Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany by Matthew Head (review)

“What better can temper manly rudeness, or strengthen and support the weakness of man, what so soon can assuage the rapid blaze of wrath, what more charm masculine power, what so quickly dissipate peevishness and ill-temper, what so well can while away the insipid tedious hours of life, as the near and affectionate look of a noble, beautiful woman? . . .” (J. C. Lavater, Physiognomy, 1775–1777) (p. vii).

With this epigram, Matthew Head points readers to the new perspective unfolded in his Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany, that the late eighteenth century in Germany represented a view of women, gender, and music distinct from that of earlier periods and especially from the role of music in the idealization and confinement of women commonly considered in German romanticism of the nineteenth century. Head argues instead that women in the late eighteenth century were seen as a civilizing, cultivating force over men, and that, as a result, some women were granted a greater cultural agency, especially through the fine arts. Head states: “[I]n highlighting a discourse—an ideology—of female sovereignty in polite culture and the fine arts one could argue that (some) women achieved symbolic power, and cultural capital” (p. 7).

Head thus captures what he presents as a special moment in the history of women’s relationships with music, a moment that allowed for women’s greater agency in society due to the view of women as civilizing influences on men. Head further argues that this agency was particularly communicated through music performance by women and through music composition by both women and men. He characterizes such a view as “a focus on music as part of the culture of sensibility” (p. 13) which also valued a man’s “capacity to feel as a woman, at least within the dominion of sensibility and the fine arts” (p. 15).

Head’s Sovereign Feminine is a significant contribution to the musicological discourse on gender, particularly on representations of, and participation of, women in music performance and composition. Head engages the significant dialogue about music and gender that has been ongoing in musicology since the early 1990s (marked by Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], which Head appropriately recognizes as “groundbreaking,” p. xvii). But, as Head highlights in his preface, even with this far greater attention to gender in musicology and with the influence of feminism in the field, there have been almost no studies of gender in the late eighteenth century.

After framing the book within the larger discourse on music and gender in the preface, Head presents his thesis and approach in the introduction. Through the example of Sophie von La Roche’s novel Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1771), Head highlights the brief period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries “when figures of womanhood enjoyed exalted status as signs of reform, progress, morality, and civilization” (p. 4). Head also introduces Berlin Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1752–1814), a highly influential voice in discourses on music in the period, but one who has been largely forgotten in modern musicology. Head employs Reichardt’s writings, musical activities, and compositions as a unifying thread throughout the book, as Reichardt provided significant arguments for and support of the view of the “sovereign feminine.”

The remainder of the book, with the exception of a brief afterword, includes six case studies to support and illustrate Head’s conception of the “sovereign feminine.” The arrangement is roughly chronological (though with much overlap, of course, given the relatively brief chronological scope of the volume), with chapters 1–4 focused on the late eighteenth century and Chapters 5–6 on the early nineteenth century. It is perhaps more helpful to think of the arrangement conceptually: chapters 1–2 are foundational studies that serve to...