Lieder By German Women Composers

Lieder By German Women Composers

What business do women have composing songs? Though we do not expect to hear this question in our culture today, it was an all too familiar one for women writing in Romantic Era Germany. In this listening journal, I will attempt to answer that question by comparing the Lieder of four German women to the standards their male counterparts established.

The primary object of my exploration is Lieder, an LP recorded by Katherine Ciesinski (mezzo-soprano), John Ostendorf (bass-baritone), and Rudolph Palmer (pianist). The recording contains twenty-one songs by Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, Josephine Lang, and Pauline Viardot-Garcia. These four women wrote primarily during the 1830s and 1840s, after Franz Schubert had established the Lied as a genre through his prolific song composing.

Lied is the German word for song, but over time, historians have come to identify the term with the style developed by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and others in 19th-century Germany. Lieder piano accompaniments particularly set them apart from earlier songs; in addition to providing a harmonic framework for the vocal line, the piano helps to convey part of the sentiment of a Lied, sometimes sharing the melody with the voice or acting as a separate character in the drama. The piano texture also helps to set the tone of contrasting sections of a piece and typically begins and ends the piece in order to portray a song’s mood in sections without words. Usually the texts for Lieder were contemporary, deeply emotional poems.

The heyday of Lied composition occurred prior to movements for women’s suffrage and other rights, but murmurings of the questioning that would eventually result in the struggle for gender equality were already present. Female musicians were an essential part of popular and high-class entertainment and had been for hundreds of years, but there were mixed feelings as to whether women ought to be a part of the business of music by publishing their compositions for money. Perhaps part of that hesitation to approve women publishing music stemmed from a doubt that women shared equal abilities with men. In fact, even the legendary Clara Schumann often doubted her compositional abilities: “I once thought that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose—no one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to? It would be arrogance, though indeed my father led me to it in earlier days” (Lieder). Others, however, simply thought it inappropriate for a woman to publish. Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s father and brother, Abraham and Felix Mendelssohn, told her that she must not try to publish or make a career out of music, though they considered her to be a skilled musician. In Felix Mendelssohn’s words, “[Fanny] is too much all that a woman should be for [authorship]” (Lieder). In fact, Fanny’s womanhood in a rich family meant that not only did she not have to work, but she was not allowed to work, and publishing and performing public concerts were both considered “work” (Sperber 24). The suggestion that it is unwomanly to work or publish music seems strange to our modern views. Due to the disparity between our culture’s collective understanding of gender and the notions of Felix Mendelssohn’s time, we cannot objectively fault Mendelssohn for his opinion on women’s occupations. We can, however, explore the ability of female composers through the works they left us, such as those on our chosen recording.

In order to get a closer look at the compositional skills of these four composers, let us examine Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel’s “Die Nonne” (“The Nun”), Op. 9, No. 12, which is in many ways representative of the other songs on the recording. As a Lied, the song set a poem by a contemporary of the composer, in this case Johann Ludwig Uhland, and tells of a young nun whose love has died. Her grief is mixed with joy, because, she says, her love has become an angel (“Er wird ein Engel sein”), and she can love angels. Sinking in exhaustion and ecstasy at the feet of a statue of Mary, she closes her eyes and dies. Mendelssohn Hensel expertly uses the piano to convey the text’s dramatic mood. The song is strophic, and during each strophe the piano’s rapid arpeggios accurately mirror the nun’s turmoil, her circling thoughts and emotions. At the beginning and end of the piece and in between each strophe the piano plays a descending thirds pattern that creates a series of sighs. If this compositional form sounds familiar, it is for no other reason than the close similarity between the structure and style of this Lied and those written by Mendelssohn-Hensel’s male contemporaries.

Hensel was not the only female composer to use compositional traits found in male composers of the time. In other Lieder by women, more shared traits occur. In Clara Schumann’s “Vorwurf” (“Reproach”), Op. 10, No. 2, for example, the piano and voice trade the melody back in forth around the word “Dahin,” a technique sometimes employed by her husband Robert Schumann in his efforts to make the piano and voice equal contributors in a song.

The Lieder of the female composers on this recording is equal in quality to the Lieder of the male composers with whom the art of the Lied is normally identified. Some exceptions are the songs of Pauline Viardot-Garcia, which use more chromaticism and exotic rhythms than I hear in most Lieder (the record sleeve claims she exhibited “the broader taste of a singer of grand opera”), but this style of writing is in no way indicative of inferior compositional ability. It should come as no surprise that talented women of the nineteenth century were the equal of talented men; when faced with many of the same influences and sharing the same compositional goal, women and men are equally able to write beautiful music (they are also equally able to write dreadfully irritating music, but that’s a topic for another day).

I was introduced to Lieder only in the last two years, but I have fallen in love with the often-passionate blend of piano and voice that the genre offers. I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to the music of these female composers, particularly as I was able to read along with the lyrics and translation and observe how the composer evoked the emotions inherent in the text. This listening assignment has introduced me to more music that I expect I will treasure for the rest of my life. On a less sentimental note, however, I found studying these pieces beneficial to understanding the art of the Lied as we spoke of it in class, since these pieces exhibit key Lieder characteristics as well as any others.

As far as goes the canon, I think these Lieder by female composers belong alongside compositions of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and others because they are as important to our understanding of the German songwriting climate as are those of male composers. They are masterfully-composed songs, and possess a distinct beauty – in my mind they can no more be said to be already represented in the canon by the works of the males than they can be said to be inferior to those of the males. For the sake of our own musical edification and to acknowledge the important accomplishments of these composers, we who appreciate good music need to listen to these compositions.

Commentary on "Dittersdorf 'Die vier Weltalter'" by Ben Cross

First of all, great post Ben. I enjoyed reading along in your blog as I listened to Die vier Weltalter. I appreciated your description of the musical elements that you think indicated the different programmatic elements of the piece. I haven’t heard much about Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Dittersdorf’s sinfonias on them before visiting your blog (I suppose that is why we are assigned to listen to them, after all). I am curious about the relation this simfonia has to the other eleven in the set. As the first sinfonia, does it also correspond to the first part of Metamorphoses?
Another question that immediately came to mind when I started reading about this work was how much programmatic instrumental work was being produced around the time that Dittersdorf wrote this piece. Outside of opera, I thought that programmatic instrumental works were not popular until the Romantic era, and as you said, Dittersdorf’s piece is a Classical work. Was his set of of 12 sinfonias an unusual work, or was it becoming more fashionable to write program music around the turn of the century?
One aspect I would have like to see expanded in your blog was the discussion of form. One of the hallmarks of the Classical Era was composers’ adherence to form –though composers like Mozart commonly explored a form and made it their own, they did not push its limits as much as Beethoven and Romantic composers would in the coming years. You mention in one paragraph that the first movement features “somewhat of a sonata form,” and it makes me ask in what ways the form is similar and different from Sonata form.