eight women

Some thoughts on

Sounds and sweet airs: the forgotten women of classical music
Anna Beer
One World 2017

In recent years I have been learning about some amazing composers who had fallen into oblivion because they happened to be women and didn't fit the composer cliche modelled on the male genius. In my orchestral adventures, I've enjoyed playing Louise Farrenc's third symphony and Emilie Mayer's overture, as well as Amy Beach's Maria Stuart. I'm hoping to learn chamber music pieces by Rebecca Clarke and by Rita Strohl one day. And have read about the life of Clara Schumann (Dieter Kühn's slightly novelised biography), as well as about those of Rebeccs Clarke, Ethel Smyth, Dorothy Howell, Doreen Carwithen in Leah Broad's recent book Quartet. Come to think of it, I even have a youtube playlist with works by some of these.

Adding to that, I now learned about a few composers I wasn't aware of from Anna Beer's book, namely
Francesca Caccini (born 1587),
Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677),
Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729),
Marianna Martines (1744-1812),
Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994)
who are featured along with the more widely known (at least to me)
Fanny Hensel (Mendelssohn) (1805-1847),
Clara Schumann (1819-1896) and
Lili Boulanger (1893-1918).

The book is a chronological array of the eight short biographies, each around 40 pages long. I love the way these eight lives cover the four centuries from 1587 to 1994 almost seamlessly - there is only a small gap between 1729 and 1744. (A graphic timeline would be a helpful addition to the book, which doesn't even list the birth and death years, I had to look them up and have now scribbled them into the table of contents with a pencil.) It is fascinating how the challenges that female composers faced over the centuries mutated and evolved over the centuries. Notably, in the early parts of the book, things seem to be getting worse for women from the Renaissance to the Classical period, as 19th century notions of gender roles came up with additional barriers that didn't exist before.

In most cases, the chapters are based on existing full-length biographies, so people who have read those may not learn anything new except perhaps the chance to find out about contradicting claims from competing biographers, which exist in the cases of some of the more colourful lives, where a fair number of unresolved paternity cases are up for debate.

While I appreciate the book for the considerable additions to my musical knowledge I have gained, I would advise readers to mistrust all quotes translated from German or French - they often appear to be subtly wrong. The consistent misspelling of the name of Friedrich Wieck (Clara Schumann's father) is a further warning that some things may have been lost in translation here.

Looking up the book online I see it has been stickered as a "companion to the Classic FM series" which makes sense in terms of the format of the eight chapters - I expect they must each have been made into a one hour or so radio piece.

I've now added some of my new discoveries to my youtube playlist:

• Caccini: Altri gelati
• Jacquet de La Guerre, Violin sonata n.1 d moll,
• Martines - Overture ("Sinfonia") in C Major - sounds lovely and very Viennese.
• Maconchy, string quartet No. 1 - probably too hard for amateurs?
• Maconchy, The sofa (opening scene of her erotic opera)

PS Shoutout also to the tumblr blog Lesser Known Composers, which features quite a few women as well (I'm no longer on tumblr, but the blog appears to be freely visible without a login.) Just yesterday, it presented the works of Vitezslava Kapralova (1915-1940) such as the Piano Concerto in D Minor, Op. 7.

Update 29.5.2025: From the always interesting Zeitzeichen podcast of the German radio station WDR, I discovered Pauline Viardot. She wrote no symphonies or quartets, sadly, but quite a few operas.