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

Musicologist Matthew Head’s impressive first book emphasizes the complexity of late eighteenth-century views regarding women’s participation in musical life. He continues a productive trend among musicologists, working with approaches of historians and literary theorists, among others, though he modifies those approaches in significant ways. Most notably, he challenges the argument that female musical activity served as a vehicle of containment and discipline in the second half of the eighteenth century. Instead he argues that although women’s abilities and activities were often trivialized, they also often served as models of Enlightenment ideals and practices. Women’s opportunities to compose and perform also expanded greatly. Head discusses developments from the late baroque to the early romantic period, but focuses on the 1770s and 1780s. His analysis and contextualization of musical examples are expert, while also being accessible to people who are not musicologists. His book should therefore be read not only by musicologists but also by historians, Germanists, and others with an interest in the era.

Head’s views have evolved significantly since his days as a graduate student, and he provides a thoughtful account of that evolution, which informs the structure and arguments of the book. He gradually came to see his earlier view—that musical life served to contain or even exclude women—as incompatible with the evidence. Three chapters, one taken from his dissertation, were published in earlier versions as journal articles. On the whole, Head makes them work well for his current arguments.

Head works with an array of interpretations of eighteenth-century culture, building on what Sylvana Tomaselli calls the “indexical theory of woman” and “an equation of women with culture and order” (29); the new idea of luxury consumption as positive; and the argument that educated women could improve male manners. He argues that ideas regarding “female inferiority” (9) that were standard by the early nineteenth century simply had not developed in the eighteenth, and that descriptions of female musicians which today might sound negative were often intended to compliment women as exemplars of Enlightenment cultural ideals. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, a Berlin musician and writer about music, serves as a guide to the era: while he sometimes trivialized women, he also “fostered the composing of his wife (Juliane) and daughter (Louise), wrote enthusiastically of women performers, and, more broadly, was enamored of contemporary ideas of female sensibility and the femininity of aesthetic beauty” (19).

Like Deborah Hertz (Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin, 1988), Tia DeNora (Beethoven and the Construction of Genius, 1997), Joan Landes (Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, 1988), and others, Head argues that the French Revolution ushered in an era much more hostile to female musical accomplishment, but even here he complicates the picture, offering a fascinating new reading of Beethoven’s self-image and several works. He argues persuasively that Beethoven’s “heroines served as emblems of the (male) artist as a self-transcending, boundary-crossing individual” (192) and shows the broad contemporary context for such thinking.

Head illustrates his arguments in case studies of three professional musicians. Charlotte (“Minna”) Brandes was an accomplished northern German singer, actress, and composer who died at the age of twenty-three. Her works were published posthumously, with her editor and former teacher as well as her father presenting her work in a way that conformed to prevailing ideals of female creativity. Corona Schröter’s Singspiel, Die Fischerin, was performed in 1782 in the woods outside the court of Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. With Schröter starring, the performance reflected contemporary ideas of the “natural” and of “vegetable genius.” In the studies of Brandes and Schröter, Head’s emphasis on the prominent role accorded to death in relation to female creativity perhaps hearkens back to his earlier uncritical acceptance of ideas regarding containment; but as he notes...