The sound of silence: classical music’s forgotten women

Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann are familiar names, but what of Fanny and Clara? Anna Beer on why we should be listening to Caccini and Strozzi as well as Mozart and Beethoven

Writing about the lives and works of eight female composers over four centuries of western European history showed me, forcefully, what they were up against. Each of them created their music in societies that made certain places off limits, from the opera house to the university, from the conductor’s podium to the music publisher, and made sure that certain jobs, whether in cathedral, court or conservatoire, were ones for which they could not even apply. In every century, certain beliefs made their task all the harder because, from 17th-century Florence to 20th-century London, their art triggered dark sexualised fantasies about the creative woman. I was amazed at the variety of ways in which the composers worked to allay those fears: through a lifetime of chastity (meet the always proper Marianna von Martines of Vienna) or relentless childbearing (take a bow, Clara Schumann, mother of eight); through the performance of perfect domesticity (the fragrant Frau Hensel of Berlin, aka Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix’s big sister), or by adopting the persona of the child-woman, as did the formidably ambitious Lili Boulanger, who nevertheless signed herself Bébé.

Creativity against the odds, that was what it was all about – and seizing the moment. Francesca Caccini, for example, made a brief moment of political history work for her. In 1620s Tuscany, female leaders needed female composers to create the soundtrack that would justify their exceptional and threatening power. As Caccini wrote to her close friend and professional collaborator Michelangelo Buonarroti, great-nephew of Michelangelo, if the Medici “ball bounces to my hand I won’t let it get away”. Precisely because of that determination, we have the first “opera” (more precisely a balletto in musica, complete with dancing horses, first performed in Florence in 1625) to be written by a woman, wonderfully brought to life last November in Brighton. Just one of the many Caccini works, this 2015 production shows what she was capable of, and what we have lost.

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