Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment by Rebecca Cypess is a much-needed, and exceptionally well-written and researched, addition to modern scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century salonnières. The monograph introduces the reader to a selection of the leading musical salons hosted by women. Crucially, Cypess challenges the narrative of Enlightenment salons as they have thus far been treated in scholarship. While the importance of salons in the careers of (mostly) male musicians has been established, fewer scholars have studied salons and the women who ran them on their own terms. Cypess demonstrates convincingly that salonnières were a vitally important part of the musical landscapes of their respective cities, acting like mediators between composers, performers, amateurs and patrons of the arts.
Naturally, a book about women in the Enlightenment must also address questions related to gender. Cypess highlights the importance of the salon as an institution specifically for upper-class women, existing in a quasi-liminal space between the public and private spheres. In that sense, the salon served as a platform for individual agency, safely shrouded in apparent domesticity, allowing upper-class women to present themselves, their music, their performances and the art of sociability. The author argues that while several of these salonnières also composed music themselves, it would be wrong to conceive of them in the same way as men who were professional composer-performers. The salon offered an avenue to women that came without the risk of societal repercussions, whereas professional aspirations in music would have been seen as transgressive for many of them, thus jeopardizing their social status.
The book begins with two introductory chapters. One provides a general overview of salons during the Enlightenment as well as their socio-historical significance. Chapter 2 focuses on salon music. Cypess, a performer herself, shares valuable insights gained from what one might consider embodied epistemology. Indeed, one of the exceptional details of this publication is the list of audio examples, available through an online link, with the author performing the keyboard parts. The chapter also highlights the social and playful nature of salon music and music-making, suggesting it was representative of, and central to, core Enlightenment values of sympathy and the development of ‘moral sentiment’ (20).
The main players in the book – the women at the heart of Europe’s musical salons – are Madame Brillon, Marianna Martines, Sara Levy, Angelica Kauffman and Elizabeth Graeme. The author dedicates a chapter to each one of them.
Anne-Louise Boyvin d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy, the salonnière of chapter 3, represents a textbook case of an upper-class woman whose station precluded her from participating in public life or pursuing professional aspirations. As a French aristocrat, modesty was her ‘lot’ and ‘taste’, as Brillon herself wrote – perhaps somewhat sarcastically (108). Cypess suggests that Brillon’s own musical productions, in the form of compositions, should be understood as ephemera, loosely based on Benjamin Franklin’s definition of the ephemeral quality of ‘worldly joys and their true value when shared with friends’ (148). Despite Brillon’s semi-private seclusion, her musical ideals – as represented by her compositions, for example – extended beyond the confines of her salon. Cypess convincingly traces Brillon’s influence on public music-making, citing Boccherini as an example, whose Op. 5 violin sonatas were dedicated to Brillon and directly inspired by her manner of playing the keyboard (134).
While Marianna Martines did not perform publicly either, she presents a vastly different case from Brillon. In chapter 4, Cypess details Martines’s masterful cultivation of musical skill in her salon, jointly hosted with the famous librettist Pietro Metastasio, who shared a household with the Martines family. Though Martines positioned herself as an amateur, this reveals more about her social position than about her abilities. Indeed, comprehending Martines’s musical engagement requires a more nuanced understanding of the term dilettante in an eighteenth-century context than is perhaps common among modern readers. Cypess highlights Martines’s ability to negotiate her social status as a member of upper-class Viennese society while also establishing herself as a highly regarded composer and performer.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to Sara Levy, a daughter of the famous Jewish banker Daniel Itzig and thus part of a dynasty of salonnières – her sisters included Fanny von Arnstein, Zippora Wulff and Bella Salomon. Beyond music, Sara Levy’s story also enhances our understanding of the situation of German Jews, and how individuals navigated the omnipresence of ‘anti-Judaism’ as ‘a fact of life’ (232) in Germany during the Enlightenment. Though there were many musically active women in Berlin at the time, Cypess argues that it was Levy who had the greatest impact on musical production, owing particularly to her connections to the Bach family. Levy was a student of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach and an avid supporter of both Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. However, rather than reducing Levy to a side note in historiographical discussions surrounding the Bach legacy, Cypess places Levy centre stage, particularly as a performer and collector of music rather than as a composer.
A kind of all-round artist, Angelica Kauffman, is the focus of chapter 6. Though best known today as a painter, Kauffman was a highly skilled singer, lauded by her contemporaries. One of her self-portraits reflects this perceived inner struggle of being torn between the two arts. Even as an established professional painter in Rome, Kauffman and her portraits echo and explore her varied artistic life as well as those around her. Her salons, far from being limited to her painterly practices, should, according to the author, also be considered musical salons. The musical performances given there, in turn, inspired many of Kauffman’s portraits, capturing and bestowing permanence upon the fleeting occurrences of women’s music-making.
Finally, chapter 7 focuses on Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, who is celebrated as one of the first women poets whose work was published in North America. As such, Graeme has thus far been predominantly (and only insufficiently) studied by literary historians. Cypess adds to the conversation by considering the intersection of Graeme’s poetry with her music and the cultivation of both in her salon, which hosted some of the most eminent intellectuals, politicians and socialites of colonial Philadelphia.
Cypess’s book is a must-read for anyone working on Enlightenment salons or, more generally, women in music history. Of course, owing to the practical limitations of a publication such as this, the individual ‘portraits’ the author paints of the salonnières cannot possibly cover everything there is to know about these five women and their indispensable contributions to the world of music, as well as the salon as an Enlightenment social institution. Still, the author provides deeply insightful overviews of the varied ways in which women attained a sense of individual agency through their cultivation of music.
