Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied

Aisling Kenny, Susan Wollenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134773879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

This book bridges a gap in existing scholarship by foregrounding the contribution of women to the nineteenth-century Lied. Building on the pioneering work of scholars in recent years, it consolidates recent research on women's achievements in the genre, and develops an alternative narrative of the Lied that embraces an understanding of the contributions of women, and of the contexts of their engagement with German song and related genres. Lieder composers including Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann, Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Josephine Lang are considered with a stimulating variety of analytical approaches. In addition to the focus on composers associated with history and theory of the Lied, the various chapters explore the cultural and sociological background to the Lied's musical environment, as well as engaging with gender studies and discussing performance and pedagogical contexts. The range of subject matter reflects the interdisciplinary nature of current research in the field, and the energy it generates among scholars and performers. Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied aims to widen readers' perception of the genre and help promote awareness of women's contribution to nineteenth-century musical life through critical appraisal of the cultural context of the Lied, encouraging acquaintance with the voices of women composers, and the variety of their contributions to the repertoire.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Aisling Kenny and Susan Wollenberg

Until relatively recently, the history of the nineteenth-century Lied, like that of so many other genres, was traditionally portrayed almost exclusively in terms of an all-male production.¹ While the intimacy and often miniature forms of the genre might seem to suggest its suitability as a vehicle for women composers (given the prejudices, and indeed barriers, against their venturing into the larger forms), the Lied – particularly with Schubert’s contribution and its aftermath, and with the generations that followed – took on something of the authoritative character associated, in the hierarchy of genres, with high-ranking, male-dominated compositional forms.² The perception of this elevated status for the Lied may have diverted the attention of music historians and critics in the past away from the contribution of women.³

In terms of compositional practice, the dual status of the Lied in the nineteenth century as a miniature and yet increasingly authoritative genre was a positive factor in women’s composition of German song. The Lied’s ‘minor’ rank allowed women to feel free to compose in the genre, while the revolution perceptible in the Lied as it developed offered them the possibility of exploring new realms of creativity. Beyond the question of women composers and their contribution to the genre, the poetic texts of the nineteenth-century Lied, together with their musical settings, are clearly rich with implications for women’s concerns and gender-related ideas.⁴ The chapters collected together here adopt both of these broad perspectives on the subject, focusing specifically on women composers of Lieder, as well as exploring ideas about women, and gender, as represented more generally in the Lied repertoire, notably in such powerful figures as the Lorelei (see Chapters 3 and 12).

The majority of the chapters originated in papers delivered at the seminal conference ‘Women & the 19th-Century Lied’, organized by Aisling Kenny and held at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth in December 2011. The conference sessions covered a range of chronological, cultural and geographical areas within the designated century: these included the salon as performance context for women’s Lieder; women’s Lieder in the later nineteenth century; women and song in nineteenth-century North America; and the Lied’s influence on women composers in Ireland. Among sessions devoted to individual composers, Lieder by women of different nationalities, including Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Clara Schumann and Ethel Smyth, received special attention, while Harald Krebs’s keynote address focused on Josephine Lang’s compositional technique. All these, and other areas of research discussed in the conference, are reflected in the thematic divisions forming the various sections of the present volume, together with a number of newly commissioned contributions. Collectively they testify to the lively interest and energies that are being invested by scholars and performers in the subject of women and the Lied.

Scholars currently working in this area have cause to value and to feel deep gratitude for the pioneering efforts of our predecessors, beginning with studies of Luise Reichardt and Fanny Hensel by Nancy Reich and Marcia Citron respectively.⁵ Enjoying as we do now a comparatively extensive (and ever-growing) literature and array of resources for the study of women in music (including music editions and CDs, as well as conferences and seminars) we remain in debt to the achievements of that first generation of scholars, who dedicated their researches to a field that was still being established amid a certain amount of mistrust, misrepresentation and controversy.⁶

In Citron’s now classic and extraordinarily stimulating Journal of Musicology article on gender and the canon (which at the time represented a new kind of venture),⁷ among the various crucial factors examined that could impact on women’s access to a professional career in music, some clearly do not apply directly to the Lied in its normative scoring for voice and piano, such as training in orchestration, or the opportunity to conduct an orchestra, for example. But others including performance and publication are highly pertinent. To these might be added specific and enabling developments such as that of the piano during the nineteenth century, highlighted by Citron in the introductory section of her chapter in Bowers and Tick, Women Making Music, as a positive factor in the rise of women composers.⁸ In the present volume, both performance history and source history are among the considerations explored in the chapters that follow, for example by Cornelia Bartsch in relation to Ethel Smyth’s early songs (Chapter 10).

Apropos of women’s neglected involvement in the Lied, Citron noted that while the creative achievement of her eight chosen composers ‘is uneven, as is that of their male contemporaries’, nevertheless ‘among the hundreds of lieder they [the women composers] produced are pieces equal to the best of the lieder composed in that era’.⁹ Citron went on to ask: ‘Why did these musicians compose lieder? What are the individual and common elements of their background that prompted them to create?’¹⁰ and she set out to provide answers to these questions by exploring sociological factors in relation to her selection of women composers of Lieder. In the light of these important questions as well as a range of critical and analytical issues we hope that the chapters assembled in our own volume will contribute further to the project of documenting and assessing women’s creativity in the genre of Lied.

The advent of the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers in 1994 seemed a welcome sign that the study of women composers was here to stay.¹¹ Together with the New Grove Dictionary itself in its original edition (1980)¹² and then the second revised edition (2001 and online),¹³ Sadie and Samuel’s volume seems to enact the process whereby first neglect, then attention and finally integration might mark the stages with which women composers have been sidelined in music history and works of reference, then had the spotlight thrown onto them, and eventually were granted the chance to be integrated into the mainstream literature. The second revised edition of the main Grove Dictionary was thus able to draw on the vastly expanded coverage of women composers offered by the 1994 volume to inform its own general coverage.

For all its sterling qualities and its many advantages over any previous such efforts, one drawback of the New Grove Women Composers was its concentration on composer entries to the exclusion of other categories.¹⁴ Turning to the main dictionary, it is instructive to compare the entry on the Lied in the original New Grove of 1980 with the revised edition.¹⁵ In 1980 Eric Sams, writing on ‘The Romantic Lied’, and constructing a historical and critical narrative of composers and their works in sections 2–7 (following an introductory section) under the headings of ‘Schubert’, ‘Loewe and Mendelssohn’, ‘Schumann and Franz’, ‘Wagner, Liszt and Cornelius’, ‘Brahms’ and ‘Wolf’, appears not to have been troubled by the fact that this was a totally male-dominated account. By the 2001 edition, the revised version of the entry (while preserving the original structure) introduced Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann to the sections on Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann respectively, even offering a comparative comment on the two women, to the effect that if Clara Schumann was ‘not the equal of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel [sic] as a song composer, it is probably because the lied interested her less than instrumental forms’.¹⁶ This forms the sum of the commentary on Clara’s songs: no particular Lied by Clara is mentioned.

And even while declaring firmly that she is no longer regarded as ‘a mere footnote to the songwriting achievements of Mendelssohn’,¹⁷ the 2001 entry on the Lied nevertheless (and somewhat ironically) in the section on Loewe and Mendelssohn devotes only a few lines at the end to Fanny Hensel, in contrast to the detail lavished admiringly on Felix Mendelssohn’s songs in the rest of the long paragraph: his works are placed confidently in a niche within the history of the Lied, while no particular place in that history is assigned to his sister’s several hundreds of Lieder. Nor is any particular critical stance adopted on her compositional achievements in the genre. Again here, and in contrast to her brother, no specific song by Fanny is mentioned by name.

Altogether the number of women composers featured in the 2001 article and the amount of space devoted to them is restricted to these two examples. Clearly there is still room for the construction of an alternative narrative of the Lied that aims to provide the requisite balance, thus one in which women’s achievements are more fully recognized across the spectrum of the genre’s history and repertoire. In focusing in the present volume on women composers of Lieder and the contexts in which they worked, we hope to invite further exploration of what might still be claimed to be a comparatively neglected strand of the Lied’s history, and to encourage its progress towards an assured place in that history.

Among the themes explored collectively in the following chapters are the connections (whether speculative or demonstrable) between biography and art at various levels. Thus Kadja Grönke, in Chapter 8 on Pauline Viardot-Garcia, considers Viardot-Garcia’s contribution to the genre of Russian Romance in the light of her concert tour to Russia in the 1840s and her knowledge of Russian literature, while in Chapter 11 on Alma Schindler and Gustav Mahler she adopts a psychological angle, discussing the circumstances of their marriage in relation to the differing concepts of love revealed in their approaches to setting poetry on themes of love by Heine and Rückert respectively.

Comparative study constitutes a particularly significant and rewarding element to consider apropos of women’s Lieder. The comments by the anonymous author of the provocative ‘Endpiece’ in the Musical Times, published in the same year that the New Grove women composers dictionary appeared,¹⁸ may have been intended as ‘tongue-in-cheek’; but his remark apropos the musicological efforts to ‘dredge up’ women composers of the past, that ‘it does seem to help if they are related to a famous male’, pinpoints an area of unease for those involved in the early stages of such efforts. Freeing the women from the dominance of their male counterparts seemed then to be utterly desirable in the face of the prevailing ignorance and prejudice that coloured their reception and conditioned the inadequate attention to their work. And even quite recently there has been a lingering and not unreasonable resistance to allowing the women to remain in the shadow of the men. This resistance is perhaps most convincing when it is expressed with the care for a balanced argument that Stephen Rodgers has demonstrated in his work on Fanny Hensel’s Lieder, where he states:

I will not undertake an exhaustive comparison of her songs with her brother’s – although I do hope that my article may inspire others to head in that direction. If anything, Hensel will become more credible as an independent artist if we start with her rather than with her brother, and if we take her music on its own terms.¹⁹

From our vantage-point further on in the development of women’s studies in music, we can perhaps feel more comfortable than might have been the case in the earlier phase, if we now choose to respond to the invitation expressed in the first part of the quotation above and invoke the male contemporaries of our female figures, in order better to understand their respective achievements.

Comparison of Lieder by male and female composers thus forms a thread running through several chapters of the present volume, including Caitlin Miller’s investigation of the settings of Heine’s Lore-Ley by Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt (Chapter 12) in terms of female power and the male gaze, while Angela Mace Christian’s discussion of the 12 Lieder, op. 9 by Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn (Chapter 5) takes a different angle, revisiting the question of the ‘Mendelssohnian’ style, a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Contexts for Women's Lieder, I
• Part II Individual Composers and their Lieder I Early Nineteenth Century
• Part III Individual Composers and their Lieder II Later Nineteenth Century
• Part IV Contexts for Women's Lieder, II
• Index