By Anna Kendall, Year 12.
When considering the world of classical music, the minds of most are filled with images of Mozart and Beethoven, Purcell and Vivaldi, Chopin and Grieg, all tremendous virtuosos whose compositions were fundamental in creating and developing the musical world. However, these pioneers all have one uniting quality: they are all male. For many, and indeed for myself, it is a challenge to think of even just one influential female composer, whilst it is easy to list countless prolific men.
Despite being regarded as inferior to the opposite sex in terms of importance in the history of music, for over a millennium, women have been composing great works, beginning with Hildegard von Bingen in the 12th century, right through to the present day. Women have in fact made a significant contribution to the musical world which should not be overlooked.
Not only a composer of some 70 works, Hildegard Von Bingen (1098-1179) was a German Benedictine Abbess, writer, mystic and visionary. Attention in recent decades to women of the medieval Church has led to a great deal of popular interest in Hildegard’s music. Her most notable work is Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues), a morality play which was thought to have been composed as early as 1151. The key feature of the work is how it exhibits her musical style: in the play, as with the majority of her works, the music is described as monophonic, that is, consisting of exactly one melodic line which dominates the piece. Her style is characterised by soaring melodies that pushed the boundaries of the typical chants of the medieval period. In this way, Hildegard was able to conform to the traditions of 12th century evolutions of chant whilst simultaneously pushing those evolutions, which in many cases was through her use of melismatic (rather than the traditional syllabic) recurring melodic units.
Moreover, despite Hildegard’s self-professed view that the purpose of her compositions was the praise of God, some scholars have asserted that Hildegard made a close association between music and the female body in her musical compositions. In her Symphonia (a collection of liturgical songs), the poetry and music could be concerned with the anatomy of female desire and could thus be described as Sapphonic, connecting her to a history of female rhetoricians. From this, it seems astonishing that such a key figure of the early musical world can go unnoticed: Hildegard’s ideas lay the foundations for many great works.
Moving forward to the Romantic period, a more well-known female composer is Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847). Sister of the distinguished composer Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny composed more than 460 works, including a piano trio and several books of piano pieces and songs. Having learned the piano from a young age, in 1820 Fanny, along with her brother Felix, joined the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin which was led by Carl Friedrich Zelter. Zelter at one point favoured Fanny over Felix: in an 1831 letter to a friend he described Fanny’s skill as a pianist with the highest praise for a woman at the time: “She plays like a man.”
Notwithstanding her abilities, she faced numerous trials whilst trying to compose. Fanny was limited by prevailing attitudes of the time toward women, attitudes apparently shared by her father, who was tolerant, rather than supportive, of her activities as a composer. Her father wrote to her in 1820 “Music will perhaps become [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament”. Her piano works are often in the style of songs and carry the title, ‘Song without Words.’ This style of piece was successfully developed by Felix, though some assert that Fanny preceded him in the genre, and the question of who out of the siblings is more rightly deserving of credit for this style is debated amongst scholars. Nevertheless, Fanny was a key composer of the Romantic period who should not be hidden under the shadow of her brother.
The wife of Robert Schumann and herself one of the most distinguished pianists of her time, Clara Schumann (1819-1896) enjoyed a 61-year concert career. She was an incredible virtuoso, and was able to change the format and repertoire of the piano recital and the tastes of the listening public in the Romantic era. She was one of the first pianists to perform from memory, making that the standard for concertizing. Trained by her father to play by ear and to memorise, she gave public performances from memory as early as age thirteen, a fact noted as something exceptional by her reviewers.
However, for many years after her death Clara Schumann was not widely recognized as a composer. As part of the broad musical education given her by her father, Clara Wieck learned to compose, and from childhood to middle age she produced a good body of work. Clara wrote that “composing gives me great pleasure… there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound”. At the young age fourteen she wrote her piano concerto, with some help from Robert Schumann (a childhood companion who would later become her husband). However, as she grew older, she sadly became more preoccupied with other responsibilities in life and found it hard to compose regularly, writing, “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?”. This self-doubt caused her to stop composing altogether: her compositional output decreased notably after she reached the age of thirty-six.
Today, her compositions are increasingly performed and recorded, and Clara is beginning to become recognised for her contributions, both as a performer and as a composer.
As well as these three key figures, there are countless other female composers throughout history who have helped to shape the musical world: Hildegard, Fanny and Clara are a brief introduction to a group of lost pioneers. It is in this modern age that we are able to uncover the hidden stories and works of these tremendous women, and I am hopeful that the absence of females in musical history may be unwritten, and that these women may finally get the recognition they deserve.