Christoph Dreßler, C.P.E. Bach, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, Johann Christian Gottfried Gräser, P.J. von Thonus (perhaps a pseudonym), Carl Wilhelm Müller, and Karl Friedrich Ebers (table 1). These collections addressed themselves to both traditional assumptions about woman’s place and emergent ideas about female character, taste, and physical nature.21 The easiness of music for ladies emerges as a prominent thread in these works, the term easy indicating here keys without many sharps and flats, melody-centered styles, and avoidance of both figuration (however easily it might fall under the hands) and thick, reinforced textures.
The English easy embraces several related terms in German musical criticism of the period that denoted, collectively, the naturalness and accessibility of galant, melody-oriented styles. Mattheson’s remarks on the foundations of melody in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) furnish a close to comprehensive inventory of what was musically at stake in “easiness” in music for the fair sex: the avoidance of excessive melodic embellishment and rapid changes of meter, tempo, and register; restriction to diatonic harmonies; uniformity rather than diversity; and cultivation of “noble simplicity.” A rejection of conspicuous compositional artifice underwrites these elements. As Mattheson confessed, “One puts artifice aside, or conceals it well.”22 The pleasures of amateur participation are privileged over the composer’s learned demonstration of art.
EXAMPLE 2. Christoph Nichelmann, Sei breve sonate da cembalo massime all’uso delle dame (ca. 1745), Sonata No. 5, opening measures from the first, second, and third movements.
TABLE 1 A selection of music for the fair sex by eighteenth-century German composers
TABLE 1 (continued)
In this light the “easiness” of collections of ladies’ music involves aesthetic precepts of eighteenth-century composition that were not, in themselves, either negative or gender specific. Nonetheless, an element of concession is undoubtedly present in their gender-specific deployment in this repertory. For women, easiness was officially sanctioned, even compulsory. Music for the fair sex summoned a rhetoric of deprofessionalization of female music making that was in place even prior to the emergence of the repertory. Already in the first decades of the eighteenth century we find a distinction drawn in the compilation of the clavier books for Anna Magdalena and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach between female (nonprofessional) and male (professional) spheres of music making (where “professional” indicates the potential to make money from music). What distinguishes these books is not the degree of difficulty of their contents but their purpose, and thus the futures they envisage for their respective dedicatees. The Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (begun in Cöthen in 1720) evinces not simply a pedagogic purpose, being a combined manual for the study of performance and composition, but, specifically, a trajectory that takes the student from the rudiments of notation, ornamentation, and fingering to that point where fugue, free composition, and thus professional appointment as organist, cantor, and kapellmeister are in sight.23 The structure of the two books for Anna Magdalena (begun in Cöthen in 1722 and completed in Leipzig in 1725), in contrast, is circular and static: the executant is in the same social position on the first page as when the last page is turned. In the second book, C.P.E. Bach recorded his earliest surviving works—three marches, two polonaises, and a solo movement (H. 1, also listed as BWV Anh. 122–25, 129), a prophecy, perhaps, of his own volume of Sonates à l’usage des dames (1770).
In Anna Magdalena’s books, suites, minuets, miniature marches, and polonaises offered “spiritual refreshment,” to use J.S. Bach’s term from the preface to his solo keyboard partitas, two of which he copied out at the beginning of the book for his second wife.24 This turn of phrase suggests the “aesthetic hedonism” that Eric Reimer associates with the sphere of eighteenth-century amateur music making.25
Personal pleasure is not the only item on the agenda, however, and much of the significance of Anna Magdalena’s music books is missed if they are viewed solely in terms of female deprofessionalization and containment. The appearance of the chorales “Gib dich zufrieden” (13a and 13b) and “Dir, dir, Jehovah, will ich singen” (39a) suggests that Anna Magadalena’s musical practice possessed spiritual significance, perhaps for the entire family.26 The newfangled vogue for galanterie playing mingled in her music books with older traditions of Lutheran Hausmusik, in an apparently harmonious coupling of secular and sacred.27 In addition to their religious aspect, the books probably fostered Anna Magdalena’s activities as teacher and composer: her authorship of some of the anonymous pieces cannot be proved, but it is unfortunate that the possibility is never even mooted in the Neue Bach Ausgabe; and insofar as the books include pieces by children of the Bach household, they suggest, rather paradoxically, that Anna Magdalena fostered the professionalization of her sons and stepsons.28
Later collections published for women recall the Anna Magdalena Bach books in their layering of fashionable dances and piety (an intriguing constellation depending on the complex cultural work undertaken by “the feminine”). Wenkel interspersed his offering of dances with pious odes addressing God and nature, inscribing woman’s role in the home as guardian of morality. The proliferation of what Johann Adam Hiller called galanterie (minuets, rondos, and polonaises) epitomized the lamented ascendance of fashionable, French taste.29 The contents of Wenkel’s first volume of Clavierstücke für Frauenzimmer (1768) were just the sort of thing to make serious-minded north German critics such as Hiller blanch: “Singode; Polonaise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Bußlied; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Singode; Menuet I; Menuet II; Marche; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Singode; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Wiegenlied; Polonaise; Angloise; Menuet I; Menuet II; Polonaise; Fuga [à 2 in 3/8].” Such an inventory attests to the discursive alignment of fashion, luxury, and the feminine in eighteenth-century consumerism. Indeed, in the context of woman’s official withdrawal from production and labor, the terms “woman” and “luxury” achieved a degree of synonymity.30 For Rousseau, it was woman who led man into alienating luxury and ancien régime decadence. Such associations rendered woman a potential threat to nationhood (a point Reichardt specifically addressed in his Wiegenlieder). This threat was not lessened by the cosmopolitan gloss of Wenkel’s collection, which embraced the local color of the polonaise, the angloise, and the ultimately French minuet. Works with German designations (such as Singode, Bußlied, and Wiegenlied) punctuate and frame the collection, so that a north German identification is not completely lost. The concluding fugue, in particular, points toward more serious musical practices, though the two-part texture and 3/8 meter render this more a learned topic or gesture within a diversionary collection than a genuine contrapuntal culmination.
The reception of music “for the fair sex” was not free of dissent about the veracity of these alignments of woman and fashion. In a review of Wenkel’s first collection Hiller undermined the credibility of the dedication to ladies, claiming that as many gentlemen as ladies shared the preference for galanterie. Inquiring why Wenkel had omitted works in difficult keys, Hiller suggested that composers sought to pass off mediocre and insubstantial works with the dedication to ladies.31 As an instance of resistant critical reception, Hiller’s remarks (published in a major German journal) should not be underestimated.32
THE LIMITS OF FEMALE IMPROVEMENT
In a German context, female accomplishments, though undoubtedly signs of gentility and status, were strenuously connected to education. Female art practices were thus linked even more directly than in England to Enlightenment discourses of self-improvement. In fact, there is no equivalent term in German for “accomplishment” in this English sense. Instead, music belonged to a realm of Bildung (improvement or education).
Nonetheless, this “improvement” resembled “accomplishment” in the limits it set upon