Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
line] never departs from the fundamental notes of the key: because of this, the harmony is regular and clear and the melody full of a natural, touching and enchanting delicacy.71
Through the figure of a German princess and her Italian opera the Spaniard Eximeno (like the Englishman Burney before him) was able to capture, and communicate even to readers today, the sensuous appeal and delusive delicacy of a sound world allied to aristocratic power. Refined but not fragile, natural without blandness, moving but still rational, this aristocratic music, for all its claims to modernity, would soon be sidelined by composers and audiences in search of less complaisant, more passionate sounds.
2
“If the pretty little hand won’t stretch”
Music for the Fair Sex
There is a moment in Emma Thompson’s brilliant free adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Columbia Pictures, 1995) that allows modern audiences to eavesdrop on music’s living muse in her original, and perhaps most important, habitat: the home. At once powerfully nostalgic for the manners and “look” of the period and historically accurate in its emphasis on female idealization and aestheticization, the scene takes place at the country home of Sir John and Lady Middleton. Marianne Dashwood, played by the youthful Kate Winslet, breaks protocol near the end of dinner with a bold request to play the fortepiano, an intervention that cuts short the intrusive questions of the hosts concerning the identity of her sister’s suitor. Elinor Dashwood’s squirming discomfort, the rambunctious repartee of the matchmaking Middletons, and Marianne’s breach of decorum are soon diffused by music. Framed by a square fortepiano and a large baroque painting of an ambiguous mythological subject, Marianne Dashwood is beheld like a living work of art. Her golden curls and porcelain complexion cast back to the beautiful women of Vermeer’s interiors. “Softly, softly,” she sings in a love song, or perhaps a lullaby, whose text and music, newly composed by Patrick Doyle, artfully evoke the “feminine” character of those simple, heartfelt strophic songs with gentle harplike accompaniments that flourished in domestic music making of the period under the fingers of young, unmarried women.
Marianne’s guileless voice (rendered with appropriate naïveté by Winslet) derives aesthetic force from its quality of naturalness and the authenticity of its expression. Apparently unaware of her power, she personifies music and its myths, a modern-day St. Cecilia, or siren. Not only does she harmonize the social order and calm the troubled breast with gentle song but, sirenlike, she summons a husband. Having arrived on horseback, Colonel Brandon is held spellbound in the darkened doorframe. In a chain of idealizing equivalence Marianne Dashwood is at once music, woman, art, nature, sensibility, and love. Of course, such elevating significance rests on certain conditions: Marianne is young, beautiful, chaste, unselfconscious, single, and—crucially—musically amateur.
How often amateur, domestic, female performances in the late eighteenth century were so unblemished, and how often successful in summoning a husband, is open to debate. The scene above is largely the invention of Emma Thompson and Ang Lee, an exercise in the historical imagination prompted by, but also negating, a couple of ironic sentences by Jane Austen in chapter 7 that highlight the lack of attention paid to Marianne’s performance: “Sir John was loud in his admiration at the end of every song, and as loud in his conversation with the others while every song lasted. Lady Middleton frequently called him to order, wondered how any one’s attention could be diverted from music for a moment, and asked Marianne to sing a particular song which Marianne had just finished.” But before dismissing costume drama as purely fictional and nostalgic, it is worth recalling the period when, say, Elizabeth Sheridan was idealized in Richard Samuel’s Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1777; see figure 2), or Maria Antonia Walpurgis in Eximeno’s Dell’origine e delle regole della musica (published in 1774; see figure 3). However far from Austen’s text, the film scene of Marianne singing “Softly, softly” cannot be dismissed as purely anachronistic. As in the eighteenth-century cases, some notion of “femininity” marks the scene of musical performance as one of bewitching power and significance.
Beyond costume drama, gallery postcards, and book jackets, however, the young lady at music has lost her mystique.1 In seminar room discussion, and in published scholarship, she is caught in a double bind. On the one hand, her repertory faces charges of musical triviality. On the other, a contextual appraisal of her practice leads almost inevitably to ideas of her containment through music.2 This chapter struggles with this dilemma in an account of music published specifically for ladies. The charge of triviality, and the related notion of female containment, is not so much dispelled as referred to a range of more positive, though still ambivalent, ideas of the period: femininity and the musically beautiful; female leisure and luxury as pleasurable and granting status; education and self-improvement; musical commodification and male authorial gallantry; song texts as invitations to subjectivity; and the possibilities for negotiation of apparent constraints in performance.
AMATEURISM, FASHION, AND LUXURY
From the mid-eighteenth century on, a stream of music variously dedicated (as geography and custom dictated) to “ladies,” “the fair sex,” “le beau sexe,” “all’uso delle dame,” or “für das schöne Geschlecht” trickled from European printing presses. In England, arrangements of songs from Handel’s oratorios appeared to the end of the century under such exalted titles as The Lady’s Banquet.3 The prestige of such collections could be enhanced by the confession of an exclusive, aristocratic source: H. Wright issued Handel’s “celebrated vocal duets” as works “composed for the private practice of Her Majesty the late Queen Caroline.”4 In the English middle-class home such gestures of aristocratic emulation were largely the task of women, a division of labor that left open possibilities for the official middle-class critique of the aristocracy.5
In Germany keyboard sonatas and lieder “for the fair sex” appeared both in collections of printed music and in women’s periodicals. Christoph Nichelmann, a chorister at the Leipzig Thomaskirche during the tenure of J.S. Bach, and subsequently second harpsichordist at the court of Frederick the Great, issued two sets of sonatas with the Nuremberg publisher Balthasar Schmid around 1745: Sei brevi sonate da cembalo massime all’uso delle dame and [Sei] brevi sonate all’uso di chi ama il cembalo massime delle dame.6 Nichelmann’s titles (“chiefly for ladies” and “for lovers of the harpsichord, chiefly for ladies”) drew upon a historical association of women with keyboard instruments in amateur and domestic circles. A Frauenzimmer-Lexicon (Ladies’ dictionary) from the beginning of the century included entries for clavier, lute, and voice (among discussions of how to pot ham, darn socks, and make soap) but omitted references to brass, woodwind, and bowed instruments.7 These historical associations of particular media and genres with the sexes, along with the assumption (as early as the sixteenth century) that music for women should be “easy,” furnished the basic vocabulary of late eighteenth-century collections for women.8
Given the gendered associations of instruments, genres, and styles, some redundancy exists in the dedications to the fair sex. Music so dedicated represents only a fraction of the repertory aimed at and practiced by women.9 On one level the dedication was just a marketing device: it targeted the product without significantly reducing the pool of potential purchasers. “For the fair sex,” with its connotation of gallantry, also prettified the act of buying and selling and made a music book more suitable as a courtship gift and a sign of romantic love (the context in which music is given as a gift in Austen).10 The product’s promise to meet specifically gendered needs rested, however, upon a generalization, the universalizing dedication to “women.” The florid and sentimental excesses of Mme. Herz and Mlle. Silberklang in Mozart’s diva intermezzo Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario; K. 486) of 1786 indicate that quite contrary discourses surrounding professional female music making circulated alongside the stereotypical “easiness” of amateur ladies’ music. Mozart’s divas display precisely that “eruption” of female music making that musical accomplishment sought to ward off.11
Music dedicated to the fair sex epitomized the feminine connotations of amateur domestic music making. The categories of the musical amateur and the feminine intersected in ideals of naturalness,