Sounds and Sweet Airs by Anna Beer
Oneworld, £14.99
Fanny Hensel was expected to write a certain type of music. Her father, Abraham Mendelssohn, applauded the bright and breezy compositions but dismissed “the more ambitious work”. In the 19th century, writes Anna Beer, the “musical establishment … policed increasingly effectively the boundaries of masculine and feminine music”.
For the women, it was usually a case of “songs, yes; symphonies, no”. Only the men were expected to be groundbreaking geniuses. Beer did not want to “represent every female composer’s life as a futile struggle against impossible odds”, so most of the figures in this book managed, like Hensel, to write some splendid music and even secure respect and celebrity, but every one of them faced mighty obstacles.
Take Francesca Caccini. She made quite a splash at the 17th-century Medici court in Florence but, like “every female musician”, had to operate “in the shadow of [the] image of the lascivious whore, who used music as a form of entrapment, destroying ‘rational man’ ”. A little later, in the France of Louis XIV, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was lauded for her musical accomplishments, but it was deemed necessary to regard her as an aberration: “a one-off” who could be “separated from the rest of her (imperfect) sex”.
It took a long time for the barriers to be torn down. In 18th-century Vienna, Marianna Martines was still being limited to older musical forms that encapsulated “decorum and respectability”. In 20th-century Britain, Elizabeth Maconchy was made a dame but still had to endure the “good old-fashioned sexism in the classical music industry”.
Such traits, as Beer laments, are still with us: just calculate the percentage of successful contemporary composers who are women, or the sluggish pace at which most major orchestras have begun to include the works of earlier female composers in their regular repertoires. All the more important, then, for excellent books like this one to remind us of what we are all missing.
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