Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
dying in June 1814, three months before the Congress of Vienna. Understandably, given the focus of Reichardt’s enthusiasms, scholars working in the former East Germany with a class-based and materialist historiography have often regarded him as a chief representative of an emerging bourgeois consciousness in German music. In focusing on Reichardt’s investments in female music making, I highlight an aspect of that consciousness.
I became aware of Reichardt’s women near the beginning of my research through his publications of songs, concerti, and lullabies “for the fair sex.” Like many modern readers of the preface to the Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (1775) I was struck by the composer’s condescension (his reference to the “pretty little hand” of the performer and its unwillingness to “stretch” to the octave), though I was keen from the start to discover more about the cultural work and meaning of that condescension, in relation to the business of selling music, the social status of the purchasers, and Reichardt’s own identity as a composer. With time, it became clear that Reichardt’s attitudes were not straightforwardly trivializing. Unusually for a German kapellmeister, he fostered the composing of his wife (Juliane) and daughter (Louise), wrote enthusiastically of women performers, and, more broadly, was enamored of contemporary ideas of female sensibility and the femininity of aesthetic beauty. Sometimes Reichardt addressed the activities of female performers and composers on sex-specific terms (as when he eavesdropped on Rosa Cannabich) and sometimes without apparent reference to sex (as in his balanced reviews of the works of the Schwerin court musician Sophie Westenholz, which I explore in chapter 5). Overall, Reichardt’s relationship to musical women frustrated my own interpretive categories and so warranted further work. Coming to terms with Reichardt involved a wide-ranging study of feminocentric aspects of his central and north German contexts. Although he appears in every chapter, he serves as a witness to concepts and practices, not as the focus of the study.
Among the intellectual sources of Reichardt’s feminocentric criticism were the musical travel diaries of the English music historian Charles Burney; I explore this connection in chapter 1. Burney (1726–1814) was a generation older than Reichardt (1752–1814), but both men undertook musical tours in Germany in the early 1770s. Burney’s unflattering comments on Prussian music, on the one hand, and his innovative way of writing about music, on the other, inspired Reichardt to a work of patriotic defense, and authorial emulation, in the Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend.41 Burney’s The Present State of Music in Germany (1773) was reported in the German press, immediately translated into German, and read closely as an account of German music through the eyes of a visiting foreigner (a favorite perspective of critical “Enlightenment” letters). One of the distinctive aspects of Burney’s writing was the prominence he granted female musicians. Not simply a question of occasional flattery of wealthy women and royalty of his acquaintance, or gallant appeals to his female readers, Burney accorded women a wide range of significance, praising their achievements in performance and composition using vocabulary that ranged across the natural and the expressive to touch on technical prowess, knowledge, and genius. Among his tropes of the female musician is that of the living muse, whose practice embodies specific aesthetic ideals and who functions, abstractly, as an exemplar. The living muse is related to the conventions of visual allegory but brings allegory to bear on historically concrete individuals with names, biographies, and even published music. Such idealizations were no doubt constraining as well as elevating; they nevertheless represent one of the ways in which the female sign became meaningful in this historical site.
Burney’s praise of women was honed on the works of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, where the figure of woman was marshaled in favor of emerging bourgeois and capitalist interests. In the 1740s, when Hume published his Essays Moral and Political, such arguments were not yet won, and the historical associations of commerce, luxury, pleasure, leisure, and the arts with effeminacy and decadence were still marked. Burney’s simplified, even simplistic, deployment of Hume’s rhetoric may indicate that the argument was largely won by the 1770s, at least in London. It also reflected his ambition to include music within the domain of polite taste, refinement, and luxury (in a positive sense) that had been outlined by Hume. In other words, the ascendance of woman in Burney’s writing is bound up with the ascent of music as a fine art, and it is in this context that Burney’s praise of “civilized” and “feminized” aspects of musical style and performance can be read.
This constellation of luxury, the feminine, and the civilized indicates that female musical ascendance was bound up not just with ideas about art but with bourgeois patronage and the rise of capitalist modes of musical production and exchange. This commercial aspect informs chapter 2, where I focus on the proliferation of accessible collections of German songs and keyboard music with dedications “to the fair sex” that were published from midcentury on. Reichardt’s collections of this type stand out for their fascinating prefaces, illustrative material, and, sometimes, contradictory messages. The appearance of gender-specific musical commodities is likely to strike modern readers as constraining for the women originally targeted by the dedication and as jeopardizing intrinsic musical value. Without denying these interpretations, I seek nuance in this chapter by imagining the performance of this music within the broad context of female accomplishment: an ideal of the period whose boundaries and implications were contested.
Music “for the fair sex” was marked by the contradictions and tensions of contemporary thinking about the sexes: it did not constitute a unified, disciplinary statement about the nature and limits of female musical practice. Some of the essential musical, moral, and aesthetic ideals of the repertory were not gender specific, despite the market’s promise to meet such needs. Both for and about women, this generically varied repertory invited diverse performance resources and practices, just as it styled a significant segment of contemporary music as feminine. The ladies of the dedications colonize music as much as they are colonized by it. Although possessing disciplinary potential, such music was not a reliable means of female containment. The mixture of generic motifs and styles in individual pieces, the pedagogic aspect that allowed for ever increasing proficiency, the seductive and imaginative elements contained in poetic texts that often brought elements of novelistic fantasy into musical practice: all these aspects complicate the assumption that the women of the dedications music were so many songbirds in a gilded cage.
However, precisely because they attempt to loosen the grip of a bourgeois feminine stereotype, these observations tend still to invoke that stereotype. Put another way, an understanding of female accomplishment as a dynamic of containment and resistance, although marking an aspect of musical practice, is incomplete. How, then, might it be understood? One answer is that female accomplishment served as a sign of social status in which the executant was positively invested. Seen in this way, the amateurism and naturalness prized in musical accomplishment appropriated aristocratic grace, rebranding Renaissance sprezzatura as bourgeois femininity. Another answer is that accomplishment offered a context for female subjectivity and pleasure. This last aspect, subjectivity, was fostered by analogies between the keyboard and the body as “strung” and “touch-sensitive” instruments. Such analogies help explain why domestic keyboard playing was not only a means to produce (in Richard Leppert’s words) “an ideologically correct species of woman” but also an exemplary phenomenon of the period, a medium of autobiography and fantasy.
The boundaries between musical performance and composition were fluid; for keyboardists, in particular, there was no conceptual gulf between playing and improvising, or even notating, music. C.P.E. Bach’s widely disseminated treatise on playing keyboard instruments guided the reader from initial study of fingering through embellishments, interpretation, accompaniment, and figured bass to improvisation and the free fantasia. Indeed, instruction in composition, as C.P.E. Bach knew from his childhood, took place in no small part at the keyboard. The fact that keyboards in the home were strongly (though not exclusively) associated with women set improvisation and composition within reach. Indeed, one of the most startling aspects of the period is the explosion in numbers of published female composers; I explore this in chapters 3–5 through three case studies.
The first of these three female composers is Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes (chapter 3), a keyboardist and opera singer whom the itinerant Reichardt probably knew from the Hamburg salon of Margaretha Augusta Büsch and her husband, Johann Georg Büsch. Based in Hamburg during C.P.E.