter Jones (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005), 98–138. 30. Burney, France and Italy, 251. 31. References to Reidt and “running the hoop” in Burney, Germany, 2:201 and 2:202. 32. Ibid., 2:206–8, esp. 208. 33. Ibid., 2:242–43. 34. Ibid., 2:312. In describing the musical festivities for the coronation of Charles VI as King of Bohemia, Burney revealed sensitivity to genre and occasion. Fux’s La Constanza e Fortezza, Burney observed, “in the old church style, was coarse and dry; but, at the same time, grand, and had a better effect, perhaps, with so immense a band, and in such an immense space, than could have been produced by more delicate compositions” (Germany, 2:178). Even delicacy, then, has its time and place, and there is a lingering admiration for sublime effects, even if these belong to a more primitive past and the inelegant rigors of church style. 35. My description of Samuel’s images is deeply indebted to several publications by Elizabeth Eger (who also offered guidance by e-mail), including “Representing Culture: ‘The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (1779),’ ” in Women and the Public Sphere: Writing and Representation 1700–1800, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O’Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 104–32. 36. The notion of the sister arts was often employed by one of the sitters, Angelica Kauffman, in such works as The Artist in the Character of Design Listening to the Inspiration of Poetry (1782) and Self-Portrait Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting (1791). 37. Samuel followed current practice in figuring women in classical garb as, or in close connection with, the muses. See, for example, Joshua Reynolds, Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces (1765) and Mrs. Hale as Euphrosyne. Reynolds addressed the way in which he coupled portraits and allegory in his Discourse VII as discussed by Gill Perry, “Women in Disguise: Likeness, the Grand Style and the Conventions of ‘Feminine’ Portraiture in the Work of Sir Joshua Reynolds,” in Femininity and Masculinity in EighteenthCentury Art and Culture, ed. Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 18–40, esp. 23–24. Perry suggests that for some viewers the results were bathetic and mock heroic.

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38. “Modern women dressed in classical robes and engaged in ancient rituals augmented the fantasy of the continuity between classical civilization and the present.” Lucy Peltz, “Living Muses: Constructing and Celebrating the Professional Woman in Literature and the Arts,” in Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008), 61. 39. Incidentally, Burney used the pseudonym “the Society of the Temple of Apollo” for several early works, including music for the comic opera Robin Hood (1750), the pantomime Queen Mab, and his opus 2 Six Songs Composed for the Temple of Apollo (ca. 1750). See Frank Kidson, “James Oswald, Dr. Burney and the ‘Temple of Apollo,’ ” Musical Antiquary 2 (1910–1911): 34–41. 40. Burney, A General History of Music, 4:481nh, 4:491. 41. Burney, Germany, 1:310. 42. Burney, Germany, 1:357. Burney’s comments circulated in German-speaking lands through the translation of his tours by Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741–1817) as Carl Burneys der Musik Doctors Tagebuch seiner musikalischen Reisen, consisting of vol. 1, Durch Frankreich und Italien (Hamburg: Bode, 1772); vol. 2, Durch Flandern, die Niederlande und am Rhein bis Wien (Hamburg: Bode, 1773); and vol. 3, Durch Böhmen, Sachsen, Brandenburg, Hamburg und Holland (Hamburg: Bode, 1773). Burney also appeared through selective quotation in reference works. In an article on Martinez in his Historisch-Biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler [1790–1792], ed. Othmar Wessely, 2 vols. (Graz: Akademischer Druck, 1977), 1:887–89, Ernst Ludwig Gerber included the analogy to St. Cecilia in comments largely derived from, and citing, Burney’s account. 43. According to August Christoph Dies, Martinez’s mother allowed Haydn to overwinter in her bedroom, due to the leaks in the roof of his attic lodgings, and, returning the favor, the composer later granted her a pension, which transferred to Marianne on the death of her mother. See August Christoph Dies, Biographische Nachrichten von Joseph Haydn (Vienna, 1810), cited (and trans.) from H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, vol. 1, Haydn: The Early Years, 1732–1765 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 65. 44. Michael Kelly, Reminiscences of Michael Kelly of the King’s Theatre and Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, ed. Theodore Edward Hook, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), i, 249; cited in Grove Music Online, s.v. “Martinez, Marianne [Anna Katherine] von,” by Helene Wessely, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/. 45. Burney, Germany, 1:294. Burney writes tongue in cheek here, as he notes the imperial prerogative “of appropriating, to the use of the officers of his court and army, the first floor of every house and palace in that city.” Germany, 1:295. 46. Ibid., 1:295. 47. Ibid., 1:224. 48. “[Abate Tarussi] favoured me with several interesting particulars relative to Metastasio, one of which was, that a young lady, the daughter of a deceased friend, who was born, educated, and still lived in the same house with him, had the greatest genius for music, in all its branches of playing, singing, and composing, of one living. Metastasio, at first, instructed her, how to set his songs; but now she delights and even astonishes the great poet himself.” Ibid., 1:245–46. 49. Ibid., 1:246.

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50. Ibid., 1:341. Unfortunately it is not possible to identify the psalm setting Martinez performed for Burney, both because there are too many that loosely answer to the description and because none is known to be on texts translated by Metastasio. The most detailed works list available appears in Barbara Garvey Jackson, “Say Can You Deny Me”: A Guide to Surviving Music by Women from the 16th through the 18th Centuries (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 272–78; hereafter Jackson, A Guide to Surviving Music by Women. However, the Italian translations of psalms are here attributed to the Neapolitan lawyer, librettist, and opera critic Saverio Mattei (1742–1795), a friend and biographer of Nicolò Jomelli and admirer of Metastasio. It is possible that Burney misattributed the Italian translation of Martinez’s psalm texts to Metastasio. 51. Ibid., 1:308. 52. Ibid., 1:308–9. 53. Ibid., 1:308–9. In a private communication to me of 3 September 2010, informed by research for a book forthcoming with Cambridge University Press on the rival divas Cuzzoni and Bordoni, Suzanne Aspden commented on this ambiguous passage: “I suspect that what Burney is describing here was an older, text-dominated style of ornamentation, which preceded and was replaced by the instrumental bravura of bel canto. One finds Francesca Cuzzoni’s voice praised in very similar terms in Tosi, Quantz, and Mancini (the latter two are paraphrased in Burney). Tosi, in particular, presents Cuzzoni as the last great representative of a dying art, which is being superseded (much to his regret) by the technical virtuosity and showmanship of Faustina Bordoni, Farinelli, and their adherents.” 54. Suzanne Aspden, private communication to me of 3 September 2010. 55. See Chloe Chard, “Effeminacy, Pleasure and the Classical Body,” in Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, ed. Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 142–61; and Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998), esp. 25–28 (“The ‘Middle Way’ in an Age of Difference”). 56. Burney, Germany, 1:235–36. 57. Ibid., 1:235; Burney here refers to John Brown, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (London, 1763; 2nd ed., London, 1772; repr. New York: Garland, 1971). The error may be mine, but I read Brown as lamenting rather than endorsing the reported separation. 58. Suzanne Aspden explores the difficulty of reconciling Italian opera and Britishness in “ ‘An Infinity of Factions’: Opera in Eighteenth-Century Britain and the Undoing of Society,” Cambridge Opera Journal 9 (1997): 1–19. 59. Burney, Germany, 1:139. Christine Fischer has identified the scene that Walpurgis sang for Burney as Talestri’s “Pallid Ombra” (act 3, sc. 5), comprising an accompagnato and da capo aria in which Talestri, fearing that her lover Orontes is dead, sees him as a ghostly apparition and resolves to follow him into the realm of the dead. See Christine Fischer, Instrumentierte Visionen weiblicher Macht: Maria Antonia Walpurgis’ Werke als Bühne politischer Selbstinszenierung (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2007), 285. 60. Burney, in Germany, 1:234, stated that Hasse “was born at Bergendorf, in Lower Saxony, within eight miles of Hamburg, and is best known in Italy, by the name of Il Sassone.” Burney declared Hasse to be “superior to all other lyric composers, as Metastasio is to all other lyric poets.” Germany, 1:236.

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61. “[Hasse] said, that he thought [Handel] too ambitious of displaying his talent of working parts and subjects, as well as too fond of noise: and Faustina added, that his cantilena was often rude.” Germany, 1:347. 62. The quotation is from an announcement at the end of the full score of Il trionfo della Fedeltà: Dramma pastorale per musica di E. T. P. A. (Lipsia: Giovan. Gottl. Imman. Breitkopf, 1756). Here Breitkopf asserted that he was the “Inventore di questa nuova maniera di stampar la Musica con Carratteri separabili e mutabili. È questo drama pastorale la prima opera stampata di questa nuova guise; comminciata nel Mese di Luglio 1755, e terminate nel Mese d’aprile 1756.” 63. Johann Christoph Gottsched, Rede, womit Seiner Königlichen Hoheit dem durchlauchtigsten Fürsten und Herrn, Herrn Friedrich Christian . . . (Leipzig: Breitkopf, ca. 1747), cited from Fischer, Instrumentierte Visionen weiblicher Macht, 38. For the facts of Gottsched’s promotion of Walpurgis I am deeply indebted to Fischer’s study, even if my interpretation differs. 64. A. E. T. P. [i.e., Ermelinda Talia Pastorella Arcada], Talestri, regina delle amazzoni: Dramma per musica . . . (Leipzig: J. G. I. Breitkopf, 1765). 65. Der Triumph der Treue, ein Schäferspiel: Aus dem, von der Meisterhand der Durchlauchtigsten Ermelinda Thalea, einer arkadischen Schäferinn, verfertigten wälschen Singspiele, Il Trionfo della Fedeltà, Seiner Vortrefflichkeit wegen, verdeutschet (Leipzig: B. C. Breitkopf, 1754); and Thalestris, Königinn der Amazonen . . . (Zwickau: Christian Lebrecht Stiehler, 1766). 66. Katherine R. Goodman, “From Salon to Kaffeekranz: Gender Wars and the Coffee Cantata in Bach’s Leipzig,” in Bach’s Changing World: Voices in the Community, ed. Carol K. Baron (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 195. See also Goodman, Amazons and Apprentices: Women and the German Parnassus in the Early Enlightenment (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999). 67. Martha Feldman interprets the genre of opera seria in these terms in her Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 68. “I vostri Sovrani Genitori esenti affatto dal volgare pregiudizio sopra l’educazion delle femine, vi diedero tutto il campo di coltivare lo spirito collo studio delle scienze, e delle arti di gusto: e Voi senza punto mancare a’ doveri d’una savia Sovrana, siete così perfèttamente giunta a possederle, che i più abili Professori sono costretti a riguardarvi come un portento certamente raro del vostro sesso.” Antonio Eximeno, dedication of Dell’origine e delle regole della musica . . . dedicata all’ Augusta Real Principessa Maria Antonia Valpurga (Rome: Michel’ Angelo Barbigllini, 1774), 3. This and all other translations from Eximeno were prepared for this study by Carlo Cenciarelli. 69. “Or permettetemi, altezza reale, che mi lagni con Essa Voi della troppo grande umiliazione, che date al nostro sesso: le virtù, che divise fra gli uomini li rendono intolleranti e superbi, in Voi sola si trovano reunite, ed accompagnate di quella ingenue modestia, e maestosa affabilità, con cui vi faceste amare da’ Cittadini Romani, allorachè gli onoraste della vostra presenza.” Eximeno, dedication of Dell’origine e delle regole della musica, 3–4. 70. “Vi fate rispettar ed ammirare non solo per la vastità del vostro genio, ma per la grandezza ancora del vostro cuore: nel Dramma della Talestri, che à per argomento l’innata inimicizia delle Amazzoni cogli uomini, dopo la critica più ingegnosa della tirannica

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prepotenza, che intendono esercitare gli uomini sopra le femine, ci perdonate generosamente, e riunite in pacifica concordia i due sessi.” Eximeno, dedication of Dell’ origine e delle regole della musica, 2. 71. “Bisogna sentir quest’Aria coll’altre del Dramma, per comprendere il sovrano dominio, che à questa Principessa sopra le corde della Musica, e sopra gli affetti del nostro cuore. . . . Con tutto ciò si comprende colla vista, che qualor mancasse ogn’altra prova della verità del Basso fondamentale da me stabilito, sarebbe quest’Aria più che bastante a dimostrarlo. Egli non si diparte giammai dalle corde fondamentali del Modo: per questo l’armonia divien così regolare e chiara, e la cantilena piena di quella natural soavità, che intenerisce ed incanta.” Eximeno, Dell’origine e delle regole dala musica, 270. 2 . “I F T H E P R E T T Y L I T T L E HA N D WO N ’ T S T R E T C H”

Chapter 2 is a revised version of an article published in the Journal of the American Musicologial Society 52, no. 2 (1999): 203–54. I am grateful to the publisher for permission to reuse this material. 1. For a representative book cover see that of Janet Wolff, The Social Production of Art, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1983), which pictures Jacob Ochterveldt’s The Music Lesson. 2. On female musical containment see Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology, and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chs. 2, 7, and 8; and The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), ch. 4. 3. Handel’s The Lady’s Banquet was issued in six books by the publishers J. Walsh and J. Hare around midcentury (RISM H1451–56). Arias from Handel’s oratorios were frequently included in The Lady’s Magazine, for example “Softly Sweet” from Alexander’s Feast in the issue of April 1790. The designation “for ladies” is more frequently met in collections of vocal than instrumental music: Amusement for the ladies, being a selection of favourite catches, canons, glees, and madrigals, book 7 (London: Longman and Broderip, ca. 1790); Six easy anthems for two voices, chiefly adapted for ladies, by an eminent master (London, ca. 1770); Eight canzonets, peculiarly adapted for ladies, with an accompanyment for the pianoforte or harp (London: Longman and Broderip, ca. 1780); and Giuseppe Antonio Paganelli, Amusement for the fair sex, or, six sonatines, for the harpsichord (London: A. Hummel, ca. 1763). Songs of advice to the fair sex were issued in the second half of the century; among these were the anonymous publication “When the Shepherds seek to woo: Advice to the fair sex; sung by Mrs. Hudson” (London: R. Falkener, ca. 1770), and responses and vindications such as “The goodness of women some men will dispute: The fair sex vindicated; sung by Mr. Vernon,” The Universal Magazine 46 (1769): 97; and “Though women by frail men are scorn’d: Advice to the sex, or an answer to the caution, by a lady” (London, ca. 1740). The last-named song was included in the late eighteenth-century collection of engraved songs A Collection of English Ballads from the beginning of the present Century when they were engraved and published, vol. 7 (British Library, G.312), 184. 4. Handel’s Celebrated Vocal Duets, Composed for the Private Practice of Her Majesty the Late Queen Caroline (London: H. Wright, n.d.). 5. On the middle-class critique of the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England see Thomas A. King, “Performing ‘Akimbo’: Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice,” in The

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Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, 1994), 23–50, esp. 24–26. 6. The suggested date is from William S. Newman, The Sonata in the Classic Era, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1983), 445; the date is based on publisher’s plate numbers. 7. Amaranthes [Gottlieb Siegmund Corvinus, pseud.], Nutzbares, galantes und curiöses Frauenzimmer-Lexicon, worinnen . . . alles dasjenige, was einem Frauenzimmer vorkommen kann und ihm nöthig zu wissen . . . erkläret zu finden (Leipzig: J. L. Gleditsch und Sohn, 1715). 8. August Nörmiger’s Tabulaturbuch (1598) was advertised with the promise that the contents were sufficiently straightforward that “for the most part, Duchess Sophia of Saxony can play [the pieces]” (Sophia, Herzogin zu Sachsen, meistenteils [die Stücke] schlagen kann). See Georg Schünemann, “Ungarische Motive in der deutschen Musik,” Ungarisches Jahrbuch 4 (1924): 67–77, esp. 69. 9. Much music not explicitly dedicated to women was nonetheless understood to be suited to their particular practice. Both Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart and Carl Friedrich Cramer observed that the melodic charm of Johann Baptist Vanhal’s keyboard sonatas would attract amateurs and ladies in particular; see Newman, Sonata in the Classic Era, 45. 10. When Jane Fairfax receives the anonymous gifts of a fortepiano and music, Frank Churchill (the anonymous benefactor) remarks, “[T]rue affection only could have prompted it” (Emma, ch. 28). Marianne Dashwood’s gift of music (an opera) is only retrospectively revealed to have been from Willoughby (Sense and Sensibility, ch. 47). 11. “The fear of music is a fear of feminine eruption, of a musical ‘she’ who ceases to charm us, who in effect denaturalizes ‘herself,’ losing ‘her’ simplicity, becoming complex, astonishing, and more like a man.” Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 69. 12. See Erich Reimer, “Kenner-Liebhaber-Dilettant,” in Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, ed. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1972–2005), 3, www.sim.spk-berlin.de/hmt_6.html. 13. See Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, s.v. “Weiblichkeit,” http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/. 14. Johann Christoph Adelung, “Weiblichkeit,” in Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart, 5 vols. (Leipzig: B. C. Breitkopf, 1774–1786), 4:1443. 15. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 160–61. 16. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, 1989). For commentary see William Outhwaite, ed., The Habermas Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 1996); and Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 17. See, for example, Denis Diderot, Diderot oeuvres choisies, vol. 3, La Suite d’un entretien entre M. D’Alembert et M. Diderot (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1962), 19–20. For another application see Elizabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 18. I consulted the first London edition, Six Short Sonatas, or, Lessons for the Harpsichord Designed for the Improvement of all Lovers of that Instrument but Chiefly for the Ladies by Cristofforo Nichelman in the Service of His Sacred Majesty the King of Prussia (London:

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Longman, Lukey and Co., n.d.). A reference to Abel’s recently published overtures on the title page would date this volume to the 1760s or 1770s, corroborating the suggested date of 1770 in the British Library catalogue. 19. See Reimer, “Kenner-Liebhaber-Dilettant,” 3. 20. The correspondence is collected in appendix 2 in Hans-Günter Ottenberg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, trans. Philip J. Whitmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 223. 21. Not included in table 1 are occasional collections addressed to both men and women, such as the anonymous Belustigungen für die Frauenzimmer und jungen Herren (Nuremberg: Johann Eberhard Zeh, 1770); and Franz Friedrich Siegmund August Reichsfreiherrn von Boeklin zu Rust’s Neue Lieder für Liebhaberinnen und Freunde des Gesangs und Klaviers (Strasburg: Stork, 1789). This study did not aim comprehensively to assess women’s periodicals, several of which contain notated songs and keyboard pieces. The extent of this repertory can be ascertained, however, by reference to Max Friedlander, Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert: Quellen und Studien, 2 vols. (1902; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), vol. 1, pt. 1, 379; and Sabine Schumann, “Das ‘lesende Frauenzimmer,’ ” in Die Frau von der Reformation zur Romantik, ed. Barbara Becker-Cantarino (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1980), 138–69. Examples of such periodicals include Iris: Vierteljahrschrift für Frauenzimmer, ed. Johann Georg Jacobi and Wilhelm Heinse, 8 vols. (1774–1776; repr., Bern: Peter Lang, 1971); Leipziger Taschenbuch für Frauenzimmer zum Nutzen und Vergnügen (Leipzig: A. F. Böhme, 1789) (containing three songs by M. Gaesies: “An die Natur,” 10–11; “Elegie,” 13–14; and “Lied,” 17); Frauenzimmer-Almanach zum Nutzen und Vergnügen, ed. Franz Ehrenberg (Leipzig: Böhme, 1786, 1790, 1792, 1794–1797); and Amaliens Erholungsstunden, Teutschlands Töchtern geweiht: Eine Monatsschrift von Marianne Ehrmann, mit Kupfern und Musik, ed. Marianne Ehrmann (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta, 1790–1792). 22. “Man setze die grosse Kunst auf die Seite, oder bedecke sie sehr.” Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister [1739], ed. Margarete Reimann (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987), pt. 2, ch. 5, 140, §48. I wish to thank Karsten Mackensen of Humboldt University in Berlin for drawing my attention to Mattheson’s remarks (correspondence of 19 February 1997). 23. Cf. Wolfgang Plath, ed., “Kritischer Bericht,” in Johann Sebastian Bach, Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, vol. V/5 of Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), 71. 24. “Denen Liebhabern, und besonders denen Kennern von dergleichen Arbeit, zur Gemüths Ergezung verfertiget”; J. S. Bach, Clavier-Übung, part 1, BWV 825 (Leipzig, 1726). 25. Reimer, “Kenner-Liebhaber-Dilettant,” 2. 26. Items are numbered according to the Klavierbuch für Anna Magdalena Bach 1725, ed. Georg von Dadelsen (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1959). 27. For a moving and insightful reading of the book for 1725 see David Yearsley, “Death Everyday: The Anna Magdalena Bach Book of 1725 and the Art of Dying,” EighteenthCentury Music 2, no. 2 (2005): 231–49. 28. Von Dadelsen has distinguished a total of seven scribes in the collections, four of whom he identified: J. S. Bach, Anna Magdalena Bach, C. P. E. Bach (16–19), and Gottfried Heinrich Bach, the eldest child of J. S. Bach and Anna Magdalena (20a and 32). The appearance of numerous anonymous items in the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach does not itself indicate her composition of them. Still less am I suggesting that she composed the “Aria” of the Goldberg Variations that appears here, in her hand, for the first time and without

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attribution to J. S. Bach. But given that she was a professional singer at Cöthen prior to her marriage and a proficient keyboardist, it seems odd that von Dadelsen does not even speculate that she might have been responsible for some of the pieces. 29. See Head, “ ‘Like Beauty Spots on the Face of a Man,’ ” 145–46. The idea of French culture as a feminizing influence in Germany persisted throughout the century. 30. Several art historical studies have informed my thinking on music as a gendered commodity in the marketplace, particularly John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1992); and John Barrell, ed., Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). On the withdrawal of woman from labor see Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979). 31. Johann Adam Hiller, “Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer, von Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel,” Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Zeitungs-Expedition, 1766–1770; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), 2:390–92; the article was in the issue of 13 June 1768. 32. Similarly, a review of C. P. E. Bach’s Sonate per il Clavicembalo Solo all Uso delle Donne exclaimed that “even men would bring honor upon themselves with them.” See Frankfurter gelehrte Anzeigen 3, nos. 61–62 (2 August 1774): 514–15; cited and translated in Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27. 33. Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 69. 34. Schumann, “Das ‘lesende Frauenzimmer,’ ” 139, 154, 139–40. 35. Monatsschrift für Damen [zum Besten des Roseninstituts für Wittwen und Waisen] (Berlin and Nuremberg, 1787); cited in Schumann, “Das ‘lesende Frauenzimmer,’ ” 155. 36. Significant older German-language studies of the notion of female improvement include U. Nolte, “Frauenbild und Frauenbildung in der Geschlechterphilosophie I. Kants,” in Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 9 (1963): 346–62; Elisabeth Blochmann, Das “Frauenzimmer” und die “Gelehrsamkeit”: Eine Studie über die Anfänge des Mädchenschulwesens in Deutschland, Anthropologie und Erziehung 17 (Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer, 1966); and Gerda Tornieporth, Studien zur Frauenbildung: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Analyse lebensweltorientierter Bildungskonzeptionen (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 1977). 37. Andreas Meier, Wie soll ein junges Frauenzimmer sich würdig bilden? (Erlangen: Wolfgang Walther, 1771). 38. “Wird die Erste die Magd ihres Gatten; so wird die Zweite eine Närrin, die ihn mit ihrer Gelehrsamkeit beherrschen will.” Ibid., 39. 39. Ibid., 38. 40. Ibid., 58. 41. Ibid., 41–43. 42. “Unter die galanten Künste, die man von einem jungen Frauenzimmer erwartet, rechne ich hauptsächlich die Musik.—‘Die Töne’ sagt Herr Batteux ‘sind die Organe des Herzens: sie rühren, sie gewinnen, sie überreden uns, und gehen ohne Umschweife ans Herz.’ ” Ibid., 46–47. 43. “ ‘Les femmes en général n’aiment aucun art, ne se connoissent à aucun et n’ont aucun génie. Elles peuvent réussir aux petits ouvrages qui ne démandent que de la légéreté

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d’esprit, du goût, de la grace, quelquefois même de la philosophie et du raisonnement. Mais ce feu celeste, qui échauffe et embrase l’ame, ce génie qui consume et dévore,—ces transports sublimes qui portent leurs ravissements jusqu’au fond des coeurs, manqueront toujours aux écrits (produits) des femmes; ils sont tous froids et jolis comme elles. Ils auront tant d’esprit que vous voudrez, j’amais d’ame’ etc.” [Anon.], “Nachtrag zu den zwei Aufgaben: Über Weiber und Blasinstrumente,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt 14, in Studien für Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde, ed. Johann Friedrich Reichardt (Berlin: Neue Musikhandlung, 1793), 105. 44. Jacob Fidelis Ackermann, Ueber die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mannes vom Weibe, ed. Joseph Wenzel (Koblenz: Johann Kaspar Huber, 1788), 144, 149. 45. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. David Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 41. The novel, in German Die Wahlverwandtschaften, was completed in 1808–1809. 46. Ibid., 41. 47. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, afterword (“Nachricht”) to the preface of Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (Berlin: Friedrich Wilhelm Birnstiel, 1775); hereafter Reichardt, Gesänge. For the complete original text see the appendix. Freia Hoffmann discussed the role of music in “the presentation of the ideal [female] body” in Instrument und Körper: Die musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1991), 39–71, esp. 39. 48. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928), 49; the translation is that of the first English edition (1561). [William Kenrick], The Whole Duty of a Woman, or, A Guide to the Female Sex: From the Age of Sixteen to Sixty (London, 1753), 48–49; cited in Leppert, The Sight of Sound, 68 (publication details corrected). The evasive je ne sais quoi of eighteenth-century femininity is part of a courtly genealogy. As Darcy expressed it in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to be considered accomplished a woman must “possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved” (ch. 8). Similarly, Castiglione recommended to courtiers the cultivation of “a certain grace, and (as they say) a hewe” (33). The idea that women are particularly susceptible to music as a form of physical and emotional pleasure is expressed in remarkably similar terms by Castiglione and Reichardt. See Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 75; and Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Vertraute Briefe aus Paris, geschrieben . . . 1802–3 (Hamburg: B. G. Hoffmann, 1804), 249. 49. Ros Ballaster, Margaret Beetham, Elizabeth Fraser, and Sandra Hebron, “Theories of Text and Culture,” in Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine, ed. Ballaster et al. (London: Macmillan, 1991), 35. 50. Editor’s introduction to Image, Music, Text, by Roland Barthes, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 9. 51. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 20. 52. James Davies captures the allure of giving and receiving scores in “Julia’s Gift: The Social Life of Scores, c. 1830,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 131, no. 2 (2006): 287–309. 53. Goethe, Elective Affinities, 54–56. Cf. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses [1782], ed. Yves Le Hir (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1961), esp. 14–16 (letter 5). In the early letters

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of this epistolary novel Cécile de Volanges describes how her sexual awakening comes about through playing duets with Danceny, who places his first love letter to her between the strings of her harp. I am grateful to Marian Read for the reference. 54. Vivien Jones, “The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (London: Macmillan, 1996), 108–32, esp. 108. For different interpretations of songs “to the clavier” see J. W. Smeed, “ ‘Süssertönendes Klavier’: Tributes to the Early Piano in Poetry and Song,” Music and Letters 66, no. 3 (July 1985): 228–40; and Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 5. 55. On Philomele see Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (London: Penguin, 1955), 146–53. 56. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (London: Virago, 1979), 73. 57. Resistance has been a persistent theme in feminist literary criticism from at least the time of Judith Fetterley’s study of American literature, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). For Fetterley, resistance is a conscious dissent from the patriarchal thematics of fiction: “The first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcising the male mind that has been implanted in us” (xxii-xxiii). Subsequently, as Vivien Jones has traced, theories of resistance drew upon Foucault and reader-response criticism. Studies of reading practices document “women’s sceptical, ironic, or simply unexpected, reading responses; using psychoanalytic theory, they point out that fantasy offers multiple, potentially contradictory, positions of identification; . . . and they stress the ways in which meanings and pleasures shift across different reading contexts.” Jones, “The Seductions of Conduct,” 115. 58. Jones, “The Seductions of Conduct,” 108–17. 59. In passing, it should be noted that Reichardt’s Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht often involve male narrators. There is a degree of incongruity in female performance of such songs, but their inclusion in the collection is not always illogical. Indeed, Reichardt’s paternalistic advice to his younger sister in the ninth song epitomizes the instructive ambiance of the collection as a whole. The suitability, however, of Reichardt’s thoughts on the value and consolation of masculine friendship in face of the torments of love (no. 10) is dubious, as is the relevance of the dialogue between father and son (no. 16). In the preface to the collection Reichardt was on the defensive about these latter numbers, ultimately mustering no more persuasive argument for the suitability of their inclusion than that of his “disappointment” had they not made their way into the volume (a disappointment, he suggests, that the fair sex would have shared). Reichardt, preface to Gesänge, iv-v (see appendix). 60. Letter of 31 October 1783 from Mozart to Leopold Mozart: “Please give a special message to little Greta [Margarethe Marchand, then Leopold Mozart’s student in voice and clavier], and tell her that when she sings she must not be so arch and coy; . . . only silly asses are taken in by such devices. I for one would rather have a country lout, who does not hesitate to shit and piss in my presence, than let myself be humbugged by such false toadyings, which after all are so exaggerated that anyone can easily see through them.” The Letters of Mozart and His Family, 859–60. The concern of the letter, however, is precisely the danger of not seeing through such coquetry, or of seeing through it but still being taken in. Mozart

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is presumably reacting against the airs and affectations ladies assumed, with more or less encouragement, within the rituals of display and courtship. 61. Representations of birdsong in this collection similarly framed female music making as natural and untutored. For more on representations of birdsong and femininity see Matthew Head, “Birdsong and the Origins of Music,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122 (1997): 1–23, esp. 22–23. 62. Though titled Gesänge, these works are described as Kleine Cantaten on the flyleaf. A note before the preface announces the availability of accompanimental parts: “Die Stimmen zu diesen kleinen Cantaten sind bei Herrn Westphal und Comp. in Hamburg zu haben.” 63. On the metaphor of the domestic “sphere” see Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (1988–1989): 9–39. 64. See Head, “ ‘Like Beauty Spots on the Face of a Man,’ ” 145–47, 153–54, 161–67. 65. Heinrich C. Koch, Kurzgefaßtes Handwörterbuch der Musik für praktische Tonkünstler und für Dilettanten (1807; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1981), 219; discussed in Head, “ ‘Like Beauty Spots on the Face of a Man,’ ” 167. 66. See Hugo Daffner, Die Entwicklung des Klavierkonzerts bis Mozart (1906; repr., Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1973); Hans Engel, Das Instrumentalkonzert: Eine musikgeschichtliche Darstellung (1932; repr., Wiesbaden: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1971); Pipa Drummond, The German Concerto: Five Eighteenth-Century Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); and Simon P. Keefe, Mozart’s Piano Concertos: Dramatic Dialogue in the Age of Enlightenment (Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2001). 67. C. P. E. Bach had already used this procedure in his Sei Concerti per il Cembalo, H. 471–76 (1771). 68. Heath, introduction to Barthes, Image, Music, Text, 9. 69. Gottlieb Muffat, Componimenti musicali per il cembalo (Augsburg: Johann Christian Leopold, 1726). An intermediary or common source for the engraving cannot be ruled out, since the recycling of frontispieces was commonplace. Nonetheless, Muffat’s Componimenti is a fitting source for the frontispiece of Reichardt’s concertos. Muffat’s volume was published with a preface promising amusement and simplicity, and explaining such issues as the choice of clefs, which notes to take with which hand, and when to change finger on a held note. Apologizing for the lightness of content, Muffat stated here that the volume contains “Capricci d’ogni Spezie, volgarmente Galanterie” (all kinds of caprices, or so-called galanterie). At the same time Muffat made no reference to the fair sex, indicating that discourses of musical amateurism and pleasure preceded their alignment with women. The preface is cited from the edition of Muffat’s Componimenti by Guido Adler in Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, ser. 3, pt. 3, vol. 7 (1896; repr., Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1959), 7. 70. Leppert, Music and Image, 194. 71. My understanding is inspired by Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Only Entertainment (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 19–35. 72. Reichardt, preface to Gesänge, v (see appendix). 73. On that attribution see Richard Gosche and Franz Schnorr von Carolsfeld, eds., Archiv für Literaturgeschichte 12 (1884; Nabu, 2010, www.amazon.de), 337 (item 146). See

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also Otto Hellinghaus, Friedrich Leopolds Grafen zu Stolberg erste Gattin Agnes geb. von Witzleben: Ein Lebensbild aus der Zeit der Empfindsamkeit (Cologne: Egelsbach, 1911). 74. See Franz Lorenz, Die Musikerfamilie Benda: Franz Benda und seine Nachkommen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), 101; Annemarie Krille, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikerziehung und Musikübung der deutschen Frau (Berlin: Triltsch und Huther, 1938), 174–75; and The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel, s.v. “Juliane Reichardt,” by Nancy B. Reich (London: Macmillan, 1994), 386. 75. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977); and Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 76. Editor’s preface to Louise Reichardt, Songs, ed. Nancy B. Reich (New York: Da Capo, 1981), ix. 77. Schumann, “Das ‘lesende Frauenzimmer,’ ” 154. 78. Ibid., 156–58. 79. Published anonymously in Berlin in 1792 by Voss. The 1826 edition is reprinted, with an introduction by Juliane Dittrich-Jacobi (Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Topos, 1981). 80. As Maria [sic] Wollstonecraft, Rettung der Rechte des Weibes mit Bemerkungen über politische und moralische Gegenstände, ed. and with an introduction by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (Schnepfenthal: Erziehungsanstalt, 1793). 81. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, preface to Wiegenlieder für gute deutsche Mütter (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer the Younger, 1798), i–ii; for the complete original text see the appendix. 82. Allan Bloom, introduction to Emile, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. Allan Bloom (St. Ives: Penguin, 1995), 3. 83. On the rise of the breast in eighteenth-century discourses of woman and maternity see Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals,” in her Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (London: Pandora, 1994), 40–47. The allegorical figure of the state as nursing mother in Revolutionary France is discussed in Mary Jacobus, “Incorruptible Milk: Breast-Feeding and the French Revolution,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 54–78; and in Simon Richter, “Wet-Nursing, Onanism, and the Breast in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1996): 1–22, esp. 5. See also Simon Richter, Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the German Enlightenment (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 84. Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 105. 85. The term bourgeois is particularly difficult for eighteenth-century studies because it brings with it the anachronistic contempt of Marxist theory. But it was already used pejoratively by Rousseau in Emile to identify people who (alienated from natural, robust emotions) distinguish their own good from the common good. See Bloom’s introduction to Emile, 5. 86. Rousseau, Emile, 44–47. 87. Hanns Dennerlein, Johann Friedrich Reichardt (Münster: Helios, 1930), 16. 88. See Christa Kersting, Die Genese der Paedagogik im 18. Jahrhundert: Campes “Allgemeine Revision” im Kontext der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft (Weinheim: Deutscher Studienverlag, 1992). 89. Richter, “Wet-Nursing, Onanism, and the Breast,” 13.

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90. A perceived analogy between the erectile nipple and the erectile penis, along with the theory of the fungibility of humors, according to which the bodily fluids are transformable one into the other, underlay the supposed physiological correspondence of lactation and emission of fluids during sexual arousal. Breast-feeding was also inversely tied to masturbation as that good which safeguarded against the latter vice. Onanism was supposedly inspired by the lascivious caresses of wet-nurses, whose milk was “the potential conveyor of both infection and depraved moral character.” Richter, “Wet-Nursing, Onanism, and the Breast,” 17. 91. “Selig! Selig! Ist die Mutter, die selber ihr Kind säugt! . . . Spreche die Mode, was sie wolle: Mutter ist Mutter.” From Idas Blumenkörbchen: Monatsschrift für Damen, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1793); cited in Schumann, “Das ‘lesende Frauenzimmer,’ ” 160. 92. Yalom, A History of the Breast, 115. 93. Reichardt, preface to Wiegenlieder, i (see appendix). 94. Koch, Musikalisches Lexicon, s.v. “Lied,” 901–4. 95. Goethe, Elective Affinities, 205–9. Reichardt and Horstig issued Zwei schwäbische Volkslieder (Two Swabian folksongs) in the second volume of Berlinische musikalische Zeitung (1806), the second song titled “Die Kindermörderin” (The child murderess). The eponymous Swabian’s despair over her deed draws compassion and displays of masculine sensibility from the editors. Nonetheless, the song is offered by virtue of the “moral improvement” that might be had from it, as the Swabian maid is led away to the gallows. 96. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions, vol. 1, bk. 1, of Oeuvres complètes (Geneva: Galliard, 1959), 11. 97. Reichardt, preface to Gesänge, iii (see appendix). 98. “Schließlich entsteht sogar eine Literatur für Mädchen und Frauen, die kaum innere Berechtigung hat.” Annemarie Krille, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Musikerziehung und Musikübung der deutschen Frau, 206. 99. Reichardt, “Chronologisches Verzeichniß,” in Reichardt, Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, 2 vols. (Berlin: J. F. Reichardt, 1782 and 1791), 1:207–9; esp. 208. 100. Reichardt, preface to Gesänge, iii (see appendix). 101. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 404. 102. Hanns Dennerlein, Johann Friedrich Reichardt (Münster: Helios, 1930), 20. Cf. Hans Michael Schletterer, Johann Friedrich Reichardt: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Augsburg: J. Schlosser, 1865), 216, where Reichardt’s compositions for women are reviewed with approbation. 103. Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 104. Similarly, conflicts in the valuation of professional Parisian female fortepianists in the mid-nineteenth century are explored by Katharine Ellis in “Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1997): 353–85. 105. See Immanuel Kant, “The Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime,” in The Philosophy of Kant, ed. and trans. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Modern Library, 1949), 3–13. 106. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 107. Ibid., 112.

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108. Ibid., 106, with specific (though not exclusive) reference to delicacy. 109. Reichardt, preface to Wiegenlieder, ii (see appendix). 110. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 83. 111. On the problems of hunting for the sublime in this period see Wye J. Allanbrook, “Is the Sublime a Musical Topos?” Eighteenth-Century Music 7, no. 2 (2010): 263–79. 112. Reichardt, preface to Gesänge, iii (see appendix). 3 . C HA R L O T T E ( “M I N NA” ) B R A N D E S A N D T H E B E AU T I F U L D E A D

Chapter 3 is a revised version of an article published in the Journal of the American Musicologial Society 57, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 231–84; I am grateful to the publisher for permission to reuse this material. 1. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), ch. 10; Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Jean Wirth, La Jeune Fille et la mort: Recherches sur les thèmes macabres dans l’art germanique de la Renaissance (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1979); and Nancy K. Miller, “The Exquisite Cadavers: Women in EighteenthCentury Fiction,” Diacritics 5 (Winter 1975): 37–43. 2. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of A Young Lady, 4 vols. (1748; London: Dent, 1962), 4:353 (letter 125). Part of this quotation is cited (though not referenced) in Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 78. 3. Goethe’s phrase appears in the concluding “chorus mysticus” of Faust, Part 2 (written 1800–1831; published 1833), lines 12110 to 12111: “Das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan” (The eternal feminine / leads us on). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 2, ed. and trans. David Constantine (London: Penguin, 2009). Today the phrase is sometimes used to encapsulate essentialist accounts of woman’s nature in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Germany that accorded “spiritual nobility” to submission and subservience; see the editors’ introduction to Beyond the Eternal Feminine: Critical Essays on Women and German Literature, ed. Susan L. Cocalis and Kay Goodman (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1982), 1–46, esp. 4. 4. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 87. 5. Peter McIssac, “Exhibiting Ottilie: Collecting as a Disciplinary Regime in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften,” German Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1997): 347–58. 6. Goethe, Elective Affinities, 239. 7. Ibid., 237. 8. McIssac, “Exhibiting Ottilie,” 350–54. 9. Goethe, Elective Affinities, 234. 10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou, La Nouvelle Héloïse [1761] (Paris: Flammarion, 1967), 556; cited in Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 79. 11. McIssac, “Exhibiting Ottilie,” 351, 352. 12. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 80, with reference to Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 2:438–65. 13. “They call me a heathen! I had Gretchen executed and Ottilie starve herself to death. Isn’t that Christian enough for them?” Cited in Constantine’s introduction to Goethe’s Elective Affinities, xx. The lack of an annotation and Constantine’s phrasing (“Goethe once expostulated”) caution us that this may be anecdotal or based on an unreliable source.

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14. Goethe, Elective Affinities, 228. 15. Catriona MacLeod, “Pedagogy and Androgyny in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” Modern Language Notes 108 (1993): 389–426, esp. 409. 16. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 283–88, esp. 286. Wall highlights the opportunities afforded by pregnancy, despite its being a perilous process, for published meditations and other literary production by women. 17. On discursive links between female authorship and prostitution see Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 1642–1737 (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1988); and Jeslyn Medoff, “The Daughters of Behn and the Problem of Reputation,” in Women, Writing, History: 1640–1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 33–54, esp. 33–34. 18. Johann Christian Brandes is appropriately nicknamed the “Goldoni of Germany” in Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIXe Siècle (Paris: Grand Dictionnaire, 1865), 2:1202. 19. Johann Christian Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3 vols. (Berlin: Friedrich Maurer, 1799–1800), 2:70n. 20. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 2:21. See also Jeremy Adler, “Lessing,” in A Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century History, ed. Jeremy Black and Roy Porter (London: Penguin, 2001), 408. 21. Brandes, Meine Lesbensgeschichte, 2:114. 22. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1912), 25–26. The reference to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie was provided by the World Biographical Index of Music: Composers, Conductors, Instrumentalists and Singers (Munich: Saur, 1996). 23. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie, s.v. “Brandes, Johann Christian,” by Thomas Bauman (London: Macmillan, 1992), 1:584. 24. Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 25–26. 25. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:305n. A manuscript catalogue of Haydn’s music library, prepared by Haydn’s copyist Johann Elssler and now held in the British Museum (Add. 32070), titled “J. Haydn’s Verzeichniß musicalischer Werke theils eigner, theils fremder Comp[o]sition,” contains, as item 71, “Musikalischer Nachlass fürs Clavier mit Lieder und einer Aria mit dem Orchester, Hamburg” by “Brandes.” This Nachlass can only be Minna’s. In his reproduction of the catalogue Robbins Landon identified the author, erroneously and without further clarification, as “Brandes (music theorist).” See H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, vol. 5, The Late Years, 1801–1809 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994). The catalogue appears on pp. 299–317 of Robbins Landon’s study, with Minna’s Nachlass at p. 306. The reference to Brandes in Robbins Landon’s index is at p. 472. 26. Reichardt is cited from Ottenberg, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, 152–53. Information on C. D. Ebeling is from the introduction to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Briefe und Dokumente, kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Ernst Suchalla, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1994), 2:1557. 27. “Demoiselle Minna Brandes, Sängerin und Schauspielerinn” is listed under the heading “Eine kleine Sammlung Musikalischer Silhouetten” in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Autobiography; Verzeichniss des musikalischen Nachlasses des verstorbenen Capellmeisters

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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach [1790], facs. repr., ed. William S. Newman (Buren: Frits Knuf, 1991), 126–28, esp. 126. A silhouette of Minna Brandes was reproduced in Bretzner, Operetten von C. F. Bretzner (Leipzig: C. F. Fleischer, 1779), 1:99, on the title page of Bretzner’s libretto Das wütende Heer, oder, Das Mädgen im Thurme. Perhaps Minna had performed the title role in this work—the title page indicates that the libretto was set by Kapellmeister Schweitzer in Weimar where the Brandes family were employed 1772–1774. But Bauman has listed Das wütende Heer as “unperformed” and makes the unannotated assertion that the libretto was not written until “around 1779”; cf. Thomas Bauman, North German Opera in the Age of Goethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 364; hereafter Bauman, North German Opera. In a private communication of 16 April 2012 Annette Richards (who rediscovered Bach’s portrait collection) confirmed the likelihood that the silhouette in Bach’s collection and on the Bretzner libretto are one and the same. 28. The title of figure 2 reads: “Minna Brandes / Singerin auf dem Theater in Hamburg” (Minna Brandes / Singer in the Hamburg Theater). The inscription immediately beneath the oval frame of the picture reads: “Schade gemalt von Sintzenich gestochen” (Painted by Schade, engraved by Sintzenich). Minna’s adult appearance and her designation as a singer in the Hamburg Theater probably date the lost portrait, and the engraving, to the last two years of her life. The oval format and vivid emphasis on the face of the sitter—who is depicted without allegorical or dramatic props—suggests that the original portrait was a miniature. Certainly, the image shies away from the flamboyance of Reynolds’s full-sized contemporary portraits of singers and actresses, such as “Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse” (1784 or 1789), or “Mrs. [Elizabeth] Billington [as St. Cecilia]” (1789), and seems more an intimate souvenir than an image of celebrity. “Schade,” the painter of the lost Urbild, is presumably Rudolph Christian Schade (b. 1760 in Hamburg; d. 16 May 1811 in Hamburg), an artist of slight output and formidable obscurity. His principal distinction is that he studied with Anton Tischbein. Better known to his contemporaries was the engraver Heinrich Sintzenich (b. 1 December 1753 in Mannheim; d. 1812 in Munich), court engraver in the theatrical and operatic center of Mannheim. For further details on both men see Hans Vollmer, ed., Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1935); and G. K. Nagler, ed., Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon (Munich: E. A. Fleischmann, 1846). The Brandes family were employed at the Mannheim court 1779–1781 and were probably acquainted with Sintzenich. 29. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 2:139. 30. Ernst Ludwig Gerber, Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler [1790– 1792], facs. repr., ed. Othmar Wessely (Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 197–98; and Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 2:139. 31. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 2:223–24, 2:213. 32. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 2:230. 33. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 2:255n. 34. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 2:276–78; and Karl von Ledebur, TonkünstlerLexicon (Berlin: Ludwig Raub, 1861), 72. 35. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 2:283. 36. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:3 (Riga), and 3:54 (Warsaw). 37. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:68 (Königsberg); 3:74 (Elbing), and 3:75 (Danzig). 38. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:202–3, 3:191.

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39. “Beide [Fantasie und Composition] verlangen natürliche Fähigkeiten, besonders die Fantasien überhaupt.” (Both [improvised fantasias and composition] require natural creativity, but this is particularly so for fantasias.) Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen [1753–1762], facs. repr., ed. Wolfgang Horn, 2 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994), 2:325–26. 40. “Merkte Minna irgend einen Kummer an mir, so schlich sie sich an ihr Instrument, phantasierte, ging unvermerkt zu einem meiner Lieblingsstücke, welche sie genau kannte, über; ich wurde darauf aufmerksam, nach und nach theilnehmend, näherte mich dem Klavier, und meine üble Laune war in wenig Minuten zerstreut. Dann sprang das gutmüthig-schalkhafte Mädchen auf, umarmte mich, äußerte herzlich lachend ihre Freude; daß ihre Universalmedicin eine so gute Wirkung auf mich hervorgebracht hätte.” (If Minna noticed that I was preoccupied she slipped over to the fortepiano, improvised, and went imperceptibly into one of my favorite pieces, which she knew very well. This would get my attention; I would respond gradually, approach the instrument, and my dark cloud was dispelled in minutes. Then the good-natured girl would jump up, wrap her arms around me, and cry out with joy, that her all-purpose medicine had worked so well on me.) Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:292n. 41. Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:252, 3:266. 42. “Minna Brandes war ein an Körper und Seele gleich vollkommenes Mädchen! Ein griechischer Wuchs, ein offenes blaues Auge, das nie bezaubern wollte, aber ohne Wissen seiner Besitzerin unwiderstehlich dahin riß. Blondes Haar, eine feine weisse Haut ohne Flecken und alle übrige Theile ihres Gesichts und Körpers im vollkommensten Verhältnisse mit dem Ganzen.” Johann Christian Brandes, “Biographie der verstorbenen Sängerin und Schauspielerin Minna Brandes,” Annalen des Theaters 3 (1789): 33–51, esp. 50; hereafter Brandes, “Biographie.” Cf. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauerkunst, 2nd ed. (1755; Dresden: Walther, 1756); and Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden: Walther, 1764). 43. On whiteness, European identity, and visions of classical antiquity see also David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 44. It is unnecessary to sign up to every aspect of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987) to recognize connections between nascent racial and aesthetic ideals of the late eighteenth century. 45. “Schon seit langer Zeit klagte Minna über heftige Ohr- Zahn- und Halsschmerzen; abwechselnd legte sich das Uebel, fand sich aber bald darauf mit verdoppelter Stärke wieder ein. Bei allen diesen Leiden bezeigte sie eine bewundernswürdige Geduld; hatte sie nur einige Stunden Ruhe, so widmete sie solche ihrer Kunst, wofür sie ganz allein Gefühl und Leidenschaft zu haben schien. In dem letztern Jahre ihres Lebens komponirte sie den größten Theil der Lieder, welche nach ihrem Tode, unter dem Titel: Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes, im Druck erschienen und mit verdientem Beifall aufgenommen worden sind.” Brandes, “Biographie,” 48. 46. “Aber in der schönsten Blüthe ihres Lebens, wurde sie ein Opfer ihres allzugroßen Eifers für die Kunst und starb zu Hamburg am 13 Jun. 1788.” Gerber, Historischbiographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler, 197–98, esp. 198.

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47. Brandes refers to his daughter’s death “after she had painfully endured close to an entire year of mucous congestion of the glands and severe rheumatism” (nachdem sie beinahe ein ganzes Jahr an einer Drüsenverschleimung und einem heftigen Rheumatismus schmerzlich gelitten hatte). Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:289n. 48. Stephen Rose, “Private Music and the Subjectivities of Mortality,” paper presented at the conference “Music and Death in the Eighteenth Century,” 8–9 February 2003, as part of the series of symposia The Art of Dying, King’s College, University of London, 2002–2003. In this stimulating paper Rose explores the “private devotional music . . . used by Protestants preparing for death and sometimes written by them as they contemplated their own mortality.” The genre of swan song attracted not just professional composers but “nonprofessionals and women” (author’s abstract). Though Rose implies that this practice died out in the early eighteenth century, it finds a ghostly return in the very year that the ailing Minna took to composition. In 1787 C. P. .E. Bach composed his last free fantasia (H. 300/536 in F♯ minor). This fantasia incorporates a melody from Bach’s song “Andenken an der Tod” (H. 752; 1781), a melody that set the words “Wer weiß wie nah der Tod mir ist?” (Who knows how close to me is death?). In the revised version of this fantasia for keyboard and violin accompaniment (H. 536; 1787), Bach added the subtitle “C. P. E. Bachs Empfindungen.” See Heinrich Poos, “Harmoniestruktur und Hermeneutik in C. P. E. Bachs fisMoll-Fantasie,” in Bericht über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Berlin 1974, ed. Hellmut Kühn and Peter Nitsche (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1980), 319–23. See also Poos, “Nexus vero est poeticus: Zur fis-Moll-Fantasie Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs,” in Studien zur Instrumentalmusik, Lothar Hoffmann-Erbrecht zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Anke Bingmann, Klaus Hortschansky, and Winfried Kirsch (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1988), 189–220; and Matthew Head, “Fantasy in the Instrumental Music of C. P. E. Bach” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995), 72–73. 49. Nigel Llewellyn, The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500–c.1800 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991), 91. 50. Ibid., 47. 51. Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, 77, with reference to Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 170–72. 52. This only came to light when I compared the movements of the family with those of Seyler’s troupe itself. On the Seyler troupe see the many references in Bauman, North German Opera; and Bauman, “Music and Drama in Germany: A Traveling Company and Its Repertory, 1767–1781” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1977). 53. This issue of generational position within the family enriches the attention given in feminist accounts of female authorship to class or social position. Cf. Nancy B. Reich, “Women as Musicians: A Question of Class,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 125–46. 54. Johann Friedrich Hönicke (1755–1809) was an actor, music director, and composer on the north German stage. From about 1781 he worked as music director at the Hamburg Opera, first for Dreyer’s troupe and subsequently for Schröder’s. Hönicke’s connection to Minna Brandes dates back at least to 1778. At this time both worked at the Gotha court theater, Hönicke as music director, Minna and her parents as actors, presumably in Seyler’s troupe. When Seyler’s troupe moved to the Mannheim court theater in 1779 Hönicke appeared again as music director, and the Brandes family as performers. Hönicke is not a

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well-known figure today and can be found in few modern reference works, but he is mentioned in Bauman, North German Opera, 204, 249. This account of his adult career is provided by Robert Eitner, Biographisch-Bibliographisches Quellen-Lexicon der Musiker und Musikgelehrten der christlichen Zeitrechnung bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (1898–1904; repr., New York: Musurgia, 1947), 5:166–67. 55. “Das Andenken an die Künstlerinn [zu] erneuern.” Hönicke’s preface to Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes, ed. J. Fr. Hönicke (Hamburg: Johann Henrich Herold, 1788). 56. Llewellyn, The Art of Death, 85. 57. See note 25. 58. Published in 1790 by Gottlieb Friedrich Schniebes, who was also a subscriber to the Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes. 59. On the culture of charity in the eighteenth century see Carolyn D. Williams, “The Luxury of Doing Good: Benevolence, Sensibility, and the Royal Humane Society,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (London: Macmillan, 1996), 77–107. Women composers sometimes framed publication of their works in terms of a charitable project. See [Maria Magdalena Kauth, née Gräff ], Das Gemaelde der Natur in Form eines Monodram: Musik und Text verfertigt bey Gelegenheit der Wasserüberschwemmung in Linz, und aufgeführt zum Besten der dasigen durchs Wasser unglücklick gewordenen Armen . . . (Berlin, 1789); and Juliane Charlotte Woldersleben, Die Umstimmung der Misstöne des widrigen Schicksals der leidenden Juliane Charlotte Woldersleben in XVI Gesängen am Piano Forte von ihr selbst in Music gesetzt [sic]. Woldersleben’s songs appeared without publication information; Eitner, Quellen-Lexicon, gives “Gotha, 1792.” 60. Llewellyn, The Art of Death, 77. 61. Quoted in Jacqueline Letzter and Robert Adelson, Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy in the Age of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 124. For further commentary see my review essay, “Rethinking Authorship Through Women Composers,” Women and Music 6 (2002): 36–50, esp. 48. 62. “Minna Brandes hatte die Musikstücke, welche diese Sammlung enthält, immer bey gewissen Veranlassung componirt, wodurch jedes durch etwas eigenthümliches charakterisirt worden, das der Kenner leicht beobachten wird. SIE hatte sie blos zu IHRER eigenen Unterhaltung gemacht, und war zu bescheiden, als daß SIE auf eine öffentliche Bekanntmachung derselben durch den Druck gedacht haben sollte. Mir hatten sie immer vorzüglich gefallen, und, wenn das Bekenntniß von dem wärmsten Verehrer des verstorbenen Mädchens partheiisch klingen möchte, so kann ich noch hinzusetzen, daß sie auch Kennern vorzüglich gefallen haben, auf deren Andringen sie j[e]tzt im Druck erscheinen. Ich habe nichts in selbigen geändert, damit man sehen möge, wie sehr die richtigen Empfindungen und das feine Gehör der Tonsetzerinn auch bey denen Stellen, die Grammatick der Musik ersetzt haben, wo ihre Kenntniß am nöthigsten war. Wenn die Freunde der Musik, welche die Verstorbene gekannt haben, beim Spiele dieser Kleinigkeiten das Andenken an die Künstlerinn erneuern, die ihnen durch IHREN einnehmenden Gesang und durch IHR reizendes Clavierspiel manche angenehme Stunde gemacht hat; so ist einer der vornehmsten Zwecke erreicht, warum ich diesen IHREN musikalischen Nachlass herausgegeben habe. Hamburg, im Monathe September, 1788. Hoenicke.” From Hönicke’s preface to Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes.

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63. Carl Friedrich Cramer, Magazin der Musik, 4 vols. (1783–1786; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971), 3:693–94, cited and translated in Marcia J. Citron, “Corona Schröter: Singer, Composer, Actress,” Music and Letters 61 (1980): 15–27, esp. 21. The importance of a woman’s social position in determining her self-identity as a composer is stressed in Reich, “Women as Musicians,” 125–46. 64. Hönicke composed music for the Nachspiel Die Heyrath aus Liebe, performed at the Gotha court theater in 1778; the libretto is by Hermann Ewald Schack. See Eitner’s Biographisch-Bibliographisches Quellen-Lexicon, s.v. “Hönicke,” 5:166; and Bauman, North German Opera, 388. 65. Johann Gottfried Herder, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. 25, Volkslieder: Erster Theil (Berlin: Wiedmannsche Buchhandlung, 1885); and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” in The First and Second Discourses together with the Replies to Critics, and Essay on the Origin of Languages, trans. and ed. Victor Gourevitchs (New York: Perennial, 1968), 239–95. 66. Mary Sue Morrow has observed that for Gottsched—whose Versuch einer kritischen Dichtkunst of 1730 exerted a powerful influence on German musical criticism around the middle of the eighteenth century—“following the rules appropriate to a particular genre of literature or art counted as a primary qualification of aesthetic excellence.” See Morrow, German Music Criticism, 80. See also Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History and Musical Genre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), ch. 5, “Small ‘Forms’: In Defense of the Prelude,” esp. 144–45, where a hierarchy of genre is noted from Chopin’s day to our own. 67. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 61. 68. Johann Adam Hiller, Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Musikgelehrten und Tonkünstler neurerer Zeit (1784; repr., Leipzig: Peters, 1979), 47. 69. These aspects of the Enlightenment are ably discussed in Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). 70. Johann Georg Sulzer, “Empfindung,” from Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774), quoted in Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment: Selected Writings of Johann Georg Sulzer and Heinrich Christoph Koch, ed. and trans. Nancy Kovaleff Baker and Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27–32, esp. 28–29. 71. “Ueberdies besaß sie viel theoretische Kenntnisse in der Musik.” Gerber, Historischbiographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler, 197–98. 72. Max Friedländer misattributes the texts to “Salis, Hölty and others, as many as six from Hölty” (Die Texte rühren u. a. von Salis und Hölty her, von Hölty allein sechs) in Das deutsche Lied im 18. Jahrhundert, 1:320. 73. Engraving, a relatively inexpensive technique, was used when a work was to be printed over time and on demand, in small runs. In Germany, however, works with large subscription lists were usually printed by movable, divisible type in single copies as needed. In his editorial commentary to the facsimile edition of Christian Ulrich Ringmacher’s catalogue (1773) Barry S. Brook commented that “the plate used for engraving music in this period could not as a rule produce more than 250 or 300 copies.” See the editorial appendix to Christian Ulrich Ringmacher, Catalogo de’ Soli, Duetti, Trii [1773], facs. repr., ed. Barry S. Brook (Leipzig: Peters, 1987), 3.

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74. On Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf ’s technical innovations of 1754–1755 see Stanley Boorman, “Eighteenth-century Innovations,” in Boorman et al., “Printing and Publishing of Music,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (2001), 20: 337–38. Boorman noted that the first work Breitkopf published with his new system was a sonnet with a preface, but that the first major work was Il trionfo della fedeltà. The clearest explanation of Breitkopf ’s technique remains Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (1954; repr., New York: Dover, 1990), 67–72. 75. See, for example, Johann L. Albrecht, Gründliche Einleitung in die Anfangslehren der Tonkunst (Langensalza: J. C. Martini, 1761); Johann F. Daube, Der musikalische Dilettant (Vienna: Johann Thomas, 1773); Johann G. Albrechtsberger, Gründliche Anweisung zur Composition (Leipzig: J. G. I. Breitkopf, 1790); and Heinrich C. Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Rudolstadt, 1782–1793). 76. Georg Joseph Vogler, Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule, 4 vols. (1778–1781; repr., Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1974), 3:469–76. 77. Suchalla, ed., Bach: Briefe und Dokumente, 1:533. Suchalla does not give the source of this information, and it is unlikely that Minna acted as tutor for Fehre in a formal capacity. Fehre was already employed as music tutor to the Geheimrat Vietinghof in Riga in 1777; the Brandes family did not arrive there until spring 1782. 78. Zwölf Lieder mit Melodien fürs Klavier, von Maria Adelheid Eichner, Kammersängerin S. K. H. des Prinz von Preussen (Potsdam: Carl Christian Horvath, 1780). For a partial index of Maria Adelheid Eichner’s songs see Jackson, A Guide to Surviving Music by Women, 153–54. According to Carl Friedrich Zelter her songs were composed to texts by her friend Stamford, an engineer in the Prussian army, as a diversion when among friends and with Zelter’s assistance in notating them. See Carl Friedrich Zelters Darstellungen seines Lebens zum ersten Male vollständig nach den Handschriften herausgegeben, ed. Johann Wolfgang Schottländer (Weimar: Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1931), 145–46. 79. Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, 353. 80. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception [1963], trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1997), 140. 81. The connections between the free fantasias of C. P. E. Bach and the baroque tombeau are noted in Peter Schleuning, Die freie Fantasie: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der klassischen Klaviermusik (Göppingen: Alfred Kümmerle, 1973), 283. Schleuning notes that in the Free Fantasia in Bb, H 289 (1785–1786) C. P. E. Bach incorporated a quotation from W. F. Bach’s Polonaise in E major, Fk 12/7, and that this may allude to the death of W. F. Bach two years before (ibid., 249–50). The dark emotionalism of C. P. E. Bach’s Free Fantasia in C minor, H 75 (1753), and J. S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, BWV 903 (ca. 1720), inspired Wolfgang Wiemer’s hypothesis that these works were written as laments on the deaths of, respectively, J. S. Bach and J. S. Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara Bach. See Wolfgang Wiemer, “Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs Fantasie in c-Moll—ein Lamento auf den Tod des Vaters?” Bach Jahrbuch 74 (1988): 163–77. The evidence for such specific interpretations is not conclusive (see Head, “Fantasy in the Instrumental Music of C. P. E. Bach,” 61n76), but it is significant that these works should inspire such readings. Both are indeed saturated with the gestures of lament, despair, and grief, drawn from accompanied recitative, and so almost inevitably suggest death and other mortal calamities. 82. “ ‘[Die] Kurländische Hure; so wird hier Ihre Tochter durchgehends gennant.’ ” Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:244.

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83. When a new suitor, named Schulz, appeared, Johann Christian Brandes stipulated, clearly against Minna’s will, that Spl—r needed to secure his father’s permission to marry within two months or relinquish all claim upon Minna. Spl—r returned promptly, claiming that all obstacles were now overcome, but further questioning revealed that his father’s permission was still not won. At this point Brandes actively sought to separate the lovers, forbidding all visits until the father’s written permission was produced. Minna and Spl—r then met secretly at the houses of theatrical colleagues and friends, a subterfuge whose discovery led to paternal rebuke and a regime of constant chaperoning. The receipt of the letter from Spl—r’s father, accusing Minna of prostituting herself to Spl—r in the hope of trapping him into marriage, and further threatening to publish details of the affair in the Berlin press, led Brandes to even more direct engagement in the matter. He wrote to Spl—r’s father, requesting clarification of his son’s intentions and recommending his removal from Hamburg in the event that the marriage did not take place. The reply, Brandes wrote in his memoir, was snobbish and cutting, and it stated that marriage was out of the question. From this point on Brandes forbade any further contact between the lovers. Minna, however, maintained a secret correspondence with Spl—r until illness rendered her too weak to write, a strong indication that her feelings were unaltered by her father’s advice. 84. Edward McInnes, “‘Verlorene Töchter’: Reticence and Ambiguity in German Domestic Drama in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Taboos in German Literature, ed. David Jackson (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 27–42, esp. 30, with references to B. A. Sørensen, Herrschaft und Zärtlichkeit: Der Patriarchalismus und das Drama im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1984), 34, and to Ingrid Walsøe-Engel, Fathers and Daughters: Patterns of Seduction in Tragedies by Gryphius, Lessing, Hebbel, and Kroetz (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), 57. 85. “Er war so gefällig, sich auch jetzt wieder für seine ehemalige Schülerinn . . . mit Wärme zu interessiren, zum öftern Musikübungen mit ihr anzustellen, und ihr auch, beim Einlernen musikalischer Rollen behülflich zu sein. Weil er diese Gefälligkeit ohne besondere Aufforderung leistete, so schien es mir unschicklich, einen so vorzüglichen Künstler als einen gewöhnlichen Alltagslehrer zu behandeln; diesem nach wurden dessen Bemühungen, um seine Delikatesse zu schonen, nicht mit baarem Gelde, sondern von Zeit zu Zeit, durch kleine Geschenke von meiner Tochter erwiedert, auch stand mein Tisch, so oft er sich dessen bedienen wollte, für ihn gedeckt. Nach und nach wurde dieser Mann ein täglicher Gesellschafter meiner Tochter; welches mir—besonders nach dem Absterben meiner Charlotte um so viel angenehmer war, weil ich, wegen meiner Geschäfte, nicht immer um sie sein konnte, und ich sie auch zugleich unter der Aussicht eines bescheidenen Hausfreundes, in nützlicher Thätigkeit wußte.” ([Hönicke was] so good as to interest himself warmly in his former pupil . . . joining her in her music practice and helping her to learn new roles. Out of a sense of decorum, this assistance was rewarded not with money—as if he were some common music tutor—but from time to time with little presents from my daughter and with meals as often as he liked. In due course this man became a daily visitor of my daughter. This was all the more pleasant to me because, since the death of my Charlotte, business meant I couldn’t always be at home with Minna, and I wanted to know her to be usefully occupied under the care of an unassuming friend of the family.) Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:249–50. 86. “ ‘Ich kann mich vielleicht irren’—fuhr er leise fort—‘aber es scheint mir, als wenn Mamsell Minne mit Herrn H . . . ein geheimes Liebesverständniß unterhält; denn ich habe

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zum öftern bemerkt, daß sie in Ihrer Gegenwart immer so ehrbar da sitzen, als wenn sie kein Wasser trübten; aber drehen Sie nur einen Augenblick den Rücken, so suscheln sie sich einander in die Ohren, geben sich allerlei Zeichen, und sehen sich zuweilen einander an, als wenn sie sich durch und durch sehen wollten. Gehen Sie auf, so wird sogleich die Saalthüre verriegelt, unter dem Vorwande, daß sie nicht in der Musik gestört sein wollen, und doch hören wir in der Folgen weder spielen noch singen; aber so bald Sie sich bei Ihrer Zurückkunft auf der Treppe hören lassen, oder Ihr Pubel bellt, wird geschwind wieder aufgeriegelt und gesungen und gespielt, daß es durch das ganze Haus schallt. Ich kann mich irren, wie gesagt; aber——!’ ” Ibid., 3:251–52. 87. “Mein Entsetzen über diese ganz unerwartete Nachricht kann man sich leicht vorstellen; indeß suchte ich mich doch so gut als möglich zu fassen, und erwiederte, daß die vermeinte versteckte Vertraulichkeit unter Beiden jugendliche Tändelei sei, die nicht sowohl eine geheime Liebe, als andre Gegenstände beträfe, welche sie sich mir nicht zu eröffnen getrauten. Das Verriegeln des Zimmers hätte ich meiner Tochter ausdrücklich anbefohlen, um allen zudringlichen Besuch dadurch vorzubeugen; und wenn kein Instrument gehört würde, so wär’ es ein Beweis, daß entweder komponirt, oder auch mündlicher Unterricht ertheilt würde.” Ibid., 3:252. 88. “Mein treuer Johann schüttelte den Kopf und ging.” Ibid. 89. In the biography Brandes wrote: “In dem letztern Jahre ihres Lebens komponirte sie den größten Theil der Lieder, welche nach ihrem Tode, unter dem Titel: Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes, im Druck erschienen.” Brandes, “Biographie,” 48. In his memoirs he wrote: “Während dieser Zeit komponirte sie, unter H—s Anleitung, den größten Theil der Lieder, welche nach ihrem Tode, unter dem Titel: Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes, in Druck erschienen.” Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:266. 90. The ambiguity of the phrase “jugendliche Tändelei,” which could also be translated as “youthful trifling” or “youthful flirting,” adds to the ultimate uncertainty of Brandes’s meaning. 91. Cf. Ann Kibbie, “The Estate, the Corpse, and the Letter: Posthumous Possession in Clarissa,” English Literary History 74, no. 1 (2007): 117–43. 92. “[Ich] sank . . . gegen H., entkräftet hin, um in seinen Armen Trost zu suchen; allein plötzlich fuhr er, mit wüthenden Blicken, und aufgehobnen Fäusten, mir entgegen, und schrie: ‘sprich nicht—keine Sylbe—Du Mörder Deiner Tochter; oder ich erwürge Dich!’ Die Umstehenden fielen dem Unsinnigen sogleich in die Arme, und rissen ihn zurück. Ich stand da, wie betäubt—niedergedrückt durch den tiefsten Schmerz—in Wuth gesetzt, durch dieß unerhört rasende Beginnen.—Ich wollte reden, aber die Zunge klebte mir am Gaumen—ich wollte den Unmenschen zu Boden schmettern; aber meine Glieder starrten, und meine Brust hob sich so gewaltsam, daß ich kaum zu athmen vermogte. Ich befürchtete einen plötzlichen Umsturz, und schwankte also kraftlos in mein Zimmer.” Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:290–91. 93. “Fast jeden Tag vermißte ich in dem Zimmer meiner Tochter Sachen von Werth, unter andern auch einen ziemlich kostbaren Brillantring. Diesen letztern Diebstahl ließ ich zwar bei den Juden, Goldarbeitern, und auch in den öffentlichen Blättern anzeigen; allein ich machte mir unnöthige Kosten: denn der Ring blieb verloren.” Ibid., 3:275–76. 94. “[Schulze] entdeckte mir, daß die Kranke fast täglich an ihre sie besuchenden Lieblingsfreunde und Freundinnen nicht allein ansehnliche Geschenke mache, sondern

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auch geäußert habe, im Fall ihre Besserung nicht erfolgen sollte, ihren sämtlichen (sehr ansehnlichen) Kleidervorrath unter die Letztern zu vertheilen.” Ibid., 3:278. 95. For the classic study of the symbolic and ritual significance of gift giving see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (1950), trans. W. D. Halls, and with a foreword by Mary Douglas (London: Routledge, 1990). 96. “Daß er meiner Tochter, während ihrer Krankheit, zum öftern ansehnliche Geldvorschüsse hätte machen müssen; und da sie sich vor ihrem Ende auch noch seiner vielen unvergoltenen Bemühungen, in Ansehung ihres Unterrichts in der Musik, mit Dankbarkeit erinnert, aber zugleich befürchtet hätte, daß ich mich nach ihrem A[b]sterben weigern würde, diese ihr obliegenden Schulden abzutragen . . . so hätte sie ihm vorläufig ihren großen Brillantring und eine goldne Dose eingehändigt, nächstdem aber auch ihr Flügelfortepiano zugesichert, und über diese drei Stücke eine förmliche Schenkungsakte an ihn ausfertigen lassen, wovon ich die genaue Abschrift, auf Verlangen, erhalten würde. Zu noch mehrerer Sicherheit hätte sie ihm ihren brillantnen Halsschmuck, nebst einigen Brustnadeln, zum Pfande gegeben.” Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:296–98. 97. “Was übrigens die noch fehlenden goldnen Dosen, Ringe, Uhren, Medaillen u. dgl. m. beträfe, so könne er mir darüber keine Auskunft geben—möglich, daß sie solche, aus Geldmangel . . . verkauft.” Ibid., 3:299–300. 98. Ibid., 3:301n. 99. This figure compares with 150 subscribers to E. W. Wolf ’s six keyboard sonatas of 1774, 519 subscribers to the first volume of C. P. E. Bach’s Sechs Clavier-Sonaten für Kenner und Liebhaber (1779), and over 2,000 subscribers to G. Benda’s Sammlung vermischter Clavierstücke of 1780. See Newman, The Sonata in the Classic Era, 74. 100. This estimate is based on information in The Letters of C. P. E. Bach, trans. and ed. Stephen L. Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), xxxvii, 125, 226–27; and Hans-Günther Ottenberg, “Die Klaviersonaten Wq 55 ‘im Verlage des Autors’: Zur Praxis des Selbstverlages bei Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach,” in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, ed. Heinrich Poos (Mainz: Schott, 1993), 21–39. 101. Editor’s introduction to Letters of C. P. E. Bach, ed. and trans. Stephen L. Clark, xxix, 126 (reference to letter 138, from Bach to Breitkopf, Hamburg, dated 9 October 1778). 102. See Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1967), in Image, Music, Text, 142–48. 103. Bach to Breitkopf, Hamburg, 16 September 1778 (letter 137) and 15 October 1782 (letter 219), cited from Letters of C. P. E. Bach, 125, 219. The second-named letter concerns C. P. E. Bach’s fourth collection of keyboard music for connoisseurs and amateurs (1783). 104. These “Demoiselles,” unless otherwise titled, are: Adamy, Alardus, Elisabet Christiana Arends, Miss Blaker, Caroline B, C. E. Bostelmann, Friederica Sophia Carstens, Caroline Mathilde Cossel, L. F. A. Cruse, Eberwahn, J. C. Eimbke, Maria Isabella Grape, Henriette Guerrier, H. C. Harmensen, Magdalena Heins, Hornberg, Fräulein von Janus, Knaack, Klefecker, Charlotte Knoop, M. M. Kuskopf, Maria Catharina Liebrecht, Anna Sophia Lühring, Fräulein von Lübbers, Marcus, M. Margaretha Martens, C. C. Misler, Henriette von Möller, Müller, Johanna Friederika Ohmann, Philippi, S. C. Reisse, Minna Rope, Rücker, Rudolphi in Hamm bey Hamburg, M. E. Schlüter, Henriette Schrader, Betty Schramm, Elisabeth von Spreckelsen, Anna Elisabeth Struckmann, Tode, and Willerding (surnames appear italicized in the original).

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105. Hamburg acquaintances and colleagues do occasionally appear in the subscription list. One example is C. P. E. Bach (who probably lived just long enough to receive his copy— he died on 14 December 1788). Another Hamburg subscriber acquainted with Minna was “Herr Zuccarini, Schauspieler,” who is presumably the theatrical colleague and friend whom Minna’s father mentions in his memoirs. Specifically, a “Schauspieler Z—i” witnessed Minna’s notarized bequest of precious objects to her former teacher Hönicke; see Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:297n. Johann Christian Brandes also refers to a second witness, the “Sänger A—sch” who might correspond to “Herr Ambrosch, Schauspieler.” One of the doctors who attended Minna in her final illness was probably a subscriber: Brandes identified Minna’s doctor as “Schröder”; Brandes, Meine Lebensgeschichte, 3:268. 106. Act 1, sc. 3, lines 7–10. The title-page epigram reads: “Sind Veilchen in des Jahres Jugend, sind / Erstlinge der Nature, früh und nicht dauernd, / Süß, aber bald dahin: der Duft, die Blüthe / Von wenigen Minuten.” 107. Classic statements of this Anglo-Teutonic aesthetic include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On German Architecture [1772]” and “On Gothic Architecture [1823],” in Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, vol. 3 of The Collected Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3–14. 108. Sigrid Nieberle has made the connection to Anna Amalie of Prussia in her excellent discussion of what she describes as the metonymic chain of music, women, and death in the novel. Nieberle, FrauenMusikLiteratur: Deutschsprachige Schriftstellerinnen im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 1999), 90–92. 109. Dorothea Mendelssohn Veit Schlegel, Florentin: A Novel (1801), trans. and with an introduction by Edwina Lawler and Ruth Richardson (Lampeter, Dyfed, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), 141, 143. The translators note the connection to Wackenroder in their introduction, lxi–lxvi. 110. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment” (1784), in Kant On History, ed. and trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 3–10. 111. For an introduction to current theories of authorship see John Caughie, ed., Theories of Authorship: A Reader (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); Seán Burke, ed., Authorship from Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995); and Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). The applicability of poststructuralist theories of authorship to eighteenth-century women composers is also discussed in Head, “Rethinking Authorship,” 36–50. 4 . A N EV E N I N G I N T I E F U RT

1. Anna Amalia von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1739–1807) married Ernst August II Constantin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach in 1756. On the death of her husband in 1758 she became regent, until the majority of the elder of her two sons, Carl August, in 1775. She was the niece of the musical princess Anna Amalie of Prussia, whose collection of music by J. S. Bach forms part of the Amalienbibliothek, a special collection in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. This collection is not to be confused with the Herzogin Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek in Weimar. Confusions easily arise, however, because Anna Amalie of Prussia often appears with the alternative spelling Anna Amalia. My admittedly novelistic speculation that the

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Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia walked to the premiere of Die Fischerin is not essential to my argument in this chapter and can be ignored by those seeking only established fact. The speculation is based on the narrow, winding paths that led from Schloss Tiefurt to the forest clearing (see figure 10), and on the fine weather that evening, as reported in Marvin Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 45. 2. Early sources spell the title Die Fischerinn, but I employ the modern spelling. 3. The attribution to Wieland is from Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre, 42. 4. Figure 10 is reproduced from Friedrich Menzel, Schloss Tiefurt, 3rd ed. (Weimar: Keipert, 1966), 41, with the permission of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. 5. The enlargement appears to precede Anna Amalia’s arrival in 1781. See “Die Entstehung des Tiefurts Park,” in the exhibition catalogue Klassik-Stiftung Weimar, Musen, Genies und Dilettanten: Anna Amalia in Tiefurt, n.d., www.klassikstiftung.de/fileadmin/ grafiken/Ereignis_Weimar/Audiofuehrung.pdf. 6. A drawing of Schloss Tiefurt from 1793 is reproduced in Gabriele Busch-Salmen, Walter Salmen, and Christoph Michel, Der Weimarer Musenhof: Dichtung—Music und Tanz—Gartenkunst—Geselligkeit—Malerei (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 42. 7. The amateur theater leaves a long bibliographic trail; even its modern academic strand reaches back at least to Karl August Hugo Burkhardt, Das Repertoire des Weimarischen Theaters unter Goethes Leitung, 1791–1817 (1891; Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1977). My understanding is honed on Carlson, Goethe and the Weimar Theatre; Annie Janeiro Randall, “Music in Weimar circa 1780: Decentering Text, Decentering Goethe,” in Unwrapping Goethe’s Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge, ed. Burkhard Henke, Susanne Kord, and Simon Richter (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 97–146; Tina Hartmann, Goethes Musiktheater: Singspiele, Opern, Festspiele, “Faust” (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2004), esp. 131–34; editor’s introduction to The Literature of Weimar Classicism, ed. Simon Richter (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), 17–21; and Jane K. Brown, “Drama and Theatrical Practice in Weimar Classicism” in The Literature of Weimar Classicism, 133–66. 8. The expressive translation of Plundersweilern as Trashville is from Randall, “Music in Weimar circa 1780,” 101. For commentary on Anna Amalia’s setting of Erwin und Elmire see Thomas Bauman, North German Opera, 157–68. 9. This chapter does not attempt a survey of music of the period expressively composed for performance in woodlands, but such a survey would include Johann Abraham Peter Schulz’s setting of Matthias Claudius’s “Serenata, im Walde zu singen” (beginning “Jedoch ihr Wald ist Schneiderscherz”), published in his Lieder im Volkston, bei dem Claviere zu singen, vol. 1 (Berlin: G. J. Decker, 1782). I was apprised of Schulz’s setting by Stefanie Steiner, “‘Durch Musik ist unser Geschlecht humanisiert worden, durch Musik wird es noch humanisiert’: Herder’s Volkslied und das Lied im Volkston von J. A. P. Schulz,” paper delivered at the conference “Herder, Music and Enlightenment,” Jesus College, University of Oxford, 6 January 2007. 10. The score is preserved as a manuscript in a keyboard-vocal reduction (Mus. IIa : 11) in the Herzogin Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek and is available online at http://ora-web .klassik-stiftung.de/digimo_online/digimo.entry. I am grateful to Annie Janeiro Randall for sharing a photocopy at a time when the score was inaccessible following the devastating fire of September 2004. During the preparation of this chapter the manuscript of the score, which survived the fire, went online.

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11. “Stellen Sie sich einen Wald vor, durch welchen Gänge, im Geschmack der englischen Parks, gehauen sind, so haben Sie eine Idee vom Ganzen, und von dem Reichthum an immer neuen, immer abwechselnden Scenen und Schönheiten, die schon aus der Natur einer solchen Anlage entspringen, und die keine Kunst nachzuschaffen im Stande ist. An den meisten Stellen sind die Wege eine fortlaufende, für Sonnenstral und Regen undurchdringbare, Laube. Bänke, oder alte Baumstämme zu Sitzen ausgehöhlt, winken überall den Wanderer in ihre Schattenplätze, oder machen ihn aufmerksam auf schöne Aussichten. . . . Folgt man den Gängen, so kommt man, hier zu einem Bad, kühl, wie das Bad der Nymphen, dort zu Teichen in Gebüschen; hier überrascht einen eine Laube von Gitterwerk, dort bleibt man vor einem Tisch von weißem Marmor im antiken Geschmack stehen, um dessen Füße sich Schlangen winden. Oeser ist der Meister, der ihn verfertigt hat. Die Büste dieses großen Mannes, von Klauer in Weimar, einem Künstler von großen Hoffnungen, so ähnlich als möglich, gehauen, ist nicht veit davon aufgestellt, und auf einer Steinplatte lieset man Jacobi’s Zuruf: ‘O! Laßt, beym Klange süßer Lieder, / Uns lächelnd durch dies Leben gehn, / Und, finkt der letzte Tag hernieder, / Mit diesem Lächeln stille stehn!’ Eine Hütte, oder Haus von Baumrinde, simpel wie sein Aeußerliches, mit hölzernen Geräthen und Binsenmatten möblirt, liegt in einer der romantischen Wildnissen des Waldes. Nicht weit davon zeigte man mir einen großen gesäuberten Halbkreis, der zum Schauplatz mancher Lustbarkeit dient. Ich sah im Zimmer der Herzoginn ein Gemälde von Kraus, das einen Auftritt aus einem Schauspiel, ‘die Zigeuner,’ von Einsiedel, vorstellte, welches hier bey Nachtzeit gespielt worden war.” Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst, 5 vols. (Leipzig: M. G. Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1779–1785), vol. 4, appendix 1, sec. 8, 239. This passage is omitted in a recent translation by Linda B. Parshall published as C. L. Hirschfeld, Theory of Garden Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). Any mention of Hirschfeld in a musical context must acknowledge a deep debt to Annette Richards, The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque. 12. On the phantasmic and uncanny in the late eighteenth century see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford University Press, 1995). 13. There is no shortage of biographical writings on Corona Schröter. I avoid duplicating this readily available information here. A contribution to Schröter’s biography would need to trace the history of such writing, which has passed through several phases, and consider what desires drive the project. To speak generally, Schröter was often portrayed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a delicate aesthetic construct whose importance lies in Goethe’s admiration for her. A nostalgic tone for the Weimar past also informs such accounts. See for example Robert Keil, Vor hundert Jahren: Mittheilungen über Weimar, Goethe und Corona Schröter aus den Tagen der Genie-Periode [1875], 2 vols. (Nabu Press, 2010, www.amazon.de); Paul Pasig, Goethe und Ilmenau: Mit einer Beigabe, Goethe und Corona Schröter (Illmenau: Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1902), (Nabu Press, 2010, www .amazon.de); and Heinrich Stümcke, Corona Schröter (Bielefeld: Velhagen und Klasing, 1904). Another phase, usefully informed by second-wave feminism, sought out a more independent, professional role for Schröter, without denying her context. See, principally, Marcia Citron, “Corona Schröter: Singer, Composer, Actress,” Music and Letters 61 (1980): 15–27; and Annie Janeiro Randall, “The Mysterious Disappearance of Corona Schröter’s Autobiography,” Journal of Musicological Research 14 (1994): 1–16. See also Peter Braun, Corona

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Schröter, Goethe’s heimliche Liebe: Porträt einer starken Frau (Düsseldorf: Artemis and Winkler, 2004); in this commercial biography Schröter’s personal autonomy and agency are at once overestimated and neutralized through a speculative romance narrative. 14. It was not unusual for productions of the amateur theater to be written for and to address individuals, be that as birthday celebrations for members of the royal family, parodies of courtiers, or tributes to members of the amateur theater. A month after the premiere of Die Fischerin Goethe, the director and principal poet of the theater, was honored on the occasion of his birthday (28 August 1782) with a musical shadow play in the Mooshütte with music by Karl Siegmund von Seckendorf. Corona Schröter, appearing behind a white screen as a moving silhouette of the goddess Minerva, was one of several mythical characters in this mixture of allegory and farce. In a finale, with the screen removed, a winged figure of genius arrived bearing Goethe’s name. His Iphigenie and Faust also appeared on “Feuer-Transparents” (fiery banners) in the clouds. See Alphons Peucer, Das Liebhaber-Theater am Herzoglichen Hofe zu Weimar, Tiefurt und Ettersberg, 1775–1783 (Weimar, ca. 1840), 64–65. 15. Referring both to “Der Erlkönig” and the search scene Goethe wrote, “Und wie die Nacht / Von Feuern leuchtet um ein loses Kind.” These are the last two lines of a letter in the form of a poem that Goethe sent to Caroline Herder, dated 17 July 1782, inviting her and her husband to the premiere of Die Fischerin, disclosing his use of lyrics from Herder’s Volkslieder, and providing a taste of the supernatural atmosphere of the piece. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, ed. Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Berlin, 24 vols. (Berlin: Akademie, 1952–1973), Poetische Werke, 2:220. Only the beginning of this letter poem is cited in the editorial preface to Die Fischerin (Poetische Werke, 4:695). This may explain why the connection between “Der Erlkönig” and Die Fischerin has not been noted. I first encountered the full letter in Ursula Pellaton-Müller, “Goethe’s Singspiele von 1775 bis 1786” (PhD diss., University of Zurich, 1973), 86–87. 16. Bauman, North German Opera, 208. Bauman’s foundational study of singspiel is of enduring value and forms an essential backdrop to my study of Die Fischerin. At a distance of twenty-five years, aspects of its critical framework inevitably show signs of age. In some respects this is all to the good: who, now, in the new age of criticism, would attempt such a survey of obscure and difficult-to-access repertory? In some other regards, however, the aging process is less felicitous. The locution “age of Goethe” is now avoided in almost all academic studies, not so much because of its canonical and heroic ring but because Goethe is understood to have written against the grain of his period. In the context of late eighteenth century opera “the age of Goethe” was always a fragile hegemonic proposition, given the number of successful north German librettists, on the one hand, and the relative isolation of the Weimar theaters in which Goethe worked on the other. Bauman’s study does not always embrace the contextual turn that it advocates, and sometimes defaults to the formalist and teleological grand narratives from which the introduction measures distance (North German Opera, 1–2). The sovereignty of Goethe is again problematic, because much of the work usually assumed by Mozart in the story of “the rise of German opera” is undertaken in Goethe’s name. Specifically, Goethe is evoked as a “progressive” figure who grasped, ahead of his contemporaries, that the future of German-language opera lay in the formal models of opera buffa. Some backward reading is involved in this image of Goethe, who, I believe, was not particularly forward thinking in musical matters in the early 1780s. The

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issue is important because it dominates Bauman’s appraisal of Die Fischerin. Here, without referencing Schröter’s music, Bauman suggests that Goethe was held back by Schröter’s weaknesses as a composer from the kinds of buffa-inspired continuity that the poet wanted to explore. Presumably Bauman is thinking of such things as action duets and ensemble finales, whose presence he almost always notes approvingly. I do not imply sexism on Bauman’s part. He is full of justified praise for Duchess Anna Amalia’s setting of Goethe’s Erwin und Elmire (1776). I also acknowledge that Schröter’s score does not obviously reveal more than a basic compositional competence. My concern is only that, on this occasion, Bauman sets his own quest for context and relativism aside so as to polish Goethe’s reputation at Schröter’s expense, and that there is insufficient supporting evidence for such negative judgment. See Bauman, North German Opera, 207–8. On Goethe’s prescience see 18–19 and 171, and on Anna Amalia’s setting of Erwin und Elmire, 157–61. 17. In the case of Marianne Gluck, the niece of Christoph Willibald Gluck, the dead lived on in the underworld. On Marianne’s death in 1776, when Gluck asked Goethe for a commemorative poem, the poet complied with “Proserpina.” This was set by Karl Siegmund von Seckendorff and performed in the Neues Theater in Weimar on 30 January 1778 as part of Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit. Proserpina was played by Corona Schröter. In Bauman’s summary of the commemorative interlude, “In the depths of Hades, Proserpina (spoken) laments her situation. She relives her carefree days on earth and also her abduction by Pluto. Unseen, the Fates welcome their new queen, who pours out her hatred and despair.” Grove Music Online, s.v. “Proserpina,” by Thomas Bauman, accessed September 15, 2012, www.oxfordmusiconline.com. 18. For example, in the first section of the first volume: no. 2 (Rosemunde commits suicide to preserve her virtue); no. 3 (a young woman, sick in bed, renounces her engagement because she is soon to die); no. 4 (a bride takes leave of her family); no. 7 (an Arabian romance ending in the death of Zaïde); no. 14 (a romance in which Katherine appears to die but makes an unexpected recovery); no. 16 (Annchen is hung on fir trees); no. 22 (a maiden dies of a broken heart); and no. 23 (Röschen is called off into the night by a voice and a death knoll). 19. Herder inspires passionate and extreme appraisals. In keeping close to Herder’s texts I hope to recover his fantasies and avoid idealization and denunciation in the abstract. For an example of the latter, which diagnoses Herder’s Volkslieder project as an elitist and kitschy expression of the culture industry see Wolfgang Braungart, “ ‘Aus denen Kehlen der ältsten Muttergens’: Über Kitsch und Trivialität, populäre Kultur und Elitekultur, Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit der Volksballade, besonders bei Herder und Goethe,” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 41 (1996): 11–32. I do not mean, however, to denounce such denunciations. Herder’s turn to the volkslied undoubtedly involved appropriation, commerce, selfpromotion, and a typically bourgeois-Christian exaltation of the lowly and humble. 20. In my understanding, Herder’s use of the term Volk was strategically vague, a way of designating a cultural collective, the “people” of a community, without referencing differences of social position. In this sense the term was a utopian proposition, typical of the idealism of the period in its suspension of hierarchy. The usual English translation of Volkslied as folk song reflects later academic use and is misleading in a Herderian context, and so I avoid it here. A possible translation would be “people’s song” but I do not want to distract the reader with neologisms. Many have sought precise definitions of Herder’s terms and to

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concretize their impact on Goethe. Useful discussions are found in the articles “Volk,” by Ehrhard Bahr, and “Volksdichtung,” by Gonthier-Louis Fink, in Goethe-Handbuch, ed. Bernd Witte, 4 vols. (Stuttgard: Metzler, 1998), 4:1103–5 and 4:1105–11, respectively. 21. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Volkslieder: Nebst untermischten andern Stücken, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Weigand, 1779), 2:6. 22. “Sie [Poesie] lebte im Ohr des Volks, auf den Lippen und der Harfe lebendiger Sänger: sie sang Geschichte, Begebenheit, Geheimniß, Wunder und Zeichen: sie war die Blume der Eigenheit eines Volks, seiner Sprache und seines Landes, seiner Geschäfte und Vorurtheile, seiner Leidenschaften und Anmassungen, seiner Musik und Seele.” Herder, Volkslieder, 2:4. 23. Homerus “sang was er gehöret, stellte dar was er gesehen und lebendig erfaßt hatte: seine Rhapsodien bleiben nicht in Buchläden und auf den Lumpen unsres Papiers, sondern im Ohr und im Herzen lebendiger Sänger und Hörer, aus denen sie spät gesammelt wurden und zuletzt, überhäuft mit Glossen und Vorurtheilen, zu uns kamen.” Herder, Volkslieder, 2:5. Cf. Ernst Ribbat, “Suggestion von Oralität: Herder’s ‘Volkslieder’ und Goethe’s Singspiel ‘Die Fischerin,’ ” Welfengarten/Weltengarten 1 (2008): 116–24. 24. If Herder presented his celebration of the voice as a challenge to the hegemony of the book, he conformed to tradition while appearing revolutionary. Jacques Derrida has reminded us that Western metaphysics (the discourses of law and philosophy) are always and already phonocentric. In the courtroom, for example, we do not scribble the truth, we swear it out loud. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). If Derrida is right, then the category of the “literary,” which serves to elevate some kinds of writing over others, could be understood as a precarious attempt to recuperate writing as an abject term. That speculation aside, the peculiar charge of the lied, volksartig or otherwise, was to restore voice to poetry, a rescue mission that lent dignity to this quotidian genre and to the (female) singing voice. 25. Herder, Volkslieder, 2:6. The topos of the maternal voice in German romantic balladry and volkslieder is noted in Sigrid Rieuwerts, “Women as the Chief Preservers of Traditional Ballad Poetry,” in Folk Ballads: Ethics, Moral Issues, ed. Gábor Barna and Ildiko Kríza (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2003), 149–59. 26. Herder, Volkslieder, 2:6. 27. “Alle künstliche Verschränkungen und Wortlabyrinthe sind dem einfachen Sänger fremde, er ist immer hörbar und daher immer verständlich.” Herder, Volkslieder, 2:6. 28. For this point I am indebted to Katrin Kohl, “Musical Metaphors in Herder’s Theory of Language and Literature,” paper delivered at the conference “Herder, Music and Enlightenment,” Jesus College, University of Oxford, 6 January 2007. 29. “Homer, Hesiodus, Orpheus, ich sehe eure Schatten dort vor mir auf den Inseln der Glückseligen unter der Menge und höre den Nachhall eurer Lieder; aber mir fehlt das Schiff von euch in mein Land und meine [sic] Sprache. Die Wellen auf dem Meer der Wiederfahrt verdumpfen die Harfe und der Wind weht eure Lieder zurück, wo sie in amarantnen Lauben unter ewigen Tänzen und Festen nie verhallen werden.” Herder, Volkslieder, 2:8–9. On melancholy see Richards, The Free Fantasia, 145–82; Nancy November, “Haydn’s Melancholy Voice: Lost Dialectics in His Chamber Music and English Songs,” EighteenthCentury Music 4, no. 1 (2007): 71–106; and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, “Ein Mittel wider sich selbst”: Melancholie in der Instrumentalmusik um 1800 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2010).

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30. Hirschfeld, Theory of Garden Art, vol. 1, sec. 3, and vol. 5, sec. 1, 145–46, 408. 31. Compare this with Richards’s concept of the musical picturesque as an improvisatory idiom, a dialectic of order and disorder, simulating the experience of moving through the artificial wildness of the “English” garden. The difference between my argument and Richards’s is between music as a picturesque feature of the landscape and the “English” garden as a metaphor for the narrative design, expressive effects, and aesthetic precepts of instrumental music. See Richards, The Free Fantasia, 1–33. 32. They were undertaken between 1788 and 1805 and published in successive issues of Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden. They were the subject of an exhibition in Schloss Tiefurt in 2006, titled “Natur und Kunst: Georg Melchior Kraus und Weimars Landschaftsgärten um 1800,” and reproduced in an exhibition catalogue Aussichten und Parthien des Herzogl. Parks bey Weimar, ed. Ernst-Gerhard Güse and Margarete Oppel, Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Leipzig: Jütte-Messendruck, 2006). 33. In 1781 Kraus, perhaps following the lead of his better-known contemporary, Jokob Philipp Hackert, who completed his Zehn Aussichten von dem Landhaus des Horaz in 1780, began a series of engravings of the celebrated parkland in Wörlitz with the title Aussichten des Landhauses und Garten zu Wörlitz. The gardens of the Duke of Dessau-Wörlitz were also an inspiration for the Weimar parks, as emphasized in Susanne Müller-Wolff, Ein Landschaftsgarten im Ilmtal: Die Geschichte des herzoglichen Parks in Weimar, Schriftreihe des Freundeskreises Goethe-Nationalmuseum 3 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007). 34. Hirschfeld, “On Beauty,” in The Art of Gardening, vol. 1, sec. 2, 160–61. 35. Bauman provides many glimpses of those debates in North German Opera. 36. I call no. 5 a volkslied, but it was written by Goethe in that style, not drawn from Herder’s collections. There is also some ambiguity about whether nos. 2 and 4 are stage songs. In the case of no. 4 the libretto seems to confirm that it is part of the fiction, as there is a reference to opening a bottle of wine, a cue for a drinking song. I also understand no. 2 as a stage song because it follows from no. 1, which we are told Dortchen sings to herself to the pass the time. There is, however, room for interpretation. 37. See Heinrich Christoph Koch, “Singtanz,” in Kurzgefaßtes Handwörterbuch der Musik (1807; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1981), 327. 38. Hirschfeld, The Art of Gardening, vol. 1, sec. 9, 112. The illustration appears on p. 113. 39. In their article “Lied” in Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, Sulzer and Kirnberger (one of his collaborators for music articles), described the lied as a short and simple melody that finds a direct path to the heart. This aim of Rührung (moving) is pursued, they instructed, without displays of artistic brilliance and harmonic knowledge, that is, without the “Bewunderung der Kunst.” Citing Klopstock, the authority in matters of the heart, they asserted that complexity, melisma, and noise of instruments are out of place in an idiom that seeks to appear “as if streaming unhindered from the soul.” This emphasis on “moving” suggests a more elevated empfindsam register for the lied than is always evident in Die Fischerin. See Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 4 vols. (1771–1774), 2:718–19; cited from Digitale Bibliothek 67 (Berlin: Direct Media, 2004). 40. Preface to Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, Lieder im Volkston, bei dem Claviere zu singen, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Berlin: George Jakob Decker, 1785). 41. Koch, “Siciliano,” in Kurzgefaßtes Handwörterbuch der Musik, 324.

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42. “Abentheuerlich. So nennet man das Unnatürliche oder Übertriebene in dem Charakter der Größe.” Koch, Kurzgefaßtes Handwörterbuch der Musik, 3–4, esp. 3. 43. “So verstehet man in dieser Kunst [die Musik] unter dem Abentheuerlichen gemeiniglich nur die absichtlich angewandte Größe an kleinliche Gegenstände, zur Erweckung des Gefühls des Komischen.” Koch, “Abentheuerlich,” in Kurzgefaßtes Handwörterbuch der Musik, 4. 44. “So verwandelt sich z. B. in Hillers Liebe auf dem Lande, die Melodie der Arie: ‘Der Gott der Herzen findet sein Reich’ etc. die in der ernsthaften Oper von einem Helden gesungen, den Charakter des Großen behauptet hätte, in dem Munde des jungen und naiven Landmannes ins Komische.” Ibid., 4. 45. “Auf diesen Moment war eigentlich die Wirkung des ganzen Stücks berechnet. Die Zuschauer saßen, ohne es zu vermuten, dergestalt, daß sie den ganzen schlängelnden Fluß hinunterwarts vor sich hatten. In dem gegenwärtigen Augenblick sah man erst Fackeln sich in der Nähe bewegen. Auf mehreres Rufen erschienen sie auch in der Ferne; dann loderten auf den ausspringenden Erdzungen flackernde Feuer auf, welche mit ihrem Schein und Widerschein den nächsten Gegenständen die größte Deutlichkeit gaben, indessen die entferntere Gegend ringsumher in tiefer Nacht lag. Selten hat man eine schönere Wirkung gesehen. Sie dauerte, unter mancherlei Abwechselungen, bis an das Ende des Stücks, da denn das ganze Tableau noch einmal aufloderte.” Cited and translated from Goethe, “Die Fischerin,” in Werke, 4:272n. According to the editors, Goethe first provided this footnote for volume 7 of the edition of his works by J. G. Cotta in 1808. Cf. Bauman, North German Opera, 207n36, who reports that it appeared in an edition of 1782 in the Litteratur- und Theater-Zeitung 5 (1782). 46. Wieland was commenting on nighttime illuminations in Goethe’s garden. See Carl-Friedrich Baumann, Licht im Theater: Von der Argand-Lampe bis zum GlühlampenScheinwerfer (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1988), 36; and Sabine Appel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Ein Porträt (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 135. 47. The search scene might also have resonated with the nighttime search for Desdemona in Othello, act 1, sc. 1. In addition to the general resemblance of night, a missing daughter, and a father’s calling to rouse neighbors, there is a close connection between the words of Dortchen’s father and those of Desdemona’s father, Signor Brabantio, who cries out “Strike on the tinder, ho! Give me a taper! Call up my people. . . . Light, I say, light!” Shakespeare was a fascination of the Weimar court, not least because of Christoph Martin Wieland’s translations of twenty-two plays in eight volumes as Shakespeares theatralische Werke (1762–1766) and Herder’s essay “Shakespeare,” which was included in the manifesto Von deutscher Art und Kunst (On German character and art) of 1773. The latter is available in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 2, Schriften zur Ästhetik und Literature, 1767–1781, ed. Günter E. Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993), 498–521; the essay “Shakespeare” is available in English in Herder, Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. and ed. Gregory Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 291–307. 48. Five minutes and nine seconds if the allegro vivace tempo is interpreted as 140 quarter notes per minute. To make it possible to reproduce this number (which occupies many pages of the manuscript), I used a repeat mark to save space. The repetition of mm. 72–111 appears written out in the manuscript. This example is not intended to represent a critical edition but serves merely to provide the reader with access to the music.

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49. Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, 61. 50. Hirschfeld, Theory of Garden Art, vol. 1, sec. 7, 99. 51. Ibid., vol. 5, appendix 2, sec. 12, 440. 52. Linda B. Parshall, introduction to Hirschfeld, Theory of Garden Art, 25. 53. “Ich sah leider! beim ersten Theil, welche armselige Gestalt die gute Feldblume mache, wenn sie nun im Gartenbeet des weissen Papiers dasteht und vom honetten Publikum durchaus als Schmuck und Kaiser-blume gefälligst beäuget, zerpflückt und zergliedert werden soll, wie gern und inständig sie dieses verbäte!” Herder, Volkslieder, 2:29. 54. Herder, Volkslieder, 2:31. 55. “Die erste Blume seiner poetischen Krone. . . . Treuherzigkeit und ehrliche Lehrgabe war von jeher unser Charakter.” Herder, Volkslieder, 2:26. 56. Von deutscher Art und Kunst: Einige fliegende Blätter (Hamburg: Bode, 1773), comprising Herder, “Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker” and “Shakespeare”; Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst”; [Paolo Frisi], “Versuch über die gotische Baukunst,” [1766, trans. anonymously]; and Justus Möser, “Deutsche Geschichte.” For a modern edition see Edna Purdie, ed., Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). 57. Cited in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 199. My understanding of vegetable genius is indebted to Abrams. 58. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 59. Cited in Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 203. 60. “Perhaps with Corona’s compositional abilities in mind, Goethe drew back from his earlier finale experiments in Die Fischerin. . . . . Time, place, and personnel limited operatic horizons at Weimar, and Goethe’s progressive conception of opera—drifting with each passing year more and more towards Italian models—set these limitations in high relief. The absence of a composer with skill and sympathy enough to do his ideas justice remained Goethe’s lot until his return from Italy in 1788.” Bauman, North German Opera, 207–8. 61. Goethe, Poetische Werke, 4:695. 62. Corona Schröter, Fünf und zwanzig Lieder: In Musik gesetzt . . . (Weimar, 1786). 63. Cited from the translation by Citron, “Corona Schröter,” 18n13. 64. Stanza 11: “Wer preist genug des Mannes kluge Hand, / Wenn er aus Draht elast’sche Federn wand.” Stanza 12: “Des Rasens Grün, des Wassers Silberfall, / Der Vögel Sang, des Donners lauter Knall, / Der Laube Schatten und des Mondes Licht— / Ja selbst ein Ungeheur erschreckt’ ihn nicht.” All quotations in German from “Auf Miedings Tod” are cited from www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Goethe,+Johann+Wolfgang/Gedichte. This passage is not translated by Citron. 65. Citron, “Corona Schröter,” 18n13. 66. See the translation from Reichardt’s autobiographical fragments in Citron, “Corona Schröter,” 16–17. 67. “Nur absichtlos, doch wie mit Absicht schön.” My translation differs here from Citron, “Corona Schröter,” 18n13 (“Unintentionally, yet as if with beautiful intent”). 68. “Beauty is the form of finality in an object, so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end.” Immanuel Kant, “Definition of the Beautiful derived from the

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third moment,” in The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 60. 69. “Der Rose frohes, volles Angesicht, / Das treue Veilchen, der Narzisse Licht, / Vielfält’ger Nelken, eitler Tulpen Pracht, / . . . Und durch den schwarzen, leichtgeknüpften Flor / Sticht eine Lorbeerspitze still hervor.” My free translation of “Lorbeerspitze” as “laurel crown” responds to the idea in the poem of honoring Mieding, as well as to Goethe’s play on the term “crown” in relation to Schröter’s first name, Corona: “Und selbst dein Name ziert, Corona, dich.” 70. “Mit lockrer Erde deckt ihn leise zu.” 5 . S O P H I E W E S T E N HO L Z A N D T H E E C L I P SE O F T H E F E M A L E SIG N

Chapter 5 uses some material from my article “Sophie Westenholz’s Mozart: Gender, Authorship and Intertextuality in German Fortepiano Culture,” in Mozart im Blick: Inszenierungen, Bilder und Diskurse, ed. Annette Kreuziger-Herr (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2007), 224–55. The focus of this chapter is different however, and it draws on several new documents. Nonetheless I am grateful to the publisher for allowing me to rework my earlier study. 1. “Ein Dilettant ist schon ein schreckliches Geschöpf, ein weiblicher Autor ein noch schrecklicheres.” Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, letter to Franz Hauser of 24 November 1843, cited from Eva Weissweiler, Fanny Mendelssohn: Ein Portrait in Briefen (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1985), 154. Also cited and discussed in Matthew Head, “Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship: Fanny Hensel’s ‘Scottish’ Sonata in G Minor (1843),” NineteenthCentury Music Review 4, no. 2 (2007): 67–88, esp. 68. 2. An early twentieth-century photograph of a portrait of Sophie Westenholz with her husband, Carl, is held in the Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg Vorpommern and can be viewed at http://lbmv-cdm.gbv.de/u?/lbmv,580. 3. Friedrich Brüssow, “Eleonore Sophie Marie Westenholz, geb. Fritzscher,” in Neuer Nekrolog der Deutschen 16, no. 2 (1838): 343 (item 297). 4. Anon., “Ueber den Zustand der Musik in Mecklenburg,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 46 (17 November 1819): 776–81, esp. 777–78. 5. I base this date on Westenholz’s 1811 letter to her employer that refers to her having been in service at court for thirty-eight years. I assume this is more authoritative than the report in Brüssow, “Westenholz,” that she arrived at court in 1779. Other secondary sources give a puzzling range of dates, often on uncertain grounds. 6. “Westenholtz (Elenora [sic] Sophia [sic] Maria) des vorigen [C. A. Westenholz] noch lebende Gattin, eine gebohrne Fritscher, und Herzogl. Hofsängerin zu Ludwigslust 1782; wird nicht allein als Sängerin, sondern auch als eine große Klavierspielerin, und noch dazu in der Bachischen Manier, gerühmt. Herr Kapellmeister Wolf hat ihr deswegen 6 seiner gedruckten Klaviersonatinen zugeeignet.” Gerber, Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler, 801. 7. “Westenholz (Eleonora Sophia [sic] Maria)—Komponistin und Virtuosin nicht nur auf dem Klaviere, sondern auch auf der Harmonika, akkompagnirte 1792, nach dem Ableben des Kapellmeisters Rosetti, auf dem Flügel bei den Schwerinischen Hofkonzerten.” Gerber, Neues historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler, ed. Othmar Wessely, 3 vols. (1812–1814; repr., Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 556.

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8. “Die Ausführung . . . stand unter der Direction des tüchtigen Kapellmeisters, Massonneau; auch nahmen an der Leitung des Ganzen die Wittwe des Kapellmeisters Westenholz, der Concertmeister Stievenard und der Kammermusicus Bode mehr oder minder Antheil.” Anon., “Nachrichten. Wismar,” in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 40 (7 October 1818): 708–11, esp. 710. 9. “Sonatinen! Ja; aber mehr werth, als ganze Ballen von Sonaten, mit denen wir jetzt und so fleißig heimgesucht werden; besonders von den Gegenden der leiernden Music vom Rhein und Oberdeutschland her. . . . Delicatesse, Feinheit und Zartheit der Gedanken characterisiren sie vorzüglich; und die richtige, harmonische Behandlung darf nicht besonders erst bei diesem Künstler erwähnt werden. . . . Der Schluß, den man aus der ganzen Zusammensetzung eines Clavierstücks auf die ausübenden Fähigkeiten seines Verfassers machen kann, ist ohnstreitig viel sicherer, als der, den man aus den Arbeiten eines Dichters auf seine declamatorischen Talente ziehen möchte. Auch hat er sie einer Virtuosinn gewidmet, die in diesem Stücke seine eigensinnigsten Forderungen zu erfüllen im Stande ist. Selten kann man dieses von dem weiblichen Geschlechte rühmen. Ihre Finger, so viel Uebung und Fertigkeit sie auch haben mögen, besitzen gewöhnlicherweise die Nerven und die Kraft nicht, die zu der prallen, characteristischen Darstellung ausgezeichneter Claviergedanken nothwendig ist, sie schlüpfen fast immer zu schnell über die Tasten weg, als glühten sie; und ihre Sprache ermangelt des nöthigen Lichts und Schattens. Allein die Frau Capellmeisterinn Westenholzen, (ich habe sie selbst zu hören verwichnen Sommer das Vergnügen gehabt), macht hiervon eine Ausnahme; [sie] verbindet mit alle dem feinen Gefühl des Ausdrucks, das der weiblichen Execution eigen ist, die männlichste, festeste Sicherheit; und weis, eine ächte Schülerinn des einzig wahren, des Bachischen Vortrags, ihrem Spiele eben so viel Kraft als Schimmer und Reiz mitzutheilen. Ein öffentliches Zeugnis, das ich um so viel lieber von diesen ihren Talenten ablege, je mehr ich es mit Wahrheit und ohne allen Verdacht der Schmeicheley thun kann.” Carl Friedrich Cramer, Magazin der Musik, 4 vols. (1783–1786, repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971), 1:1255. 10. See Hans Rentzow, Die mecklenburgischen Liederkomponisten des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Triltsch und Huther, 1938); Barbara Garvey Jackson, Lieder by Women Composers of the Classic Era, vol. 1 (Fayetteville, AR: ClarNan Editions, 1987); Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, ed. Martha Furman Schleifer and Sylvia Glickman, vol. 4, Composers Born 1700 to 1799: Vocal Music (London: G. K. Hall, ca. 1996). 11. Dieter Härtwig, “Westenholz, Eleonore Sophia Maria,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, ed. Julie Anne Stanley and Rhian Samuel (London: Macmillan, 1994), 492; and Härtwig, “Westenholz, Eleonore Sophia Maria,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Friedrich Blume et al., 17 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter und Metzler, 1949–1986), 14:522. 12. I am grateful to Raimund Jedeck of the Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern for his assistance in solving this mystery (private communication of 1 August 2000). 13. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin, particularly Dr. Elsbeth Andre and Frau Brigitta Steinbruch, who tracked down the relevant documents and provided me with copies. 14. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Autobiography, cited from William S. Newman, “Emanuel Bach’s Autobiography,” Musical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1965): 363–72, esp. 372.

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15. For sources of information on which I relied see the notes to table 1. Some information in this paragraph is drawn from Rentzow, Die mecklenburgischen Liederkomponisten. 16. L. Fr. L. Riesenberg, “Zur Lobe der Harmonica: Als die Capellmeisterin Westenholz sie spielte, im Sommer 1787,” Monatschrift von und für Mecklenburg 2 (1789): n.p. On the cult of the musical glasses see Heather Hadlock, “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 507–42. 17. See Matthew Head, “Sophie Westenholz’s Mozart: Gender, Authorship and Intertextuality in German Fortepiano Culture,” in Mozart im Blick: Inszenierungen, Bilder und Diskurse, ed. Annette Kreuziger-Herr (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, December 2007), 224–55. On the aristocratic corporeality of Mozart’s pianism see Tia DeNora, “Embodiment and Opportunity: Body Capital, Gender, and Reputation in Beethoven’s Vienna,” in The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans, and Idealists, ed. William Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 185–97. 18. Clemens Meyer, Geschichte der Mecklenburg-Schweriner Hofkapelle (Schwerin: Ludwig David, 1913), 109–10. 19. On Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel and publication anxiety see Head, “Genre, Romanticism and Female Authorship,” 67–88. 20. “Viele [sind] gar keine Lieder . . . sondern [haben] den Charakter und Styl größerer Singstücke. . . . So hat auch M. W. gewisse Lieblingsmodulationen . . . die für Lieder aber ihrer Härte und Raschheit wegen, nur mit großer Vorsicht anzuwenden sind.” [Johann Friedrich Reichardt], “Berlin, bei Rudolph Werkmeister: Zwölf deutsche Lieder, mit Begleitung des Pianoforte, in Musik gesetzt von Sophie Westenholz, 4tes Werk,” Berlinische musikalische Zeitung 41 (1806): 163. 21. Cited in Rentzow, Die mecklenburgischen Liederkomponisten, 30. 22. Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980), 19–20. 23. “Die kleine, mehrmals wiederkehrende, harmonische Nachlässigkeit im sechsten und siebenten Takte desselben hätte die brave Componistin leicht vermeiden können. Ueberhaupt ist bei dergleichen Compositionen, der Entfernung der vier Stimmen wegen, oft viele Vorsicht in der Vertheilung der Harmonie zu beobachten. An mehreren Stellen indessen hat die Künstlerinn hier glückliche Lagen zwischen den beiden Parthien zu benutzen gewußt. Das sehr lebhafte Schlußrondo will mit großer Leichtigkeit, ohne alle schwerfälligen Accente vorgetragen sein, und es ist, so vorgetragen, gewiß von sehr gefälligem, angenehm muthwilligen Charakter, dem indeß die starken Ausweichungen und schnellen Rückkehrungen in der Mitte nicht ganz vortheilhaft sind. Alle gute Clavierspieler werden der baldigen Fortsetzung dieser glücklichen Arbeit sicherlich mit Vergnügen entgegen sehen.” Johann Friedrich Reichardt, review of Sophie Westenholz, Sonate a quatre mains, op. 3, Berlinische musikalische Zeitung 39 (1806): 155. 24. “Ueberall wäre der innern Seele dieser Stücke bloß mehr Ruhe zu wünschen, da die beständige Unruhe, die besonders in den Variationen durchaus herrscht, nicht von einer wilden, zügellosen Fantasie herstammt, sondern mehr in angewohnter Beweglichkeit ihren Ursprung zu haben scheint. Wenigstens müßte diese Unruhe von reicherer und bedeutenderer Modulation unterstützt sein, die dem innern Leben des Ganzen mehr Gehält gäbe. Sonderbar genug hat die Componistin in beiden Stücken die weiten und kühnen Abweichungen bis gegen das Ende aufgespart und dadurch selbst dem Schluß seine wohlthätige Ruhe genommen. So

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ist auch die elfte Variation, die einzige im Adagio Tempo, voll Bewegung, da hier doch gerade ein einfacher Gesang überaus wohl gethan haben würde. Solche schnelle Bewegungen in Adagiosätzen hat Haydn sehr klüglich zuerst aufgebracht, um lange Adagiosätze zu beleben, und da thun sie oft auch den erwünschtesten Effekt.” [Johann Friedrich Reichardt], review of Rondo for pianoforte, op. 1, and Thème avex X [sic] Variations, by Sophie Westenholz, Berlinische musikalische Zeitung 23 (1806): 91–92. Though the review is not signed, Reichardt wrote the reviews for this periodical, and the language and style are characteristic of him. 25. “Diese Würze alltäglicher Melodieen wird widerlich, oder am Ende gar dumpf und taub, wenn sie so mit vollen Händen ausgestreuet wird. . . . Wenigstens müßte diese Unruhe von reicherer und bedeutenderer Modulation unterstützt sein, die dem innern Leben des Ganzen mehr Gehält gäbe.” Ibid. 26. “Madame Westenholz hat sich durch ihre Reisen als eine sehr große Clavierspielerin bekannt gemacht. Diese Arbeiten zeugen gleichsam nicht weniger von ihrer Virtuosität, als von ihrem angenehmen Talent zur Composition, das auch nicht ohne Kunstausbildung geblieben.” Ibid. 27. “Man hat sehr oft den Damen in den Künsten die Gabe der Erfindung abgesprochen, aber ihre Feinheit und Anmuth in der Ausführung, besonders der Details, gerühmt: diese Werkchen, womit eine Dame debütirt, bestätigen den Satz in seinen beyden Theilen. Die Variationen erheben sich nur etwa in No. IX und X über das öfters gebrauchte Figuriren, sind aber durchaus angenehm, gefällig, fliessend geschrieben (bis auf die Coda, wovon hernach;) [sic] beschäftigen Ohr und Hände reichlich, bleiben aber doch applikabel—kurz, sie sind Musik, wie man sie Dilettanten, die nicht viel Strenge und nicht wenig Geschicklichkeit besitzen, mit Ueberzeugung empfehlehn darf. Und so ist es auch im Ganzen mit dem Rondo, dessen niedliches, pikantes Thema— mag es auch dem Rodeschen, im Finale von dessen erstem Quartett aus Es, etwas zu sehr ähneln—so wie, was diesem Thema nahe steht, Niemand ohne Vergnügen hören wird. Die Verf. will aber, wie die Coda der Variationen, und mehrere Stellen des Rondo beweisen, sich nicht mit dem engern, freundlichen Kreise begnügen, den sie so gut ausfüllt, sondern leidenschaftlich, originell, wol [sic] auch gelehrt erscheinen; sie verfällt deshalb zuweilen plötzlich in sehr scharfes Moduliren und dgl. Selbst wenn ihr das recht gut gelänge, so wäre doch offenbar dazu nicht hier der Platz. Wir wollen dies nur so kurz berühren, gewiss, ihr eigenes Gefühl oder ein erfahrner Kunstfreund werden ihr sagen, was noch hinzuzusetzen wäre.—Der Stich beyder Werkchen ist schön.” Anon., review of opuses 1 and 2, by Sophie Westenholz, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 31 (30 April 1806): 495–96. 28. See Gramit, Cultivating Music, 139–43. 29. See Richard Hibbitt, Dilettantism and Its Values: From Weimar Classicism to the Fin de Siècle (London: Legenda, 2006), chapters 1–2; and Janet Besserer Holmgren, The Women Writers in Schiller’s Horen: Patrons, Petticoats, and the Promotion of Weimar Classicism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007). 30. “Was No. 31 an den zwey frühern Werkchen dieser Virtuosin von einem andern Beurtheiler ist getadelt worden, trifft dieses in einem stärkern Masse, und was dort gelobt worden, in einem mindern. Für vier Hände zu schreiben, ist nicht so leicht, als es der Verf. zu seyn scheint, und als sie es sich gemacht hat. Auch hat sie hier andere Komponisten wirklich noch weit mehr als benutzt. Es ist zu hoffen, dass sie gegen eine Dame artig seyn und ihr Eigenthum nicht reklamiren werden; sonst nähme, z.B. von dem Rondo, Kozeluch

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gleich das ganze Thema, bis auf eine einzige kleine Veränderung in einem Uebergange, hinweg. (Es gehört nämlich ebenfalls einer Doppelsonate, ebenfalls aus F dur, in Kozeluchs frühesten Werken.) Doch wird so vieles jetzt gekauft und nicht ohne Unterhaltung durchlaufen, blos um einzelner fliessender Melodieen und gefügiger Passagen willen: da sich nun dergleichen hier auch finden, so ist dem Werkchen ein ähnliches Schicksal wol auch zu gönnen.” Anon., review of Sonate à quatre mains, op. 3, by Sophie Westenholz, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 40 (2 July 1806): 640. 31. To “investigate” the charge of plagiarism from Kozeluch I compared Westenholz’s theme against the thematic catalogue in Milan Poštolka, Leopold Koželuch: Život a dílo (Prague: Státní hudební Vydavatelství, 1964), 161–365. 32. Cited in Christopher Alan Reynolds, Motives for Allusion: Context and Content in Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 101. The original passage in Kant reads: “Auf solche Weise ist das Product eines Genies (nach demjenigen, was in demselben dem Genie, nicht der möglichen Erlernung oder der Schule zuzuschreiben ist) ein Beispiel nicht der Nachahmung (denn da würde das, was daran Genie ist und den Geist des Werks ausmacht, verloren gehen), sondern der Nachfolge für ein anderes Genie, welches dadurch zum Gefühl seiner eigenen Originalität aufgeweckt wird, Zwangsfreiheit von Regeln so in der Kunst auszuüben, daß diese dadurch selbst eine neue Regel bekommt, wodurch das Talent sich als musterhaft zeigt.” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, vol. 5 of Gesammelte Schriften, 2nd ed. (Akademie Ausgabe, 1913), 318. 33. See Elaine Sisman, “Pathos and the Pathétique: Rhetorical Stance in Beethoven’s Cminor Sonata, Op. 13,” in Beethoven Forum 3 (1995): 81–106, esp. 85, which references the first review of the Beethoven sonata that appeared in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1800. 34. Sisman, “Pathos and the Pathétique,” 89, 93. 35. Information in this paragraph is from an anonymous journalist who wrote on behalf of Voith Sulzer in that company’s commercial journal; see “Paper Culture: Ludwigslust Palace, Waste Paper Recycling of a Different Kind,” in Twogether [sic]: Paper Technology Journal 5 ([ca. 1997]): 72–77, www.voithpaper.com/media/vp_en_twogether_5.pdf. 36. Louis Massonneau, “Verzeichnis Sämtlicher Musikstücke, welche in denen Hof-Concerten, Kirchen etc aufgeführt worden sind von 1803,” transcribed as appendix 4 in Clemens Meyer, Geschichte der Mecklenburg-Schweriner Hofkapelle (Schwerin: Ludwig David, 1913), 273–323. 37. I am borrowing Charles Burney’s metaphor from his account of the orchestra of the Mannheim court, in Burney, Germany, 1:93. Burney’s metaphor conveyed his sense of the orchestra as powerful, large, and made up of soloists and composers rather than rank-andfile ensemble performers; the orchestra was, he wrote, “an army of generals, equally fit to plan a battle, as to fight it.” 38. Catherine Clément’s interpretation of opera as a context for female sacrifice was first published in 1979 and appeared in English as Opera, or, The Undoing of Women, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Susan McClary’s readings of the patriarchal, even misogynist narrative desires of both operatic and wordless instrumental music followed, in her landmark Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). On the “Beethoven and rape” controversy arising from some comments McClary made in 1987 in the Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter see the article on her work at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_McClary.

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39. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 300. 40. Cited from Johann Kaspar Lavater, Physiognomy; or, The Corresponding Analogy Between the Conformation of the Features and the Ruling Passions of the Mind: Being a Complete Epitome of the Original Work of J.  C. Lavater (London: William Tegg, 1867), 180. 41. “Es sind gegenwärtig volle 19 Jahren,—seit dem Tode das seeligen Capellmeisters Rosetti,—als ich von Ihr Herzogl. Durchlaucht den Befehl erhielt, mich bei Ausführung der Sings-Musicken am Clavier zu setzen. Auch ist es zu bekannt, welche richtige Kentniß Höchstdieselben von der Musick,—und von der Vollmacht, die nothwendig mit dem Geschäft eines DIRECTEURS am Clavier verbunden ist,—haben, als daß man glauben könnte, Ihr Herzogl. Durchlaucht hälten mich bloß als eine Figurante, oder so gut wie eine Null am Clavier gesetzt. Noch weniger läßt es sich nur denken: daß Ihr Herzogl. Durchlaucht eine unerwährende Behinderung meiner Pflicht—von Seiten das Concertmeisters—oder wohl gar eine öffentliche Prostitution von selbigem erdulden zu müßen— billigen würden? Bei Gelgenheit, da der Durchlauchtigste Erbprinz die Musick von Romberg (betitelt ‘die Glocke’ von Schiller) zu hören wünschten, ich mich auch—wie gewöhnlich—beeiferte, diese Musick nach allen Kräften, und mit einem richtigen Gefühl auszuführen, mußte ich sagen bei der Probe jener Musick von Massonneau öffentlich eine Inpertinanz hören. Bei der Ausführung blieb ich denoch meiner Pflicht getreu, und wollte eben bei einem gewißen DUETT,—welches bloß von 2 Hörner, und 2 Fagotten begleitet wird,—das gehörige TEMPO mit der Hand geben, als Massonneau (der Ehrfurcht vor dem gegenwärtigen Hohen Herzoglichen Personen sogar vergeßend)—sich nicht scheute, mich abermals öffentlich zu beleidigen, indem er mich mit dem Violin-Bogen auf den Arm schlug, und mich mit einer boshaften Miene drohte, das Tempo nicht zu geben! Nachdem ich das Glück genoßen habe, einem hohen Herzoglichen Durchlauchtigsten Hause schon seit vorigem Ostern, 38 Jahre zu dienen,—und dies gewiß nach allem meinen Kräften,—auch mir durch vieles Studium, die zu meinem Würkungskreis gehörigen Kentniße, und Kraft zur Ausübung erwerben habe,—so läßt es sich danken, daß ich mich von Massonneau nicht in meiner Pflicht behindert, noch weniger von ihm öffentlich prostituirt sehen möge. (Alle die mannigfaltigen Kränkungen, so ich immer erduldet habe, hier anzuführen, würde zu weitläuftig sein.) Können Ihr Herzogl. Durchlaucht es mir verdenken, wenn ich, nach dem eben angeführten Gründen, aus wahren Ehrgefühl, mich nicht wieder am Klavier setzen kann. Vielmehr bitte ich Höchstdieselben unterthänigst mich—bei Singe-Musicken—vom Klavier gnädigst zu dispensieren! Als eine hohe Gnade werde ich dies erkennen, und Ihre Herzogl. Durchlaucht mit meinem übrigen wenigen Talent—auf Höchste Herrschaften Befehl—in den gewöhnlichen Conzerten, oder bei einer Quartett-Musick—um desto freudiger aufwarten, je weniger ich durch Schikane gestöhrt, und dadurch an der Ruhe meines Lebens gewinnen werde! In der tröstenden Hoffnung einer gnädigen Erhörung meiner unterthänigsten Bitte, erstrebe ich in tiefster Ehrfurcht, als Ihr. Souverainen Herzogl. Durchlaucht unterthänigste Dienerinn Sophie Westenholz. Ludwigslust den 16 Sept. 1811.” Sophie Westenholz, letter of 16 September 1811 to Duke Friedrich Franz I (Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin, Großherzogliches Kabinett I, 2.26–1, Sachgruppe Kunst und Kunstgewerbe—Musiker, Nr. 10218 [verwitwete Kapellmeisterin Westenholz], item 15, 74–76).

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42. Anon., “Nachrichten: Wismar,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 40 (7 October 1811): 710. 43. Brüssow, “Eleonore Sophie Marie Westenholz, geb. Fritzscher,” in Neuer Nekrolog der Deutschen 16, no. 2 (1838): 343–44 (item 297). 6 . B E E T HOV E N H E R O I N E

Chapter 6 is a revised version of an article published in 19th-Century Music 30, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 97–132; I am grateful to the publisher for permission to reuse this material. 1. The Letters of Beethoven, ed. and trans. Emily Anderson, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 1:313 (letter no. 296, dated 10 February 1811); cited in Maynard Solomon, Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 210, 346nn21–22. Solomon identified the quotations as being from act 5, sc. 14, and act 5, sc. 2, respectively. 2. See, among others, Julie D. Prandi, Spirited Women Heroes: Major Female Characters in the Dramas of Goethe, Schiller and Kleist (New York: Peter Lang, 1983); and W. Daniel Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory: Political and Gender Cross(-Dress)ing in Goethe’s Egmont,” in Outing Goethe and His Age, ed. Alice A. Kuzniar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 125–46. 3. See Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), 23–25, 31, 36. 4. Other examples include Ferdinando Paer’s Leonora, ossia L’amore conjugale (1804) and Giovanni Mayr’s L’amor conjugale (1805). On these works see John A. Rice, Empress Marie Therese and Music at the Viennese Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 253–56. 5. Best known, for sure, but not the most easily understood. As Stephen Rumph and others have explored, the allegorical, political ideals espoused in Fidelio “float free of narrowly historical interpretations,” and it remains unclear whether the opera, and its eponymous, transvestite heroine, were understood by contemporary audiences as figures of revolution against, or restoration of, monarchy. See Stephen Rumph, “Allegory and Ethics in Beethoven’s Fidelio,” in Les Cahiers de la Société Québécoise 11, nos. 1–2 (March 2010): 47–60, esp. at 48. 6. [Friedrich Heinrich?] Jacobi, “Weiblicher Heroismus,” Schlesische Provinzialblätter 59 (1814): 165–70. See also Louis Noël, Die deutschen Heldinnen in den Kriegsjahren 1807– 1815 (Berlin: Julius Köppen, 1912); and Moritz Stern, Aus der Zeit der deutschen Befreiungskriege 1813–1815, 2 vols. (Berlin: Hausfreund, 1918–1938), 2:11–12. Stern reported the case of Luise Grasemus, a German-Jewish woman who enlisted in 1813, purportedly to make contact with her military husband. Distinguishing herself in battle, Grasemus received a Prussian state pension until her death around 1852. 7. In her often brilliant but error-strewn monograph Anatomy of Heroism (New York: Legas, 2000) Anna Makolkin proposed that “extraordinariness” is the universal meaning of the sign of the heroic. 8. See Wendy Beth Heller, Chastity, Heroism, and Allure: Women in the Opera of Seventeenth-Century Venice (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1995); David Gail, Female Heroism in the Pastoral (New York: Garland, 1991); and Lee R. Edwards, Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984).

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9. Letter of 12 October 1830, cited in Barthélémy Jobert, Delacroix (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 130. 10. See Lee Johnson, The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1:148. 11. I refer here to Robert Haven Schauffler, Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music (New York: Tudor, 1946), and the critical tropes contained therein of Beethoven the “emancipated emancipator” (364). 12. Cf. the significant discussion of Beethoven and androgyny in Stephen Rumph, Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), esp. ch. 7, “Androgynous Utopias.” Rumph’s focus is on the poetic and music-stylistic mixture of masculine and feminine topics in the Ninth Symphony and Wellingtons Sieg. 13. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1. 14. Ibid., 2. 15. Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801 (London: Scarlet Press, 1993), 90–91, with reference to Dugaw, Warrior Women; Randolph Trumbach, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, vol. 1 of Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): and Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989). 16. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), with reference to Donoghue, Passions between Women, 90. 17. Joseph Kerman, Alan Tyson, Maynard Solomon, and William Kinderman equate the epithet “heroic” with the new path that Czerny told us Beethoven spoke of around 1803. See Joseph Kerman, The Beethoven Quartets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 90–92; Alan Tyson, “Beethoven’s Heroic Phase,” Musical Times 110 (1969): 139–41; Maynard Solomon, Beethoven (London: Cassell, 1978), 124; and William Kinderman, Beethoven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 11. Solomon differs from Kerman and Tyson in the extent to which he lends a quasi-libidinal character to what he terms Beethoven’s “heroic impulse” (203). The term “impulse” implies a drive in the psychoanalytic sense, and this is born out by Solomon’s assertion that the heroic builds up and is then released in the course of Beethoven’s career. Specifically, Solomon writes that Beethoven’s “heroic impulse” entered “a state of quiescence following each of its major manifestations” (203). Freud’s comments on the waxing and waning of the libido surely influenced Solomon’s formulations. 18. Hannelore Schlaffer, Klassik und Romantik, 1770–1830 (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1984), 125–31. 19. Discussed in Schlaffer, Klassik und Romantik, 125; and Walter Schafarschik, Friedrich Schiller, Literaturwissen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1999), 125–34. 20. “Schon als Kronprinz kam Ludwig I. 1807 auf die Idee, für alle großen Deutschen einen Ehrentempel zu errichten, und die ersten Büsten wurden schon in den Jahren 1807 bis 1812 erstellt.” See http://de.metapedia.org/wiki/Walhalla. See also Schlaffer, Klassik und Romantik, 125–31. Reviewing images of the artist from the late Enlightenment, Schlaffer distinguished the Volk-Dichter, who sings to and of the people, from the solitary genius, the poet as hero (126).

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21. See Elizabeth E. Bauer, Wie Beethoven auf den Sockel kam: Die Entstehung eines musikalischen Mythos (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1992); and Hans H. Eggebrecht, Zur Geschichte der Beethoven Rezeption: Beethoven 1970 (Mainz: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1972). 22. Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). “Overcoming” is Sanna Pederson’s gloss on Burnham’s conception of the heroic. See her “Beethoven and Masculinity” in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 313–31, esp. 324. Burnham himself speaks of struggle and triumph (see Beethoven Hero, xiv). Compare Eggebrecht, Zur Geschichte der Beethoven Rezeption, and Robin Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the Composer’s Lifetime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 23. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 187n1, citing Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1, The Poetry of Desire, 1749–1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 7. 24. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, xviii. 25. Pederson, “Beethoven and Masculinity,” 326, 325. 26. For a study of this exchange in Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata see one of the texts through which Pederson frames her argument, Lawrence Kramer, After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 171–72. The sections on the Kreutzer are collected as “Tolstoy’s Beethoven, Beethoven’s Tolstoy: The Kreutzer Sonata,” in Lawrence Kramer, Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 27. The technique of thematic disintegration is noted in Solomon, Beethoven, 203–4. 28. Lawrence Kramer, “The Strange Case of Beethoven’s Coriolan: Romantic Aesthetics, Modern Subjectivity, and the Cult of Shakespeare,” Musical Quarterly 79, no. 2 (1995): 256–80, esp. 272, 274; repr. in Kramer, Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response. 29. Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Potts argues that before 1789 David presented images of “heroic austerity” in Le Serment des Horaces (Oath of the Horatii), La Mort de Socrate (Death of Socrates), and Les Licteurs rapportent à Brutus les corps de ses fils (The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons), involving draped male figures painted in a “manly roman style” (224). He argues for a more complex gendering of the heroic male body in David after 1789, one that comes (in L’intervention des Sabines [The Intervention of the Sabine Women]) and La Mort du jeune Bara [The Death of Young Bara]) to rest on the “damaged body,” the “pathos of a vulnerable yet indomitable subject facing annihilation” (234). After 1789 David, inspired by Winckelmann, turned to nude Greek males who are “more sensuously graceful and beautiful” and incite erotic desire (234). 30. Joseph Kerman, Alan Tyson, and Scott Burnham, “Beethoven, Ludwig van,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd ed. (New York: Grove, 2001), 3:73–140, esp. 98. 31. Barry Cooper, Beethoven, The Master Musicians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 4. 32. Michael Broyles, Beethoven: The Emergence and Evolution of the Heroic Style (New York: Excelsior, 1987), 145. 33. Romain Rolland, Beethoven the Creator, trans. Ernest Newman (1929; repr., New York: Dover, 1964), 3–4.

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34. Lewis Lockwood, “Beethoven, Florestan, and the Varieties of Heroism,” in Beethoven and His World, 27–43, esp. 43. 35. H. B., A Letter concerning the Glory and Excellency of the peaceable state of the Kingdom of the Messiah; wherein the nature of warlike heroism, and that of Christian fortitude, are distinguished (London: Luke Hinde, 1755). The editor’s preface is signed “J. B.” In the British Library online catalogue “J. B.” is identified as Joseph Besse. It is possible that Besse, or a relative, was the author of the Letter and not just of its “editorial” preface. 36. Ibid., i, iv. 37. Such an investigation might draw on Richard Kramer’s discussion of the song “Resignation” (WoO 149, 1817) in his “Lisch aus, mein Licht: Song, Fugue, and the Symptoms of a Late Style,” Beethoven Forum 7, ed. Mark Evan Bonds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 67–88. In the conclusion to this richly suggestive chapter Kramer links resignation to late-style topics of “questioning and seeking” and “the exhaustion of Art itself ” (81). 38. John Coleman Adams, Christian Types of Heroism (Boston: Universalist Publishing House, 1891), 7, 9–10. 39. Cited from Beethoven: Impressions of Contemporaries, ed. Oscar George Theodore Sonneck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 81. 40. On the title of Symphony No. 3 see Solomon, Beethoven, 133. 41. Hans-Günther Klein, “Beethoven’s Music for the Stage and Various Other Works,” liner notes for Beethoven, Orchestral Works: Music for the Stage, vol. 3 of Complete Beethoven Edition (Hamburg: Deutsche Grammophon, 1997), 32–33. 42. Britannia appeared as early as a.d. 119 on a Roman coin as an image of English capture by Rome; she was revived in the seventeenth century for English coinage. See Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 45–46. On Marianne see xx, 27, 267–68, 270. 43. On the music of Beethoven’s funeral see Christopher H. Gibbs, “Performances of Grief: Vienna’s Responses to the Death of Beethoven,” in Beethoven and His World, 227–85. 44. “Liberty is not represented as a woman, from the colossus in New York to the ubiquitous Marianne, figure of the French Republic, because women were or are free. In the nineteenth century, when so many of these images were made and widely disseminated, the opposite was conspicuously the case. . . . Often the recognition of a difference between the symbolic order, inhabited by ideal, allegorical figures, and the actual order, of judges, statesmen, soldiers, philosophers, inventors, depends on the unlikelihood of women practising the concepts they represent.” Warner, Monuments and Maidens, xix–xx. 45. Translation, slightly altered, from Lionel Salter’s texts and translations in Klein, “Beethoven’s Music for the Stage and Various Other Works,” 165. 46. Heather Hadlock, “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000): 507–42. 47. However, writers tend to portray this as a distinctive feature of the particular periods of their research. John M. Steadman, Milton and the Paradoxes of Renaissance Heroism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), noted the repugnance of Renaissance Stoics and Neoplatonists at the violence detailed in Homer’s epics and the turn to sanitized allegorical readings of battle. A similar notion of moral progress informs the attempts of Christian theologians to figure love and forgiveness as the essence of heroism, Christ as the ultimate hero: see Makolin, Anatomy of Heroism, 34. In a musical context Leon Plantinga has noted late twentieth-century skepticism over heirloom heroes from the era of imperial

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conquest and exploration; see his Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance (New York: Norton, 1999), 8. 48. For further biographical information on Prohaska see Freia Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper, 380–92, esp. 382. Hoffmann’s documentary study forms the basis of my interpretations. 49. Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper, 385, 386. 50. Ibid., 386. 51. Ibid., 387–88. 52. Ibid., 389. 53. Beethoven, Beethovens Werke, series 9, vol. 7, Musik zu Egmont und andere Schauspielmusiken, ed. Helmut Hell (Munich: G. Henle, 1998). The overture to Egmont was published by Breitkopf und Härtel in 1811, the remaining incidental music in 1812. Goethe’s Egmont had been first published in 1788 and is today available in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, ed. Erich Trunz, vol. 4, Dramatische Dichtungen II (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1982), 370–454. An English translation is available in Goethe, The Collected Works, vol. 7, Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, ed. Cyrus Hamlin and Frank Ryder, trans. Michael Hamburger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 83–151. 54. Solomon, Beethoven, 222–30. 55. See Nicholas Cook, “The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813–14,” 19th-Century Music 27 (2003): 3–24. 56. Solomon, Beethoven, 39. 57. Prandi, Spirited Women Heroes, 2. 58. Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” 144. 59. Prandi does not read or even invoke Kant in this way, but my reading is inspired by her account of heroines in German drama. In Lewis White Beck’s translation the relevant passage from Kant reads: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your reason!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.” Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 3–10, esp. 3. 60. Kinderman, Beethoven, 147. 61. Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” 136, stresses Egmont’s passivity. My reading differs from Wilson’s in the consideration of music and specifically female heroism, which lead to a different interpretation of the dungeon scene. 62. Egmont, in Goethe, Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, 133. 63. Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” 128–29, citing the passage in Egmont in the translation in Goethe, Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, 119. 64. See Ernst Oster, “The Dramatic Character of the Egmont Overture,” Musicology 2 (1949): 269–85, repr. in Aspects of Schenkerian Theory, ed. David Beach (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 209–22; and Donald Francis Tovey, “Overture to Egmont, Op. 84,” in Essays in Musical Analysis, vol. 4, Illustrative Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937; 1972), 45–47. 65. Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” 136.

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66. On that theme (though not on Egmont) see Heinz Schlaffer, Der Bürger als Held: Sozialgeschichtliche Auflösungen literarischer Widersprüche (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). Schlaffer establishes a paradox between the heroism depicted in the literature of classical antiquity and the private interest of the eighteenth-century bourgeois sphere. He notes that the age of revolution triggered memories of a classical heroic age and inspired a discourse of the transformation of identity from bourgeois to citizen (128). The private socialization of art inspired corrective fantasies of antique poetry as being equivalent with antique heroism (135). 67. This caution was a trope of the revolutionary period. In her account of Eleonore Prohaska, Freia Hoffmann notes the ambivalence that runs through Friedrich Rückert’s poem “Auf das Mädchen aus Potsdam, Prohaska” (1813), in which the narrator confesses, “I would be ashamed, to call myself a man, / If I couldn’t wield the sword / And wanted women to take it up / So that they could wield it [instead]!” Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper, 390. 68. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 114. 69. Egmont, in Goethe, Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, 95. 70. Ibid., 109. See also Irmgard Wagener, ed., Erläuterungen und Dokumente: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Egmont” (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974), 18, cited in Wilson, “Amazon, Agitator, Allegory,” 131. 71. Egmont, in Goethe, Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, 98. 72. For an overview of this issue see Lisa Fishman, “ ‘To Tear the Fetter of Every Other Art’: Early Romantic Criticism and the Fantasy of Emancipation,” 19th-Century Music 25 (2001): 75–86. 73. Originally published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 15 (21 July 1813): 473–81. An English translation of the review is available in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: “Kreisleriana,” “The Poet and the Composer,” Music Criticism, ed. David Charlton, trans. Martyn Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 341–50, esp. 346. 74. Catriona MacLeod, “Pedagogy and Androgyny in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” 389–426. 75. Goethe, “Frauenrollen auf dem römischen Theater durch Männer gespielt” (1788), cited in MacLeod, “Pedagogy and Androgyny,” 395. 76. MacLeod, “Pedagogy and Androgyny in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” 395. 77. The literature is extensive. A useful starting point is Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 78. An English translation of Goethe’s unfinished treatise “Über den Dilettantismus” (1799; translated as “On Dilettantism”), a collaboration with Schiller, is available in Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, 213–16. 79. Charlton, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, 351. 80. Ibid., 348. 81. Compare Annie Janeiro Randall, “Music in Weimar circa 1780: Decentering Text, Decentering Goethe,” in Unwrapping Goethe’s Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge, ed. Burkhard Henke, Susanne Kord, and Simon Richter (London: Camden House, 2000), 97–145. 82. On Florestan’s vision of Leonore see Paul Robinson, Ludwig van Beethoven: Fidelio, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–17.

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83. Compare the performance with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Beethoven, Orchestral Works: Music for the Stage, vol. 3 of Complete Beethoven Edition. In this recording Klärchen’s pantomime is replaced with a monologue in which Egmont describes Klärchen’s gestures. This concert version was not the work of Goethe and/or Beethoven and imparts an utterly misleading logocentrism to the otherwise musicovisual scene. 84. For more on figures of woman, the feminine, and the musical ideal in this period see Lars Franke, Music as Daemonic Voice in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century German Culture (PhD diss., University of Southampton, U.K., 2005). 85. Klärchen’s appearance in the dungeon scene may refer to the classical Greek goddess of Victory, Nike, who became the Roman goddess Victoria. Warner, in Monuments and Maidens, 128, has noted that in Athenian tradition Nike was not just the figure of Victory or its bringer but Victory itself (128); this substantiates my suggestion above that Klärchen achieves synonymity with Music and ultimately with the Victory Symphony at the end of the play. It is relevant that Nike grants victory not only to military heroes and athletes but also to musicians, poets, and dramatists. A relationship between Nike and Klärchen/Liberty in Egmont is further evident in Liberty’s hovering above the stage in the final dungeon scene. As Warner observed (129), “Nike acts above all as Athena’s emanation, enhancing the goddess’s might and stature by her hovering, often discreet, but always graceful presence.” 86. For an introduction to musical idealism see Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music; Charlton, “Hoffmann as a Writer on Music,” 1–20; Andrew Bowie, “German Idealism and the Arts,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 239–57; and Mark Evan Bonds, “Idealism and the Aesthetics of Instrumental Music at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50, nos. 2–3 (1997): 387–420. 87. Cook, “The Other Beethoven,” 11–12, 23–24. 88. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 129. Burnham also speaks of “the most garish treatment imaginable” of the pitch A in an F-major chord. 89. Charlton, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings, 350. 90. Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophy of Music, Fragments and Texts, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 78. 91. Ibid., 79. 92. Literature on the issue of motivic and tonal organicism in the Victory Symphony is reviewed in Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 126–42, with particular reference to Oster, “The Dramatic Character of the Egmont Overture,” 209–22, and Martha Calhoun, “Music as Subversive Text: Beethoven, Goethe, and the Overture to Egmont,” Mosaic 20 (1987): 43–56. 93. Burnham, Beethoven Hero, 117. 94. Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music, 10. C O N C LU S I O N

1. There is truth in that reading, even if the exclusion of women from Schiller’s clumsy Enlightenment idyll is exaggerated by the complaints against that exclusivity. Beethoven announces the ideal of fraternity in a four-part choir of male and female voices, a texture that complicates the premise of a purely male utopia. Even Schiller’s text mixes its messages,

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personifying joy in an allegory of the female form: “Joy, beautiful spark of the gods / Daughter of Elysium, / We enter, drunk with fire, / Heavenly one, your sanctuary!” Cf. Judith Priver, “Revolution, Romanticism, Restoration,” in A History of Women’s Writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, ed. Jo Catling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 68–87, esp. 69. 2. See Nicholaus Saul, “Aesthetic Humanism,” in The Cambridge History of German Literature, ed. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 202–71, esp. 223. 3. The treatise remained unfinished and unpublished, and Schiller went on to cultivate female contributions to his journal Die Horen. See Richard Hibbitt, Dilettantism and Its Values, chs. 1–2; and Janet Besserer Holmgren, The Women Writers in Schiller’s Horen. 4. Schiller’s emphasis in his poem “Würde der Frauen” on the fundamental differences between men and women is cited approvingly in Fidelio 2, no. 2 (Summer 1993), www.schil lerinstitute.org: “Würde der Frauen” “indicts the ideology of modern feminism and ‘gay rights,’ which flattens the moral and emotional implications of the biological differences between sexes.” 5. Alexander von Humboldt, “Ueber den Geschlechtsunterschied und dessen Einfluß auf die organische Natur,” Die Horen 1, no. 2 (1795): 99–132. 6. Schiller’s “Würde der Frauen” was initially published with seventeen stanzas in the Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1796. The version translated here in table 8 follows Schiller’s revised, final thoughts, first published in the Gedichte von Friedrich Schiller, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Siegfried Lebrecht Crusius, 1800). Both versions of the poem are available in the Nationalausgabe of Schillers Werke. The first version appears in Gedichte, vol. 2, pt. 1, ed. Norbert Oellers (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1983), 240–43, and the revised version in Gedichte, vol. 2, pt. 2a, ed. Georg Kurscheidt and Norbert Oellers (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1991), 205–6. 7. “Ah! Richer than he, though his soul reigneth o’er / The mighty dominion of Genius and Lore, / And the infinite Circle of Song.” Friedrich Schiller, The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, trans. Edward Bulwer Lytton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1844), 2:35. 8. Friedrich Schiller, ed., Musenalmanach auf das Jahr 1796 (Neustrelitz: Michaelis, 1796), 186–92. 9. Cf. Gretchen Wheelock, “Schwarze Gredel and the Engendered Minor Mode in Mozart’s Operas,” in Musicology and Difference, ed. Ruth Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 201–21. 10. Christian Gottfried Körner, letter to Schiller, 28 January 1796, cited in Schillers Werke, vol. 2, Gedichte: Anmerkungen, ed. Georg Kurscheidt and Norbert Oellers (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1993), pt. 2b, 367. 11. Amalia Thierry, Würde der Frauen (Hamburg: C. Lau, n.d.), Die Erwartung (Offenbach am Main: J. André, n.d.), and Die Ideale (Hamburg: J. A. Böhme, n.d.). The only contemporary reference I could locate to this composer is in Johann Georg Meusel, Teutsches Künstlerlexicon oder Verzeichniss der jetztlebenden Teutschen Künstler, 2nd rev. ed., 3 vols. (Lemgo: Meyer, 1808–1814), 2:430. However, the entry “Thierry (A.)” in this lexicon is essentially empty (“Tonkünstler zu . . . : geb. Zu . . .”), indicating that the compiler had no information about her.

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Bi blio graphy

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Note: Where works were first published anonymously, the author’s name is set in editorial brackets, even when their authorship is now well known. Where authorship remains unknown, the work is alphabetized as by “Anon.” Ackermann, Jacob Fidelis. Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Mannes vom Weibe. Trans. Joseph Wenzel. Coblenz: Johann Kaspar Huber, 1788. Adelung, Johann Christoph. Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuchs der hochdeutschen Mundart. 5 vols. Leipzig: B. C. Breitkopf, 1774–1786. Albrecht, Johann L. Gründliche Einleitung in die Anfangslehren der Tonkunst. Langensalza: J. C. Martini, 1761. Albrechtsberger, Johann G. Gründliche Anweisung zur Composition. Leipzig: J. G. I. Breitkopf, 1790. Alexander, William. History of Women: From the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time. 2 vols. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1779. Amarenthes. Nutzbares, galantes und curiöses Frauenzimmer-Lexicon, worinnen . . . alles dasjenige, was einem Frauenzimmer vorkommen kann und ihm nöthig zu wissen . . . erkläret zu finden. Leipzig: J. L. Gleditsch und Sohn, 1715. Anon. “Nachrichten: Wismar.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 40 (7 October 1818): 708–11. ———. “Ueber den Zustand der Musik in Mecklenburg.” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 46 (17 November 1819): 776–81. ———. Unsigned review of Opuses 1 and 2, by Sophie Westenholz. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 31 (30 April 1806): 495–96. ———. Unsigned review of Sonate à quatre mains pour le pianoforte, by Sophie Westenholz. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 40 (2 July 1806): 640. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. London: Thomas Egerton, 1814. ———. Pride and Prejudice. London: Thomas Egerton, 1813. 301

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[Austen, Jane]. Sense and Sensibility. London: Thomas Egerton, 1811. B[esse?]., H. A Letter concerning the Glory and Excellency of the peaceable state of the Kingdom of the Messiah; wherein the nature of warlike heroism, and that of Christian fortitude, are distinguished. Ed. Joseph Besse. London: Luke Hinde, 1755. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel. “Autobiography.” In Autobiography; Verzeichnis des musikalischen Nachlasses des verstorbenen Capellmeisters Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. 1790. Facs. reprint, ed. William S. Newman. Buren: Frits Knuf, 1991. ———. The Letters of C. P. E. Bach. Ed. and trans. Stephen L. Clark. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. ———. Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. 1753–1762. Facs. reprint, ed. Wolfgang Horn. 2 vols. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994. Bach, Johann Sebastian. Clavier-Übung [Part 1, BWV 825]. Leipzig, 1726. Beethoven, Ludwig van. The Letters of Beethoven. Ed. and trans. Emily Anderson. 3 vols. London: Macmillan, 1961. Bennett, John. Letters to a Young Lady, on a Variety of Useful and Interesting Subjects Calculated to Improve the Heart. Warington, 1789. Bicknell, John [Joel Collier, pseud.]. Musical Travels Through England. London: G. Kearsley, 1774. Bossier Chambor, W. de la. “Von der Achtung und Wertschätzung, welche die alten Teutschen für die Weiber ihrer Nation hatten.” Magazin für die Philosophie und ihre Geschichte 7 (1789): 94–103. [Brandes, Johann Christian]. “Biographie der verstorbenen Sängerin und Schauspielerin Minna Brandes.” Annalen des Theaters 3 (1789): 33–51. Brandes, Johann Christian. Meine Lebensgeschichte. 3 vols. Berlin: Friedrich Maurer, 1799–1800. Brown, John. A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music. Reprint (of 1772 edition). New York: Garland, 1971. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Ed. Adam Philips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Burney, Charles. Carl Burney’s der Musik Doctors Tagebuch seiner musikalischen Reisen. Ed. and trans. Christoph Daniel Ebeling. 3 vols. Hamburg: Bode, 1772–1773. ———. The Cunning-Man: A Musical Entertainment, in Two Acts. London: T. Becket, 1766. ———. A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, to which Is Prefixed, a Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients. 4 vols. London, 1776–1789. ———. The Present State of Music in France and Italy, or, The Journal of a Tour through those Countries, undertaken to Collect Materials for a General History of Music. London: T. Becket, 1771. ———. The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, or, The Journal of a Tour through those Countries, undertaken to Collect Materials for a General History of Music. 2 vols. London: T. Becket, 1773. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Thomas Hoby. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1928. Caughie, John, ed. Theories of Authorship: A Reader. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

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Index

accomplishment, female musical, xviii, xx, 20–21, 27–28, 34, 36, 180, 261n48; aestheticization of the body in, 62, 68, 83; containing function of, 50, 59–60; and courtship, 50, 63–64; as education, 59–60; elevates practitioner above servants, 60; genres employed in, 58, 70, 81; iconography of, 36–37, 70–71; idea of easiness in, 21, 52–57; motif of seduction in, 66; naturalness valued in, 48, 68; religious aspect of, 58; as virtuous seclusion, 64, 71–73, 121 Ackermann, Jacob Fidelis, 5, 9, 61, 236 Adorno, Theodor, 203, 230 Alexander, William, 30 Alxinger, Johann Baptist von, 165 Amazons, 6, 8, 44, 45, 47, 101, 207, 223 androgyny, xx, 6, 17, 25, 41, 86, 191, 200, 202, 207, 215, 232 Anna Amalia of Weimar, 10, 22, 71, 88, 123, 126, 128, 155. Works: Erwin und Elmire, 124, 281n16; Der Jahrmarktsfest zum Plundersweilern, 124; Die Zigeuner, 125 Anna Amalie of Prussia, 72, 121, 277n108 Apollo, 35, 36, 38, 39, 47, 49, 259n39 Apollo Belvedere, 17, 237 Ariès, Philippe, 105 Austen, Jane, xxi, 48–49, 50, 63–64, 261n48 authorship, xix–xx, 3, 6, 28, 42–43, 58, 73, 91, 126, 267n16, 277n111; allegory of, 191–92; ambivalence about female, 85–87, 114–15, 267n17; as

aspect of education, 21, 101; and death, 22, 85–86, 93–94, 115, 121–22; dissemination of knowledge about, 101; embedded in family life, 100; gendered hierarchies of, 156, 159, 178–79, 181, 215, 236; and idea of transcendence, 194, 232; invisible, 23, 58, 207, 224; and money, 116; naturalness of, 97–98, 126, 154; and printing technology, 101 Bach, Anna Magdalena, 57–58, 68, 259n28 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 54, 56, 70, 88, 92, 93, 107, 118, 119, 161–62, 167, 185; approach to rondo, 174; catalogue of his estate, 95; figured-bass techniques, 99–100. WORKS: free fantasia, H. 300/536, 111; free fantasia, H. 75, 182; Heilig, H. 778, 119; keyboard collections for connoisseurs and amateurs, 102; Sonates à l’usage des dames, 57; Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen, 82, 182 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 11, 18, 50, 58, 67, 91, 259n28 Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann, 57 Baggesen, Jens, 75 Barthes, Roland, 63, 71, 118 Batteux, Charles, 60 beautiful, as aesthetic category, 10, 41, 82, 285n68; as feminine, 15, 16, 22, 35, 49, 82–85, 92, 119, 121, 157, 234 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 81–82, 160, 188; heroic style of, 194–96, 210–11, 277–31, 293n17;

321

322

Index

Beethoven, Ludwig van (continued) identification with Joan of Arc, xvii, 190, 193; and passivity, 199–200, 205. WORKS: Coriolan, 196; Egmont, 24–26, 203–32; Fidelio, 191, 197–99, 202, 232; Der glorreiche Augenblick, 230; Leonore Prohaska, 191, 201–3; Sonata op. 13, 182; Sonata op. 26, 200; Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), 197, 200; Symphony No. 9, 233; Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria, 230 Benda, Felicitas, 91, 160 Benda, Friedrich Ludwig, 91 Benda, Georg: Ariadne auf Naxos, 88; Der Jahrmarkt, 91 Berquin, Arnaud, 75 Bicknell, John, 32–33 Bildung, 16, 59, 60, 196 Billington, Elizabeth, 29, 268n28 Blumauer, Johann Aloys, 165 Bordoni, Faustina, 42, 44, 255n53, 256n61 Bothwell, Anne, 75 Brandenstein, Caroline von, 101 Brandes, Charlotte “Minna,” xix, 21–22, 84–122, 158, 237, 267n25; Seufzer, 105–8; Das Traumbild, 108–11 Brandes, Esther Charlotte (née Koch), 87–88, 94 Brandes, Johann Christian, 21–22, 86–87, 88, 108, 122, 142, 237; biography of Minna Brandes, 91–94; Memoirs, 111–18 breastfeeding, 76–80. See also lullaby Brentano, Bettina, 190 Bretzner, Christoph F., 88–89, 268n27 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 84–85, 94 Brun, Friederike, 75 Burke, Edmund, 82 Burmann, Gottlob Wilhelm, 57, 75 Burney, Charles, 27–47; on Berlin, 19, 35, 91, 188; accords genius to women, 27–28; indexical theory employed by, 29–31; influenced by David Hume, 20, 31, 33–34; influence on J. F. Reichardt, 19; on Maria Antonia Walpurgis, 42–44; on Marianne Martinez, 38–42, 162; parodied by John Bicknell, 32–33; and Rousseau, 251n3; on Getrud Schmeling, 35; translated into German, 88, 254n42 Büsch, Margaretha Augusta, 88 Campe, Johann Heinrich, 75, 76–77, Cannabich, Rosa, 15, 17, 19 cantata, 40, 68–70, 119, 187 Carter, Angela, 66 Claudius, Matthias, 75, 78, 165, 278n9

Clery, Emma, xxi, 30–31, 252n10 Collier, Joel. See Bicknell, John composer, female: as a category in music historical writing, xviii–xix, 23, 158, 188; championing of, 6, 101; chaperoning of, 6, 101, 169; and charity, 95, 271n59; as living muse, 38–47, 241; as natural, 22–23, 154–55; as plagiarist, 178, 181, 290n31; prefatory rhetoric concerning, 97–98, 116, 169; and prostitution, 112, 115, 118, 189; review and appraisal of, 23, 159, 168, 174–82; and self-improvement, 101 concerto, 35, 70–71, 82, 161, 171, 182 containment hypothesis, xvii, xx, 20–21, 49, 58–59, 62, 67, 80, 85, 118, 235–36, 241 Cramer, Carl Friedrich, 23, 159, 258n9; review of Sophie Westenholz, 161–63 cross-dressing. See androgyny Dahlhaus, Carl, 98, 141, 232 David, Jacques-Louis, 196, 294n24 death: and C. P. E. Bach, 270n48, 273n81; and brides, 85, 128; in Egmont (Beethoven), 25, 207–8, 223; in Elective Affinities (Goethe), 85; experienced as financial loss, 116, 118; in Die Fischerin (Schröter), 23, 130–31; and Marianne Gluck, 281n17; of Christel von Laßberg, 130; in the lieder of Minna Brandes, 105–111; and memorials, 21, 92, 94, 119, 156, 191, 200; occasioning female authorship, 84–86, 92–93, 155, 160; as perfecting beautiful women, 22, 84–85; as present in life, 105, 157; and Juliane Reichardt, 120–21; in Volkslieder (Herder), 131–32; in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Goethe), 86 Delacroix, Eugène, 192–93, 202; Liberty Leading the People, 192fig. despotism: in Berlin, 35; and garden style, 153; reform of, 4, 7, 33, 35, 44–45, 188, 198, 207 Diderot, Denis, 54, 248n15 Doyle, Patrick, “Softly, softly,” 48 Dreßler, Ernst Christoph, 54, 56; “Die Zufriedenheit,” 64–66, 76 Eagleton, Terry, 63 Ebeling, Christoph Daniel, 88, 254n42 Ebers, Karl Friedrich, 54, 56 effeminacy, 11, 20, 51, 199 Eger, Elizabeth, xxi, 253n35 Egmont (Beethoven), 24–26, 203–32 Ehrmann, Marianne, 73 Eichner, Maria Adelheid, 102, 273n78 Empfindsamkeit. See sensibility

Index Englishness, purported Saxon origin of, 42, 43 Enlightenment: critical temper of, 19, 33; emotional refinement sought in, 99; Habermas on, 52; historiography of, 4, 29–30; hostility towards educated women in, 60, 156, 187; ideal of female equality in, 205; idea of female creative superiority in, 2, 34, 236; idea of self-improvement in, 59, 100; Immanuel Kant’s definition of, 122, 205; twentiethcentury critiques of, 7–8, 230 “Erlkönig” (Goethe/Schröter), 126–27, 128, 129, 138–39 Evers, Joachim Lorenz, 164 Eximeno, Antonio, xxi, 45–47 femininity, xviii, xx, 49, 201; as aesthetic category, 19, 83, 85; and authorship, 26; as commodity, 73; historical development of, 51; influence of courtly manners on, 21, 261n48; as moral insurance policy, 61; perfected by death, 85; as performative, 52; as sign of leisure, 51–52, 62; as sign of musical modernity, 32; as sign of status, 60, 202 Fidelio (Beethoven), 191, 197–99, 202, 232 Field, John, 241 Forkel, Johann Nicolaus, 186; his concept of manly German music, 10–11; fondness for lists, 13; musicological bias towards, 11–12; significance of institutions to, 16 Foucault, Michel, 8, 60, 94, 105, 179 Frederick the Great, 17, 35, 50, 72, 87, 91 galanterie, 56, 58, 59, 263n69 gallantry, 4, 13, 19, 33, 49, 50, 62, 84, 98, 168, 174 garden art, 22, 95, 97, 108, 121, 130; as a context for Singspiel, 125–26, 134; and the ephemeral, 23; Hirschfeld as theorist of, 134, 137, 153; and memorials, 126, 130; nocturnal illumination of, 141; and the picturesque, 95–96, 137; political metaphor in, 153; and vegetable genius, 154 genius: accorded women, 19, 27, 28, 39, 42, 96, 98, 254n48; denied women, 61, 81, 178; original, 23, 28, 119, 154, 181–82; vegetable, 23, 154–55 Gerber, Ernst Ludwig, 93, 100, 160–61, 254n42 German music, the idea of, 9–13, 19, 159, 168 glass harmonica, 161, 163, 167, 201, 202, 287n16 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 40, 175, 237, 281n17 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1–2, 4, 22; on female musical accomplishment, 63, 64; idea of the eternal feminine, 198, 266n3;

323

involvement with Herder’s Volkslieder, 23, 127, 131; preference for J. F. Reichardt’s settings of his poetry, 18, 22. WORKS: Von Deutsche Art und Kunst, 154; Egmont, 24–25, 203–7; Elective Affinities, 64, 85–85; Erwin und Elmire, 124; Die Fischerin, 126–32, 134–37, 141, 155; Frauenrollen auf dem römischen Theater durch Männer gespielt, 215; Götz von Berlichingen, 205; Iphigenia auf Tauris, 128; Der Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern, 124–25; Miedings Tod, 156–57; Die natürliche Tochter, 205; Torquato Tasso, 194; treatise on dilettantism, 233; Werther, 1, 4; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 86, 215 Goethezeit, as a problematic concept, 195, 280–81n16 Gramit, David, 9–10 Gräser, Johann Christian Gottfried, 54, 57 Grétry, Lucile, 97 Habermas, Jürgen, 9, 52, Hamburg: Felicitas Benda in, 91; as a centre of pedagogic theory, 76; importance of keyboard music in, 102. See also Bach, C. P. E.; Brandes, Charlotte “Minna” Reichardt, J. F.; Reichardt, Juliane; Reichardt, Louise Handel, George Frideric, 43–44, 50 Hasse, Johann Adolf, 40, 42, 43, 91, 255n60 Haydn, Joseph, 39, 88, 95, 102, 119, 170; attic lodgings of, 254n43; The Creation, 161; enlivened adagios with rapid movement, 175; owned copy of the Nachlass of Charlotte “Minna” Brandes, 267n25; performed by Sophie Westenholz, 161, 167, 168, 189 Herder, Caroline, 128, 280n15 Herder, Johann Gottfried: concept of “Volk,” 281–82n20; review of The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, 2; set by J. F. Reichardt, 74, 75; set by Corona Schröter, 129, 131, 155; Volkslieder, 23, 98, 131–34, 153–54 Hermes, Johann Timotheus, 166 heroism, 1, 11, 25, 26, 188, 236; Beethoven’s representations of, 196–99, 200–202, 207–14, 218, 223, 231; in Beethoven studies, 82, 190, 195; and Christianity, 199–200; in late Enlightenment, 191–95, 205 Hiller, Johann Adam, 11, 22, 58, 59, 99, 128, 139 Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von, 73, 205 Hirschfeld, Christian Cay Lorenz, 125, 134, 136–37, 153 Hönicke, Johann Friedrich, 21, 86, 92, 95–118

324

Index

Humboldt, Alexander von, 205 Hume, David, 20, 31–34 Jacobi, Johann Georg, 75, 125, 133, 259n21 Joan of Arc: Beethoven’s identification with, xvii, 190–94 Jones, Vivien, 66–67 Kallberg, Jeffrey, 81 Kant, Immanuel: on beauty, 157, 285n68; on Enlightenment, 205; on genius, 182 Karsch, Anna Louisa, 28 Kauffman, Angelica, 16, 37 Koch, Heinrich Christoph: on dance songs, 137; on masculine music, 70; on the siciliano, 138; on the term abendteuerlich, 139 Koch, Heinrich Gottfried, 87 Körner, Christian Gottfried, criticism of J. F. Reichardt as composer, 237 Kosegarten, Ludwig Gotthard, 165, 166 Kozeluch, Leopold, 181, 290n31 Kramer, Lawrence, xvi, xxi, 196 Kraus, Georg Melchior, 125, 126, 130, 131fig., 135, 136fig., 137 La Roche, Sophie von, 1–4, 5 Laßberg, Christel von, 130 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, vii, 187 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 87, 113. WORKS: Minna von Barnhelm, 87; Miss Sarah Simpson, 205 lied: composition of restores poetry to voice, 40, 133; and female authorship, 73, 102, 107; and female domestic performance, 50, 64–65; as limiting, 211; stylistic variety within, 138, 169, 283n39; as swansong, 120. See also volkslied living muse, xx, 15; and Charlotte “Minna” Brandes, 86; in costume drama, 48; defined, 19; as idealized domestic musician, 83; and Maria Antonia Walpurgis, 42–47; and Marianne Martinez, 41; provenance of the term, 36; in Schiller’s Musenalmanach, 237; Getrud Schmeling insufficiently polished to be a, 35; and Corona Schröter, 128, 156–58; and Josiah Wedgewood’s jasper ware, 38 lullaby, 48, 74–81, 216 luxury, 4, 20, 31–32, 36, 38, 49, 58, 71, 99 MacLeod, Catriona, 86, 215 manliness: lacks refinement, 15; loss of in contemporary music, 10–11, 32–33; in musical performance, 162, 188; musical

representation of, 237; prized in civic humanism, 31; in women, 202 Mara, Gertrud Elisabeth (née Schmeling), 35, 91 Marchand, Margarethe, 68, 262n60 Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm, 11, 99 Martinez, Marianne von, 36, 39–42; as composer of Metastasio’s poetry; as embodiment of golden age of opera seria, 41–42; and neoclassicism, 40–42; as St. Cecilia, 39; and the sister arts, 39 Massonneau, Louis, 159, 185–89 Mattheson, Johann, 54, 57 Matthisson, Friedrich von, 165, 166 McClary, Susan, xvii, xxi McClintock, Anne, 51–52 Meier, Andreas, 60, 61 Meissner, August Gottlieb, 91 Mendelssohn-Hensel, Fanny, 158, 169 Metastasio, Pietro, 39–42 Mieding, Johann Martin, 156–57 Miller, Johann Martin, 165 Minerva: Maria Antonia Walpurgis as, 44, 47; Corona Schröter as, 280n14 mothers: bad, 76, 80, 202; good, 26, 59, 71, 74, 77, 235, 254n43; lost, 81, 92, 93, 111 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: and Rosa Cannabich, 15; and Margarethe Marchand, 68, 262n60; and Marianne Martinez, 39; and Sophie Westenholz, 24, 159, 167–71, 174, 175, 182. WORKS: Die Entführung, 30; Fantasia and Sonata in C minor, K. 475 and K. 457, 182; Piano Concerto in C major, K. 467, 182; Der Schauspieldirektor, 50; Sonata in A major, K. 331, 138; “Das Traumbild,” K. 530, 108 Müller, Carl Wilhelm, 54, 56 Müller, Johann Nikolaus, 54, 56 muse. See living muse music: and androgyny, 17, 41; and battle, 188, 190, 191, 200, 201–203, 210; as the beautiful, 82; as a career for women, 87, 93, 159; and charity, 95; closeness to nature of, 2–3, 141, 154, 236; as completion of poetry, 40, 133; as context of the imagination, 13; as disembodied spirit, 121, 220; and drinking, 129, 283n36; educational value of, 7, 21, 49, 59–61; effects of despotism upon, 35; embodies female sovereignty, 17, 45; embodies national character, 6, 23, 74, 153; as expression of love, 3, 132; fear of, 258n11; femininity of, 21, 49, 51–52, 83, 201; and fishing, 134; flourishes in commercial society, 29, 32; as found object, 138; and

Index the heroic, 11, 25, 200, 203, 211; as idealist metaphysics, 18, 232; as imagined community, 132, 137; as liberty, 218; linked to pantomime and gesture, 223–24; lost manliness of, 10–11, 32–33; as luxury, 31; as medicine, 92; as medium of courtship, 50, 63–64; as memorial, 92, 95; military metaphors for, 25, 188, 196; nondiegetic, 136, 140–41; and overcoming, 195, 210; and recycling, 185, 263n69; rhetorical devices of, 10, 11, 80, 107–8; as sign of transience, 96, 121, 155; and sleep, 39, 74, 77–79, 128, 129, 206, 208, 216, 218, 223; as solace, 1, 21, 198; as sublime, 10, 11, 168; as virtue, 21, 64, 66, 73, 93; as vista, 134–35; and violence, 187, 236; as working song, 137 musical performance, constitutive role of, 10, 15, 17, 20, 21, 36, 49, 69–71, 74, 83, 111, 139, 176, 237 Napoleonic wars, 10, 18, 23, 24, 25, 77, 159, 168, 188, 191, 201, 203, 227 national identity, Teutonic, 11, 12, 43, 154–55 neoclassicism: and aristocratic status, 45; and elevation of women, 15, 17, 40–41, 45, 241; as the middle path, 17, 37, 40, 42; and noble simplicity of melody, 237; and racial purity, 30 new musicology, xv Nichelmann, Christoph, 50, 52, 54–55, 56, 70 Nieberle, Sigrid, 277n108 Nike, 298n85 opera: cultivated by female royalty, 42–47, 124–25; incursion into instrumental music, 11; as morally suspect, 3–4; as the sister arts united, 42; as a topos of nondiegetic music within singspiel, 142 Outram, Dorinda, 7–9 Pederson, Sanna, 195–96, 198 pleasure: as aesthetic hedonism, 58, 81; arising from luxury, 31; breaches identity, 63; confirms identity, 63; of doing good, 95; of melancholy, 22, 88; of melody, 178, 180; of publication, 169; of terror, 142; unchaste, 52, 64, 66 printing, music: technology of, 6, 44, 101, 272n73; by subscription, 88, 95, 98, 101, 112, 117, 119, 156 Prohaska, Eleonore, 191, 201–203, 204fig. Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 47 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich: attitudes to musical women, 18–19; autobiographical writing, 88;

325

and Charlotte “Minna” Brandes, 21, 91; gender issues in his journalism, 12–17; reasons for posthumous neglect, 18; and Corona Schröter, 22, 157; and Sophie Westenholz, 24, 168–69, 174–79. WORKS: Briefe, 19; Egmont, 24, 216, 218; Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht, 19, 62, 66, 68–73, 83; Landlied, 57; Musikalisches Wochenblatt, 61; Oden und Lieder, 73; Six Concerts, 56, 70–72fig., 81, 82; Wiegenlieder, 58, 73–81, 82; “Würde der Frauen,” 26, 237–38 Reichardt, Juliane (née Benda), 19, 73, 99, 102, 120fig., 121 Reichardt, Louise, 19, 73 Rellstab, Ludwig, 200 Rembrandt, 141 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa, 84–85, 95; Pamela, 3 Romberg, Andreas Jakob, “Die Glocke” (Schiller), 187 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 27, 42–43, 58, 61, 73. WORKS: Confessions, 81; Emile, 3, 76; Julie, 85; On the Origins of Languages, 98 Saint Cecilia, 39, 48, 254n42, 268n28 Salis-Seewis, Johann Gaudenz von, 166 Samuel, Richard, 36–38, 37fig., 41, 42, 49, 93, 237 Sappho, 75 Schade, Rudolph Christian, 90fig., 268n28 Schale, Christian Friedrich, 57 Schiller, Friedrich, 18, 26, 113, 205; on female writers, 181. WORKS: Anmut und Würde, 237; Die berühmte Frau, 233; Das Kind in der Wiege, 75; Die Ideale, 164; Joan of Arc, 190, 194; Das Lied von der Glocke, 187; Ode to Joy, 233; Die Theilung der Erde, 194; Würde der Frauen, 26, 233–37 Schink, Johann Friedrich, 166 Schlegel, Dorothea, Florentin, 121 Schlegel, Friedrich, 215 Schmeling, Getrud. See Mara, Gertrud Elisabeth Schröter, Corona, 22, 102, 233, 237; biographical traditions for, 279–80n13; as living muse, 156–57, 241; and notion of separate spheres, 10; and Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit, 281n17. WORKS: “Erlkönig,” 126–27, 138–39; Die Fischerin, 22–23, 113, 126–155, 280–81n16; Fünf und zwanzig Lieder, 97–98, 155–56 Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel: on the musically comic, 11; on melody, 258n9

326

Index

Schulz, Johann Abraham Peter, 163; Lieder im Volkston, 138, 278n9 Schuster, Joseph, Der Alchymist, 91, 102 Schweitzer, Anton, 88, 91, 268n27 sensibility: and the appoggiatura, 198; as an artistic value: xx, 1, 3, 4, 24, 98, 141; defined, 236; as discipline, 63; and female idealization, 49; in the journalism of J. F. Reichardt, 13, 15, 16, 19, 24; lack of is dehumanizing, 128, 241; loss of status around 1800, 187–88; and nostalgia, 80 Seufzer (Minna Brandes), 105–108 Seyler, Abel, 87–88, 91, 94, 124 Shakespeare, William, 120, 121, 284n47 Sheridan, Elizabeth, 37, 38–39, 49 Sintzenich, Heinrich, 15, 90fig., 268n28 Starobinski, Jean, 4 Stockmann, Cornelius August, 165 Stollberg, Agnes Gräfin zu, 72–73, 75 Stollberg, Friedrich Leopold Graf zu, 75, 166 sublime, the: and the idea of German music, 6, 10–11, 168; as a male preserve, 236; musicological hunting for, 82; and the topos of the pathétique, 176 Sulzer, Johann Georg, Allgemeine Theorie, 4, 23, 99, 155, 182, 283n39 superstition: associated with low social orders, 23, 128, 153; contributes to the power of the lied, 132; and lullabies, 74, 80; out of fashion, 8; about women, 5 Thierry, Amalie, 26, 239–41 Thonus, P. J. von, 54, 56 Tischer, Johann Nikolaus, 54, 56 Tomaselli, Sylvana, 4, 29 Transchel, Christoph, 91 Vogler, Georg Joseph, 101 volkslied, 131–34, 153, 154, 155

Walpurgis, Maria Antonia: and Breitkopf ’s movable type, 44; extolled by Eximeno, 45–47; as Minerva, 44, 46fig.; as performer, 43; promoted by Gottsched, 44; reunited poet and musician, 27, 42. WORKS: Talestri Regina delle Amazzoni, 42, 43, 45; Il Trionfo della Fedeltà, 42, 101 Warner, Marina, Monuments and Maidens, xix–xx, 201 Weiblichkeit. See femininity Weiß, Caroline (née Eichner), 191 Wenkel, Johann Friedrich Wilhelm, 52–53, 54, 56, 58–59, 260 Westenholz, Carl Friedrich August, 160 Westenholz, Charles, 164 Westenholz, (Eleonore) Sophie (née Fritzscher): charge of plagiarism against, 181; performance on glass harmonica, 167; a photograph of a portrait of, 286n2; pianistic textures in music of, 170, 176; praised by Carl Friedrich Cramer, 162; reviews of published music by, 167, 174–82; struck by Louis Massonneau’s bow, 187; study with Johann Wilhelm Hertel, 159–60; table of compositions by, 164–67; as teacher, 170–73 Wieland, (Christoph) Martin, 2, 91, 123, 141 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 17, 92, 93 Winslet, Kate, 48 Wolf, Ernst Wilhelm, 88, 159, 161–62 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 73 Wright of Derby, Joseph, Corinthian Maid, 222 Young, Edward. See genius Ziegler, Marianne von, 44 Zumsteeg, Johann Rudolph, 54, 56