which illustrates the continuing currency of female musical ascendance on the Viennese stage as late as 1810. The genesis and publication of this work spans almost four decades, beginning in 1774 (when Goethe set to work), through 1787 (when the poet completed and published his text), 1796 (when Reichardt’s setting premiered in Weimar), and 1809–1810 (when Beethoven composed his music), to 1812 (when Breitkopf published it). This lengthy genesis encompasses most of the period covered by the book, from the last years of Goethe’s so-called Sturm und Drang phase and Beethoven’s infancy to the end of the literature of “Weimar classicism” and the beginning of Beethoven’s “late” style. In other words, Egmont’s genesis begins when Germany was still recovering from the Seven Years’ War and continues through the French Revolution, the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars (the context in which Beethoven’s setting was commissioned). Such shifting political contexts, along with the differing views of poet and composer on the status and role of music in relation to literature, free the modern reader of any obligation to discover a single message or essential unity of content in the piece. If there is anything to the notion that works embody their historical moment we would expect to discover fracture and contradiction here. Without denying these aspects of disunity, one can nonetheless find in Egmont a relatively coherent projection, even a summation, of the discourse of female ascendance in, as, and through music that characterized the period of its genesis.
Music plays an unusually prominent role in Egmont and is associated primarily with the mistress of the eponymous hero, Klärchen, a burgher’s daughter and military maiden. Goethe’s stage directions call for two stage songs for Klärchen (in acts 1 and 3), as well as music signifying her death (in act 5) and a victory symphony to end the work. In Beethoven’s setting an additional melodrama and pantomime in act 5 create an almost unbroken musical culmination and conclusion to the drama, something in excess of (though not necessarily at odds with) Goethe’s specifications. As part of this musical complex Klärchen appears to imprisoned Egmont as a disembodied spirit, hovering above the stage to the accompaniment of shimmering and pictorial orchestral music. These additions to Goethe’s text, along with Beethoven’s setting of Klärchen’s stage songs not as simple strophic melodies but as epic, through-composed arias with heavy orchestral accompaniment, exalt her musically and, more abstractly, compositionally as a figurehead of Beethovenian (and more broadly romantic) preoccupations: breach of generic decorum, heroic overcoming, music as spirit and ideal. If Goethe drew on the strong association between music and exemplary womanhood in his original conception of Klärchen as driven by strong emotions to the defense of her lover and her country, Beethoven’s setting (emphasizing Klärchen’s self-transcending androgyny) can extend that association into musical-aesthetic and compositional realms far removed from Goethe’s original. Arguably, Beethoven’s emphasis on Klärchen as a boundary breaker rewrites the poet’s more equivocal construction of her as a girl inspired by love to brief political agency. But if Beethoven’s Klärchen appears as a far more potent figure than she is in Goethe’s play, Beethoven’s version of Klärchen is not so much “about” female empowerment as it is about male compositional and musical transcendence.
In turn, Beethoven’s use, in this and other stage works, of female androgyny (a mixture of masculine and feminine elements in characterization of lead female characters) to signify a universal vision of the heroic as morally righteous transgression of established boundaries, raises issues of difference between his conceptions of music’s relationship to gender and those of (some of) his modern admirers. Beethoven’s reading of the dramas of Schiller and Goethe is often summoned by biographers as evidence of the composer’s attachment to male heroes and the political visions those heroes are said to embody. But his stage works, most obviously Fidelio, paint a far more complicated picture, one explicable in part by their textual sources and genesis in the vanishing culture of female musical ascendance. That said, Egmont, particularly in Beethoven’s setting, reveals a shift in register from the eighteenth century’s aesthetic and moral elevation of (approved) female musical practices to more formal allegorical figurations of both women and music that refer to, and even celebrate, male creativity.
In an afterword I seek to write small the conceptual core of this study through a reading of Schiller’s poem Würde der Frauen (1795) and two settings of it, one by Reichardt and the other by the little-known composer Amalia Thierry. Schiller’s poem reveals an intense investment in the two-sex model, tracing in quasi- philosophical manner the implications of male and female character in all domains of life. Unsurprisingly, given Schiller’s reputation, women are pictured as loving, domestic, flower-weaving mothers and daughters, whereas men roam and strive heroically in unbounded, hostile spaces. There is a contradiction, however, that confounds current convictions about the function of a stereotyped “femininity” in relation to artistic production. Specifically, Schiller locates knowledge and poetry within the peaceable female domain, aligning the elevated women of his text with the production and consumption of the arts and letters. In doing so he sends a tremor through the system of sex and gender as we have come to analyze and understand it and hints at those different conceptual structures that form the objects of history.
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Europe’s Living Muses
Women, Music, and Modernity in Burney’s History and Tours
Burney’s women summon superlatives. In Naples Mrs. Hamilton is the best performer on the harpsichord; in Mannheim Maria Antonia Walpurgis, Dowager Electress of Saxony, brings about “a reconciliation between poetry and music” in her operas; in Munich “Signora Mingotti” holds forth on music “with as much intelligence as any maestro di cappella.”1 There is barely a negative comment about the fair sex in The Present State of Music in France and Italy, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, or A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. Admittedly, Burney was underwhelmed by the performance of the girls of the Ospidale della Pietà in Venice (“the composition and performance I heard to-night did not exceed mediocrity”). There was also a hiccup in Burney’s regime of praise when he congratulated Mrs. Hamilton for the “expression and meaning in her playing” given that “ladies . . . though frequently neat in execution, seldom aim at expression.”2 But this aside, Burney’s books are lined with accomplished women, heirs to history, and embodiments of its present.
Just as striking is what Burney praised women for: knowledge, expertise, education. Such terms were far removed from Rousseau’s influential idealization of women in terms of the natural and the naive.3 In Passy Burney met Madame Brillon, “one of the greatest lady-players on the harpsichord in Europe. This lady not only plays the most difficult pieces with great precision, taste, and feeling, but is an excellent sight’s-woman; . . . she likewise composes; and was so obliging as to play several of her own sonatas, both on the harpsichord and piano forte. . . . But her application and talents are not confined to the harpsichord; she plays on several instruments; knows the genius of all that are in common use, which she said it was necessary for her to do, in order to avoid composing for them such things as were either impracticable or unnatural.”4 If Burney concluded with a generic notion of female accomplishment (“she likewise draws well and engraves, and is a most accomplished and agreeable woman”), this is less to contain her achievements than to assuage suspicions that such an erudite woman must be in some ways masculine or confusing—a gender monster—or, in terms used by Brillon herself, “impracticable and unnatural.”5 Even scientific erudition did not exceed Burney’s conception of female nature. Of the scientist “Dottoressa Madame Laura Bassi,” whom he visited in Bologna, he assured his readers that “though learned, and a genius, [she] is not at all masculine or assuming.”6
Such emphasis on female rationality and educability does not indicate reluctance on Burney’s part to acknowledge raw talent. In Madame Karsch, the Berlin poet, Burney discovered an “original genius” that he ranked next to Klopstock: “This lady is quite a meteor, and surprises more by the elevation of her poems, on account of her low origin, she being descended from parents who were unable to afford her a liberal education, and married very young to a serjeant [sic], in a regiment quartered at Glogau.” Having bestowed on Karsch the often sex-specific accolade of original genius, Burney went on to endorse her productivity and profile