Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
to think in such terms about the “woman question” in Western culture, and to resist biological essentialism in debates about female destiny. But the situation in late eighteenth-century Germany cannot be so easily summarized; to deem medical science at that time as uniform in its conclusions about the nature of the sexes, or particularly authoritative beyond its own domain, is misleading. The biological turn, in Outram’s report, was bleakly dominating and uniform: “anatomical studies on women’s brains argued that they were of smaller size, and thus conclusively demonstrated women’s unfitness for intellectual pursuits.”15 A problem hidden in that summary is that there were very few medical and anatomical discussions of women before 1800. The most influential in German, by Ackermann, came to the opposite conclusion, as discussed above.
There was no grand theory, based in scientific thinking, about female inferiority, nor any stable association between physical and mental weakness. If there had been it would be difficult, even impossible, to explain why this period witnessed the blossoming of women intellectuals, writers, artists, and musicians. The emerging bourgeois public sphere, as Habermas terms it, offered not just prohibitions against but opportunities for female participation, creativity, and leadership even as it furnished some demeaning and stereotyping images.16
GENDER AND THE IDEA OF GERMAN MUSIC
Not surprisingly, the musical culture of the period is marked by these complexities, granting ambiguous prestige to the female sign. But in emphasizing the obstacles women faced, musicological studies of the period may have overestimated female exclusion and subordination. For example, in a prefatory gesture to his excellent account of the attitudes and aspirations of serious German musical culture circa 1770–1848, David Gramit diagnosed female exclusion as a defining feature, albeit one overcome by spirited female exceptions:
Ultimately, the status of German musical culture rested on a precariously double-edged claim: serious (and most often German) music was held to be universally valid, even though, at the same time, maintaining its prestige demanded limiting access to it along the lines of existing social divisions, prominent among them class, gender, education, and nationality. To ignore the significance of the claim to universality would not only obscure the ways in which the equally significant exclusions operated, but it would also distort the motivations of the advocates of serious music. To overlook those exclusions, however, as musicology all too frequently has, is to mistake the ideals of a culture for its admittedly less flattering but considerably more complex social dynamics.17
The difference between my emphasis on female sovereignty and Gramit’s emphasis on female exclusion arises in part from Gramit’s interest in continuity in public musical culture across a century and a half. I confine my study to a shorter period and am as much concerned with private and court contexts as with public venues. At least until the period of the Napoleonic wars, I argue, female participation and “feminine” values in German-speaking lands were ways of positively signaling bourgeois and aristocratic musical identity and taste, even amounting to arguments in favor of music as a fine art. Addressing the origins of nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutions of classical music, and the hegemony of German music, Gramit understandably treats public venues and large genres as the most prestigious and, on this basis, understands the amateur and domestic realms as relatively lacking in aesthetic significance. Focusing particularly on the 1770s and 1780s, however, I argue that public and private operated differently: the “private,” with its connotations of authenticity and its closeness to individual feeling and morality was, paradoxically, of intense public interest. Nor did the private and the amateur always coincide: Corona Schröter, for example, was a professional actress and singer who moved from private and semipublic performances in Leipzig to a career at the court of Anna Amalia of Weimar, appearing in circles that were either entirely closed or open only to select townspeople. The notion of separate male and female spheres, and of their hierarchy of value, is particularly difficult to maintain in this historical context.
This is not to deny that, even before 1810, German music served male interests and linked (a version of) masculinity with particular artistic values in ways that were potentially alienating to women. In the famous preface to his Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek (three volumes, 1778–1779) Johann Nicolaus Forkel marshaled a classical Republican rhetoric of modern degeneracy and decline to inveigh against the loss of manliness, or “Männlichkeit” (virility) in contemporary German music:
Throughout the first half of the present century the art of music stood indisputably and in every regard in its finest and most virile maturity. Seriousness, dignity, grandeur, and sublimity in its inner nature,—order and correctness in its grammatical and rhetorical structure,—outwardly brilliant but authentic and appropriate performance were characteristics of its true perfection, and, taken together, these exemplary qualities of those former, happy times cannot be denied. . . . Admittedly, the theory of music, or at least some aspects of it, has been developed admirably in recent times; but how rarely theory and practice coincide. . . . Indeed, more than ever people now hold forth about the great, the sublime, the beautiful, and a manly and powerful expression, but when have we ever had less of the great, the sublime, the truly beautiful, and of manly power in expression?18
If Forkel’s sense of a loss of manliness in contemporary music covertly acknowledged the ascendance of feminine values, his rhetoric of current decline constituted a powerful rejection of such a development.
For this reason it is useful to gain a sense of what Forkel meant by the musically “manly.” The term männlich had a range of compositional and musical associations for Forkel, from God-like perfection, at one extreme, to competent craftsmanship at the other. In his preface to Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek he used the term to intensify references to musical seriousness, strength, inventiveness, integrity, and Germanness rather than as a word with its own clear meaning. The “manly” also validated the powerful emotions that Forkel imputed to, and admired in, music of the high baroque. The remedy to present decline, Forkel argued, was to return to and develop the music theory of music’s manly maturity: that is, to revive the music-rhetorical thinking of the first half of the eighteenth century.
Forkel’s posthumous canonization as one of the first German musicologists could mislead modern readers into thinking that his views in the 1770s were more representative and influential than in fact they were. Musicology has been kind to Forkel because he wrote the first full-length biography of J.S. Bach (published in 1802) and one of the first histories of music in German.19 For these achievements alone he features prominently in studies of Bach reception, accounts of the development of German musical nationalism, and musicology’s construction of its past. This is not to deny all currency in the 1770s to his notion of music’s decline and loss of manliness. A conventional historiography was at work here, a well-worn inheritance from classical antiquity that pitted a manly past against an effeminate present. Such terms were often employed by German critics in the second half of the century, both before and after Forkel’s famous preface.20 In the 1752 edition of J.S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge Marpurg lamented that the “manly character” of music, exemplified by Bach’s fugal counterpoint, had given way to “womanish song.” The popularity of lighter styles (which Marpurg also called the “galant”) is attributed “to the tender ears of our time,” an admission, perhaps, that the manly, as Marpurg understood it, had lost ground.21 In an oft-cited review from 1766, of a set of six symphonies by Giovanni Gabriel Meder, Johann Adam Hiller took exception to the inclusion of “Frenchified” and courtly minuets. In symphonic contexts, he asserted, such dances “always seem to us like beauty spots on the face of a man: they give the music a foppish appearance, and weaken the manly impression made by the uninterrupted sequence of three well-matched, serious movements.”22 Subsequent critics reported that Teutonic musical seriousness was under siege not so much from French habits as from the incursions of Italian comic opera into instrumental music. Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, for example, assuming the role of a military general, ordered that “since the comic taste has caused so much devastation among us, our first endeavor must be to confine this taste as much as possible and make room once more for the serious, heroic, and tragic, for pathos and the sublime.”23 By the end of the century, and particularly