NOW IN SPANISH TRANSLATION. SOUNDS AND SWEET AIRS BY ANNA BEER REVIEW – THE FORGOTTEN WOMEN OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

Both Mendelssohns were composers, yet it is Felix not Fanny who is remembered. Why have so many female artists remained unheard?

Independent Opera’s 2007 production of Maconchy’s The Sofa at Sadler’s Wells. Photograph: Belinda Lawley

In the 1980s a retired urban planner of Johannesburg named Aaron Cohen, with no musicological training but with a great love of music, began publishing his Encyclopedia of Women Composers. In two volumes, it contained around 5,000 entries. Even allowing for the fact that many of these women’s scores were lost, the concert-goer of today would be forgiven for expressing surprise at the sheer number here, for it is certainly not reflected in programmes. You could, without too much difficulty, pass through an entire concert-going life without hearing a single note written by a woman. This is despite recuperative efforts by individual musicians (for example, Oliver Knussen’s recordings of the remarkable American modernist Ruth Crawford Seeger), and a flourishing of feminist musicology from the late 1980s. The institutions of classical music tend to be heavily invested in a carefully protected performance tradition that hands on the precious flame of white, male genius from generation to generation and has little interest, for all kinds of reasons, in disrupting the canon. The weight of this history still bears down in the contemporary postmodern world, in which figures such as Judith Weir, Tansy Davies, Anna Meredith, Emily Hall and Cheryl Frances-Hoad (to name only Britons) have successful and fruitful careers. Female compositional talent is still “othered”, to a degree that male colleagues are sometimes blind to, and indeed that women themselves might prefer not to countenance – not unreasonably finding climbing the mountain more productive than pausing to contemplate the drop.

Sounds and Sweet Airs, by cultural historian Anna Beer, is a timely bulwark against forgetting, and proffers a number of reasons for the fading of female artists’ reputations. Her subjects are eight European composers who form a kind of chain through four centuries, beginning with the early-modern Tuscan, Francesca Caccini, whose 1625 opera La Liberazione di Ruggiero was performed at the Brighton early music festival last year; and ending with Elizabeth Maconchy, an English composer of Irish heritage, who died in 1994. To make work, these artists, like their male counterparts, required aptitude, a supportive family, an excellent musical education, and either a sufficient income from their work or other means by which to keep going. They encountered obstacles, on the other hand, that their male composers didn’t, whether the vagaries of childbearing (Clara Schumann ploughed on as a composer, and especially a performer, through eight pregnancies) or straightforward full-on sexism (Maconchy was told in the 1930s by publisher Leonard Boosey that “he couldn’t take anything except little songs from a woman”). More subtly, but no less powerfully, female composers have had to negotiate notions of what has constituted a “suitable” activity for a woman.

This is not a story of direct progress: in some ways, Beer’s early-modern women seem to have enjoyed greater freedom than their sisters in later centuries. Caccini was the daughter of a family that made its living in the music trade; a woman with a fabulous voice in an era when the membrane between composer and performer was thin. She found herself in the right place at the right time in the Tuscan court of the 1620s, when Cosimo II de’ Medici’s early death left two women as regents for the young Ferdinando – Christina of Lorraine and her daughter-in-law, Maria Magdalena. Caccini produced scores for court occasions at a frenetic rate (most of which are lost) and even whistle-blew the chief court poet, Andrea Salvadori, who was neither the first nor the last man to use the couch as an aid to casting for the stage. A contemporary wrote that Caccini, “a woman as fierce and restless as she was capable in singing and acting, could not abide this behaviour, and began to expose and talk about him”. His response was to write a poem called “Donne Musiche Parlano dell’Inferno” (Women Musicians Speak from Hell). Beer writes too of Barbara Strozzi, who came of age as a composer in the 1650s in Venice, and produced alluringly beautiful and clever songs that subtly undermined their sexist lyrics. Fast-forward to Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix’s sister. Both were brought up in the same hothouse musical environment, both composed like crazy, but it was Felix not Fanny who is remembered; propriety, her class and the age meant that her musical ambitions were mostly pursued in private. Her painter husband Wilhelm Hensel encouraged her to publish her music, but Felix most certainly did not, writing that “it runs counter to my views and convictions … Fanny … has neither enthusiasm nor calling for authorship; then too, she is too much a Frau, as is proper, raises Sebastian and cares for her home … ” (She did in fact have the appetite for authorship and she did, eventually, publish.) After her death her work was subject to insidiously gendered critiques: it was said to lack “a commanding individual idea” and the “feeling which originates in the depth of the soul”.

A production of Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero as part of the Brighton early music festival, 2015. Photograph: Robert Piwko/BREMF

Schumann, the virtuosa pianist, subsumed her writing into her husband’s career, and internalised male anxieties about female composers, becoming her own fiercest critic. Maconchy did what young women often do today: self-organised, so that she was not wholly reliant on existing institutions. Together with like-minded colleagues including composer Elisabeth Lutyens, violinist Anne Macnaghten and conductor Iris Lemare, she put on concerts in the Ballet Club theatre in Notting Hill, London, in the 1930s. Male critical responses to her work register a sometimes aggrieved sense of having been gender-wrongfooted: one referred to her music’s “almost aggressive virility” as if it were an affront. Even now, she is described as “furrow-browed” and “sombre” – descriptions that certainly do not fit her farcical one-act opera, The Sofa, which was revived in London in 2007. Maconchy cared for her children by day, and composed at the piano at night, fiercely compartmentalising her life. Her colleague Macnaghten described an artist who was “like a tiger inside … between nursery rhymes and washing nappies”

Maconchy’s career, in Beer’s entertaining account, comes closest to what a successful composer’s life in modern Britain might consist of, with its conservatoire education, Proms commissions and eventual damehood – though no one could claim that her music was overperformed today. She was the first woman president of the Society for the Promotion of New Music. The successor to that organisation, Sound and Music, which supports composers in Britain, has a strong commitment to gender equality. It is also keen to increase opportunities for black and minority ethnic composers, who are woefully invisible in the UK’s classical musical culture. Some balk at the notion that such “extra-musical” factors might be invoked when programming a concert – as if commercial concerns, personal relationships and a host of unremarked prejudices did not come into play in any act of curatorship. This book helps show why a narrative that insists that the good stuff will naturally and always rise to the surface is simplistic. It is important for us all, composers, musicians, audiences, men, women, society at large, that we seek out the best and most exciting creative voices, from wherever they may come.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/26/sounds-and-sweet-airs-the-forgotten-women-of-classical-music-anna-beer-review