the world. These metonymic shifts between music and female character were facilitated by a central eighteenth-century metaphor: the body as a strung instrument or clavier.17 Within song texts this proved an irresistible conceit. The Berlin-based organist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel opened his second set of Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1771) with a rhetorical apostrophe to “Das Clavier” (example 1). In stanza 3 the female narrator eschews unspecified “false pleasure” in preference for “sweet harmony.” The metaphor of the body as clavier is pursued in a play on “rein,” a reference to both moral purity and equal temperament. Music was not simply a means of disciplining the female subject but a metaphor through which femininity was produced as a discursive ideal.
NICHELMANN AND THE RHETORIC OF EASINESS
Reflecting their early date of composition, Nichelmann’s sonatas remained largely unaffected on the level of musical style by assumptions concerning female character and taste. Indeed, his ambiguous dedication (“chiefly for ladies”) leaves open the possibility of male performance and in so doing complicates the rhetoric of separate female and male spheres deployed by subsequent collections aimed exclusively at women.18 Similarly, in arranging the sonatas in a pedagogic ascent from “easy” to increasingly “difficult,” Nichelmann did not succumb to an essentialized connection between music for women and musical “easiness” (whatever that might be). On the contrary, such arrangement asserts that facility increases with practice. Minor keys (Sonatas Nos. 2, 4, and 6), chromaticism (Sonata No. 4, second movement), and such formal refinements as the elision into the finale of a slow movement in an enharmonically related key (Sonata No. 5, second and third movements) partake of the serious, intellectual realm of the north German Kenner (connoisseur). “Difficult” or unusual keys are cultivated to an eccentric degree in Nichelmann’s Sonata No. 5 in E♭ (example 2). The slow movement is set in B major, an extremely rare key in the mid-eighteenth century. Furthermore, the slow movement ends, or rather does not end, with a transition into the finale in which the E♭ tonic is approached enharmonically through D♯ minor. Such artful harmonic techniques, appealing to the intellect and more at home in the improvised free fantasia than in the sonata for ladies, are far from the aesthetically feminized sphere of the late eighteenth-century amateur.19 The esoteric enharmony of Nichelmann’s Sonata No. 5 was beyond the range of materials that were later stereotypically associated with the lady at music. When Diderot wrote to C.P.E. Bach and Friedrich Melchior Grimm requesting sonatas for his daughter to play, he specifically requested works in “difficult keys,” explaining that his daughter was genuinely talented. The fact that such comments were necessary suggests an ingrained association of female executants with “easy” works. Diderot also expressed his fears that marriage will bring his daughter’s musical development to a premature conclusion: “I believe that she will be a good player, but I am practically certain that she will be a musician, and that she will learn the theory of this art well, unless some future husband should ruin everything, spoil her figure, and take away her appetite for study.”20
EXAMPLE 1. Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wenkel, Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1771), no. 1, “Das Clavier”.
| Süß ertönendes Clavier!Welche Freuden schaffst du mir!In der Einsamkeit gebrichtMir es an Ergötzen nicht.Du bist was ich selber will,Bald Erweckung und bald Spiel. | Sweet sounding clavier,What joy you bring me!In lonelinessIt does not fail to delight.You are, what I myself would be,Now rousing and now play[ful]. |
| Scherz ich, so ertönet mir,Ein scherzhaftes Lied von dir.Will ich aber traurig sein,Klagend stimmst du mit mir ein.Heb ich fromme Lieder anWie erhaben klingst du dann! | If I jest, then you sing to meA playful song.But if I want to be sad,Then you join with me dolefully.If I offer devout songs—Then what sublimity in your sound! |
| Niemals öffne meine BrustSich der Lockung falscher Lust!Meine Freuden müssen rein,So wie deine Saiten sein:Und mein ganzes Leben nieOhne süße Harmonie. | My breast never opensTo the temptation of false pleasure!My joys must be as pure,As your strings are:And my whole life neverWithout sweet harmony. |
After Nichelmann, collections of sonatas, keyboard pieces, and songs for women were issued by Johann Nikolaus Tischer, Johann Nikolaus Müller, J.F.W. Wenkel, Ernst Christoph Dreßler, C.P.E. Bach, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, Johann Christian Gottfried Gräser, P.J. von Thonus (perhaps a pseudonym), Carl Wilhelm Müller, and Karl Friedrich Ebers (table 1). These collections addressed themselves to both traditional assumptions about woman’s place and emergent ideas about female character, taste, and physical nature.21 The easiness of music for ladies emerges as a prominent thread in these works, the term easy indicating here keys without many sharps and flats, melody-centered styles, and avoidance of both figuration (however easily it might fall under the hands) and thick, reinforced textures.
The English easy embraces several related terms in German musical criticism of the period that denoted, collectively, the naturalness and accessibility of galant, melody-oriented styles. Mattheson’s remarks on the foundations of melody in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) furnish a close to comprehensive inventory of what was musically at stake in “easiness” in music for the fair sex: the avoidance of excessive melodic embellishment and rapid changes of meter, tempo, and register; restriction to diatonic harmonies; uniformity rather than diversity; and cultivation of “noble simplicity.” A rejection of conspicuous compositional artifice underwrites these elements. As Mattheson confessed, “One puts artifice aside, or conceals it well.”22 The pleasures of amateur participation are privileged over the composer’s learned demonstration of art.
EXAMPLE 2. Christoph Nichelmann, Sei breve sonate da cembalo massime all’uso delle dame (ca. 1745), Sonata No. 5, opening measures from the first, second, and third movements.
TABLE 1 A selection of music for the fair sex by eighteenth-century German composers
TABLE 1 (continued)
In this light the “easiness” of collections of ladies’ music involves aesthetic precepts of eighteenth-century composition that were not, in themselves, either negative or gender specific. Nonetheless, an element of concession is undoubtedly present in their gender-specific deployment in this repertory. For women, easiness was officially sanctioned, even compulsory. Music for the fair sex summoned a rhetoric of deprofessionalization of female music making that was in place even prior to the emergence of the repertory. Already in the first decades of the eighteenth century we find a distinction drawn in the compilation of the clavier books for Anna Magdalena and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach between female (nonprofessional) and male (professional) spheres of music making (where “professional” indicates the potential to make money from music). What distinguishes these books is not the degree of difficulty of their contents but their purpose, and thus the futures they envisage for their respective dedicatees. The Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (begun in Cöthen in 1720) evinces not simply a pedagogic purpose, being a combined manual for the study of performance and composition, but, specifically, a trajectory that takes the student from the rudiments of notation, ornamentation, and fingering to that point where fugue, free composition, and thus professional appointment as organist, cantor, and kapellmeister are in sight.23 The structure of the two books for Anna Magdalena (begun in Cöthen in 1722 and completed in Leipzig in 1725), in contrast, is circular and static: the executant is in the same social position on the first page as when the last page is turned. In the second book, C.P.E. Bach recorded his earliest surviving works—three marches, two polonaises, and a solo movement (H. 1,
