Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head
and exclusive) notions of the musically “true,” ideas of progress, and the canonization of Bach as a law giver and musical patriarch. In these developments from around 1800, and particularly in Forkel’s Bach biography, John Deathridge has discovered “the first real step towards the fake Teutonic musical universalism first promoted in the middle of the nineteenth century.”24
EXEMPLARY WOMEN IN THE FORKEL–REICHARDT CONTROVERSY
Back in the early 1780s, however, Forkel’s rhetoric did not go uncontested. The Berlin kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt developed an alternative vision: patriotic but also cosmopolitan, and acknowledging male excellence but celebrating female achievements and influence. Perhaps empowered by the distinction of a royal appointment, Reichardt framed his representations of contemporary musical culture as both parodies of and serious alternatives to Forkel’s musical almanacs of 1782–1784. These writings by Reichardt are barely remembered today, and so it will be useful to review them here in some detail. They established a critical counterpoint (Reichardt contra Forkel) in which the character of contemporary music was personified through contrasting relationships to the figure of woman.
The trigger and parodic target for Reichardt’s publications was Forkel’s generically innovative but somber Musikalischer Almanach für Deutschland auf das Jahr 1782, with its sequels for 1783 and 1784.25 The precise chronology of Reichardt’s rejoinders is uncertain, but he was clearly piqued by Forkel’s prefatory claim in 1782 to be the first musical author to introduce this format of publication in Germany.26 In publishing his own volume with the same title (Musikalischer Almanach auf das Jahr 1782) Reichardt announced a competition in the formation of public taste. In 1783 he extended his remit to both music and the visual arts in his Musikalischer- und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783. This double focus spoke both to aesthetic theory (then concerned with the relationship between the arts) and to the interests of a broad readership. Not without polemical implication, it highlighted Forkel’s stern focus on music (and music alone) in the institutional contexts of court and church. Reichardt’s final installment, in readily portable, pocketbook format, was the Musikalisches Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1784. Almost obsessively concerned with praising contemporary female musicians, professional and amateur, the Taschenbuch can be read as Reichardt’s most pointed rebuff to Forkel’s retrospective vision of German music led by a divinely ordained hierarchy of (almost exclusively male) kapellmeister, konzertmeister, and subsidiary instrumental and vocal employees of state and church. Not for the last time, the professional identities and intellectual frameworks of male critics were organized around a polarized relationship to the figure of woman, whose presence or absence organizes disagreements that are not only “about” sex and gender.
In his almanacs Forkel proved an advocate of the list. Largely avoiding evaluative comments, he assembled the names of the personnel in courts and churches throughout Germany, as if institutional affiliation were itself proof of value and quality. Women appear only under the list of “male and female singers,” and sparingly even there. This approach is particularly marked in the Almanach of 1782, which resembles a reference work rather than a volume to stimulate conversation or self-improvement. Forkel began with reports on inventions and improvements to instruments (6–38) and proceeded through lists of musical journalists, composers, singers, instrumentalists, musical courts, publishers, engravers, societies, and instrument makers. The Almanach resembled precisely what it was not: an official document of and for a court or church. Perhaps Forkel intended to constitute the nation by describing it as an imaginary institution writ large. But, that speculation aside, his account of German music is notable in passing over domestic and amateur music making—and so, by default, the greater part of female practice.
Reichardt’s Musikalischer Almanach auf das Jahr 1782 provided a broadly based alternative to Forkel through a focus on music as part of the culture of sensibility. Sensibility was a general marker of bourgeois artistic practices and, as Reichardt’s overarching theme suggests an entirely different set of musical values. Subsequent issues of the Almanach would usher in the figure of woman as sovereign in this realm, although this is only hinted at in 1782. This almanac offered a musical calendar, listing every day of the year in tabular form, alongside the name and sphere of activity of a living or deceased musician. These musical name days are accompanied by poetic evocations of the character of the months. In prose portraits Reichardt personified the seasons and the natural world in terms of emotional and creative personality, breathing the spirit of Klopstock, Ossian, and Goethe’s Werther into the musical imaginations of his readers. These “portraits” suggested a fusion of visual art, physiognomy, poetry, and music under the higher concept of feeling. Music took its place among the sister arts.
This is not to suggest that Reichardt was blandly sentimental. Irony was an elevating component in the culture of sensibility, sometimes acting as an insurance against the merely mawkish, sometimes providing a critical tool to direct at enemies of the feminized empire of feeling. The first role is evident in Reichardt’s authorial performance: for all his talk of mists and moonlight, freezing rain and winter tears, there is a subtle irony in the stylized, self-conscious deployment of emotive language and the imitation of then modish poetic conceits. The impression is of a stylish, gallant address to the readership: one that seeks to move, amuse, and impress. The second, more pointedly critical, role is evident in the frontispiece to the volume, which lampoons a scene of amateur music making (figure 1). An engraving shows four male musicians in cramped domestic quarters. In the lower right-hand corner a small dog howls. The incompetent players are afflicted with various infirmities. The diminutive, hunched double bassist is too short for his goliath instrument and plays standing on a chair; a gawping, emaciated, and bespectacled keyboardist strains to read his music; a string player turns his oversized instrument on its side and bows the wooden body; a pained singer looks heavenward in desperation. This witty image signals the entertainment value of Reichardt’s publication, as well as the reader’s domestic context. It can also be read as a deflation of male musical authority, a critique of “manliness” that prepares the reader for the realm of sensibility within the volume—for the (not entirely fictitious) authority of the heart. At the very least, it paints a poor image of men who make music without female influence and participation.
FIGURE 1. Frontispiece of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Musikalischer Almanach (1782).
Reichardt’s next installment, the Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, found in the language of feeling a vocabulary to evoke an ideal mingling of hearts and artistic media in domestic mixed-sex contexts.27 If for Forkel true music inspired wonder and astonishment, for Reichardt of the Almanach of 1783 it was something with which to fall in love. A key term in Reichardt’s praise of music, painting, and women was that they provide “Entzücken” (enchantment), a term that suggests the power to seduce the senses and heart. Reichardt elides images of beautiful women in painting and engraving with those of beautiful female performers, so much so that the female sign crosses boundaries of art and life, the real and the represented. For example, referring to the painter Sintzenich and his images of a range of contemporary literary and mythological heroines, Reichardt sighed, “What enchantment filled our heart when we saw your Emilia, your Zemire, your Cecilia, your Vestal Virgins in brightly colored prints.”28
Young ladies singing and playing brought forth similar effusions. For example, Reichardt, playing the peeping Tom in a novelist’s moment, describes eavesdropping and gazing upon Rosa Cannabich as she played Sterkel’s Frühlingsstücke at the piano. (Cannabich, the daughter of the Mannheim konzertmeister Christian Cannabich, is known today chiefly as a pupil of Mozart during the composer’s stay in Mannheim in 1777 and, according to one of Mozart’s letters home, the subject of musical portraiture in the slow movement of the Sonata K. 309/284b).29 Employing neoclassical motifs through which “the fair sex” were often elevated at this time, Reichardt described her as a “die Grazie sich mit der spielenden Muse vereiniget” (the graces united with the [clavier]-playing muse).30 At once “a girl” of seventeen and a “female virtuoso,” she combines a personal timidity proper to her youth and sex with emerging keyboard mastery.