The study of female composers from the nineteenth century and earlier is in the midst of an impressive period of fruitful new research. Scholarship on women composers received a major stimulus in the 1980s and early 1990s with the pioneering work of Marcia Citron, Nancy Reich and others, who not only threw new light on the lives and compositional activities of figures such as Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn) and Clara Schumann (née Wieck), but also questioned the mechanisms of canon formation that had effectively written nineteenth-century women’s music out of the historical record.Footnote ¹ Thanks to their groundwork, scholars are now uncovering and analysing the musical output of at least some nineteenth-century female composers with a depth and nuance that matches the research on music by canonic male composers. The recent publication Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied is indicative of the breadth of women composers that is now under consideration in the scholarly discourse, as well as the depth of engagement with their music – both of which signify growth in this area of music scholarship. This book is a collection of 12 essays, plus an introduction and a resource list, that grew out of a 2011 conference held at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, ‘Women & the 19th-Century Lied’, organized by Aisling Kenny.

The collection is arranged in four parts with two broad thematic focal points: the larger context for women’s lieder, and individual composers and their works. In the Introduction, Kenny and Wollenberg note the perplexing history of the lied’s reception as an overwhelmingly ‘male’ genre, even though its instrumentation, performance context and form would suggest it as an obvious genre choice for nineteenth-century female composers – which, indeed, is exactly what this volume demonstrates. The book’s stated aim is to participate in ‘the construction of an alternative narrative of the Lied … one in which women’s achievements are more fully recognized across the spectrum of the genre’s history and repertoire’ (p. 5). Central themes include the connections between life and musical output, the choice of text, musical analysis and the broader cultural context. The essays in this volume demonstrate a new openness to comparisons of closely related works by male and female composers, an approach of which earlier musicologists working on women in music were often wary, but one that the editors now feel can be safely undertaken.

In Part I, ‘Contexts for Women’s Lieder, I’, Aisling Kenny examines the position of women in the nineteenth century and how the practices of female composers were influenced by the necessity of engaging with numerous aesthetic and social dichotomies, including serious/popular, public/private, professional/amateur, vulgar/exclusive, and so forth. The problem of access to performance venues and to critical reception, whether in the private context of the salon or the public context of publication, shaped women’s development as artists and influenced whether their compositions were intended for a professional or amateur musical audience. Focusing on Josephine Lang, Kenny argues that Lang’s need to negotiate an ambivalent landscape of social class, as well as the effect of her marriage on her ability to engage in professional activities, affected her compositional output for deeply practical reasons; composers who experienced a different kind of social situation and less rigid marital expectations, such as Fanny Hensel, were – unsurprisingly – able to produce a more virtuosic body of work. The convincing argument and well-articulated discussion of the virtuoso- and amateur-oriented aspects of Lang’s lieder would have been nicely supported with a musical example or two, even if only briefly discussed.

Briony Cox-Williams’s chapter on Pauline von Decker contextualizes Decker’s compositional practices in the historical silencing of women’s voices and thus the need for subversive expressive acts, which she reads into Decker’s musical settings of Carl Simrock’s ‘Warnung vor dem Rhein’, a poem that evokes the Lorelei legend, and Anastasius Grün’s ‘Das Blatt im Buche’, an epigrammatic poem that refers to Christoph Wieland’s telling of the fairytale Aboflede. Cox-Williams’s analyses have significant implications for performance choices in these lieder; the suggestion that the narrative voice in ‘Warnung vor dem Rhein’ is simultaneously a masculinized parental figure and the Lorelei herself complicates the usual ‘object/subject’ dualism found in songs portraying female figures (which is also explored in Caitlin Miller’s essay, discussed below).

The book’s opening section on context is rounded out by Lorraine Byrne Bodley’s thorough study of salon culture in ‘In Pursuit of a Single Flame: Fanny Hensel’s “Musical Salon”’. The first part of this essay places the institution of the salon within the dynamics of Vormärz political matters, the early nineteenth-century emphasis on Bildung (particularly in German-Jewish society) and the salon as an alternative space for women’s intellectual development, given their exclusion from universities. Many notable salons developed in Berlin (including those of Amalie Beer and Sara Levy), which not only became sites of interaction between leading local and visiting musicians, but also negotiated the notions of public and private space for the women who hosted and attended them. The second part of this essay turns to Fanny Hensel, whose ‘Sunday musicales’ were a sphere in which she could engage her many musical talents on a professional level, reflecting the development of her artistic identity as well as her relationship to community.

Part II, ‘Individual Composers and their Lieder I: Early Nineteenth Century’, refocuses the discussion to specific composers and works from the first half of the nineteenth century from an analytical approach. Bodley’s essay on Hensel from Part I connects to the opening essay of this second section, ‘“Der Jüngling und Das Mädchen”: Fanny Hensel, Felix Mendelssohn, and the Zwölf Lieder, op. 9’, in which Angela Mace Christian tackles problems of agency in the collection published as Felix Mendelssohn’s op. 9 Zwölf Lieder. Mendelssohn’s op. 9 famously – perhaps notoriously – includes three lieder known to have been composed by his sister, Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn). Premising her discussion on Douglass Seaton’s convincing reordering of op. 9 so that songs from each half of the cycle are performed in alternation – a reordering that leads to both greater tonal and narrative coherence – Mace Christian explores Hensel’s role in selecting content and organizing Zwölf Lieder for publication. Mace Christian’s study of the manuscript of Hensel’s ‘Die Nonne’, number 12 in op. 9, provides useful insights and correctives on the original and revised endings of this song. In the context of typical publication practices for women in the early nineteenth century, Mace Christian argues that the view that Fanny’s music was in any way stolen or appropriated by Felix is misguided, and that the attempt to discriminate between a ‘Mendelssohnian’ and a ‘Henselian’ style in such pieces is ultimately futile.

In a contribution that likely stems from his keynote speech at the 2011 Maynooth conference, Harald Krebs constructs a taxonomy of the piano introductions found in Josephine Lang’s lieder, explaining the manifold ways that Lang deployed introductory material to foreshadow developments in the vocal part. The musical examples, rather than being embedded in the text, are collected in a 29-page appendix to the chapter; while this allows for extended musical citations, this layout is nonetheless a somewhat infelicitous choice, as the reader is forced to flip constantly from one section to the other in order to follow the discussion. Treating 22 of Lang’s songs (17 of which are excerpted in the appendix), this chapter serves as a whirlwind introduction to Lang’s lieder. Susan Wollenberg’s deep analytical treatment of text, music and the union of the two in Clara Schumann’s lied ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ concludes the second section of the book. Wollenberg contextualizes Schumann’s compositional choices in the difficulties that Robert and Clara experienced in the marriage battle with Friedrich Wieck, leading to the psychological relief of their union, and the anxiety that Clara continued to feel about her compositional abilities afterward, even as Robert selected this lied for inclusion in their joint publication op. 37/12.

Part III, ‘Individual Composers and their Lieder II: Later Nineteenth Century’, continues the focus on the works of specific composers, moving into the second half of the century. Kadja Grönke analyses Pauline Viardot-Garcia’s ‘Ne poj, krasavica, pri mne’ in the larger genre of the Russian Romance, comparing Viardot-Garcia’s setting to those on the same text by Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov. Grönke argues that Viardot-Garcia was a force for cross-cultural understanding through her polylingual, multistylistic compositional works – and indeed, Viardot-Garcia was a remarkable example of an artist who worked in an international aesthetic at a time of increasing nationalization throughout Europe.

The now largely forgotten Swedish-German composer Ingeborg von Bronsart is treated in Melinda Boyd’s contribution, which contends that Bronsart’s op. 16 lieder, a setting of five poems by Bronsart’s contemporary Ernst von Wildenbruch, is characterized by a level of poetic and musical unity that merits the designation ‘song cycle’. Boyd weaves anecdotes from Bronsart’s life into her argument, showing her warm relationship and aesthetic collaboration with Wildenbruch, but also demonstrating, in microcosm, how political structures and cultural expectations of the time actively discouraged women from pursuing composition. Ethel Smyth’s early Lieder und Balladen, op. 3, and Lieder, op. 4, are the subject of Cornelia Bartsch’s chapter. Bartsch describes the established musical circles that Smyth found in Leipzig when she moved there at age 19 to pursue composition seriously, which included the last resonances of a convivial private salon culture in the home of Livia Frege, as well as Leipzig’s music publishing industry, where Smyth encountered overt sexism. Bartsch analyses Smyth’s two lieder cycles together, arguing for their reordering and demonstrating how aspects of Smyth’s transgressions of gender norms in her personal life are reflected in her lieder.

Kadja Grönke’s second essay in this volume compares two lieder on different texts dealing with the subject of love, one composed by Alma Schindler (who would become Alma Mahler) before she met Gustav Mahler, and the other by Gustav Mahler, composed shortly after their marriage. The differences in compositional technique and musical engagement with the concepts of love parallel the troubled dynamic of the Mahler marriage, in which Alma was never able to reconcile herself fully to the sacrifice of her creative ambitions that was expected when she married. This essay would have benefited from an introductory paragraph to clarify the structure of the argument that follows. Grönke convincingly demonstrates the potential for interpretation of musical texts to enhance our understanding of biography, in a reversal of the usual music-historiographical paradigm.

The fourth section concludes the collection by returning to the question of context. Caitlin Miller turns our attention to two settings of Heine’s Lorelei poem, one by Franz Liszt and the other by Clara Schumann. Miller argues that Liszt’s setting objectifies the figure of the Lorelei by musically separating the narrator from the poem and from Lorelei herself, while Schumann’s musical treatment grants the Lorelei more agency and subjectivity through emphasizing her independent voice and tying her closely to the narrative ‘I’. Miller’s discussion stands in dialogue with Sanna Iitti’s recent work on the Lorelei in lieder, which considers nineteenth-century interpretations of the Lorelei as a site of social and sexual anxieties about women, as found in musical settings by Friedrich Silcher and Joanna Kinkel as well as those by Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt.Footnote ² Miller’s essay demonstrates the effect of musical interpretation on narrative framing, showing gender-based tendencies without oversimplifying the question of complicity with or subversion of the ‘male gaze’. In the final individual contribution, Ita Beausang undertakes the search for traces of the lied in nineteenth-century Irish performance repertoires. Her chapter is a starting place for an understudied topic, but the argument is diffuse, making it difficult to determine the central point of the discussion. The book ends with an introduction to current scholarly approaches to its subject and a selective list of sources, which – despite its brevity – highlights the growing wealth of materials available for researchers to pursue not just the topic of women composers of lieder, but extended study of individual composers as well. The list of websites would have benefited from comprehensive annotations and access dates, as there is a great deal of variation in depth of content, and some of the links are already outdated as of the writing of this review.

This volume is well-crafted and -edited, and includes many valuable features beyond the text. The plentiful musical examples and figures make for engaging study, and encourage the reader to find recordings of the works discussed so that they can hear the musical examples so readily available on the page. Slightly closer attention to copyediting might have avoided the few typos or problematic translations, but these are minor issues in the context of the outstanding achievement that is this collection.Footnote ³

This book is a highly significant contribution to the study of its subjects, not only in making clear the robust potential for the study of female musicians’ lives and in providing a sweeping overview of the state of research on nineteenth-century women composers, but also as an important entry in the study of the genre of the lied and the arena in which it developed and flowered. The numerous analytical studies turn our attention to the music itself, rather than merely the phenomenon of woman-as-composer, a crucial step in re-evaluating the significance of this repertoire. The comparative approach reveals new insights into how the strongly differentiated gender roles that were de rigeur in nineteenth-century Europe inevitably had an effect on artistic output from both women and men. There is valuable potential for dialogue between essays contained within this volume (for example, on the topic of the Lorelei, or the differing stances on marriage and defiance of gender norms taken by the composers under discussion), while the book also stands in conversation with other current publications on the composers and works included Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied takes nineteenth-century music scholarship a considerable step closer toward a greater inclusiveness of repertoire, composers and methodologies, and for that it is profoundly welcome.