Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
before Bach’s death that same year. On her death her father, the playwright Johann Christian Brandes, and her close friend and teacher Johann Friedrich Hönicke prepared two memorials to her memory, a biography and a collection of her music, the latter titled Musikalischer Nachlass von Minna Brandes and published in Hamburg in 1788. (Bach was a subscriber to that posthumous collection.) These memorials situated her authorship in the contexts of pedagogy and education, the composition of occasional works for the home, and the solace offered by music amid bereavement and illness. The principal discourse was of death itself: Brandes’s memorialization shared with the novels of Goethe a topos of the female dead in which the corpse (or its representation) is exhibited as a beautiful artifact. Death turned Brandes from an active composer into a passive, aestheticized object of male authorship. These discursive contexts figured her activities as a composer within a framework of bourgeois femininity. Both Brandes’s father and her teacher were at pains to stress that she sought neither fame nor fortune from her compositions. However, such representations were misleading. Her collected works suggest that she was working toward a published collection of strophic German songs and the composition of operatic music for her own performance. The idealizing tropes of the memorials are also challenged by Johann Christian Brandes’s later memoirs, in which his daughter’s turn to composition is situated in what he described as her multiple breaches of deferential daughterly conduct. Brandes’s reported profligacy during her final illness may have stimulated the posthumous publication of her music, which was possibly a form of fund-raising for her multiply bereaved father, a corrective to both his emotional and his financial loss. The healthy list of 518 subscribers indicates that youthful female death was marketable as a topos occasioning the pleasures of melancholy. From the contradictory evidence that survives, Brandes’s authorship was subject to multiple interpretation by contemporaries as evidence of virtue and vice; it was apparently prompted by personal creative volition and economic need, and it was at once freely undertaken and constrained through conventions of genre, market forces, and the availability of instruction. For these reasons Brandes’s composing, and its contemporary interpretation, prefigured neither romanticism’s and modernism’s black-and-white narratives of female authorial weakness nor women’s heroic self-determination but rather an unresolvable play between presence and absence, self-assertion and self-effacement, conformity to and the refashioning of her world.
I continue this archaeology of authorship and what it meant to compose in the late eighteenth century in chapter 4, exploring the complexities of the familiar association of female composers with nature and the natural. The focus is on a nocturnal, woodland singspiel composed and performed by one of the better-known women of the period, the singer and actress Corona Schröter, one of Reichardt’s youthful infatuations during his time in Leipzig, where Schröter trained and worked with the so-called father of the singspiel, Johann Adam Hiller. The libretto was written for the occasion by Goethe (who preferred his lyrics to be set by Reichardt but turned to his Weimar colleague Schröter for this home-grown theatrical). In describing the landscape setting and garden aesthetics that informed the piece I attempt to re-create the atmosphere of Die Fischerin, which was performed in a forest clearing in the rustic grounds of the summer residence of Anna Amalia of Weimar on the evening of 22 July 1782. As if a farewell not just to Schröter but to the symbolism of Anna Amalia’s artistic projects at court, the plot concerns the attempt of the young fisherwoman, Dortchen, to reform the rough, unsocial manners of her father and fiancé. To this end she stages her own death as punishment for their habitually late return from fishing, a strategy that fails, however, to influence them. The female sign, associated here with both reform and the agency of the individual, appears to lose its power, and Dortchen is folded back into a world of (imaginary) tradition and superstition on the eve of her marriage. Goethe drew the lyrics of several of the stage songs that dominate this piece from Herder’s Volkslieder, a collection morbidly concerned with the topos of death and the maiden, even though, as Herder’s preface makes clear, he shared his period’s investment in the singing voice as a sign of human presence. Schröter’s music for Die Fischerin, which has remained unpublished and undiscussed, is perfectly matched to these discursive contexts, not restricted just to “folksy” settings of lieder. The generic and ephemeral aspects of her music, as notated, correspond to the aesthetics of landscape gardening, specifically to the idea of invisible and absent authorship, or, to refer back to the reception of Sophia Sternheim, of art without “authorial art.”
Schröter’s contributions to Die Fischerin, like the work itself, resonated with the English-derived theory of “vegetable genius” common to music aesthetics and the contemporary theory of “Gartenkunst” (garden art). Writers on aesthetics such as Johann Georg Sulzer and Carl Friedrich Cramer invoked this English-derived theory in descriptions of the state of creative inspiration in general, and of the effusions of genius in C.P.E. Bach’s improvisations in particular. Although stylistically opposed to those eruptions of invention, Schröter’s songs (and to some extent the composer herself) represented versions of the same theory of natural and national artistic production, differing more in degree than in kind. No essential antithesis of male and female creativity, no grand metaphysics of sexual difference, were at stake, even in a singspiel concerned with sex-specific roles in a fishing village.
The last of the three case studies (chapter 5), although it concerns a largely forgotten figure, returns to more familiar musical territory: solo keyboard music. Sophie Westenholz occasionally appears in modern music histories as a composer of German songs—she is included in a couple of collections of lieder by women—and, in the annals of music at the court of Ludwigslust in Schwerin, Mecklenburg, as a singer, fortepianist, and wife of the kapellmeister Carl Westenholz. There is much more to be said about her, however, not least because of a body of unknown keyboard music, the most substantial and ambitious of which remains unpublished, and archival documents concerning her activities and the circumstances of her eclipse as a musical director at court. Putting this material to work, her career can become an example of the ascendance and eventual eclipse of the female sign in music culture of the late eighteenth century, marking the rapid change of atmosphere during the Napoleonic wars. Within this broad account of historical change, the chapter focuses on the intellectual history of the category of the “woman composer” that crystallized in reviews of her published music in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of 1806. Perhaps for the first time in these reviews, and not to Westenholz’s advantage, the domains of sex, music, and composing were linked in a strenuously disciplinary manner. Sex, in particular, emerged as a master category, not inflecting but forming the horizon of possibility for musical production and meaning within a bourgeois masculine discourse of the musically serious and transcendent. In this context Reichardt’s balanced, supportive reviews, according no interpretive weight to Westenholz’s sex, are more sunset than dawn.
Westenholz was caught out by historical change. Her career was founded on the earlier feminocentric and aristocratic values of the era of sensibility. Born to a family of musician artisans, Westenholz was raised for a musical career at court expense, owing to the desire for local female singers. Early keyboard instruction, reportedly after the precepts of C.P.E. Bach, further equipped her to teach the royal children and compose. At court she established a culture of Mozart’s fortepiano music, regularly appearing as soloist in his concerti and chamber music. Authorizing her own compositions in terms of Mozartian discipleship, she programmed Mozart alongside her own: if the fortepiano and Mozart are subject to a feminizing reception, Westenholz gained symbolic membership of an emerging male canon of Viennese instrumental music, as formulated in the criticism and reviews of E.T.A. Hoffmann.
Arguably, the context of the Napoleonic wars not only triggered Westenholz’s decision to publish but also encouraged the tone of the review, as if contemporary political chaos inspired a corrective disciplinary vision of musical sex and gender roles: an illusory clarity. Inevitably, this newly imagined tradition of female subordination dealt a blow to the practices and discourses of female ascendance. There were other signs, too, that the dark clouds of Virginia Woolf’s nineteenth century were gathering: in a letter of resignation from 1811 Westenholz referred to her humiliation by the new konzertmeister, who had struck her with his violin bow when she gave the musicians the tempo with her hand. In emphasizing this affront to her person and, by extension, to his Highness Frederick Francis I, Westenholz offers a fitting envoi to the sovereign feminine of the previous century.
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