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WOMAN IN MUSIC.
WOMAN IN MUSIC
BY
GEORGE P. UPTON
AUTHOR OF “THE STANDARD OPERAS,” ETC., ETC.
Second Edition
REVISED AND ENLARGED
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY
1886
COPYRIGHT,
BY A. C. MCCLURG AND COMPANY,
A.D. 1886.
As a tribute
TO THE
FRIENDSHIP OF A STEADFAST COMRADE,
AND AS AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HER
HELPFUL SERVICE,
I Dedicate
THESE STUDIES OF MY LEISURE HOURS
_TO MY WIFE_.
PREFACE.
The first edition of this work appeared in 1880; but its circulation
was interrupted by a fire which destroyed the plates. A renewed demand
for the work seems, however, to warrant the author in presenting a
revised and much enlarged edition, in which the scope of the general
subject has been widened, and its illustration has been made still more
complete by additional stories of composers whose success has been due
in some degree to the influence of woman. The work has been written
in the leisure hours of other pursuits, and of necessity is compiled
from the writer’s musical readings. A long list of authorities has been
consulted for facts bearing upon the subject; and, so far as is known
to the writer, only the highest have been laid under contribution. As a
well-stocked musical library is something of a rarity in this country,
he ventures to hope that his compilations, and his comments thereon,
will be of interest to the musical student, and possibly of value to
the general public.
G. P. U.
CHICAGO, 1886.
If to the depths of tenderness and devotion in which the true and
irresistible empire of woman must commence, and deprived of which she
is only an enigma without a possible solution, Nature should unite
the most brilliant gifts of genius, the miraculous spectacle of the
Greek Fire would be renewed; the glittering flames would again sport
over the abysses of the ocean without being extinguished or submerged
in the chilling depths, adding, as the living hues were thrown
upon the surging waves, the glowing dyes of the purple fire to the
celestial blue of the heaven-reflecting sea.—LISZT.
There is no living soul so capable of enjoying and correctly judging
of a work of art as a finely cultivated woman; for her whole inner
life is in itself a sort of work of art. Even the highest kind of men
have something formless and unfinished about their natures. The hasty
demands of life do not stop to inquire whether it be Sabbath or not:
they surprise man amid the worship of the beautiful, and scarcely
give him time to refrain from profanation of the altar. But the life
of woman,—how calm as a festival day, how full of harmony may it not,
should it not be! When the storm-bells of passion have rung out, then
a pure ether remains behind.... In such minds the impression made
by a work of art is correct and immediate; for they are prepared to
receive it,—themselves serene and pure as bridal devotion.—EHLERT.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
PAGE
WOMAN IN MUSIC 15
PART II.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH 35
GEORGE FREDERICK HÄNDEL 48
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 60
FRANCIS JOSEPH HAYDN 84
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART 96
FRANZ SCHUBERT 112
ROBERT SCHUMANN 125
FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY 138
FREDERICK CHOPIN 149
CARL MARIA VON WEBER 162
RICHARD WAGNER 177
PART III.
WOMAN AS THE INTERPRETER OF MUSIC 187
APPENDIX 209
DEDICATIONS 211
INDEX 219
PART I.
WOMAN IN MUSIC.
[Illustration]
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.
The 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 illustrations, drawn from the
lives of representative composers, as can be furnished by a musical
library. It is intended to be historical and æsthetic, rather than
philosophical or dogmatic; and to present facts for consideration by
the thoughtful reader, collated from the most authoritative sources,
rather than to 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 encouraging 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 instrumental
music. The latter branch of the subject certainly does not require
special attention in these days of the great queens of song, whose sway
is everywhere acknowledged, and, so far as the scope of this essay
is concerned, hardly needs more than eulogistic reference. The other
branch, however, has been but little considered; 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 careers 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 steadfast love and thoughtful care of
woman in the quiet duties of home life. Few students of music know
the effect of these subtile influences, except through the medium
of romances and rhapsodies that have been woven about the lives of
composers by enthusiasts of the Rau and Polko school, or of pretty
fancies and legends, current in their time, that have come down to us,
and are implicitly believed, though they have no foundations to rest
upon. There are probably very few persons, even among musicians, who
do not firmly believe that Beethoven addressed his immortal love-song,
the “Adelaide,” to some real inamorata; that his C sharp minor sonata
was inspired by the moonlight; that Mozart wrote his “Requiem” at the
request of a mysterious stranger who was in some manner connected
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 genius
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.
The study of this subject, however, would not be complete without
considering one of its phases which is in the nature of an enigma, 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 development 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 proposition, that music is the interpreter
and the language of the emotions. It sounds every note in the gamut
of human nature, from ecstatic 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, saddens,
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 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 powerful
and at the same time more delicate emotional force than man, who is
artistic by temperament, whose whole organism is sensitively strung,
and who is religious by nature,—why is it that woman, with all these
musical elements 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
happiness among her pleasures and her sorrows, her commonplaces and
her conventionalities, and that it does not find its highest sources
_in_ her? In other fields of art woman has 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
Bronté, and Madame de Staël in fiction, have successfully rivalled man
in their fields of labor; while George Eliot, with almost more than
masculine force, has grappled with the most abstruse 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 pain.
These may all stand as types of creative power; 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 repertory.
Man has been the creative representative. Beethoven has shown its
depth, its majesty, its immortality; Mendelssohn, its elegance of
form; Händel, its solemnity and grandeur; Mozart, its wondrous grace
and sweetness; Haydn, its purity, freshness, and simplicity; Schumann,
its romance; Chopin, its poetry and tender melancholy; Schubert, the
richness of its melody; Bach, its massive foundations; 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 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 accompanied 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 Provençal troubadours and German minnesingers, has consigned
nearly all that was accomplished 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 musical 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 unquestionable, 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
compositions of Madame Schumann attest; but of all the works written
by these numerous composers, hardly one is known to the lyric stage
to-day. And why?
The most palpable answer, 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
subject 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-rooms with 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 instance in modern times, perhaps in
any times, of a female composer who attains even to the eminence of
a third-rate opera writer? Composition in letters may be of no sex.
In that Madame Dudevant and your friend Madame de Grantmesnil 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
_femme_.”
Conceding that music is the highest expression 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 emotional by temperament and nature, and cannot project
herself outwardly, any more than she can give outward expression to
other mysterious 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 religious faith in notes. Man controls his
emotions, and can give an outward expression of them. In woman they are
the dominating element, and so long as they are dominant she absorbs
music. Great actresses who have never been great dramatists may express
emotions because they express their own natures; but to treat emotions
as if they were mathematics, to bind and measure and limit them within
the rigid laws of harmony and counterpoint, 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 musical 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 Müller, in his “Deutsche Liebe,”
has a neat illustration of this. He imagines one returning 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 listened on
summer evenings under the window when the faithful soul indulged in his
own enjoyment and played fantasies, as the roaring and hissing engine
lets off the steam which has accumulated during the day.” The large
majority of women drop their music long before 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
demands of household cares; 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; 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; 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 progress. The lives of the
great composers, 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
indifference of contemporaries. Beethoven struggled all his life
with adverse fate. Schubert’s music was hardly known in his lifetime,
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 Händel struggling against the malicious cabals
of petty and insignificant rivals for popular favor, who now are
scarcely known even by name. Mozart’s life was a constant warfare; 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.
Berlioz’s music is just beginning to be played in his native country.
Wagner fought the world all his life with indomitable courage and
persistence, 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
appreciated 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, in the pursuit of art,
woman is not calculated to endure. If her triumph could be instant;
if work after work were not to be assailed, scoffed at, and rejected;
if she were not liable 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 instant triumphs
are not the rewards of great composers. The laurels of success may
decorate their graves, placed there by the applauding 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. Nearly 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
unremunerative until within the last fifty years. The enduring music
has been the child of poverty, the outcome of sorrow, the apotheosis
of suffering. Sebastian Bach was the son of a hireling 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 humble circumstances,
and his grandfather a bookbinder. Händel was the son of a barber and
surgeon. Méhul 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. Cimarosa’s father was
a mason, and his mother a washerwoman. Schumann was a bookseller’s
son; and Verdi, the son of a Lombardian peasant. Weber’s father was a
strolling musician and actor. Wagner, the musician of the future, was
born in humble circumstances; his 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
composers, 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 relaxation, certainly
no leisure for musical effort. Its demands are so exacting that she
has neither time nor disposition for the theoretical application which
musical composition requires.
But even assuming that woman had the disposition and the leisure to
devote to musical composition, would she _then_ succeed? The bluntest
answer to this is that she has not succeeded when she has had the
opportunity. But there is another way, perhaps, of arriving at an
answer. Woman reaches results mainly by intuitions. Her susceptibility
to impressions and her finely tempered organization 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 emotion, 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 impartiality; she recognizes what is true and what is false more
quickly. If music were only an object of the perceptions or a matter of
instinct; if it simply addressed itself to the senses; if it were but
an art composed of ravishing melody, of passionate outbursts,—of the
attributes of joy, grief, and exaltation, and vague, dreamy sensations
without any determinate 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 unrelentingly mathematical. Its mastery requires long years
of patient toil and continuous application. The imagination does not
have a free flight, but is bounded within the limits of form. The mere
possession of the poetical imagination and the capacity to receive
music in its 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 problems 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 originate 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 that it is not exaggeration to claim
that without 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 inspiration; and that she
has, in numerous notable 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, Händel, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn,
Schumann, Schubert, Weber, Chopin, and Wagner,—eleven of the
representative names in the highest forms of composition,—and thus
establish the first branch of the general subject that was laid down in
the beginning of this essay.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]