book jackets, however, the young lady at music has lost her mystique.1 In seminar room discussion, and in published scholarship, she is caught in a double bind. On the one hand, her repertory faces charges of musical triviality. On the other, a contextual appraisal of her practice leads almost inevitably to ideas of her containment through music.2 This chapter struggles with this dilemma in an account of music published specifically for ladies. The charge of triviality, and the related notion of female containment, is not so much dispelled as referred to a range of more positive, though still ambivalent, ideas of the period: femininity and the musically beautiful; female leisure and luxury as pleasurable and granting status; education and self-improvement; musical commodification and male authorial gallantry; song texts as invitations to subjectivity; and the possibilities for negotiation of apparent constraints in performance.
AMATEURISM, FASHION, AND LUXURY
From the mid-eighteenth century on, a stream of music variously dedicated (as geography and custom dictated) to “ladies,” “the fair sex,” “le beau sexe,” “all’uso delle dame,” or “für das schöne Geschlecht” trickled from European printing presses. In England, arrangements of songs from Handel’s oratorios appeared to the end of the century under such exalted titles as The Lady’s Banquet.3 The prestige of such collections could be enhanced by the confession of an exclusive, aristocratic source: H. Wright issued Handel’s “celebrated vocal duets” as works “composed for the private practice of Her Majesty the late Queen Caroline.”4 In the English middle-class home such gestures of aristocratic emulation were largely the task of women, a division of labor that left open possibilities for the official middle-class critique of the aristocracy.5
In Germany keyboard sonatas and lieder “for the fair sex” appeared both in collections of printed music and in women’s periodicals. Christoph Nichelmann, a chorister at the Leipzig Thomaskirche during the tenure of J.S. Bach, and subsequently second harpsichordist at the court of Frederick the Great, issued two sets of sonatas with the Nuremberg publisher Balthasar Schmid around 1745: Sei brevi sonate da cembalo massime all’uso delle dame and [Sei] brevi sonate all’uso di chi ama il cembalo massime delle dame.6 Nichelmann’s titles (“chiefly for ladies” and “for lovers of the harpsichord, chiefly for ladies”) drew upon a historical association of women with keyboard instruments in amateur and domestic circles. A Frauenzimmer-Lexicon (Ladies’ dictionary) from the beginning of the century included entries for clavier, lute, and voice (among discussions of how to pot ham, darn socks, and make soap) but omitted references to brass, woodwind, and bowed instruments.7 These historical associations of particular media and genres with the sexes, along with the assumption (as early as the sixteenth century) that music for women should be “easy,” furnished the basic vocabulary of late eighteenth-century collections for women.8
Given the gendered associations of instruments, genres, and styles, some redundancy exists in the dedications to the fair sex. Music so dedicated represents only a fraction of the repertory aimed at and practiced by women.9 On one level the dedication was just a marketing device: it targeted the product without significantly reducing the pool of potential purchasers. “For the fair sex,” with its connotation of gallantry, also prettified the act of buying and selling and made a music book more suitable as a courtship gift and a sign of romantic love (the context in which music is given as a gift in Austen).10 The product’s promise to meet specifically gendered needs rested, however, upon a generalization, the universalizing dedication to “women.” The florid and sentimental excesses of Mme. Herz and Mlle. Silberklang in Mozart’s diva intermezzo Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario; K. 486) of 1786 indicate that quite contrary discourses surrounding professional female music making circulated alongside the stereotypical “easiness” of amateur ladies’ music. Mozart’s divas display precisely that “eruption” of female music making that musical accomplishment sought to ward off.11
Music dedicated to the fair sex epitomized the feminine connotations of amateur domestic music making. The categories of the musical amateur and the feminine intersected in ideals of naturalness, songfulness, instinct, the untutored, and the gently moving rather than the learned. At the same time, music for the fair sex, by inscribing a sex-specific role within the amateur sphere, produced, if only by default, the possibility of masculine involvement in that sphere.12 Seen in this way, music for the fair sex sought to establish sex-specific boundaries amid musical practices in which distinctions between the sexes were blurred. After all, men enjoyed the freedom of playing their own instruments as well as those, such as the keyboard, to which the fair sex was officially restricted. This masculine freedom to mediate between, and exhibit mastery in, both male and female domains is easily overlooked. So, too, are the implications of this situation for how male and female musical practices were constructed. The female musical realm was not fundamentally different from that of the male, but it represented a segment in a masculine universe of possibilities. This is not to deny the gendered element in the binary oppositions of, say, public/private, professional/amateur, orchestral/solo, and flute/clavier but, rather, to highlight the mobility accorded to men within those oppositions. Music for the fair sex intervened in this complex situation, seeking to clarify a specifically feminine practice in accordance with the broader late eighteenth-century attempt to distinguish the feminine and the masculine as opposite, if complementary, terms and map these onto the categories of private and public, respectively.
As a newly articulated (if not literally new) genre, music for the fair sex arose in the 1740s in response to multiple social and economic stimuli. Such music was a medium of, and commerce in, a new category of gender: femininity. This category (which one might mistakenly assume to have existed throughout history) arose in the eighteenth century alongside the two-sex model and elaborated the premise that men and women were fundamentally different in their biology. Though present in the German lexicon already in the fifteenth century, the word Weiblichkeit (femininity) accrued new meanings in the course of the eighteenth century, in part through the influence of an English discourse on womanhood, a description of female character that yoked together physical, moral, intellectual, and emotional characteristics.13 In a way that can now seem peculiar, early eighteenth-century discussions of gender in Germany were focused on men and pivoted on the terms masculinity and effeminacy. Only gradually did femininity emerge as the primary opposing term to masculinity, its inclusion in Johann Christoph Adelung’s Versuch of 1774–1786 a landmark.14 There, as elsewhere, femininity was a class-based ideal assuming female leisure and lending the figure of woman decorative, moral, and aesthetic significance.
We need not read Karl Marx back into this period to recognize that femininity signified an absence of and unsuitability for physical labor. As such, the rise of femininity accords with the familiar grand narrative of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s history. As Anne McClintock has summarized this narrative, “At some point during the eighteenth century, the story goes, the spindle and loom were pried from her fingers and all the ‘bustling labor’ of the previous century—the candle- and soap-making, the tailoring, millinery, straw-weaving, lace-making, carding and wool-sorting, flax-beating, dairy and poultry work—were removed piecemeal to the manufactories.” The topics of amateurism and domesticity within and around music for the fair sex rhetorically consigned woman to a newly articulated private sphere in which idleness was taken on as, in McClintock’s words, a “character role.”15 Such withdrawal was the flip side of the utopian but ultimately patriarchal Enlightenment ideal of the “bourgeois public sphere” (influentially if contentiously expounded by Jürgen Habermas) in which individuals—primarily educated men—debated matters of collective civic interest in the public domains of clubs, coffeehouses, and print culture.16
Music for the fair sex performed a double disciplinary function. On the one hand it invited women to the practice of music as an alternative to the false pleasures of, and moral dangers posed by, the social world. On the other hand it sought to prescribe the nature of that musical practice, to deprofessionalize it, tether it to ideals of female character, and inscribe women’s primary roles within the patriarchal family as wife, mother, and daughter. The disciplinary
