Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment:

Rebecca Cypess

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226817927
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Music

A study of musical salons in Europe and North America between 1760 and 1800 and the salon hostesses who shaped their musical worlds. In eighteenth-century Europe and America, musical salons—and the women who hosted and made music in them—played a crucial role in shaping their cultural environments. Musical salons served as a testing ground for new styles, genres, and aesthetic ideals, and they acted as a mediating force, bringing together professional musicians and their audiences of patrons, listeners, and performers. For the salonnière, the musical salon offered a space between the public and private spheres that allowed her to exercise cultural agency.In this book, musicologist and historical keyboardist Rebecca Cypess offers a broad overview of musical salons between 1760 and 1800, placing the figure of the salonnière at its center. Cypess then presents a series of in-depth case studies that meet the salonnière on her own terms. Women such as Anne-Louise Brillon de Jouy in Paris, Marianna Martines in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Angelica Kauffman in Rome, and Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia come to life in multidimensional ways. Crucially, Cypess uses performance as a tool for research, and her interpretations draw on her experience with the instruments and performance practices used in eighteenth-century salons. In this accessible, interdisciplinary book, Cypess explores women's agency and authorship, reason and sentiment, and the roles of performing, collecting, listening, and conversing in the formation of eighteenth-century musical life.

CHAPTER ONE

Musical Salons as Liminal Spaces

Salonnières as Agents of Musical Culture

Cultural practices and institutions changed dramatically in eighteenth-century Europe. As historians have long noted, the centrality of courtly life in the ancien régime diminished in the eighteenth century. Spaces such as public concert halls and public gardens, accessible to individuals from a wide array of social and economic strata, assumed some of the role of cultural innovation, as well as the formation of group identity, that had formerly been centered at court. In addition, the rise of the middle or merchant class coincided with an increased social fluidity, as members of elite intellectual circles known, informally, as the “Republic of Letters” now mixed more freely with men and women of aristocratic birth. Individuals of lower means could use education and success in the mercantile economy to achieve entry into seemingly more prestigious and refined society. High-ranking family origin was no longer the only signifier of virtue; education, refined behavior, and cultural accomplishment could stand in its stead.

These widespread social changes led to—and, in some cases, were enabled by—new developments in musical life. With the rise of the bourgeoisie and increasing cultural self-consciousness, practices such as amateur music lessons became widespread.1 Public concerts such as the “Concerts of Antient Music,” as well as subscription concerts and events such as the centenary commemoration of the birth of George Frideric Handel, meant that music assumed substantial social and political significance.2 Critics and encyclopedists published popular periodicals claiming to disseminate “true taste,” as well as weighty tomes that purported to encompass all musical knowledge, thus shaping musical aesthetics and ideals in the literate public sphere. In all these institutions—music lessons, public concert life, music scholarship, and music criticism—the twenty-first-century observer may discern manifestations of a recognizably modern musical culture. They all persist today.

Some institutions of eighteenth-century musical life have, however, not survived, or survive only in a highly modified, reified form, and their roles in eighteenth-century society and musical culture are little understood. One among these is the musical salon—a regular, usually weekly gathering of professional musicians, elite amateurs, artists, and intellectuals, generally presided over by a female hostess or salonnière. Salons of all sorts—musical and otherwise—were instrumental in the formation and dissemination of knowledge and social practices in the second half of the eighteenth century.3 They formed a testing ground for ideas about politics, human relationships, literature, philosophy, science, and the arts. Salons were multimedia and multisensory, often featuring good food and drink; refined visual pleasures such as artworks, furniture, and fashionable clothing; and the sounds of music. Salons constituted a venue for the expression of sentiment and, perhaps above all, the cultivation of polite conversation—an essential element in the formation of an enlightened self.

Many salons involved music to some extent, and there is no clear line separating the “musical salon” from salons more broadly. I define the institution loosely, then, as one in which the salonnière had a primary or strong interest in music and was, in most cases, highly involved in “musicking” herself.4 More than simply setting the agenda for her salon gatherings, hostesses of musical salons would often play or sing with their guests and with the professional musicians in their circle; engage in spoken, conversational musical criticism; and provide the aesthetic stimulus for the salon by expressing their tastes and aesthetic values through patronage, the collecting of scores and instruments, and the coordination of the musical event.

Cultivating connections with the professional composers in their regular salon circles or who visited salons while traveling, salonnières frequently became patrons to such musicians. While the financial aspects of this patronage—manifested, for example, in the underwriting of costs of new publications—have long been recognized, I argue that this patronage sometimes went deeper. Nor did salon women simply act as “muses”—as vague inspirations for creative art.5 More, the women at the center of musical salons provided a time, place, and impetus for elite amateurs and professional musicians to come together to work out musical issues through conversation and collaboration. The salon offered fertile ground for the germination of ideas, styles, and practices that might eventually enter the public sphere through composition or performance. Salon hostesses also sometimes amassed collections of scores, wrote and read about music, played or sang outside the walls of their homes, and engaged in the composition and publication of their own works. The musical salon often served as a stimulus to these more public activities, thus allowing the quasi-domestic situation of the salon to spill out into the public sphere. Through their own musicianship, their cultivation of relationships with other performers, composers, and listeners, and their connections with one another, salonnières and their salons formed a bedrock of Enlightenment musical culture.

The purpose of this book is to consider musical salons between roughly 1760 and 1800 as sites of female cultural agency. I attempt to meet the women at their center, as much as possible, on their own terms. While the historical record on these institutions is fragmentary, I consider a variety of sources of evidence to present new interpretations of eighteenth-century musical salons that excavate the interests and musical personae of salonnières and their circles. I show that, while they were constrained by social conventions that viewed women’s participation in the public sphere as questionable, they often used the institution of the salon and its related outgrowths, such as epistolary exchanges, diaries, and in some cases, public performance and publication, to exert agency and shape their musical environments.

In the present chapter I explore the institution of the musical salon as a liminal space that mediated between the public and private spheres—categories that were still very much in formation during the eighteenth century.6 In contrast to writers such as Jürgen Habermas and Dena Goodman, who understand the salon as an institution of the bourgeois public, I adopt the understanding of Antoine Lilti that salons were neither fully public nor fully private—and indeed, that musical salonnières in particular used musical practice as a marker of domesticity to further complicate the status of the institution. Within this ambiguity lay the potential for these women to exert cultural agency. In Lilti’s words, the salon formed a “privileged space for female action”—one in which they could exercise their taste, influence, and talents in order to shape their musical environments. In this chapter I discuss a wide array of musical salons and salonnières to show how they navigated the complexities of the private–public divide. Their networks of contacts and collaborators included both professional and elite amateur musicians, friends, mentors, and protégées. These networks, which sometimes extended across Europe and into America, enabled musical salonnières to act as agents of musical culture.

Musical Salons as Liminal Spaces: From Private Practice to Public Influence

The debate over women’s participation in the public sphere was extensive, and salons held a prominent place in it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of women in theater, written in response to Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s essay on Geneva in the Encyclopédie, figured women in the public eye as equivalent to actresses who inappropriately command public attention. Just as actresses have the power “to make women and girls the preceptors of the public,” the salon placed women at the center of public attention and gave them power over public taste and sentiment. As Rousseau wrote,

The ancients had, in general, a very great respect for women, but they showed this respect by refraining from exposing them to public judgment, and thought to honor their modesty by keeping quiet about their other virtues. . . . With us, on the contrary, the most esteemed woman is the one who has the greatest renown, about whom the most is said, who is the most often seen in society, at whose home one dines the most, who most imperiously sets the tone, who judges, resolves, decides, pronounces, assigns talents, merit, and virtues their degrees and places, and whose favor is most ignominiously begged for by humble, learned men.7

Rousseau’s objections to the presumption of women who would become arbiters of the intellectual agenda of the Enlightenment centered around the institution of the salon, in which women exercised such a role freely. Yet, as Dena Goodman argues, most of the philosophes viewed salonnières “as the legitimate governors of a potentially unruly discourse.”8 That the salon assumed such a role in the public discourse of the Republic of Letters contributed to Jürgen Habermas’s understanding of the salon as a feature of public life: as courtly culture assumed decreased significance in the determination of artistic taste and intellectual value, and as systems of royal patronage diminished, the salon assumed some of those roles.

Goodman’s understanding of French salons as an important feature of the public discourse of the Republic of Letters did much to rehabilitate the salonnières after a long history of condemnation that accepted Rousseau’s negative judgments at face value. Yet Goodman’s insistence on the intellectual agenda of salons downplayed other aspects of the institution that were rooted in sensory experience. These have been emphasized in subsequent work by scholars focused on the history of the arts, fashion, furniture, and music, among others.9 Habermas’s notion of the “public” as a body that comes together to exercise its reason and intellect—alongside or in opposition to the state—has thus been inflected by a more nuanced understanding that does not require eighteenth-century cultural and social institutions to fit clearly into the “public” or “private” spheres. Antoine Lilti has argued that the salon was one institution that “[resists] being categorized according to the binary division public/private.” For Lilti, “cafés, salons, clubs, conversation circles [and] Masonic lodges. . . . define an in-between space, much more broadly open than domestic and family life, yet based on assimilation. This space, which in the eighteenth century was called ‘society,’ is based on an ideal type of codified exchanges, both intellectual and social, that nurtures conversations in all its various forms.”10

Within Lilti’s “in-between space,” salons occupy a special position. Unlike cafés, Masonic lodges, and town squares, salon gatherings took place in the home (though often in a specially designated room), and they were usually presided over by a woman. In this respect, they filled a gap in the social landscape, enabling women to remain (or pretend to remain) out of the public eye while interacting with a broad range of individuals from across the elite and professional classes. Generally restricted from systematic education and from full participation in public discourse, women’s behavior was subject to mores and conventions that circumscribed their participation in the public sphere. Salons formed one outlet in which women could exercise their intellectual curiosity and talents, continuing to receive an informal education even as they sought to edify their guests. Salons were liminal spaces, mediating between the public and private spheres.

If this point was true of salons in general, it is crucial to understanding salons with a strongly musical agenda. The domestic ethos of the salon was intensified by the musical practices enacted there, since many of the women who played music in salons would not have done so in public for fear of appearing indecorous or subjecting themselves to inappropriate scrutiny, as Rousseau accused actresses of doing in his “Lettre à M. d’Alembert.” Thus, while Goodman has noted that the role of the salonnière frequently required women to engage in a measure of self-effacement, silencing their own perspectives in order to facilitate the conversation of their guests, the role assumed by musical salonnières was somewhat different.11 Women who played instruments and sang alongside their guests put forth their skills, their tastes, and their selves.

The liminal nature of the musical salon can be discerned in the various ways that salonnières navigated the complexities of the public and private spheres. Perhaps no case illustrates these complexities more effectively than that of Ann Ford: when Ford hosted musical parties in her London home, they were the toast of high society, but when she stepped out into the public sphere by staging paid concerts, her own father as well as other critics deemed them inappropriate. Ford was the daughter of a solicitor who had received a thorough and costly education in music, dance, visual art, and languages, likely through the engagement of private tutors. A biographical sketch in the journal Public Characters discovered by Peter Holman demonstrates that, as early as 1759, Ford was hosting and playing in a weekly series of musical concerts in her home that “attracted the notice of all the gay and fashionable world.”12 Her guests included members of the upper class, including the noted Bluestocking intellectual and patron Lady Montagu and her husband.

While the report on these salon concerts in Public Characters is a retrospective one, published in the early nineteenth century, Holman notes that it contains evidence acquired through firsthand accounts, including from Ford herself. The details that it provides are specific and offer a window onto the exclusive world of Ford’s salon. As in most musical salons, Ford herself played in these gatherings together with a series of guests, whom the article in Public Characters divides into “amateurs” (including Ford and her future husband, Governor Thicknesse) and “professors”—that is, professional musicians. The article ...