SCOPE, ARGUMENTS, AND DRAMATIS PERSONAE
If Reichardt is so revealing a witness to this period, why is he so little known, or valued, in Anglophone musicology? One reason, already hinted at, is his colorful style, which seeks to capture (musical and individual) character rather than to proceed in a primarily documentary and positivist manner. His music, like his writing, also lost out to historical change. As the composer of around 1,500 mostly strophic songs, his musical output, though admired by contemporaries, was eclipsed by the Schubertian revolution. Specifically, Reichardt’s obedience to the form of the poetry he set revealed too little of that compositional rewriting, and subjectivity, admired in the romantic metaphysics of music that was emerging at the end of his life. As the preferred composer of major poets of the day, particularly Goethe, Reichardt appeared to modern eyes too devout (too Lutheran, perhaps) in his relationship to the word. Similarly, in instrumental music, Reichardt’s adherence to ideas of unity of style and affect, though typical of his Prussian context, was also a matter of regret within the discourse of Viennese classical style, as it developed in the twentieth century.
A pattern of Othering Reichardt as reportedly uncharacteristic of his period persists to this day. Symptomatic is the omission from the New Bach Reader of his important essay on J.S. Bach, first published in the Musikalisches Kunstmagazin (1782). The omission may reflect positivistic difficulty with Reichardt’s social and literary frameworks for musical meaning. His stigmatization began early, with his dismissal from the post of court kapellmeister in Berlin for his publication in 1794 of a relatively positive account of the French Revolution in the Vetraute Briefe über Frankreich. This disgrace, along with Schiller’s (presumably related) personal dislike of him, probably influenced Reichardt’s reputation in the canon-building and patriotic Prussian nineteenth century, and though the details of that scandal are not remembered now, it seems to have cast a long shadow.
In selecting Reichardt as a companion to this study I hope to highlight some of his novel modes of writing and thinking about music, and to place them within wider feminocentric aspects of the late eighteenth century. His life spans the entire period covered by this study. Born in the east Prussian city of Königsberg four years before the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), he was a witness to all but the last battles of the Napoleonic wars, dying in June 1814, three months before the Congress of Vienna. Understandably, given the focus of Reichardt’s enthusiasms, scholars working in the former East Germany with a class-based and materialist historiography have often regarded him as a chief representative of an emerging bourgeois consciousness in German music. In focusing on Reichardt’s investments in female music making, I highlight an aspect of that consciousness.
I became aware of Reichardt’s women near the beginning of my research through his publications of songs, concerti, and lullabies “for the fair sex.” Like many modern readers of the preface to the Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (1775) I was struck by the composer’s condescension (his reference to the “pretty little hand” of the performer and its unwillingness to “stretch” to the octave), though I was keen from the start to discover more about the cultural work and meaning of that condescension, in relation to the business of selling music, the social status of the purchasers, and Reichardt’s own identity as a composer. With time, it became clear that Reichardt’s attitudes were not straightforwardly trivializing. Unusually for a German kapellmeister, he fostered the composing of his wife (Juliane) and daughter (Louise), wrote enthusiastically of women performers, and, more broadly, was enamored of contemporary ideas of female sensibility and the femininity of aesthetic beauty. Sometimes Reichardt addressed the activities of female performers and composers on sex-specific terms (as when he eavesdropped on Rosa Cannabich) and sometimes without apparent reference to sex (as in his balanced reviews of the works of the Schwerin court musician Sophie Westenholz, which I explore in chapter 5). Overall, Reichardt’s relationship to musical women frustrated my own interpretive categories and so warranted further work. Coming to terms with Reichardt involved a wide-ranging study of feminocentric aspects of his central and north German contexts. Although he appears in every chapter, he serves as a witness to concepts and practices, not as the focus of the study.
Among the intellectual sources of Reichardt’s feminocentric criticism were the musical travel diaries of the English music historian Charles Burney; I explore this connection in chapter 1. Burney (1726–1814) was a generation older than Reichardt (1752–1814), but both men undertook musical tours in Germany in the early 1770s. Burney’s unflattering comments on Prussian music, on the one hand, and his innovative way of writing about music, on the other, inspired Reichardt to a work of patriotic defense, and authorial emulation, in the Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend.41 Burney’s The Present State of Music in Germany (1773) was reported in the German press, immediately translated into German, and read closely as an account of German music through the eyes of a visiting foreigner (a favorite perspective of critical “Enlightenment” letters). One of the distinctive aspects of Burney’s writing was the prominence he granted female musicians. Not simply a question of occasional flattery of wealthy women and royalty of his acquaintance, or gallant appeals to his female readers, Burney accorded women a wide range of significance, praising their achievements in performance and composition using vocabulary that ranged across the natural and the expressive to touch on technical prowess, knowledge, and genius. Among his tropes of the female musician is that of the living muse, whose practice embodies specific aesthetic ideals and who functions, abstractly, as an exemplar. The living muse is related to the conventions of visual allegory but brings allegory to bear on historically concrete individuals with names, biographies, and even published music. Such idealizations were no doubt constraining as well as elevating; they nevertheless represent one of the ways in which the female sign became meaningful in this historical site.
Burney’s praise of women was honed on the works of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, where the figure of woman was marshaled in favor of emerging bourgeois and capitalist interests. In the 1740s, when Hume published his Essays Moral and Political, such arguments were not yet won, and the historical associations of commerce, luxury, pleasure, leisure, and the arts with effeminacy and decadence were still marked. Burney’s simplified, even simplistic, deployment of Hume’s rhetoric may indicate that the argument was largely won by the 1770s, at least in London. It also reflected his ambition to include music within the domain of polite taste, refinement, and luxury (in a positive sense) that had been outlined by Hume. In other words, the ascendance of woman in Burney’s writing is bound up with the ascent of music as a fine art, and it is in this context that Burney’s praise of “civilized” and “feminized” aspects of musical style and performance can be read.
This constellation of luxury, the feminine, and the civilized indicates that female musical ascendance was bound up not just with ideas about art but with bourgeois patronage and the rise of capitalist modes of musical production and exchange. This commercial aspect informs chapter 2, where I focus on the proliferation of accessible collections of German songs and keyboard music with dedications “to the fair sex” that were published from midcentury on. Reichardt’s collections of this type stand out for their fascinating prefaces, illustrative material, and, sometimes, contradictory messages. The appearance of gender-specific musical commodities is likely to strike modern readers as constraining for the women originally targeted by the dedication and as jeopardizing intrinsic musical value. Without denying these interpretations, I seek nuance in this chapter by imagining the performance of this music within the broad context of female accomplishment: an ideal of the period whose boundaries and implications were contested.
Music “for the fair sex” was marked by the contradictions and tensions of contemporary thinking about the sexes: it did not constitute a unified, disciplinary statement about the nature and limits of female musical practice. Some of the essential musical, moral, and aesthetic ideals of the repertory were not gender specific, despite the market’s promise to meet such needs. Both for and about women, this generically varied repertory invited diverse performance resources and practices, just as it styled a significant segment of contemporary music as feminine.
