The 19th century developed industrial-aesthetic machinery to keep women who harbored public musical aspirations in their place—off the concert stage and in the home. One of the most potent of these tools was the printed word, disseminated in the magazines and books about music that were devoured by a burgeoning middle class eager to be schooled in the refinements of high culture. These publications proliferated at a pace and in quantities unimagined by Gutenberg when he first printed the Bible four hundred years earlier.
What must it have been like for a skilled and dedicated composer to have been bludgeoned by Eduard Hanslick’s claim, in his influential book On the Musically Beautiful (1854), that since “women are by nature preeminently dependent upon feeling, [they] have not amounted to much as composers.” For Hanslick, composing was like sculpting marble: a series of cold, calculated acts. The application of precise technique and deliberate decision-making should elicit emotion when persuasively sounded in performance, but this required that sensuality (for Hanslick, coded female) be suppressed during creation. Hanslick’s psychosexual obsessions with manly mastery of feeling meant that he hated Wagner, who often pulled on women’s stockings and spritzed the air with Parisian perfume so as to work himself up into a delirious lather, while he disgorged operatic scores surging with desire. The only thing worse than a female composer was a man who dressed up as one.
A week-long festival presented by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, which concludes tomorrow evening, has offered a necessary corrective to such misogynistic nonsense in a series of concerts devoted to works—big ones, including symphonies, overtures, and a piano concerto, all preserved in Berlin’s State Library—by Emilie Mayer. It was fitting that the Europe-wide reputation Mayer enjoyed during her lifetime, and more importantly, her music, should be reanimated in Berlin, where Mayer spent fifteen years on either side of 1850 and then her last seven years leading up to her death in 1880 at the age of seventy.
Mayer had some ardent supporters in the city, as Linus Bickmann points out in his informative essay in the festival program book. The eminent Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab praised her symphonies as among “the best works of modern times, written with enthusiasm and displaying an unusual talent, which cannot be denied the respect it is due.” But other members of the boys’ club were scathing in the faintness of their pseudo-praise. The reviewer for the New Berlin Musical Newspaper condescended, “that which feminine powers (forces of the second order) are capable of, Meyer has achieved and reproduced.”
The impulses that drive music and men towards intrepid exploration, conquest, domination, and development have long been elevated above other artistic qualities, often denigrated as weak and womanly. Mayer has sometimes been foolishly marketed as the “female Beethoven,” a pointless comparison to a composer whose music is heard to embody heroic triumph over obstacles and therefore enemies (e.g., deafness, despair). Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony claims that “all people are brothers.” The sisters aren’t mentioned.
One has to be careful about the adjectives used to describe Mayer’s music. If you say it is graceful or lovely or ambitious, you might appear to be as condescending, if somewhat less blatantly, as her sneering 19th-century detractors.
But I would argue that these values should be praised and embraced: why the incessant need to struggle and overcome and to show everybody that that is what you are doing? Maybe goodness is better than greatness.
The festival venue was Berlin’s newest concert hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal in the center of the city. The oval-shaped auditorium with its wooden interior, gently undulating balcony, and resonant acoustics has the warm intimacy of a salon, yet the capacity and modest grandeur of a concert space. The seating can be reconfigured in various ways, from in-the-round to more frontal setups. From my seat in the first row of the slender balcony, I could look right down and read the scores on the elegant music stands.
The hall is housed within the building of the Barenboim-Said Academy, where some 90 music students, mostly from the Middle East and North Africa, practice and play, get instruction from leading teachers, and make music for themselves and enthusiastic audiences. The Boulez Saal is their home venue. I saw many of these students at Thursday’s concert. They were there to listen to and learn from the focused collaborative precision and expressive nuance of the Akademie für Alte Musik. Founded in 1982 and the recipient of many international awards for their fascinating projects, this chamber orchestra, which uses instruments appropriate to the wide repertoire it performs, is led by the first violinist rather than a conductor. The lanky Bernard Forck, who, like the rest of the players, stood while playing, set the opening tempos with his bow and otherwise used the motion of his violin’s scroll, his own gestures and glances, smiles and raised eyebrows, to help shape the phrases and synchronize entries. But the orchestra members listen to and look at one another. Neither they nor the audience misses having a conductor.
The program’s three works, all composed around 1850, did not clear new terrain for Romantic harvest. Mayer’s Overture in D Major begins in the overcast parallel minor, a modicum of distant gloom summoned by the brooding horns. These elegant portents made the flighty major melodies of Mozartean cast that followed all the more delightful. The music conjured the grace and good feeling of the late 18th century rather than the hectic energy of the 19th. Familiar sequences and tried-and-true cadential patterns, decades in circulation, brightened the landscape. The novelty was in their combination and arrangement, the deft application of orchestral color, the witty aside, the passing cloud, and the sunny return.
The Russian keyboard virtuoso Alexander Melnikov, who lives in Berlin and frequently appears with the Akademie für Alte Musik, joined the ensemble for an equally Mozartean concerto, also in a major key and the only one that survives from Mayer’s pen. I suppose some might have preferred to see a woman at the piano, a lovely rosewood-veneered Blüthner from Mayer’s mid-century, but Melnikov plays with a sense of levity, even a whiff of irreverence, that deflates such objections. There were no seething themes from which he might wring Romantic truths, no profound monologues, or storm-swept detours into dark woods, but instead plenty of beauty (probably not of Hanslick’s type) and flair in abundance.
For the closing symphony in sunny C major, three trombones and a tuba joined the band. The work is nicknamed the “Military,” but it did not glorify the gore of battle. The blast of the timpani and bass drum, the crash of the Janissary cymbal, the charge of the strings and winds, and the report of the trumpets and trombones had the snap and style of the parade ground, and when they echoed from the front lines it was as if they were heard during an officers’ ball, all polished boots and slippers, pressed uniforms and elegant gowns.
Melnikov appeared in the lobby during the intermission, soon after having received a rousing and richly deserved ovation for his deft and not overdone performance of Mayer’s piano concerto and then a duet encore with Forck of a Romance by Clara Schumann. The Russian had shed his black concert attire for a sweatshirt. He was ready to head out to his next gig, in Amsterdam the following day. I congratulated him, and he smiled and said something about “Mayer’s music of eternal spring,” as if to apologize.
Rain and high winds—Sturm und Drang—were forecast. On Französische Straße outside the Barenboim-Said Academy, cold mist swirled beneath the streetlights. Weather was on the way. Eternal spring sounded—musically and meteorologically—pretty good to me.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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