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WOMAN L---

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BY

GEORGE P. UPTON ~

AUTHOR OF (( THE STANDARD OPERAS," ETC., ETC.

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CHICAGO Rf--j ::</'62... A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY

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WOMAN IN MUSIC.

A GENERAL VIEW OF WOMAN'S INFLUENCE ON MUSIC. - LOVE ATTACHMENTS AND HOME LIFE. - THE FAILURE OF WOMAN IN COMPOSITION.- SOME CONSIDERATION OF REASONS WHY SHE HAS PRODUCED NO ENDURING MUSICAL WORK.

,~ ~ HE special purpose of this essay is to .~ ~ characterize the real relation which . woman holds to music; and it

makes no more pretentious claim than to be a study of the subject, with such illustra- tions, drawn from the lives of representative composers, as can be furnished by a musical library. It is intended to be historical arid resthetic, rather than philosophical or dog- matic; and to present facts for consideration by the thoughtful reader, collated from the most authoritative sources, rather than to

16 WOMAN IN MUSICo

attempt to explain all the problems of woman's relation to music. The subject naturally divides itself into two

heads: first, the influence of woman in en- couraging the great composers to labor, and inspiring them in the production of their finest works; and, second, the relations of woman to the performance of vocal and in- strumental music. The latter branch of the subject certainly does not require special at- tention in these days of the great queens of song, whose sway is everywhere acknowledged, and, so far as the scope of this essay is con- cerned, hardly needs more than eulogistic ref- erence. The other branch, however, has been but little considered j and what little is known is, as a rule, incorrect. The attachments of love; the bonds of friendship, the endearments of home, and the influences of society have played an important part in shaping the ca- reers of the great composers, and in giving color, form, and direction to their music. In all these phases of life genius has more than once knelt at the feet of beauty and executed her behests; and more than one immortal work of music may be traced to the stead- fast love and thoughtful care of woman in the quiet duties of home life. Few students

WOMAN IN MUSIC.

of music know the effect of these subtile in- fluences, except through the medium of ro- mances and rhapsodies that have been woven about the lives of composers by enthusiasts of the Rau and Polko school, or of pretty fan- cies and legends, current in their time, that have come down to us, and are implicitly be- lieved, though they have no foundations to rest upon. There are probably very few persons, even among musicians, who do not firmly be- lieve that Beethoven addressed his immortal love-song, the" Adelaide," to some real inam- orata; that his C sharp minor sonata was in- spired by the moonlight; that Mozart wrote his "Requiem" at the request of a myste- rious stranger who was in some manner con- nected with his death; that Haydn expired in an ecstasy of joy during the performance of his "Creation;" that Weber died at his piano; and that Chopin died of a broken heart, because George Sand, tiring of her passion and his morbidness, flung him away. It is easy for the world to accept and believe such fancies, because it is ready to credit gen- ius with anything that is bizarre or romantic, just as it is ready to condone excesses and eccentricities that would not be tolerated in the ordinary plodder.

2

18 WOMAN IN MUSIC. The study of this subject, however, would

not be complete without considering one of its phases which is in the nature of an enig- ma, and to which no satisfactory answer has yet been given. The writer does not hope to solve the problem, but only to offer such hints as suggest themselves, leaving to others better versed in the mysteries of the female nature and in the peculiar intellectual and emotional qualities necessary to the de- velopment of a great composer, to discover the exact reasons why woman has failed to create important and enduring works in music, At the first glance it would seem that

musical composition is a province in which woman should excel. It may be laid down, as a fundamental and indisputable proposi- tion, that music is the interpreter and the language of the emotions. It sounds every note in the gamut of human nature, from ec- static joy to profound despair. It is " of all sweet sounds the life and element." It wakes "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." It inspires, enrages, elevates, sad- dens, cheers, and soothes the soul as no other one of the arts can. It can" swell the soul to rage, or kindle soft desire." It gives voice

WOMAN IN MUSIC.

to love and expression to passion, lends glory to every art, and performs its loftiest homage as the handmaid of religion. Why is it, then, that woman, who possesses all these attributes in a more marked degree than man, who is the inspiration of love, who has a more power- ful and at the same time I110redelicate emo- tional force than man, who is artistic by tem- perament, whose whole organism is sensitively strung, and who is religious by nature, - why is it that woman, with all these musical ele- ments in her nature, is receptive rather than creative? Why is it that music only comes to her as a balm, a rest, or a solace of hap- piness among her pleasures and her sorrows, her commonplaces and her conventionalities, and that it does not find its highest sources z"n her? In other fields of art WOITlanhas been creative. Rosa Bonheur is man's equal upon canvas. Harriet Hosmer has made the marble live with a man's truth and force and skill. Mrs. Browning in poetry, Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel in science, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, and Madame de Stael in fiction, have successfully rivalled man in their fields of labor; while George Eliot, with almost more than mascu- line force, has grappled with the most ab-

20 WOMAN IN MUSIC.

struse problems of human life, and though an agnostic has courageously sifted the doubts of science and latter-day cultured unbelief, and plucked many a rose of blessing for suffering humanity from amid its storms of sorrow and pam. These may all stand as types of creative

power j but who is to represent woman in the higher realm of music? While a few women, during the last two centuries, have created a few works, now mostly unknown, no woman during that time has written either an opera, oratorio, symphony, or instrumental work of large dimensions that is in the modern rep- ertory. Man has been the creative repre- sentative. Beethoven has shown its depth, its majesty, its immortality j Mendelssohn, its elegance of form j Handel, its solemnity and grandeur j Mozart, its wondrous grace and sweetness j Haydn, its purity, freshness, and simplicity j Schumann, its romance j Chopin, its poetry and tender melancholy j Schubert, the richness of its melody j Bach, its mas- sive foundations j Berlioz, its grotesquerie and supernaturalisms; and Liszt and Wagner, its poetical idealism. In the symphony, in opera, in oratorio, even in the lesser realm of chamber music, woman has either been

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WOMAN IN MUSIC. 21

silent, or what she has attempted to create has had but an ephemeral existence.

It has been claimed by some writers that the folk-songs of many countries belong to women, though the claim is mere surmise, and by others that the trouveresses who ac- companied the troubadours upon their tuneful journeys created melodies; but even this is mythical, and history, while it has carefully preserved numerous poems and songs of the Provencal troubadours and German minne- singers, has consigned nearly all that was ac- complished by the trouveresses to the Lethe of oblivion. Some of their poems that have survived show much grace and tender feeling, but their musical ability was mostly restricted to the singing of their male companions' songs. That there is a natural aptitude among musi- cal women for the writing of songs and ballads is unquestionable; but they are mostly short- lived, and are rarely woven into the fabric of national life. That woman has also ventured into the realms of higher music is equally un- questionable, as the list of female composers in the appendix to this essay will show, and as the songs without words of Fanny Hensel, sister of Mendelssohn, and the piano compo- sitions of Madame Schumann attest; but of

22 WOMAN IN MUSIC.

all the works written by these numerous com- posers, hardly one is known to the lyric stage to-day. And why? The ~n_Qst_palpableanswer, and the only one

that is fairly indisputable, is that having had equal advantages with men; they have failed as creators. This somewhat Milesian reply is illustrated in Mr. Bulwer's novel of "The Parisians. " Isaura Cicagna, writing to her friend Madame de Grantmesnil, informs her that she has consulted Dr. C. upon the sub- ject of writing music instead of entering stage life as a prima donna, to which the Doctor replied :_

"My dear child, I should be your worst enemy if I encouraged such a notion; cling to the career in which you can be greatest: gain but health, and I wager my reputation on your glorious success on the stage. What can you be as a composer? You will set pretty music to pretty words, and will be sung in draWing-roomswith the fame a little more or less that generally attends the compositions of female amateurs. Aim at something higher, as I know you would do, and you will not succeed. Is there any in- stance in modern times, perhaps in any times, of a female composer who attains even to the emi- nence of a third-rate opera writer? Composition in letters may be of no sex. In that Madame Dudevant and your friend Madame de Grant-

WOMAN IN MUSIC.

mesnil can beat most men; but the genius of musical composition is homme, and accept it as a compliment when I say that you are essentially fe 71Ulle."

Conceding that music is the highest ex- pression of the emotions, and that woman is emotional by nature, is it not one solution of the problem that woman does not musically reproduce them because she herself is emo- tional by temperament and nature, and cannot project herself outwardly, any more than she can give outward expression to other myste- rious and deeply hidden traits of her nature? The emotion is a part of herself, and is as natural to her as breathing. She lives in emotion, and acts from emotion. She feels its influences, its control, and its power; but she does not see these results as man looks at them. He sees them in their full play, and can reproduce them in musical notation as a painter imitates the landscape before him. It is probably as difficult for her to express them as it would be to explain them. To confine her emotions within musical limits would be as difficult as to give expression to her relig- ious faith in notes. Man controls his emo- tions, and can give an outward expression of them. In woman they are the dominating

WOMAN IN MUSIC.

element, and so long as they are dominant she absorbs music. Great actresses who have never been great dramatists may express emo- tions because they express their own natures; but to treat emotions as if they were mathe- matics, to bind and measure and limit them within the rigid laws of harmony and counter- point, and to express them with arbitrary signs, is a cold-blooded operation, possible only to the sterner and more obdurate nature of man. As I have said, so long as the emotions are dominant, she absorbs music. When the emotions lose their force with age, her musi- cal power weakens. Almost every man who has learned to play an instrument, or to sing, be it ever so poorly, and be his troubles or his cares ever so pressing, continues to play or to sing as long as he has strength. Max Muller, in his "Deutsche Liebe," has a neat illustration of this. He imagines one return- ing to his native village after an absence of many years. As he wanders about the streets he finds a familiar house: "here the old music-teacher lived. He is dead; and yet how beautiful it seemed as we stood and lis- tened on summer evenings under the window when the faithful soul indulged in his own en- joyment and played fantasies, as the roaring

WOMAN IN MUSIC.

and hissing engine lets off the steam which has accumulated during the day." The large majority of women drop their music long be- fore the hair grows gray, or at the first touch of sorrow. This may be due partly to the effect of forced and unwholesome practice in these days, when it is thought that every girl, whether she have musical intelligence and ability or not, must learn to play the piano or to sing, and partly to the engrossing de- mands of household cares j but these causes do not explain what is a general rule: while, in the matter of care, even the pressure of business does not divert man's attention from his music j on the other hand, he turns to it, even in his old age, for rest and solace. There is another phase of the feminine

character which may bear upon the solution of this problem j and that is the inability of woman to endure the discouragements of the composer, and to battle with the prejudice and indifference, and sometimes with the malicious opposition, of the world, that obstruct his pro- gress. The lives of the great cornposers, with scarcely an exception, were spent in constant struggle, and saddened with discouragements, disappointments, the pinching of poverty, the jealousies of rivals, or the contemptuous in

26 WOMAN IN MUSIC. difference of contemporaries. Beethoven struggled all his life with adverse fate. Schu- bert's music was hardly known in his life- time, and his best works were not fairly recognized until after his death. Schumann is hardly yet known. There is scarcely a more pitiable picture than that of the great Handel struggling against the malicious ca- bals of petty and insignificant rivals for popu- lar favor, who now are scarcely known even by name. Mozart's life was a constant war- fare; and when this wonderful child of genius went to his grave in the paupers' quarter of the churchyard of St. Marx, he went alone,- not one friend accompanied him, and no one has known to this day where he sleeps. Ber- lioz's music is just beginning to be played in his native country. Wagner fought the world all his life with indomitable courage and per- sistence, and died before he had established a permanent place for his music. There is scarcely a composer known to fame, and whose works are destined to endure, who lived long enough to see his music appreci- ated and accepted by the world for what it was really worth. Such fierce struggles and overwhelming discouragements, such pitiless storms of fate and cruel assaults of poverty,

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in the pursuit of art, woman is not calculated to endurev If her triumph could be instant; if work after work were not to be assailed, scoffed at, and rejected; if she were not lia- ble to personal abuse, to the indifference of her own sex on the one hand and masculine injustice on the other, - there would be more hope for her success in composition: but in- stant triumphs are not the rewards of great composers. The laurels of success may dec- orate their graves, placed there by the ap- plauding hands of admiring posterity, but rarely crown their brows.

It is a curious fact that nearly all the great music of the world has been produced in humble life, and has been developed amid the environments of poverty and in the stern struggle for existence. The aristocracy has contributed very little to music, and that little can be spared without detriment. N early all the masters have been of lowly and obscure origin, and have lived and died in comparative poverty; for, with rare exceptions, musical composition has been miserably unremunera- tive until within the last fifty years. The endur- ing music has been the child of poverty, the outcome of sorrow, the apotheosis of suffering. Sebastian Bach was the son of a hireling

28 WOMAN IN MUSIC. mUSICIan. Beethoven's father was a dissipated singer. Cherubini came from the lowest and poorest ranks of life. Gluck was a forester's son. Lulli in his childhood was a page, and slept in palace kitchens. Haydn's father was a wheelwright; and his mother, previous to marriage, was a cook in the kitchen of Count Harrach, the lord of his native village. While on his death-bed, Beethoven called Hummel's attention to a picture, and said: "See, my dear Hummel, the house in which Haydn was born; to think that so great a man should have first seen the light in a peasant's wretched hut." Mozart's father was a musician in hum- ble circumstances, and his grandfather a book- binder. Handel was the son of a barber and surgeon. Mehul was the son of a cook. Rossini's father was a miserable strolling horn-player, who led a wild Bohemian life. Schubert was the son of a poor schoolmaster; and his mother, like Haydn's, was in service as a cook at the time of her marriage. Cima- rosa's father was a mason, and his mother a washerwoman. Schumann was a bookseller's son; and Verdi, the son of a Lornbardian peasant. Weber's father was a strolling musi- cian and actor. Wagner, the musician of the future, was born in humble circumstances; his

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WOMAN IN MUSIC.

father having been a petty municipal officer, and his stepfather an unpretentious portrait- painter, who at one time had also been a very poor actor. Among all the prominent com- posers, but three were born in affluence,- Auber, Meyerbeer, and Mendelssohn. With these three exceptions, they developed the grandeur, the sublimity, the passion, and the majesty of their music out of the storms of life, the pangs of sorrow, and the hard battle with fate. In this sphere of life, where music seems to have had its origin, the lot of woman is bounded by homely but unintermitting cares .

. Her existence is mainly devoted to the same tedious routine of labor from the rising to the setting sun, which has few intervals of relaxa- tion, certainly no leisure for musical effort. Its demands are so exacting that she has neither time nor disposition for the theoretical appli- cation which musical composition requires.

But even assuming that woman had the dis- position and the leisure to devote to musical composition, would she then succeed? The bluntest answer to this is that she has not suc- ceeded when she has had the opportunity. But there is another way, perhaps, of arriv- ing at an answer. Woman reaches results mainly by intuitions. Her susceptibility to

WOMAN IN MUSIC.

impressions and her finely tempered organi- zation enable her to feel and perceive, where man has to reach results by the slow processes of reason. So far as music is a matter of emo- tion, she is more immediately sensitive to it than man; she absorbs it more quickly, if not so thoroughly; she discriminates with more nicety, and often judges with more impartial- ity; she recognizes what is true and what is false more quickly. If music were only an object of the perceptions or a matter of in- stinct; if it simply addressed itself to the senses; if it were but an art composed of rav- ishing melody, of passionate outbursts, - of the attributes of joy, grief, and exaltation, and vague, dreamy sensations without any deter- minate ideas, - woman possibly would have grasped it long ago, and flooded the world with harmony as she has with song: but music is all this and more, for these are only effects. It is not only an art, but an exact science, and, in its highest form, mercilessly logical and unrelent- ingly mathematical. Its mastery requires long years of patient toil and continuous applica- tion. The imagination does not have a free flight, but is bounded within the limits of form. The mere possession of the poetical imagina- tion and the capacity to receive music in its ,

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WOMAN IN MUSIC. 31

fullest emotional power will not lead one to the highest achievements in musical art. With these subjective qualities must be combined the mastery of the theoretical intricacies, the logical sequences, and the mathematical prob- lems which are the foundation principles of music. It has every technical detail that, characterizes absolute science in its most rigid forms. In this· direction woman, except in very rare instances, has never achieved great results. Her grandest performances have been in the regions of romance, of imagination, of intuition, of poetical feeling and expression, or in those still higher duties which call for the exercise of religious "faith and works." For these and many other reasons growing

out of the peculiar organization of woman, the sphere in which she moves, the training which she receives, and the duties she has to fulfil, it does not seem that woman will ever origi- nate music in its fullest and grandest harmonic forms. She will always be the recipient and interpreter, but there is little hope she will be the creator.

However this may be, there is a field in which she has accomplished great results; namely, her influence upon the production of music. She has done so much .for music

32 WOMAN IN MUSfC.

that it is not exaggeration to claim that with- out her influence many of the masterpieces which we now so much admire might not have been accomplished at all; that the great composers have often written through her in- spiration; and that she has, in nurnerous no- table instances, been their impulse, support, and consolation. What music owes to her I shall try to

show by reference to the lives and labors of Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Schubert, Weber, Chopin, and Wagner, - eleven of the repre- sentative names in the highest forms of corn- position, - and thus establish the first branch of the general subject that was laid down in the beginning of this essay.