concerning her activities and the circumstances of her eclipse as a musical director at court. Putting this material to work, her career can become an example of the ascendance and eventual eclipse of the female sign in music culture of the late eighteenth century, marking the rapid change of atmosphere during the Napoleonic wars. Within this broad account of historical change, the chapter focuses on the intellectual history of the category of the “woman composer” that crystallized in reviews of her published music in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung of 1806. Perhaps for the first time in these reviews, and not to Westenholz’s advantage, the domains of sex, music, and composing were linked in a strenuously disciplinary manner. Sex, in particular, emerged as a master category, not inflecting but forming the horizon of possibility for musical production and meaning within a bourgeois masculine discourse of the musically serious and transcendent. In this context Reichardt’s balanced, supportive reviews, according no interpretive weight to Westenholz’s sex, are more sunset than dawn.
Westenholz was caught out by historical change. Her career was founded on the earlier feminocentric and aristocratic values of the era of sensibility. Born to a family of musician artisans, Westenholz was raised for a musical career at court expense, owing to the desire for local female singers. Early keyboard instruction, reportedly after the precepts of C.P.E. Bach, further equipped her to teach the royal children and compose. At court she established a culture of Mozart’s fortepiano music, regularly appearing as soloist in his concerti and chamber music. Authorizing her own compositions in terms of Mozartian discipleship, she programmed Mozart alongside her own: if the fortepiano and Mozart are subject to a feminizing reception, Westenholz gained symbolic membership of an emerging male canon of Viennese instrumental music, as formulated in the criticism and reviews of E.T.A. Hoffmann.
Arguably, the context of the Napoleonic wars not only triggered Westenholz’s decision to publish but also encouraged the tone of the review, as if contemporary political chaos inspired a corrective disciplinary vision of musical sex and gender roles: an illusory clarity. Inevitably, this newly imagined tradition of female subordination dealt a blow to the practices and discourses of female ascendance. There were other signs, too, that the dark clouds of Virginia Woolf’s nineteenth century were gathering: in a letter of resignation from 1811 Westenholz referred to her humiliation by the new konzertmeister, who had struck her with his violin bow when she gave the musicians the tempo with her hand. In emphasizing this affront to her person and, by extension, to his Highness Frederick Francis I, Westenholz offers a fitting envoi to the sovereign feminine of the previous century.
Traces of that sovereignty were not simply wiped away in 1800, of course. In the concluding chapter I explore Goethe’s tragedy Egmont, set by Reichardt as well as Beethoven, which illustrates the continuing currency of female musical ascendance on the Viennese stage as late as 1810. The genesis and publication of this work spans almost four decades, beginning in 1774 (when Goethe set to work), through 1787 (when the poet completed and published his text), 1796 (when Reichardt’s setting premiered in Weimar), and 1809–1810 (when Beethoven composed his music), to 1812 (when Breitkopf published it). This lengthy genesis encompasses most of the period covered by the book, from the last years of Goethe’s so-called Sturm und Drang phase and Beethoven’s infancy to the end of the literature of “Weimar classicism” and the beginning of Beethoven’s “late” style. In other words, Egmont’s genesis begins when Germany was still recovering from the Seven Years’ War and continues through the French Revolution, the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars (the context in which Beethoven’s setting was commissioned). Such shifting political contexts, along with the differing views of poet and composer on the status and role of music in relation to literature, free the modern reader of any obligation to discover a single message or essential unity of content in the piece. If there is anything to the notion that works embody their historical moment we would expect to discover fracture and contradiction here. Without denying these aspects of disunity, one can nonetheless find in Egmont a relatively coherent projection, even a summation, of the discourse of female ascendance in, as, and through music that characterized the period of its genesis.
Music plays an unusually prominent role in Egmont and is associated primarily with the mistress of the eponymous hero, Klärchen, a burgher’s daughter and military maiden. Goethe’s stage directions call for two stage songs for Klärchen (in acts 1 and 3), as well as music signifying her death (in act 5) and a victory symphony to end the work. In Beethoven’s setting an additional melodrama and pantomime in act 5 create an almost unbroken musical culmination and conclusion to the drama, something in excess of (though not necessarily at odds with) Goethe’s specifications. As part of this musical complex Klärchen appears to imprisoned Egmont as a disembodied spirit, hovering above the stage to the accompaniment of shimmering and pictorial orchestral music. These additions to Goethe’s text, along with Beethoven’s setting of Klärchen’s stage songs not as simple strophic melodies but as epic, through-composed arias with heavy orchestral accompaniment, exalt her musically and, more abstractly, compositionally as a figurehead of Beethovenian (and more broadly romantic) preoccupations: breach of generic decorum, heroic overcoming, music as spirit and ideal. If Goethe drew on the strong association between music and exemplary womanhood in his original conception of Klärchen as driven by strong emotions to the defense of her lover and her country, Beethoven’s setting (emphasizing Klärchen’s self-transcending androgyny) can extend that association into musical-aesthetic and compositional realms far removed from Goethe’s original. Arguably, Beethoven’s emphasis on Klärchen as a boundary breaker rewrites the poet’s more equivocal construction of her as a girl inspired by love to brief political agency. But if Beethoven’s Klärchen appears as a far more potent figure than she is in Goethe’s play, Beethoven’s version of Klärchen is not so much “about” female empowerment as it is about male compositional and musical transcendence.
In turn, Beethoven’s use, in this and other stage works, of female androgyny (a mixture of masculine and feminine elements in characterization of lead female characters) to signify a universal vision of the heroic as morally righteous transgression of established boundaries, raises issues of difference between his conceptions of music’s relationship to gender and those of (some of) his modern admirers. Beethoven’s reading of the dramas of Schiller and Goethe is often summoned by biographers as evidence of the composer’s attachment to male heroes and the political visions those heroes are said to embody. But his stage works, most obviously Fidelio, paint a far more complicated picture, one explicable in part by their textual sources and genesis in the vanishing culture of female musical ascendance. That said, Egmont, particularly in Beethoven’s setting, reveals a shift in register from the eighteenth century’s aesthetic and moral elevation of (approved) female musical practices to more formal allegorical figurations of both women and music that refer to, and even celebrate, male creativity.
In an afterword I seek to write small the conceptual core of this study through a reading of Schiller’s poem Würde der Frauen (1795) and two settings of it, one by Reichardt and the other by the little-known composer Amalia Thierry. Schiller’s poem reveals an intense investment in the two-sex model, tracing in quasi- philosophical manner the implications of male and female character in all domains of life. Unsurprisingly, given Schiller’s reputation, women are pictured as loving, domestic, flower-weaving mothers and daughters, whereas men roam and strive heroically in unbounded, hostile spaces. There is a contradiction, however, that confounds current convictions about the function of a stereotyped “femininity” in relation to artistic production. Specifically, Schiller locates knowledge and poetry within the peaceable female domain, aligning the elevated women of his text with the production and consumption of the arts and letters. In doing so he sends a tremor through the system of sex and gender as we have come to analyze and understand it and hints at those different conceptual structures that form the objects of history.
1
Europe’s Living Muses
Women, Music, and Modernity in Burney’s History and Tours
Burney’s women summon superlatives. In Naples Mrs. Hamilton is the best performer on the harpsichord;
