Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
fair sex, by inscribing a sex-specific role within the amateur sphere, produced, if only by default, the possibility of masculine involvement in that sphere.12 Seen in this way, music for the fair sex sought to establish sex-specific boundaries amid musical practices in which distinctions between the sexes were blurred. After all, men enjoyed the freedom of playing their own instruments as well as those, such as the keyboard, to which the fair sex was officially restricted. This masculine freedom to mediate between, and exhibit mastery in, both male and female domains is easily overlooked. So, too, are the implications of this situation for how male and female musical practices were constructed. The female musical realm was not fundamentally different from that of the male, but it represented a segment in a masculine universe of possibilities. This is not to deny the gendered element in the binary oppositions of, say, public/private, professional/amateur, orchestral/solo, and flute/clavier but, rather, to highlight the mobility accorded to men within those oppositions. Music for the fair sex intervened in this complex situation, seeking to clarify a specifically feminine practice in accordance with the broader late eighteenth-century attempt to distinguish the feminine and the masculine as opposite, if complementary, terms and map these onto the categories of private and public, respectively.
As a newly articulated (if not literally new) genre, music for the fair sex arose in the 1740s in response to multiple social and economic stimuli. Such music was a medium of, and commerce in, a new category of gender: femininity. This category (which one might mistakenly assume to have existed throughout history) arose in the eighteenth century alongside the two-sex model and elaborated the premise that men and women were fundamentally different in their biology. Though present in the German lexicon already in the fifteenth century, the word Weiblichkeit (femininity) accrued new meanings in the course of the eighteenth century, in part through the influence of an English discourse on womanhood, a description of female character that yoked together physical, moral, intellectual, and emotional characteristics.13 In a way that can now seem peculiar, early eighteenth-century discussions of gender in Germany were focused on men and pivoted on the terms masculinity and effeminacy. Only gradually did femininity emerge as the primary opposing term to masculinity, its inclusion in Johann Christoph Adelung’s Versuch of 1774–1786 a landmark.14 There, as elsewhere, femininity was a class-based ideal assuming female leisure and lending the figure of woman decorative, moral, and aesthetic significance.
We need not read Karl Marx back into this period to recognize that femininity signified an absence of and unsuitability for physical labor. As such, the rise of femininity accords with the familiar grand narrative of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s history. As Anne McClintock has summarized this narrative, “At some point during the eighteenth century, the story goes, the spindle and loom were pried from her fingers and all the ‘bustling labor’ of the previous century—the candle- and soap-making, the tailoring, millinery, straw-weaving, lace-making, carding and wool-sorting, flax-beating, dairy and poultry work—were removed piecemeal to the manufactories.” The topics of amateurism and domesticity within and around music for the fair sex rhetorically consigned woman to a newly articulated private sphere in which idleness was taken on as, in McClintock’s words, a “character role.”15 Such withdrawal was the flip side of the utopian but ultimately patriarchal Enlightenment ideal of the “bourgeois public sphere” (influentially if contentiously expounded by Jürgen Habermas) in which individuals—primarily educated men—debated matters of collective civic interest in the public domains of clubs, coffeehouses, and print culture.16
Music for the fair sex performed a double disciplinary function. On the one hand it invited women to the practice of music as an alternative to the false pleasures of, and moral dangers posed by, the social world. On the other hand it sought to prescribe the nature of that musical practice, to deprofessionalize it, tether it to ideals of female character, and inscribe women’s primary roles within the patriarchal family as wife, mother, and daughter. The disciplinary focus of this music thus moved between the practice of music and questions of women’s character and their place in the world. These metonymic shifts between music and female character were facilitated by a central eighteenth-century metaphor: the body as a strung instrument or clavier.17 Within song texts this proved an irresistible conceit. The Berlin-based organist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel opened his second set of Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1771) with a rhetorical apostrophe to “Das Clavier” (example 1). In stanza 3 the female narrator eschews unspecified “false pleasure” in preference for “sweet harmony.” The metaphor of the body as clavier is pursued in a play on “rein,” a reference to both moral purity and equal temperament. Music was not simply a means of disciplining the female subject but a metaphor through which femininity was produced as a discursive ideal.
NICHELMANN AND THE RHETORIC OF EASINESS
Reflecting their early date of composition, Nichelmann’s sonatas remained largely unaffected on the level of musical style by assumptions concerning female character and taste. Indeed, his ambiguous dedication (“chiefly for ladies”) leaves open the possibility of male performance and in so doing complicates the rhetoric of separate female and male spheres deployed by subsequent collections aimed exclusively at women.18 Similarly, in arranging the sonatas in a pedagogic ascent from “easy” to increasingly “difficult,” Nichelmann did not succumb to an essentialized connection between music for women and musical “easiness” (whatever that might be). On the contrary, such arrangement asserts that facility increases with practice. Minor keys (Sonatas Nos. 2, 4, and 6), chromaticism (Sonata No. 4, second movement), and such formal refinements as the elision into the finale of a slow movement in an enharmonically related key (Sonata No. 5, second and third movements) partake of the serious, intellectual realm of the north German Kenner (connoisseur). “Difficult” or unusual keys are cultivated to an eccentric degree in Nichelmann’s Sonata No. 5 in E♭ (example 2). The slow movement is set in B major, an extremely rare key in the mid-eighteenth century. Furthermore, the slow movement ends, or rather does not end, with a transition into the finale in which the E♭ tonic is approached enharmonically through D♯ minor. Such artful harmonic techniques, appealing to the intellect and more at home in the improvised free fantasia than in the sonata for ladies, are far from the aesthetically feminized sphere of the late eighteenth-century amateur.19 The esoteric enharmony of Nichelmann’s Sonata No. 5 was beyond the range of materials that were later stereotypically associated with the lady at music. When Diderot wrote to C.P.E. Bach and Friedrich Melchior Grimm requesting sonatas for his daughter to play, he specifically requested works in “difficult keys,” explaining that his daughter was genuinely talented. The fact that such comments were necessary suggests an ingrained association of female executants with “easy” works. Diderot also expressed his fears that marriage will bring his daughter’s musical development to a premature conclusion: “I believe that she will be a good player, but I am practically certain that she will be a musician, and that she will learn the theory of this art well, unless some future husband should ruin everything, spoil her figure, and take away her appetite for study.”20
EXAMPLE 1. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel, Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1771), no. 1, “Das Clavier”.
| Süß ertönendes Clavier!Welche Freuden schaffst du mir!In der Einsamkeit gebrichtMir es an Ergötzen nicht.Du bist was ich selber will,Bald Erweckung und bald Spiel. | Sweet sounding clavier,What joy you bring me!In lonelinessIt does not fail to delight.You are, what I myself would be,Now rousing and now play[ful]. |
| Scherz ich, so ertönet mir,Ein scherzhaftes Lied von dir.Will ich aber traurig sein,Klagend stimmst du mit mir ein.Heb ich fromme Lieder anWie erhaben klingst du dann! | If I jest, then you sing to meA playful song.But if I want to be sad,Then you join with me dolefully.If I offer devout songs—Then what sublimity in your sound! |
| Niemals öffne meine BrustSich der Lockung falscher Lust!Meine Freuden müssen rein,So wie deine Saiten sein:Und mein ganzes Leben nieOhne süße Harmonie. | My breast never opensTo the temptation of false pleasure!My joys must be as pure,As your strings are:And my whole life neverWithout sweet harmony. |
After Nichelmann, collections of sonatas,