Do not believe…that the artistic career is more accessible to my sex. This is a grave error. The steps are infinitely more difficult, and the good fellowship, which helps so many artists, is in a way shut out from a woman who has the good – or the ill – luck to be born a musician!
— Augusta Holmès (1847–1903), Irish–French composer
The women from history whose music we hear today were often the daughters of musicians, receiving training from childhood and having little social status to lose. Francesca Caccini (1587– 1640) was the daughter of the composer Giulio Caccini; Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677) the adopted (and probably biological) daughter of the Venetian poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi. Both women were singers as well as composers. The French composer and harpsichordist Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729) was born into a family of harpsichord makers; Harriet Wainwright (c. 1766–1843) came from generations of English church organists, although she herself was a singer as well as a composer. Louise Farrenc (1804–1875) was the daughter not of a musician, but of a sculptor; Clara Schumann (1819–1896) had pianists as parents, and her mother was also a singer. Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), whose father was a tenor, and who herself became one of the most celebrated opera singers of the 19th century, composed chamber music, songs and little drawing-room operas (three of them with librettos by the Russian novelist Turgenev), though never as a commercial enterprise. Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944), also from a musical family, was very much a professional composer, her music performed and published in her lifetime. She was even made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, although, with the exception of a flute concertino, she was rapidly forgotten after her death. The same happened to Florence Price (1887–1953), born of African American heritage in Arkansas, where her mother was a music teacher. Her first symphony (of four) was played in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a program called “The Negro in Music”.
It was feminist scholars who unearthed these and other forgotten names and their music, and much of it has only recently been revived and recorded, a project that continues. These women tended to write in rather conservative styles, and perhaps this made them easier to dismiss in the progress-obsessed 20th century.
Lili Boulanger (1893– 1918) and her older sister Nadia (1887–1979) were exceptions to the rule. Like the others, they had musical backgrounds – they were the daughters of a French composer and teacher and his former singing student, a Russian princess – but Lili in particular had a distinctive style that might have become even more distinctive had she lived as long as her sister. The death of this young woman at the age of twenty-four was inevitably overshadowed by Debussy’s death just ten days later, yet hearing Lili’s music today one recognises a voice with little or no obvious influence from her older compatriot. Indeed, in a work such as D’un soir triste (1918), we hear a pre-echo of the kind of music Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) would go on to write in the later 20th century – multi-hued, chromatic and mystical. Nadia Boulanger more or less gave up composition after Lili’s death, devoting her long life to conducting, teaching and guarding her sister’s legacy. Her pupils included composers as different from one another as Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Thea Musgrave, Philip Glass, Quincy Jones and Burt Bacharach.
When I was young, comparatively few women worked.
— Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983), English composer
Elisabeth Lutyens’s remark requires context. She made it in 1962, speaking to the Canadian composer R Murray Schafer for his book British Composers in Interview. Lutyens is the only woman in that volume – her given name misspelt – and Schafer asked her why she thought there had been so few female composers in history. Lutyens’s reply betrays her aristocratic upbringing; when she says “few women worked”, she means that in the Edwardian England into which she was born, women seldom had professions. (The census of 1901 records that nearly a third of British women were in paid employment, more than 40 per cent of them working as domestic servants, with another 40 per cent in other service jobs or factories.)
Even so, Lutyens makes an important point, one that underlines the fact that composition was not only a vocation but a job; and as a professional composer in the mid-20th century, Lutyens knew all about hard work. She composed more than 160 official opuses, along with a vast amount of incidental music for theatre, radio, television and film; she was the first British woman to compose the score of a feature film, a more male-dominated medium even than the concert hall. But her successes were hard won. By 1941, she was raising four children under the age of ten from two marriages, while battling depression and alcoholism. What’s more, as the first composer in Britain to adopt Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique (as early as the 1930s), her music hardly courted popularity. It did, however, seem to suit the string of horror movies she scored from the mid-1950s.
What Lutyens’s answer to Schafer’s question misses is the fact that in the early twentieth century, there were already successful female composers. Back in the seventeenth century, the Caccinis and Strozzis had been locally successful, and Strozzi is said to have published more music than anyone else in her lifetime, but success in the modern world was a different matter and Lutyens’s compatriot Ethel Smyth (1858–1944) experienced some of that. In 1906, the year of Lutyens’s birth, Smyth’s opera The Wreckers received its first production in Berlin, followed by performances in Prague and then a season in London at Covent Garden, conducted by Thomas Beecham. An earlier one-act opera, Der Wald (The Forest), had also had its premiere in Berlin, prior to performances at Covent Garden and, in 1903, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where it was the last opera by a woman for 113 years.
Excerpted with permission from The Shortest History of Music, Andrew Ford, Pan MacMillan.
