FIGURE 1. Frontispiece of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Musikalischer Almanach (1782).
Reichardt’s next installment, the Musikalischer und Künstler-Almanach auf das Jahr 1783, found in the language of feeling a vocabulary to evoke an ideal mingling of hearts and artistic media in domestic mixed-sex contexts.27 If for Forkel true music inspired wonder and astonishment, for Reichardt of the Almanach of 1783 it was something with which to fall in love. A key term in Reichardt’s praise of music, painting, and women was that they provide “Entzücken” (enchantment), a term that suggests the power to seduce the senses and heart. Reichardt elides images of beautiful women in painting and engraving with those of beautiful female performers, so much so that the female sign crosses boundaries of art and life, the real and the represented. For example, referring to the painter Sintzenich and his images of a range of contemporary literary and mythological heroines, Reichardt sighed, “What enchantment filled our heart when we saw your Emilia, your Zemire, your Cecilia, your Vestal Virgins in brightly colored prints.”28
Young ladies singing and playing brought forth similar effusions. For example, Reichardt, playing the peeping Tom in a novelist’s moment, describes eavesdropping and gazing upon Rosa Cannabich as she played Sterkel’s Frühlingsstücke at the piano. (Cannabich, the daughter of the Mannheim konzertmeister Christian Cannabich, is known today chiefly as a pupil of Mozart during the composer’s stay in Mannheim in 1777 and, according to one of Mozart’s letters home, the subject of musical portraiture in the slow movement of the Sonata K. 309/284b).29 Employing neoclassical motifs through which “the fair sex” were often elevated at this time, Reichardt described her as a “die Grazie sich mit der spielenden Muse vereiniget” (the graces united with the [clavier]-playing muse).30 At once “a girl” of seventeen and a “female virtuoso,” she combines a personal timidity proper to her youth and sex with emerging keyboard mastery. This, Reichardt declared, is an intoxicating combination.
More is at stake in Reichardt’s performance of sensibility than a claim to Werther-like susceptibility to female, and musical, beauty. The now familiar idea of a male critic’s being inspired to strong feelings by the sight of female performance goes hand in hand with something less obvious: Reichardt’s feelings for women were also demonstrations of a capacity to feel as a woman, at least within the dominion of sensibility and the fine arts. Laced through Reichardt’s almanacs is a figure of exchange—poetically styled, an exchange of souls—through which men and women find an ideal, sex-transcending union in the hallowed realms of love, music, and sensibility. One of the roles of the arts, it seems, was to furnish common ground where different artistic media, and newly polarized sexes, might meet on something fantasized as being equal terms. In that not-entirely imaginary space, some aspects of male authority could be suspended; the figure of refined and refining womanhood is ushered in as a symbolic sovereign, and the capacity to be moved, and to love, is the condition of belonging—an altogether different basis for membership from the institutional affiliations and professional pedigrees recorded by Forkel.
This largely forgotten moment in the history of music and male identity was self-conscious and the subject of some contemporary theorization. Reichardt himself offered a formulation and reflection in two concluding essays of the Almanach for 1783.31 The first essay is on the education of taste, the second on the use of images of suffering heroes in the arts. Both essays directed German youth to female influences. In “Vom Geschmack und der Wichtigkeit einer frühzeitgen Bildung” (On the taste and importance of early cultivation) Reichardt recommended that the young should be spared harsh moralizing and allowed simply to spend time in the company of cultivated women.32 This, he argued, is the surest means to acquire taste, which is the ability to recognize and be moved by the morally good. A “Gefühl des Schönen” (feeling for the beautiful), which unites the domains of aesthetics and ethics, is nurtured through the elevating example of (the right kind of) women. At the opposite pole to exemplary womanhood stands “Der kalte lieblose Mann, oder noch mehr, der Bösewicht” (the cold, loveless man, or, still worse, the scoundrel), the army of rakes, libertines, villains, and unmovable fathers, indifferent to the torments they inflict.33 The reader is persuaded of this cause through felicitous semantic duplication, the use of schön to designate both women (“das schöne Geschlecht”) and the morally beautiful (“das Schöne”).
In the second essay, “Vom Interesse des leidenden Helden für die Kunst” (On the interest of suffering heroes for the arts), Reichardt provided an art-theoretical rationale for the idea of an exchange of souls. Suffering heroes are ideal material for artistic representation, he argued, because they arouse sympathetic identification: “As soon as we see someone suffering . . . our imagination places us with them in an identical situation; it seems as though we were in their place.”34 He then elaborated this principle in terms that both impose and dissolve sexual difference. Women, he asserted, are more readily and deeply moved than men, for which reason they make better “suffering heroes.”35 Indeed, elsewhere in this almanac Reichardt described the celebrity painter Angelica Kauffman in just these terms, as a sorrowing artist, burdened by a secret, suffering from love.36 What could be more moving than a virtuous woman in distress, Reichardt pondered at length. Where we might expect images of the male rescuer to enter the text Reichardt simply dwells, sympathetically, as if experiencing himself in the position of a suffering heroine.
The exchange of souls as an aesthetic and moral ideal, though more readily articulated through the visual arts and literature, also haunted Reichardt’s ideals of sound. The charms of Rosa Cannabich notwithstanding, Reichardt often attributed not narrowly gendered characteristics to performances but an androgynous mixture of forcefulness and delicacy that both entice and command. In the voice of Josepha Hellmuth, a court singer in Mainz, Reichardt discovered a mixture of tenderness and power that could be understood as encompassing extremes of manliness and femininity: “None can deny their astonishment at her richly toned, powerful, tender, touching, voice.”37 Not just expressive range but harmonious balance of contrasting elements is conveyed in this description. Far from representing a transgressive aspect, this androgynous balance of antithetical elements was a neoclassical ideal in art theory of the period, theory with which Reichardt seems to be working. Androgyny, as a golden mean and principle of balance, was influentially propounded by the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his reappraisal of classical statuary and epitomized by his celebration of the equilibrium of masculine and feminine, adult and youthful, characteristics of the Apollo Belvedere.38 Along these lines, Reichardt admired the antithesis between ingratiating “performance” and “manly” tone in the (male) violinist Schick: “Pleasingness, sweetness of performance perfects his glory; this performance is unsurpassable because it ‘speaks’ and is full of soul. . . . The tone that he produces from his violin is powerful, manly, profound.”39
However, there was an emphasis in Reichardt, alien to Winckelmann, on the female exemplification of aesthetic ideals that has implications for the political coloring of the realm of the arts. Reichardt began the Almanach for 1783 with a twenty-year-old violinist, one “Baier,” the daughter of a court trumpeter. The “Stärke und Werth” (power and integrity) of her playing, Reichardt affirmed, were recognized when Frederick the Great condescended to accompany her on his flute. This musical inversion of social hierarchy (the king as servant) hints at the notion of woman’s musical sovereignty. Reichardt also perceived aristocratic sprezzatura in Baier’s playing, even though she was not of aristocratic rank. Specifically, he praised her as the exception not only to her own sex but to male violinists in preserving in her playing a “decorum and artful negligence in execution.”40 Praise of female musical excellence is coupled here with some notion that the power of the sovereign is fleetingly usurped or checked. In this emphasis on an individual’s musical skill and, related to this, the unique character of her sound, Reichardt’s sense of music, and of writing about it, appears more modern, if impressionistic, than Forkel’s lists of institutional musicians,
