IN THE SHADOWS OF MEN — Nicholas Phan

The path of progress is rarely a straight line, and as women’s access to music education increased through the years of the Enlightenment, there remained a resistance to the idea of the use of that education in the public sphere. There was a stigma of impropriety associated with women working as professional musicians: Barbara Strozzi’s legacy has been highly entwined with allegations of her as a courtesan and the most famous portrait of her depicts her leaning back with an open shirt that exposes one of her breasts as she seductively grasps the neck of a viola da gamba. Some of this resistance was simply couched in the misogynistic fears of the dissolution of home and family structure: if women became professional composers, who would take care of the children? Who would cook the meals and keep the house?

As a result of this, much of the music that women composed in the 19th century was geared towards domestic performance: works for solo keyboard and songs. Primarily meant to be enjoyed in the home during an era before the advent of recorded music, in which people needed to make music themselves if they wished to enjoy it outside of the concert hall or opera house, these forms took on a gendered understanding. Deemed domestic and “feminine”, they became acceptable forms in which women could write.

This domesticity of their composition often led women composers to be somewhat overshadowed by the men in their life. Some men were key to supporting and enabling their work as composers–this was certainly the case for Fanny Hensel, Clara Schumann, and Alma Mahler–but each woman’s compositional oeuvre has been greatly overshadowed by a husband or a brother. In the case of Clara Schumann (1819 – 1896), seemingly willingly; less so for both Fanny Hensel (1805 – 1847) and Alma Mahler (1879 – 1964).

Born Fanny Mendelssohn, both Hensel and her brother Felix displayed prodigious musical talent at a young age. Music was central to the Mendelssohn family life, and from an early age Fanny’s father encouraged her musical education. A wealthy banker, he ensured she had access to the highest quality musical instruction, including lessons in the most advanced kinds of harmony and counterpoint, implying support for her as both a pianist and a composer.

However, as Fanny and Felix approached adulthood, the encouragement of the siblings took divergent paths. A professional musical life was deemed appropriate for young Felix, who had already published his first composition at the age of 13. Fanny’s father encouraged his daughter to keep her music as a “decoration” to her being, as opposed to the “taproot” of her identity. To be a professional composer in the public sphere would simply be un-feminine. After their father died, Felix continued these admonishments, always supporting his sister’s musical creativity, but only as long as it remained in the domestic and private realm. Despite his disapproval, and in large part due to the support of her husband, the artist Wilhelm Hensel, Fanny did manage to publish a few of her 250-plus Lieder and roughly 125 solo piano works. Still, most of these went unpublished during her lifetime, only to be enjoyed in the privacy of her salon.

As a child, Clara Wieck received great musical encouragement (if not outright pressure) from her overbearing father, Friedrich, the great piano teacher. Unlike the Mendelssohn family, Wieck had no qualms about his daughter pursuing a professional career as a musician, pushing her into the public sphere as a piano prodigy, organizing for her to make her debut at just 9 years old. Calculated in his large-scale ambitions for her career, knowing that it was customary at the time for piano soloists to perform their own compositions, Wieck also ensured that his daughter had access to the most elite education in the tools of composition.

Clara would eventually break away from her father in order to marry one of his students, Robert Schumann. In order to be able to marry Robert, the couple would have to sue Friedrich, who refused to permit the marriage, resulting in an anguished three-year engagement. While Robert envisioned them as a sort of classical music power couple and made efforts to encourage Clara as a composer, in practicality their marriage was centered around Robert’s compositional career. Believing Robert to be a pioneering genius whose ability to work must be protected at all costs, Clara’s days were spent managing the household, teaching, and taking care of the business related to the publication of Robert’s music. She maintained her prolific performing career in part to so she could continue to draw in substantial performing fees to support Robert’s ability to compose. As Clara worked to ensure that Robert had as much unfettered time as possible to work, she sacrificed her time to compose. She did this in part because she had internalized misogynistic beliefs about women’s roles and capabilities and, therefore, lacked confidence in her own abilities as a composer:

“I once believed I had creative talent, but I have given up on this idea; a woman must not wish to compose – there never was one able to do it. Am I intended to be the one? That would be arrogant to believe that…I gave up on believing this. May Robert always create; that must always make me happy.”

Clara Schumann’s belief about her place within Robert’s shadow as a composer persisted until her death at the age of 76. She survived Robert by 4 decades, yet rather than increasing her compositional output, she only wrote a handful more pieces, largely devoting the rest of her life towards preserving Robert’s legacy. As a performer, along with Pauline Viardot, Clara deeply influenced performance practice (she is largely responsible for the tradition of pianists performing from memory which lasts until today) and the establishment of a “canon” of classical music repertoire. It is no coincidence that neither woman included themselves or any other woman in the pantheon of “great” composers they worked so hard to establish.

“…this letter. My heart missed a beat…give up my music – abandon what has until now been my life? My first reaction was – to pass him up. I had to weep – for then I understood that I loved him…I find his behaviour so ill-considered, so inept…this will leave an indelible scar.”

So wrote Alma Schindler in her diary after Gustav Mahler made clear to her that she must give up her compositional aspirations if they were to marry. In the end, swept up in the passions of the moment, romantically justifying her decision-making as a self-less act of love, she acquiesced to his demand. Less than three months after the letter that she found so outrageous, Alma ignored her initial instincts, married Gustav, and gave up her ambitions to be a composer.

An extraordinarily independent, liberated, and strong-willed woman, Alma’s decision to discard her musical work for marriage seems incongruous. In the years before she met Gustav, she composed anywhere from 50-100 works and was pursuing serious compositional study with teachers such as Josef Labor and Alexander von Zemlinksy. However, an examination of her diaries leads one to believe that she might have made this sacrifice partly as a folly of youthful passion (she was just 22 years old, Gustav 41). In the days following Gustav’s letter imploring her to abandon her ambitions, Alma wrestles with the idea: “but must one of us be subordinate? Isn’t it possible – with the help of love – to merge two fundamentally opposing points of view into – one?” However, she ultimately talks herself into this decision, feeling that her love for him is too great to give him up: “My longing is infinite. I would give everything for him – my music – everything – so powerful is my longing!”

Ultimately, the sacrifice Alma Mahler made did leave an indelible scar: 8 years into their marriage, Alma would begin an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. Only after this marital rift did Gustav come around to supporting Alma’s compositional work. In an apparent effort to make amends, he took a sudden interest in her music, helping her publish some of her Lieder. Ironically, posterity has this moment of reparation to thank, as this publication of her work enabled the preservation of the few pieces we hear today. Of the numerous works she composed in her youth (perhaps upwards of 100 lieder), only 16 or 17 songs survive to this day. Regardless, the damage was done: Alma did not go on to compose much more after Gustav died the following year in 1911.

Rebecca Clarke (1886 – 1979) experienced a similar rift with important male figures in her life that interrupted her musical training. However, Clarke remained undaunted and managed to persevere, publishing her music for many years. Clarke spent the early part of her life in England, where she received her musical training. Forced from her house after a family dispute with her father, she was forced to cut off her musical studies in composition and support herself as a performing violist.

A pioneer as both a virtuoso violist and woman composer, Clarke entered her 1919 viola sonata in a competition at the Berkshire Festival of Chamber Music. The rules of the competition required anonymous submissions, and the piece placed a very close second to an entry by Ernest Bloch. When it was revealed that the viola sonata so loved by the jury was composed by a woman, the judges were astonished. The piece would go on to become central to the instrument’s standard repertory and the publicity about her near-win cemented her international reputation as a composer. After extensive performing tours from 1916 through the early 20’s, Clarke returned home to London in 1924 and remained until the outbreak of World War II.

Visiting family in the United States in 1939 when England declared war on Germany, Clarke found herself stranded in America, unable to obtain a visa to get back across the Atlantic. During the war, she reconnected with a colleague from her time as a student, pianist James Friskin, who had moved to New York to join the piano faculty at Juilliard. The two married, and Clarke remained in the states until her death in 1979. The tumult of World War II interrupted Clarke’s musical life. She composed a few compositions in the years following the war, yet despite encouragement from her husband and many friends, she didn’t compose much in the final few decades of her life.

Published shortly after she composed her famous viola sonata, The Cloths of Heaven is a hauntingly beautiful setting of William Butler Yeats’ famous poem. While the composition date and performance history of her setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem Up-Hill are unknown, tonight marks the song’s second-known performance.

In contrast to these women above, Vitěszlava Kaprálová (1915 – 1940) was very supported by her family in her pursuit of a professional life in music. Born in 1915 to musician parents (her father was a composer, pianist, and teacher, and her mother was a singer), music was central to her household growing up. She began composing at the age of 9, and by 15 had enrolled as a dual-major in composition and conducting at the Brno Conservatory, shortly thereafter becoming the institution’s first woman alumna. Following further studies in Prague, Kaprálová eventually moved to Paris to continue her studies in conducting with Charles Munch. She also became connected with fellow Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, with whom she studied privately. Martinů’s relationship with Kaprálová soon evolved into a passionate affair, and Martinů worked hard to promote both her music and conducting.

In her early 20s, Kaprálová enjoyed tremendous success, with important conducting debuts with both the BBC Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic, as well as many important premieres of her large-scale works for orchestra. She seemed poised for a trailblazing international career, but the outbreak of World War II interfered with that path of progress. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, she became stranded in Paris and without her state-supported stipend to sustain her. In the spring of 1940, as the Nazi invasion of Paris seemed more and more imminent, she was evacuated to Montpellier, already exhibiting signs of illness, likely a misdiagnosed case of typhoid fever. She passed away a few weeks later, a stranded refugee, at the age of 25, her promising career tragically cut short.

A trailblazing composer whose career was not cut short is Dame Ethel Smyth (1858 – 1944). Similar to Clarke and Hensel, Smyth was heavily discouraged by her upper-middle-class British father to pursue a profession in music, in line with the Victorian aversion to working women. However, Smyth prevailed in her argument for a proper musical education and relocated to Leipzig to study composition at the conservatory there. While in Leipzig, Smyth met such musical luminaries as Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Edvard Grieg, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Soon after her arrival in Leipzig, Smyth took her first important professional steps with the publication of some her German Lieder that she had written during these first years of study.

Determined to establish herself in larger-scale forms, Smyth studied orchestration privately in Leipzig and soon made her mark with orchestral compositions and large-scale choral works. At the age of 40, she achieved a major milestone in the career of any professional composer, regardless of gender: premiering the first of the six operas she composed during her lifetime.

A staunch feminist, Smyth is now perhaps best remembered for her anthem for the suffragist movement, March of the Women. She became heavily involved in the movement, taking a two-year hiatus from composition to devote to the cause, at one point even serving prison time for her protest activities. Her Three Songs were composed following her return to composition just after her hiatus and are highly reflective of her experience protesting for women’s right to vote. The second song, Possession, is dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffragette movement. The final song, On the Road, is dedicated to Pankhurst’s daughter Christabel, and heavily quotes Smyth’s own suffragist anthem, most notably at the end of the song.

During her lifetime, Smyth did the unthinkable and achieved major international success as a professional composer as a woman. Yet the path of progress was a jagged line of advancement and retreat rather than a constantly upward trajectory. Smyth’s work, like that of all her colleagues on this program, has largely been overlooked in the years since her death until recently. While Smyth cracked a glass ceiling when her second opera, Der Wald, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1903, she didn’t quite manage to shatter it. Her opera was never revived at the Met, and it would be another 113 years before another opera written by a woman would be produced by the opera house.

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