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

Sovereign Feminine is a splendid book. An important contribution to eighteenth-century studies, it explores the activities of female musicians in a variety of roles—as composers and performers, and especially as participants in the cultural ideology of the time. In this way, Head offers perspectives that potentially revise our sense of Enlightenment music-making and women’s place in it.

Several themes pervade the volume. Head sees the female sign as sovereign in eighteenth-century Germany, creating a feminocentric world with musical woman as an ideal, a civilizing force, and a marker of sensibility. Embodying the best in social values, she serves as a sort of ‘living muse’. Around 1780 this positive view starts to change, and in the nineteenth century the category of ‘woman composer’ and its connotation of limited agency become negative for women. This does not mean that authorship is irrelevant in the eighteenth century. Indeed, it figures prominently in several chapters (3, 4, 5), where Head demonstrates that authorship is not unitary and is subject to historical context. In addition to substantive matters, methodology itself emerges as a theme. Head recognizes that his approach is a departure from second-stage feminist work. In his formulation, second-stage research focused on real-life issues as defined by the historiography of the late twentieth century, including canonicity, professionalism, formal reception, and practical containment. In Sovereign Feminine, Head avoids these categories and argues that in eighteenth-century terms woman as an ideal was positive for women, not negative.

Although my characterization suggests a standpoint of certainty, Head is often ambivalent about the privileging of idealization over practicality, revealing his awareness of the complexities involved in the binary. This strengthens the book—it would be hard to accept a study that reverses foundational work on women without the nuanced self-questioning found in Sovereign Feminine. That is a good thing, for there is a lot to like in Head’s book, which succeeds beautifully most of the time. It is built on an impressive knowledge of primary sources; one need only consult the dedicated list in the Bibliography to grasp the historical depth of the study. The volume ranges widely, to cover art, architecture, literature, landscape, theatre, and philosophy in addition to music. The scholarly idyll (if I may put it that way) into feminocentric musical life comes alive in a writing style that captures the flavour of Enlightenment culture. Add in an inquisitive critical mindset, and Sovereign Feminine becomes a highly original study with the potential to change our notion of eighteenth-century music.

The book consists of discrete essays from 1999 through the present, with approximately half previously published. The presentation is loosely chronological by topic. Chapter 1, ‘Europe’s Living Muses: Women, Music, and Modernity in Burney’s History and Tours’, paints a broad canvas of the period. We learn about the influence of David Hume and other thinkers on Burney’s ideas, and how ‘the ascendance of woman in [his] writing is bound up with the ascent of music as a fine art’ (p. 20). This is followed by an essay on keyboard music intended for ladies, “‘If the pretty little hand won’t stretch”: Music for the Fair Sex’. The earliest piece, this chapter is the weakest part of the book, showing the strains of outdated assumptions and theories. At best it might be considered a useful link in a disciplinary chain tracing the development of feminist work, but in the event does not fit comfortably in the book. Next comes an excursion into composer Charlotte (‘Minna’) Brandes and the trope of the ‘beautiful dead’. The first of three chapters on female authorship, it highlights contemporary paradigms and shows how idioms we might ignore were significant in assessing a composer. Chapter 4 takes us to a world of landscape, nature, and theatre surrounding Corona Schröter’s Singspiel Die Fischerin. As...