Musical Women in England, 1870-1914: ''Encroaching on All Man's Privileges''

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 “Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges”

Paula Gillett

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914

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“Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges”

Paula Gillett

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.

MUSICAL WOMEN IN ENGLAND, 1870–1914

Copyright © Paula Gillett, 2000. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. ISBN 0-312-12156-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gillett, Paula, 1934Musical women in England, 1870–1914:“encroaching on all man’s privileges”/by Paula Gillett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–12156–3 (cloth) 1. Women musicians—England. 2. Music—England—19th century-History and criticism. 3. Music—England—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. ML82.G55 2000 780’.82’0942—dc21 99–42809 CIP First edition: June, 2000 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my father, Ira R. Levy

Permissions

Figure 1.1 Figure 3.1 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 5.1

Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2

Photograph provided by the Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,The University of Texas at Austin. Provided by the Fine Art Society, London. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,The University of Texas at Austin. Photograph provided by the Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Photograph provided by the Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Reproduced with the permission of Punch Ltd. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,The University of Texas at Austin. Mary Evans Picture Library

Contents

Preface

vii

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter

Four Five Six Seven

Introduction: Music and the Female Sphere Music and “Woman’s Mission” in Late-Victorian Philanthropy Talents Discovered and Rewarded: Female Recipients of Music Philanthropy Woman and the Devil’s Instrument The New Woman and Her Violin Immortal Tones:Woman as Public Singer Music as a Profession for Women

Notes Bibliography Bibliography of Untitled Newspaper Citations Index

1 33 63 77 109 141 189 228 287 305 307

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Preface

he goal of this book is to extend and enrich current understandings both of women’s participation in late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century English musical culture and of perceptions of the female musician that were heatedly discussed and challenged during that era. The major sources I have used include music journals, girls’ and women’s magazines, fictional works, and poetry. Among the publications for girls and young women, The Girl’s Own Paper is an especially fruitful source: its enormous popularity—close to a third of respondents to an 1888 poll of one thousand girls between the ages of eleven and nineteen declared it to be their favorite reading1—combined with extensive coverage of musical subjects, in articles often written by music professionals, earned it the enthusiastic commendation of The Musical Times.2 Among women’s magazines, the most useful was The Lady. While its music coverage was often scarcely distinguishable from the fashionable gossip that filled many of its columns, the magazine included some well-informed musical commentary, especially during the early twentieth century, when it provided a vehicle for the Oxford-educated Christopher St. John, whose critical reviews were warmly praised by the best-known woman composer, Ethel Smyth.3 The fictional sources drawn on vary widely in literary quality, but almost all are characterized by a passionate engagement with issues prominent in contemporary discussions of the female musician, especially the nature of her talent and its relationship to the all-important issue of its effects on her decisions concerning marriage and motherhood. Writers of popular fiction are especially revealing to the social historian, as their success depends upon the accuracy with which they are attuned to public sentiment.4 But imaginative writers do not simply mirror that sentiment. In periods like the one that provides the focus for this book, when traditional values and practices that had long created the framework for women’s lives were being re-examined and redefined, the contributors to imaginative culture played a significant role in shaping opinion. By vividly portraying

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turn-of-the-century musical women and the vocational and personal choices open to them, writers and artists contributed in important ways to the modes of their entrance onto the public stage and to their reception. It is a pleasure for me to thank the institutions and organizations that have provided assistance to this project through the years of research and writing. San Jose State University has supported this endeavor with several grants of released time and funding: these include a Travel Award from the Dean’s Small Grants Program, College of Humanities and the Arts, in 1992; an award of travel funds and released time from the SJSU Affirmative Action Grant Program in Spring/Summer, 1994; and a Difference-inPay leave for the academic year 1996–1997. In 1992 I received a National Endowment for the Humanities Travel Grant. In 1993, I was awarded a summer fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship/Grant-in-Aid Program and a California State University Summer Research Fellowship. In 1996, I spent a month at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow. During the academic year 1996–1997, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. These awards made it possible for me to visit the collections of a number of libraries in the United States and Great Britain. Research was conducted at the following libraries and archives in the United States: the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; Stanford University; Harvard University; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; the Library of Congress; the Beinecke Rare Book Library,Yale University; the Huntington Library; and the New York Public Library and its Lincoln Center Performing Arts branch. In Great Britain, I have worked in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University; the British Library and British Newspaper Library; the Fawcett Library; the London Library; and the Senate House Library and the library of Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. I have also consulted manuscript collections at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. I am grateful for the generous assistance of staff at these institutions and would like to give special thanks to Christopher Bornet and Oliver Davies at the Royal College of Music and to Maria Mitchell, Dell Hollingsworth, and Pat Fox at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.The staff of Clark Library at San Jose State University has provided ongoing assistance; I would especially like to thank Catherine E. Perez, Department Head of the Interlibrary Loan Office, and her predecessor, Hjordis Madsen, as well as ILL Specialist Shirley G. Miguel. My thanks also to Judy Reynolds, Library Education and Assistance Program Head, for help with the complexities of database selection

Preface

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and searching. Gail Cameron of The Museum of London and David Doughan of The Fawcett Library responded generously to my requests for information and materials. Other colleagues and friends who provided various kinds of advice and assistance are Pamela Blevins, Margaret Campbell, Ellen Lerner, Anthony Curtis, Liane Curtis, Susan Croft, Lisl Day, Katharine Ellis, Sophie Fuller, Lidia Haberman,Trevor Herbert, Jan Marsh, and Martha Vogeler. Several members of the online discussion group, VICTORIA: The Electronic Conference for Victorian Studies, hosted by Indiana University, Bloomington, have provided answers to my queries, and I am grateful to the Group’s director and guiding spirit, Patrick Leary, for a number of valuable suggestions and for pioneering work in shaping this new scholarly medium.Warm thanks to William Weber for his critiques of the developing manuscript and for sharing valuable information from his own research on nineteenth-century music institutions. I am deeply grateful to Sheldon Rothblatt, my dissertation adviser at Berkeley years ago and a good friend since that time, for the formative influence of his teaching and for his encouragement of my work. Cyril Ehrlich has been an inspiring mentor whose kindness is beyond measure; I have been fortunate indeed to have had the benefit of his comments on the manuscript and his numerous suggestions for improving it. Of course, errors of fact and judgment in this book are fully my responsibility. I would like to thank Kristi Long, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, for much good advice and for her patient encouragement. Ella Pearce, Editorial Assistant, has been most helpful in organizing the final stages of the project. Members of the production staff have given valuable assistance in the book’s final revisions; I would especially like to thank Ruth Mannes, Production Editor, Copyeditor Karin Bolender, and Production Assistant Meg Weaver for their commitment to this project and for their fine work. My husband, Eric, has lived with this book—including a number of its unanticipated side effects—since its inception. I am grateful for his unfailing support of a project that has often required the postponement of other plans and for his companionship and love over the course of many years.

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Chapter One h

Introduction: Music and the Female Sphere

espite prevailing prejudices against their intellectual and creative powers, women contributed in important ways to the rich musical life of England during the late-Victorian period and the early-twentieth century. Women composed in a wide variety of genres and were prominent on the concert stage, where two of the most admired performers were Clara Schumann, who made 19 concert trips to London between the mid-1850s and the late ‘80s, and Wilma Norman-Neruda (later, Lady Hallé). The latter was, for many years, a star of the Popular Concerts at St. James’s Hall, which introduced large numbers of concertgoers to the chamber music repertoire.The most famous musical women were the great divas who appeared each year on the London opera and concert stage. The personal lives and finances of Adelina Patti, Christine Nilsson, and their colleagues and rivals received close scrutiny in the press; newspapers and journals featured gossip about and interviews with these fascinating women, whose magnificent musicianship evoked the most extravagant adulation, even when their power to command enormous fees was deplored. By the turn of the century, a number of women had taken their places among the foremost instrumentalists of the day, especially as pianists and violinists. Several women founded and managed traveling opera companies that regularly toured the provinces and performed in a number of American cities. Many women were involved in philanthropic activities that brought free or inexpensive concerts to neighborhoods geographically and socially distant from the cultural world of London’s West End. The 1870s, the first decade of the period under study, was an especially important time for English women. At the start of the decade, women

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Introduction

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moved into the public arena as school board members and Poor Law guardians, and Millicent Fawcett, one of the most inspiring feminist leaders, began her work in the long campaign for female suffrage. Improvements in women’s education were supported even by women and men unsympathetic to the suffrage cause; by the end of the decade, four women’s colleges had been established at Oxford and Cambridge.The entire period under study was characterized by continuous discussion and debate over women’s nature, capacities, and proper sphere; the efforts of musically gifted women to widen their choices and advance their prospects should be understood within this context. Like other areas of social and economic life, the world of nineteenthcentury music practice, both amateur and professional, was sharply divided by gender. Whether the subject under discussion was the choice of an instrument or a musical vocation, the capacity to respond to music or performance style, all such questions were heavily laden with gendered rules or connotations. Women’s participation in music took place in a context pervaded—and sometimes dominated—by nonmusical criteria: will performance on this instrument detract from female beauty? What degree of expressiveness is appropriate for a girl destined for a life that requires restraint and self-effacement? Does the self-display of public performance unfit a woman for marriage and motherhood? This chapter will provide an introductory overview of concerns like these that made the woman’s world of music-making strikingly different from that of her male counterparts. One major area of difference was that of instrument choice: while a boy had an almost unlimited choice of instruments, a girl’s options were highly restricted for most of the period under study.The instrument most closely associated with girls and women was the piano; its capacity to provide the solo player of every level of proficiency with a wide range of musical experience, in combination with the service it gave to ideals and practices of female domesticity, made it by far the favored female instrument.1 The once-popular harp was an unusual choice by the late-Victorian years; John Thomas, harpist to the queen, found it necessary to begin his article,“How to Play the Harp,” published in The Girl’s Own Paper in 1880, by countering the widespread perception that the instrument was hard to learn and onerous to tune. No longer, as in Jane Austen’s times, a frequent domestic companion to the piano, the harp had for some time been eclipsed by that “second hearth,” “the very altar of homes,” to quote the artist Edward Burne-Jones, who designed a piano for the firm of Broadwood. Roslyn Rensch, in The Harp: Its History,Technique and Repertoire, explains that technical improvements in the harp early in the century and the development of a more demanding repertoire made the instrument more effective in the concert hall, but less accessible to the amateur player.2

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The piano’s rapidly decreasing prices during the final decades of the century made ownership feasible even for some working-class families.3 This democratization of the piano decreased the social value of amateur piano skills for the middle- and upper-class girl, and enhanced the attraction of the new fashion of female violin-playing, a trend also facilitated by the availability of inexpensive instruments—another contrast to the high cost of the forsaken harp that, by the mid-nineties, was described as about as expensive as a grand piano.4 Although there were brief fashions for the mandolin, zither, and banjo, as well as a short-lived, nostalgic return to the guitar, piano and violin were the main instruments of female music-making during the lateVictorian era and the early years of the twentieth century. Before the violin fad of the eighties and nineties had begun to offer an acceptable and intriguing alternative, a moderate level of skill at the piano was the core element in the “accomplishment” curriculum of the wellbred girl, and an important prerequisite to success in the marriage market. Piano was the perfect fit for the Victorian girl and woman.The seated position accorded well with female modesty, no awkward motions or altered facial distortions were required, and there were no suggestive movements to disturb the modest female image; the pianist touched her instrument only with the extremities of fingers and toes, with the actual sound mechanism masked from view. In addition to its musical and social rewards, the piano, as was often pointed out, offered a precious gift in the solace it could provide to woman’s sensitive nature. This extramusical virtue of the instrument received the warm endorsement of the Reverend H. R. Haweis, liberal clergyman, amateur violinist, and author of the enormously popular Music and Morals, which went through 16 editions between its 1871 publication and the author’s death in 1901: That poor lonely little sorrower, hardly more than a child, who sits dreaming at her piano, while her fingers, caressing the deliciously cool ivory keys, glide through a weird nocturno of Chopin, is playing no mere study or set piece. Ah! what heavy burden seems lifted up, and borne away in the dusk? . . . The angel of music has come down; she has poured into his ear the tale which she will confide to no one else, and the “restless, unsatisfied longing” has passed;That domestic and long-suffering instrument, the cottage piano, has probably done more to . . . bring peace and happiness to families in general, and to young women in particular, than all the homilies on the domestic virtues ever yet penned.5

As the instrument most closely associated with the home, the piano was seen as the perfect companion for the homebound woman whose life of

Introduction

5

self-sacrifice, at once an expression of her familial duty and her essential nature, often produced pent-up emotions unsettling in their intensity. Music was the ideal outlet for such feelings, and the compositions most favored for this purpose were pieces by Frédéric Chopin; many of these were widely available in simplified and abridged form in collections that bore such titles as “drawing-room trifles.”6 Charles Hallé, a friend of Chopin, no doubt had such collections in mind when he remarked, in the mid-1890s, that Chopin was now “the property of every schoolgirl.”7 The therapeutic use of Chopin’s music that the Reverend Haweis recommended to female pianists appears in a number of fictional works of the period. One example, set in high social circles, is that of Lady Harrison in Louise Mack’s novel, The Music Makers.8 Deeply depressed after discovering her husband’s love for a younger woman,“she drew off her long white gloves and walked over to the piano. . . . [Opening] the thick pale green book with ‘Chopin’ in big black letters on its cover, . . . she turned over the pages till she came to the wonderful First Ballade. She played, and gradually all the storm and stress began to die down. . . . The hatred fled from the atmosphere.”9 Haweis’s and Mack’s choice of composer was hardly accidental; Chopin’s works, whether in original or simplified versions, were most often played by women during the nineteenth century. The composer’s reputation suffered considerably from the close association of many of his works with the female world. A recent article by Jeffrey Kallberg discusses the effort, first by the influential American critic, James Huneker, and later by the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, to “rescue” Chopin from the taint of the devalorized feminine.10 Perhaps Huneker’s advocacy of a more “vigorous” and less “sentimental” approach to the performance of Chopin was familiar to the novelist Henry Handel Richardson (pseudonym of Ethel Robertson, née Richardson) who, before becoming a writer, had studied for three years at the Leipzig Conservatorium in preparation for a career as a concert pianist.The hero of her 1908 novel, Maurice Guest, gains insight into the “essentially masculine” character of Chopin’s music when he hears it performed by a German pianist in a manner completely different from “the sentimental fashion of the English drawing room.”11 Such gendered discourse formed a regularly encountered component of the intellectual and cultural environment of music students and readers of the music press. As the example of Chopin suggests, usage of the terms “masculine” and “feminine” evoked a complex matrix of sometimes conflicting connotations.While piano-playing carried such strong feminine connotations that boys were often discouraged from studying the instrument—George Grossmith writes of the disapproval his boyhood talent at the piano evoked from family friends during the early 1860s12—the image of great virtuosi

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such as Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, and Paderewski was so sexually attractive as to evoke effusions of female devotion that were often the subject of humorous or disapproving commentary.13 While public performers in opera and on the concert stage, both male and female, were celebrities in Victorian England, it was not until the final decade of the century that such careers came to be regarded as appropriate models for musically-gifted young women of genteel upbringing.The 1880 article on playing the harp that was mentioned earlier illustrates this point. It was one in a series of musical “how-to” articles featured in The Girl’s Own Paper, a widely read publication of the Religious Tract Society, to encourage the development of skills with which a girl could grace leisure hours and soothe and refresh her overburdened paterfamilias. While the magazine wrote admiringly of young women who were able to earn money by drawing on artistic or musical skills so as to help their families in times of financial crisis, these skills were typically employed in home settings, most often, in work as a teacher or governess.The music-related articles that The Girl’s Own Paper published during the early 1880s implicitly shared the disapproval with which middle- and upper-class parents viewed female careers in public performance; the time had not yet arrived when they would turn away from the cautionary words of a well-known midVictorian manual, Maternal Counsels to a Daughter: “Who would wish a wife or daughter, moving in private society, to have attained such excellence in music as involves a life’s devotion to it?”14 The prejudice against public performers had deep roots; Adam Smith had thought it significant enough for analysis in his classic work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (l776): “There are some very agreeable and beautiful talents of which the possession commands a certain sort of admiration, but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of public prostitution.” Smith believed the high fees earned by famous actors, opera singers, and dancers to be compensation not only for years of training, but also for “the discredit of employing [these skills] in this manner.”15 His understanding of polite society’s mindset, that allowed for the ardent admiration of artistic talent and the simultaneous denigration of those who made their living from it, continued to be descriptive of upper-class cultural attitudes a hundred years after his words were set down. This attitude underwent significant change close to the century’s end, although socially conservative parents continued long thereafter to maintain traditional prejudices, especially towards the aspirations of musically or dramatically inclined daughters. For the great majority of girls and young women who studied music as a delightful pastime or a social duty, “respectable” society’s disapproval of

Introduction

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professional careers in music was hardly a relevant concern. But the appearance of extraordinary talent could produce a painful degree of social dissonance and personal frustration. Such was the poignant dilemma of the pianist, Bettina Walker, a student of the composer William Sterndale Bennett during the early 1870s.Although pleased by her daughter’s talents and willing to support her continued program of study, Walker’s mother adamantly opposed the choice of a musical career. Bennett, then Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, was hardly more encouraging, telling his student that the life of the concert pianist was “a path . . . beset with thorns.”With no one to help her pursue her dream,Walker agreed to “stay quietly at home” with occasional trips to London for lessons, excursions that then required the company of her mother or some other chaperon. The consequence, as Walker wrote years later, was inevitable:“If art was to be only my pleasure, and not my life’s vocation, what right had I just for this pleasure to turn all family arrangements upside down?”16 If a family’s finances were at all limited, or other demands competed for the chaperon’s time, a purely private goal for music-study was likely, sooner or later, to call into question the expenditure of time and money for professional-level instruction. Eventually, after a period of turning away completely from music, Walker found a way to pursue her studies in Germany, where she developed a friendship with Franz Liszt and studied with several eminent piano masters. She settled in London in 1890, the year her autobiography was published.Walker never became a concert pianist, devoting herself instead to advocating and publicizing the teaching methods of her German mentor, Adolf Henselt.17 Middle-class parents often opposed musical careers for sons as well as for daughters, but such opposition was magnified for the latter by the belief that women compromised respectability by making themselves objects of the public—that is, of the male—gaze.That the sacrifice of respectability by the paid performing artist is far greater for a woman than for a man is implicit in Adam Smith’s use of the word prostitution, and in no field of performance was the loss greater than in activities associated with “the stage,” a term that designated both acting and operatic or dramatic singing.18 In this spirit, Max Hereford, the sympathetically presented fiancé of the eponymous heroine of Edna Lyall’s 1894 novel Doreen, while respectful of his future wife’s decision not to leave the singing profession—“She would not have been the girl whom he loved and reverenced, had she done so”19—nevertheless expresses concern at the prospect of the continuation of male stares once Doreen becomes “his.” Enraged by a man who expresses his infatuation with Doreen by frequenting her performance sites and following her movements around town, Hereford is especially disturbed by the legitimate status of this gaze inside the concert hall: “I hate to think that by paying a

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few shillings he can stare at you through an opera glass . . . and when we are married, I don’t see how you can expect me to allow it.” Doreen, who winces at the word “allow,” points out that when Hereford enters Parliament, ladies in the gallery will be able to view him through opera glasses without paying anything at all: “And as to the public meetings,—I really don’t think I can allow you to speak in public any more when we are married!”20 The joke falls flat because their situations are clearly not parallel: the public realm of politics is, incontestably at this time, both an honored realm and a man’s world.While the woman singer is among the few of her sex to have an approved and valued public role, the erotic component of the male gaze that her performance evokes, the component that is so troubling to Hereford, colors that role with an ambiguous social status. Lyall resolves the disagreement, awkwardly for a feminist author, by having Doreen lose her singing voice before she and Hereford marry. In portraying Hereford, a political liberal who shares Doreen’s dedication to the cause of Irish Home Rule, as conflict-ridden regarding his future wife’s career “on stage,” Lyall shows the strength and persistence of the prejudice against female public performance, a prejudice that reached its greatest intensity when the performer was both a singer and a married woman. Although Hereford’s ambivalence about Doreen’s career leads to a period of alienation between the lovers, he retains the author’s sympathy because of his willingness to examine his prejudice in the light of his mother’s understanding that singing for Doreen is not just a career, but a sacred calling. Max’s attitude presents a strong contrast to the implacable hostility of narrow-minded conservatives who self-righteously opposed the appearance of “respectable” women on stage, even in amateur performances. One example of such opposition, which The Magazine of Music shared with its readers in January, 1896, was that of the Vicar of Carlisle, who was outraged by the appearance of a young female member of his church choir in the chorus of a local amateur production of Iolanthe. “It has grieved me,” he wrote to her in a letter made public by the Magazine, more than anything that has occurred in connection with St. John’s during many years past.You have also afforded, I hear, merriment among the young men of the choir, who freely commented upon your appearance on the stage.You will quite understand how impossible it is for me to ask you to continue to be a member of St. John’s choir. I write this with great sorrow and disappointment, but your appearance in the choir would cause so much unpleasant comment, and give so much umbrage and hinder my spiritual work to such an extent, that I should despair of recovering from such a blow for years to come. Yours, with much regret and painful disappointment,W. M. Shepherd

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A decade—certainly, two decades—earlier, the vicar would have gathered substantial community support for his point of view, but by the midnineties, amateur theatrics had become enormously popular and amateur musicians often shared their talents on stage alongside professionals in charity events. It is not surprising to learn from The Magazine of Music that the majority of performers in the operetta represented “the most respectable class in the community.” No wonder, The Magazine concluded, there is indignation in Carlisle over the vicar’s treatment of Miss Gibson. If obstacles to paid public performance were far stronger for women than for men through most of the period of this study—and disapproval of careers for married women continued in music as in other professions— career choices for those somehow able to surmount those obstacles were far narrower.Women soloists of talent and ambition—singers, pianists, and eventually, violinists—developed highly successful and remunerative careers, but soloists are by definition a tiny minority of professional musicians. Other women, even those who had excelled as students in conservatory orchestras, had to face the fact that London’s major orchestras were closed to all but a very small number of harpists. Given this context, the event that stands as a sterling exception was the hiring of six female string players—violinists and violists—in 1913 by Henry Wood, Director of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, an action that Wood had long contemplated and in which he always took pride.21 Unfortunately, his example stood virtually alone among major orchestras. Most women who wished to put their professional training to use were obliged to play in ladies’ or amateur orchestras, or in small ensembles that performed in restaurants and at homes—options that usually paid poorly, if they paid at all.22 Inevitably, increasing numbers of women turned to music teaching. The female music teacher best known to Victorians was a specialized version of the “daily governess,” who went out each day to the homes of her pupils and was paid by the lesson or by the quarter. Artists often portrayed such women in images meant to evoke the viewer’s compassion, as in John Everett Millais’s painting, “The Music Mistress,” shown at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1862. Millais, who often spoke of his love of music and enjoyed the company of musicians, asked his wife, Effie, to serve as model for the teacher. She is shown, alone on a city street, carrying a roll of music on which is printed the words, “The Young Ladies Instruction for the Piano Forte.”23 A number of artists helped to familiarize the public with the daily governess’s plight: The Spectator, in its review of the Academy exhibition of 1875, criticized Louisa Starr’s portrait of a tired music teacher as a “stock subject.”24 Entitled “Hardly Earned,” Starr’s picture, which was suggested by a young woman she had seen on a London street, shows the teacher, exhausted at the end of her day’s work, asleep on

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a chair next to the fading fire, her muddy boots the result of miles of walking in wet weather.While the Times praised the picture—“so unpretendingly true”25—The Illustrated London News, which featured “Hardly Earned” on its front page, turned its review into a kind of editorial that criticized young women for clinging to the vestiges of gentility at the cost of their own health and undermining the education of their charges. Certainly, said The ILN, the portrait evokes sympathy for the “weary life of lonely toil and little encouragement, which many a daily governess in London has to endure”: The poor fatherless girl, well bred and accustomed in childhood to the refined comfort and domestic cheerfulness of a well-supported English home, now lodges in a solitary chamber in the dullest suburb of this vast city; and starts before eight o’clock in the morning . . . to walk a round of some twelve miles, in any weather of any season, and teach the listless or unruly children of several families what she has but imperfectly learnt at her own former school, during the lifetime of her deceased father. She has returned at a late hour in the evening from the day’s circuit of harassing work, ill paid with a few shillings, which are most “hardly earned:” and, sitting here alone until bed-time, wrapped in a thin shawl to make up for the want of the failing fire, she has fallen into the deep slumber of extreme fatigue.

The daily governess, the author suggests, merits our censure even as she evokes our compassion, for she has not only brought a portion of this misery upon herself, but is also cheating her pupils of a satisfactory education: “With no leisure or further opportunity for studies, and with the loss of nerve and natural spirits consequent on a depressed state of health, she will do less good to the little boys and girls under tuition than might be done by a resident governess, the worthy inmate of their prosperous parents’ household.” Poorly educated, Starr’s teacher should have sought employment as a housemaid or studied cooking or become a lady’s personal attendant. That she has not done so, The ILN charges, is due to her own erroneous views of class respectability.26 Although The Illustrated London News does not specify music teaching as the subject of “Hardly Earned,” The Spectator and The Athenaeum— correctly, I believe—take the rolled paper on the table near the sleeping woman as evidence of her specialty. The combination of sympathy and criticism that characterized the response to Starr’s portrayal is symptomatic of the ambivalence that many people felt towards young and poorly qualified women who turned to teaching in a desperate effort to support themselves without altogether relinquishing genteel status.The daily governess who taught music attracted special blame. If her mastery of music were poor, then her lessons spread ignorance and she was one of thousands

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regularly accused of undermining or preventing England’s development as a musical nation. And regardless of her level of musical skill and knowledge, she was accused of presenting unfair competition to male teachers. If the number of music teachers was rapidly growing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that growth was furthered by the need of England’s music conservatories for the tuition fees of pupils, only a minority of whom became performing musicians,27 and fueled by the decisions of thousands of young women to teach music. If these decisions, taken en masse, were unfortunate in creating an enormous and exploitable pool of workers that eluded efforts to establish quality control, they were also, when seen individually, perfectly understandable in the context of two major constraints that exercised powerful effects in the lives of young women.The first was the problem that Victorians knew as “female redundancy.”The second was the severely limited nature of occupational choice for middle-class women. Dedicated as they were to the ideal of the woman in the home, gracing the lives of her husband and children,Victorians who thought about social issues had to come to terms with the fact that large numbers of women would be left out of this idyllic picture. Every census from mid-century on made it clear that there were not enough men to supply husbands for the large female surplus.The demographic imbalance was ascribed to the reluctance of many men to marry, their employment in the empire, and the frequency of their emigration to the colonies.28 While it now appears that increases in the proportion of unmarried women were far smaller than contemporaries believed,29 the number of spinsters was constantly increasing and frequent discussion heightened the public’s awareness of the plight of unsupported middle-class-women, although, as Martha Vicinus has pointed out, their numbers were always small when compared with their counterparts in the working class.30 Even though new avenues of employment did open for women during the final decades of the nineteenth century, most of these jobs paid poorly; while they attracted many working- and lower-middle class women, they were far less appealing to those of more genteel backgrounds, especially to those with some access to partial family support.The burgeoning numbers of music conservatories and art schools of the late nineteenth century offered young women who could afford tuition costs the opportunity to develop skills that extended accomplishment training and could also, if the need arose (i.e., if they remained unmarried), enhance their employability in the traditionally female field of teaching. Given these patterns, it is not surprising to find that the Pall Mall Gazette’s 1884 report,“Women Who Work,”31 listed music as one of the few professions in which the number of women workers approached the numbers of men. (The others were medicine, because of the large number of nurses, education, and drama.) If, as The

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Illustrated London News had reflected nine years earlier, in the conclusion to its review of the tired music teacher,“a false opinion of class respectability [was] still fatal to the real welfare of thousands,” the prejudice that led middle-class women to choose low-paid itinerant teaching jobs over in-house governessing or work in offices and shops had deep social roots. Such a prejudice was not likely to be excised by blaming its victims. The kinds of issues touched on here—marriage and its alternatives, threats to social status, protecting respectability—were mainstays of Victorian fiction. Among the women writers who explored these questions were two whose works touch directly on music teaching: Jessie Fothergill (1851–1891) and Emma Marshall (1830–1899). Both wrote with personal experience of the suddenly reduced income that led many women into teaching. Fothergill’s father, a Manchester cotton master, left his family “much reduced in circumstances” after his death in 1866.32 Marshall, mother of eight children, became the family breadwinner in 1878, after the failure of the bank that had employed her husband, a financial disaster that left them without income and (since he had been a shareholder) deeply in debt.33 The heroine of Fothergill’s most popular novel, The First Violin, serialized in Temple Bar and published in 1878, is May Wedderburn, age 17 when the book opens. One of three daughters of a vicar, May has been raised in genteel idleness and has just rejected the proposal of a wealthy local aristocrat who is many years her senior and whose appearance and personality disgust her.Adelaide, May’s older sister, urges their need to face reality and berates May for turning down an offer of security that would have benefited the whole family:

“Papa is fifty-five years old, and has three hundred a year. In the course of time he will die, and as his life is not insured, and he has regularly spent every penny of his income, . . . what is to become of us when he is dead?” . . . [May answers that they can work and Adelaide responds to this suggestion scornfully.] “Pray, what can we do in the way of work? What kind of education have we had? The village schoolmistress could make us look very small in the matter of geography and history.We have not been trained to work; and let me tell you, May, unskilled labor does not pay in these days.” . . . [May insists that since she can sing, she will be able to teach singing.] “Do you suppose that because you can take C in alt34 you are competent to teach singing? You don’t know how to sing yourself yet.Your face is your fortune. So is mine my fortune. So is Stella’s her fortune.You have enjoyed yourself all your life; you have had seventeen years of play and amusement, and now you behave like a baby.”35

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May, whose fine singing voice and musicianship are developed during the course of an eventful stay in Germany, never becomes a teacher but prepares for a performance career that is cut short by marriage to the “First Violinist” of the book’s title. Although Fothergill’s later heroines were “masculine” by the standards of the time,36 this early work resembles other examples of musical fiction from the 1870s to early 1880s in accepting marriage as the desirable conclusion of a musical career. Love is woman’s true vocation and submission to the man woman’s duty: “If you want to keep me,” [says May to her prospective husband], “you must be the master. . . .You must rule, or I shall rebel; you must show the way, for I don’t know it.”37 Emma Marshall’s 1889 novel, Alma, or the Story of a Little Music Mistress,38 shares the conventional marriage ending, but its emphasis on the dignity of woman’s work—and respect for a decision to continue it after marriage—reflect the change in attitude during the decade that separates it from Fothergill’s novel, a change subsequently represented, in the mid1890s, with the character of the impeccably virtuous professional singer Doreen. Marshall’s heroine Alma Montgomery, age 19 and a lady by birth, undertakes the responsibility of supporting an invalid mother and three young brothers after the death of her musically gifted, but improvident, father.With no teacher but her father, she has become a fine pianist as well as a composer. Helped by introductions from a local clergyman, Alma is barely able to piece together a living by teaching in two schools (one of which “pays” her in free tuition for her brothers) and by giving piano instruction to the four daughters of Mrs. Law, wife of a physician and an assiduous social climber. This penny-pinching woman, who recognizes the social value of musical skills that go beyond those of her “decayed-gentlewoman” governess, offers Alma a fee so low—£20 a year or about 2s. 6d. per lesson—that Alma’s clergyman-sponsor tries to dissuade her from accepting the arrangement. But Alma, desperate for income and hopeful that this contract will lead to others, accepts the offer and for the same reasons agrees to play at a party soon to be given by Mrs. Law. Her son Herbert, who is frittering away his time and allowance at Cambridge, is horrified when, home for a visit, he learns that his mother has offered Alma just ten shillings for six hours of music. Despite Herbert’s subsequent declaration of love and proposal of marriage, Alma continues to protect her independence and good name, refusing to allow him to escort her home through the dark streets after his sisters’ lessons, and insisting that they not see each other until Herbert has completed his medical education and is ready to take his place as his father’s assistant. Inspired by Alma’s example of hard work and responsibility, Herbert abandons self-indulgent ways and goes to London to prepare for

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Musical Women in England, 1870–1914

his profession. Outraged by what she sees as Alma’s successful designs to marry Herbert, Mrs. Law cancels her daughters’ lessons, an action that immediately deprives the music teacher of the greater part of her income. In desperation,Alma requests an audition with the town’s noted musician, Dr. Earle, who, in addition to performing and teaching, is also responsible for producing a prestigious series of classical concerts. Earle, who is impressed by her talent, gives Alma a place as soloist in the next concert, where she gives a triumphant performance. (Emma Marshall carefully notes that Earle pays Alma ten guineas for the performance and an additional five for her encore.) With her newly acquired prestige and the signing-on of pupils recommended by Dr. Earle, Alma now charges l0s. 6d. per hour for instruction and no longer goes to her pupils’ homes as Earle has made his studio available for her lessons. Impressed by Alma’s newly fashionable status and mollified by her husband’s observation that Alma is a lady by birth, Mrs. Law ends her opposition to Herbert’s forthcoming marriage. The book ends, as one would expect, with the happiness of marriage vows, but the concluding narrative places far less emphasis on wedded bliss than on the effects of Alma’s noble character, as it has manifested itself in her work—work carried out with dedication and dignity, work that has supported her loved ones and inspired and energized the worthy aspects of Herbert’s character. Marshall’s novel is indeed a tribute to the work of women who, like herself, are “obliged to keep pace with the requirements of those they love by needle, brain, pen, or music.”39 In response to his mother’s expression of concern at the state of his health as he works to complete his medical studies, Herbert replies that “it would be disgraceful if I did not work when I remember . . . how far harder many women work in these days. . . .”40 And Alma, accepting the proposal of marriage from the man she loves, presents him with a caveat. Even when married, she may well decide to continue work in her profession: “You would have to consider well if you would like me to be a music-mistress then.”41 “The highest and best mission for any woman,” writes Marshall, in a statement that confirms the traditional Victorian ideal of woman’s role, “is to raise the man who loves her to a higher level.”42 In her portrayal of Alma, “the little music-mistress,” Marshall successfully combines older ideals of women’s nobility and self-sacrificing nature with newer currents of opinion that seek respect for women’s talent and uphold the dignity and moral value of women’s work, whether it is carried out in the privacy of home or in the public sphere. Marshall dedicated her novel to “Mrs. Ellicott and ‘Rosalind’ distinguished musicians, and true lovers of the ‘Heaven-born gift,’ to whom Alma would not have appealed in vain for sympathy and help.” Mrs. Ellicott and Rosalind were, respectively, the wife and daughter of the Bishop

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of Gloucester and Bristol; it is likely that Emma Marshall made their acquaintance during the late 1870s when she and her family lived in Gloucester.43 An acquaintance with the career of the composer Rosalind Ellicott introduces us to gender-derived inequities different in their nature from those discussed so far: the social derogation associated with paid public performance, exposure to the male gaze, and the exhausting travails of the underpaid and unchaperoned daily governess. A gifted and ambitious young woman, Rosalind Ellicott benefited from her mother’s musical interests and friendships. Mrs. Ellicott, an accomplished amateur singer, rejected the formal dignity expected of an eminent churchman’s wife, and shocked local clergy by her preference for Bohemian society.44 Born in 1857, Rosalind showed early promise as a musician; she entered the Royal Academy of Music at age 16 and studied piano and composition there for seven years. Beginning in 1883, her compositions were performed at the triennial Gloucester music festival, where she often performed as vocal soloist. If Bishop Ellicott’s local prominence served to advance his daughter’s fame in Gloucester, interest in her music represented far more than local pride; in addition to works written for the Gloucester festival, a number of her compositions, which included orchestral, choral, and chamber works, were performed at the Crystal Palace and at venues in London and other English and German cities. Mirroring her mother’s unconventional response to a social position believed to require a fuller measure of restraint and dignity, Rosalind made no effort to disguise her ambition, one highly unusual in a woman born to exalted social status, to be recognized as a serious professional musician. “Miss Ellicott,” observed the novelist and erstwhile music student Robert Hichens, “was determined to be a somebody” and her mother was even more ambitious for her.45 Her success in large-scale musical genres seldom attempted by female composers made Rosalind Ellicott an attractive subject for interviews that were published, accompanied by her photograph, in The Magazine of Music, The Illustrated London News, Men and Women of the Day, and in several girls’ and women’s magazines. Yet despite the combined advantages of encouragement by a musically sophisticated and well-connected parent, extended professional training, and access to performance in a prestigious music festival—and despite a remarkable level of success as measured by repeat performances of several of her major works—only a small number of Ellicott’s compositions were published and much of her work has been lost.46 If this outcome was shared by other noted female composers of the time,47 Ellicott’s case was complicated by a double liability: the ambitious scope of her work evoked critiques that regularly described it as “unfeminine” or as disconcertingly “masculine,” and she was unable, despite efforts, to escape the label of

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Musical Women in England, 1870–1914

“amateur” that was automatically attached to a musician of high social status.A brief sampling of reviews will convey the extraordinary importance accorded to the composer’s sex, a degree of attention that seems to render aesthetic criteria almost irrelevant. The Musical Times’s review of Ellicott’s 1892 work for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, The Birth of Song, praised its occasional displays “of vigour in construction and expression, such as would warrant the qualification ‘manly.’”The piece “challenge[d] comparison with masculine work”;48 by implication, The Birth of Song was found wanting because it fell short of some ideal level of (masculine) strength. Ellicott’s compositions, wrote The Magazine of Music in the same year, “are more than above the average of lady musicians,”49 in other words, among the best of an inherently inferior category. In its 1898 review of Ellicott’s choral piece for male voices, King Henry of Navarre, written to a text by Thomas Babington Macaulay, The Musical Times criticized the work’s lack of passion, adding that this was hardly surprising, since “such a theme needs to be handled by a strong man, not by a woman. . . .”50 Brown and Stratton’s 1898 Dictionary of British Musicians and the early-twentieth-century edition (1904–10) of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians judged Ellicott as worthy member of the lesser league of women composers. “Her compositions,” wrote Brown and Stratton, “are numerous, and have secured her an honourable place among women composers.” “Her numerous compositions,” according to Grove, “show not only ambition, but an amount of technical knowledge and skill which is rare among female composers.” In addition to finding her work criticized either as insufficiently or as inappropriately masculine, when it was not patronized as the best that could be expected from one of her sex, Ellicott regularly confronted the presumption of amateurism, a designation automatically attached to male and female artists and musicians of the upper classes. It must have been especially distressing for Ellicott to find herself classified in this way by The Englishwoman’s Review, the major journal dedicated to widening professional opportunities for women. In its notice of Ellicott’s cantata Elysium, performed at the Gloucester festival of 1889, The Review mentioned her father’s name and position, then praised “Miss Ellicott [as] certainly one of the gifted of our lady musical amateurs. . . .”51 To counter the persistent designation of amateur that stood in the way of the kind of recognition she sought, a charge she found “exceedingly distasteful,”52 Ellicott provided interviewers with two arguments to demonstrate her right to professional status: the first pointing to her affiliations, the second, to her method of publication.The sketch of the composer in the 1890 edition of Men and Women of the Day, noting Ellicott’s defense of her use of the term “‘professional,’ despite her social position,” called attention to Ellicott’s

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long-standing membership in the Musical Artists’ Society and her more recent affiliation with the National Society of Professional Musicians. More significant, however, was the fact that none of Ellicott’s published compositions had been issued at personal expense; this circumstance alone, wrote Men and Women of the Day, would justify the composer’s use of the term “professional.” A decade later—just a few years after her Fantaisie for piano and orchestra had received repeat performances, one of them at the important Crystal Palace concerts53—an interview with Rosalind Ellicott was the opening feature for an article, “Some Popular Women Composers,” published in the journal The Young Woman. The article was introduced as a response to the “stock argument” made by “opponents of women’s rights and oppressors of the fair sex” that women lacked originality and creative power.54 Ellicott, now age 43, again expressed pride in her productivity and in her election to the Incorporated Society of Musicians. But the tone of this interview reflected a major change in Ellicott’s life: no longer an active composer, she now spent much of her time in the Bishop’s Palace. Although she still performed at the local festival and was pleased to note a recent performance of one of her compositions at Steinway Hall, Ellicott confided that “lately, through various family reasons, there have been so many calls on my time that I have not done anything in the way of composition. I am practically secretary to my father, and my mother’s delicate health makes me her constant companion.”55 How can one explain Ellicott’s willingness to turn away from her single-minded devotion to musical gifts so carefully nurtured and developed? While such an outcome is not uniquely feminine, elements in Ellicott’s family life clearly bore more heavily on her than on most male counterparts in ways that seem likely to have cut short her productive years. While her unusual social background no doubt helped get her work performed in a marketplace sometimes open to the novelty of a woman’s composition, the persistent designation of “amateur,” in the context of the pervasive assumption of female intellectual inferiority, seems likely to have limited the seriousness with which her work was taken and reduced the likelihood of publication. Repeated encounters with the double denigration of “amateur” and “woman’s work” may well have sapped Ellicott’s energy to continue her demanding enterprise. But perhaps the explanation is far simpler: the call commonly experienced by women—especially by unmarried, only daughters—may have been even stronger in her case; the illness of her mother deprived the bishop of the help he needed to fulfill the social and administrative duties of his office, and John Ellicott had never shared his wife’s or daughter’s passion for music.

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Musical Women in England, 1870–1914

Although Rosalind Ellicott’s “distant relation,” Alma Montgomery, followed an infinitely more difficult road to success, the concert pianist’s triumph was more readily accepted. While gender issues conditioned the reception of all women performers, their gifts—even their “genius”—were recognized and often well rewarded.The situation was different for women composers because their work, if they ventured—as Ellicott most publicly and insistently did—beyond the composition of songs to genres seen as more complex and demanding, implicitly challenged ideas of male intellectual superiority and female incapacity that prevailed both within and outside the world of music.The rest of this chapter will look at these ideas and at their effects on women composers. The belief in women’s intellectual inferiority was hardly new in the late nineteenth century, but it was “reissued” in powerful scientific packaging during these years, specifically in the context of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the study of the human brain. Not coincidentally, the theorizing that confirmed female inferiority was elaborated during the years that saw the beginnings of women’s university education, the entry of women (in the face of bitter hostility) into the medical profession, and the quickening of the movement for female suffrage. According to Charles Darwin, in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, natural selection over the course of millennia had acted to strengthen man’s body and sharpen his intellect.The men most likely to survive as hunters— and therefore, to father offspring—were those with courage, physical strength, and a quick wit. Evolution brought out different, but complementary, qualities in women who were charged with the prime responsibility for reproduction and child rearing: tenderness and a desire to nurture.Women would be most attracted to the best providers, while men would select the most sexually attractive as their mates.Through the long space of human history, sexual selection would continually intensify these differences. The discovery that female brains typically weigh less than those of males, popularized by the Darwinian psychologist George John Romanes in an influential 1887 article in the journal The Nineteenth Century,56 provided a new justification for continued male dominance in all intellectual fields, including musical composition. A direct causal connection between lower brain weight and the lesser intelligence ascribed to women was so widely accepted in late-Victorian England that a fashionable woman’s magazine could refer, without further explanation, to the “five-ounce deficit,” the implications of which were explained by Romanes. Some scientists, persuaded by the so-called “elephant problem”—the superiority of man’s intellect to that of large mammals with even heavier brains—shifted the basis for belief in the intellectual disparity between the sexes to other anatomical causes, such as the ratio of brain to body weight, the depth of

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brain furrows, or patterns of frontal lobe dominance.57 Whichever explanation was preferred, the ultimate message was the same: women who attempted to compete with men courted costly and frustrating failure, and violated both the laws of their own nature and nature’s grand design as seen in the complementary abilities and roles of the sexes. These ideas were directly reflected in the music press, which featured numerous discussions of woman’s ability to compose as well as analyses of “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics in musical works and performance styles. A review of highlights of these discussions that appeared through the period of this study will help us reconstruct an important segment of professional and public opinion on the issue of gender and musical creativity. One of the most influential writers on these matters was Frederick Niecks, a German-born musician and scholar who studied philosophy at Leipzig University and migrated to Scotland in the late 1860s; in the judgment of the distinguished music scholar, Percy Scholes, Niecks was a “man of wide learning and plain commonsense.”58 Beginning in 1875, Niecks wrote for The Monthly Musical Record; a few years later he became a regular contributor to The Musical Times. In 1888, Niecks published a biography of Chopin, and in 1891 was appointed Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. His 1877 discussion of masculine and feminine elements in Schubert’s music provides us with the views of an exceptionally well-read aesthetician as well as those of a practicing musician. Niecks’s discussion of Schubert’s piano works, which appeared in The MMR,59 expresses admiration for passages of great beauty but finds them mixed with jarring imperfections: Schubert sometimes tries to “look taller than he really is.” Dissatisfied with his own considerable charm, Schubert has gone beyond this rightful “sphere,” succumbing to attractions “outside of and above it,” thus sacrificing his “peculiar power,” yet unable to attain what he strives for. Inspired by Beethoven, Schubert has achieved a great deal in this piano music, but unlike the great master, is “thought-ridden” rather than “thought-compelling”: Would not his own way of saying, though less heaven-scaling, have been more valuable to us? Would not his own sweet voice have given us more comfort and delight than his borrowed voice gives us strength and aspiration? “There are so few voices and so many echoes,” says Goethe. Pity that one who had a voice should have ever so far misconceived his mission as to echo that of another.

According to Niecks, Schubert’s failure was caused by a level of masculinity insufficient to meet his high goals. Extending Schumann’s observation that

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Schubert’s position relative to Beethoven’s was like woman’s to a man, Niecks writes that Schubert’s character was feminine “in a wider sense” as well. Like women who have aspired to artistic creativity, Schubert lacked “sustained strength and comprehensive thought.” He had, Niecks points out, many characteristics associated with women writers: good features such as sensitivity, delicate feeling, sympathy, and the power of acute observation, especially of small things, as well as traits that detract from excellence, among them “languid dreaming, a complaisant dwelling on the comparatively unimportant, frequent digressions [and] a losing sight of the whole over the details.” Even so, one would never mistake Schubert’s work for that of a woman; as Schumann stated, “only [when] compared with Beethoven could Schubert be called feminine.” Having completed this judiciously balanced evaluation of Schubert’s gifts and legacy, Niecks indulges in a digression that links Schubert’s failure in aspiring beyond his proper sphere to that of women who fail to accept their inborn limitations: [Schubert] has enough of the man to distinguish him from the woman.The sex can never be quite disguised, and fool he or she who regrets it. For there is work for both sexes and for each individual within them. As woman has a work to do in art, as well as in life, which can only be done by her, so also has Schubert done work which could not be done by anyone else, be his name Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, or whatever you like. Here, perhaps, you will allow me a parenthetical remark, suggested by Schumann’s comparison and our discussion. Is it not strange that, although so many women have attained to high places in literature, there is not one woman composer that could be ranked with a Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, George Sand, and others? One would have thought that the sensitiveness and delicacy peculiar to woman would have particularly qualified her for some styles and branches of musical composition.60

Although he was masculine enough to rise above female levels of achievement, Schubert’s faults, as Niecks identified them, were those that nineteenth-century writers typically ascribed to women: he fell short in the ability to sustain his most elevated thoughts, to develop them and to understand their implications; he lacked both the art and the intellectual power to weave those ideas into a “grand conception.” Schubert gives us “only parts, more or less well joined together,” but cannot give us the satisfying and inspiring whole that makes a great work of art. Nor, in the opinion of the great majority of nineteenth-century male critics, were women capable of doing so. A serious student of aesthetics, Niecks would have been deeply versed in Kant’s beliefs concerning women’s talents. Beautiful in form and nature, women, in Kant’s view, were incapable of “deep meditation,” “long-sustained reflection,” or “laborious learning.” A

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woman who deviates from her proper role and cultivates learning “might as well even have a beard.”61 A woman’s “sensitiveness and delicacy” might well qualify her to succeed in some musical styles and genres, but these would be predefined as representing the less ambitious genres. Five months after the publication of Niecks’s article, a response appeared in The MMR’s correspondence column under the title “Women as Composers.” Signed by “Artiste,” a designation that applied equally to male or female, the writer asserted that women were not prevented “by nature” from excelling in composition, but by sex-linked tendencies that prevented the expression of their musical creativity. Women, in the judgment of “Artiste,” lack the “enormous perseverance and energy necessary for a composer.” Too easily discouraged by the disappointments and obstacles that all composers encounter, and weakened by their “undecided, vacillating spirit,” women become impatient for success and readily succumb to the temptation to write in a popular, crowd-pleasing mode. The nonappearance of a female Beethoven also reflects women’s lack of the “physical strength without which such a genius could not exist,” a statement inconsistent with the writer’s opening generalization denying the crucial influence of “nature.” Although in music as in literature and painting, a man’s work is easily distinguished from a woman’s, each should possess merits to be gratefully recognised, and mutual profit be gathered therefrom. My object in writing this will have been obtained if my remarks serve in any degree to encourage and stimulate to fresh efforts of perseverance, any who may have been disheartened and taught to have an exaggerated depreciation of their own abilities by those who are continually impressing upon their minds the disagreeable truth that “woman can never be a great composer.”62

Beginning and ending the letter with a message that would seem to encourage female creativity in music,“Artiste” develops his or her argument in ways that clearly undermine that message. Stimulation to effort, the writer’s stated goal, is strangely served by an argument that designates as the causes of women’s failure in the higher reaches of composition both remediable character flaws—primarily, impatience and lack of perseverance—and constitutional weakness, and then goes on to deny women “the possibility of any rivalry with the present masters of the field of composition,” a denial based in part on the irremediable lack of physical strength that is a stated precondition of genius. If woman is to “work out a path of distinction for herself,” then what is that path to be? If woman were to overcome impatience and resist her supposed proclivity to satisfy the popular market, what sort of work should she pursue that would gain her the

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recognition of her literary counterparts, Barrett Browning, Sand, and Eliot? Would her creative “genius” then be recognized, or was that a condition to which only male composers could aspire? An unequivocal answer to this question was provided in 1880 by the famous pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, in an article that The Musical World reprinted from the Leipsig Signale. Deeply impressed by the musicianship of the violinist Wilma Norman-Neruda, von Bülow reflects that her gifts show that women are capable of genius, but that their genius is of a limited kind: interpretive and responsive,“receptive” rather than original: Let us give unto the ladies the things that are the ladies’; this is, it is true, sometimes less than they demand, but, thank Heaven, the reasonable and not the outrageous ones still constitute the majority. . . . [W]e may allow that the fair sex possess reproductive genius, just as we unconditionally deny that they possess productive genius.The rare exceptions in French and English literature, Georges Sand and Elliot [sic], cannot constitute a precedent in music. . . . There will never be a compositoress, there can be only, at most, a copyist spoilt. . . . Signed Hans von Bülow, Bayreuth, 15 February 1880

Von Bülow’s use of the word “reproductive” is significant in showing how arguments concerning female musical creativity inevitably reflected more general reactions to contemporary discussions of woman’s nature, and to the women’s rights movement in which the “outrageous” and “unreasonable” had achieved a discomfiting degree of prominence. Von Bülow’s conclusion, one that recognized women’s interpretive genius but considered achievement in composition as beyond their reach, was common to many commentators who could hardly deny the brilliant musicality of such artists as Clara Schumann and Wilma Norman-Neruda, not to mention the achievements of a panoply of celebrated singers in opera and on the recital stage. Like those who denied women entry to medical schools and other avenues of professional training on the basis of a belief in the necessity of separate spheres, writers on music often described women who attempted to break gender barriers as deviants deserving of severe censure. In an 1882 article entitled “The Feminine in Music”63 (written in response to a performance of a cantata by a woman composer, Alice Meadows White’s The Passions), The Musical Times, continuing along the lines of von Bülow’s biological metaphor, explored the reasons for women’s “musical barrenness.” Why, The MT asked, should half the human race, “and that half the one most susceptible to the impressions from which music springs and to which it gives birth . . . be thus non-productive. . . . Woman, as a creative

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musician, can hardly be said to exist.” Perhaps the discussion of feminine characteristics in the work of male composers had clouded the issue; Schubert, for example, was sometimes described as a “feminine Beethoven.” But this was “figurative talk.” The existence of wide differences among men should not obscure the fact that a “real gulf ” divided the sexes; until women composers understood this, they were doomed to failure. In support of its argument, The Musical Times quoted at length from an essay by the mid-century Parisian critic Pietro Scudo on Teresa Milanollo, a prodigy musician who had broken the social barrier against female violinists to achieve Europe-wide renown during the 1840s and ‘50s.64 Reflecting upon her exceptional status, Scudo insisted that art works must reflect the distinctions between the sexes that nature has established: A woman who, when taking a pencil, pen, or music-sheet, forgets what are the character and the obligations of her sex is a monster who excites disgust and repulsion. For one or two who succeed in gaining a masculine celebrity which robs them of the mystery of grace and enchantment that forms their appanage, there are thousands who remain mutilated and become objects of general scoffing. They are neither men nor women, but something which has no name and no part in life. . . . No one debars the woman from . . . the culture of arts which open up infinite horizons, provided she remains within the limits God has imposed upon her. . . . Forgetfulness of this fundamental rule not only wounds decency, . . . but troubles the economy of God’s work. In the human duality, the woman expresses the eternal sentiments of the soul, and her heart is a fountain full of tenderness and poetry. If she abandon the sweet empire of grace to look to other destinies, . . . she disturbs the equilibrium of life, and her fall is inevitable.

Providing no justification for leaning on the argument of a critic who had died 18 years earlier, The MT distanced itself slightly from Scudo’s opinions that, it said, were expressed “in exaggerated form.” Nevertheless, within his sentiments there was “much pertinent truth” in his exhortation that a woman artist would always represent her art “from a woman’s point of view. . . . The result may not compare with the works of men for strength and comprehensiveness, but that is neither necessary nor desired. What we regard as both necessary and desirable is the emancipation of woman within her own musical domain.” But what did it mean to be “emancipated” within a domain in which her very best could not exceed the small-scale virtues of “woman’s work”? Could such a goal be acceptable to musically talented women at a time when long-established barriers in other fields were under challenge? These and similar issues were discussed in a paper presented by Stephen S. Stratton before the Musical Association65 on May 7, 1883, and published in its

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Proceedings. A musician, composer, and critic, Stratton is now remembered as co-author, with James D. Brown, of the reference work British Musical Biography. In his impassioned defense of women’s proven ability and potential in composition, Stratton cites as the only previous study of women’s work in music an essay, “Woman as a Musician: An Art-Historical Study” by the American writer Fanny Raymond Ritter.66 Written in 1876 for the Centennial Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Woman at the invitation of the astronomer Maria Mitchell, Ritter’s essay had reviewed the important contributions women had made to the art of music through the ages but, as Stratton correctly points out, wrote somewhat apologetically about their achievements in composition. In a revised version of her book published in 1891, Ritter suggested the likelihood that many folk songs were the work of women, and cited the creativity of the trouvères, but provided a list of only 11 women composers who were said to represent the majority of all those who had ever written music.67 Although she recommended that composition be added as an elective in “ladies’” colleges, the “self-sacrificing” course of study she considered essential to serious female composers—“mathematics, acoustics, psychology, languages, as well as general literary acquirements, the practice and technicalities of several instruments, and the science of music”68—she could suggest no greater reward than the likelihood that “there is surely a feminine side of composition, as of every other art.”69 Ritter was far more persuasive in her appreciation of women’s accomplishments as performers and in her advocacy of the important role women played as sophisticated amateurs and patrons of the art.70 Stratton criticizes Ritter for her failure to find no more than 11 named female composers, appending to his paper a list, far from complete, of over 300. While agreeing with the judgment of Niecks, and of The Musical Times’s 1882 reflections on Scudo’s essay, that no woman had yet achieved greatness as a composer, he dismisses the argument that women should create only in genres that follow a recognizably “feminine” aesthetic : “It is generally believed that woman is only fit for such and such work, and that other kinds belong exclusively to man; but this law has been laid down by man, and from such decision woman should have a court of appeal”:71 What is feminine? Is it working at the forge, driving barge horses, ruling a great empire? All these we allow women to do in this country. If a woman has what we call a masculine mind, is it not, she being a woman, really feminine? To my thinking, these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, and based upon the assumption of man’s superiority. We rejoice in Milton’s line on Adam—

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His fair large front and eye sublime declared / Absolute rule;—but since then we have been ruled by women, and women . . . have shown such powers of endurance, strength of purpose, and loftiness of mind, that fully equal the exhibition of such qualities by man.72

Stratton ascribes the absence of great women composers to inadequate education, to the formerly low status of the art and of the musician, and to “Mrs. Grundy,” the power of social propriety, that had erected numerous barriers to female ambition.Among recent developments indicative of a more propitious climate for female creativity, Stratton cites improvements in girls’ education that often enable them to outperform boys on examinations;73 the increasing numbers of prizes awarded to women writers and musicians, including the highly esteemed Mendelssohn Scholarship, which a woman (Maude Valérie White) won for the first time in 1879; and the entrance of women into a number of previously all-male fields. Disagreeing with Schopenhauer’s statement that genius in the arts was attainable only by men, Stratton declares himself at one with the philosopher in his view that great music leads us to lose both our own individuality and enables us to enter into the objective state of great art: “The objective then, rather than the feminine, should be the goal for women and men alike, and sex in art a thing no longer to be conceived.”74 Of the comments that followed Stratton’s paper and that were printed in the Association’s Proceedings, the most elaborate were those of Ferdinand Praeger, a musician, composer, and friend both of Richard Wagner,75 and of Mr. Meadows-White, husband of the composer whose cantata had elicited The Musical Times’s reflections on the place of “The Feminine in Music” (see p. 22). Praeger said that the question of women’s capacity to compose is one to which he has given a great deal of thought, and cited as unique qualifications for his opinion the opportunity to review scores sent to him by women composers—“which I have waded through with attention to find out whether woman was capable of composing work such as would spring from a man’s innermost soul.” No one, said, Praeger, had greater admiration for women than he, but Goethe was correct in saying that “‘the very best thing a woman ever did can only be compared to the second-rate performance of a man.’” Echoing Schopenhauer, whose works he had read at Wagner’s recommendation, Praeger held that women, whose strength was in instinct and intuition, had weak powers of reasoning; it is these powers that enable a man to work logically through sustained mental effort. Lacking these powers, women composers cannot go beyond small-scale works, most notably, songs. Man’s brain, his highest attribute and that which differentiates him from other animals, has created all the arts. Music, as Schopenhauer said, is the greatest of arts “because it

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raises man above himself.”The ability to create great and original musical works belongs only to men.76 While agreeing with Praeger that there is “a difference of physique, and I dare say of brain-power in the average woman,”77 Meadows-White pointed out that exceptional women such as Eliot and Browning had shown that members of their sex were clearly capable of remarkable powers of reasoning and concentration.The absence of women from the very short list of truly eminent composers was more understandable if one remembered that only small numbers of women had made the studies requisite to such a pursuit, in comparison with the enormous numbers of men whose best efforts had left them in second or lower ranks. Excellence in music, said Meadows-White, is achieved by the same methods, whether the composers be men or women; equalized educational opportunities are likely to narrow the achievement gap between the sexes. He cited violinplaying as an instructive example:“I have not the slightest doubt, now that the violin is being cultivated by women as an ordinary instrument, that we shall find the proportion of great women violinists will rise, and that it will soon not be considered an exceptional thing to find a woman in the first rank, but as it is with the piano we shall find an equal number of women pressing forward into the front ranks with the men.” Meadows-White expressed appreciation for Stratton’s mention of his wife’s recent success; she had won it, he said, as any success is won, by taking pains in the cultivation of her abilities. He concluded his talk by assuring his listeners that his wife’s work in musical composition did not in any way prevent her from “the good management of domestic affairs.”78 Discussions of women’s creative deficiencies continued into the pre–World War I era, with some variety added to the ascribed causes of their inferiority. Weakness of intellect continued to be cited, but increasingly, women’s emotional and imaginative faculties were also found wanting. Female success in songwriting was acknowledged, but work in this genre, The Musical Times pointed out in 1887,79 was like swimming with a “cork jacket or an oar”; with words to lean on, the song composer could circumvent the challenge of building from a formal musical conception. Was not women’s emotionality of use in an art known for its emotional nuance and power? Those who wished to respond in the negative could do so with greater authority after the publication of George Romanes’s influential Nineteenth Century article of the same year that, in addition to the charge of intellectual deficiencies discussed earlier in this chapter, emphasized women’s superficiality in the realm of feeling: as shallow emotionally as she was intellectually, “a woman’s tears do not represent the deep feeling of a man’s sobs.”80 Emotion in women, according to an article summarized in The Magazine of Music in June 1894,81 “is mere nervous

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excitability.” Drawn to the concrete, woman was also inferior in imagination: “She cannot soar into the region of abstract emotion, where music has its highest dwelling-place.” Summarizing an article recently published by Atlantic Monthly, The MM expressed surprise “that a nineteenth-century woman [Edith Brower] has appeared who proclaims the inequality of the sexes.” Two years later,82 The MM echoed Brower in characterizing women’s emotions as easily stirred but falling far short of men’s greater “depth of feeling.” While most discussions of women’s musical abilities denied them creative powers but conceded their interpretive ability—“reproduction” over originality—in 1892, one of Europe’s most highly respected musicians issued an unambiguous denunciation not only of female musicianship but also of women’s influence in the music world. Making an exception only of the art of singing, an area of undisputed female accomplishment, the pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein told his female interviewer (“Madame von—”) that the growing increase of women “in instrumental execution as well as in composition”—a trend that characterized the second half of the century—was “one of the signs of the downfall of our art.” As interpreters of music, women lacked courage and conviction, while as composers, they were wanting in depth, concentration, power of thought, and breadth of feeling: It is enigmatical to me that exactly music—the noblest, most beautiful, most refined, soulful, loving art that the mind of man has created, is so unattainable to woman, who is still a combination of all these qualities. In poetry, literature, painting, and all the other arts, even in the sciences, she has accomplished much! The two feelings most natural to her: her love to man and her tenderness to her children, have never found, from her, their echo in music. I know no love-duet composed by a woman, and no cradle-song.—I do not say that there are none in existence, but that none composed by a woman has had sufficient artistic value to be stamped as type. That [said the interviewer] is not flattering for our sex.—If it be the case, however, we must comfort ourselves with the hope that, as women have devoted themselves in such quantity to music of late, they may in time attain and give evidence of corresponding quality. Perhaps the next Beethoven and the next Liszt may be women! —I shall not live to see it [replied Rubinstein]—hence I will not try to rob you of the hope.83

Rubinstein’s rhetorical question—why is it that women, who exemplify music’s most prized attributes, are unable to create significant musical works?—leads us to yet another important component of the antifeminine

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prejudice in this art: the long-standing tradition of conceptualizing music itself as feminine.84 The muses were female; even the innovative Wagner, whose influence was growing so rapidly during these years (the London Branch of the Wagner Society, founded in 1884, began publishing its journal, The Meister, in 1888)85 characterized music as a woman.86 This feminine identification of the art often led to a highly sexualized description of the composer’s work, as in the following description of music as a beautiful and compliant slave: offering consolation to women who aspired to compose (but who might do greater service by attempting a less ambitious role), The Musical Times, in its 1887 article discussed earlier,87 suggested that those who worship music may be equally blessed as are “those to whom she shows herself a willing slave, and who bend her to their will.” Equally sexualized, but without the violence of this version of the psychology of composition, was the idea, frequently encountered in early twentieth-century commentaries, that since most great works of music were inspired by idealizations of woman held by men, women, lacking a parallel source of inspiration, were necessarily left out of the race. A useful summary of this view was provided by “Lancelot,” nom de plume of the music critic for The Referee. The occasion for the reflections he gathered under the title, “Of Matters Musical:Women as Musicians,” was the founding, in 1911, of the feminist Society of Women Musicians, one of whose aims was the encouragement of women composers.Taking note of the Society as witness to women’s greater importance in the music world, Lancelot urged his [presumably male] readers not to overreact to this news: “the glory of woman is, and ever must be, motherhood.” But since not all women can (or should) marry, and since a small percentage of women have talents that appropriately take them beyond the sphere of their social circle, female advancement in music may be welcomed.Yet rivalry from women need not be feared.The weakness of women’s music is based on “psychological and physical facts.” The female mind is weak in reasoning and deduction “which means inventive and constructive abilities.”While the male mind is slower than the female to arrive at conclusions, this very deliberateness contributes to an intellectual self-consciousness that enables him to trace his mental processes and to see the relation between cause and effect. One further element is absent to woman who, as muse, can find no equivalent to the primary source of man’s inspiration, the ideal woman. The proof of man’s idealization of women is found in the female elements in man’s music. Most of the world’s beautiful melodies are the result of man’s effort to express the ideal woman. Feminine elements are present in the male pianist’s rendition of “passages of amorous and delicate sentiment [but] it is seldom one hears them interpreted with such intense tenderness by a woman. The

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man is expressing an ideal.” Music’s power lies in this ideality, and this, says Lancelot, “differs greatly in the sexes.” Man idealizes woman, placing her among the angels, allowing her to inspire his noblest thoughts. Woman does not idealize man as man does woman, and therefore lacks a comparable source of inspiration for her art: “It is difficult to see how inspiration can inspire itself.” “This is emphatically the age of Woman,” wrote The Magazine of Music in 1895. “The sex is pushing its way into every department of life and work which has hitherto been regarded as the exclusive property of the male.”88 The Magazine was responding both to the public performance of women’s compositions and to the increased visibility of female performers on the “hitherto-male” instruments of violin, cello, and flute: women’s string orchestras of the 1880s featured cellists as well as double bass players, and, by the early 1890s, female flutists and clarinetists were participants in the student orchestra of the Royal Academy of Music,89 a development that met with The Magazine of Music’s strong disapproval. Comments opposed to the widening of women’s musical sphere continued to appear in the music press well beyond the Edwardian years, even in the presence of positive reviews of female musical performances and compositions.While women’s talents were needed and appreciated during the World War I, the old “proof ” of their inferior musicianship was readily at hand once peace returned. Women composers who had made their mark during the lateVictorian and Edwardian years were soon forgotten. Gender continued to be an issue when critics evaluated a performance—when the musician was female. As Olga Samaroff, one of America’s first internationally famous pianists, remarked in a 1937 speech, at least 80 percent of her critics either wrote that she had played like a man or commented on a feminine quality in her performance; whenever the reference was to her sex, a negative judgment was sure to follow.90 Did the endless negative commentary discourage all but a small number of women from composing in complex and large-scale genres, a discouragement that would have been intensified by the problems female composers faced in getting their best work into print? For example, Dora Bright, composer of the first work by a woman to be performed at a Philharmonic Society concert (Fantasia in G minor for piano and orchestra), was unable to have any of her numerous orchestral works published,91 while Ethel Barns succeeded in arranging for publication of her Concertstück for violin and orchestra, a work performed at a 1907 Proms concert, only with orchestral parts in piano reduction.92 While publication was no easy matter for any but the best-known composers of either sex, the presumption of inferiority that greeted women’s more ambitious compositions constituted a serious obstacle beyond those faced by their male peers.

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Added to the weight of misogynist commentary was the reaction against the militant suffragette campaigns of the prewar years, which may well have intensified the pressure on musically talented girls in conservative middle-class households to exemplify traditional female virtues. Such an interpretation is suggested by the reflections of two women musicianactivists on the dearth of female efforts in the demanding genre of the string quartet. In an article published in The Music Student Supplement in May 1914, Katharine Eggar, composer and pianist, and Marion Scott, composer, violinist, and musicologist, cofounders of the Society of Women Musicians, speculate that the near-absence of female work in this genre, one generally regarded as “the most searching test of musicianship,” may be the result of the persistence of “modesty and prudence” as foremost among prized female attributes.The single exception noted is that of Ethel Smyth, a personality never associated with those characteristics.93 The argument Scott and Eggar used to explain female avoidance of the string quartet would have applied equally well to all compositions outside the traditional female genres of song and piano. Is it possible that a young woman, musically inclined but lacking strong encouragement or counterexamples to what she read, would not have been affected in some way by glancing at her parents’ copy of The Monthly Musical Record of March 1, 1895, and finding this authoritative critical judgment inscribed just below the ruggedly masculine image of Beethoven on the masthead:“I see no signs of women having in them great latent creative faculty of any sort whatever”? Or, four years later, reading in her mother’s February 2, 1899, issue of The Lady: “Literature is the only branch in which women have been creative. As a rule women are not creative and are not likely to become great painters or musical composers. For women along these lines, therefore, we do not predict a great future.” Smyth, the most famous woman composer of the period under study, would appear to be the most striking exception in our story: productive in a range of genres, her works were widely performed during a long musical career and her talents prestigiously rewarded when she was made Dame of the British Empire in 1920. A closer look, however, shows that Smyth had social advantages that facilitated her access to recognition and a musical reputation in some ways less lasting than the fame she later achieved as author of ten books.Well connected in upper-class circles as the daughter of a general, the 25-year-old Smyth was able to arrange for a high-profile performance by the Royal Choral Society of her Mass in D with the backing of her friend, the exiled Empress Eugénie, and the encouragement of members of the British royal family.94 Despite this strong claim to public attention and the performance of numerous other works—including the opera most often regarded as her masterpiece, The Wreckers, conducted by

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Thomas Beecham in 1909—the composer Rutland Boughton, celebrating her achievements in a 1912 article in The Music Student, pointed out that Smyth’s music was far less appreciated in Britain than in Germany. Although Smyth’s Mass was later admired by the eminent musicologist Sir Donald Tovey (who included it in his Essays in Musical Analysis),95 its second performance came a full 30 years after its debut. Despite her remarkable achievements, Smyth’s music succumbed to the pattern that characterized the reception of music by other women composers: recognition during her lifetime followed by a reputation that quickly faded with the nonperformance of her work. Sophie Fuller writes that in the closing years of her life, Smyth was regarded “as little more than a typical English eccentric who wrote amusing memoirs. . . .”96 An oddly jarring, albeit indirect, footnote to Smyth’s reputation appeared in print in 1944, the year of her death, in an anthology of articles on a variety of subjects previously published in Vogue. Although her name is not mentioned anywhere in the text, Smyth would necessarily have been in the mind of the author, Sir Thomas Beecham, who had played such an important role in the performance career of The Wreckers, which he once described as “one of the three or four English operas of real musical merit and vitality.”97 In his echo, half a century later, of Anton Rubinstein’s pronouncement on women’s role in music, Beecham wrote that the result of women’s increased participation in the music profession during the previous three decades or so had inevitably brought music to “a state of hopeless decadence. . . .There are,” he continued,“no women composers, never have been and possibly never will be.”98 Although many readers of Beecham’s article would have regarded his attitudes as out of step with the times,99 such a statement by one so highly placed in international as well as English musical circles signified continued legitimacy to the prejudice against female creativity in the art. Beecham’s words, delivered in apparent disregard of the achievements of such British composers of the post–World War I era as Poldowski, Lutyens, Maconchy, and Rebecca Clarke, and of Americans Amy Beach, Ruth Crawford, and Gena Branscombe—could he have missed hearing about the first-place tie of Clarke’s Viola Sonata with Ernest Bloch’s Suite for Viola and Piano at the Berkshire Festival in 1919?—100can help us understand why the recognition of women’s work in music, still very far from complete, has taken so long to accomplish.

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Chapter Two h

Music and “Woman’s Mission” in Late-Victorian Philanthropy Her voice is sweet, but grave in tone, No ring hath it of joyous mirth; Yet somehow when she speaks, methinks A benediction falls on earth. —M. Hedderwick Browne, “The District Visitor,” The Girl’s Own Paper, March 1888

he subject of this chapter is “woman’s mission”—the dedication of traditional female virtues to society’s moral improvement—and the role that music played in furthering that mission during the late-Victorian period, especially in London. In the course of this discussion, we will see how the close association of music with philanthropic activity led women far beyond the private realm in ways that simultaneously weakened the ideology of separate spheres and the barriers to female participation in the professional music world. The idea of “woman’s mission” was based on an understanding of female characteristics that emphasized the following traits: emotional responsiveness; pleasure and fulfillment in domestic life; a lack of egotism and, consequently, an absence of selfish behavior; a psychological need for dependence on a male figure; and the capacity for self-sacrificing love. These characteristics were seen in their most admirable light in a girl’s behavior toward family members, and in the way a woman carried out her responsibilities toward husband and children or, if she were unmarried, toward ill or aged relatives. In addition to these ideal character traits, women manifested other characteristics that were believed to be part of their biological inheritance.

T

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The most important of these were physical frailty, a tendency toward emotional instability, and intellectual inferiority to men. According to this ideology, women, as members of the “weaker sex,” would always need the protection and control of their wiser and stronger menfolk.Yet women’s role was upheld as spiritually more worthy than men’s: the competitive struggles that characterized the male world would create a society that was raw and brutal were it not for the grace, love, and self-sacrifice of noble women whose dual mission it was to nurture the family and to infuse society with those high moral values that were seen as essentially feminine. Building on the influential work of Herbert Spencer,1 social scientists and “sexologists” supported the idea that the progress of civilization required that the sexes perpetually maintain these complementary functions—men to venture out into the worlds of business, politics, and the professions, and women to care for home and family. If wives or daughters chafed at the restrictiveness of the private sphere, as many did during the century’s final decades, then charitable work provided the ideal answer: it could ease that restlessness and widen the scope and influence of woman’s accepted mission without encroaching on the competitive world of men. The large-scale development of philanthropic organization and activity that took place during the nineteenth century, at a pace that greatly accelerated during its latter half, responded to the acute social needs of urban industrial society with a tremendous infusion of female energy.2 Music found a significant place in this development, as a source of education and entertainment for society’s disadvantaged, and as an effective and fashionable means of fund-raising for worthy causes. Middle- and upper-class women were well prepared to draw on musical skills in these charitable pursuits, since such skills were typically included within a curriculum of domestic “accomplishments” that were designed to attract a husband and fill hours of genteel leisure. Music provided the core of this curriculum;3 lessons in piano and voice were its main constituents until the latter half of the 1870s, when violin (and occasionally, cello) added variety; other instruments continued, for some time, to be regarded as unsuitable for musicians of the female sex. Although important reforms were made in girls’ education beginning in the 1870s, most of the new schools continued to give an important role to accomplishment-level music; even the more academic schools, fearful of having their course of studies perceived as unfeminine, had as their main goal the education of future wives and mothers.4 During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many musically inclined single women moved beyond this genteel musical education to refine and broaden their skills at conservatories and music academies whose

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numbers grew with student enrollments that were, not surprisingly, in great majority female. This development reflected both the strong contemporary interest in music as well as the need, perceived by parents and daughters, for “something to do” between secondary school and marriage; those who foresaw the possibility of a future that did not include marriage, whether by their own choice or as a result of the surplus of females in the population—the much-discussed issue of “female redundancy”—would benefit by developing skills that might later provide a means for earning income. Music teaching was one of the few possibilities within a still-severely restricted choice of career options for genteel women. Standards of musical competence were being raised by parental demand at the same time that the movement to strengthen girls’ educations turned parents against the smattering of skills previously provided by the “everythingteaching governess,”5 a figure now rapidly approaching obsolescence. Women of all ages, both single and married, took part in music philanthropy. Those who had the experience of conservatory study were especially well prepared to teach singing and piano in girls’ clubs and to perform in the wide range of charity concerts that were a prominent feature of the London season. Freed from onerous household duties by domestic servants, with fewer young children to care for (the result of a decline in the middle-class birth rate that began in the 1870s6), substantial numbers of musically trained women accepted the new opportunities for service and leadership offered by the organized charitable work of the century’s last decades. As the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts pointed out in an authoritative 1893 report entitled Woman’s Mission, the individual acts of kindness that had eased suffering when England was largely rural were no longer sufficient in the context of huge and crowded cities.7 In these new and difficult circumstances, woman’s mission was as important as ever; in responding to the complex challenges produced by a vastly altered society, it had changed its form but not its essence. In addition to the female-led charities listed in Lady Burdett-Coutts’s report, many of which included music in their educational and recreational programs for young people and for the sick and indigent, musical women planned and performed in concerts to raise money for these and a multitude of other causes, and took leadership roles in several organizations that put on concerts in underserved neighborhoods in London and other cities. So great was the scale of philanthropic activity at this time, and so powerful its appeal to women, that by the close of the nineteenth century, the great majority of middle- and upper-class women had engaged in some form of charity work in poor neighborhoods, whether as volunteers or as paid workers, and the word “slumming,” coined by the satirical writers of Punch, had entered the contemporary vocabulary.8

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Musical women—those whose interests and skills in the art went beyond minimal levels of genteel competence—were obviously a minority among this vast female army, but they were a highly respected segment, for Victorian culture looked upon music as a unique and potent moral influence.The best-known popularizer of this point of view—the counterpart to John Ruskin in the field of painting—was the liberal clergyman (and amateur violinist) Hugh Reginald Haweis. His book Music and Morals, continually reissued in successive editions over the course of the last three decades of the century, held that music’s moral force derived from its unique ability first to evoke, and then to discipline, the emotions.9 Although Music and Morals was criticized by scholars for inconsistencies and high-flown and imprecise generalizations, it remained for many years the most widely read discussion of the moral effects of music;10 the memoirs of musicians include many anecdotes about individuals who were led to moral action or reform by the experience of listening to inspiring music. Slum work, insofar as it took place in a kind of liminal space between the domestic and the public sphere, moved women out of purely domestic roles in ways that, while they did not directly challenge separate spheres ideology, served nevertheless to weaken its hold. Women who worked in poor and sometimes dangerous parts of the city were “allowed” (by fathers, husbands, and public opinion) to leave the protection of home and socially approved surroundings because their activities were regarded as extensions, and appropriate uses, of traditional, nurturing female attributes. Recent scholarship has given rise to reevaluations of the private/public sphere distinction, making it clear that these terms are more accurately conceptualized as extremes of a continuum, than as a clear-cut dichotomy. Like other women volunteers, musical social workers were moving, without chaperons, through city streets long considered out of bounds to respectable members of their sex. And because they were so often participants in evening rehearsals and concerts, music volunteers were more likely than other charity workers to return home alone, often late at night. In this way, as in their work as concert performers, the experiences of charitable amateurs began to move closer to those of professional women musicians. An additional factor heightened the image of the musical woman volunteer who was, most often, involved in the teaching of singing or in vocal performance. In the Western world, since classical antiquity, the female voice has evoked a bifurcated response: woman has been portrayed both as muse and siren. In ancient Greece, the songs of the muses, daughters of Zeus and goddesses of poetry and music, brought immortal fame to heroes, while the equally beautiful voices of sirens lured men to a terrible death.11 During the Victorian age, female opera singers were often referred to as “sirens,” while singers not identified with the morally sus-

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pect world of theater frequently evoked the term “songbirds.”12 Unlike the dangerous voice of the professional opera singer, that of the upperclass female amateur was thought of as possessing a wholly beneficent influence. Urging upper-class women to study singing with a view to entering (and thereby “elevating”) the profession, the musician Frederick J. Crowest wrote, in an 1887 article in the journal The Lady’s World: “The trained female voice is an elegant and valuable instrument, . . . a moral agent of no mean order.” With a power more distilled in singing than in speech, the voice of the musical social worker—especially if she were upper class—represented and communicated the essence of the high civilization that was thought to be as serious a lack in the slums as was decent housing and an ample supply of nutritious food. In her introduction to Jane Ellice Hopkins’s 1875 book, An Englishwoman’s Work Among Working Men, Elia Burritt drew attention to the potent influence of Hopkins’s voice on the men to whom she directed her philanthropic ministry. “Never before,” Burritt wrote,“did they hear such a voice—never, even by accident. Not a mother’s son of them ever heard the like.”13 Singing with and to the poor, practices recommended to slum workers by Octavia Hill and other Victorian philanthropists,14 was thought of as an appropriate and effective vehicle of female influence, one that might well have been designed to further woman’s mission. In the article he wrote for The Lady’s World, Crowest expressed pleasure in the inspiring examples recently set by women of the aristocracy—even by members of the Royal family—who sang or performed music for charitable causes. Such practice, he said, would help to break down the longprevalent prejudice against women appearing in public. This prediction proved correct: by the turn of the century, unpaid, charitable performance by upper-class amateurs had altered patterns of professional recruitment, especially among singers, blurring the line between amateur and professional musicians and between private and public performance. Just as work in the slums led some women into political activity and public office as school board members and Poor Law guardians, parallel work by musical women led them, increasingly, into the once-disapproved practice of public performance. Crowest counseled women who complained that they had too little to do, “who sigh for methods of killing time,” to enroll at one of England’s music conservatories so as to prepare themselves “for the noble purpose . . . of carrying light and music and refinement of face and intellect into dark places and squalid holes such as abound in Shoreditch, Whitechapel, . . . and other districts in East London,” to help those of limited means who are already carrying out this volunteer work. Used in this way, he said, music not only helps those who hear it, but also elevates

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the lives of the singers, those “of enforced luxuriance and indolence,” many of whom might otherwise let themselves become the slaves to fashion. In these articles, and many others in music journals and women’s magazines, a heavy dose of cultural imperialism is intermixed with the desire to serve the poor.15 The rich lived in London’s fashionable West End, and commentators, in the spirit of Crowest’s articles, sometimes referred to a principal locus of their volunteer work, the city’s East End, as the “Far East.” The decade of the 1880s saw a flowering of organizations dedicated to bringing music to the people. This activity was, in some ways, a reactivation of the “rational recreation” movement of the 1840s, in which music had played a significant part. For example, the singing-school movement of that decade, in which thousands of working-class men and women learned to sight-read music, had elicited the support of several employers and contributed to the enduring strength of the oratorio tradition.16 The temperance movement’s Band of Hope, which also began in the 1840s, used vocal and instrumental music to strengthen group feeling and spread its message—many children received free lessons in instrumental music in the context of this movement; Band of Hope members took part in megaconcerts at the Crystal Palace beginning in 1862, when a choir of a thousand appeared on that stage.17 The rebirth of “rational recreation” was encouraged by an influential article, “Amusements of the People,” first published in 1878 in the Contemporary Review. Its author,W. Stanley Jevons, an eminent logician and economist who then held an appointment as Professor of Political Economy at the University of London, contrasted the wealth of amusements available to England’s upper classes with the paucity of choices available to working people, a situation he saw as, in great measure, the result of the suppression of traditional popular festivals, fairs, and wakes that took place over the course of many years: It is hardly too much to say that the right to dwell freely in a grimy street, to drink freely in the neighboring public-house, and to walk freely between the high-walled parks and the jealously preserved estates of our landowners, is all that the just and equal laws of England secure to the mass of the population.18

Like Haweis, but for different reasons, Jevons believed that music was the cultural form best suited to enrich and elevate the lives of the masses. While Jevons regarded theaters, art exhibitions, public libraries, and science lectures as desirable urban amenities, he held that music answered best to the most crucial requisites for popular recreation. Unlike visits to museums and galleries, which required fatiguing postures that led to mus-

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cular exhaustion, listening to music left the body rested, an important asset for “the wearied mechanic, or the overworked clerk or man of business”; music involved “no straining of the nerves or muscles, no effort of any kind.” Unlike drama, which sometimes includes “sensuous ideas,” melody and harmony can “raise the hearer above the trifling affairs of life” and bring about an “exhilaration and elevation of mind . . . devoid of . . . injurious effects of any kind.What some seek at the cost of health, and life, and reputation, from alcohol, and from opium, that they might obtain innocuously from music, if they could cultivate true musical taste.”19 Perhaps most important of all, approved forms of music were needed in order to counteract what reformers believed was the art’s illegitimate use in the “noxious” music hall. The people [said Jevons] will have amusement and excitement of one kind or other, and the only question is, whether the business of recreation shall fall entirely into the hands of publicans, or whether local movements . . . will not provide suitable counter-attractions.”20 All forms of rational recreation devised during the 1870s and ‘80s reflected Jevons’s distaste for the music halls. There were about 500 music halls in London during the 1880s. Most of their money was made by the sale of drink, and some halls were favored recruitment sites for prostitutes. By the early 1890s, attendance at the 35 largest music halls reached 45,000.21 Reformers’ ire toward the music halls began to ease during the 1890s, when proprietors moved away from the tavern model of interaction toward a more controlled mode of presentation and more “respectable” content; noted performers of art music began to accept engagements on the musical hall stage during that decade. The Lady placed its seal of approval on the music hall in 1908, with a short story in which a father who has disowned his son for working at one of the halls is shown to be seriously behind the times; induced to pay a visit to a place he has long considered a den of iniquity, he is astonished to find nothing in the show that is in the least objectionable.22 Women played prominent roles in all the organizations that brought music to “the people.” Our discussion of these will begin with three that were established during the late 1870s—the Kyrle Society, the People’s Entertainment Society, and the People’s Concert Society, a trio whose functions often overlapped, but whose distinct approaches and philosophies demonstrate the variety of outlook and practice that characterized music philanthropy. We will then look at two philanthropic institutions established during the 1880s, the Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall and the People’s Palace.The final portion of the chapter will shift the focus to charity given by the poor to others in dire circumstances, and to the experience of receiving music philanthropy.

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THE KYRLE, PEOPLE’S ENTERTAINMENT, AND PEOPLE’S CONCERT SOCIETIES The Kyrle Society took its name from an inspiring figure in Alexander Pope’s third “Moral Epistle,” a landowner of modest means who devoted himself with great generosity to the welfare of others.The Kyrle’s founder was Miranda Hill, older sister of the housing reformer, Octavia Hill, who became the society’s treasurer.23 The Society’s main goal was to bring beauty into the lives of the poor, by decorating schools, workmen’s clubs, and other centers of working-class life with pictures and flowers, planting gardens on unused land, and by putting on concerts in schools, churches, hospitals, and workhouses.24 The eminent painter Frederick Leighton, who became president of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1878, was a society member, as was William Morris, who decorated a hospital for it. Men and women of the Kyrle Society aimed to “bestow ‘beauty’ on the people as freely as Nature bestows it.”25 To carry out its musical activities, a Kyrle Society choir was organized that gave free concerts of oratorios and cantatas in schools and churches; smaller groups of volunteers performed in hospitals and workhouses. A wealthy aristocrat, the Countess of Meath, subsidized the Kyrle’s workhouse programs and urged other women with “accomplishment” training to follow her example: “Why shouldn’t we ladies bestir ourselves?” she asked. “We have all spent many weary hours in ‘practising.’We should use what’s otherwise a waste of money, time and energy.”26 In December 1880, The Musical Times printed a request by the Kyrle Society for more volunteer singers.The journal warmly endorsed this solicitation, encouraging its readers to join the Kyrle, and citing various kinds of evidence in support of music’s curative effects.27 A year later, The Musical Times praised the Kyrle Society for establishing “Choral Classes for the Poor,” which were to be open to all men and women for a nominal fee after inquiries were made “as to their respectability.” Members of the advanced class would become eligible to join the Society’s performing choir without any additional fee. Readers wishing further information were advised to write to the society’s Honorary Treasurer, Octavia Hill. The treasurer’s own account of the Kyrle Society’s musical work was published in an 1884 article in The Nineteenth Century, “Colour, Space, and Music for the People,” an adaptation of a paper previously read before the society’s members. Hill’s focus on practical details and specific needs was in keeping with her demanding responsibilities as manager of working-class housing, and her experience as adviser to the Charity Organisation Society. The Kyrle, she wrote, has a choir that meets each Wednesday evening either for practice “at the West End of the town” or for performances in

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poor neighborhoods. Singers arrive home very late after concerts, “owing to the enormous distances” between concert locales and their own homes. Hill commented on the makeup of Kyrle audiences.While some concerts were attended by the very poor, others represented working people, “intelligent, very attentive, and tolerably comfortable-looking, but, one would guess, rarely carried beyond the somewhat prosaic routine of their daily lives.” She expressed impatience with rich people who preferred to ignore the latter group, whose members did not suffer from extreme want but whose lives were aesthetically impoverished by the dreariness of their environment. Criticizing those who show “a depraved hunger for rags, sharp need, and slums, which pollutes some who profess charity,” Hill emphasized the importance of enhancing the lives “of worthy working people, who by thrift and industry have raised, or kept, themselves above the brink of pauperism.”28 In her work for the Kyrle Society, as in her housing reform, Octavia Hill combined the outlook of the moralist who sought to reward the deserving poor with that of the lover of beauty, whose devotion to the cause of the preservation of open spaces led directly to the establishment of the National Trust.29 Hill used her 1884 article to urge more men and women to join the Kyrle choir as well as the society’s smaller groups that performed in schools, mission-rooms, hospitals, and workhouses. Donations were also needed to cover the costs of printing and piano rentals, and to pay professional musicians who sometimes participated in the concerts and who could not be expected to contribute their services on a regular basis.30 The practice of upper-class singing to the poor and sick received strong encouragement in February 1888, when the popular journal The Graphic printed a double-page illustration of Alexandra, Princess of Wales and future queen of England, serving as piano accompanist to her three daughters as they sang before patients at the Brompton Hospital for Consumptives. Alexandra had a genuine interest both in hospitals and in music. One of the first members of an English royal family to involve herself in hospital improvements, she had recently befriended the horribly ill John Merrick, whose multiple and deforming tumors had given him the name of “Elephant Man.” The princess visited Merrick several times at London Hospital, the main hospital that served people of the East End; her kindness to him encouraged others to follow her example, and Merrick’s final years were cheered by visits from great and titled ladies.31 Alexandra was equally influential in the cause of music.An energetic advocate for the newly built Royal College of Music, an avid concertgoer, and patron of a new residence hall for women students of art and music in London, the princess took great pride in the honorary music doctorate that the University of Dublin had awarded her in 1885, an event publicized by pictures

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of the future queen in her doctoral robes.The fashion industry attempted to benefit from this event by marketing a “doctor of music” hat; it was admired by Lady’s Pictorial as “one of the most universally-becoming kinds of head-gear.”32 Hospitals at this time were places for the “respectable” poor: the destitute were treated in workhouse infirmaries, while middle- and upper-class people were nursed at home.The Brompton Hospital, opened in the 1840s when no other hospital would admit tubercular patients, served a pressing social need. Tuberculosis was the century’s great killer, especially of women: half of all female deaths between the ages of 15 and 35 were caused by this disease, which was especially prevalent among the poor, their resistance lowered by an inadequate diet and crowded living conditions.A dramatic change in the understanding of the disease took place just a few years before Alexandra and her daughters entertained at Brompton. The bacillus that causes tuberculosis was discovered by the German scientist Robert Koch in 1882; long regarded as the product of an inherited predisposition and often associated with artistic genius, TB was now seen as a highly contagious illness.The barrier of flora, as well as the wary look on the faces of hospital personnel in The Graphic’s powerful image, convey a sense of potential danger were that barrier to be breached by the patients’ coughs. During this period, singing—especially by voices trained in proper breathing technique—was believed capable of preventing tuberculosis. A 1908 article in The Musical Herald quoted the British Journal of Tuberculosis of that year as advocating singing both as a preventive and a curative measure in the early stages of the disease.33 The artist who depicted the unusual Brompton Hospital concert knowingly portrayed the separate worlds of health and illness on the two sides of the greenery divide, as well as a striking image of upper-class, cultivated musicality and its more privileged access to the breath of life. The Kyrle Society used music primarily to bring beauty into the lives of slum dwellers and solace to the helpless. The goals of the People’s Entertainment Society were quite different. In the spirit of Jevons’s diagnosis of social ills, the PES were “rational recreation” reformers who sought to undermine the patronage of public houses and music halls that made their money on alcoholic beverages. Providing an attractive alternative to these favorite working class places of resort, the PES gave concerts, either free or at very low cost, on Saturday evenings with the stated purpose of drawing men away from the temptations of drink at “lower places of resort.” The founder of PES appears to have been Charles Bethune, a musical amateur who had some success in persuading employers to provide free musical performances to their workers; The Musical Times, on February 1, 1880, reported on one such concert that the firm of Doulton gave for 700

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workers at their Lambeth potteries. Bethune was able to secure the collaboration of Lady Blanche Lindsay, a member of the Rothschild family and coproprietor of the Grosvenor Gallery, whose inner circles included a number of London’s leading musicians.34 Lady Lindsay performed an important service to the society by enlisting the participation of the Viscountess of Folkestone (subsequently, Countess of Radnor), a talented and indefatigable worker in music philanthropy who, in addition to numerous singing engagements, would soon become conductor of her own allwomen’s choir and orchestra.35 As described by The Graphic (March 26, 1881), People’s Entertainment Society performers were “unprofessionals, amateur ladies and gentlemen who have a talent for vocal or instrumental music, and who are members of the Society”; it was their aim “to convince the working classes by practical means that there is a better, a more rational, and a cheaper way of spending a few hours on a Saturday night than in drinking, even though it be in good fellowship, at a public-house bar.” During the first half of the 1880s, the peak years of PES activity, the society offered an ambitious schedule of concerts—66 during the first four months of 187936—in some of London’s poorest neighborhoods. PES programs typically consisted of short instrumental pieces, vocal selections, brief readings or dramatic presentations, and sometimes a comic song.The upper-crust Queen magazine described these programs as well-suited offerings that a “rough and uncultured audience . . . can most easily feel and follow.”37 The journal Musical Opinion also approved of the Society’s programs. They were, the journal said, “such as ‘Arry can understand.”38 Like the Kyrle Society volunteers who sang to the destitute in workhouses, PES amateurs crossed a social chasm, but because the central goal of the “Entertainers” was to change behavior rather than offer music as an unencumbered gift, concern about audience demeanor and responsiveness was a major component of the concert givers’ evaluation of their success. Accounts of the Society’s activities provide detailed reports of their reception among concert beneficiaries. One female PES worker, organizing a concert for men of the “lodging houses” and “thieves’ quarters” in Whitechapel, where the only “lady” the men had previously met was Lady Burdett-Coutts, was asked if any “white ties” would be in attendance. Assured that no members of the clergy were expected, the men packed the concert; they applauded Lady Folkestone’s solos hard enough to frighten her.39 In 1880, PES organizers of a series of concerts in Battersea noticed that half the audience of workmen attended in shirtsleeves, some wearing red ties.A year later, the philanthropists congratulated themselves on a significant change of dress; the local curate reported that instead of spending their money at the pub, the men were saving to buy cutaways like the one

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worn by “His Lordship,”Viscount Folkestone, husband of the singer and the society’s treasurer. One of the most informative descriptions of the planning of a charity concert is recounted in Lady Folkestone’s memoirs. She was to be featured soloist in a PES concert in 1881.The event was to be held in Whitechapel for the enjoyment of a group the Daily News described as “the lowest class of residents in the neighborhood.”To ensure that the desired audience was assembled rather than better-off entertainment seekers eager to take advantage of the policy of free admission, PES officers enlisted the assistance of the police, who helped distribute tickets to the occupants of lodginghouses and “rookeries” (densely populated tenements). The concert was warmly received, and, at its conclusion, Lady Folkestone was honored for her singing by the gift of a bouquet from a young male admirer, one of several such honors that she received from appreciative audiences in ceremonies reported in the press.40 The aristocratic Court Circle provided a detailed description of an award presented to the singer in May 1882 by a group of Battersea workingmen: The hall was densely packed by an audience composed of working men, who were desirous of witnessing the presentation to her ladyship of a small token of the esteem and admiration with which she is regarded in that district. The present consisted of a handsome scent stand, worth about ten guineas, and was handed to her ladyship by Mr. May, a genuine working man, who read an address expressive of the gratitude of the working men of Battersea. . . . Lady Folkestone, who was visibly affected, . . . [stated] that the nights she had spent in Battersea were amongst the happiest she had known. She would, she said, value the gift, but she would value still more highly the kindly feelings which had prompted the donors. Loud cheers greeted the speech of the Viscountess, and the concert proceeded, Lady Folkestone’s songs being enthusiastically encored each time.41

The relationship between PES philanthropists and their audiences appears in comic relief in Lady Folkestone’s account of her husband’s timely intervention as she was about to sing God Save the Queen. Lord Folkestone suddenly touched his wife on the arm to delay the song’s opening and said in a loud voice,“Wait a minute, my dear! There is a man in the gallery sitting down with his hat on.”Then, turning toward the audience, he said,“I never allow my ‘Missus’ to sing God Save the Queen unless people are standing up, with their hats off!” The situation was quickly corrected and the song went on.42 It would be a mistake to assume that the ability of the People’s Entertainment Society to attract large working class audiences signified uncritical admiration of the performers or a willingness on the part of substantial

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numbers of people who frequented pubs and music halls to give up those pleasures. While a small nucleus of audience members motivated in these ways may well have attended these concerts and made themselves known to the concert givers, it seems likely that many attended PES concerts irregularly, their presence as audience members signifying nothing more than the appreciation of free entertainment, enjoyment of some of the performers, and the novelty of being sung to by a titled lady. And just as it would be simplistic to ascribe a sole motive to listeners, it would be equally inaccurate to accept the Society’s main stated goal, to pull slum-dwellers away from local attractions that served alcohol, as the only motivation of the men and women who performed in its programs. Devotion to music and the desire to communicate its special pleasures are likely to have carried a momentum of their own for a performer of Lady Folkestone’s musical gifts and training, and the same would have been true for many other PES volunteers. Both philanthropists and audiences were engaged in a complex interchange of multilayered patterns of expectation, musical and extra-musical communication, and response. The music press, which was generally supportive of efforts to bring good music to the poor, almost always described working-class audiences as polite and attentive, often contrasting their behavior with that of West End concertgoers, whose conversations during performance and untimely exits enraged musicians and critics. One suspects, however, that instances of disruptive behavior at PES concerts were underreported—some were perhaps prevented by the weeding out of troublemakers before concerts began; given the high status of the society’s sponsors and performers, it seems unlikely that the police cooperation mobilized for the 1880 Whitechapel concert (described above) was limited to that one event. Whether or not such intervention was employed, occasional comments in the press show that social resentments were not altogether absent at these events. The Musical Times (February l, 1880) reported that several PES audiences evidenced a desire to “guy” the performance, laughing at the first “hitch,” and advised the society to keep in mind the “limited sympathies” of their auditors. Concern about holding audience attention with short musical selections clearly reflected not only the supposedly ill effects of music hall fare, but also uneasiness about the tendency toward “boisterous” behavior.43 One especially memorable expression of resentment evoked by upperclass music philanthropy occurred in the context of an outdoor band concert, an event in a weekly evening series presented under People’s Entertainment Society auspices on summer evenings in 1881.The incident is related in Henrietta Barnett’s biography of her husband, Samuel A. Barnett, the clergyman whose tireless efforts to improve conditions in the

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slums led him to found Toynbee Hall, the first East End settlement house, and to adopt the socialist creed of Arnold Toynbee, the economist and social reformer in whose honor the settlement house was named.44 According to Henrietta Barnett, the young people drawn to these summer concerts had insisted on dancing, an activity tolerated with great reluctance by their benefactors. On this occasion, the concert attracted a “rough element” whose dancing turned into a “Bacchanalian scene.”The Barnetts called a stop to the concert and sent the children home from the adjoining playground: The street was full of angry people who so blocked the pathway that we had to walk in the road.They howled and hooted and threw stones, at first a few, then many. . . . [My husband] remained calm and unruffled, bidding me walk slowly and trust their aim was bad—and it was! “And it’s us as pays you,” they shouted, ignorant of the financial basis of the Established Church.45

This account of an incident that was one of the most distressing points in Henrietta Barnett’s narrative leaves the rioters’ motives unclear. Was anger directed solely against the Church? Had People’s Entertainment Society concert presenters introduced their music with words of patronizing exhortation? Were those who attended the outdoor concerts even aware of the society’s identity, apart from the other ladies and gentlemen who designated themselves the bringers of “culture” to blighted neighborhoods? Whatever the answers to these questions, it is clear that paternalistic attitudes, which were all but inevitable even on the part of the most sincere and dedicated of philanthropists in this class-ridden society,46 were alienating at least to some portion of charity’s recipients. It is also clear that some of the philanthropists, including those associated with music philanthropy, gave evidence of attitudes that exceeded the bounds of well-meaning paternalism and expressed demeaning sentiments of personal and moral superiority. It may be that few among Whitechapel’s poor residents read the judgment expressed in the magazine Good Words (1881) by Kyrle Society member Mrs. Russell Barrington, that the poor “are very much like children and with them, as with children, example is better than precept,” but those who sang in the Kyrle’s singing classes would have known that an investigation to prove their “respectability” was required before they could advance into the senior chorus, a process never suggested for singers from the West End.47 Resentment of similar investigations of Charity Organisation Society applicants is well documented.48 Lady Violet Greville, a well-trained singer and musician who often sang to the poor, remembered how, in one of her

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early slum experiences, she drove into the East End in a fashionable equipage pulled by two horses and driven by a powdered footman, leaving him to wait as she conducted her visit. She returned to find her servant surrounded by a crowd “pointing and laughing at him. ‘Look at ‘im, he’s floured his head,’” jokes and cries following them as they drove away.49 Lady Greville recognized the resentment caused by lady visitors who preached and patronized, advising slum workers only to “suggest.”50 One need hardly wonder about the response to the “suggestions” of a wealthy and titled visitor—typically, about matters of thrift and cleanliness—to an exhausted, overworked, and underpaid slum dweller. George Bernard Shaw, in his early novel The Irrational Knot, provides a scathing commentary on the social snobbery of many music philanthropists.51 Written in 1880 and published serially, five years later, in Annie Besant’s socialist journal Our Corner, the novel opens with a “people’s concert” put on by the “Parnassus Society for the Propagation of the Arts.”The concert’s organizer, the Reverend George Lind, has recruited the audience by distributing free tickets among the families of local working men.The event features a Haydn symphony, arranged for four English concertinas by one Julius Baker and performed by the arranger and his children: Master Julius, Miss Lisette, age eight, and Miss Tottie, age six and a half.52 Marian Lind, the clergyman’s sister, disappointed at the cool reception of her mediocre singing, comments that “Spohr’s music is too good for the people here,” echoing her brother’s judgment that their audience lacks musical sensitivity: “They are only workmen,” the Reverend comments. Ned Conolly, the working-class hero of the novel, has been invited as guest soloist. When his refined singing and ability to ad lib a missing piano accompaniment show him to be an accomplished musician, Lind responds with concern that Ned’s musical talents may cause him to aspire beyond his class: “Injudicious encouragement,” says the Reverend to a patronessperformer, “might perhaps lead him to forget his real place in [society].” Soon after Shaw completed The Irrational Knot, the comic journal Punch turned its attention to music philanthropy. On May 28, 1881, whether in response to Mrs. Barrington’s article in Good Words or more generally commenting on the practice of philanthropic entertainments for the poor, Punch published a mock-monologue,“Me and the Missis on Entertainments for the People,” in which the supposed beneficiary of such efforts expresses resentment at being “labelled” as if he were luggage and catered to with a “drop-it-down-nice-and easy to-’em style.”53 Twelve years later, Punch expanded its commentary to ridicule upper-class amateurs who used philanthropy as an excuse to showcase their own meager talents.The social group satirized in Punch’s “Diary of an Amateur” (1893) includes dilettante actors, painters, and musicians who, searching for an

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amusing new activity, decide to call themselves the “Band of Amateur Benefactors” and “do something” for the East End. One member, the “Viscountess Felstead,” the Band’s Honorary Treasurer, says she can sing and no one contradicts her—“too polite.” During the course of meetings at the Viscountess’s townhouse and the country house of another titled lady, the Band of Benefactors considers a number of activities that will “bring class and class together.” Eventually, they give an East End performance that they consider successful except for its failure to draw the intended audience: “The working-men and their wives and families . . . did not come up—but this was rather an advantage than otherwise [since it] left more room for the friends of the performers.”54 Although the Kyrle, People’s Entertainment, and People’s Concert Societies were similar in offering concerts and some music instruction to working-class Londoners, the last-named of the three had, from the start, an image of its work that set it apart from the more overtly paternalistic charities of the time. The root of this difference lay in the single-minded devotion of People’s Concert Society philanthropists to widening the audience for classical music; its clearly stated purpose,“to increase the popularity of good Music by means of Cheap Concerts,”55 differentiates it from the mixed social messages that emanated both from the Kyrle, whose wider interests in the beautiful mingled uneasily with the philosophy and practices of the Charity Organization Society, and from the People’s Entertainment Society’s high-toned amateurism and overt goals of social control.To differentiate the PCS in this way is not to suggest that dedication to music melted away class prejudice, or even that the PCS attracted an entirely different group of volunteers—people interested in music often gave support to more than one organization and amateurs who wanted to serve—or perform, or both—did not necessarily identify exclusively with one group. But the orientation of PCS seems to have reflected its far closer association with the professional musicians who were its main concert performers, a group seldom drawn from the upper classes; it was this partnership that allowed it to be less class-bound than the other societies. In her article,“Music and the People,” which appeared in The Nineteenth Century magazine in December 1880, the music educator, composer, and conductor Florence Marshall—herself an unusual combination of philanthropist and professional musician—writing as a PCS advocate, pointed to “the prevalence of endless class distinctions” as inimical to the progress of music: Here, where professional people fight shy of shopkeepers, where large shopkeepers will not send their children to school with those of small shopkeepers, nor small shopkeepers theirs with those of artisans, . . . where each man, and still more each woman, is on the defensive lest he or she should

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be suspected of associating on equal terms with any one in a “lower set”— what chance here is there for an art which neither knows nor recognises any of these things? If we are to combine in musical art work, all sense of favours conferred or received must be put aside.56

Oratorio, said Marshall, was the most successful genre of classical music in England because it had achieved some degree of association across social classes. Progress across the wider field of music had to begin with the upper classes whose training and leisure fitted them for this responsibility, but their work must lead to a more egalitarian participation that would be as improving to upper-class amateurs as to people of less privileged backgrounds. Appreciative of the gratis-admission concerts the People’s Entertainment Society offered to those lowest on the social scale, Marshall saw the work of the two “People’s” societies as complementary rather than opposed, since the demanding repertoire presented by the PCS was clearly inappropriate for people struggling for subsistence.57 Dedicated philanthropist though she was, Marshall nevertheless saw the goals of philanthropy and music as “antagonistic,” for while philanthropy aims to modify behavior, whether “by legislation, by persuasion, [or] by inducement,” the “essence of art is freedom and self-development.” The efforts of the People’s Concert Society would bear fruit more slowly, for its work was to sow “the seed of art for art’s sake among the people.”58 Also opposed—albeit for different reasons—to the “galling chains” that had for so long linked music with charity in England, George Bernard Shaw nevertheless recognized that without the efforts of philanthropists, only a small minority of his contemporaries would have any access at all to professionally performed classical music.The one-shilling price for unreserved seats at the so-called “Popular” concerts at St. James’s Hall was beyond the means of working-class people, even without adding related costs for concert programs and transportation. Music lovers associated with the PCS had, in Shaw’s opinion, a “lucid idea” of what needed to be accomplished.59 Good music needed to be performed by excellent musicians; concerts had to be presented in different working-class neighborhoods and offered at cheap prices. Shaw wrote appreciatively of the People’s Concert Society performances he attended in 1883. Typical programs consisted of movements of chamber music interspersed with vocal pieces “of a superior class”—selections of musical substance, rather than sentimental ballads or comic songs.The singers were—again, in Shaw’s words—“efficient amateurs,” and the instrumentalists well-known professionals. Admission charges were a penny or three pence.60 Only Sunday concerts were (by law) free of admission charge; voluntary collections helped to defray the costs of these concerts.61 As the concerts developed and audiences became

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more familiar with the experience of chamber music, works began to be played in their entirety. By the mid-eighties, People’s Concert Society programs were described as mirrors of those at the Monday “Pops.”62 The musical press was strongly supportive of the work of the People’s Concert Society. The Musical World praised the organization’s high artistic standards, criticizing the condescension implicit in programs presented by other groups: “[t]o introduce to [the people] drawing room ballads of no more real intrinsic value than music-hall ditties, is to impose upon this public, and the imposition is likely to be more successful when it comes to them with the cachet of culture and the authority of the aristocratic classes.” Music at PCS concerts was played by “truly competent artists and a few privileged amateurs whose technical skill and earnest purpose are above suspicion.”63 The main problems encountered by the People’s Concert Society were related to finance and audience composition. In order to charge ticket prices as low as a few pennies, the organization had to continue finding artists willing to play at a reduced fee in an ongoing and ambitious series of concerts likely to lead to more than a single request for their services. A related problem was the response by participants in the professional music world to the likelihood that a low-cost charity performance would weaken attendance at full-price concerts. “There are many people,” wrote The Musical Times in 1881,“who prefer to hear Mrs. Osgood or Mr. Santley in the far East for the sum of sixpence to paying seven shillings for the same treat at St. James’s Hall, perfectly able though they may be to afford the latter amount.”64 Musicians knew—often from their agents—that there was no easy way to limit audiences to those unable to afford standard concert prices. For example, in 1907, the noted violinist Fritz Kreisler agreed to play without a fee for a PCS “penny” concert.When the newspapers publicized the event, Kreisler immediately cancelled the engagement, as he was convinced that such wide publicity would attract people who could afford to hear him at another concert he was to play at a large hall in the West End. Kreisler was persuaded to reconsider and performed for l,400 people under People’s Concert Society auspices. The violinists’ magazine Strad found it worth pointing out that the 1,400 people in the audience were in fact “people of the poorer classes.”65 People’s Concert Society volunteers of the 1880s no doubt shared the view of other philanthropists of the day that working-class life was led in a cultural void. Certainly, they shared the horror of the music hall that was such a strong motivating force for the People’s Entertainment Society. A case in point is Florence Marshall’s reaction to an incident that took place during a PCS concert in Whitechapel. The event was saved from the mishap of a missing cello by the surprising presence of two musicians in

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the audience who offered to fetch their instruments from home.The concert continued successfully with the borrowed instrument. Pleased by this example of audience collaboration, Marshall nevertheless worried about the cello’s previous and future life:“Where was it in the habit of performing, and to what music had it been accustomed? On this occasion it took part in Beethoven’s . . . Septet. . . . Let us hope that after such a baptism it never reverted to anything lower.”66 These were strong words from the daughter of a clergyman and granddaughter of an Anglican bishop, but Marshall was also a serious musician—a pianist, composer, educator, and the founder and conductor of an amateur orchestra under whose baton soloists of the rank of Kreisler and Casals performed.67 Marshall’s activities clearly show that the organizations of music philanthropy often overlapped in their practice more than their enunciated goals might suggest: a founder of the People’s Concert Society, Marshall also assisted with Kyrle Society programs,68 while Lady Folkestone, who worked so energetically for the PES, also participated in programs at the Bow and Bromley Institute, an older charity whose musical activities elicited Shaw’s warm praise.69 Bow and Bromley officials awarded Lady Folkestone Freedom of the Institute; she was the first woman to be so honored.70 If Punch’s 1893 satire used her as the model for its “Viscountess Felstead,” the comparison was certainly unfair to one whose musicality was admired by a musician as important as the composer and Royal College of Music educator Charles Hubert Parry;71 the Countess’s tireless concert-organizing and performance provided significant assistance to a number of important musical and philanthropic London institutions. If the People’s Concert Society achieved a half-century longevity rare among the music charities of its day, it was the result of a message that transcended, even as it inevitably reflected, the mood of the eighties, a mood characterized by upper-class fear of political radicalism caused by a severe economic downturn that exacerbated the chronic poverty of many London areas.72 The message of the People’s Concert Society was effectively communicated by the musicians who performed for it, and by its largely female group of volunteers.The PCS, said its representative to the International Women’s Congress of 1899,“has been largely supported and represented by women, and its secretary has always been a woman.”73 The kernel of the Society’s message, as enunciated by Marshall during its earliest years, was that nature awards musical sensitivity and aptitude without regard for class distinction and that the role of music philanthropy must be to counter the workings of the commercial market place so as to allow these democratically awarded gifts to flourish.74 Far less burdened than organizations that far more closely exemplified the rubric of “rational

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recreation,” the People’s Concert Society was able, to a remarkable extent, to let the music speak for itself. PALACES OF RATIONAL RECREATION: THE ROYAL VICTORIA COFFEE MUSIC HALL AND THE PEOPLE’S PALACE Although neither was a musician, Emma Cons and Walter Besant figure importantly in any account of late-nineteenth century philanthropy as founders of new institutions that enriched musical life for residents of, respectively, South London and the East End. Unlike the organizations just discussed, none of which was associated with one specific site, the Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall (later famous as the “Old Vic”) and the People’s Palace were public places whose offerings featured music in distinctive physical and social settings. Opened in 1880, the Royal Victoria Music Hall (“coffee” was dropped from the title early on) was so closely associated with the personalities of Emma Cons and, later, with her successor Lilian Baylis, that no account of the place can proceed without some details of this extraordinary pair.75 A middle-class young woman with artistic leanings, Cons was obliged to turn her art training to practical use when her father, who had worked for the Broadwood piano firm, became a permanent invalid. During the 1850s, Emma Cons worked for the Ladies Art Guild, which aimed to help needy gentlewomen use their art skills in paid employment. The Guild, which was managed by Mrs. Hill, mother of Octavia, brought Cons the friendship of the future housing reformer and of John Ruskin, for whom both women worked, first as art copyists and later as managers of his workingclass rental property. Before Cons moved into her own principal career as housing manager, she worked as a watch engraver and stained glass designer; the angry reception she encountered from male competitors in both occupations toughened her spirit, made her a strong woman’s rights advocate, and prepared her for service on the first London County Council and for the efforts of conservative male opponents who succeeded in bringing about her removal from that office.76 Like other workers in overcrowded London slum districts, Cons became convinced of the need for places where people could go to socialize and relax. In addition to starting crèches and clinics for her tenants, Cons also founded clubs for workmen, a hostel for girls, and with the help of wealthy philanthropists, coffee taverns where working-class families could relax and buy inexpensive meals in an alcohol-free environment; her observation of the close connection of drunkenness with wife abuse among her Lambeth tenants had made her a convert to temperance. Deeply reli-

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gious, yet with a tolerant (except on the subject of drink) and pragmatic spirit that eventually alienated the doctrinaire Octavia Hill, Cons was described by one contemporary as “keen, quick, very clever and very good, . . . with a passion for helping anyone in difficulties, absolutely careless of herself and her comfort and devoted to the people among whom she worked,”77 and by the younger Beatrice Potter (later Webb) as “not a lady by birth, with the face and manner of a distinguished woman, almost a ruler of men . . . a calm enthusiasm in her face, giving her all to others.”78 Even as a little girl, Lilian Baylis, daughter of Cons’s youngest sister, recognized “Emmie” as a special presence and would introduce herself as “auntie’s niece.” Cons decided to turn her energies from coffee taverns (which were beginning to face competition from the first tea shops) to a temperance music hall out of motivation not altogether different from that of the People’s Entertainment Society; but unlike the efforts West End charity workers made in the cause of rational recreation, hers was devised and carried out in the context of a life lived close to “the people,” for she made her home in the Lambeth complex in which she worked.With support from aristocratic backers, influential musicians (including Arthur Sullivan and Sir Julius Benedict), and the industrialist Samuel Morley, a Liberal M. P. and temperance advocate, Cons was able to start the hall and carry it through its financially shaky early years. Entertainment at the Royal Victoria Music Hall varied with the night of the week, and included variety shows with clowns and acrobats, temperance meetings, and a series of science lectures that led to the establishment of Morley College, whose premises remained in the theater building until 1889.79 Beginning in March 1881, “ballad” concerts (mixed musical entertainments) were presented one night each week;80 these were successful not only in drawing audiences, but in holding their attention—because at the start of the shows, disruptive patrons were often ejected.Two friends of Emma Cons were among the artists who gave their services or performed for lowered fees in these concerts.These were the eminent contraltos, Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, a singer of oratorio for whom Mendelssohn had composed the contralto arias in Elijah, and Antoinette Sterling, a famous ballad singer also admired for her interpretations of German lieder. An American of Quaker origins who, like Emma Cons, was a passionate advocate both of the temperance and women’s suffrage movements, Sterling’s charismatic presence was unforgettable to those susceptible to it. In the judgment of the eminent musicologist and librettist Edward J. Dent, “to have heard her sing and to have heard her speak was an experience never to be forgotten.”81 One incident that occurred during an Old Vic concert shows her astonishing theatrical presence. When

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Emma Cons said she could do nothing about the heavy smoke in the hall—this was a rough crowd unlikely to be responsive to the female sensibility even of a noted singer—Sterling took charge. “I want to sing to you,” she told the crowd, “but if I do, all this smoke will hurt my voice. Now, if you like your pipes more than my singing, why, you go on smoking.” No one did.82 Within a year, the ballad concerts were drawing audiences of 2,800, their behavior so orderly that the hall’s patrons invited a visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales, whose attendance in April 1882 was noted by The Musical World.83 George Bernard Shaw, writing in 1883 in the Musical Review, objected to the mixing of temperance ideology with music, saying that only a small segment of the working class would respond to this scheme. Shaw did, however, express pleasure at the fact that, as the supply of performers willing to work without pay had diminished, musicians were being paid in the regular way.84 By 1884, The Musical World could refer to the “Royal Victoria Coffee Palace” as “this now fashionable music centre.” In 1890, The Illustrated London News, reviewing the work of “the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern,” expressed pleasure in its progress, giving high praise to Miss Cons,“Alderman elect of the London County Council,” for her fine work; The News displayed a large illustration both of the coffee house portion of the building and of the theater.85 By this time, an opera evening had become a regular part of the fare at the hall, although lack of a theater license (its license was restricted to variety entertainments) required that opera be shown as “costume tableau,” that is, each aria presented as a separate, staged number with the curtain raised and lowered to prevent any suggestion of dramatic continuity. By the mid-1890s, the indomitable Emma Cons, who had added political work to her housing management in Lambeth and continued to direct the Royal Victoria Hall, was getting tired. Fortunately, both for her and for the institution, a woman of equal gifts would arrive before long to lead it to its period of great achievements. Like her aunt Emma, Lilian Baylis was deeply religious; unlike Cons, whose girlhood talents were in drawing, Lilian was a musician. Born in London in 1874 to parents who were both professional musicians—her mother a pianist and contralto, her father a baritone—Baylis was raised in a Bohemian atmosphere and at an early age studied violin with John Tiplady Carrodus, a well-known composer and violinist. In 1891, when she was 16, her parents decided to see if their talents would be better rewarded in South Africa.There they led an adventurous life, living in covered wagons, bringing their entertainments to people who had no knowledge of formal concerts. At some point, Lilian went on to Johannesburg, where she taught music and founded and conducted a women’s

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orchestra. In about 1896 (sources differ on the exact date), Baylis became ill and had to undergo surgery. Cons cabled her parents, suggesting that a sea voyage might be good for Lilian and offering to pay her fare. Lilian arrived in England to find her aunt ill and overworked.Although she had intended to return to South Africa, it was clear that she was needed and that her experience in organizing concerts would be put to good use at the Royal Victoria Hall, whose manager she became in 1898. Baylis worked closely with her aunt, who continued to be involved in directing the Old Vic until her death in 1912.86 Under Lilian Baylis’s direction, the Royal Victoria Hall came into its own as a place for music rather than a place where music was made in the service of temperance. Symphonic concerts began to be offered in the early 1900s. Because these drew smaller audiences than opera and were therefore a luxury in an institution always short on funds, Baylis reluctantly recommended, at a 1907 Governors’ meeting, that they be discontinued. Here it was Emma Cons, an active member of the board until her death, who spoke up for music. Disagreeing with Baylis’s proposal, Cons called attention to the grant the Vic had received (from the City Parochial Fund) “to give good music to the people and raise their taste for same.” Baylis was overruled and the symphonic concerts continued.87 Both the popularity of opera and the limited access that low-income people had to this most expensive musical form argued for the Vic to specialize in operatic productions. After Cons’s death, the mixed character of nightly entertainments at the Vic changed, as indicated on the cover of the 1912–14 annual report whose title read as follows: “The Royal Victoria Hall—the People’s Opera House.” Until World War I, opera continued to be presented in tableau form. Prewar ticket prices ranged from two pence to two shillings; increasing costs necessitated higher prices after the war, but these were kept moderate.88 Art, said Baylis, was a necessity in the lives of rich and poor alike.89 According to E. J. Dent, who was associated with Baylis in a number of opera productions, she knew that she needed rich people’s money, but these were not the people she wanted in her theater. There were boxes for those who could pay for them, but Baylis viewed them with distaste as savoring too strongly of Covent Garden’s social exclusiveness.90 In the early days of cinema, films were shown regularly at the Vic and were highly profitable, but Baylis ended the practice as competition developed and the quality of movies, as she saw it, declined. Shakespearean productions became a feature of the Old Vic beginning in the latter part of 1914, and for some time after the war, opera and plays shared the theater, with opera given two nights each week and on alternate Saturday afternoons.91 The quality of operatic performance was high, a remarkable

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achievement considering the constant and dire need to economize—understudies could not be afforded and rehearsal time was severely limited. Wagnerian operas were produced in tableau form before World War I: Tannhäuser in 1904 and Lohengrin in 1906.92 From 1914, full opera was allowed. The Marriage of Figaro was presented in 1919 in a translation by E. J. Dent, and productions of Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute followed. Much of the credit for production quality was due to the 30-year musical direction of Charles Corri, who spent summer vacations reorchestrating opera scores for his smaller forces, always achieving “a proper consistency and balance of tone” and never overpowering the singers.93 Begun by one woman who sought to use music in the cause of temperance, the Old Vic developed into a musical institution that brought opera into thousands of lives that would never otherwise have experienced it. It was, as Ethel Smyth described it,“a growth as miraculous as anything in the Bible or in fairy tales.”94 If the Old Vic could be said to have developed from a temperance hall into something as miraculous as a fairy tale, the People’s Palace began as just such a fantasy—in the words of the one whose dream gave it life, it was “an impossible story.” That phrase formed the subtitle of Walter Besant’s best-selling 1882 novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men,95 a book that embodied his dream of a great palace of delight that would transform what the author thought of as the dreary lives of East London’s working poor. The story took shape in Besant’s mind during the course of visits to the East End in 1880 and 1881, visits that convinced him of the great need in this part of the city for “a centre of organised recreation, orderly amusement, and intellectual and artistic culture.”96 In his book, the dream is realized by the philanthropy of a brewery heiress, Angela Messenger, a Newnham College (Cambridge) graduate who becomes the richest woman in England, in partnership with Harry Goslet, a young man who, believing himself to be of aristocratic lineage, learns of his working-class origins. Just two years after his “impossible story” was published, Besant, in an article entitled “The Amusements of the People”—the title replicates the one used by Jevons six years earlier in the same journal—was able to tell his readers that the palace of delight, now called the “People’s Palace,” was about to be “transferred from the region of theory to that of practice” on the Mile End Road, the thoroughfare that “runs though the most extensive portion of the most dismal city in the world.”97 Funds for the first stage of the ambitious project were made available by the Beaumont Trust, whose assets had been dedicated to “the mental and moral improvement” of the inhabitants of Stepney and surrounding areas. The man selected as chairman of the Beaumont Trustees, Sir Edmund Currie, was well known in the East London political world. His wealth, like Angela Messenger’s,

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came from a distillery, and he used her fictional achievement as a blueprint for the Palace.98 The goals of the People’s Palace were set forth in a “handbook” issued before the ceremonies that celebrated its grand opening in May 1887, Queen Victoria’s fiftieth jubilee year. The Palace, the handbook declared, was established in order to “create and scatter pleasure,” pleasure of the kind that fit the term “rational amusement,” and confirmed the belief that “thought must underlie all true enjoyment.” Underlying its stated goal resonates a fear of the working-class radicalism that intensified in the 1880s, in response to a severe contraction in East End trade and employment.99 With adequate support, the People’s Palace would offer art not only as a source of “delight,” but also as a deterrent to dangerous pleasures: those ignorant of art, literature, and fine music are likely “to take their pleasure to their own injury, or by the sacrifice of the best in others.Those whose eyes or ears are untaught to accept the best in art or music, are apt to seek beauty in sensationalism or joy in excitement, and thus they become incapable of the gentler pleasures which create and foster home life.”100 When the Palace was officially opened with Victoria’s visit to the grand hall named for her, it was a dream only partially begun. Six months after that visit, Walter Besant wrote in the first issue of the Palace Journal that Queen’s Hall still “stood alone with no buildings round it”; the technical schools were obliged to hold programs “in the disused buildings of the old almshouses.”101 Additional funds were needed, as were volunteers. A pamphlet issued by the trustees appealed to the public for various forms of assistance: to the rich for needed money; to people with leisure and workers (the term used for those who came to the slums to help the poor) for their time; “to those who have talent for making music, or the gift of a beautiful voice, for service, . . . and to all those who love the people, and look for their emancipation from the thraldom of loneliness, ignorance, or dulness. . . .”102 It was clear from the start that music was to enjoy a central place as a refining pleasure in the People’s Palace; even those critical of the Palace’s later development—a group that included Besant—seemed to agree that music was one of its most striking areas of success. Queen’s Hall, the facility in which Palace concerts were held, accommodated an audience of 4,000; its size was conducive to the marshalling of large forces for oratorio and orchestral concerts, but unsuitable for the chamber music performances provided by the People’s Concert Society and other groups. Through his columns in the Palace Journal, Besant encouraged attendance at these concerts, exhorting audiences to proper concert behavior and berating lapses in decorum: “Could not we manage to refrain from talking loudly during the performances? So many of us seem to forget that the audience is assembled to hear music, and not the buzz of

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conversational friends.”103 Besant believed that participation in music and in group sports served a similar function: both pursuits provided training in discipline, an aspect of socialization that he saw as central to the culture of the upper-classes but lacking among those low on the social scale.The young man in public school, whether at work or play, “has gone through a mill of discipline out of school as well as in. Law reigns in his sports as in his studies.Whether he sits over his books or plays in the fields, he learns to be obedient to law, order, and rule. . . . This discipline of self, . . . the young workman knows not.” The inability of the working classes to sing in parts “unless, which is naturally rare, they belong to a church choir,” or to play an instrument (Besant ignores the strong working-class brass band tradition) shows the same failure of socialization, a failure Besant identified in the indifference of the working-class to reading or, still worse, in the preference of those who did read, for radical journals.104 The heady conclusion of Besant’s 1884 article on the people’s amusements shows how central music was to his vision of the Palace. It also reveals the limited and inaccurate nature of his understanding of the people and culture of East End London: I see before us in the immediate future a vast University whose home is in the Mile End Road; . . . the graduates of this University are the men and women whose lives, now unlovely and dismal, shall be made beautiful for them by their studies, and their heavy eyes uplifted to meet the sunlight; the subjects of examination shall be, first, the arts of every kind . . . and next, the games, sports, and amusements with which we cheat the weariness of leisure and court the joy of exercising brain and wit and strength. . . . Outside, in the street are those—a vast multitude to be sure—who are too lazy and too sluggish of brain to learn anything: but these, too, will flock into the Palace presently . . . to read in the library; to see the students’ pictures upon the walls; to listen to the students’ orchestra, discoursing such music as they have never dreamed of before; to look on while Her Majesty’s Servants of the People’s Palace perform a play, and to hear the bright-eyed girls sing madrigals.105

As one East End resident wrote in a commentary published in The Times soon after Besant’s death on June 9, 1901, Besant had exaggerated the dreariness of life in East London, which “was not even then merely a densely-populated desert.” Religious organizations and the Bow and Bromley Institute were already contributing to the area’s cultural enrichment before the publication of All Sorts and Conditions of Men. Even so, wrote The Times’s informant, local residents welcomed the attention the book brought to their needs and regarded Besant as a kind of “secular patron saint.” Although the “Palace of Delight,” as Besant had envisioned it, was a failure—“our people have not to any appreciable extent adopted it

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as a centre of social intercourse and enjoyment”—the technical colleges (wrote the East End resident), are highly valued, as are the Palace’s library, swimming bath, and the concerts in Queen’s Hall.106 Besant’s decision to personify the founder of his fictional Palace as a female philanthropist leads one to wonder what significance the institution had for women, both for young members and for the visitors who came to teach or to perform.An early list of Palace classes seems to indicate that music instruction was first offered to men—Singing, Choral Society, Pianoforte, Orchestral Society, and Military Band were included only under the category that was designated “For the Men”;107 music classes subsequently appeared in a separate listing, with reduced fees offered to female students in singing classes and the choral society.108 The listing of a woman, Mrs. Spencer, as one of two piano instructors in the Journal of May 15, 1889, suggests that women studied that instrument; they may also have studied violin with Mr. Jackson. The orchestra, which began as male, was later opened to all students, and women’s voices were needed in the choral society once student performances of oratorio began.109 Insofar as informal encouragement was concerned, Besant, despite his vision of women studying at the Palace University, strongly upheld the ideal of separate spheres based on female intellectual and physical inferiority. In the Palace Journal of May 29, 1889, he expressed pleasure in the news that women were not to be admitted to serve on County Councils. The law of nature, he wrote, had determined the proper spheres of the sexes: man works and creates, invents, and develops new branches of science, while woman enjoys the fruits of man’s labor: “When I can find women actually doing men’s work, I mean in the way of invention, . . . advancing science, creating new and original thought, carrying on war and extending the science of war, showing enterprise and power of combination,— then I will believe that they are fitted by nature to rule and govern the sex which has hitherto done all this. And that will never happen.” Not surprisingly, Palace Journal accounts of the activities of female Palace members emphasized social advantages, especially, their access to a well-furnished drawing-room where they could entertain friends. Besant as Journal editor did, however, include a “Ladies’ Column” that sometimes appeared under the byline of Clementina Black, a strong feminist who worked to improve the conditions of female sweated labor, a cause Besant warmly supported, and to bring about women’s suffrage, a cause he just as strongly opposed.110 Women musicians figured prominently in musical programs at the Palace. Lady Brooke, “Her Royal Highness the Ranee of Sarawak,” and Mrs. Godfrey Pearce entertained the Ladies’ Social Club with piano duets; the members, the Journal reported, were charmed not only with the performances but by the musicians’ “affability and friendly bearing.”111 Lady

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Brooke returned a month later to play duets with Orton Bradley, musical director at the Palace.112 The amount of music scheduled at Queen’s Hall—at least two concerts each week, on Wednesday and Saturday evenings, open to the general public and free of charge to members— opened many opportunities for performance, and several women’s groups were featured in the Palace’s first decades: Miss Eleanor Clausen’s Orchestra of Young Ladies, Miss Nellie Williams’s Gipsy choir, the Aeolian Ladies’ and English Ladies’ Orchestras, and the string bands conducted by Lady William Lennox and Lady Folkestone.113 One of the musicians who took part in the opening season of the People’s Palace was Rosabel Watson, then in her early twenties and a graduate of the Guildhall School of Music. A close look at her contribution to Palace and other East End musical activities, and at their role in developing her talents and enterprising spirit, will require a change of focus from the institutional profiles we have been looking at to the narrative of an individual career. Watson’s career will provide us with a closer look at the varied activities of charity music-workers in neighborhoods underserved by London’s mainstream musical institutions, and will show how such philanthropic experience could further the informal musical education and entrepreneurial skills of aspiring young professionals. Born in 1865, Rosabel Watson cherished memories that connected her family with the educational work of the philanthropist Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury: as a young man, her father had given up his evenings to teach in one of Shaftesbury’s “ragged” schools for poor orphan boys.114 The connection continued into Watson’s early childhood; she would always remember a New Year’s dinner her uncle gave to these boys, an event Rosabel witnessed from the vantage point of a high chair placed at one end of the room.Watson’s unpublished recollections, written when she was in her nineties, include no further information about her parents. She was raised by an aunt in circumstances that were middle-class but not wealthy. Her interest in theater was encouraged and she learned piano easily. During the latter part of the ‘70s,Watson regularly attended August Manns’s concerts at the Crystal Palace, the place whose memory she cherished as the source of all her early education in art and music. In 1880, she became a student at the new Guildhall School of Music, continuing her education as concertgoer, especially at concerts of the Philharmonic Society. She took advantage of student tickets and sat at the back of the orchestra so that she could observe the conductor in the hope that one day she would herself conduct an orchestra. By the time the People’s Palace opened, Watson had completed her professional education. She played violin and double bass—before long, viola and French horn would be added to these accomplishments—and was in great demand as a music teacher in girls’ schools.

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Watson performed in a chamber concert at the People’s Palace during its inaugural year and subsequently (beginning in the 1890s or early 1900s) contributed to Palace entertainments by arranging its programs of Sunday afternoon concerts.115 An article in The Musical Herald of May 1, 1912 credits her work in arranging these chamber programs with the increase in Sunday attendance at these Palace concerts from an average of 150 to 600. Simultaneously with her work for the Palace, Watson arranged classical chamber concerts at Toynbee Hall, where many well-known artists played before giving their West-End performances.Yet another site for her philanthropic activity was Bethnal Green, then London’s poorest district—in 1889, Charles Booth found almost half its population living below subsistence level.116 Watson sent a small all-female orchestra there each week to perform in a popular series of Shakespeare plays, presented under the auspices of the Oxford House Settlement at a derelict bathhouse. Watson’s “girls,” as she calls them, were probably not members of her well-paid professional (Aeolian Ladies’) orchestra, but residents of the hostel she and her close friend, the pianist Anne Mukle, established for women students at the Royal Academy of Music.Their work with Shakespeare in Bethnal Green brought them good experience and payment of five shillings each. Watson’s work at Toynbee Hall led directly to her appointment, in 1911, as director of the Institute School of Music in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, a community initiated by Henrietta Barnett, who had envisioned it as a place that would integrate people of a wide range of occupations and social classes.There Watson directed choirs and orchestras of adults and children, a madrigal society, and chamber music classes, activities that flourished until halted by the start of the war in 1914.This position brought her into association with important figures in the British music world: Henry Wood was the school’s president and Frank Bridge, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Gustav Holst gave lectures there.The cellist May Mukle (sister of Anne and of the trumpet player, Lillian Mukle), once a member of Watson’s orchestra, served on the teaching staff.117 The women’s suffrage movement reached its most intense phase during the years immediately preceding the war. “Of course,” writes Watson, “I joined it.” She organized women musicians in favor of the vote, took part in marches, and brought her orchestra to play at meetings at the Albert Hall. Suffrage work was cut short by the war, but Watson continued philanthropic music-making in concerts for the YMCA. Watson did not differentiate her charity work from the professional engagements at the center of her career; the contacts she made in one sphere were regularly drawn on in the other. Whether she was organizing programs for Toynbee Hall or the People’s Palace, directing studies at the Hampstead Garden Suburb school, or conducting theater orchestras, all of

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it was music-making, all of it worthwhile, important, and fulfilling. Insistent and vocal on the cause of an equal pay scale for women musicians, she found it natural to combine this strong professional consciousness with work in the philanthropic sector. Perhaps this explains some of the pleasure she shares in beginning her memoir of a long, eventful, and happy life with family memories of help provided to London’s ragged schoolboys. While Rosabel Watson’s career was unusual in its scope and variety, its combination of music-making for charity and for income, and of teaching and administration combined with performance, exemplify the interconnections of these modes of musical life, especially for women, at the turn of the century. Hardheaded and ambitious,Watson’s feminist goals were inseparable from her professional consciousness. Her pride in the talents and high performance standards of the women she appeared with and conducted was expressed in her repeated insistence on adequate compensation. In the crabbed handwriting of her old age, she added to her typed manuscript the memory of an event that strengthened her professional pride and feminist convictions.The event was an invitation from either the Fabians or the Independent Labor Party—she could no longer remember which—for her to bring a group of six players to entertain at a social gathering, a Saturday reception that would last from 6 to 9 P.M.; following the reception, there would be dancing from 9 to midnight.The pay offered to the women by these champions of the working classes for six hours of “hard playing” was a grand total of three pounds and three shillings for the group.Watson attributed her abandoning the “inherited” radicalism of her youth for the “hard bitten” Toryism of her later years to this demeaning offer. The prominence of women musician-volunteers in London’s active charitable life had the effect of linking the idea of “woman’s mission” to the expectation of gratis or low paid performance even when female musicians contracted for professional, noncharitable engagements. It was a linkage Watson would repeatedly and strenuously oppose, in precept as in practice.

Chapter Three

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Talents Discovered and Rewarded: Female Recipients of Music Philanthropy

ost of those who benefited from music philanthropy were concertgoers, the many thousands of women, men, and children whose lives were enriched by musical events planned and presented outside the network of commercial agencies and venues. Musical instruction was another benefit; classes in voice, piano, and choral singing were offered by philanthropic organizations, most notably by those discussed in the previous chapter, and by girls’ clubs and other recreational programs. People’s Palace members who joined its first chorus were soon raising their voices in the huge Palace concert hall, and singing was a favorite activity at settlement houses. From the mid-1880s, many women who had studied at London’s conservatories—in addition to the longestablished Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College opened in 1883, and the Guildhall School, established in 1880, soon described as the world’s largest music school—were able to train and conduct small choirs. According to Maude Stanley, founder of London’s girls’ clubs, singing was generally the most popular activity among their members. In her 1890 book, Clubs for Working Girls, written in response to repeated requests for advice on how to start and run them,1 Stanley suggested that club practice go beyond singing by ear to music appreciation and sight reading—most girls had already received some training in the tonic sol-fa method taught in the board schools.2 Stanley found that the girls enjoyed putting on an annual concert with a small ticket charge of a penny or so that raised money for the club. Her own club in Soho had weekly musical evenings where musician-volunteers came to sing and play:“Amateurs have now so

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improved that their playing is no longer scrambling through a few pieces; but they are often musicians.” The popularity of choral singing among girls’ club members was such that Maude Stanley’s suggestion of intergroup contests became a regular feature of the club calendar; congratulatory speeches at their conclusion were reported in the music press. An especially dedicated and resourceful choir director could form close bonds with her choristers. One noteworthy example, reported by The Musical Herald in 1912,3 was that of Miss Say Ashworth; the success of her Lancashire choir of “rough mill girls” led to invitations to sing at Interlaken and Lucerne. After hearing the girls perform in Manchester, Sir Henry Wood invited them to take part in a Promenade Concert. Keeping the girls’ attention after an exhausting workday, and developing their musical skills, had been a long and sometimes trying process, but, Miss Ashworth told The Herald, her pupils were worthy of all her efforts and she felt amply rewarded by their love and devotion. An important aspect of music philanthropy not yet touched upon is the story of assistance to impoverished girls of exceptional talent. The prototype narrative of talents rewarded and social heights attained was that of Christine Nilsson, the “second Swedish nightingale,” a star both in London opera and in high society during the peak years of her career. Nilsson’s story was frequently recounted in newspapers and magazines—often, as in The Graphic and The Illustrated London News, with accompanying illustrations of the beautiful singer. Christine (properly, Kristina) was the youngest of eight children in a poor Swedish family in which music held a special place: her father was “chief chorister” in the district church and her eldest brother, Karl, played the violin.4 Christine attracted attention from a very early age, both by her singing and her precocious mastery of the violin; she had taught herself secretly, using her brother’s instrument in his absence. Karl had already begun to earn money by playing his fiddle at fairs, and now decided to take Christine along, finding that her voice, which she often accompanied on the violin, attracted crowds and more generous handouts than he had formerly earned when performing alone. At one fair, a local magistrate was drawn to their music, and followed his queries about their family and circumstances with an offer to adopt the little girl so as to further her musical education. Christine’s father, who had previously rejected such offers as the “wiles of Satan,”5 accepted this one despite his wife’s opposition, as he believed the high status and sincere interest of the patron would bring her opportunities that would never otherwise be within her reach. Christine’s new life included two years at boarding school, education in several languages, a lengthy program of vocal training, mentoring by a baroness who had been a professional singer, and an ambition kindled by reports of the fame of her older countrywoman, Jenny

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Lind. Nilsson made her Paris debut in 1864; her first great success came a year later, in Mozart’s Magic Flute. As one contemporary wrote, the “poor child-violinist [had] now become the Queen of the Night.”6 Nilsson made her first London appearance in 1867 and, in the words of The Athenaeum, took the town “by charm.”7 Until 1888, when she appeared in her (second and final) farewell concert, Nilsson was one of the best known singers in London, her professional and personal life—including two marriages, the first of which was held in Westminster Abbey—regularly chronicled and commented on in the press. Except for the child-violinist Marie Hall, no later examples of the transformative power of individual music philanthropy conveyed the mythic quality of Nilsson’s, a quality that matched the unique enchantment of her looks and manner. But each of the following English examples of talented girls befriended by one or several patrons shares some element of Nilsson’s tale: removal from a parental home, nurturing by a surrogate parent (whether patron or musician-mentor), and the stirring of dazzling ambitions. Although the first of our three examples of philanthropic intervention in the lives of young women musicians did not succeed in charting a path to fame and fortune, the story of Hannah Hotten’s “discovery” provides us with testimony concerning the role of music in a girls’ club that is unusual in coming from the “girl”-participant herself (albeit in a narrative shaped by a journalist-interviewer) rather than a philanthropist’s account.8 Hannah’s story was related in a detailed interview, illustrated with her portrait, in the January 24, 1891, issue of the fashionable magazine, Lady’s Pictorial. The occasion for the article was the presentation of the Sainton-Dolby Scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music. The scholarship, named for the English contralto, Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, was open to female singers between the ages of 17 and 20 who were not already Academy students. The interviewer, having heard that there was something unusual in the background of the scholarship winner, had decided to investigate. Hannah Hotten had learned about the prize through a chain of events that began with her participation in a musical evening at the Greek Street Girls’ Club in Soho. Founded in 1880 by Maude Stanley, a daughter of Baron Stanley of Alderley, the Soho club was the model for a movement that grew so rapidly that by 1883 Stanley had decided to establish a Girls’ Club Union.9 A friend of Hannah’s who belonged to the Greek Street club had heard her sing while Hannah was scrubbing benches and floors in the Gospel Temperance Mission building where her father served as keeper.The friend invited Hannah to take part in a musical evening at the club, where Maude Stanley, impressed by her lovely mezzo-soprano voice, asked if she would like to study music. Hannah, as she later told the Lady’s Pictorial, “jumped at the very idea of such a thing,” and accepted the gift

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of introductory lessons from Edwin Holland, a voice teacher at the Guildhall School of Music who also taught at the Royal Academy. Ambition was no new thing to Hannah, who had sometimes “grumbled” over her work “and longed for a different kind of life.” Several members of her family were musical, but had never received instruction and could play the piano and other instruments only by ear. By the time of her interview, Hannah had moved into the Soho club, where she lived for six days each week, a number of girls’ clubs having added (or affiliated with) residential facilities—“homes”—for the girls they served. Hannah ascribed the good fortune of her scholarship award to the personal interest and kindness of Miss Stanley, and gratefully acknowledged the help of a second philanthropist, Lady de Clifford, who invited her and another club member for a month-long country house visit where Hannah sang to her hostess each morning. Hannah’s scholarship would provide her with 15 guineas each year for a total of three years of study; she knew that would pay far less than half her tuition fees.10 Unfortunately the Lady’s Pictorial article did not conclude with the announcement of a subscription for the support Hannah would need for the remaining tuition cost and living expenses, ending instead with a tribute to the Greek Street Girls’ Club whose existence was proof “of the vast amount of good work which is being done by a few good women in ‘darkest London,’ quietly and unobtrusively, without any flourish of trumpets or beating of drums.” Whether or not the cause was the inadequacy of her award, Hannah appears to have dropped out of the Royal Academy after one year.11 Like Hannah Hotten, Adelina De Lara and Marie Hall experienced childhoods of severe poverty. But unlike Hannah, the young Adelina and Marie came from homes with musical instruments and a parent who could impart some level of musical instruction. Impressive talents and early instruction notwithstanding, financial deprivation would have prevented De Lara and Hall from reaching the heights of their profession, had they not attracted the generous and long-term support of a group of music patrons and professional musicians. The assistance that both young women received—and the public’s readiness to recognize their gifts—resulted in some degree from the legacy of the eminent women musicians who preceded them and gave legitimacy to female ability in instrumental performance. For De Lara, there were many pianist predecessors, among whom her own teachers, Fanny Davies and Clara Schumann, were personally the most important. Marie Hall, whose teachers were men, benefited from the examples of earlier performers whose brilliance had made obsolete the long prejudice against women violinists—first, of course,Wilma NormanNeruda, then, in the generation that separated her from Hall, a succession

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of performers well known to English concert audiences, among them, Teresina Tua, Emily Shinner, Camille Urso, Gabriele Wietrowetz, Marie Soldat, and the American Maud Powell. Adelina De Lara (originally, Preston) was born in 1872 into a family of musical gifts and precarious financial status. Her mother, once a singer of promise, had ruined her prospects by a disastrous first marriage; her father, who played several instruments and had a beautiful baritone voice, made a tenuous living as an engraver.12 Adelina had a close relationship with two half-sisters; her half-brother, George, angered his father by leaving home in his teens to marry an actress.13 In her autobiography, Finale, De Lara writes that she has no memory of learning to read music; it was almost as if she had been born with this skill. Her family moved often, as her father was perpetually in search of clients for his engravings. However dismal their lodgings, they always managed to rent a piano and Adelina, who never attended school, had many hours each day to develop talents that were evident from an early age. The Prestons’ income fluctuated wildly; when money grew so short that the family went hungry, they would be rescued by emergency funds from a well-to-do London aunt.14 When Adelina was six-and-a-half, she played before the kindly owners of a Staffordshire hotel, who encouraged her to continue with similar performances.Adelina took part in a children’s musical competition in Liverpool and won the prize. By this time, her parents saw her potential as family breadwinner and directed their efforts to furthering her career, a process that began with a name change. Having entered a music shop with her father and his family name,Adelina exited it as Mademoiselle De Lara; the adoption of her mother’s maiden name resulted from the shop owner’s advice to her father that his child’s career would go nowhere with an English name. For several years,Adelina supported the family with a succession of engagements that began in Liverpool at a Madame Tussaud-like waxworks gallery where she played for four pounds per week every afternoon, from 3 to 5:30 and again in the evening, from 8 to 10. Her performances often drew crowds.The Manchester Guardian commented on the “astonishing” abilities of this ten-year-old pianist who played for several hours at each session, entirely from memory. But after awhile, the novelty wore off and the crowds began to thin. Soon afterwards, tragedy struck; in 1883, during the space of a few weeks,Adelina was orphaned—her father died of pneumonia, her mother of heart failure—and her 18-year-old eldest sister, unable to cope with loss and fear for the future, committed suicide by drowning. Fortunately, the middle sister, Pen, age 16, thought of writing to a concert manager who had once heard Adelina, and the young pianist was able to support them both until a second aunt, who lived in London and took in paying guests, invited the girls to stay with her.

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This move proved to be the turning point in De Lara’s career. One of the aunt’s boarders, an army captain, invited the sisters to visit his mother at their home in Brighton. Introductions to highly placed patrons followed: Adelina played at Marlborough House before the Prince and Princess of Wales, then visited Birmingham where she performed for two wealthy families prominent in that city’s active musical life, the Priestleys of the Music Warehouse of Rogers and Priestley, and Mr. and Mrs. George Hope Johnstone. These families provided a form of personal patronage that, in De Lara’s opinion, became far less common as the twentieth century advanced; When I was young, music was a far more social and personal affair than it is today, and it was very usual for eminent families to give their patronage to musicians of promise, to help and encourage, support them financially and give social functions at which an artist was introduced to their circle and played in the intimate surroundings of their homes.

The interest shown in her by these wealthy business families and music lovers opened a new world to de Lara. She played chamber music for the first time with the Priestleys’ two sons, a violinist and a cellist, an experience that made her “come alive.” At a musical evening she was taken to, she heard the pianist Fanny Davies, then just returned from Frankfurt, where she was studying with Clara Schumann. Davies’s performance was a revelation to Adelina; it made her aware of her own limitations as a performer, and stimulated her desire to improve. Soon afterwards, de Lara accepted an invitation to play at the Johnstones’ house. When she finished her performance of Schumann’s D Major Novelette, Fanny Davies rushed up to the young prodigy, embraced her, and spoke “six glorious words: . . . ‘You must go to Madame Schumann.’”15 After a year of preparatory study with Davies, Adelina auditioned with Clara Schumann and was able to spend five years studying in Germany, her expenses underwritten by several patrons, the most important of whom was George Johnstone. As Jerrold Northrop Moore characterizes him, Johnstone was a man of “formidable business ability, and . . . an experienced patron who understood musicians’ problems, having dealt at close quarters with Gounod, Grieg, and Dvorak, and entertained them in his home.”16 “A great man and a good man,” as de Lara called him, Johnstone understood the importance of his role and was gratified by the relationships that followed upon his generosity; he told de Lara that ingratitude was the greatest sin.17 The years in Frankfurt were the happiest of de Lara’s life, interspersed as they were with holidays in England hosted by her patrons and their mu-

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sical friends. She met Grieg and Dvorak and upon her return to England, made her home for a time with Sir Henry Thompson and his wife. Kate Loder Thompson, who years earlier had given up a successful career as concert pianist for marriage, was now incapacitated by severe arthritis and took a strong interest in furthering the career of her new guest. In March, 1891, de Lara launched her London career with a stunning debut at the “Pops,” an engagement made possible by an introduction from Madame Schumann. Once the victim of childhood exploitation and successive tragedies, de Lara had reached the heights of her profession thanks to the kindness of several eminent musicians and the long-term assistance of wealthy and well connected music lovers. Equally heart-wrenching and inspirational was the story of the prodigy violinist Marie Hall. “The one and only, our Marie,” began an article on the violinist Marie Hall sent to The Strad in 1907 by a correspondent identified only as “Lancastrian.” This effusion exemplified the heady excitement generated by this small, frail, and dark-eyed young woman whose astonishing London debut had been made four years earlier, when she played an extraordinarily demanding program—Paganini’s Violin Concerto in D major, Tschaikowsky’s Concerto, and Wieniawski’s “Faust” Fantasie—demonstrating, as critics enjoyed pointing out, amazing reserves of strength, endurance, and that favorite word of nineteenth-century philosophers, will.18 It may be that the recent loss (in 1901) of England’s internationally noted native-born woman violinist, Emily Shinner, at the age of 39, intensified the rapture that greeted Marie Hall’s debut. Journalists described Hall’s story as a romance; although she declined to use that word in the numerous interviews she granted, she drew upon the language of legend by referring to herself as “Cinderella,” and to the “fairy godmother and godfather” who were the main actors in devising her escape from poverty, drudgery, and a life inimical to the development of great musical gifts. The legendary character of Hall’s rise to success and fame—“A Few Years Ago Earning a Few Pennies a Night in the Slums of London, Now Delighting the Musically Elect of America,” wrote World Magazine on Hall’s first American tour19—was magnified by journalistic hyperbole. Once success had become a normal part of her life, Hall grew weary of the endless retellings of her tale, advising the interviewer for The Strad in 1910 that “I am really sick to death of all that has been written about my youth and its vicissitudes.”20 In earlier interviews, however, Marie Hall had shared her personal history openly and eagerly. To contemporaries, it was even more compelling than Nilsson’s, for it was, after all, the story of “our Marie.” Like de Lara’s rise to fame, Hall’s could not have happened without the generosity of professional musicians; like Nilsson’s, it benefited,

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during its early stages, from the kindness of a group whose charity is well known but hard to quantify, that of the poor.21 Marie Hall was born in 1884, into an environment of music and harsh poverty. Her father, a harpist in Newcastle, is variously described as a member of the Carl Rosa orchestra and a player in a music hall; it seems likely that he was both.22 Marie’s memory of the family’s Newcastle home was of the scampering and squeaking of rats that could be heard through the walls.23 But there was always music-making at home, performed by her father with several relatives and friends. Hall wanted his daughter to become a harpist, but like Nilsson and Neruda, she was passionately drawn to the violin and he reluctantly allowed her to learn it. At the age of nine, Marie made her debut at Newcastle Town Hall.A group of wealthy men who attended it offered to sponsor her musical education, but as their plans would have required her to leave home, Marie’s father refused their offer. A wanderer by nature, Hall’s father moved the family to Malvern, where the two played for handouts at street corners.24 It was there that Edward Elgar, still several years from celebrity, discovered Marie, bought her an Italian violin, and managed to convince her father to allow her to travel to London to be heard by a great master. Elgar gathered money from several friends and Marie played the Mendelssohn concerto for the German musician, August Wilhelmj, his wife accompanying at the piano.25 Wilhelmj invited Marie to live in his home, where he would take charge of her scholastic and musical education. The 11-year-old violinist remained for three months and had daily lessons with the master. But she was not happy—later she said she had been too young to appreciate the value of the experience and longed for home—and left, with the understanding that her return would always be welcome. Home, however, was not the right place either; its deficiencies were less tolerable after the stimulus of several months of study and encouragement, and Marie became increasingly irritated by “our erratic way of life.” Mrs. Bramlis,“a kind friend,” offered to fund a three-year course of study at the Birmingham School of Music.There Marie worked with Max Mossel, a former pupil of the eminent Belgian violinist Ysaye, and lived with Mrs. Ratcliffe, another wealthy and musical woman who treated her as a daughter and saw to her general education. After these promising developments, the 14-year-old Marie encountered a great setback. Having won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, she was obliged to decline it; her father was too poor to pay her living expenses in London and said she was needed at home to help with three younger siblings. By this time the family had moved to Bristol.Again, Marie and her father played for local people, especially along the docks and waterfronts. “Only the remembrance of my mother and the children at

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home induced us to take the few coins these people could so ill afford to give.”26 Although the coins were helpful to her family’s immediate needs and the sympathetic audience response was gratifying—“they used to gather closer and closer about us as we played, and for a time they would forget their own misery”27—the playing that brought her the attention of people who could afford to help in a substantial way did not take place in the streets but outside the windows of great mansions. Marie and her father, after obtaining permission to enter the grounds, would perform in front of drawing-room windows; the result was usually an invitation to play inside, one often followed by other engagements.28 The existence of this clientele of at-home givers, and of music lovers who had heard her play or learned of her gifts from others, emboldened Marie to give a concert. She sold tickets from house to house, but once it became clear that expenses would exceed sales, she made the difficult decision of canceling the event and returning the ticket money. Fortunately, Marie shared her troubles with a sympathetic musician who had been generous in her purchase of tickets. Jane Jackson Roeckel, a pianist and music educator who had studied with Hallé and Clara Schumann, dedicated much of her life to helping musicians in need.29 She arranged for Marie to meet with Philip Napier Miles, a composer who, thanks to his inheritance of landed property, was also a millionaire active in support of music in the Bristol area.30 With financial help from Miles and a plan devised by Jane Roeckel and her husband, also a composer (Marie had been introduced to these “fairy godparents” by the musician and scholar, Canon Fellowes), Mr. Hall was persuaded, albeit reluctantly—for he did not like a plan “that put me into control of others”—to accept his daughter’s departure for three years of study in London under Professor Johann Kruse. Miles paid Hall one pound per week as compensation for the loss of his daughter’s services. In London, she lived with a special governess and also studied French, German, and literature.31 Continued support from Philip Napier Miles enabled Marie to study, at age 17, with the great Sevçik in Prague, with whom she worked for almost a year and a half. Following a successful Prague concert, which Sevçik arranged on the advice of Dvorak, Hall returned to London for her sensational debut at St. James’s Hall. It was, indeed, a story of astonishing gifts, of almost superhuman perseverance, of the patronage of several compassionate music-lovers, and of the sympathy and generosity of a number of professional musicians. The important role of various sorts of philanthropic endeavor in the lives of late-nineteenth-century women musicians, both professional and amateur, provided fiction writers with new themes; in magazine stories, the charity concert and musical performance on the city streets were especially favored. These portrayals always stress the presence of redemptive motiva-

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tion and outcomes; in the course of telling the story, the author typically shows how a “womanly” goal justifies a high level of self-confident, even assertive, behavior and the incursion into public space. Two short stories of the mid-1890s, “Corinna’s Concert” by Eric Austin and “The Result of a Song” by Ellen A. Bennett, show authors exploiting the contemporary interest in female music-making—reflecting, humorously in the first case, on altered modes in philanthropy suited to the modern woman, and in the second, on the moral responsibility that falls to the woman gifted with a beautiful voice. Published in The Strand Musical Magazine in 1895, a new journalistic venture by which publisher George Newnes tried to develop a specialized version of his enormously popular The Strand Magazine,32 “Corinna’s Concert” contrasts the fund-raising styles and methods of Aunt Evelina with her young niece, Corinna, the vicar’s daughter.The concert that provides the focal point of the story will raise money for “coals and blankets” to give comfort to the poor people of their town in the coming winter. Aunt Evelina’s contribution will come from her ladylike watercolor art: the local stationer will give her two shillings for each of her pictures of roses. Corinna urges her to play a piano solo at the concert: “I play? Before a crowd of people, many of them strange gentlemen?” Pressed by Corinna’s pleading of the worthy cause, Evelina reluctantly agrees, but will blame her niece if she is “laid up afterwards.” Stepping out of her aunt’s old-fashioned ideas of self-effacing philanthropy, Corinna seizes on the news that Signor Baretti, one of Europe’s most renowned singers, has stopped at the local hotel on his way to London. Dressed in her most attractive outfit—“for it must be admitted with regret that Corinna had set forth with the deliberate intention of fascinating the celebrated baritone”—Corinna goes to the hotel and asks where she can find the signor: “In the public coffee-room?” “Why, yes, miss—it’s a public room.” “Then show me in there.”

Furious at the intrusion after declaring he would give no interviews, Signor Baretti, whose English appears curiously unaccented, bursts into Figaro-like laughter when he sees that Corinna, who has taken possession of a chair and concentrates on her copy of The Times, is reading it upside down. At first responding with a blush, Corinna breaks into “low, musical laughter.” The ice broken, Corinna pleads her cause. Signor Baretti, who admits to being a native of County Cork, has himself known what it means to be without coals and blankets. The concert, featuring the great Baretti

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and other eminent performers he is able to line up, is a grand success.Aunt Evelina does not perform, but Corinna, at Baretti’s request, charms the audience with an Old English song. “Radiant with the thought of having successfully provided for her beloved poor,” Corinna has also found her man; six months later, they are married. If Corinna is not, as Baretti initially suspected, a “New Woman,” but one content to carry out the nurturing work of vicar’s daughter, she has nonetheless left far behind the backstage role of her aunt. Full of self-confidence in approaching, alone, a man in a public place, uninhibited about laughing out loud, comfortable in performing on stage with professional musicians before an audience of county families, Corinna has reached her story’s happy ending in a recognizably modern spirit. And even the traditional narrative closure of matrimony encompasses a departure from tradition: the author of a more conventional version of this story would inevitably have discussed a lessthan-enthusiastic response by Corinna’s family and community to her marriage to a professional singer. As one would have expected from its placement in the 1896 “Extra Christmas Number” of The Girl’s Own Paper, in a section called “Our Christmas Wreath,” Ellen A. Bennett’s story, “The Result of a Song,” contains a lesson appropriate to the season. At a time when a significant number of the magazine’s readers were enrolled in conservatory classes or studying music privately, among whom some unknown proportion nurtured heady dreams of success, their “own” paper warned them of the moral dangers of such dreams. Evelyn Stuart, an orphan cared for by the Lesters, loving friends of her mother, decides on a singing career when financial setbacks undermine the formerly prosperous condition of her guardians. Renamed Leonora Dolci, she enjoys a success beyond anything she had thought possible and, as the story begins, has accepted the marriage proposal of a man of wealth and high position. Evelyn tries to hide from herself the doubts she feels about this match; her fiancé has made not only the usual stipulation that she quit “the stage,” but has also insisted she no longer give gratis performances in the parish of clergyman Basil Lester, son of her former guardians. Arnold Vincent would not have her wasting her voice on Lester’s crew of ruffians:“They could hear plenty of songs in the publics quite good enough for them, she should keep her voice for his friends. . . . In vain she had pleaded the desirability of keeping his poor friends out of those very publics. . . . She had been obliged to tell Basil that she should not be able to sing any more.” Having come to town for a day of shopping, Evelyn is on her way to catch the evening train when she encounters a desperate old woman, shivering with the winter cold as she tries to attract handouts by singing. Frustrated by the inability of her weak and quavering voice to attract passersby,

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the woman begs the elegantly dressed Evelyn for help.The old woman and her seriously ill husband are newcomers to this town, have exhausted their resources, and face the danger of starvation. She has tried to speak with the local clergyman, but he has been busy with other demands and it may take several days before he can turn from the pressing needs of local residents. Evelyn, an experienced slumworker,“trusted to her instinct to warn her if she was being taken in” and believed the woman’s story. Since she has spent all her money and has little in her purse besides her railway ticket, she decides to take the poor woman’s place as street singer and present her with the proceeds. A crowd gathers as Evelyn’s beautiful voice rings out. Pausing in her program, she announces that she sings on behalf of the brave old woman and her sick husband, and is “ashamed to say I have spent more in this one day than would have kept them in comfort for many.” As she continues to sing, a friend of Arnold Vincent passes by and anticipates the influence his recounting of this scene will have on his friend’s marriage plans. Evelyn’s singing has potent effects: the song she repeats, about faithful love, inspires her hearers’ commitments to their own loved ones, and a large sum is collected that will help the old couple to survive their crisis and resettle in St. Cuthbert’s Almshouses.Vincent, when he learns of Evelyn’s street singing, immediately ends their relationship. Evelyn returns to her profession, and after singing in a charity concert to benefit a hospital, she finds her true love and soul mate in Basil Lester. This story does not disapprove of professional singing for women, a career that The Girl’s Own Paper by this time included among those acceptable for the respectable modern girl, especially for those obliged to make their own way in the world. Bennett’s story does, however, urge the dangers of this, and other musical careers, in their potential for leading women astray. The beauty of a woman’s voice, an especially powerful moral agent, can be used for good or ill. Even a good woman like Evelyn Stuart can be led away from woman’s true mission—to help those in need and strengthen virtue—towards a pattern of life that places excessive value on fine clothes and surroundings, a pattern that can easily lead to a disastrous marital choice.This is hardly a new theme, but there is an element in the story that reflects both the increased acceptance of careers for women, even on “the stage,” as well as several decades of female experience in music philanthropy. A man like Arnold Vincent, who would have turned his wife’s singing into an entirely private social acquisition, is heavily censured by the author. The reason for this disapproval is not his insistence on his future wife’s retirement from a money-making career; the author does not engage with this question, and most, although not all, readers of the 1890s (and much later) would have accepted this prerequisite for marriage as reasonable. But this prospective upper-class

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husband’s proscription of singing for charitable causes and in concerts for slum-dwellers is unequivocally denounced as morally reprehensible, for such restriction would prevent a precious and uniquely constituted moral agent from achieving its beneficent goals, goals seen as central to woman’s character and as necessary to the accomplishment of her societal mission. Music philanthropy, of which we have seen many examples in these two chapters, served to reaffirm traditional female identity even as it allowed—and, indeed, encouraged—women to bring their private accomplishments into ever more public spheres.

Chapter Four

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Woman and the Devil’s Instrument Tartini dreamed the Devil stood one night At the bed-foot, illumined by a beam, Charming alike his hearing and his sight, By fiddling a most enchanting theme. . . . .. . . .. So strongly did it haunt his waking mind, That he with pen and ink on paper wrote The melody and harmony combined. . . . .. . . .. Joachim picks it with such art and skill, That hearers dream old Nick enchants them still. Anon., The Musical World, 8 July 1865 How oft thy full & shapely bosom Hath charm’d my ravished eye . . . .. . . .. The graceful beauty of thy smooth neck I’ve cherish’d, with many a fond caress, Delighting o’er & o’er to trace, The beauteous curves that grace thy head The acme of the sculptor’s art. Ethelbert Ames, “My Fiddle,” The Violin Times, February 1905

he subject of this chapter is the informal ban on women’s violinplaying in England and its demise, a process that began in the 1870s and developed so rapidly that two decades later, observers of the music scene began to take note of a “glut” of female violinists. What

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was the basis of the long-standing proscription of female violinists? Why and how was it overthrown? How did society respond to the new figure of the woman violinist? The explanation most often given for the ban was a perceived awkwardness and distortion in the player’s stance and movements: as a writer in The Fiddler explained during the mid-1880s—by which time the woman violinist was a well-accepted figure both in domestic music and on the concert platform—the most important source of the problem had been the depressed position of the violinist’s head and the rapid arm movements required in presto passages.1 Such temporary distortion was acceptable for a man, but not for a girl or woman whose attractiveness was all-important and who, for this reason, was advised to play the piano, which required no facial or bodily distortion, or the guitar or harp, both of which were said to call attention to gracefully feminine movements of hand and wrist.2 For reasons that will be explored in detail in the course of this chapter, I believe that the awkwardness ascribed to female violin-playing before the 1870s—a perception that, as The Fiddler’s reflections on a seemingly distant past would suggest, almost immediately disappeared once the ban was broken—never adequately accounted for the heavy emotional weight of the negative response evoked by the sight of the female violinist.To say this is not to deny the reality of prevailing perceptions of awkwardness, but rather to suggest that feelings of aesthetic displeasure at a tucked-in chin or too-prominent elbow seem puzzlingly insufficient to account for the intensity of the moral disapproval—disgust is not too strong a word—that characterized the response to the female violinist; the vehemence of that disapproval, when looked at with the benefit of over a century’s distance, seems vastly disproportionate to the ascribed cause. The charge of awkwardness was clearly a rationalization, rather than the primary reason for keeping girls and women from playing the instrument. The most potent causes of the ban lay hidden well below the surface of journalistic discourse and drawing room conversation. A large and varied body of evidence drawn from music criticism, articles in girls’ and women’s magazines, and from poets and fiction writers points to two deeply rooted and psychologically potent reasons for the conviction that female violin-playing was inappropriate, improper, and aesthetically jarring.The first of these causes is found in the highly gendered perception of the instrument itself and in the mode of its playing; the second is found in the violin’s close association with sin, death, and the devil. This chapter will explore the background to these reasons, the factors that led to the overturning of the ban on female performance, and the appearance of the new phenomenon of the woman violinist; chapter 5 will explore the response to this change, both in the music world and in the

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general culture of the time, especially as the novel combination of womanand-violin was depicted and interpreted by artists and fiction writers. It is important to see this major change on the late-nineteenth-century music scene in the context of the developing feminist movement. This is not to suggest that all, or even most, women violinists were feminists: no doubt, many women musicians, including those who played the violin, shared the indifference to the cause of female suffrage expressed by the eminent Czech-born violinist,Wilma Norman-Neruda; since her London debut in 1869, Neruda was looked upon as the shining role model by women who aspired to play the violin. Whatever their political orientation, however, women who sought to widen their options in the world of music were seen as part of the broader movement to expand female opportunities and gain greater respect for female intellect and talents. As a prominent music critic noted in The Athenaeum, England’s major journal of high culture, in response to news of concerto performances by Neruda and the French-American violinist, Camilla Urso, “The fair sex are gradually encroaching on all man’s privileges.”3 Indeed they were, and women’s success in gaining access to the violin quickly led, first by implication and then in action, to challenges to other prohibited instruments. “We are in the nineteenth century, and music is having her day,” wrote Bertha Thomas, in her 1880 novel, The Violin-Player, the earliest example I have found of a series of fictional works about female violinists that appeared over the course of three decades.4 Eight years later Mrs. Humphry Ward, in her most famous novel, Robert Elsmere, which also portrays a woman violinist as a central character, wrote that it was music rather than her own field of literature that expressed “the heart of our own day.”5 The presence of brilliant violinists of both sexes in the works of a surprisingly large number of popular writers of this time may be seen as the response of perceptive authors to the centrality of this instrument in nineteenthcentury musical composition and performance. Prized for its beauty of tone, brilliance, emotional expressiveness, and power, the violin occupies a unique position in Western music; as the major instrument in chamber ensembles and orchestras and, like the piano, an instrument prized for its tradition of virtuoso solo performance, the violin has provided composers of various periods and many styles with one of their richest sources of inspiration.6 Given the instrument’s central and celebrated status, the informal ban on women’s violin-playing represents one of many manifestations of women’s disadvantaged position during the Victorian era. It was a significant obstacle to the full expression of female talent within the music world. For this reason, January 18, 1872, should be seen as a landmark date; on that day, the Royal Academy of Music, then a half-century old and England’s most prestigious institution of music education, enrolled its first

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female violin student.7 Coeducational since its inception, the Academy had previously limited the instruction of girls and women to voice, piano, and harp, a policy that reflected widespread and deeply rooted beliefs about the suitability of some musical instruments, and the inappropriateness of others, to performers of the female sex. Two eighteenth-century examples can help us begin an exploration of the nature of the prejudice against women violinists. The strength of the prejudice at this time is especially striking, as many upper-class women of the period, like the male amateurs of their acquaintance, enjoyed playing the bowed viola da gamba—held on or between the knees—without evoking even a suggestion of social disapproval. Contemporary comments make it clear that the supposed unsuitability of the violin to the female sex was visual, a matter of sight rather than sound: something about the playing of this instrument looked unfeminine.This opinion was so strongly held that in the late 1750s, the father of the child prodigy violinist, Gertrude Schmeling, was persuaded “by the advise of English ladies, who dislike a female fidler,”8 [sic] to have her give up the instrument and learn singing instead. Fortunately, the girl had the makings of a beautiful voice and, under her married name of Gertrude Mara, became of the most famous singers of the late eighteenth century.9 The ban on female violin playing in England was never absolute; from time to time, a woman would perform on the instrument, but praise in some quarters was typically matched by negative comments regarding the unsuitability of instrument to gender. For example, Louise Gautherot, a former pupil of the great Viotti and one of only two women violinists listed in Doane’s 1794 Directory of Musicians, won high praise from the Morning Post for her participation in London concerts during the late 1780s and early nineties. But William Parke, principal oboist at Covent Garden, whose memoirs are a major source of English music history during these years, wrote that the ear had been more gratified than the eye by her “masculine effort.”10 Mme. Gautherot, Parke said, should play her fiddle publicly only in darkened rooms.11 In 1834, Elise Mayer Filipowicz, a former student of Spohr, played a violin concerto at one of the prestigious Philharmonic Society concerts in what was probably the first public performance by a woman violinist in London since the time of Madame Gautherot. Madame Filipowicz was received sympathetically, not only because of her fine musicianship, but also because she played as an exile and sole support of her family, her husband having lost his fortune in the Polish revolution.These circumstances notwithstanding, The Athenaeum’s response to her performance included the comment that while Mme. Filipowicz’s skill and feeling “[gave] our ears great pleasure, . . . our eyes told us that the instrument is not one for ladies to attempt.”12 When many years later, H. Heathcote Statham, architect, Fellow of the Royal Philharmonic Society,

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and writer on music, observed that in Jane Austen’s day,“a girl who played the violin would have been considered to have unsexed herself,”13 he described a frame of mind present in all the examples just cited, and one that persisted at least through the 1860s. Although the objection to female violin-playing was visually rather than acoustically based—no one claimed that the sound of the violin, like that of a strident brass instrument, was unfeminine—it is surprising how seldom those who objected to Gautherot, Filipowicz, and other women violinists identified the precise source of the gender violation they so strongly perceived. My belief that an unattractively positioned chin and rapid arm motions do not adequately explain the revulsion evoked even by the most gifted female violinist is suggested by the striking omission of the cause of the “unsexing” in Statham’s comment, and is confirmed by the remarks of two other well-informed observers of the music scene who confessed themselves puzzled by the harsh attitudes towards women fiddlers. “Female violinists are rare,” wrote The Spectator in 1860, “the violin being, we do not know why, deemed an unfeminine instrument” (my emphasis). In a similar vein, Blanche Lindsay, co-proprietor of the ultra-fashionable Grosvenor Gallery and a talented amateur violinist (her portrait performing on her instrument was a major feature of the gallery’s celebrated opening exhibition in 1877) wrote in an 1880 article in The Girl’s Own Paper that the perception of the woman violinist as unattractive seemed to her an inherent rejection of several of the most aesthetically appealing traditions of earlier ages: had not women and girls been admired for skill on the viol? Had not Renaissance artists delighted in the graceful images of female string-players?14 Why, then, did nineteenth-century women violinists evoke such strong disapproval? Attributing the demise of the ban to her friend Wilma Neruda, a kind of “musical St. George,” who “violin and bow in hand, [fought] the dragon of prejudice,” she nevertheless wondered why such heroism should ever have been necessary. Portions of the answer to Blanche Lindsay’s question are implicit in or suggested by other passages in her own perceptive article. First is the specificity of the prejudice: animus toward the woman violinist had not been inherited from her performance on an earlier bowed instrument: it was the violin itself, in a woman’s hands, that evoked hostility. Lady Lindsay’s article also identifies the second component of the prejudice: its strongly moral resonance. The ill will toward women violinists was far more than a phenomenon of aesthetics alone; for a woman to play the violin was not merely unattractive, but in some clearly present but undefined way, reprehensible. Evidence of the disreputable aura that attached to the woman violinist is not hard to find. “I have . . . in former days,” wrote Blanche Lindsay in

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her 1880 article, “known girls of whom it was darkly hinted that they played the violin, as it might be said that they smoked big cigars, or enjoyed the sport of rat-catching”; these comments strongly imply that some women, no doubt members of families with male violinists, were playing the instrument in private settings, while trying to guard their reputation by keeping this activity from public view.15 The author of an 1892 article in Sylvia’s Journal, who praised Wilma Neruda for doing “more than anyone else to establish an honourable position for female violinists,” added that, “until her advent, that instrument was too much regarded as exclusively masculine, and the women who adopted it were, as a rule, looked upon with disapprobation.”16 In an 1893 article, Hugh Reginald Haweis, reflecting on the woman violinist depicted in the novel Robert Elsmere (published seven years earlier), remembered the time when a drawing-room performance similar to Rose Leyburn’s would have been thought “most unfeminine, if not highly indelicate.”17 Gender-specific rules regarding musical instruments have existed in other periods and cultures and have served to limit male, as well as female, activity:18 during much of the nineteenth century, English boys were discouraged from studying the piano, an activity considered de rigueur for their sisters. As noted earlier the musical entertainer George Grossmith, born in 1847, remembered the surprised comments evoked by his youthful piano-playing, when he often heard ladies comment on how odd it was to see a boy pianist. Piano-playing, Grossmith wrote in an 1888 memoir, was then considered a sign of effeminacy.19 Negative attitudes toward women violinists were long prevalent in continental Europe as well as in England; despite his admiration for the musicianship of his pupil, Elise Mayer Filipowicz, Louis Spohr accused women of mishandling the violin and lowering performance standards.20 But the prejudice against female violinists seems to have been especially tenacious in England, even though English women visiting Germany characteristically described women’s lives there as far more restricted than in their own country. Authoritative testimony on this point was provided by Wilma Neruda in an 1890 interview for The Woman’s World: “When I first came to London, [in 1869] . . . I was surprised to find that it was thought almost improper, certainly unladylike, for a woman to play on the violin. In Germany the thing was quite common and excited no comment. I could not understand—it seemed so absurd—why people thought so differently here.Whenever in society I hear a young lady tuning a violin I think of . . . the reproachful curiosity with which the people at first regarded my playing.”21 It is a now almost a cliché to compare the violin’s softly curving shape with a woman’s body. Stephen S. Stratton took evident pleasure in alluding to this comparison in the 1883 paper he read before the Musical As-

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sociation, in which he championed women’s right to equality within the music profession; perhaps Stratton meant the resemblance to serve as an outward sign of the innate musicality he attributed to the female sex.22 The analogy between body and fiddle noted by Stratton and by many since his time is implicit in standard terms used to describe sections of the instrument: “belly,” “back,” “waist,” and “neck.” The violin’s small size and delicacy give this body a decidedly feminine character, as does its graceful design and a three-and-a-half octave range that encompasses the lowest and highest female notes with a quality of sound often described as close to that of the human voice. Our understanding of the effects on audiences of the powerful and long-lived perception of the violin-as-female-body can be enhanced by drawing on Lucy Green’s category of “delineated meanings”: as opposed to the “inherent meanings” that derive from relationships between the materials of music themselves, delineated meanings constitute a kind of socially-caused overlay, the effects of a variety of contextual factors. While the character of a musical experience results from the combination of inherent and delineated meanings, the proportion of these variables will differ in different contexts.23 Insofar as the stance and gestures of a woman violinist interact with her audience’s ideas of femininity, their response to her performance of, for example, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, will be affected both by those ideas and by the extent to which her performance confirms or disrupts them. It is not surprising to find that the strongly gendered view of the violin influenced the perception of the female player long years after she had taken her place on the concert stage.The “full and shapely bosom” of the poem, “My Fiddle,” (quoted at the opening of this chapter) strikes the late-twentieth-century reader as bizarre; the violin/female body metaphor remains familiar to us, but changes in gender roles within and outside the music world have lessened the significance and emotional potency of the association. (Female saxophonists, however, still evoke “delineated meanings” that may well approximate the reactions to pioneer Victorian women violinists.) If younger readers of the 1905 Violin Times smiled at Ethelbert Ames’s full-bosomed fiddle, theirs would have been knowing, not puzzled, smiles. The comparison of a human being to a stringed instrument goes back at least to the early Pythagoreans, who described the soul as an “attunement” comparable to that of a lyre.24 In Socrates’s last conversation, as related in the dialogue Phaedo, the analogy is held to be incompatible with the soul’s eternal nature, since material matter (strings and the instrument’s body) would logically have to precede even the most ideal tuning.25 The analogy between an instrument’s strings and the emotions is still familiar to us in the word “heartstrings,” which English speakers have used since at least the fifteenth

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century.26 If active use of this noun is now limited mostly to greeting-card poetics, the term still expresses our sense of the corporeal placement of intense feelings and affections, retaining an older understanding of human anatomy that imagined the heart as braced and sustained by tendons or nerves. A still-current example of the body-as-stringed-instrument metaphor is the phrase “high-strung,” used to characterize a person whose nerves we imagine as overly taut and in constant danger of snapping. During the eighteenth century, the familiar comparison between a stringed instrument and the human body was developed so as to demonstrate a new understanding of the physical basis of feelings, and especially, of women’s emotional nature. Medical authorities held that the delicacy of women’s nerves, which made them unfit for the demands of abstract thought, greatly increased the subtlety and speed of their responsiveness to external stimuli.This extraordinary degree of sensitivity was likened to the vibrations set in motion on the strings of a musical instrument.27 Robert Lovelace, the rake in Samuel Richardson’s 1748–49 novel Clarissa, provides this description of female susceptibilities: “Like so many musical instruments, touch but a single wire, and the dear souls are sensible all over.” The instrument/body analogy had taken on erotic overtones, and like exquisitely sensitive strings, the nerves spoken of were most often those of women. In this mode, Horace Walpole, writing in 1770, described a man as possessed of nerves that “trembled like a woman’s.”28 The comparison was well known to Victorians, whose most popular writer on music, Hugh Reginald Haweis, likened women’s constitutions to “fine violins that vibrate to the lightest touch.”29 The composer Ethel Smyth brought the metaphor from the Victorian world of her young years into our own century, adapting it in a striking passage of self-reflection in which she compared herself to “an instrument with two strings,” each representing the man and woman most beloved by her.30 Two characters in Victorian fiction, Mrs. Humphry Ward’s gifted violinist, Rose, and the young country woman, Car’line Aspent in Thomas Hardy’s story,“The Fiddler of the Reels,” show the brilliant use that imaginative writers of the late nineteenth century could still make of the ancient tradition of body-as-stringed instrument, as that legacy was reconceptualized by eighteenth-century scientists and authors. In a passage that describes Rose immediately after her passionate read-through of music by Brahms,Wagner, and Rubinstein that she has just brought home from London, Ward describes the face of the beautiful young violinist as “quivering and relaxed”; in this striking evocation of the nerves/strings analogy,Ward shows how Rose’s acute musical responsiveness brings about her own sympathetic “vibration,” the musician herself in mystic unity with the strings of her own instrument.31

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Hardy’s story, published in an 1894 collection Life’s Little Ironies,32 deals with the tragic results of a young woman’s intense susceptibility to the music of an itinerant fiddler. It would require a neurologist, Hardy writes, to explain the effect Wat Ollamoor’s music has on Car’line, an effect her father first identifies as some sort of epilepsy. Responding to the fiddler’s footfall outside her door, Car’line “would start from her seat in the chimney-corner as if she had received a galvanic shock, and spring convulsively towards the ceiling; then she would burst into tears, and it was not till some half-hour had passed that she grew calm as usual.” Ollamoor plays upon Car’line’s nerves as on the strings of his fiddle. His mastery is complete, its sexual connotations explicit: although engaged to another man, Car’line is seduced by Ollamoor and bears his child. The violinist’s seductive power over women (for Hardy tells us that Ollamoor, while unattractive, even repulsive, in the eyes of men, was “supremely” a woman’s man)33 was made possible by the supposed affinity between the violin’s responsive strings and the physical structure underlying female emotionality.Although a century and a half separated Richardson’s fiction from Hardy’s,Wat Ollamoor would have had no difficulty in understanding Lovelace’s conceptualization of female responsiveness. If the violin has been characterized as feminine for its size and shape, the responsiveness of its strings, and the quality and compass of its voice, the bow provides a decidedly masculine contrast.Also known as the stick or fiddlestick (from the medieval fydylstyk),34 the bow conveys authority as the initiator and controlling force over the instrument’s sound:“Bowing determines the length of a note, its basic character, its dynamic nuance and its manner of connection with other notes.”35 The bow was an immediate predecessor of another important musical stick, the conductor’s baton—in the early nineteenth century, the first violinist, while not himself playing, would wave his bow to lead the orchestra.36 Depictions of the bow through its long evolution from the tenth century, when it was widely used in the Islamic world and in the Byzantine Empire, almost always show it held in the right hand, the instrument in the left, as is still standard practice,37 a stance that has been compared to the medieval warrior holding sword and shield.38 The bow’s original convex shape and the French, Italian, German, and English words that designated it—archet or petit arc, archetto, Bogen, bow— suggest that its name and shape were inspired by the hunter’s bow.39 Although there is no proof that the bow derived directly from the instrument that sends the arrow into flight, some scholars consider it significant that the area of Central Asia in which bowing originated was also known for fine hunting bows: “it may be that one of these was eventually brushed against the strings of a hitherto plucked instrument thus creating a new sound.”40 Readers of The Athenaeum were reminded of the bow’s ascribed provenance

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by an 1845 concert review of the brilliant Italian violin-prodigy sisters, Teresa and Maria Milanollo, in which the critic stated, as high praise, that Teresa, the elder of the two, drew “the long bow” like a man.41 A poem published in The Musical World in 1865, “The Violin Bow,” again reminded readers interested in questions of origin and evolution, of the presumed derivation of the musical bow:“Primal makers,” wrote The MW’s anonymous poet, formed the earliest bows according to the hunting bow’s shape. The name continues to remind us of these origins and similarities: “old names remain, when forms and fashions fade”: We may presume our modern Bow in use, Retains in ancient name, because it springs So pliantly, while passing o’er the strings, According to its tension—fast or loose. ‘Tis though the twanging bow, when strung and bent, was ancient music’s parent instrument.42

Long before the Victorian era, the traditionally convex bow had evolved towards its modern appearance; the sleek, concave version perfected in the late eighteenth century by the Frenchman, François Tourte, became and remains the standard form. As the shape of this modern bow lessened the association with the violence of archery, it allowed for the perception of the performer as masterful lover of his delicate, exquisitely responsive, and beloved instrument, a perception heightened by the soloist’s caressing arm movements and facial expressions, sometimes accompanied by closed eyes, suggestive of inward joy or ecstasy.The best-selling novelist Marie Corelli conveyed this image of the violinist in her 1883 description of the Spanish violinist, Pablo Sarasate, one of the great virtuoso players of the period, who frequently concertized in London: He will stay indoors a whole day testing strings for his beloved instrument. Waste of time? Not at all. What expectant bridegroom will not gladly pass a whole day in turning over the choicest gems of a jeweller’s store, in order to find the exactly suitable gifts wherewith to adorn his bride on her marriage morn? Sarasate weds his violin each time he plays, and it behooves him to see that his marriage offerings are appropriate.43

Corelli contrasted the passionate Sarasate with his rival, Joseph Joachim, whom she characterized as a man of culture and a great musician, but one who communicates learning rather than Sarasate’s spirit of ardent love. The conviction held by many people in Europe and North America, that the violin is most appropriately played by a man, extended well into the second half of the twentieth century—some would say it has not alto-

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gether disappeared—despite the fame achieved by a number of noted women performers. In his 1972 book, The Glory of the Violin, Joseph Wechsberg, who studied the instrument at the Vienna State Academy of Music and made his living as a violinist long before gaining distinction as a writer in the United States, called attention to the “atavistic notion” that the violin is an instrument for men.44 Four years after Wechsberg issued his call for discarding the prejudice against women violinists, one of the century’s greatest performers on the instrument reformulated it in an eloquent and memorable statement that would not have been at all foreign to the preconceptions of many Victorian music lovers: I have often wondered whether psychologically there is a basic difference between the woman’s relationship to the violin and the man’s. . . . Does the woman violinist consider the violin more as her own voice than the voice of one she loves? Is there an element of narcissism in the woman’s relation to the violin, and is she, in fact, in a curious way, better matched for the cello? The handling and playing of a violin is a process of caress and evocation, of drawing out a sound which awaits the hands of the master.45

In Menuhin’s deeply felt account of his own intimate and highly gendered experience of violin-playing, the instrument, whose “shape is . . . inspired by and symbolic of the most beautiful human object, the woman’s body,” is most fittingly performed on by a worshipful “master”; a female player represents an inherent violation of this norm. Playing on an instrument whose voice and shape are a version of herself, the woman violinist appears narcissistic in her self-absorption. Menuhin did not invent this view of the female violinist, but restated in an arresting manner a response that was, at least “officially,” long out of fashion by the time he articulated it. His formulation, however, accurately represents the reactions of earlier generations of musicians and music lovers and will help us, in the next chapter, to unravel the complex responses of several late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century novelists to the woman violinist. If part of the explanation for the negative attitude towards female violinists was a strong sense of unfitness that derived from the instrument’s ascribed gender and male-defined mode of performance, another, and equally potent, cause of the prejudice was the instrument’s close association with ideas of sin and death, and with Satan, traditionally believed to be the agent who brought both into human history. In the Victorian world of separate spheres, it was man’s responsibility to deal with evil influences to which women were especially vulnerable, and from which they needed protection. The violin’s well-known and close associations with evil and socially disruptive forces made it seem a highly improper vehicle for

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women’s musical expression. What were the origins of these associations, and how did they acquire their place in English culture and maintain it for so many long years? The characterization of the violin as “devil’s instrument” has been traced to the mid-sixteenth century, when the instrument achieved its modern capabilities and form. Its primary function in those early days and for some time afterwards—and the one that gave it its diabolical connection—was as leader of the dance; the earliest violin music was written for this purpose.While early forms of the violin had produced a tone that was soft in volume and nasal in quality, the greatly enhanced audibility of the modern instrument, combined with its ability to transmit a strong rhythmic pulse, made it an ideal accompaniment to dancing, a practice denounced by Protestant and Catholic clergymen in many European communities as the invention of the devil and an activity conducive to unrestrained sensuality.46 Since fiddlers, predecessors of the Wat Ollamoors of Victorian times, were often itinerants who gained much of their livelihood in taverns and inns, they quickly gained the reputation of rogues and vagabonds and were subject to the disrepute and legal sanctions brought against people identified with those outcast groups.47 The connection between the violin, sin, and death was strengthened by artists who, from the late middle ages into modern times, popularized the image of the dance of death, the danse macabre or Totentanz. An imaginative response to the episodes of plague that devastated Europe in the fourteenth century and returned periodically even as late as the nineteenth, the dance of death depicted revelers who, unaware of their immediate peril, carried out the bidding of their skeleton-leader, who was often shown carrying or playing a musical instrument. During the middle ages, this instrument was typically shown as a pipe; once the violin became the favored instrument for dance, artists reflected that change and portrayed it as death’s characteristic instrument. A folktale still recounted in the southwest of England as late as 1970 illustrates both the dance of death theme and the devil’s change of instrument from the pipe of the narrative to the fiddle of the title, which no doubt belongs to a later version of the story.“The Fiddler and the Maids” tells of a wedding party held in a field outside a church on a Saturday night. The harper who plays for the wedding guests warns, as midnight approaches, that it is time to end the dance and return home before the Sabbath. Intent on their revelry, the guests keep dancing, in accord with one of their number who vows that they will continue, even if they have to summon the devil to provide their music. Immediately, a tall piper appears and plays at an ever-quickening tempo; the frenzied dancers, realizing they are in his power, are no longer able to stop their dance. The dancers’ cries and

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shrieks are heard throughout the night. By morning, their places are taken by three stone circles.48 By the closing years of the sixteenth century, when Shakespeare’s Prince Hal quipped,“Heigh, heigh, the Devil rides upon a fiddlestick,” the instrument’s satanic association had long been established.49 Represented by a skeleton, or by Satan himself, Death was often depicted in woodcuts and paintings as an expert fiddler. The devil’s fiddling skills were especially valuable when he bartered for the souls of the most musically gifted violinists, who were susceptible to offers of magical violins or of dazzling, superhuman levels of virtuosic mastery. Many legends developed that linked extraordinary violin-playing with a bargain the performer had made with the devil. In Scandinavia, folk legends told of a male water sprite or nåkk, a supernatural being who inhabited waterfalls and streams and possessed secret knowledge of violin techniques that could enable the player to gain total power over those who danced to his music.50 When the German virtuoso, Thomas Baltzar, the first great violinist to perform in England, was heard during the late l650s, an eminent music scholar in attendance jokingly stooped down to his feet to see whether Baltzar was man or devil.51 The belief in the demonic origin of extraordinary skill on the violin was widespread in Europe and was transplanted by emigrants to North America; anthropologists doing fieldwork in rural parts of the United States near the close of the twentieth century were often told that “the fiddle is the Devil’s instrument” or that “the Devil’s in the fiddle.”52 The belief that music can exert a morally deleterious influence has ancient precedents in Pythagorean ideas on the unstable nature of the human soul, an instability that resulted from its creation from material less pure than that used to create the cosmos. In his dialogue Timaeus, Plato suggests that the soul’s unstable nature makes it highly susceptible to the motions that cause sound; thus, while well-ordered music strengthens virtuous propensities, music of a disordered or corrupt nature is morally dangerous.53 For this reason, Plato severely limited both the musical modes and the instruments that would be allowed into his ideal republic.54 The idea of music’s moral ambiguity often appeared in the works of Christian theologians, and was prominent in the controversy over polyphony that developed in the sixteenth century.55 The suspicion with which music was held in some English circles through most of the nineteenth century has often been attributed to the Puritan legacy.Writing in the 1930s, Percy Scholes showed that the Puritans were not, in fact, programmatically hostile towards music, and even looked favorably upon its “lawful” use.56 Nevertheless, the “strict view” of dancing taken by many of Calvin’s followers, in England and on the continent, almost inevitably resulted in a strong animus toward the fiddler and his instrument.As Scholes points out, however,

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removing the charge of opposition to music from the Puritans is not equivalent to denying its existence in English culture. In Victorian times, the strong evangelical distrust of the art was expressed in opposition to one of the most beloved of musical genres, the sacred oratorio, and Quakers continued to proscribe musical instruments in the home as well as in meeting houses.57 Richard Leppert has commented that the violin’s close association with “art” music, an association that began in the seventeenth century, represented a “taming” of the instrument, a movement away from its folk origins toward respectability.58 A simultaneous development was the instrument’s professionalization, since much of the new music written for it was difficult for all but the most dedicated amateurs. According to Ian Spink, the violin “was a symbol of the new order where the virtuoso dominated and the amateur applauded rather than participated.”59 The highstatus viol now out of fashion, some male amateurs developed violin skills sufficient to play the “accompanied sonatas” published at this time for keyboard and violin; these were generally easy pieces written for domestic use, in which the violin was the accompanying instrument. In these duets, the violin was always played by a man, the keyboard by a woman.60 Leppert, who has done extensive research on artists’ depictions of musical life, has not been able to locate a single image of a female violin player during the eighteenth century.61 The violin’s centrality to small ensembles and orchestras presented an image of the seated musician that weakened the instrument’s diabolical associations within this new context; the group musician is by definition a socialized, cooperative artist, a strong contrast to the charismatic leader of the late-medieval dance of death or to the fiery, virtuosic soloist. Changed attitudes towards dance, at least in upper-class circles, also tended to weaken the violin’s satanic connotations. Although weakened, those connotations did not altogether disappear: even as dancing became a requisite of high-toned social life in the eighteenth century, the suspicion of moral danger clung to the traditional association of the fiddle with rhythmical, pleasurable body movements. French dancing-masters, their nationality alone making them morally suspect, were the most fashionable teachers of the art to young and old alike. Depicted (by Rowlandson and other artists) in standing posture with their violins, or with nearby accompanists on the instrument, these men were repeatedly characterized, in literature as in visual representations, as fops and seducers, tempting their pupils to excessive love of the sensual pleasure of dance, and endangering female virtue.62 In addition to the centuries-old tradition that linked the violin—especially in the hands of the solo performer—to the devil, another set of influences gave the instrument a potent aura of the weird and the darkly

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mysterious. These influences, already alluded to in the example of the violin-playing water sprite, derived from the European legacy of folklore and fairy tale. The Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century stimulated a strong interest in myths and legends that intensified through the course of Victoria’s reign. Knowledge of tales from the British Isles, Europe, Asia, and Africa was disseminated by a series of translations and anthologies, which began with the first English version of the Grimm brothers’ stories in 1823 and culminated in multinational collections by Andrew Lang and Joseph Jacobs in the late eighties and nineties.63 The journal Notes and Queries, founded in 1849, gave extensive coverage to folklore; the Folk-Lore Society, founded three decades later, increased public interest in myths and legends as a source of anthropological understanding by publishing the works of several distinguished members (including Lang) and holding highly publicized international meetings.64 The influence of fairy tales and folklore in art, literature, and the drama was profound.Victorian novels are permeated by motifs and figures from fairy lore; a new genre of fairy painting appeared, associated especially with the names of Richard Dadd and Richard (“Dicky”) Doyle; and drama, as well as the popular genre of pantomime, made use of fairy themes—James Barrie’s 1904 play, Peter Pan, represents the culmination of this trend.65 Music plays a significant role in the corpus of European fairy tale and legend; elves, fairies, and witches are often associated with rituals that involve dance, while magical instruments are used both to lure the innocent to seduction or death and to rescue them from those fates.66 Although fairy tales deal with extraordinary events, they also provide starkly dramatic examples of human passion, both noble and base; of extremes of love and hatred; and of the consequences of such uncontrolled emotions as greed, jealousy, and rage. “Binnorie” or “The Twa Sisters,” one of many English tales recounted in sung ballads, is especially relevant to the surprisingly large body of novels and short fiction about the violin written during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Common to the various Scandinavian and British versions of the ballad that were included in Francis James Child’s celebrated five-volume collection, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (published in the United States in the late 1850s and in England during the eighties and nineties),“The Twa Sisters” has as its central theme the drowning of a younger sister by an elder who has been made jealous by her beloved’s preference for her sibling. The young sister’s corpse washes up on shore and a passing harpist, fiddler, or other actor in the story’s different versions fashions the appropriate body parts into a harp, viol, or fiddle; the dead girl’s breastbone forms the main part of the instrument; her yellow hair, the strings. Set down before the victim’s family, the instrument then sings by itself in words that clearly reveal the murderer’s identity.67

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Implicit in all versions of the tale are the identification of the stringed instrument with the female form, the belief that a soul continues to inhabit parts of a dead person’s body—especially, her bones and hair68—and the understanding that a stringed instrument maintains the identity of the person out of whose substance it has been created and can, in some way, communicate the essence of that identity as well as important secrets that vanished with the deceased. “The world is full of wonderful stories about Fiddles,” wrote R. E. Francillon, in the introductory paragraph to his own contribution to the genre, “A Fiddle with One String,” which appeared in The Illustrated London News summer number of 1884. Francillon’s comment was even more true by the early twentieth century; in 1901, Frank H. Marling, in an article on musical fiction published in the London Musical Courier, pointed out that far more fiction had been written about the violin than on any other instrument.69 Musical fiction, a potent disseminator of violin lore, appeared in novels, popular magazines, and music journals; it was an especially prominent feature of The Magazine of Music (1884–97), The Strand Musical Magazine (1895–99), and The Violin Times (1893–1907). The coeditors of The Violin Times, Eugene Polonaski, a distinguished violinist and teacher and first editor of the journal The Strad, and Edward Heron-Allen, historian of stringed instruments, gave a great deal of space to violin fiction; it seems likely that the anonymously published violin mystery tales the journal published, some of which appeared under spoof-pseudonyms, such as “The McAmati” and “Rosin le Beau,”70 were the work of Heron-Allen, whose astonishingly varied list of publications ranges from mineralogy and marine biology to Persian literature into occult fiction, much of it published under various pen names.71 A sampling of three stories published in The Violin Times between 1899 and 1902 will give the flavor of this genre and illustrate its direct incorporation of themes from the fairy tale literature so popular at this time. Written by “an American Contemporary,” Aubertine WoodwardMoore,“The Legend of a Violin,” which appeared in the issue of December 15, 1899, recounts (or embroiders upon) a story told about Gaspar da Salo, who was for many years erroneously regarded as the earliest violin maker.72 According to this tale, the young Gaspar, son of a lute-maker, falls in love with Marietta, a student of the local convent who also sings in its choir. Motherless daughter of a fisherman, Marietta is the object of village gossip; it is said that she helps her father by bewitching the fish with her beautiful singing. After her sudden death, the grief-stricken Gaspar vows to make a lute that will incorporate the tones of her lovely voice. He labors over the course of years until one day those golden tones are “imprisoned” in the first violin, the instrument said to have been the model followed by

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Guarnerius over a century later.Woodward-Moore’s little story combines elements of the mermaid tradition with the mystique that, to our day, continues to color the memory of the early violin-makers. Unlike most Victorian short stories about the violin and its makers and players, which are typically given Italian or German settings, “The Maker of Violins,” anonymously published in 1900 in three spring issues of The Violin Times, is set in China.The skilled instrument-maker Shing Poon loves his violins as most fathers love their children, but pays scant attention to his own son and daughter. One stormy night, Chu, Shing Poon’s son, who has always been drawn to his father’s instruments, steals a violin from the shop and immediately plays it with the brilliance of a mature virtuoso. Upon discovering the theft (but ignorant of the thief ’s identity), the instrument-maker accuses his daughter of having caused the disaster by allowing her shadow to fall on the threshold. Shing Poon then seeks the advice of the local magician, who arranges for him to overhear Chu as he plays on the stolen fiddle. The father immediately recognizes his son’s genius, dedicates his life to his service, and decides to destroy all his other instruments. Chu’s fame spreads, but the magician, who sees the chance to profit from Shing Poon’s credulity, convinces the latter, on the eve of Chu’s first performance before the emperor, that success will come to his son only if the violin is given the soul of a dying person.The magician has in mind old Wong who lives nearby, but when the old man dies before the magical transfer can be made, the desperate Shing Poon devises a new means of infusing the instrument with a human soul. The great performance day arrives, but as Chu draws his bow, the violin emits only strange, gasplike sounds that tell of murder; after a final sigh, it falls silent. Chu kisses the wood of his instrument; his sister’s soul, speaking from within the violin, has borne witness to her death by the hands of Shing Poon who is suddenly stricken: “An unconscious old man lay on the mat as the moaning fragments of a crushed violin fell to the floor.”After its declaration of guilt, the violin perpetrates a deed of self-destruction that is repeated in numerous stories in this ghostly-violin genre that made frequent appearances in Victorian music journals and popular magazines. The author of “His Violin,” a story published in the October, 1902, issue of The Violin Times, was “Marjorie Dillwyn (aged l4),” the editor adding that the text represented the exclusive efforts of the young writer, without editorial correction or assistance.This is the story of a widowed English father and his son who have lived for the past five years in a German village. The gifted young Lorin, who attends school during the day and plays the violin in a restaurant each evening, has sacrificed to save money for a better instrument. Thrilled by the purchase he has finally made, Lorin leaves

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his new violin with the kind landlady to seek a doctor for a sick child. His drunken father enters and, infuriated at his son’s expenditure, crushes the violin beneath his feet. Upon his return, the heartbroken boy immediately knows that the person he had believed responsible for his mother’s death has also killed his violin. In despair, he runs out into the street and is immediately hit by a passing streetcar. Brought back to his room by a policeman, the dying boy smiles as he hears a student in a nearby house playing a violin sonata. “Mother! Mother!” Lorin calls out, and dies. The supernatural aura that never entirely departed from the violin’s persona was strengthened during the nineteenth century by the frequently-evoked memory of two famous Italian violinists and composers, Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) and Niccolo Paganini (1782–1840).Tartini’s contribution to the tradition derives from a single, famous incident: a dream in which, having accepted the devil’s bargain for his soul, the composer, delighted by the services he has received, hands Satan his violin to see what he is able to do with it. The devil proceeds to play a sonata of such extraordinary beauty that the dreamer, once awake, immediately tries to capture the notes on paper. Although the results of this ghostly dictation cannot bear comparison with the excellence of the original, “The Devil’s Trill Sonata” was, in Tartini’s judgment, his finest composition; it became one of the most famous pieces in the virtuoso repertoire, its origins often alluded to in music journals, as in the poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter, and described in the program notes that were a regular feature of concert life in the later nineteenth century.73 The association of Tartini’s name with diabolical influence also appears in musical fiction. One especially dramatic use of the “Devil’s Trill” was made by Eliza Margaret Gollan Humphreys, the popular author who published under the name “Rita.” In her 1884 novel Countess Daphne: A Musical Romance, Rita begins the story’s most emotionally intense section with a quotation of music from the famous sonata.74 The book’s two narrators, a Stradivarius and an Amati, take turns telling the story and reveal differing perceptions of the characters.The chapter named “The Amati’s Story: ‘The Devil’s Trill,’” recounts the spiritual crisis of the hero,Tista, a brilliant violinist and composer who, living in destitution in a Paris garret, learns that his opera has just made a brilliant success under the name of the man to whom he had once submitted his score. Ill and delirious,Tista calls out that the world is not God’s but the devil’s:“Had I been wise I would have served him—is it too late still?” The young, deeply religious friend who has come to help him is terrified as Tista suddenly picks up the Amati and plays the “unearthly music” from Tartini’s “‘Trillo del Diavolo’ embellished and placed in weird harmonies. . . . Nita calls to the saints as she hears it,”75 and Tista’s story proceeds to its predictably tragic end.

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One of the most remarkable works to build upon the association between music and evil was a novella, The Lost Stradivarius; published in 1895, it was the work of the ecclesiastical historian and mystery writer, John Meade Falkner. The book’s main character, Sir John Maltravers, falls under three combined and malevolent influences: the precious violin he finds hidden in his student quarters at Oxford; the gagliarda movement of an eighteenth-century dance suite his friend has brought in manuscript from Italy; and the ghost of the man who played the long-hidden instrument one hundred years earlier, a gifted but decadent musician who once studied with Tartini. During the course of the story, Sir John abandons Christian belief for paganism, cruelly mistreats his loving wife, refuses contact with his newborn son and heir, and eventually loses his reason. The story ends, after Sir John’s death, with the burning of the violin whose playing had initiated John’s slide into sin and the reflection of his loyal friend (the purchaser of the gagliarda) on the morally ambiguous nature of music: “I am sure that if some music is good for man and elevates him, other melodies are equally bad and enervating.”76 The most powerful of all evocations of the violin’s demonic associations was the memory of Paganini; many people still alive in the 1880s and even in the 1890s had personally experienced the amazing performances he gave throughout Britain in 1831 and 1832. Paganini’s first visit, which followed years of fame on the continent, was preceded by rumors that he had perfected his art during years of imprisonment for murder— some said the victim had been his wife, others that it was a rival for his mistress.77 Strange, supernatural stories circulated about Paganini: that his dead wife’s vengeful ghost inhabited his violin, that Paganini had had his instrument strung with fiber from the intestine of a former mistress,78 and, of course, that his phenomenal technical mastery had been acquired in exchange for selling his soul to the devil. All of these stories were repeated in late-nineteenth-century music journals that catered to what seems to have been an insatiable appetite for details of Paganini’s life, especially the most sensational ones. In 1886, The Musical World published “Recollections of Niccolo Paganini,” whose author, Felix Weiss, gave a detailed description of the violinist’s strikingly demonic appearance: “Thin as a scarecrow, Paganini’s arms and hands were unnaturally long, his fingers bony. He wore his hair long, with ringlets hanging on his shoulders. All his movements were unusual—he glided onto the platform “like a phantom.”79 The Violin Times provided its readers with a continuous stream of anecdotes and descriptions. An article in 1896, translated from German, describes Paganini first as a vampire, then as an angry Lucifer: “He who still believed in the old German legend of the Vampire must have seen in Paganini the embodiment of what his imagination pictured

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as one of these, for, according to Folk Lore, the unmistakable sign of such nocturnal bloodsuckers was the meeting of their eyebrows without a break.” Disappointed in his love for a beautiful young countess for whom he had played at the court of Lucca, Paganini began 30 years of wandering and although “overwhelmed with gold and honours, . . . in his heart he still nursed fury and rage against mankind whom he hated and by whom he always imagined himself deceived.”80 An article in 1898,“New Story of Paganini,” told of his power over the emotions of visitors to an auction house during his first tour of London. A black and greasy violin attracted few bids until Paganini picked it up and began to play:“The first three or four notes thrilled everyone; in another moment many were in tears; soon their feet moved as if they wished to dance. . . . Now they smile and nudge one another for gladness; again tears start to their eyes. . . .When Nicolo [sic] Paganini reverently kisses the violin and places it in its case, half-a-dozen persons cry, 50 guineas! Another 60; others 70, 80, 90, and then, followed by a great cheering, the fiddle is knocked down to the famous musician for 100 guineas.”81 In October of the same year, The Violin Times reprinted two of the most memorable descriptions of the great master, those by Leigh Hunt and Heinrich Heine. Hunt’s poem shows Paganini as a tragic figure whose sacrifice of soul had been made for powers far more significant than mere virtuosity: His hand, . . . clinging to the serious chords With godlike ravishment drew forth a breath, So deep, so strong, so fervid, thick with love— Blissful, yet laden as with twenty prayers— That Juno yearned with no diviner soul To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. The exceeding mystery of the loveliness Sadden’d delight; and with his mournful look, Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face ‘Twixt his dark flowing locks, he almost seems To feeble, or to melancholy eyes, One that has parted from his soul for pride, And in the sable secret lived forlorn.

“Musicians,” Hunt writes, “pressed forward from behind the scenes to get as close to him as possible, and they could not sleep at night for thinking of him.” Heine’s response to Paganini’s Hamburg performance contrasts the suspicion of charlatanism evoked by the violinist’s initial appearance on stage—“is it some phantom arisen from the grave, a vampire with a violin, which comes to suck, if not the blood from our hearts, at least the

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money from our pockets!”—with the almost unbearably intense experience of his music, unforgettable sounds that somehow bring their hearers in touch with forbidden realms: Then were heard melodies such as the nightingale pours forth when the perfume of the rose intoxicates her heart with sweet forebodings of spring! What melting, sensuously languishing notes of bliss! Tones that kissed, then poutingly fled from one another, and at last embraced and became one, and died away in the ecstacy of union! Again, there were heard sounds like the song of the fallen angels, who, banished from the realms of bliss, sink with shame-red countenance to the lower world. These were sounds out of whose bottomless depth gleamed no ray of hope or comfort; when the blessed in heaven hear them, the praises of God die away upon their pallid lips, and, sighing, they veil their holy faces.82

The public response to the early career of Marie Hall was enhanced by her strangely juxtaposed, dual evocation of the image of Cinderella, whose name she used in numerous interviews to describe her impoverished early life, and the memory of Paganini, whose concerto she performed in her 1903 debut concert.83 Alluding to the philanthropic couple whose efforts had made her career possible, Hall, in an interview she gave to The Girl’s Realm soon after her London debut, compared herself to Cinderella, “whom they have transported into the world’s great ballroom.”84 In an 1907 interview, Hall spoke of how close she felt to the spirit of Paganini, who had performed on the violin that was recently given to her:“He loved it,” she said; “he watches it jealously.”85 Despite the obvious contrast between her lovely appearance and that of the demonic Paganini, there was nevertheless a link in the uncanny juxtaposition of her frail and delicate frame with the forceful brilliance of her playing, as described by a Blackpool reviewer in a 1907 issue of The Strad: What a striking figure she was! A study in black and white—black hair, eyes, eyebrows & belt, white dress, bow, skin, and complexion—small, thin, no muscular development at all.What is the secret of these marvellous powers? She wore short sleeves. What arms! Mere bone and white skin. There is something weird, supernatural, uncanny, about Marie Hall, as there was about Paganini, whom probably she approaches in technique.What is the secret of these wonderful, incomprehensible powers? What is the source of the vast forces—mental and physical—generated in that poor frail flimsy frame? For Marie Hall never seems tired, she never seems even hot—a flush of colour never comes to those pale cheeks. She performs terrific feats of execution, and she never turns a hair, and she has plenty of tone. . . . It is mind. A triumph of mind over matter—nerve force.86

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If the ban on women’s violin playing was, as I have argued, the result of satanic and other unsettling supernatural associations juxtaposed with an almost visceral expectation that this female-gendered instrument should have a male master, it is clear that this context of beliefs continued in force long after the ban was broken. How can we then account for the lifting of the ban, given the continuation of these causative factors? If there was an element of truth to the view of Blanche Lindsay and several of her contemporaries that Wilma Neruda was responsible for the taboo’s demise, her role was clearly not that of a female St. George, but rather of an active and influential participant in a dynamically shifting situation. I would point to three central elements in that situation as especially crucial in creating a new climate favorable to change. First in importance was the growing current of opinion associated with the reform of female education and, more intensely, with the feminist movement, a current that called into question much received wisdom concerning the totality of restrictions on girls’ and women’s roles in society. Now that some girls were studying a demanding curriculum once thought suitable only for their brothers, now that women were moving into higher education, serving on school boards and as Poor Law guardians, and conducting a campaign for suffrage, how much longer was the ban on female access to one of the most prized instruments in the music-making tradition likely to remain unquestioned? There is no doubt that the gracious Wilma Neruda eased the transition for women violinists, but had she not appeared, another gifted player would surely have performed the same service.Yet, even if the moment was right, the accomplishment was, in large measure, hers, and one can easily imagine the pleasure with which the following The Illustrated London News review of the Monday Popular Concerts was received in many musical households in March of 1872: The most recent accession to these concerts is Madame Norman-Neruda— a female violinist—who made her first appearance in this country at the Philharmonic Concert of May 17, 1869, when she performed two movements of a difficult concerto by Vieuxtemps with such fine qualities of tone, style, and execution as at once stamped her an artist of the highest order. At the close of the same year, and during each subsequent season, this accomplished lady violinist has proved . . . that she is not merely a brilliant executant, but also that she can lead, with admirable expression, the best works of the greatest masters. . . . Her performances have not only been a special feature of the Monday Popular Concerts, but have been heard with equal interest at the Crystal Palace and in the provinces.

The second influence that contributed to the demise of the ban on women violinists was the love of the chamber music repertoire that devel-

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oped as audiences came to know the works brought to them by the justly renowned Popular Concerts.A fiction writer in The Violin Times alludes to the stimulus those events gave to domestic music: having attended a Saturday afternoon Popular Concert that featured Neruda “in exquisite form,” he and his wife returned home to “attempt portions” of some of the music.87 Such efforts at replication would have been the only way for music lovers to deepen their knowledge of works of special interest; illustrations and journalistic accounts of the concerts make it clear that a segment of the “Pops” audiences regularly brought scores with them.The love of this repertoire must have provided a strong stimulus to girls’ violin study: since music was the major pursuit for girls living at home, why not have them diversify their instruments, so as to extend and deepen the enjoyment of the repertoire with which Neruda and her distinguished colleagues had enriched their lives? The third reason for the ban’s demise was less nobly motivated: female violin-playing provided an answer to the social need created by the democratization of the piano.Although cheap and durable pianos did not become available until the 1880s,88 more people were in a position to afford mid-priced pianos in the decades that preceded this price revolution, some availing themselves of the three-year installment payment plan that was well established by the 1860s.89 The increasing popularity of the piano, which made the instrument a well-recognized symbol of Victorian respectability, inevitably diminished its prestige within the fashionable world, and led to the devaluation of piano-playing skills as currency in the upperclass marriage market. This change in the social positioning of the piano was noticed by Punch as early as 1875: a cartoon of that year shows a newly hired servant expressing concern to the mistress of the house lest rooms in the maids’ quarters be too small to accommodate the servant’s instrument.90 An incident reported in an 1890 issue of the Gentlewoman attests to the reaction of some members of the higher classes to the downward dissemination of piano skills. The magazine relates the experience of a philanthropic and musically accomplished lady “very well known in Society” who satisfies her “whim for going down to the East-end” by playing there at social gatherings and penny readings: At the last one she was succeeded at the piano by a child, so young, and who had such wonderful skill and execution, that Lady _______ immediately asked her name. She was the daughter of her Ladyship’s own coachman!91

Given the commonplace status of upper-class female piano-playing—a practice whose loss of cachet was accelerated by competition from those lower on the social scale, some of whom, as noted by the Gentlewoman,

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were turning out to be disturbingly able musicians—what could be more helpful to a young woman’s ability to stand out in a crowd that included scarce, eligible bachelors than to appear in the striking and novel pose of the standing violinist? The Strad, in 1894, making no effort to disguise its self-interest, contrasted the graceful appearance of the standing violinist with the pianist who “invariably looks—to use an expressive if somewhat vulgar phrase—more or less ‘all of a heap.’”92 The Reverend Haweis took his advice directly to the target audience. In an article entitled “The Musical Girl,” published in 1896 in The Young Woman, Haweis, despite his concern that the female violin fad was getting out of hand—violin mania, he wrote, has reached “proportions which call for a protest”—still saw fit to recommend the instrument as a means of helping some of the “thousands of nice girls who are lost in the crowd of our surplus female population” to “stand out and shine.” Reminding his readers that the routine inclusion of the pianist at social events—and her seated posture—meant that even a talented performer often found herself ignored—“effacé”—the standing posture of the singer or violinist could not fail to evoke notice, since the typically unmusical Briton was socialized to be attentive to a woman “en évidence.” Those who encouraged girls to take up the instrument gave both musical and social reasons for their advice.Writing in the same year, Henry C. Lunn, editor of The Musical Times, commented on the enrichment of domestic music promised by the new trend. In an article titled “Home Music-Worship,” Lunn pointed out that home music had been limited and dull before “the rise of lady violinists.” The only works heard in drawing rooms were either written for piano, transcribed from another instrument, or reduced from full score. The fact that all the girls in the family played the same instrument had encouraged a spirit of competition and jealousy, exacerbating rivalry among sisters.93 The Illustrated London News, in 1883, added its words of welcome to the new trend. In comments that accompanied an idyllic picture of two lovely young women engaged in a violin/piano duet, The ILN wrote that the example of Madame Neruda and a few other distinguished players shows that women can attain a level of skill on the violin equal to that of men,“and it has long since been decided that there is nothing unfeminine in the gesture and attitude of a violinplayer. . . . We hope, therefore, by this illustration, to encourage the study and practice which will give occasion to many future duets, trios, quartets, and other musical amateur combinations, doing justice to the great store of beautiful compositions, so arranged by the Italian and German masters of this delightful art.” Additional testimony to the girl violinist’s enhancement of domestic life was seen at the Royal Academy exhibition of the same year, in a striking

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group portrait by the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Arthur Hughes. “The Home Quartet: Mrs. Vernon Lushington and her Children” showed Academy viewers an example of how the playing of stringed instruments could strengthen the bond between mothers and daughters even as they provided a wider range of musical experience.94 A notable addition here is the cello; female performance on that instrument rapidly followed the advent of the women’s violin-playing; this development was made possible by the adoption of the cello endpin, which allowed for the decorous use of the sidesaddle playing position. A recent article suggests that the use of the endpin by women cellists of this period had a major influence in advancing the pin from optional to universal use.95 An article in an 1890 issue of The Woman’s World encouraged study of the cello as part of a family chamber music project for which a recommended plan was suggested: Where there are 2 or 3 members of the family desirous of taking up a stringed instrument, it will be found a most gratifying plan for each to study a different instrument of the string quartette, either the violin or violoncello.The advantage of this is clear. In the instance of a family of four or five girls, two should study the violin, the other two might study the viola and violoncello, and the fifth the pianoforte.Thus a quartette or quintette would be found in one family, and the pleasure of playing together when a degree of proficiency had been attained would make up for all the trials and troubles of the elementary stages.96

In addition to the developments that contributed directly to the undermining of the ban on women violinists—the influence of the feminist movement, a heightened interest in chamber music, and the decline of the piano as status marker—another important aspect of the late Victorian social climate indirectly favored not only the ending of the taboo, but also fostered attitudinal changes that made female violin-playing a high-profile feature of fashionable life.This indirect cause was a striking metamorphosis in attitudes toward the weird, supernatural associations discussed earlier in this chapter: as the century moved toward its close, experiences of the strange and paranormal began to be prized and cultivated—even regarded, within advanced social circles, as pathways to higher forms of understanding.The new fascination with the occult took place within the context of the late-nineteenth-century crisis of faith. In the aftermath of Darwin’s 1859 publication of The Origin of Species, many men and women faced a spiritual void: no longer able to accept the worldview provided by traditional Christianity, they felt a continuing need for an alternate source of belief and certainty, and supported efforts to discover scientific proof of the soul’s immortality. The Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882,

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was dedicated to this quest, whose centrality to the age is suggested by the intellectual distinction of its presidents—among them, the philosophers Henry Sidgwick and William James and the future prime minister,A. J. Balfour. The Society’s membership included such prominent Victorians as Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll),Arthur Conan Doyle,William Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, Andrew Lang, and Edmund Gurney, whose 1880 work, The Power of Sound, was the most important treatise on music written in Britain since Haweis’s Music and Morals of 187l; Gurney was coauthor of the Society’s 1886 publication, Phantasms of the Living, which argued for the scientific basis of telepathy.97 Like Doyle and Lang, many people, both within and outside this organization, who sought evidence of a supernatural presence in human affairs in telepathy and in the work of mediums at the séances so popular at this time, also regarded the supernatural events in folklore and fairy tales as compelling, collective testimony supporting the existence of the paranormal. One can only speculate about the effects of this domestication of the occult on the reception of women who dedicated themselves to performing on the instrument most closely associated with mysterious forces, one that was imagined to hold, and credited with the power to reveal, the darkest of human secrets. Evidence that we will look at in detail in the next chapter suggests that, in the social and intellectual climate of late-nineteenth century England, the violin’s varied associations with supernatural forces heightened the experience of listening to—and watching—both male and female performers, but that the lingering psychological effects of the recently broken taboo on women’s violin-playing, in combination with the instrument’s still highly-gendered status, would have added more than a frisson of attraction to the female violinist, providing a fairy tale glow to girl players and an aura of deep mystery to their older sisters.The aura is strongly evoked by Charles Dodgson’s photograph of the talented girl violinist, Xie Kitchin, his favorite model.98 By the early eighties, opposition to women’s violin-playing was beginning to sound old-fashioned among the musically sophisticated. The acceptance of female amateur players was encouraged by the success of the ladies’ string band founded by Lady Radnor in 1881; the professional world, too, was changing, with new female virtuoso violinists appearing on the concert stage.The most celebrated female soloists during this decade— in addition to the ever-popular Neruda—were Teresina Tua and Emily Shinner. The 15-year-old Italian-born Tua was enthusiastically received during her London concerts in 1883; her performance at the Crystal Palace in May of that year was so impressive that she was reengaged to play the following week.99 At about the same time, the young English musician, Emily Shinner, began a distinguished career that lasted until her early death in 190l. Born in 1862, she had begun study of the violin at the age of

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seven, the year of Neruda’s London debut. A pupil of Joachim, Shinner founded the first all-female quartet in England—perhaps, the first anywhere—in 1887; on the occasion of her marriage in 1889, Queen Victoria sent her a diamond bracelet.100 Many more women soloists and new all-female ensembles appeared during the 1890s. Young people were probably surprised to learn, from older relatives, about ideas of awkwardness formerly used to describe women violinists. Perhaps addressing the latter group among readers’ parents, as well as the subscribers themselves, H. R. Haweis, in an 1893 article in The Young Woman, explained that violin-playing had once been regarded as masculine not because of inherently mannish characteristics (as was the case for such activities as cricket, shooting, and trumpet playing), but simply because more men than women had been players of the instrument.101 Yet even the strongest proponents of the female violinist were perturbed by the unexpected magnitude and rapidity of change. In the 1880 article discussed earlier in this chapter, Lady Lindsay had warmly recommended the violin to girls, pointing to its rich musical rewards: the instrument’s great value in ear-training, the satisfying experience the player has in producing a tone with the beauty and emotional warmth of the human voice, the pleasing character of the nontempered scale over the fixed intervals of the piano, and the violin’s portability, which obviates the need to play on unfamiliar instruments when performing away from home. Even a good thing had its proper limits, however, and Blanche Lindsay declared herself uneasy about the unexpectedly rapid pace with which girls were adopting the violin, and about the inappropriate role that fashion was playing in accelerating this process: “Certainly, no one requires now-a-days to be encouraged to learn the violin, but rather the contrary. Nay, sometimes I am haunted by the fear that all ‘girls of the period’ of the next generation will scrape unmercifully on their fiddles. . . .There will be no one left who does not play the fiddle, . . . and, alas, the pianoforte, the harp, the organ, the guitar, the zither, and many other beautiful instruments will be altogether laid aside, or left to the sterner sex.” Lady Lindsay’s omission of all other instruments from the traditional list she favored for girls is significant; many of those who championed female access to the violin (and, perhaps, to other stringed instruments) opposed their performance on other nontraditional instruments, especially on those that touched the mouth. In the final year of the eighties, The Graphic expressed even stronger reservations about the trend in an article that crossed the line from concern into cynicism. This “wonderful, mysterious, spirit-moving voice,” wrote its columnist, has been vilely used in England during the past 15 years:

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First, a few adventurous damsels, fired perhaps by the example of Madame Neruda (but without her genius) made trial of the instrument. It was found to give an exceedingly novel and pretty effect, with a good figure; as graceful as, and perhaps more striking than, the old harp attitude of our greatgrandmothers. The fashion spread like wildfire, and it is now de rigueur in any family of daughter for one or two, at least, to “play” the violin.102

By 1890, a practice considered avant-garde a decade and a half earlier had become highly fashionable; a noted amateur violinist even complained that ambitious parents were “thrusting” the violin on thousands of young girls.103 Within a few years, female students of the violin were almost as numerous in London’s conservatories as girls and women studying piano. But even as critics and feminist writers concerned with women’s employment options began to warn of a glut of female violinists—the theatrical journal Echo reported in 1891 that a servant interviewed for a new position requested that an evening be left free each week for her violin lesson104—the fascination with the pairing of woman and violin seemed to grow.The instrument continued to attract both the musically talented as well as those who sought either a premarital avocation or the enhancement of skills in preparation for the likelihood of a spinster’s teaching career. The appeal of this difficult instrument, even to girls of lesser or scant talent, lasted long after the practice of female violin-playing had lost its novelty. If they had not learned from the pen of H. R. Haweis and the columns of The Strad that the woman violinist, standing before her audience, commanded far more attention than was given the average pianist, young women could easily have gleaned this useful information from the popular fiction of the day. As Bertha Thomas wrote in her 1880 novel, “conversation may flow the faster and smoother to pianoforte accompaniment, but it is another thing when a violin is holding forth.To talk seems rude, not merely to the violinist, but to the violin, which addresses you in a distinct, direct manner, like an orator of more or less eloquence. . . .”105 One such commanding female presence was the eponymous heroine of Walter Besant’s Armorel of Lyonesse, whose concert at a fashionable athome was depicted in a drawing for the serialized version of the novel published in 1890 in The Illustrated London News. (The artist was Frederick Barnard, a Royal Academy exhibitor who also worked for Punch, The ILN, and other magazines; his drawing of Armorel playing the violin appeared in the March l5 issue.)106 With a level of musicianship “not often found outside St. James’s Hall,” this brilliant young violinist is presented as the center of far more than ordinary attention; if the women in the room look on, as Besant tells us, with envy, the men are shown, to borrow a word

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prominent both in fairy lore and in violin fiction, as “bewitched.” The “witchery” that emanates from Armorel’s presence and performance, a phenomenon often described by the novelists and story writers of this period, gave the violin fad of the 1880s and 1890s a high degree of intensity. While matters of technique and interpretation were best explicated by critics, the woman violinist’s unique appeal to her audience was most sensitively examined by poets, storytellers, and artists, and it is to them that we will turn in the next chapter as we look closely at the response to the new phenomenon of the woman violinist.

Chapter Five

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The New Woman and Her Violin

She thought of the story of the fisherboy who listened one night on the shore to the wind-dances of the water-nixies, and afterwards wandered through the world with his violin, charming all mankind. . . . Bertha Thomas, The Violin-Player, 1880 “A village Norman-Néruda?” whispered the guest to the host. . . . Rose’s figure was standing thrown out against the dusky blue of the tapestried walls, and from that delicate relief every curve, every grace, each tint—hair and cheek and gleaming arm gained an enchanting picture-like distinctness. . . .”How can that man play with her and not fall in love with her?” thought Lady Charlotte, to herself, with a sigh. . . . Mary Augusta Ward, Robert Elsmere, 1888 There is nothing more pleasing to look at, just now, than a girl playing the violin. Walter Besant, Armorel of Lyonesse, 1890

n 1875, just three years after the Royal Academy of Music enrolled its first female violin student, Punch called its readers’ attention to this new development with a drawing by its lead artist, George du Maurier.1 The picture’s prominently featured, two-part title, “ The Fair Sextett (Accomplishments of the Rising Female Generation),” identified female violin-playing as part of the movement that sought a wider scope for women’s talents, even as the artist called attention, both in his title and in the comically juxtaposed string ensemble-cum-giant brass instrument that together comprised the “sex-tett,” to the sexual dimension of

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female musical performance. In addition to an indefinably haunting quality, several aspects of the drawing call attention to it as more than merely casual satire. Perhaps most striking is the combination of the statuesque feminine beauty that du Maurier admired with an ambience that seems claustrophobic and even threatening. The women stand, crowded together, at the very front of the stage and are totally absorbed in their music-making—with the exception of the brass-instrument player, there is no eye contact either with audience members or with the Punch reader.2 The cellist, whose left arm is distorted in the drawing, holds her instrument straight up against her body; a glimpse of a lifted skirt inside her right leg and the hint of her left knee on the other side of the cello suggest that she uses the male cellist’s position, one that would be considered shocking for women players for at least the next two decades. Unlike the other players, those of the two large and most “unladylike” instruments—the double bass and the giant brass instrument—the latter a sort of fantasy-cross between the tuba, the snake-like brass instrument appropriately named the serpent (here resonating with associations of the temptress Eve), and the recently invented sarrusophone3—wear dresses with deep décolletage, the expression of female sexuality best known to Victorians in the fashion of formal or “full” dress.The double bass player leans her breasts familiarly on her instrument. The performer on the monstrously huge brass instrument (an incongruous partner for a string ensemble), her face drawn in profile, is shown in the most indecorous act of all, blowing into the tube that connects to the horn’s big bell. As she does this, a man in the boxes stares intently at her through his opera glasses.The recurrent pattern of bare arms and graceful fingers—holding instruments against chin or body, lovingly drawing the bow, steadying the barely balanced horn—finds a visual echo in the curving brass pipes on the right. The audience, or that portion of it shown in the first few rows of the concert hall, shows the same rapt attention as was later depicted in Frederick Barnard’s illustration to Besant’s Armorel, but the sexual aspect of du Maurier’s performance is heightened by his decision to show women performing exclusively for men. If both images exemplify the Victorian male’s right to gaze directly at women (I use Stephen Kern’s helpful definition of “gaze” as a way of looking that serves an erotic purpose),4 the women are hardly passive recipients of that scrutiny, for the inward gaze that signifies total absorption in music also declares their rejection—at least, during the performance—of the traditional expectation that women be in perpetual readiness to serve others. It is the men who are given the passive role in du Maurier’s drawing; acted upon by these instrument-wielding sirens, the male listeners sit, heads tilted back, responding to the extreme visual and

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aural impingement of their space, du Maurier’s metaphor for the many ways in which women had, by the mid-seventies, begun to challenge male monopolies and formerly uncontested male space. Two years after du Maurier’s drawing appeared in Punch, its main rival, the satirical journal Fun,5 published a different sort of response to the advent of the woman violinist. The poem, “True Music,” that appeared anonymously on April 18, 1877, discusses the conflictual choice faced by the poet who weighs the charms of Mirabel, a violinist and Royal Academy student, against those of the musically untutored Mary: True Music Mirabel’s a blithesome fairy, Frolicsome is she; Better I love little Mary (Who believes in me!) Mirabel, on music doting, Comes it rather strong, Almost day and night devoting Unto psalm and song. Mary has but little learning,— Exercises, scales, Open to her mind no yearning for minute details. Mirabel, who’s monstrous clever, Plays the violin In a way remembered ever Should she once begin. Mirabel has been to college (R. A. M. I mean), She possesses all the knowledge; She says Mary’s ‘green.’ Yet I can’t help often thinking That upon the whole Mary’s voice is music linking Loving soul to soul. So I love my little Mary, Mary, full of glee, Mary, who is ne’er contrary, Mary, who loves me. Let them who, in music living, Think that love is nought,

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Mind lest proof of this they’re giving: They are the untaught.

Like the listeners depicted by du Maurier and Barnard, the narrator of “True Music” is fascinated by the new phenomenon of the woman violinist, an interest enhanced by Mirabel’s enticingly “frolicsome” and clever attributes. His reasons for resisting her charms, while presented lightheartedly in this delicately comic poem, are significant in that they are later shown in darker colors by writers who include the Mirabels of their acquaintance among the “strong-minded” violinists who repudiate what were seen as the most admirable aspects of feminine nature, in their pursuit of social advancement and women’s rights. For the Fun poet, as for those later writers, Mary’s lack of musical (or other) learning is no lack at all, but part of a loving and giving nature, a foil to the female violinist’s narcissism.The poem’s “story” is the renunciation of the temptress whose name suggests a vision of beauty. Although he is unable to erase the memory of Mirabel’s violinplaying, the poet, inspired by the selfless and well-named Mary—and anticipating the rewards of her devotion to him (“Mary who loves me”)—turns away from temptation to the soul’s “true music.” The allure of the woman violinist continued to evoke an almost obsessive level of commentary throughout the period of this study. “The Fair Violinist,” a story published anonymously in The Lady in 1885,6 shows the vulnerability even of a man who declares himself indifferent to music, to that seductive image. Lord Heryngtower, who has accompanied his mother to a concert out of a sense of duty, is anticipating a dull afternoon when the lovely young soloist, listed on the program as “Signorina Bianca,” appears on stage, tastefully dressed,“a mass of dusky blue-black hair” piled on her small head, her slender white arms bare.The initial impression she gives is one of “shrinking timidity” but this changes as soon as she begins to play: All appearance of timidity left her; she and the music she called forth were one, and fear was no longer possible. She was inspired; the great soft eyes that appeared to look at the audience in reality saw nothing but the spirit of the sound she drew, quivering and trembling, from her violin.The audience sat spell-bound, looking fascinated into those beautiful, unseeing eyes. . . . Lord Heryngtower drew a long breath and resolved his sudden passionate emotion into one very positive thought— “If ever I marry, that woman shall be my wife.”

Fortunately for young Lord Heryngtower, Signorina Bianca turns out to be Blanche Egerton, a gifted amateur of impeccable lineage; she has agreed to play a solo during her teacher’s concert at his urging and is not, as Lady

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Heryngtower has feared, a professional musician, “a woman fit to provoke and encounter public criticism.” Hearing her play at a country house gathering, Lord Heryngtower is again smitten by this “creature of inspiration, the fair trembling soul of music. . . . Those slender white arms, how expressive they were in their graceful movements!” The two become engaged, and only Oriot, Blanche’s celebrity-teacher, is disappointed: “‘Alas, alas!’ he said; ‘if that girl had been born in a gutter she would have been the glory of the profession.’” Shielded from professional life by her high birth and natural timidity, this Mirabel proves to be a Mary at heart: “Blanche always loved her violin more dearly than anything in the world, except perhaps Heryngtower himself. And he is sometimes a little jealous of it.”7 If the sight of a woman fiddler was captivating, the opportunity to see several or many at one time was all the more likely to draw an audience. All-women’s orchestras, staffed by graduates of London’s growing panoply of music schools, proliferated in response to this interest; some, like Mrs. Hunt’s “Merveilleuses,” sought to enhance their visual appeal with clever names and period costumes.8 One unusual effort to exploit the public’s interest in seeing women perform on the violin was reported in 1898 by Strad under the title, “A New Profession for Ladies.” The “profession” referred to, violin-playing seen but not heard, was the invention of an enterprising concert manager in Berlin who hired six pretty young women to play violins with soaped—and therefore silent—strings as part of a performance with his all-male orchestra.The women were instructed to play, standing, with the appearance of passionate engagement, turning the pages of their music books when the men did. The unsuspecting audience was “enchanted to see so many young and pretty women” in this role and “it is needless to state that the manager found many imitators as soon as his trick was known.”9 An overpowering compulsion to watch the women string players who perform at his seedy hotel in the tropics—despite the atrocious quality of their music-making—motivates the main character (and drives the plot) of Joseph Conrad’s 1915 novel, Victory. Although the sounds of the women’s orchestra that Axel Heyst hears are jarringly discordant—“systematic noise,” “murdering silence”—Heyst is nonetheless drawn by the sight of the players’ bare arms and low-cut dresses:“In the quick time of that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces, the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of brutality—something cruel, sensual, and repulsive.”10 As different as Conrad’s character and setting are from those of “The Fair Violinist”’s Lord Heryngtower almost three decades earlier, Heyst is equally fascinated by the violinist, Lena (known also as Magdalena

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and Alma), especially by her lovely “masses” of brown hair and her “beautiful bare arms.”11 “Bianca’s” slender, bare, white arms are mentioned three times in “The Fair Violinist”; thick tresses and bare arms are standard attributes in fictional portrayals of women violinists.Abundant hair and bare arms intensified the male viewer’s attraction to the female violinist; literary contexts make it clear that the combination carried strong connotations of seductiveness and the promise of intimacy.12 Yet that intimacy was not offered by the violinist directly to those who constituted her male audience; instead, in a way that was at once intriguing and disorienting, the object of intimacy was the instrument upon which she played. Of all musical instruments, Lady Lindsay had pointed out in her 1880 article for The Girl’s Own Paper, the violin is the one to which the performer becomes the most attached.This sense of bonding, of closeness between the musician and his violin, was no new concept; what was new and fascinating was the public display of this private communion by a female performer, a display to which du Maurier called attention in his drawing by having his performers play from memory, without music stands to block the audience’s perception of the performer-instrument relationship. The stage appearance of the standing violinist was very different from that of other female soloists who, in nineteenth-century England, had almost exclusively been pianists or singers. Unlike the violinist, the seated pianist did not face the audience; insofar as her hands were visible to viewers in different parts of the concert hall, they were far more the focus of attention than were her facial features.The solo singer faced the listeners just as the violinist did, but the singer’s attention was completely focused on her audience; her ability to charm and move them expressed traditional female attributes of graciousness and seductiveness. In contrast to both of these soloist-contemporaries, the female soloist on the violin faced the audience but seemed oblivious to its existence—hers were the unseeing eyes of “Bianca” in the “Fair Violinist” or of the performers in “The Fair Sextett.” Mary, the sweet singer of “True Music,” gives all her attention to the recipient of her song and is far too self-effacing to perform publicly, before strangers. Like the members of the lovely “Sex-tett,” Mirabel, Bianca, and Armorel convey a very different impression to the male viewer. Focused on an inner reality, these women, while engaged in music-making, enter a secret world they share only with their instruments. A poem written in 1892 by the musicologist and feminist Marion Scott, then 15 years of age, provides vivid testimony of what that secret world felt like for a young woman violinist. Born in 1877, Scott began her violin study during the years when female violin-playing was rapidly gaining acceptance and participated in the burgeoning of all-female ensembles as a member of the Reverend E. H. Moberly’s ladies’ string orchestra.The

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sonnets she wrote to her violin personalize Lady Lindsay’s remarks on the intensity of the bonding between player and instrument:13 My dear, sweet faithful friend, I love you more Than words, which are small things, can ever tell. Let it suffice we know our love so well That protestations need not make it sure. When on your mellow strings my bow I draw I leave the common world, and haply dwell In regions where the foot of man n’er fell, And where you bring me close to Heaven’s door. Ah! friend, t’is only thou and I who know The whole of one another’s mind and heart! We have no secrets, and to you I show My thoughts, of which the world knows but a part. Then friend, come good or ill, it can but prove That we are steadfast friends, and truly love.14

Described as more than a friend, the violin shares secrets that provide exclusive knowledge of the player’s mind and heart; it is a being that responds to specific physical acts by the musician (“When on your mellow strings my bow I draw”) by giving access to ecstatic experience,“Heaven’s door.”There is an equality between the faithful friends, both of whom love and share secrets, but the most heightened moments of their joint experience—leaving the “common world”—remain in a potential state until the inanimate instrument is acted upon by the player’s hand and bow. Scott provides further explanation of this mutuality in a quatrain from the next sonnet in the sequence: How great a soul is in my violin Waiting my hand to waken it from sleep, And rouse its fourfold voices; while I win Still greater knowledge of its secret deep.

If the sexual aura of Marion Scott’s confessional poetry emerges from the page only in a suggestive way, some of her contemporaries were more direct. Here, again, is the ubiquitous Haweis; writing in the late 1890s in the Contemporary Review, he envisions a lovely young violinist who plays, “in a natural and fetching pose, just a little on one side,” arms and shoulders bare, her hair artistically arranged:

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Her cheek leans lovingly upon the smooth surface of her glowing Cremona. . . . [She is] exquisitely fitted to manipulate its anointed fabric and call forth the secrets of its mysterious soul. Her sensitive hand seems made to clasp its smooth and taper [sic] neck. . . .With what a swiftness of command does her bow attack, caress, or dally with the willing strings; how comfortably and fondly does the Cremona nestle under her little chin, close above her throbbing heart, as though listening fondly to the whispering rustle of those tender beats before transmuting their message into mystic sound.15

As articulated by Scott and Haweis, the highly physical love relationship between woman and the instrument that most strongly resembles her may well have evoked in some viewers a response similar to that with which they viewed the androgynous figures of Burne-Jones’s paintings—a response of appreciation troubled by a strong connotation of sexual ambiguity. Female violin-playing became popular during a period of gender fluidity exemplified by striking changes in female movement and dress. Girls in the gymnastics classes that became part of the secondary curriculum during the eighties engaged in exercises and sports previously reserved to boys. The heavy, upholstered look of Victorian female dress was under challenge both by advocates of “rational” dress reform and by proponents of the naturally-flowing lines of the aesthetic movement seen in Hughes’s portrait of the Lushington women. Like Burne-Jones’s mythological figures, women violinists of the period were perceived as part of a highly charged atmosphere of gender-role ambiguity; it seems likely that some of the fascination evoked by female violinists resulted from their evocation of currents of feeling that led George Gissing to characterize this period as an age of “sexual anarchy.”16 Until the sight of the female violinist had become so familiar that it no longer stimulated comment, her movements of “caress and evocation,” especially if she was young and attractive, conveyed, for some viewers, unsettling implications of the auto- or homoerotic.17 One possible response to the psychic discomfort this caused was to ascribe a male role to the violin. Such gender-redefinition is suggested by the conclusion to the “Fair Violinist,” which playfully describes Lord Heryngtower’s “jealousy” of Blanche’s beloved instrument as that of a rival lover. H. R. Haweis used the gender modification more clumsily in advice contained in an article he wrote for The Young Woman magazine in the mid-nineties. A girl, Haweis wrote, should choose her violin as she would her husband: “Remember you have got to live with this fiddle, to handle it, to be at close quarters with it, to confide to it your moods and feelings, to converse with it freely, even to tend it and nurse it sometimes.”18

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A far more complex and interesting use of the violin/husband analogy appears in the 1896 novel, Miss Träumerei, an affectionate, gently satirical story of the circle of Lizst’s students and admirers in Weimar that one reviewer designated “the musical novel of the year”;19 its American author, Albert Morris Bagby, had himself studied piano there with “the Master.” Dismayed by the intensity of her lover’s rapturous response to the dazzling performance of a woman violinist, Bagby’s heroine, the gifted pianist Muriel Holme, tells him (Stanford) what another celebrated woman violinist had once revealed to her:“‘I love my husband better than an man living, but I don’t love him a quarter as much as I do my violin.’” Asked by Stanford whether a piano had “that same power over a woman,” Muriel is evasive, but suggests that the violinist she quoted “was nurtured on the homage of the public. It was her daily bread.” Herself an accomplished musician and one of Liszt’s favorite students, Muriel subtly charges her rival with the excessive self-love that her contemporaries often perceived in the performance of a woman violinist. Brilliant as her music-making might be, the female violinist was perceived by some in her audience as an aural, regendered Narcissus, dangerously enamored of her own voice. A more light-hearted and imaginative defeminization of the violin is the unspoken theme of a poem that appeared under the title “Her Violin,” in the May, 1896, issue of The Magazine of Music. The poet, James B. Keynon, fantasizes himself as a cross-gendered violin that, in the hands of a woman player, becomes her passive, warmly caressed male beloved: Her Violin I would I were her violin, To rest beneath her dimpled chin, And softly kiss her swan-white throat, And breathe my love through every note. When o’er my strings her fingers fair Should lightly wander here and there, The while her flashing bow did press My bosom with its swift caress, Then would I waken into song The rapture that had slumbered long. Mine ear against her swelling breast, Should hearken to its sweet unrest, And—happy spy!—then should I know How, deep beneath that drifted snow, A blissful tumult in her heart Made all her fluttering pulses start. Then that high calm, that maiden grace,

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That meekly proud and peerless face, That aureole of sun-bright hair, That brow such as the seraphs wear— No longer these should baffle quite The anxious lover’s dazzled sight. Ah, would I were her violin, That thus her secret I might win. “The Century,” James B. Keynon

Inevitably, a highly gifted woman violinist, in fact or fiction, faced the issue of the compatibility of love and marriage with the practice of those gifts outside the private sphere.“What will be her future?” wrote The Strad correspondent “Lancastrian,” in his 1907 article on Marie Hall,“What will be her end? Will mind ultimately consume matter, or will matrimony consume both? God forbid this last! At present obviously she is wedded to her art; it absolutely monopolises her devotion and loyalty.Will it always be so? Quien sabe?” In view of contemporary comments that Hall be considered Neruda’s English successor, it is striking to find the latter’s marital status so seldom alluded to in discussions of the marriage issue that loomed large in discussions of other women’s musical careers. Was it Neruda’s foreign origins that made her example seem to lack relevance for native violinists, or was there reluctance to open the matter of her personal history? A Catholic, Wilma Neruda had lived apart from her first husband for 16 years, from 1869 until 1885, the year of his death. Her continued concert career as Lady Hallé—Charles Hallé was knighted in 1888, the year of their marriage— was one of the highest degree of respectability and prestige, but it seems likely that her origins in the professional music world of continental Europe and the special circumstance of marriage to two professional musicians caused her career and marital patterns to be viewed as sui generis rather than as a useful (or monitory) model to aspiring young women musicians, however inspired they were by her genius on the violin. Whatever career a woman contemplated, the traditional answer to the choice between profession and husband was the same: woman’s true mission is marriage and family. Some women violinists depicted in fictional works act in accordance with this traditional view. Blanche Egerton, in “The Fair Violinist,” is talented enough to become a professional, but high birth and personal preference make marriage her natural choice. Rose Leyburn’s decision, in the concluding pages of Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere, to accept the marriage proposal of her philanthropist-aristocrat lover, implies the irrelevance of her past ambitions and is presented as proof of her maturing into what contemporaries called a “womanly” woman. In Rose’s last appearance in the book, she asks her husband-to-be, Flaxman, to forgive her

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for making him wait so long for her answer: “‘It was impertinent—it was like a child playing tricks!’”20 An extended analysis of the conflict between career and marriage is given by Elizabeth Godfrey (the pseudonym used by Jessie Bedford) in her 1895 novel about a young woman violinist, Cornish Diamonds. Godfrey’s heroine, Jenifer (sic) Lyon, recognizes that her musical gifts lift her far above the category of “young-lady music,”21 and she pursues her studies in Germany with great energy and determination.When asked if music is completely fulfilling to her, however, she responds that if it is not,“‘it makes me forget that I am not contented.’”22 In Godfrey’s view, Jenifer acquires true wisdom when she comes to understand that, important as music has been in her life, only love for a husband can fulfil a woman’s deepest nature. Disappointed at his loss of a valued professional partner, her teacher, Nicolai, comments that “after all, she’s only a woman,” a statement Godfrey believes is true in a sense more profound than Nicolai can understand.23 The authors of these three fictional works readily, even joyfully, accept the transition of their violinist-women to a kind of marriage that requires the abandonment not only of careers, but also of the high performance standards that can be maintained only by constant practice. They accept and celebrate this transition, even while recognizing woman’s musical genius, because they see nothing in violin-playing that contradicts traditional ideas concerning woman’s nature and place in society. There is a flash of danger in the loss of feminine timidity when Rose, Blanche, and Jenifer begin to play, but their authors make clear that this change is a requisite of public performance that will not preclude submissiveness in marriage: While she [Jenifer Lyon] played, the crowded hall became to her simply a large coloured mass in which she never attempted to discriminate, and she withdrew into a world where she and the composer had it to themselves. Had it not been for her power to do this, she would hardly have had the nerve to face a London audience.”24

Walter Besant shows how his gifted violinist, Armorel, “naturally” chooses submissiveness once her future husband, Roland Lee, has responded to her inspiring example and lifted his own formerly decadent life up to her high moral plane. Armorel is presented as a person of remarkable intellectual powers and the paragon of every virtue. She unmasks the glamorous swindler who has claimed Roland’s paintings and the literary works of others as his own, and defies the criminal at great personal risk. Yet once she has accepted the marriage proposal of the man whose spiritual rebirth has come about through her own courage and integrity, she immediately accepts Roland as her “master.”25 Armorel’s wholehearted ac-

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ceptance of this change in their relationship is appropriate because, in the judgment Besant has clearly expressed early in the novel, the history of a woman begins only when the right man enters her life.26 Besant allows for no exception to this generalization, even when the woman’s genius and sterling character and the man’s serious moral defects are juxtaposed with full clarity. Some fiction writers, however, dissented from the prevailing view that marriage was always the best choice for women of musical genius. These authors saw the marriage question as especially problematic for the highlygifted woman violinist, believing as they did that she was, in some fundamental and important way, different from other women. Whether the woman violinist was different because of the instrument’s influence, or whether she revealed her essential difference when she chose it, the violin would, according to these authors, retain a place in her life that could not, and should not, be altogether supplanted by a husband. If she were to marry, marital arrangements would have to be different in important ways from those of most of her contemporaries.This issue forms the substance of three fictional works written by women during the 1880s and 1890s: Bertha Thomas’s 1880 novel, The Violin-Player; Mildred Finlay’s short story, “The Stradivarius,” published in 1897 in The Strand Musical Magazine; and M. E. Francis’s novel, The Duenna of a Genius, published in 1898.27 Bertha Thomas’s Laurence Therval is the daughter of a French bandmaster who teaches her the violin in the hope that she will win the recognition denied him.28 Laur continues to develop her gifts through a succession of hardships that ensue after her father’s death up until the time she becomes an international star.The 12-year-old Laur acquires the most significant portion of her training through an act of trickery; disguising her true sex by means of a short haircut and male clothing, she is able to fool the misogynistic Professor Nielsen who, as a matter of principle, accepts no female pupils. Regarding her as a boy of the highest musical gifts, he warns Laur about the jealousy that genius provokes, and urges his pupil to consider following some easier path. In a speech that foreshadows the traumas Laur will later experience, Nielsen tells her that the life of the great musician is full of pain and sorrow; ambitious rivals spread false rumors that ruin the great artist’s reputation and even alienate those he loves: “The artist has no family, no love. There is no mistress, no wife so mercilessly jealous as Art. She claims you body and soul.”29 Laur replies, “I did not choose the [artist’s] life—it chose me.There is no other I could live.”30 Nielsen teaches Laur for a period of two years, by which time her maturing body has begun to make the disguise hard to maintain. Furious when she confesses her deception, Nielsen overcomes his anger, but not his misogyny; he recognizes that she had to prove herself “outside my law”

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and that “even a general truth admits of exceptions.”31 Nielsen’s warnings take on still greater urgency with his knowledge of her true identity.The question now is whether Laur is equal to the gifts born within her: “You have a great future before you. Be true to it. Never think there are not other things which will one day seem greater to you, and more dear than art, and tempt you to neglect it. The sacrifice for a man is very great; for a woman it is infinite. If you flinch from making it, I shall repent I ever taught you. Promise me . . . that your vocation, if it cannot always hold the first place in your heart, shall always be the first moving power in your life.”

Laur promises and the author adds: “Never seemed vow more easy, more delightful. St. Cecilia was her votive idol, the rest was trash.”32 Lovely according to the pattern of all such heroines, her hair predictably long and luxuriant,33 Laur’s public performances as a young woman are characterized by the “extraordinary self-forgetfulness” we have seen in fictional performers already discussed, except that, in her case, there is an added element, the fervor of religious dedication: Laur’s playing impresses her audience as “one offering a sacrifice at an unseen shrine.” Truly a Saint Cecilia, once she falls in love, she inspires Gervase, her formerly self-indulgent beloved, to her own high moral plane. Even so, his love and marriage proposal evoke conflicting feelings within her: “It is woman’s destiny, they say, to love. Had she thought she would escape it? had she rashly defied it? that the powers that rule our lives [been sent] her thus, as it were in mockery, and to test her powers of resistance?”34 The reformed Gervase tells her that, married, she will be still happier,“‘only with a higher happiness. . . . If you shut out love from your life, will you even be the better musician? Never believe it!’”Their decision, one frustrated by his early death, is for her to stay true to her profession, but to give up the exhausting schedule of the touring artist, the “nomad” life.35 A widow faithful to her husband’s memory, Laur’s dream of love will remain in the past; “she wanders through the world again alone, with a loyal old comrade—her violin.”36 Fictional writings about women violinists, all of which focused on the marriage question, burgeoned during the nineties, the decade in which female violin-playing became so fashionable that H. R. Haweis, who had strongly encouraged girls to take up the instrument, was moved to call it a “ mania [that] has reached proportions which call for a protest.”37 The high visibility and rapid progress of this trend placed female violin-playing among other changes associated with the image of the New Woman, who turned away from the restrictions associated with traditional mores, sometimes denounced marriage as an oppressive institution, and embraced such

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novelties as smoking, public speaking, and club life. A cartoon on this change that appeared in Funny Folks in October, 1891—“Will it End in Smoke?”—shows a women’s club room filled with smoking ladies who are entertained by a woman fiddler, her female accompanist contentedly puffing away at the piano. The decade of the New Woman was also the time when the interest in fairy tales reached its peak among scholars and the general public. No doubt George Newnes, proprietor of The Strand Musical Magazine, identified the appeal of Mildred Finlay’s story of thwarted musical genius in the way it combined fairy tale motifs with contemporary concerns about the compatibility of female musical genius with traditional marriage patterns. The Strand Musical Magazine was a short-lived effort (1895–1899) by Newnes to replicate the enormous success of his The Strand Magazine in a more specialized market. It featured interviews with celebrity musicians, articles on music institutions, fiction, and printed music. Directed to this music-loving readership, “The Stradivarius” tells the story of Martha, a country girl whose “ordinary” life is disrupted by the chance discovery of her musical genius. A dowdy child of 13, she is transfixed by the sound of a violin she hears in church, and persuades the violinist who has just moved to her village to teach her on an instrument her brother has brought home from a fair.A few years later, her teacher dies and leaves her his beloved Stradivarius, which she continues to play without further formal instruction. When she is 19, a renowned musician, who has come to the village to recuperate from an illness, hears her play as he passes her parents’ cottage. Impressed by her talent, he offers to take her to London to embark on a musical career. Martha’s parents, who have no sympathy for music, deride her abilities and pressure her to marry a local mill-hand, a plan that she resists. Finally, Martha’s mother decides to take matters in hand. She visits the musician and tells him Martha is about to marry. Infuriated by her mother’s intervention, Martha runs out to accept the offer of a London career, whereupon her mother takes the precious instrument and throws it into the fire: A dirty old bit o’ wood w’ two holes in it, an’ some old string, . . . it’ll be a blessing to burn it. She need never know; she’ll think as ‘twas stolen. . . . That old man bewitched her, I’ll be bound. Folks do say as he was a wizard, or such like.”

Martha returns while the Strad is still burning and snatches its charred remains from the fire. As she leaves the cottage, she turns to her mother and says, with a look on her face that the woman would never forget, “Mother, I curse you!” Her mother tells her that she has acted in Martha’s

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best interest, adding that it is time she married and forgot this nonsense. Sorrowful but resigned, Martha agrees to marry Jem. “And the following week the great musician went away; and that is how the world lost a rare and a great genius.” Of interest in this slight and strange tale are the romantic idea of musical genius that almost miraculously appears in the person of a rustic young woman, the fairy tale pronouncement of a curse, and the lingering memory of the fiddle as devil’s instrument, whose burning Martha’s mother justifies as a form of blessing and exorcism from the “bewitching” of her daughter. M. E. Francis’s book, The Duenna of a Genius, portrays a female violinist whose simplicity is as marked as Martha’s, but whose gifts eventually find a place to blossom. Of mixed French and Hungarian parentage, the brilliant musician,Valérie Kostolitz, is so childlike and impulsive that she needs constant looking-after by Margot, her level-headed sister, the “duenna” of the title.Valérie’s persistently rash and impulsive behavior frustrates her sister’s efforts to help her establish a concert career—for example, she responds to a fashionable audience’s cool reception of her performance of a demanding piece of music by following it with an unannounced encore that a puzzled listener identifies as variations on ta ra ra boom de-ay. But the author makes it clear, through the familiar touchstone of self-forgetfulness in performance, that Valérie’s genius is the genuine article: While she played she seemed to forget everybody and everything, except her art; her face was transfigured, her eyes dilated; she had even a majesty of bearing with which no one could have credited her. It was as though she were actually uplifted by her own genius.

Eventually,Valérie achieves success through unorthodox, almost magical, means.The sisters attend a concert by a visiting Hungarian pianist and composer, Paul Waldenek.Valérie is swept off her feet and, in a chapter entitled “Appassionato Subito,” plays one of his compositions on her Cremona, declaring that the musical art of both musicians will be complete only on the day that they play together: “My love would fill up that void in his heart of which his music speaks.”38 Margot is alarmed by Valérie’s fantasy: “Were the child’s delicate artistic brain and highly strung nervous organisation giving way under the pressure of this sudden fierce excitement?”39 Following a physician’s advice, Margot takes her sister for a restful stay in Wiesbaden, but Valérie’s composure is shattered when she hears that Waldenek has arrived there for a concert “This is Fairyland!” she tells her worried sister, “The Prince is waiting!” Awakened early the morning after Waldenek’s Wiesbaden concert, Valérie hears footsteps outside her window and sees the pianist on his way for an early walk in the woods.

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She decides to follow with the plan of playing her violin for him, alone “in that green, silent world.” As he sits, resting halfway up the hillside,Valérie, standing in the shadow of the fir trees, plays the Reverie he had performed the night before. He listens, spellbound, tears in his eyes, immediately acknowledging the genius of the unseen musician. He searches around him to find the source of the music:“What was this vision? A child, a sprite, the Spirit of the woods? Then he took a step nearer and looked into her luminous, inspired eyes. . . . It was a woman! . . .Waldenek felt as it were bewitched.”Valérie plays another of his compositions and he recognizes that she has mingled a deeper pathos to his own notes. “You can make your heart speak,” she tells him, “but I can make it sing.” Before long, the two marry and begin a new life of performing in partnership. In the chapter “Finale con Molto Sentimento,” Margot, too, finds love and marriage. It is, indeed, fairyland. One other book published during this decade, Sarah Grand’s celebrated New Woman novel The Heavenly Twins, brought out by Heinemann in 1893 (a year after the author had published it at her own expense), gives the violin a central role in the context of a narrative focused on gender identity.40 The segment of the novel that focuses on Angelica Kilroy, a brilliant young woman violinist, had a quasi-independent publishing history; it was written in 1880–81, years before the rest of the book, and was published separately in 1899, again by the adventurous Heinemann, who may have been motivated by the interest fiction readers had recently shown in the female violinist, as well as by the warm reception given in 1893 to the mischievous siblings of Grand’s title.41 In this strange fantasy, which she called “The Tenor and the Boy.—An Interlude,” the unconventional twin, Angelica, develops a friendship that is playful yet deeply serious, in nocturnal visits to a noted singer who is employed by the local cathedral. Although Angelica is married (a circumstance the tenor knows nothing about), her husband, her senior by 20 years, had agreed, as a condition to their union, to her continued freedom to do “as she liked.” Angelica, who often exchanged clothes with her brother, Diavolo, when they were children, visits the Tenor in male disguise and he accepts her as a boy, although he comments, from time to time, on “his” effeminate voice and features. When the Boy first plays his violin outside the Tenor’s house, the singer immediately recognizes “the tone of a rare instrument, and the touch of a master hand.” On repeated visits, the Boy continues to impress the Tenor both with his technical mastery on the instrument and the originality of his interpretations. In her “real” life as a young woman, Angelica had wished to become a professional violinist, but her family, and subsequently her husband, would not hear of it.This is one of many obstacles to the full development of her

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talents that Angelica had to face, in contrast to her far less gifted brother, who received educational opportunities and vocational choices that were automatically denied to his twin, even though she was the “elder, taller, stronger, and wickeder of the two.” At home with the gentle and patient Mr. Kilroy, Angelica’s main use of the violin is as a means of extortion: she enhances the persuasiveness of requests for extra money by threatening to play the instrument in exchange for payment.42 Angelica’s brilliant playing to the Tenor, who is highly susceptible to the music and to the player’s whimsical but engaging personality, intensifies the gender-based reversals of these visits: the female violinist is fully in control and the Tenor exquisitely receptive. Having been told, in response to his question, that the Boy’s name is Claude, the Tenor laughingly suggests he must mean “delicate, dainty, white-fingered Maude.” In return, the Boy demands the respect due to his true mastery, a talent that transcends traditional gender divisions even as it evokes an erotically-laden aura: “I’ll make you respect these delicate fingers of mine, though,” the Boy irritably interposed, and then he took up his violin. “I’ll make you quiver.” He drew a long melodious wail from the instrument, then lightly ran up the chromatic scale and paused on an upper note for an instant before he began, with perfect certainty of idea and marvellous modulations and transitions in the expression of it, to make music that steeped the Tenor’s whole being in bliss.”43

Carried away by the spell of the Boy’s playing, the Tenor recognizes that his young friend’s music appeals to his senses rather than his intellect, a situation he does not object to “for music was the only form of sensuous indulgence he [the Tenor] ever rioted in.” No longer teasing about the Boy’s effeminacy, the Tenor calls him a genius and compares him to the sexless creature of the “Witch of Atlas.” Frowning, the Boy redefines genius not as sexlessness but as a kind of androgyny, a combination of “the attributes of both minds, masculine and feminine, perfectly united in one person of either sex.”44 This is, in essence, the burden of Angelica’s story: that relations between the sexes are spoiled by gender rules that denigrate female intellect and confine its development and sphere of action. As she tells the Tenor, once her disguise has been revealed, their friendship would never have been possible had her true sex been known. The story reaches a tragic climax during an idyllic boating excursion at night on the river. As the Tenor rows, the Boy plays his violin brilliantly, “making it respond to his touch like a living creature.” Grand creates a scene that is at once sensuous and sacred:“‘Making music,” the Boy says “is a religious rite to me.” But the air grows misty and he begins to worry that

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the dampness will ruin his instrument. The Tenor turns the boat around and sings gloriously as the fog mysteriously clears.Then the mood of exaltation suddenly ends. Tired, the Tenor asks the Boy to row but the Boy teases him, stands up in the boat, and flourishing the violin as if to hit the Tenor on the head with it, loses his balance, and immediately sinks into the deep water.The Tenor dives in and rescues the Boy, who, although unconscious, holds tightly to the violin; the Tenor understands the power of this “ruling passion.” Once on dry land, the Tenor carries the Boy to his home. Anxious to know if his friend is still alive, the Tenor holds him in a close embrace and is relieved to feel the Boy’s limbs quiver through the blanket he has wrapped around him.45 This magical moment of near-physical union is quickly followed by disillusionment and death—not the Boy’s, but the Tenor’s. Awakening, her own thick dark hair and wet form revealed,46 the Boy is now recognized as Angelica, the young woman the Tenor had admired in church; her violinist-“brother” had spoken of her as his twin. The Tenor, who had idealized and fantasized marrying the lovely young woman, is bitterly disillusioned by the deception, but responds compassionately to Angelica’s plea for forgiveness: “Poor misguided girl! . . . may God in heaven forgive you, and help you, and keep you safe, and make you good and true and pure now and always.” Angelica explains the background to the adventure, telling him of her childhood delight in masquerading as her brother, Diavolo; her family’s indifference to her aspirations (“Nothing of this kind . . . would have happened . . . if I had been allowed to support a charity hospital with my violin—or something; made to feel responsible, you know”); and of the danger of leaving “an energetic woman without a single strong interest or object in life.”This adventure, she explains, has been a distraction from a frustrating life; the real problem, for her as for others of her sex, derives from society’s requirement that a girl must stifle her talents.47 The tragedy that ensues, the Tenor’s death from pneumonia, results from his immersion in the cold river. Devastated when she learns of it, Angelica struggles to rethink the purposes of her life. She sleeps for a long time, and in a dream imagines how, if life’s conditions were different, she would take her violin “and make it what it was intended to be, a delight to thousands.” But Mr. Kilroy responds to this plan by lowering his eyes, and the resignation of this dreamed response leads her to understand how unhappy she has made him; still dreaming, she promises never to play in public as long as she lives.48 Awakened and with new understanding,Angelica comes to appreciate her husband’s kindness, and he recognizes his own neglect of his inexperienced young wife. Although she has recovered her violin, mysteriously unharmed, in the dead Tenor’s house,49 at this moment of closure, the instrument of her exuberant male-and-female nature and of her professional

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aspirations—“’To make music is my vocation,’” she had told the Tenor, “‘and I follow it like a man’”50—disappears from the narrative. By attributing to Angelica a brilliant level of mastery on this instrument that had so recently opened a new dimension of music-making to women, and then decisively ending the possibility of a performance career (even one dedicated to philanthropic goals), Sarah Grand conveys a deep sense of the loss that results from the suppression of woman’s gifts. Newly dedicated to traditional marriage, Angelica has nevertheless experienced the possibility of living a fuller and emotionally richer life.Angelica would turn from her violin, but others would successfully follow the examples set by Neruda, Shinner, and soon, by Marie Hall. The fictional works on women violinists we have discussed so far have presented musicians deserving of our sympathy, although only Laurence Thorval and Armorel Rosevean are meant to personify the height of moral stature as well as musical genius.The stories we will turn to now represent a very different response to the woman violinist, one highly critical not of her abilities, but of her character. A striking characteristic of all these works, whether admiring or critical of the female musician, is an atmosphere of highly charged intensity. However the author depicts the bond between woman and violin, it is seen as a potent one, heavy with emotional weight and meaning. One of the most subtle, puzzling, and haunting of these fictional pieces is a story,“Forgotten Chords,” published in 1897 in The Lady’s Realm. The author, Lady Mabel Howard, was one of a number of aristocratic writers the magazine featured during its early years.51 The story’s main characters are a married couple, George and Nellie Beresford. Retired from active duty at the time the story begins, Colonel Beresford serves on the board of directors of a London hospital. A man of high ideals, he is deeply attached to Nellie, whom he considers “the soul of purity and truth.” Others, however, see her as cold and unsympathetic, and she is noticeably taciturn and unresponsive towards her husband. One especially odd characteristic of Nellie is her dislike of music, a feeling so strong that she is distressed by an invitation to a concert or opera and even bribes organgrinders who appear on her street to move on. During the time that George and Nellie were engaged to be married, he had been called to duty in Egypt. Although George noticed a change in his fiancée upon his return, his pleasure in being back outweighed any desire to look into its source.Whatever happened during his absence was never revealed to him, but he was vaguely aware that Nellie’s people had somehow been “in trouble.” The main event of the story is the shattering of Nellie’s emotional wall and of her husband’s illusions. It is brought about by the arrival of a guest

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whom George has invited to dinner. The man, a professional pianist, is puzzled by Nellie’s hostile response to the question he feels strangely compelled to ask her: “‘Are you a musician, Mrs. Beresford?’” Her answer is that she hates music: “‘It is the deepest and most subtle of all evil influences, because we shelter ourselves behind it and call it good. . . . [Music] draws us in spite of ourselves, and then drops us with a future of unsatisfied cravings.’” Mr.Tenion suggests that she hates it because she fears it and the subject is then abruptly dropped. Later in the evening, he opens the “evidently unused” piano and plays the “wild, sad melody” from the second act of Tristan. “As if moved by an irresistible force,” Nellie leaves the room and returns with a violin that she prepares with the practiced skill of a professional. George, who has had no idea of the presence of this instrument, is stunned: Was that Nellie, who stood there with the violin?—erect, with her head thrown back, her lips parted, and her whole face and figure alive with passion and tenderness, and the possibilities of life and living before her. She had gone into another world, and she was living her own life, a life in which he had never shared, of which he knew nothing. Her whole self was transformed, and her violin was telling her of the days that had gone; and through its medium her soul had come back to life. The phantoms of the past were round her, . . . flooding her whole being with passion, the strings answering to her touch, now telling of tenderness and love, and then of such pain and suffering that the sound of it wrung his heart. He held his breath as he stood listening, and he began to realise . . . what possibilities of heaven and hell had been open to her, of which he had known nothing . . . then he began to understand; his very soul died within him, and somehow he knew. And with the knowledge, the faith and hopes of years lay shattered at his feet.

The secret is not spelled out for the reader, but George understands it to be implicit in a puzzling comment Nellie had made earlier in the day, that time heals all sorrows but remorse for sin. He had often told her that she knew no sin, believing her a model of purity. It was through her violin that he came to understand her deception. Like the harp or fiddle in “Binnorie,” Nellie’s violin revealed the hidden and disturbing truth: the instrument, to echo Menuhin’s oddly appropriate words, was truly “her own voice,” making known what Nellie had tried to keep even from her own conscious mind by withdrawing from music and silencing the vehicle of her genius. If Lady Mabel Howard’s story is a kind of morality tale, she colors it with a shadow of ambiguity, suggesting that Nellie may herself have been the victim of some undisclosed and barely hinted-at family trauma. Nev-

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ertheless, her response to Wagner’s wildly passionate music leaves little doubt of a sexual cause for her remorse, almost certainly infidelity.Whatever the precise nature of her “sin,” Nellie has ruined the life of the husband who has foolishly idealized her.The power of “Forgotten Chords” lies in the author’s ability to evoke the folkloric legacy of the violin as the revealer of hidden truth in a veiled and mysterious narrative of deception and violated trust. Our final examples of 1890s violin-centered musical fiction present a strikingly different set of responses to the woman player.Theodora Legh, in Cecily Ullmann Sidgwick’s A Splendid Cousin (1892) and Alma Frothingham in George Gissing’s The Whirlpool (1897) are portrayed wholly without sympathy as women who cynically exploit male susceptibility to the charms of the female violinist to their own illegitimate ends. A Splendid Cousin, one of the few among her 45 novels that the author published under the pseudonym Mrs. Andrew Dean, provides a foil for the captivating Theodora in her cousin, Ruth Godwin, who embodies the feminine virtues of kindness, modesty, and selflessness. Unfortunately for the loving and loyal Ruth, who cares devotedly for Theodora’s terminally ill mother, these virtues, however highly valued, do not entice. Mrs. Legh compounds the injustice of this social reality when she provides Mr.Wyndham, a widower who lives next door with his young daughter, with contrasting descriptions of the cousins. “She is tall and elegant,” says Mrs. Legh of her daughter,“and none of her hats hide her hair.”As for Ruth,“No one ever notices Ruth—do they, my dear? Your manner is more business-like and you are short.”52 Despite limited family finances,Theodora has no qualms about going to Germany for two years of music study. Upon her return, she exercises her charms on Mr. Wyndham, who has been on the verge of proposing to Ruth. Ruth’s fears that her “splendid cousin” will “appropriate” him are quickly realized: “[Theodora’s] deep red gown was a mystical and bewitching garment. With her fiddle tucked lovingly under her chin, and her great eyes staring unobservantly at him as she played, he thought that she was the most beautiful and remarkable woman he had ever seen.”53 Self-absorbed and supremely confident of her own attractions,Theodora has no idea that she has stolen the man Ruth loves:“She never dreamed that any one much in her company could think of another woman.”54 Although Theodora cares little for Wyndham and, in New Woman fashion, has made it clear that she considers marriage the equivalent of prison, she accepts his proposal when her mother’s physician insists that Mrs. Legh go abroad in a final effort to recuperate: Ruth is to serve as her aunt’s companion and Theodora, with little money, has trouble finding substitute lodgings. Having agreed to Theodora’s desire to give her life to music as a

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condition of their marriage, Wyndham is quickly disillusioned; Theodora ignores household responsibilities and behaves callously toward her stepdaughter. Obsessed by an ambition far greater than her talent, she practices for hours at a time and soon develops a painful cramp in her hand. Urged by her husband and her German violin master to give up playing, Theodora refuses to let go of the ambition that has governed her life. But when she tries to play, the cramp returns and her best efforts bring only “a jumble of sound”: With a moan of pain, a sob of rage, Theodora threw down her bow, stood with her violin poised in her right hand and with a sudden uncontrollable impulse hurled it crashing upon the fire. She saw it bruised and broken, she saw the flames lick it round. It was like looking on at a murder.

Distraught,Theodora rushes into the street, blinding pain in her head, and walks out into the fog, following the street to the towpath at its end. Disoriented by the sounds of traffic, she loses her footing and drowns in the high tide. Sidgwick’s novel includes a number of features familiar in the works we have looked at: a beautiful woman made irresistible by the stance of violin-playing; the female violinist’s power to “bewitch” a male admirer, intensified here by Theodora’s seductive style of dress; the efficacy of the violin as the moral agent that brings about punishment for the evildoer; and finally, the story’s dramatic climax that brings a terrible death both to the violin (in the classic mode of conflagration) and to its player. But there are clear differences between this tale of 1892 and those that preceded it. Unlike Laur Thorval, Blanche Egerton, Rose Leyburn, and Armorel Rosevean, Theodora is not devoted to the violin for its musical rewards, but for its social advantages—her happiest thoughts are associated with the entrée into Society promised by her teacher’s invitation to join him in performances at socialite parties. Human relationships have scant value when compared with Theodora’s desire for success and recognition. Sidgwick emphasizes the contrast between Ruth’s loving care of her aunt and of little Etty Wyndham, and Theodora’s limited tolerance of children, which the author characterizes as a masculine aspect of her character.55 If we juxtapose a rereading of the last verse of Fun’s 1877 poem, “True Music,” with the violent deaths of player and instrument that provide the conclusion to A Splendid Cousin, the novel emerges as a kind of late Victorian parable: the poet’s half-playful decision to turn away from frolicsome Mirabel is magnified by Sidgwick into a warning against the woman whose absorption in music signifies a destructive self-absorption, the lack of the most highly prized female attribute, a loving soul:

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Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Let them who, in music living, Think that love is nought, Mind lest proof of this they’re giving, They are the untaught.

George Gissing’s 1897 novel, The Whirlpool,56 develops a far more nuanced portrait of a woman violinist and of the social world that gives scope to her ambitions. There is, however, a strong bond that unites his Alma Frothingham with Theodora Legh, as suggested by their ironically chosen first names: Alma or “soul”; Theodora, or “gift of God.” Like Theodora, Alma is able to capitalize on a modest level of musical talent by her physical beauty and seductiveness. Because Alma’s social climbing begins from a more advantageous position, her fall takes place on a wider and more public scale; because she marries and becomes the mother of a son, her failure as a woman reaches into the next generation. A violinist and former student at the Royal Academy of Music, Alma is the daughter a self-made man whose wealth derives from work as a financial adviser affiliated with a banking and investment firm. Almost 24 when the story begins,Alma has founded her own string quartet and regularly performs at her mother’s at-homes. A guest at these events, Harvey Rolfe, a 37-year old bachelor with a taste for music, falls under the spell of the lovely violinist. Like du Maurier in his drawing of string players in a small ensemble, Gissing presents Alma in standing posture so as to maximize the impact of her presence on the male portion of her audience, mixing his own half-cynical, authorial response with Rolfe’s more innocent vulnerability: Alma’s countenance shone—possibly with the joy of the artist, perhaps only with gratified vanity. As she grew warm, the rosy blood mantled in her cheeks and flushed her neck. Every muscle and nerve tense as the strings from which she struck music, she presently swayed forward on the points of her feet, and seemed to gain in stature, to become of more commanding type. . . . She stood a fascination, an allurement, to the masculine sense.57

Ambitious for a musical career, Alma dislikes her amateur status and expresses a half-serious wish to be pushed into professional goals by being turned out of house and home without financial support.58 Shaken by the disgrace of the suicide of her father, who is implicated in financial scandal— and by its effects within her social world—Alma accepts Rolfe’s proposal of marriage with the understanding that she will be free to follow a musical career if she so wishes.

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Gissing places Alma’s ambitions and marriage plans squarely in the context of ideas on female independence associated with the emancipated woman of the nineties. Rolfe fully accepts her conditions: “‘Many people nowadays,’” he tells Alma, “‘revolt against marriage because it generally means bondage. . . . ’”Theirs will instead mean shared liberty.59 Both wish, however, to escape the London “whirlpool” of the title, the endless rounds of being entertained and returning invitations, of supervising servants and trying to look as if one’s income is far larger than it is.60 They move out of London and Alma bears a son but, to Rolfe’s great distress, shows little interest in him. Without the stimulus to her musical performance that came from the admiration of fashionable society,Alma loses interest in her violin. Unhappy apart from the excitement of the whirlpool,Alma returns to her instrument with plans for a debut concert that will begin her delayed professional career. Her susceptibility to flattery and willingness to compromise her reputation in pursuit of success involve her in a life of deception that leads inevitably to disgrace and to self-inflicted death by an overdose of narcotics. While Alma and Rolfe are highly individualized characters, Gissing leaves no doubt that they are also representative of a social trend he believed dangerous: men’s acquiescence in women’s desire for independence within marriage.Alma’s tragedy is presented as, in great measure, the result of Rolfe’s failure to rule: had he not given his wife freedom to attend concerts and social functions without him—as well as the unsupervised use of her own bank account—Alma, Gissing implies, may well have accepted her responsibilities as wife and mother. In bowing to his wife’s ambitions, Harvey, Gissing tells us, has violated his own instinctive, best judgment. His distaste in seeing Alma’s name displayed at the entrance of the concert hall in which she will play reveals the genuine beliefs that lie beneath the strain of acting the part of an “enlightened” modern husband: he feels “much as a man might feel who has consented to his own dishonour.”61 Civilization, Gissing tells us by way of a conversation between Rolfe, now a widower, and his wise friend, Basil Morton, has made men too sensitive and sentimental:62 “With a little obtuseness to the ‘finer’ feelings, a little native coarseness in his habits towards women, he would have succeeded vastly better amid the complications of his married life.”63 The novel’s exemplary sounds of a woman’s “true music” come not from the violin, but from piano and voice, as the loving and reverentially portrayed Mrs. Morton, a wife and mother “after the old fashion,”64 accompanies three small children—one of them, the pale and slightly nervous Hughie Rolfe65—as they sing the songs she has taught them in the scene that ends the novel.66 If Harvey Rolfe exemplifies the emasculated male that Gissing saw as a product of his times, then Alma represents the figure, so prominent in art

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works of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, of the female destroyer.The violin is the chosen instrument of her power, enhancing the seductiveness that tempts unwary men and serving to magnify her vanity. Alma’s abandonment of the traditional vehicles of female musical expression, voice and piano, both of which she had formerly studied at the Royal Academy—combined with her disdain for the traditional female role of musical amateur—is seen by Gissing as a rejection of woman’s domestic role:“Music at home, and at other people’s homes, isn’t enough.You know my old revolt against the bonds of the amateur. I’m going to break out-or try to.”67 Like Theodora Legh, Alma has cultivated her musical talent primarily as a means of social advancement: Alma had no profound love of the art. . . .To her, music was not an end in itself. Like numberless girls, she had, to begin with, a certain mechanical aptitude, which encouraged her through the earlier stages, until vanity stepped in and urged her to considerable attainments. . . .When at length, with advancing social prospects, the thought took hold of her that, by means of her violin, she might maintain a place of distinction above ordinary handsome girls and heiresses, it sufficed to overcome her indolence and lack of true temper.68

In their portrayals of women violinists, Cecily Sidgwick and George Gissing have adapted the old association of the violin as instrument of the devil by placing it instead in the hands of the fin-de-siècle she-devil, the female vampire, who uses it to further her plans to seduce and destroy. Nowhere is Alma’s Satanic urge to power so clearly revealed as in her concert performance. While traditionally feminine fictional violinists like Blanche Egerton and Jenifer Lyon must shed the timidity ascribed to wellbred women in order to perform before public audiences, the use of their musical power is wholly unselfish, allowing them to share their deep devotion to music. In contrast, Alma savors her power in a spirit of heady, self-serving, and diabolical pleasure: On first stepping forward, she could see nothing but a misty expanse of faces; she could not feel the boards she trod upon; yet no sooner had she raised her violin than a glorious sense of power made her forget everything but the music she was to play. She all but laughed with delight.69

Carefully situated in London’s musical venues about which he did careful research,70 Gissing’s protagonist represents the woman violinist as a tantalizing version of the female vampire, a beautiful woman transformed, “upon her denial of man’s ownership rights to her,” into a dangerous predator.71

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WOMAN AND VIOLIN IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION In the more secular world of the twentieth century, the violin no longer conjures up apparitions of the devil as it did in Paganini’s time and for years afterward. But the identification of the violin as the devil’s instrument has never disappeared from the performance repertoire and continues to be evoked in recent musical works. Saint-Saens, in his 1874 symphonic work Danse Macabre, gave musical form to a poem by Henri Cazalis in which skeletons are called from their graves to join in a dance by the figure of Fiddling Death; Liszt wrote his piano transcription of the work three years later.72 Gustav Mahler deliberately evoked the instrument’s association with death in the scherzo movement of his fourth symphony, instructing the solo violinist to play “screeching and rough, as if Death would strike up the music.”73 Frederick Delius drew on the tradition in the figure of the Dark Fiddler in his opera, A Village Romeo and Juliet,74 as did Igor Stravinsky in The Soldier’s Tale, an opera about a fiddle-playing soldier and his futile struggle to cancel a bargain he made with the devil.75 As noted earlier, the tradition has been especially strong in the rural American South, where the country-and-western musician Charlie Daniels recently dramatized it in his story and song,“The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”76 The American composer John Corigliano recently wrote the score for an international film, The Red Violin, whose story, about an instrument-maker who stained his violin with varnish made from the blood of his beloved, dead wife,77 might have come from the pages of an 1890s issue of The Violin Times. And the American novelist Anne Rice has made use of the genre in Violin: A Novel, the tale of a diabolical virtuoso-ghost who haunts and tries to dominate the heroine with his magic violin.78 While the violin-devil connection remains culturally available to the literary imagination, it exists for late-twentieth-century readers and music lovers as a historically- based motif rather than a living force; the connection no longer causes the spiritual equivalent of goosebumps. Early in the century, the emotional resonance of that response was still accessible to artists and writers. Born in 1884, the poet Anna Wickham had a rare ability to understand and convey both the psychological weight of the belief in music’s sinfulness that had been so powerful in her own family as well as her own alienation from this tradition. Wickham, the daughter of a Wimbledon music-store owner and piano tuner, once studied for a career in voice with the great opera singer, Jean de Reszke.79 In her “Fragment of an Autobiography,” and in verses on her family published during the 1930s, she describes the intergenerational tensions that repeatedly divided her forebears on issues regarding music and morality. Her paternal family,

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the Harpers, seem to have alternated religious zealotry with impressive musical talent.The first William Harper was a seventeenth-century fiddler and mummer; his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors were Methodist preachers. Edwin,Wickham’s grandfather, was a musical prodigy who revolted against his own father’s efforts to ban music.The conflict between them became explosive as soon as the boy Edwin began to excel on the violin: My great-grandfather was a pious man, He lived carefully and well as a Methodist can. He was thrifty and laborious, he made no waste, He closed his house at nine at night, was faithful and chaste But all the calculations of his life-time were undone By my grandfather, who was his only son. My grandfather was naturally addicted to sin, At the age of eight he bought a violin. Alone he learned to play that instrument of evil, Though well he knew that music was the language of the devil Sweet sounds and sin were wedded joy To the perverted sense of that farm-boy One day his Father found his fiddle and in ire Broke the vile thing, and threw it on the fire. Savage and unpersuaded, the mad fellow, Begged, stole and starved, until he bought a cello . . .

The playful, jingly character of this poetic memoir is belied by the emotional weight Wickham gives, in her autobiography, to grandfather Edwin’s formative musical experience. His gifts recognized in boyhood by a local cobbler who was a bassoon virtuoso, Edwin Harper acquired a fiddle with the encouragement of that older friend, who also procured an invitation for the young violinist to play at a servants’ ball. When great-grandfather William found out about this performance, he succeeded in finding the violin his son had hidden in the hayloft, broke the instrument across his knee, and threw it into the fire, warning Edwin to remember the fires of hell and to forget music and lewdness. The defiant Edwin eventually became a music teacher and organist whose London shop earned enough for him to send two daughters to study at the Royal Academy of Music and help his son, Geoffrey, Wickham’s father, establish his own music business. Geoffrey’s Positivist beliefs banished the devil, but Anna’s poetic imagination found him again in this vivid family history, a recovered memory of violin, sin, and enduring musicality.80

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If the violin’s identification with the devil became, by the middle of the twentieth century, more of a vague memory and literary legacy than a living influence on audience perception of orchestral or even of solo performers, the image of the violin as woman’s body, used to legitimize exclusively male mastery, retained its force for a much longer time.The almost obsessive fascination with the female violinist’s bare arms and sensuous gestures—a response no doubt most acute among those whose musical experience predated the entrance of women players—peaked during the 1890s.After that, while older music lovers retained the memory of the old taboo, those born in the late Victorian and pre–World War I years accepted woman’s violin-playing as a normal part of the musical landscape. By century’s end, girls’ gymnastics and participation in bicycle riding and sports had accustomed people to seeing women move far more freely than in earlier Victorian times, ladies’ orchestras and violin soloists had lost their novelty, and women constituted the majority of violin students in England’s conservatories. Despite these changes, the violin, with its unique legacy of supernatural association and traditionally gendered character, continued to interest several fiction writers, among them Ethel Sidgwick,81 niece of the popular writer, Cecily Ullmann Sidgwick. The conviction that the violin is preeminently a man’s instrument is shared by the woman whose seductive violin playing for her infant son forms a striking beginning to Ethel Sidgwick’s 1910 novel, Promise. Unlike her modestly talented predecessor, Theodora Legh, the beautiful Henriette Lemaure, daughter of a famous French violinist and composer, is a brilliant musician who has distinguished herself in violin study at the Conservatoire. Like Theodora and Gissing’s Alma, Henriette’s appeal as a performer cannot be separated from her striking beauty and her use of the power it gives her: she has performed publicly for throngs of people who came “largely for the pleasure of looking at her.”82 Having “practiced upon” a long succession of admirers, Henriette decides to marry an English suitor twice her age and bears two sons, the younger of whom,Antoine—known for his first few years as “Bébé”—becomes a violin prodigy. Henriette, who has withdrawn from the role of concert artist to a new life as wife and mother, expresses her continued and intense need for admiration in a frenetic social life and in her egoistic exploitation of the infant Antoine’s precocious sensitivity to music.Although Sidgwick conveys a deep love of music that is absent from Gissing’s novel, her portrait of Henriette, like Gissing’s of Alma, shows the violin as peculiarly well suited to serve the woman musician’s narcissistic desire for admiration and power: “Henriette had an incorrigible habit of practising her powers upon every mortal . . . who crossed her path. No matter whether the weapon she chose for the purpose were her beauty, her

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wit, her art, or, for want of anything better, her temper, conquer she would by one means or another.”83 In one of the most vivid scenes of her novel, Sidgwick portrays Henriette’s manipulative appeal to Antoine’s musical susceptibility in a strange and disturbing act of incestuous bewitchment. It is late at night, after Antoine and his mother have spent a long day visiting the chateau of a Russian princess who is one of Henriette’s most fervent admirers.Awakened by the sound of conversation, Bébé has begun to cry. His parents come into his room and Henriette decides to comfort him with music. “Look at me and listen,” she tells her son, who has no need for those directions; eyes fastened on his mother, he watches her take her violin from its case with “reverent care” as she transforms herself into a “dreadful goddess-mother.” Annoyed when the violin bow catches in the lace of her sleeve, Henriette pulls her arm out of her loose robe. “Au diable les convenances,” she says, as her motion loosens the heavy knot of hair on her neck, causing it to fall suddenly, “uncoiling” down her back. The four-year-old Antoine watches her in “fearful worship,” “fascinated, awed, by the poise of the slim white shape against the heavy black masses of hair. . . . His eyes followed mechanically the gleam of her bare arm, in the movement that is one of the most graceful in the world.” Henriette plays Schumann’s “Day-dream,” expressing in her rendition virtues of sympathy, understanding, and self-control that she seemed capable of only within music, as if they were imprisoned and unable to escape into her ordinary life.“‘Maman does play beautifully, doesn’t she?’,” Henriette asks her tiny worshipper: But so shall he some day. Better than maman, and better than grandpapa. . . . Maman was a mistake, Bébé: just a silly girl. But you will be a man, and great music must be made by men. Oh, how I used to cry and cry because I could never be a man! But I shall be one after all, for you shall be one for me.84

Sidgwick confirms Henriette’s prediction—and her belief in the masculine nature of great music—near the end of the book when the youth Antoine plays “that test of the tried artist, the Bach Chaconne,” for his brother and now long-widowed father: Henriette Lemaure had played that, at her first and only concert; but never the least like this. Her husband heard it stupefied. No woman played like this, for it was a man’s music, conceived in the mind of a man. He had never grasped the difference before, but there it was.85

The same view of gendered musical hierarchy, in which violin mastery is emblematic of a more general male superiority, is the subject of the final

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fictional work we will look at in this chapter, Is It Enough? A Romance of Musical Life, a novel by the Anglo-American author Harriette R. Campbell (1883–1950), published in New York and London in 1913.86 Campbell tells the story of a musically gifted young New England girl and her development as musician and woman. Jean Kontze, who enters Hild Emery’s life as her violin teacher, overcomes her resistance to his frequently abusive mastery and makes her both his wife and his instrument. Angered by his mistreatment, Hild leaves him for a time; when she returns, he tells her that if she stays, she must be like his violin:“You must make your home in my soul.”87 His playing is said to have a “mesmeric” effect on Hild, an effect that liberates her from her Puritan inheritance. Until Jean achieves a great success with the opera he has composed, they live in poverty and survive by performing in cheap New York cafés; a gifted pianist, she accompanies him and sometimes dances. Hild, who would once have regarded this life as sordid, revels in her newfound sexual identity: It had all come about through loving Jean. . . . All that was temperamental in her had found itself to give to him . . . and all that was lawless and primitive emerged by the same way. . . . She longed to be as much the creature of Jean’s thought as one of his compositions. It was because of this surrender that she could dance, smiling into smoke-wreathed faces, obeying the message of Jean’s music as if she were the body and it the soul.88

The book’s strange ending celebrates Hild’s pleasure in her own beauty and sensual nature with the joy of self-abnegation in the service of Jean’s genius:“He took out his violin and began to play. He played until by sweet approaches he had laid hands on her soul. . . .‘My business [Jean tells her] is to live—yours is to love! And is it not enough?’”To be a good wife, to suffer for Jean’s sake—with the sigh that ends the book and answers the question in its title, Hild agrees: it is enough.The violin’s power to bewitch has been chillingly evoked in this story that oddly juxtaposes the theme of New Woman sexuality with a view of the female role close to that of Schopenhauer. For Hild, the getting of wisdom is a process of accepting, as exactly parallel, her place as Jean’s wife and the role of his violin: both serve, in exquisitely tuned receptiveness, the musical genius that belongs, appropriately, to the man. The novels by Gissing, Cecily Sidgwick, Ethel Sidgwick, and Harriet Campbell provide evidence that the achievements and fame of female violinists in the decades preceding World War I did not erase the prejudice of earlier years, although the nature of that prejudice was clearly altered. None of these novelists suggests that women could not, or should not, play the violin—it was far too late for such a statement to be meant and taken

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seriously. Instead, this more modern prejudice, supported by many music lovers of both sexes, held that while some women could play the violin at an impressive level of competence and musicianship, the heights of violin playing could be attained by men alone. This attitude toward women violinists is set forth in the brief essay on violin-playing that the amateur violinist and music philanthropist Walter Willson Cobbett wrote for the 1911 edition of Grove’s Dictionary. Cobbett’s supportive attitude toward women musicians is clear at the start of his article, which discusses the advent of women violinists as one of the important changes in violin-playing to develop since the writing of the essay in the 1889 edition of Grove to which his pages formed an addendum.89 Cobbett wrote that the success of lady violinists, who stand “upon the concert platform almost coequal with artists of the other sex,” is now well established. As for orchestral players, “they have not made, and cannot, for obvious reasons, be expected to make, the same progress, few of them possessing the force and intensity which belong to the average male performer.” In chamber music, however, the field of Cobbett’s strongest personal interest, “the lady violinist holds her own, imparting into it the delicate, and in some works welcome, charm of femininity.” Cobbett’s statement, one of warm but measured appreciation, points to the remarkable progress made since the days when a woman carrying a violin case evoked denigrating comments that had nothing to do with the quality of her musicianship. His statement also makes us aware of the frustration that was partner to that progress, as female violinists of extraordinary talent who excelled in conservatory classes and coeducational orchestras were obliged to recognize, upon the termination of their training, that England’s major orchestras were, with one notable exception, closed to them.90 Our awareness of the limitations and ambivalence that surrounded women’s achievement of access to the violin—a development that clearly opened the way to other previously blocked modes of musical expression—should not allow us to minimize the significance of this achievement, one whose long-term effects are strikingly evident on today’s concert platforms. It was with justifiable pride that The Lady’s Realm, commenting on one of the landmarks of women’s progress in the final year of the nineteenth century, drew its readers’ attention to the emergence of women violinists as important participants in musical culture: We, of this time, have outlived the dark ages when the violin was looked upon as an exclusively manly instrument. It is one of the surest marks of progress in the Victorian Era that those days are passed. The fame of a Paganini, of an Ernst, of a Joachim, of a Sarasate, is a fame which women have proved themselves full worthy to share.91

Chapter 6

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Immortal Tones: Woman as Public Singer

The most remarkable indication of the instinctiveness of song is the characteristic growth of the voice organs at the outset of manhood and womanhood. It is as if the full development of the body were crowned with the completion of the instruments of sound, which express with such particular eloquence the passions and emotions attendant upon the great mystery of sex. W. A. Aikin, “Singing,” A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed; 1904–10)

PART ONE: PERCEPTIONS OF THE FEMALE SINGER he women musicians best known to the English public were, without question, singers.While their vehicles of vocal artistry included oratorio, art song, and ballads, the heights of fame were reached only by the stars of opera: during the 1870s, shop windows displayed photographs of Patti,Albani,Trebelli, and Nilsson alongside those of Disraeli, Gladstone, and other men of the highest prominence.1 Supremely self-confident, multi-lingual—(a New York journalist described Patti’s speech as “Franco-Anglo-Teutonic-Italian chatting”)2—at home in all of Europe’s major courts and capitals, and feted, during widely publicized travels, by the social elites of the Americas, South Africa, and Australia, the great prima donnas were, except for empresses and queens, the most highly paid women of their time. In the mid-1880s, the critic H. Sutherland Edwards pointed out that the highest-earning women singers commanded

T

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incomes far larger than were paid to any government official, incomes double the size of those earned by ambassadors. Unlike those highly placed men, however, the singers could accept gifts without restriction,3 no small advantage, as presents as lavish as diamond tiaras were central elements in the rituals of diva-reception, appropriate forms of tribute to the goddesses of voice. Only a tiny minority of those who read about the prima donnas and saw images of their faces in shop windows and magazines ever experienced the glory of their voices at the great opera houses, but many thousands heard them in provincial concert tours, in London performances at the ten thousand-seat Royal Albert Hall (where Patti began two decades of annual concerts in 1886),4 and, in the case of those singers who, like Emma Albani, were able to “cross over” into sacred music, in oratorios performed in concert halls, churches, and cathedrals. Performances by the great divas received fulsome praise not only from critics but also from poets, in a tradition whose English antecedents go as far back as John Milton. Son of an amateur composer, Milton wrote three Latin sonnets in honor of Leonora Baroni, one of the finest singers of the time, whom he had heard in Rome in 1639.5 The poetic series, striking in its juxtaposition of the spiritual with the material and of Christian with classical allusions, expresses the ambivalence that long marked the public response to the female singer. “The music of your voice,” Milton tells Baroni in the first sonnet,“bespeaks the presence of God. . . . [Either God or the Holy Spirit] is moving mysteriously in your throat . . . teaching mortal hearts how they may gradually become accustomed to immortal tones. If God is all things and permeates all things, in you alone He speaks and possesses all His other creatures in silence.”6 The second and third poems in the sequence move from Christian to classical imagery; here the influence of Leonora’s voice, like that of Naples’s “liquid-voiced Siren” of ancient days, is presented as a potent but now morally ambiguous force that can move men either to madness or to inner peace, in either case placing “the spell of her song upon both men and gods.” In his poetic tribute to Baroni, Milton evokes the ancient tradition in which the woman singer can be Muse or Siren, either a goddess who bestows immortality (both upon the poet and the heroic figures he would memorialize), or a temptress whose charms signify danger and death to men.7 Especially problematical, because of its unpredictability, is the possibility that she may simultaneously embody the Muse’s elevating beauty and the Siren’s morally (and mortally) dangerous temptation. The Homerically derived, dichotomized view of the woman singer was in full bloom during the Victorian era. Famous women singers were often referred to as sirens—writing in the mid-1870s, H. R. Haweis commented

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on the “unlimited number of notable sirens” currently on the music scene,8 and painters delighted in portraying the mythological figures who were thought of as their precursors—half-woman, half-bird—creatures whose seductive voices lured sailors to a certain death. In his study of nineteenth-century British classical-subject painting, Joseph Kestner lists 16 artists who exhibited pictures of sirens between 1888 and 1901; Kestner also points out that clergymen often used the term “siren” as a euphemism for “prostitute.”9 While Swinburne and other poets inspired these pictures that characterized women singers as vampire-like sirens,10 several journals of the day published hyperbolic tributes to female opera stars, which presented them in idealized terms as divine spirits whose brief sojourns in England offered to their audiences unique and precious experiences of exquisite beauty and spiritual renewal. Musical World featured several of these paeans that were written in a highly Latinate Italian whose precise meaning would have eluded all but the most linguistically sophisticated readers: “Gentle page,” one of MW’s poets wrote, referring to Pauline Lucca and her famous portrayals of Cherubino, “you who overwhelm hearts and make them fall in love with heavenly ecstasy, now that you must soon leave us, alas, at least we are supported by the hope that the sweet ray of your grace and beauty will return to us to make us happy again. Farewell, beautiful Page!”11 Two English sonnets written in honor of the quintessential prima donna, Adelina Patti, elaborate on the ecstatic response evoked by the divas, while conveying the belief that their voices were, by some sort of assumed but undefined necessity, exotic visitors to the British Isles whose gifts were to be savored in an atmosphere of highly distilled and soon-tobe-gone pleasure. The sonnets were published in The St. James’s Magazine in 1878; Patti, then 35 years of age, had made numerous appearances in London and the provinces since her Covent Garden debut in 1861. Sonnets to Madame Adelina Patti Now, when bright birds with music in each heart Fly from the far-off dreamlands to our shore, Thou, with the inspiration of thine art, Queen of immortal melody! once more Dost glide like sunrise to the city’s gloom, To touch with sweetness as of that fair Land Whence first all streams of music from one Hand Divinely came, the listening hearts of men. . . . Nor with thy purity of voice alone Dost thou exalt and glorify the mind

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Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Of him who feels thy spell . . . Upon the throne Of Tragedy thy genius unconfined Hath set thee gloriously, while crowds below Pour to thine ears the passion of their praise. Fame is with thee where’er thy footsteps go; Anticipation fondly hears thy lays. And when thy song, like some ethereal stream, Now, glad with rapturous joy’s effulgent day, Now, sweetly sad as twilight when the dream Of heavenly sunset wanes, has died away, In Memory’s soul thy radiant raptures rise And fade, like rainbows in the silent skies!12

This passionate evocation of the diva, a heavenly goddess in the earthly form of Adelina Patti, raises issues that the poet himself, when in a less exalted state, may well have recognized as central to the ambiguous social status of the professional women singers of his day. For example, what relation had “purity of voice” and ethereal song to the proverbial moral laxity of the theatrical settings in which the divas pursued their sacred calling? The poet can hardly have been ignorant of the international scandal that Patti had caused in the previous year when she left her husband, the Marquis de Caux, for a celebrated affair with the French tenor Nicolini, also married, and the father of five children.13 Why were the highest queens of melody in England—“bright birds with music in each heart”—assumed to be visitors from alien shores? Was it, perhaps, that the moral laxity attributed to theatrical singers was less jarring when associated with foreigners? Why did these welcome visitors of the female sex seem to commune most significantly with the male auditor—the “exalted” and “glorified mind” of “him who feels thy spell”—and this, in a magazine whose audience has been described as made up principally of “middle-class matrons”?14 To extend our questions still further from the poet’s focus, we are led to an issue that held a central place in the Victorian response to the woman singer: what is the effect on the successful public singer of the fame and adulation, the constant passion of praise that crowds (a designation that includes the poet himself) “pour” into her ears? The belief that constant admiration was an influence likely to degrade the character of the female performing artist was widely accepted during the Victorian era and well beyond. In combination with disdain for her theatrical milieu, this meant that even the most sincere expressions of a music lover’s appreciation for a Lucca or a Patti—even for a Jenny Lind— appeared within a social context that questioned whether the woman singer would be welcomed by respectable society. In religious, and especially evangelical circles, such negative sentiments were especially intense.

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John Ruskin’s mother, for example, responded to her son’s interest in inviting Lind to view his Turners with the emphatic declaration that the venerated singer was no better than “an ordinary actress.”15 The disdain for actors and actresses was not limited to those of ultrareligious persuasion; upper-class men and women—even those who delighted in amateur theatricals—had long excluded members of the acting profession from their inner circles.16 And since the dramatic use of voice and gesture was at the heart of theatrical and operatic experience, a high degree of expressiveness in “this land of quiet speech”17 could itself be seen as a departure from norms of genteel behavior. “Singers, and those of this country especially,” admonished a contributor to the early twentiethcentury edition of Grove’s Dictionary, “are very little (in too many cases not at all) alive to the fact that the moment singing is touched, we enter upon the region of the dramatic.”18 Voice teachers sometimes attributed the disproportionately small presence of English women among the outstanding singers of the day to the practice of raising middle- and upper-class girls according to ideals of selfeffacing modesty and bland politeness that magnified this antidramatic prejudice and served as significant obstacles to the development of expressive power.This issue received attention in women’s magazines, the music press, and in fictional works on aspiring women singers. An anonymously published article in the early 1890s in the feminist journal Atalanta, for example, pointed to the undemonstrative nature of the “true-born Briton” as an obstacle to artistic singing and urged aspiring singers to study elocution so as to cultivate the power of dramatic expression.19 At the close of the decade, Helen Lemmens Sherrington, a leading English singer and educator, expressed similar sentiments. In an interview with The Musical Herald, Lemmens Sherrington said that while their voices were potentially as good as any, English girls were lacking in initiative, ambition, and “quickness of perception,” failings she attributed to educational practices according to which they had been raised to become quiet, ladylike, and self-suppressed.20 As late as the 1920s, the eminent singer and teacher Blanche Marchesi described her typical English female student as one who has been taught to “bottle up all her feelings.”21 Singing teachers who deplored the habitual self-restraint imposed on English girls were correctly perceived as would-be subverters of this aspect of respectability. The response of Miss Hallam, May Wedderburn’s loving chaperon in Jesse Fothergill’s The First Violin (1878), to the recommendation that May study for a career in opera, sums up an attitude widely held during most of the Victorian period.“Miss Wedderburn,” says the shocked Hallam,“is a young lady—not an actress.”The distinguished German conductor and voice teacher Von Francius responds that his understanding of

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May’s genius leads him to believe that the scope opera offers for passion and emotional abandon will bring out May’s fullest talents: “Passion! abandon! I think you cannot understand what you are talking about! . . . My dear sir, you must understand that those kind of things may be all very well for one set of people, but not for that class to which Miss Wedderburn belongs. Her father is a clergyman. . . . She may learn as much as she likes, but she will never be allowed to go upon the stage.”22

Given these attitudes, it is understandable that a high degree of expressiveness in a young amateur’s singing was often regarded with uneasiness, a sentiment intensified by any hint that the performer might be harboring professional aspirations. A truly extraordinary drawing-room performance might evoke praise, but the admiring looks and words that were so gratifying to the singer were very likely regarded as a cause for concern to her parents—concern not only that effusive praise might encourage thoughts of “going on the stage,” but, more immediately, for the deleterious effects of admiration on her character. An influential formulation of this moral concern had appeared in midcentury in the Quarterly Review in the context of an unsigned and widely ranging essay on the aesthetics and history of music.The author, journalist and art critic Elizabeth Eastlake (then Elizabeth Rigby),23 explained the grounds for the close linkage between female amateur singing and moral danger. Reprinted in book form, Eastlake’s article must have been well regarded in musical circles, since she was among the first to be invited, two decades later, to charter membership in the newly formed Musical Association, although it seems likely that the invitation also reflected her social prominence as widow of the eminent art administrator, Sir Charles Eastlake.24 The article’s remarkable longevity in the collective memory of the cultured elite was attested to by an 1892 reference in a discussion of sex and music in The Lancet, where it is referred to as a “celebrated essay.”25 Eastlake begins her essay with fulsome praise for music, an art deeply rooted within the human soul, one whose importance is attested to by its ubiquity:“If poetry and painting have their thousands, music has her tens of thousands.” Music’s universal appeal has great moral value in that its delights are pre-lapsarian in their innocence: “It is as if she [music] had taken possession of the heart before it became desperately wicked, and had ever since kept her portion of it free from the curse, making it her glorious avocation upon earth to teach us nothing but the ever higher and higher enjoyment of its innocent pleasure.”The status of this pleasure is enhanced by music’s traditional association with mathematics, a connection recognized since classical antiquity and one that “invests music with the highest dignity. . . .

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It is like adding to the superstructure of a delicate flower the roots of an oak of the forest.” No other art, Eastlake continues, is characterized by music’s exquisite sense of time; it is this remarkable confluence of sound and measure that creates a “bond of union” between Euclid and Jenny Lind. Once it moves from the manuscript page, however, music takes on material form and is consequently as subject as are all human activities to corrupt influences, of which the chief sources are texts of immoral tendency and the character of performers. Sacred texts—especially, that of Handel’s Messiah—are, unsurprisingly, Eastlake’s favorites as are, on a more modest level, English part-songs, which she describes as repositories of national virtues: “sound piety, broad fun, perfect liberty of speech, and capital eating and drinking.”26 She appears untroubled by the questionable reputation of professional musicians: so many are foreigners whose violations of English norms are in any case to be expected, while most sacred music is, fortunately, performed by native-born men and women, no more worthy of blame than other English people. It is not, however, professional musicians who evoke Eastlake’s anxiety so much as amateur singers, and in an unexplained shift of pronoun gender, she makes it clear that those at highest risk are women: We know that superiority of all kinds must have its penalties, and none more keenly felt than in the ranks of private musical excellence; and though the first-rate amateur may command all the higher enjoyments of the art, without those concomitants of labour, anxiety, and risk which devolve on the professed artist—though she may be spared all the hardships and many of the temptations which lie so thick in the path of her professional sisters, yet the draught of excitement is pernicious to all alike, and one which we instinctively shrink from seeing at the lips of those we love.

Even women of “cool heads and pure hearts,” who are capable of preserving their modesty in the midst of this excess of adulation, will still suffer the trial “of perpetually feeling their better selves overlooked in the homage paid to an adventitious gift”—here Eastlake echoes a perennial charge made against singers, that beauty in vocal performance results from an accident of birth and owes little to mastery achieved by constant study and practice. Eastlake does believe, however, that female amateur singers have an important musical responsibility: that of enhancing the domestic life of fathers and husbands who, spiritually refreshed by home music and female care, are then better prepared to assume their role as members of an ideal concert audience, a group Eastlake seems to define, in another sleight of gender slippage, as essentially male.The musical amateur, writes Eastlake, who receives the art’s purist and least selfish pleasure

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is he who has no stake of vanity or of anxiety in the matter—but who sits at overture, symphony, or chorus with closed eyes and swimming senses— brightens at major keys, saddens at minors—smiles at modulations, he knows not why,—and then goes forth to his work next morning with steady hand and placid brow, while ever and anon the irrepressible echoes of past sounds break forth over desk or counter into jocund or plaintive hummings. . . . Happy hummings these for wife or sister, to whose voice or piano he is for ever a petitioner for pleasures it is a pleasure to give. . . .

Despite her sympathy for the cause of women’s educational reform, Eastlake here, as in her notorious critique of Jane Eyre (also published in the conservative Quarterly), presents herself as an arch-traditionalist whose dislike of the vanity-inducing praise evoked by the talented woman singer so overpowers, as to render irrelevant, the appreciation of her true artistry.27 The careers and personal lives of female singers continued to attract a high degree of public interest into the early decades of the twentieth century. Interest was most strongly focused on their response to what an 1860s writer described as the “snares and pitfalls that surround their steps,”28 on the degree and nature of their acceptance into respectable society, and on their decisions concerning marriage and family. This continuous interest, in combination with the romance of the operatic world and the intense excitement later generated by Wagnerian opera, attracted a number of writers to feature women singers as main characters in their stories and novels. One such work of the late 1860s is a rich source for this inquiry, not only because of its sharp focus on the singer’s social status, but also because its author, whose intellect (as revealed in this fictional work) was described by Henry James as “flexible, subtly ironic, [and] winningly observant,”29 had herself been a singer of high attainments, one who enjoyed a brief but stellar career in England and on the continent. A member of the famous Kemble acting family—daughter of Charles Kemble, niece of Sarah Siddons (whose portrait Joshua Reynolds painted as the Muse of Tragedy) and younger sister of the Shakespearean interpreter, Fanny Kemble30— Adelaide Kemble had studied voice on the continent where one of her teachers was the great Italian prima donna Giuditta Pasta,31 and during the course of her residence abroad, toured with Franz Liszt.32 Returned to England in 1841 after four years of concertizing in Europe,Adelaide spoke with a foreign accent and complained about the dullness of English life.33 Kemble’s Covent Garden appearances during 1841 and 1842 evoked admiration both for her singing and for her dramatic power. She was warmly praised for her performances in the operas of Bellini (especially, Norma) and Rossini, and also sang on the concert stage with the Philharmonic So-

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ciety and the Concert of Ancient Music. Henry Chorley praised her as a “poetical and thoughtful artist, whose name will never be lost so long as the art of dramatic singing is spoken of.”34 Adelaide Kemble’s career was abruptly terminated by her decision to quit the stage for marriage early in 1843, when she was in her late twenties.35 She had consented, in the previous year, to give a final performance at Covent Garden, in order to save her father Charles, its manager, from bankruptcy. Her fiancé, Edward Sartoris, was a gentleman of wealth (with an annual income close to £5,000) and of sufficient standing to gain him, in later years, a seat in Parliament.36 Although Mrs. Sartoris’s married life was conducted in settings of great opulence—most notably in Rome, where her home became a salon for Anglo-American artistic and literary society—and although her singing continued to thrill those within her cosmopolitan social circle, her decision to leave opera was painfully conflictual. Not long after her marriage, she shared her ambivalence with a close family friend: I need hardly tell you of the acute suffering of parting from a profession that I love & [sic] a career that has been so short and successful—I felt it horribly in spite of a series of annoyances that I had to undergo in the theatre that ought to have sickened me . . . of my trade.

The letter was first signed Adelaide Kemble; then “Kemble” was crossed out and “Sartoris” written in its place, with the added comment, “Think of my not knowing my name yet!”37 Years later, Mrs. Sartoris confided to her friend Anne Thackeray Ritchie, “I have everything a woman could wish for, my friends and my home, my husband and my children, and yet sometimes a wild longing comes over me to be back, if only for an hour, on the stage again, and living once more as I did in those early adventurous times.”38 Sartoris’s well received novella, A Week in a French Country House, was first published in 1867 and reissued in 1902.39 Her narrator, Bessie Hope, is a young music teacher and the daughter of the former governess of Olympe, Countess of Caradec, in whose house the story takes place. Ursula Hamilton, another guest, is a singer whose glorious contralto voice causes “shivers down [Bessie’s] spine.”40 The daughter of an Italian prima donna who died when Ursula was a small child, and of a once-wealthy Englishman who, having squandered his fortune, raised his daughter in Florence for the sake of economy, Ursula was left destitute upon her father’s death. Her decision to “go on the stage” was altered—“à contre coeur,” the author tells us—when a rich aunt suddenly died and left her a large sum of money and a Devonshire estate. Ursula’s ambiguous social status is

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at the heart of Sartoris’s narrative. No longer a mere singer of talent but an heiress with a beautiful voice, she is a potential asset to the social season: Lady Blankeny, who had long snubbed her, “flew” to her side when she learned of the inheritance, eager to bring Ursula to England and sponsor her as “lioness” of the day. But money cannot altogether erase the lingering taint of her mother’s profession, nor does Ursula wish it to be effaced: she insists on defying the norms of respectability by maintaining a close (but not romantic) friendship with Jacques Dessaix, a violinist and composer who, when she was a neglected child, had taken compassionate care of her, nursing her through the trauma of smallpox. Even the relatively enlightened Mme. Olympe disapproves of the “ill-bred familiarity” of this couple, whose relationship reflects Sartoris’s own close friendship with the composer Josef Dessauer.41 The emotional climax of the country-house sojourn, as overheard and recounted by the astonished Bessie, is the marriage proposal that the upper-class René de Saldes makes to Ursula.The terms of the proposal, as well as Ursula’s trenchant understanding of their implications, tell us a great deal about attitudes toward the professional woman singer that served, for many years after Adelaide Sartoris’s lifetime, to cast a pall of ambiguity over the singer’s social standing. Openly disdainful of the “disadvantages” of Ursula’s birth and education, de Saldes declares himself willing to make allowances for them, and even admits that they have contributed to the “strong individuality—which, while it is your snare, is also one of your most powerful attractions.”With great composure, Ursula comments on his “kind and highly flattering” willingness to “overlook my antecedents . . . and marry me on account of my originality,” but points out that once married, de Saldes would do his best to stamp out that originality so as to make her fit in with other women of his class.42 When, in an earlier conversation, Ursula had admitted her reluctance to abandon plans to become a professional singer, de Saldes responded with sarcasm:“‘It must be gratifying, indeed,’ said he,‘to pass one’s evenings exposed to the gaze of every idiot who chooses to pay his half-crown for his stare, and equally delightful to spend one’s days in the society of profligate and uneducated vagabonds.’”43 Alluding to that discussion as she rejects the marriage proposal, Ursula declares, “‘since a vagabond I am, a vagabond I will remain.’” Fully aware of the validity of de Saldes’s claim that marrying him will place her in a different sphere,“the one for which nature intended you,” Ursula also recognizes that accepting him would require her to “‘repudiate my class,—the class to which my mother belonged.’”44 Wife of a Member of Parliament, mistress of a succession of mansions as grand as that of the fictional Countess of Caradec, Ursula’s creator remained, in some layers of her complex identity, a professional singer and one of the actor-Kembles.45

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There was a way—one not chosen by Adelaide Kemble or her alter ego Ursula—that the aspiring singer could evade societal disapproval: that was by choosing to perform only in concert or oratorio settings removed from the dangerous influence of the theatrical milieu. The full scope given to “passion” and “abandon” in large nineteenth-century opera houses was out of place in more intimate venues where the expression of emotions, if more intense, was more histrionically restrained; even in today’s more informal culture, gestures and body language appropriate to operatic performance are considered inappropriate to artsong recitals.46 Like concert singing, oratorio performance was incompatible with the elaborate costumes, theatrical makeup, and (worst of all), cross-dressing sometimes required in opera, while the sacred texts and settings gave moral resonance to the singer’s art. Parents who adamantly opposed operatic careers would sometimes allow their daughters to prepare for singing in nonstage settings. One example of this compromise, especially interesting in that it deals with the experience of one of the nineteenth century’s most famous voice teachers, is presented in Mathilde Marchesi’s book of reminiscences, Marchesi and Music. Born in 1826 into the family of a Frankfort merchant, Mathilde Graumann’s musical precocity was strongly encouraged; when her father lost his fortune, the 17-year old Mathilde wanted to earn her living as a singer “but my family held different views from my own; it would not redound to their credit, they said, for me to become an artiste, and so it was decided I should become a governess.” Not even her aunt, Baroness Dorothea von Ertmann, a friend and pupil of Beethoven and an accomplished pianist, would support Mathilde’s ambitions. Fortunately, financial assistance from a devoted sister who had become a governess in England strengthened Mathilde’s appeals, and she was allowed to study with the great Manuel Garcia in Paris. But after two years of intensive study—besides voice lessons, she worked on French, Spanish, Italian, and studied harmony, dancing, acting, elocution, and deportment—her parents demanded that she sign “a written promise to renounce all idea of the theatrical profession, a promise which cost me a great struggle and many bitter tears.” Any hopes she might have had to overturn her parents’ ban on an opera career were abandoned upon her marriage to Salvatore de Castrone, a singer of aristocratic lineage whose “determined veto” kept her forever from the opera stage: “The fates were certainly not propitious to a theatrical career.”47 Marchesi decided to devote herself both to concert singing and to teaching future opera singers; among her most famous pupils were Emma Calvé, Emma Eames, and Nellie Melba. Her love of drama was vicariously expressed through their triumphant careers.

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George Eliot on The Woman Singer Two of the most revealing Victorian-era commentaries on the character and social status of singers were written during the 1870s by the novelist George Eliot. A devoted amateur pianist and avid concertgoer, Eliot was fascinated by the coincidence of her birthday with the festival day of St. Cecilia, music’s patron saint;48 several of her contemporaries found it especially fitting that her last public appearance was in the audience of a Popular Concert at St. James’s Hall, where she and the partner of her “unconsecrated” marriage, George Henry Lewes, were habitués of the cheap section of seats.49 Most of Eliot’s heroines are musically talented, a group that includes Maggie Tulliver of The Mill on the Floss, regarded as the most autobiographical of her novels.50 The works that most fully convey Eliot’s vision of music in its widest social dimensions are the poetic dialogue,“Armgart,” written in 1870, and Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, published six years later. Musical expression, especially the art of the singer, is a central preoccupation of both.“Armgart” presents the story of a prima donna, while the main characters of Daniel Deronda—the eponymous hero, his mother, future wife, and the woman who loves him unrequitedly—all define themselves to a considerable extent by the nature of their singing; two other characters, the musician-genius Klesmer and the talented pupil who defies her upper-class family by marrying him, show their high moral standing by placing their devotion to each other and to musical ideals far above the requirements of conventional morality.51 While Eliot upheld music as the art that reached more deeply than any other into the wellsprings of emotional life, she viewed its public practice as necessarily embedded in a morally ambiguous psychological and social matrix. High levels of ambition and the insatiable need for admiration and praise appeared to her as strong corrupting forces in the lives of performing artists. This belief had deep roots in Eliot’s own life, beginning in her girlhood when, as the most proficient pianist in her school, she would follow successful performances before students and guests by withdrawing into painful episodes of guilt and self-blame, strongly disapproving of her own ambition and desire for praise, characteristics she referred to as her “besetting sin.” As Rosemarie Bodenheimer has observed, the repeated portrayals of musicians in Eliot’s fiction reflect not only her devotion to their art, but also serve as a vehicle by which the author can, in disguised form, delve into the painful and unending conflicts she experienced over her own ambitions and the constant desire for the recognition of her talents.52 In “Armgart,” Eliot creates a complex psychological portrait of a great opera star who is shown first at the height of her powers and then, a year

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later, at the tragic moment of her response to the loss of her singing voice. The other characters in the poem are Walpurga, Armgart’s cousin, a loyal woman who, despite a physical disability, has devoted herself sacrificially to the prima donna’s comfort; Leo, Armgart’s voice coach and an unsuccessful composer; and the Graf (Count) Dornberg, an ardent suitor who urges Armgart to fulfil the womanly part of her nature by leaving the stage to marry him before the onset of the inevitable decline of her powers. Armgart is presented as an arrogant queen who revels in the brilliance of her artistry. Just returned from a triumphal performance as Gluck’s Orpheus, she has “[poured] her passion on the air made live / with human heartthrobs” and brought Leo to tearful regret that the great composer himself could not have heard her. Leo has even admitted that the trills the prima donna added to the score, despite his strong disapproval, contributed to a performance that opened new musical vistas. As Eliot describes it,Armgart’s triumph is more than a musical event; it is a declaration of the ability of an extraordinary woman to match levels of achievement normally reserved to men. In the course of her self-dramatization, Armgart reveals her disdain for the anonymity and subservience that she believes to be the lot of the “superfluous herds” of women whose sole achievement is motherhood: Yes, I know The oft-taught Gospel: “Woman, thy desire Shall be that all superlatives on earth Belong to men, save the one highest kind— To be a mother.Thou shall not desire To do aught save pure subservience: Nature has willed it so!”53

Armgart reminds us of how recently opera had become, preeminently, a woman’s art—although outstanding female singers had participated in opera since its beginnings in the early seventeenth century, most of the stars of the 1600s and 1700s had been the brilliant castrati. It was only in the early nineteenth century that women had become the main players, winners of riches and glory.54 “Speaking roughly,” wrote The Musical Times in 1892, “the prima donna hardly had a fair chance before the end of the last century.”55 It was the preference of nineteenth-century composers for the female voice that has allowed Armgart to triumph over the limitations that society, in the name of “nature,” had imposed upon others of her sex: Oh, I am happy! The great masters write For women’s voices, and great Music wants me!

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The operatic vehicle of Armgart’s triumph, as well as several references in the poem, strongly suggest that Eliot’s portrait of the diva was inspired by the mezzo-soprano Pauline Garcia-Viardot, who had gained fame by her portrayal of Orpheus in a version of Gluck’s opera that Berlioz adapted to her voice; Viardot sang this role over 150 times between 1859 and 1861.56 Viardot, the inspiration for the heroine of George Sand’s 1843 novel Consuelo,57 would have been a well-known figure to George Eliot before the singer came to London to escape the Franco-Prussian War. During the course of Viardot’s London sojourn, the two women visited each other’s homes and Eliot’s letters contain several references to the beauty and emotional power of her singing.58 While Armgart is not an exact portrayal of Pauline Viardot, she clearly incorporates elements of the character and career of the great prima donna. Both women lack conventional physical attractiveness—“The women whispered,‘Not a pretty face!’” says Armgart of her audience. Both overwhelm their audiences with the emotional depth of their acting and the expressive power of their voices: Charles Dickens wept openly in Viardot’s dressing room after experiencing her Orpheus,59 while the fictional Leo attests to a similar experience of emotional intensity: “Orpheus was Armgart,Armgart Orpheus.” Both Viardot and Armgart took liberties with the printed score to engage in flights of ornamentation that were technically brilliant and musically revelatory; reluctantly, the composer Leo admits that Armgart’s departures from the written notes opened new doors to heaven.60 Finally, the relentless ambition that drove both women to the heights of achievement took an eventual toll on vocal health. Eliot does not name the cause of Armgart’s loss of voice but Viardot blamed the early decline of her vocal quality squarely on her own determined efforts to push the upper part of her range beyond its natural limits: “Don’t do as I did,” she counseled a young singer; “I wanted to sing everything and I spoilt my voice.”61 Armgart’s sudden and drastic fall from eminence allows Eliot to reveal serious flaws in the singer’s character; bereft of the vocal brilliance on which all attention had been focused, Armgart comes to understand that devotion to her art had been accompanied by a high degree of egotism and callousness. Not until the failure of her voice had she thought of the cruel effects of her disdain for ordinary women upon Walpurga; never had she troubled to learn of Leo’s bitter disappointments as a failed composer. Rejecting Walpurga’s suggestion that she now accept the Graf ’s proposal of

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marriage, Armgart correctly predicts that he will no longer see her as a great prize: the termination of her glorious career will no longer signify a sacrifice to him and he will not be able to lay claim to the conquest of a reigning queen. No longer “unwoman’d” by ambition,Armgart is softened by her suffering and now feels a spiritual bond with Leo as she decides to serve music, instead of her own ambitions, as a teacher in the town where Walpurga was born.The pang of regret comes in her final lines when she reflects that “Paulina” sings tonight in Fidelio—a role Viardot had sung in Paris immediately after her triumph as Orpheus—and will be warmly welcomed by the crowds whose memory of Armgart will soon fade.62 If “Armgart” is, as Rupert Christiansen suggests, the first fictional presentation of the prima donna as a serious and dedicated artist,63 it is also a passionate statement of woman’s capacity for the highest levels of artistic achievement: Men did not say, when I had sung last night, “‘Twas good, nay, wonderful, considering She is a woman”—and then turn to add, “Tenor or baritone had sung her songs Better, of course . . .”

The poem is, however, not only about female artistry but also about the moral danger inherent in a particular kind of achievement, the career of what the Victorians termed “public singing” in opera, the musical genre that, more than any other, brought women to unprecedented pinnacles of wealth and renown. Not surprisingly, opera was a genre that evoked an ambivalent response in Eliot: although she attended and sometimes enjoyed operatic performance, especially the works of Mozart, Gluck, and Rossini, her strongest preferences were for instrumental music and for vocal music that could be performed in private settings.64 Although Lewes’s interest in opera continued long beyond his service, during the early 1850s, as opera critic for the Leader, Eliot’s lifelong distaste for the stage seems to have alienated her from more recent works of opera.65 Singing limited to the private realm would never have led to the levels of adulation and fame that feed Armgart’s ambition and support her selfishness. Eliot recognizes the genuineness of Armgart’s commitment to the highest musical standards, but is alienated by the mixing of that commitment with narcissistic motivation and pleasure. It is only when the house “ring[s] with plaudits” that Leo knows her best singing is assured.And when Armgart reflects that the final applause of the splendid evening made her feel “a happy spiritual star / Such as old Dante saw, wrought in a rose / Of light in Paradise,” he mocks this self-apotheosis

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with a comment on the evident pride with which Armgart had received “a star of brilliants, quite an earthly star, valued by thalers,” that was sent from the royal box. If, as Eliot believed, the highest function of music was to strengthen the bonds of human sympathy and transcend selfishness,66 the opera star, as depicted in “Armgart,” and later in Daniel Deronda, was unfit for that mission. Of the six characters in Deronda whose lives are in some way involved with music, four are professional or amateur singers.67 The two singers of the highest moral standing—Deronda himself and Mirah Lapidoth—are repelled, for reasons to be discussed below, by the admixture of theatricality and music required in operatic singing. For Gwendolyn Harleth, whose musical ambitions are based on superficial talents, singing is a manifestation of a seductive personality and a possible means of escape from life as a poor governess. Eliot’s portrait of the fourth singer, the Princess Leonora HalmEberstein, Deronda’s mother, provides a second portrayal of a diva, a parallel image to the character of Armgart. The shape of Deronda’s early life has been determined by the character and ambitions of his mother, the Alcharisi, stage name of the divaprincess; the new life he embarks upon at the end of the book is inspired by another woman whose exquisite singing expresses a very different moral sensibility. Raised in aristocratic luxury by Sir Hugo Mallinger, whom he regards as his uncle, Daniel is kept in ignorance of his true parentage. His musical gifts appear early and Sir Hugo encourages this interest by taking him to the opera. Eliot describes Daniel’s boy soprano voice as one that seems to “bring an idyllic heaven and earth before our eyes,” while his “fine musical instinct” soon enables him to provide his own piano accompaniments.68 Daniel is nevertheless outraged at Sir Hugo’s suggestion that he might, one day, wish to become a great singer. Of the two reasons the boy gives for this response, the first, that singing is not a gentleman’s career, is abandoned as Deronda matures and outgrows his childhood snobbishness.The second reason, however, remains a permanent part of Deronda’s outlook and clearly reflects Eliot’s own discomfort with theatrical performance. Daniel angrily rejects the idea of being dressed up to sing before “all those fine people who would not care about him except as a wonderful toy.69 He continues to develop his musical knowledge, but there is no further discussion of his becoming a professional singer. It is Deronda’s singing as he rows on the Thames, thinking about a future vocation now that his formal education is over, that attracts the attention of young Mirah, whose desperate situation has led her to contemplate suicide: having come to England in flight from the cruel actor-manager father who trained her lovely voice with the aim of selfishly exploiting her talents, Mirah has been unable to find the mother and brother who, as she

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believes, live somewhere in London. Deronda rescues her, arranges for her to live with a friend’s family, and helps her find pupils and singing engagements. Mirah brings to Deronda the gift of selfless love and reunites him with the birthright of Jewish identity; the novel culminates in their marriage and departure from England in pursuit of the cause of a Jewish homeland. At his very first meeting with Mirah, Deronda immediately compares her with his own unknown mother:“Perhaps,” he thinks,“my mother was like this one,”70 an ironic comment since the Alcharisi has rejected that which Mirah holds most dear, her Jewish identity and faith. Like Armgart, the Alcharisi has risen to the top of her profession by placing ambition above human ties; to Leonora, love cannot exist without subjection. Having rejected the patriarchal tradition of religion and the authority of men—she chose marriage as her avenue to freedom once she recognized that she could rule her husband as she could not rule her father—she also rejects maternal ties, accepting the offer of Sir Hugo, a devoted suitor, to take responsibility for the two-year-old, fatherless Daniel. Glorying in her fame, the Alcharisi nevertheless ends her career prematurely, fearful that the appearance of a tendency to sing out of tune signifies the beginning of vocal decline; like Armgart, she cannot bear to be anything less than Europe’s preeminent prima donna. Leonora’s singing regains its high quality too late for her to resume her profession: after accepting Christian baptism, she marries a Russian nobleman and, by the time of the meeting with Daniel that she arranges after becoming fatally ill, has borne him five children. Unlike Armgart, who has been redeemed by suffering, and unlike Gwendolyn, whose responsiveness to music shows a capacity for selfknowledge and selfless love and the promise of eventual redemption, Leonora’s egotism, hypertrophied by years as queen of the opera stage and expressed in her callous disregard for a loving husband and cold rejection of the natural bonds of motherhood, has corrupted the sacred springs of music within herself and distorted the talent that Eliot believed should be used to strengthen empathy and bring hearts together. Through Deronda’s conversation with his mother, Eliot provides an altogether different model for the ideal female singer, one unsullied by love of self-display and the desire for fame. Asked by the Princess (who insightfully describes herself as “not a loving woman”) to describe his beloved, Daniel responds that although Mirah has been brought up as a singer for the stage, theatrical life is “repugnant to her.” Mirah’s exquisite singing is matched by physical beauty, but unlike Armgart and the Alcharisi, these attributes have not caused her to become ambitious: “Not one who must have a path of her own?” asks the Princess.“I think,” replies Deronda, “her nature is not given to make great claims.”71

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Eliot recognizes the value of the intensive vocal training that has given power and subtlety to Mirah’s brilliant musicality, enabling her to elicit warm praise from the brilliant pianist and composer Herr Klesmer:“Let us shake hands: you are a musician.”72 Yet while she has fully mastered the elements of the singer’s craft, Mirah feels even more strongly than had the child Deronda a revulsion towards all aspects of theatricality: the advice given by Klesmer, that her voice is unsuited for any space larger than a drawing room, is fully congruent with her own desires. Mirah’s voice had blossomed with the fine instruction her father provided, but she detested his practice of having her sing “for show, . . . as if I had been a musical box. . . .The clapping and all the sounds of the theatre were hateful to me; and I never liked praise. . . . It seemed all very hard and unloving.” She was especially troubled by the contrast between the words and manners of actors on and off the stage: “women looking good and gentle on the stage, and saying good things as if they felt them, and directly after I saw them with coarse, ugly manners.”73 In contrast to Armgart, who could experience love only after the loss of her singing voice, and the Alcharisi, for whom all ties were a form of enslavement, Mirah’s voice was love itself, “the sort of voice that gives the impression of being meant like a bird’s wooing for an audience near and beloved.”74 For George Eliot, the issue in the life of the woman of extraordinary talent, whether author or musician, was not marriage versus career, but the importance of controlling a desire for public admiration that was conducive to excessive self-love and corrosive of a womanly, loving nature. The examples of her three most gifted female singers—Armgart, the Alcharisi, and Mirah—reveal Eliot’s strong distaste for the career of public singing. It is ironic that Eliot, an early supporter of the women’s movement and close friend of one of its most inspiring leaders, Barbara Bodichon, would respond so harshly to female practitioners in one of the few fields outside her own in which nineteenth-century women reached the heights of achievement and unquestioned eminence.75 “‘St. Cecilia’: If The Heart Speaks, Must One Not Listen?” In April 1885, The Magazine of Music, a popularly written journal for music students, educators, and amateurs, then in its second year of publication,76 featured the first installment of a serialized novelette that would appear in every issue through the following March.The eponymous heroine,“Saint” Cecilia, is one of three Raeburn sisters who live in straitened circumstances in an Edinburgh suburb. Poor relations of an upper-class family, their widowed father has long since gone to Jamaica to found a Christian mission, leaving them with scant resources.“Cis” receives a small salary for

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her work as a school music teacher but all of it goes to household necessities; she has no hope of paying for the instruction she needs in order to develop her lovely voice. Cis is thrilled when Hugh Jardine, her cousin and admirer, who is studying to become a clergyman, presents her with a shilling ticket to hear the great Tietjens in a local concert.The significance of the (unnamed) author’s choice of Cecilia’s most immediate source of inspiration would have been immediately recognized by The Magazine’s musically informed readers. The German-born soprano, who had died in 1877 at the age of 46, was deeply loved in England where she had become a naturalized citizen a decade after settling in London in the late 1850s.Tietjens was admired not only for her extraordinary voice and musicianship, but also for her integrity and kindness: she was generous in assisting struggling young singers and made a practice of singing on Sundays in poor neighborhoods where it was said that people kissed the ground she walked upon. Significantly in the context of The Magazine of Music’s novella,Tietjens was believed to have remained unmarried, although in 1896 a man in Montevideo was reported in the Times to have identified himself as her husband.77 If her own voice developed as she dreamed it might, Cecilia would use it as Tietjens had hers, to reach people’s hearts, to be “good for them and helpful to them.” Music was a “deliverance for her soul.”Thrilled as she is by the concert, Cecilia’s unrealistic dream of years of voice study becomes a source of torment, the name of Cecilia as much a burden as a source of inspiration. Gently feminine both in manner and in her love for her sisters, Cecilia perceives her desire to become a great singer as a masculine element in her character, telling Hugh,“You don’t know what it is to have all the longings of a man and be only a girl,” a comment oddly similar to the Graf ’s observation of Armgart’s heroic goals: “She bears Caesar’s ambition in her delicate breast. . . .” Cecilia’s character combines the loving nature of Mirah with the boundless desire for greatness that characterized Eliot’s two divas. Desperate for funds, the sisters decide to take in boarders.The first two are elderly ladies; the third, an acquaintance of Hugh Jardine, is a German musician, a former student of Liszt who is clearly modeled on Eliot’s Klesmer. Herr König discovers Cis’s lovely voice and musicality and teaches her songs of his beloved Schubert.“Your sister,” he tells Susan Raeburn, in a response that directly echoes Klesmer’s to Mirah’s singing,“is an artist. . . . She has the gift that heaven gives but to the few.” At an Edinburgh at-home given by Cecilia’s wealthy aunt, König accompanies Cis in Schubert’s Ungeduld (Impatience), a rapturous declaration of love with the repeated refrain, “Yours is my heart and will be yours forever,” Saint Cecilia’s vow of faithfulness and self-consecration, not to an earthly lover, but

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to music itself. Cecilia’s passionate singing at her aunt’s party causes a series of whispers to run through the room.The professor’s pupil was a new star being trained for the opera; she was said to be going abroad. “Many eye-glasses were levelled at her; she would be an attractive actress when she was trained.” Rumor, the gaze, the glamour and taint of the theatre—all these elements of the female singer’s life were set in motion long before Cecilia’s career was begun. König helps Cis make arrangements to study voice in a small town in the German Rhineland (Leipzig is considered beyond financial reach) where she will earn enough to cover expenses by giving English lessons to a local noblewoman. Cis’s dream was becoming a reality:“Thus it was that Cecilia received her investiture, and became one of the guild who enrich the world with beauty. She was a Cecilia with a mission, now.” In a spirit close to the feminist expressions of a later era, the author contrasts the bright professional future that awaits her with “poor” Fanny Mendelssohn, whose artistic aspirations were repressed “by the unwritten law that forbade her to shine in the same firmament as Felix. Cis might be a star if she chose.” The question that soon arises is what she will choose once past this period of study: lifelong dedication to music, or marriage to her beloved and faithful Hugh, for the author makes clear that both understand that these choices are, and must remain, mutually exclusive. Hugh, who has escorted Cis to Germany, prepares her for the inevitability of this choice in “a fiery rush of words” that constitutes his farewell: Don’t deceive yourself, and fancy that your art, as you call it, is going to be everything to you, and that you can afford to lose all else for its sake.There would be no greater mistake to start with.Art makes life beautiful—yes, but it is not the whole of life—not even the best part of life.You are a woman— you have a woman’s heart, and you can’t stifle it or sing it down.There will come a time when all the music in the world will not satisfy you.

She responds that she knows there will be times “when the price will seem too heavy to pay, but that will be because I am a coward, not because the music falls short.” His parting words tell her that one day he will ask her if this art of hers is enough and that he hopes she will answer truthfully. Cecilia’s talent and dedication lead to the expected success, although there is suffering along the way: cruel rumors have been spread that she has persuaded her pupil’s brother to make her rich through marriage, even though theirs has been an innocent friendship based on a shared love of music. After a long separation, Hugh decides to visit Cologne to hear the now famous Cecilia in a performance of Bach’s Sacred Music. Pressed by

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the large and crowded audience, Hugh is thrilled when her voice rings through the great cathedral: Every tone of that vibrating, pathetic voice was familiar to him. . . . He had thought to hear it again unmoved, and he could not. . . . Now for the first time he realised to what a high vocation Cecilia had been called. . . . How many hearts thrilled to new resolves as she breathed out the tender prayer— “Come and dwell within my heart.” In this outpouring of large and assured belief was not many a dumb soul there singing with her? And all this—the riches and breadth of her art, the power it gave her over others; the intensity of joy its expression yielded to herself—he had asked her to surrender— for him. He had gone to her like a conqueror, and summoned her to renounce it all and take his love instead. Oh, a fine, manly, unselfish love, truly! It was against himself that he was scornful now. . . . Had she not her mission—high and pure—her work elevating and satisfying? What were I and my claims but so many hindrances, making stumbling blocks in her upward path?”

After the performance, Cecilia and Hugh meet outside the cathedral. She asks if he remembers the question he once asked her, whether music would be enough to fill her life. He replies that he finally understands what music means to her and to others through her; he has heard her answer in her singing. The very nobility and dedication required for her mission, however, makes it incompatible with marriage: “I want my wife for myself. I will not share her gifts with all the world.” Cis answers that she is tiring of the world and when he insists that she must say, “Hugh, I love you best,” she repeats his words, “obediently.” They marry and although, from time to time, she questions her decision, Cecilia is prepared to answer these doubts. Dedicated to improving the lot of the industrial poor, Hugh becomes a minister in a Lancashire mill town. Both take part in philanthropic work, Cecilia training the church choir and singing to the mill workers, whose applause she finds “a great deal more hearty and sincere” than that of fashionable audiences. Only her voice teacher, visiting from Germany, is dismayed and declares he will never again teach one of her sex. “And yet,” Cecilia thinks to herself,“if the heart speaks, must not one listen? . . . Love comes first. It is the best.” While The Magazine of Music’s novella reflects the influence of George Eliot’s writings of the previous decade, the relation of “St. Cecilia’s” author to the specialized audience of this later narrative gives it a different character. Neither the career of the public singer, whatever her performance genre, nor the morality or ambition of the heroine is in any way disparaged—the example of the beloved Tietjens makes this amply clear.The path of the actress-singer is shown as a dangerous one, but Cecilia, however

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pained she is by gossip, is never tempted from the path of virtue or from her sense of vocation. If Cecilia’s ambition, like Armgart’s, is characterized as “masculine,” such ambition is seen by The Magazine of Music’s author as wholly appropriate to one whose voice will one day fill a great cathedral with the glory of Bach’s inspiring music. Yet despite its fervent appreciation of women’s musical talents—even an empathic understanding of the unjust sacrifice society exacts from women as gifted as Fanny Mendelssohn—the story has a monitory character. Its implicit message spoke directly to those readers who were among the thousands of would-be Cecilias enrolled in England’s conservatories or contemplating foreign study. The critic Joseph Bennett had sounded the cautionary note in his journal The Lute, a year before “St. Cecilia’s” publication. Pointing to the tremendous interest in musical careers among young people, with music schools crowded and thousands each year seeking to join the profession, Bennett concluded that the current situation would soon be found untenable; teachers were now prospering but performers, especially singers, lacked employment.78 In this context, Cecilia’s story would have suggested to young women (and their parents) that they consider carefully whether they, too, have the high calling and impressive gifts of the heroine, whether they have the capacity to suffer the threat to respectability then implicit in the word “actress,” whether the demands even of a successful musical career might lead eventually to dissatisfaction, and whether the sacrifice of marriage and motherhood might not lead to bitter regrets. Even if Hugh Jardine had been wrong to include a condition in his marriage proposal—“I want my wife for myself. I will not share her gifts with all the world”—his point of view was widely shared among English men and it was well for women to plot their course realistically. The story’s conclusion does not undermine the value of serious musical study for the journal’s student readers. Instead, it urges that marriage to a loving man, should such a one appear, will be found both more satisfying and more worthy even than the glamorous career of public singer, and that musical gifts are most joyously shared with those not found among fashionable concert audiences. PART TWO: THE 1890S AND AFTER As we have seen in earlier chapters, musical performance for philanthropic causes often allowed upper-class women to appear in public roles that would otherwise have evoked disapproval or even scandal. As exemplified by Lady Radnor, singers were especially prominent in this “crossover” of charitable amateur into quasi-professional performer in all respects but

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payment. By the mid-1880s, this practice had become so commonplace that its social currency was beginning to lose value: in 1885, a columnist in The Lady wrote that “the privilege of listening to the musical performances of the aristocracy is now accorded so freely that its market value has considerably deteriorated, and nothing short of the appearance of a Princess of the Blood Royal can any longer be reckoned on as a safe ‘draw.’”79 Writing in The Lady’s World two years later, the musician and author Frederick Crowest suggested that the participation of the aristocracy in public musical performance was changing patterns of female recruitment into the singing profession: whereas formerly the prejudice against women’s appearing in public had resulted in recruitment from lower social levels, now “all this is altered.”80 If the prejudice against the professional woman singer lost some of its sting near the close of the century, it cannot be said to have vanished.The English heroine of F. Marion Crawford’s widely read 1905 novel, Fair Margaret, is warned by her socialite mentor that her decision to become a professional singer will require the sacrifice of her closest friends, her status as a lady, and the chance of a respectable marriage.81 In the book’s 1908 sequel, Prima Donna, the prediction proves at least partly true. Once she has become a famous singer, Margaret learns that she has, indeed, been “classed” and set aside by women who would have been her friends had she not entered the profession. She also learns how little “real consideration she . . . [can] expect from men of the world.”82 The cosmopolitan Crawford, Italian-born but American by parentage and education, had himself once contemplated a singing career. He was a friend of the soprano Nellie Melba, who was in some ways the model for his fictional “Prima Donna.”83 If, as Crowest wrote in 1887, the lessened animus against “public” women singers was an unplanned but welcome result of the frequent appearance of aristocratic women on the concert platform—often alongside professionals—this was not the sole, or even the principal, cause of attitudinal change. More potent causes were the increasing respectability of theater and of the acting profession, two (male) representatives of which were knighted during the 1890s;84 and, especially, the powerful attraction of Wagnerian opera that blossomed during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. Impossible as it is to know how many young women of the higher social classes studied voice with professional goals, evidence of a social climate more accepting of such goals— this was understood to mean before marriage—appears during the 1890s in girls’ and women’s magazines. The clearest statement of the erosion of upper-class opposition to singing careers is found in an article on the training of singers published in The Lady on September 7, 1899.“Thanks to the

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revolutionising of English feeling on the question of a girl gently born and nurtured facing life as a public singer,” writes the journal, “many mothers are now turning their attention early to their daughters’ voices.”The article continues with an evaluation of educational options. Leipzig is not considered a good place for learning vocal technique; initial training in London is recommended, preferably at the Royal Academy of Music or the Guildhall School of Music, followed by foreign study in France or Italy. Authoritative as it may sound, The Lady’s judgment on the “revolution” in attitudes towards the respectability of public singing may have been the overstatement of a trend limited to avant-garde circles among the “gently born.” Long-standing prejudices lasted far longer within more conservative and religious segments of society. While Judith Rowbotham, in her survey of Victorian girls’ fiction, found greatly increased evidence of a positive attitude towards female careers beginning in the 1870s, public singing met only with the most limited acceptance: the favored vocational choices were nursing, teaching—preferably, in private girls’ schools—and, perhaps, art. Public performance was reluctantly approved only in the presence of dire financial need and in the absence of other options. For example, the heroine of the 1895 novel White Turrets, by the enormously popular children’s author Louise Molesworth, sings publicly only until marriage releases her from poverty and allows her to limit her performances to private settings and, above all, to share her gifts with poor people.85 While The Lady’s report of the demise of prejudice against the female professional singer probably did not meet with the agreement of all its readers, there are other indications that careers in singing and instrumental performance were becoming increasingly acceptable among many music-loving, upper-class families.This change was reflected in a comment by the distinguished musicologist and critic J. A. Fuller Maitland who, in a book on English music published in 1902, took note of “the frequency with which ladies and gentlemen in the truest sense, well born, well bred, educated and refined, have entered the ranks of the profession in the latter part of the XIXth century.”86 This altered pattern of recruitment, one that blurred the line that had previously existed between the respectable amateur and the professional woman singer, is relevant to the appearance of a story that appeared in The Lady in 1891, two years after its purchase by Thomas Gibson Bowles; as founder and former owner of Vanity Fair, Bowles had long experience in selecting material that would interest upper-class subscribers. The short story, “Mademoiselle Lili,” appeals to those readers with a plot that foregrounds the beneficent influence of the combination of music with philanthropy, but the carrier of moral values is not, as was the case with the People’s Entertainment Society, a volunteer of genteel background, but a public singer whose name and appearance re-

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flect theatrical affiliation.The main characters of the story are an unlikely pair: Dick, a street waif and accident victim who lies dying in the children’s ward of an East London hospital, and the eponymous “Mademoiselle,” described as “a marvellous singer with whose praise all London was ringing.” The two are brought together as the result of the child’s delirious, but insistent cries to see “the beautiful white lady with the stars in her hair, as sang about ‘ome.” The nun who cares for the child is puzzled and frustrated by this strange request, but the surgeon making his rounds understands immediately that the boy must have heard the famous Mademoiselle Lili in a concert at the People’s Palace, the East End cultural center designed to serve as a bridge between the classes, which the Queen had opened, with great panoply, in her Jubilee Year of 1887.The memory of Mademoiselle Lili’s rendition of “Home, Sweet Home” in the great concert room of the Palace had lingered in the homeless boy’s mind, but it stirred his sense of deprivation as much as his sense of beauty:“What ‘ome?” he asked;“I ain’t got no ‘ome.” Reluctantly acceding to the nun’s request, the doctor, who is described as tall, young, and handsome, pays a visit to Mademoiselle Lili to ask if she will comfort the dying child with a song. She receives him in a “beautiful boudoir” where the air is sweet with the scent of flowers. Deeply moved by her visitor’s plea, she follows him to Dick’s bedside.When her cool hand on his fevered forehead gives no comfort, she at once understands the reason. She goes home, returns quickly in the costume she had appeared in at the People’s Palace concert, and sings her most beautiful performance of the “tender old strain.” “‘Tis the white lady! My own white lady—her as sings of ‘ome, sweet ‘ome,’” says the child. Homeless no longer, Dick is led by her song to his last, spiritual home. If the People’s Palace provided the necessary setting for the initial gift of music in this maudlin tale, Mademoiselle Lili’s song was the story’s active agent of spiritual transformation. Beloved by the Victorians, “Home, Sweet Home” was one of the most evocative aural icons of its time; its curious history suggests the complexity and ambiguity that often underlie cherished symbols. “‘Home, Sweet Home,’” wrote the journal Musical Society, in 1886, “will only cease to live when all nature is dead, and Time is no more.”87 It appears, however, that this song that inspired Victorians to celebrate the virtues of simple living had its origin in an odd tangle of contradiction and duplicity. The music to the song was first published under the title, “A Sicilian Air,” in 1821, in an anthology, Melodies of Various Nations; when Henry Bishop used the tune two years later in his opera Clari, he was accused of stealing it and had to admit that the suppressed “Sicilian Air” had been his own composition, written to fit an unfilled space in the anthology.88 Bishop’s own home life hardly exemplified the domestic

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virtues celebrated in his famous song: a known “home-wrecker,” he died destitute, leaving two children with no means of support, his second wife, a noted singer, having left him years earlier to elope with a harpist.89 As was the case for the music of “Home, Sweet Home,” so was it with the words, which were found to be strikingly similar to two poems previously published in England and America.90 John Howard Payne (1791–1852), the poet of “Home, Sweet Home,” was an American-born actor who had an unsuccessful career on the English stage. He led an unhappy life and never had a permanent home. Payne died in 1852 in Tunis, where he held the post of United States consul, a position given him at the influence of well-connected friends.91 How can one account for the unflagging enthusiasm evoked by a song as trite and repetitious as “Home, Sweet Home”—a song that has been described as “a vacuum of a tune which nostalgia rushes to fill”?92 As Nicholas Temperley has suggested, perhaps that reassuringly dull stability in fact constituted the main source of its appeal:93 at a time when so many middle-class homes were subject to sudden ruination from the volatile marketplace, when rapid upward mobility depended on the continued health and earning power of a vulnerable paterfamilias, the song’s suggestion of permanent and untroubled comfort would have been especially welcome.Temperley suggests yet another reason for its popularity: as with many other ballads,“Home, Sweet Home” expressed national values—indeed, the ballad was seen as a quintessentially English form. Although the central Victorian values in the song are obviously the ties to home and family, Temperley finds another, just below the surface of the poetry—that is, the displacement of sexual love.94 That displacement was overtly stated in the song’s original context, where it expressed the contrition of a once-virtuous maid who, abducted into a duke’s palatial home, leaves her lover and returns home to ask the forgiveness of her humble parents.95 “Home, Sweet Home” was repeatedly—one might say, obsessively— performed by many of the great foreign-born divas of Victorian England, from the beloved “Swedish nightingale,” Jenny Lind, to the equally adored Adelina Patti, who made it her theme song and valued it as a showpiece for the middle notes of her range.96 It served Patti well throughout her five-decade-long career: as a girl of 17, her rendition of Bishop’s song so impressed the English concert manager James Henry Mapleson that he immediately decided to form an opera company featuring her as one of its stars.97 Patti incorporated the song into the lesson scene in The Barber of Seville.98 In later years, she enjoyed playing a seductive game with her audiences, withholding the famous encore until their clamor for the piece reached fever pitch.99

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The French-Canadian soprano Emma Albani, who was probably the Queen’s favorite singer, performed Bishop’s song in many parts of the world. On a tour of Australia she moved her audience to tears by bringing them his evocation of the “home” country.100 She also sang the ballad at the official dedication of the People’s Palace, where its evocative power led the widowed Queen to speak of “the interest which would have been felt in this undertaking by him whose love and support once made the Palace home so happy. . . .”101 The story in The Lady touches on, though never explicitly, connections between the singer’s sexuality, the beauty of her voice, and the listener’s experience of transcendence, reminding us again of the meaning of the word diva as female divinity or goddess.Although Mademoiselle Lili is introduced as a “great” singer, a term that implies her presence in the world of “high” art, her Frenchified stage name conveys an aura of less respectable connotations, whether theater or music hall—the reader’s suspicions along these lines are strengthened by her reception of the handsome young doctor in a “beautiful boudoir.” Given these suggestive overtones in the story, it is significant that the bed the singer visits is that of the dying boy, and that the kiss she gives—dressed in white, the silken draperies fallen at her side “like angel’s wings”—is a chaste one that leads her young listener to a state of blessedness. As Temperley suggests in his comments on the song, sexuality is subordinated here, placed in the service of the sacred mission of art, which can comfort the weary spirit even when the recognized agents of religious life—the hospital sisters who have renounced sexuality—are unable to do so. If “Mademoiselle Lili” was traditional in its use of this favorite ballad in combination with a sentimental theme of the blessedness of charity, its incorporation of the sexual, however discreetly, into its vision of redemption connects it to the new Wagner-inspired ethos that characterized English high culture beginning in the late 1880s. The origins of what came to be called “Wagner-mania” date to the early 1870s, with the publication of important articles by the music critic Francis Hueffer and the pianist and music scholar Edward Dannreuther, who founded the Wagner Society.Wagner’s orchestral music was performed in London during the seventies—the composer himself conducted a series of concerts at the Albert Hall in 1877. In 1882, London audiences had their first opportunity to hear several of Wagner’s operas in German (the Ring, Meistersinger, and Tristan and Isolde). From 1888 to 1895, the Wagner Society published a journal, the Meister, to disseminate Wagner’s ideas. Despite the frequent lack of consistency in Wagner’s prose writings (and inconsistencies between his theoretical expressions and his operatic practice), William Ashton Ellis, the editor, found the core of Wagner’s ideas to be a deeply spiritual, anti-utilitarianism. In England as elsewhere, “Wagnerism”

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took on a life of its own, and came to be associated by various interpreters with aestheticism, occultism, socialism (for G. B. Shaw and the composer Rutland Boughton), and with the fin de siècle interest in the erotic.102 The themes of passion and lust dealt with, respectively, in the operas Tristan and Tannhäuser were especially significant to English writers of the 1890s, a time when a number of authors and artists engaged in candid and searching presentations of sexual thoughts and feelings. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, sitting rapt in his opera box, identifies his own tragedy of moral degradation in the prelude to Tannhäuser.103 Lady Hayes, the seductress of E. F. Benson’s 1893 novel, The Rubicon, identifies herself with the temptations of Venusburg, motive force of the knight Tannhäuser’s life of sin.104 Aubrey Beardsley was fascinated by Tannhäuser and drew a series of erotic (and highly controversial) drawings based on the opera.105 George Bernard Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite, published in 1898, wrote that Tristan and Isolde was “such an astonishingly intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a pair of lovers” that its depiction of sexual passion might well have shocked Shelley,106 poet-prophet of sexual liberation.And in an autobiographical novel published in the 1920s, Maurice Baring, thinking back to a performance of Tannhäuser he attended while a student in Germany, wrote of it as a transformative experience, one that by its nature exposed outmoded “conventions, creeds, prejudices, morals and ideals. . . . He felt as if he had put on new armour and was ready to go and fight the world in defence of freedom, and of the joy of life. He wanted to shatter the world’s false idols, and break the walls of the established temples. It was a fresh landmark in his progress of emancipation.”107 Although Wagner and his adherents despised grand opera’s elevation of the star singer above the totality of a musical and dramatic experience, even advocating a new etiquette limiting audience applause,108 the centrality of love and sexuality in such operas as Tristan and Tannhäuser had the paradoxical effect of enhancing traditional public interest in romantic aspects of the lives of the most prominent singers. If women were, as widely believed, acutely sensitive to music, then surely, the women who recreated the characters of Isolde or Kundry, the seductress in Parsifal, would be, in some way, marked by their identity with these roles. Or was it, rather, the presence of a heightened sensuality that led them to such roles and added to the power and persuasiveness of these singers? Questions such as these became central themes in a succession of novels with singer-heroines that appeared in the 1890s and 1900s.109 The authors of these books show how the context of romantic personal liberation associated with English Wagnerism became closely linked with New Woman issues of female sexuality, and the aspiration to artistic achievement and recognition. The novels I will discuss appeared over a

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12-year period beginning in 1895: Mary E. Martin’s Her Debut; Elizabeth Godfrey’s Poor Human Nature (1898); George Moore’s Evelyn Innes (1898) and its sequel, Sister Teresa (1901); and Claire De Pratz’s Eve Norris (1907). The heroines of these novels present a striking contrast to the main characters in two slightly earlier books.The first of these, discussed in chapter one, was Edna Lyall’s Doreen, whose heroine expresses few regrets when the failure of her thrilling voice causes her to leave public singing for marriage and family.The second was the enormous international success, George du Maurier’s Trilby, in which the heroine’s beautiful voice is created and fully controlled by the diabolical genius Svengali. Unlike these predecessors of 1894, the novels by Martin, Godfrey, Moore, and De Pratz present singers whose voices are described as direct emanations of their sexual nature, singers whose sense of vocation transcends the desire for marriage and children.110 Erma (Ermengarde) Laninska, the main character of Her Debut, is 18 when the book begins and has two closely related goals in life: to sing and to be free. Daughter of an ill-matched and long separated couple—her father, a gifted but unsuccessful German violinist, her mother, a social climber of mysterious foreign origin—Erma becomes increasingly restless during a visit to the upper-class Thurstan family’s country-house with her mother. Erma’s musicianship is introduced immediately after one of the Thurstan daughters sings with what local people consider a “great deal of expression.” Accompanied by her mother, Erma sings a piece from Lohengrin to which the Thurstan mother and daughters listen “astonished, overpowered yet disgusted. . . . Erma’s rich, full, glorious contralto flooded the room, the house. She could no longer be only that “queer, disagreeable girl,” she was not less objectionable, but more important. From a sort of easy contempt their feelings became pronounced distaste. It was not “the thing” to perform like that—it would suit a concert-hall, an opera-house, not this quiet country gentleman’s place in dear old England.111

Later in the novel, Erma’s singing at a Sunday church service that she has reluctantly attended at her mother’s insistence elicits a similar response. Drawn in by the music of the liturgy, Erma loses herself in its beauty; her lovely singing brings this part of the service far above its usual standard. While the vicar is impressed and the curate is charmed “in spite of himself,” the ladies of the congregation are scandalized: “they considered it theatrical, indecorous, almost indecent, . . . as if she were performing at a theatre. . . .” The vicar expresses his suspicion—“She must, I think, be professional.”112

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Erma and young Gilbert Thurstan fall in love, but Erma tells him she will never marry because she wants liberty above all else, “the right to make my life what I choose.” She tells Gilbert that she has always known she wanted to be a singer.“A public singer?” asks Gilbert. She says she must do this and Gilbert’s older brother warns him that if he marries Erma, it will be “hard work keeping that girl in a cage!” Erma knows she is a misfit in society,“unwomanly,” not gentle, unable to nurse the old,“stupid” with children, and out of place in the drawing room: But in my proper place—on a platform, a stage (I know, for I have sung at the Conservatoire concerts), all that vanishes. I am no longer dull, awkward, disagreeable, because I no longer hate myself. I rejoice in myself instead. . . . It is not right . . . to keep me out of my own place.113

Erma regards her voice as “her one treasure, her one gift.” The fullest description of her unconventional beauty follows her impassioned singing from Lohengrin. Erma prepares for bed and loosens her hair, which falls in “wild, picturesque confusion.” Martin describes her as if she were already a figure of Wagnerian opera: As she stood erect with her finely-carved arms . . . , she looked the picture of an unformed, but magnificent, half-savage creature, scornful of bonds and restraints, full of crude desire and passionate impulse.114

Erma and Gilbert do not marry. He chooses a wife better suited to be the mother of his children and she becomes a famous singer. The novel’s last scene shows Erma about to triumph in a cantata written for her by a composer who is rumored to be “an intimate friend of the great contralto.” A mature woman of 26, Erma is fulfilled by her work, strenuous but grateful work, a constant stretching on to some unattainable new effort. . . . She had only to stretch out a hand, and take love too.Would she need it? Was her lonely strength sufficient to her without it? Reader, I cannot tell you. I only know that Ermengarde Laninska thinks that she can stand alone; but, if her heart ever yields to any longing that it does not own to yet, the passion of her womanhood will transcend the fanciful passion of her early youth, and it will be worth the winning at the cost of many a year’s devotion.115

Clare Arrowsmith, the heroine of Poor Human Nature, is also a Wagnerian singer single-mindedly devoted to her art.An Englishwoman, Clare has long been a resident of Germany; after years of training there, she has become eminent in a company highly respected as an “early cradle” for Wag-

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ner’s operas. Clare lives with her socialite mother who had opposed her daughter’s operatic career, urging her instead to restrict herself to concerts and teaching. But the nature of Clare’s voice and her dramatic talent pointed to opera. She had, Godfrey tells her readers, a streak of “true genius” and a genuine need for self expression; she was motivated by more than the desire “becoming so common among women, for an independent career.” Madame Malaxa, Clare’s mother, continues to be concerned about her daughter and tries to persuade her to marry an English aristocrat who has long been in love with her. Clare responds unequivocally: “If I marry an Englishman my singing life would be a closed chapter,” and points out that her suitor’s family and friends would be scandalized if he were to wed an opera singer. The book’s title refers to the story’s main theme: the testing of Clare’s belief that a determined and morally upright woman can work in opera without being unduly disturbed by the indignities and rumors that surround the life of the actress, and that her passionate nature can be wholly fulfilled by her extraordinary musicianship. Predictably, the plot proves her wrong. She is paired to sing a series of roles opposite a brilliant new tenor whose marriage to a narrow-minded village girl deteriorates as he and Clare develop a close bond of sympathy.An endless buzz of rumors spreads through the town long before Dahlmann recognizes and declares his love, a declaration that immediately follows their inspiring performance as the lovers,Tristan and Isolde. Deeply distressed as she recognizes her true feelings toward this married man, Clare decides that they must no longer sing together. She breaks her contract and leaves Blankenstadt, works for some time in St. Petersburg, and five years later, comes to London to sing a concert of Wagner— excerpts from Lohengrin and Tristan—at St. James’s Hall. Dahlmann, now a widower whose voice has been lost to recurrent illness, has been living in London and attends the concert with his young son. At last the would-be lovers reunite, having found “something of the eternal” in their love. Always true to her high morality and her artistic genius, Clare had nevertheless been wrong on two counts: to believe she could insulate herself from the cabals and jealousies of the opera world and, more importantly, to believe that she could, without pain or sacrifice, restrict her passionate human nature to music alone. Like Clare Arrowsmith, Evelyn Innes becomes a famous Wagnerian singer, but Evelyn’s career in music has roots in family history. Her mother, who died some years earlier, had been a great opera star and her father, a musician and instrument-maker dedicated to the revival of early music in England, is a fictional portrait of Arnold Dolmetsch, whose concerts on early instruments attracted many of London’s literary and artistic elite and

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who served as unofficial musical editor of Moore’s novel.116 When the book opens, Evelyn, who teaches private pupils and performs as instrumentalist and singer at Mr. Innes’s concerts, has become restless and bored, concerned that her future may hold nothing but continued, predictable work as her father’s assistant. Her life changes radically when she falls in love with Owen Asher, an aristocrat, sensualist, and musical amateur who has just bought The Wagnerian Review, in whose columns he plans to discuss Innes’s innovations. Impressed by the beauty of Evelyn’s singing,Asher persuades her to live with him in Paris, where he will support the intensive vocal study necessary for an operatic career. He takes her for an interview with the famous Madame Savelli, a fictional reflection of Mathilde Marchesi, who is thrilled with Evelyn’s voice and predicts that serious study will lead her to a great future in opera. By the time of Evelyn’s return to England with Asher, several years later, she has become a famous opera star, as noted for her dramatic power as for the beauty of her voice. Asher has promised to marry Evelyn once she decides to leave the stage, but wants to postpone marriage until she has performed all the major Wagnerian roles. Evelyn’s sexual desires become more and more intense as she enters more and more fully into her Wagnerian roles. Raised a Catholic, she has acceded to Asher’s worldly atheism but begins to be subject to obsessive thoughts of her own sinfulness.At first pleased to sing Isolde’s love for Tristan as a counterpart of her own for Asher, she must dismiss the growing conviction that her portrayal of sexual passion might be sinful, that “it could not fail to suggest sinful thoughts. . . .”117 She falls in love with the romantic poet-composer Ulick Dean and recognizes her desire for him as a sign of her own sexual insatiability.118 She seeks spiritual relief in visits to a convent and thinks of the contrast between the nuns’ lives and her own: Thinking of the poor sisters who lived in prayer and poverty . . . she remembered that her life was given up to the portrayal of sensual emotion on the stage. She remembered the fierce egotism of the stage—an egotism which pursued her into every corner of her life. Compared with the lives of the poor sisters who had renounced all that was base in them, her life was very base indeed. In her stage life she was an agent of the sensual passion, not only with her voice, but with her arms, her neck and hair, and every expression of her face, and it was the craving of the music that had thrown her into Ulick’s arms. If it had subjugated her, how much more would it subjugate and hold within its sensual persuasion the ignorant listener—the listener who would perceive in the music nothing but its sensuality.119

Although she sees the “stage” and the sensuality of Wagner’s music as the primary agents of her soul’s corruption—“To sing Isolde and live a

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chaste life, she did not believe it to be possible”120—Evelyn believes that the sinfulness associated with those external influences has become a permanent characteristic of her voice and is apparent even when she sings sacred music to raise funds for the convent:“Even in singing the ‘Ave Maria’ [of Cherubini] she had not been able to subdue her vanity. Her pleasure in singing it had in a measure sprung out of the somewhat mean desire to proclaim her superiority over those who had attained the highest plane by renouncing all personal pride.”121 In the sequel novel, Sister Teresa, Evelyn becomes aware of how central to her art is the desire to please men; while singing from the church organ loft, she looks down to see if there are men in the congregation,“knowing she would not sing so well if she were only singing to women.”122 The overwhelming nature of her guilt leads Evelyn to perceive her voice as agent and sign of her corrupt nature. The perception becomes painfully clear to her as she contrasts the quality of her voice with the innocent voices of the nuns in the convent where she goes in search of spiritual peace: Evelyn hummed the plain chant under her breath, afraid lest she should extinguish the pale voices and surprised how expressive the plain chant was when sung by these etiolated sexless voices. She had never known how much of her life of passion and desire had entered into her voice and she was shocked at its impurity. . . . Her voice, she felt, must have revealed her past life to the nuns, her voice must have shocked them a little; her voice must have brought the world before them too vividly. For all her life was in her voice, she would never be able to sing this hymn with the same sexless grace as they did. Her voice would be always Evelyn Innes—Owen Asher’s mistress.123

The vocal characteristic that differentiates Evelyn’s voice from the “sexless” voices of the nuns was also present in the rich sound of Ermengarde Laninska’s warm and thrilling contralto and in the “vibrating” tones that Hugh Jardine recognized as a marker of Cecilia Raeburn’s voice as it filled the vast space of Cologne’s cathedral.That characteristic, vocal vibrato, has been defined as a “pulsation of pitch usually accompanied with synchronous pulsations of loudness and timbre, of such extent and rate as to give a pleasing flexibility, tenderness, and richness to the tone.”124 While there is controversy about the history of vocal vibrato and not all aspects of its production are well understood,125 it is nevertheless possible to point to a few facets of the use of vibrato and its reception in England that are relevant to our fictional divas as to their historical models.Vibrato conveys an atmosphere of drama, emotion, and, as Robert Rushmore and several

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other students of vibrato believe, of sensuality,126 an effect that has been characterized as the aural equivalent of diamonds sparkling.127 Whatever the extent of its use in earlier times, it is certain that vibrato established itself in classical singing during the course of the nineteenth century as the increased size of orchestras and concert halls required more powerful singing.128 As one authority has bluntly stated, “it is almost impossible to sing loudly without vibrato.”129 During our period, the use of vibrato was especially marked in the singing of Wagnerian opera and in the late operas of Verdi.130 We have already seen that voice teachers often identified the English genteel preference for emotional restraint as a detriment to the development of fine singers.“Get your voice disciplined and clear,” Ruskin advised the female readers of his Sesame and Lilies, “and think only of accuracy; never of effect or expression: if you have any soul worth expressing, it will show itself in your singing; but most likely there are very few feelings in you at present, needing particular expression; and the one thing you have to do is to make a clear-voiced little instrument of yourself. . . .”131 It is not surprising that some of those socialized to this ideal might well have preferred a female sound closer to the “etiolated and sexless voices” that Moore contrasts with the fully resonant and, as he describes it, sex-laden voice of an Evelyn Innes. Perhaps the Anglican tradition of boys’ choirs influenced the reception of vibrato in the years before radio and recordings transformed the musical environment. Robert Rushmore has identified a continuing tradition in England of appreciation for “the pure, sexless sound” of the vibrato-free choirboy; it is possible that Nellie Melba’s acceptance into the highest English social circles may have been facilitated by the pleasure she took in comparing her voice to that of a choir-boy,132 a claim that gives perspective to Evelyn Innes’s conviction that the vibrato of her operatic singing was a publicly recognizable sign of sexual excess and guilt. Like Evelyn Innes, Claire De Pratz’s Edwardian-era heroine Eve Norris—in the context of this novel, “Eve” clearly signifies New Woman—understands the close connection between dramatic singing and her own sexual nature. Unlike Evelyn, however, Eve is able to forge a path to artistic fulfillment enriched by, but not hostage to, sexual desire. Always a misfit within her conventional, middle-class family, Eve at age 21 has received a small inheritance that will allow her to pursue her ambition of becoming an opera singer and makes plans to study in Paris. Just before she leaves, she meets a mysterious stranger whose tragic fate—charged with killing her illegitimate child, she has served a prison sentence and will emigrate to Australia—gives depth to her observations on the exploitation of women. She shares a vision of women’s future

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that strengthens Eve’s desire for independence, a vision that overturns the tradition according to which women were limited to the roles of courtesan or housewife. Man has taken advantage of woman’s physical weakness during months of childbearing, “has beaten her down and crushed her still more . . . because of that physical fact, and has built around her the walls of society, avowedly to protect her, but in reality to imprison her as his own slave.”133 Chastity, observes the stranger, has been regarded as woman’s highest virtue, but feminine virtue must be redefined in wider and nobler terms. Marriage and motherhood will remain woman’s most important role—“that is the natural law”—but women who do not marry can lead worthy lives like those who now “devote themselves to all arts without derogation, and are great there.134 While Eve never forgets this conversation, she must endure an ordeal of suffering before she reaches a full understanding of the stranger’s insights. Eve goes to Paris, studies singing, and supplements her small income by teaching. Although she has “worshipped”Wagner as a giant of the musical world, she believes her physical frame inadequate to the demands of his operas,135 and finds an ideal vehicle in a new work written by a young composer who introduces her to bohemian Paris and with whom she falls passionately in love.The scene in which Eve sings an excerpt from Jacques Lunel’s opera to his friends links her brilliant dramatic singing directly to the start of her spiritual “demoralization,” a recapitulation of Moore’s theme in Evelyn Innes. Eve’s artistry, like Evelyn’s, is nurtured by a sexuality that is intensified by the eroticized atmosphere of vocal performance. For his opera, Jacques has adapted the ancient legend of Hero and Leander, lovers who live on either side of the Hellespont. Leander swims across the strait each night to visit the beautiful Hero, priestess of Aphrodite, but meets a tragic end when a strong current overwhelms and drowns him. When Hero sees his body, she throws herself into the water, a sacrifice to love.136 Eve sings the music that precedes the tragedy, when Hero, awaiting her lover, holds high a lamp to guide him across the waters: Eve sang with such force and action that her passionate movements caused the heavy knot of her hair to become displaced, and it slowly began to untwist itself. She impatiently threw back the loose strands, but the madness of her audience had reached its paroxysm at that moment, and to give a more dramatic effect and illusion to the performance, Marchand cried to Eve: “Take down your hair, mademoiselle, and let it cover Hero’s shoulders.” . . .And Eve, half intoxicated too with her triumph over them all, rapidly drew out the pins which held her locks, and the rich hair fell down, covering her to the waist. . . . At the end of the act the whole party pressed forward, and men and women alike caught and kissed the hanging strands. But Eve rolled it up

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quickly again. She was radiant, jubilant. This was her first success. She had held them all enthralled, and had seen them stand breathless with admiration before her as she sang. . . .That evening was one of a whole series of its kind, but as the artist grew and developed in her, strange to say, the soul of the woman correspondingly altered, perhaps deteriorated. . . . She knew that the very spirit of shameless insouciance which had urged her to loosen her hair before the art-students so as to aid her interpretation of Hero, was transforming her into a more emotional artist, though robbing her of womanly modesty. . . . So it came about that, partly through means of her art and the expression of the emotions it contained, her sense of delicacy was blunted.137

Eventually disillusioned by Jacques’s treatment of her, Eve comes to understand that the passion that gave richness and vitality to her art had become the dominant force in her life: “For the sake of her art she had followed and obeyed it, and now passion, through Jacques, was her master.”138 By this time, Eve has lived in Paris for five years and is preparing for auditions at the Opéra Comique. She decides to return to England to see her family before beginning her professional career. During this visit, she is courted by a family friend who is thrilled by her beautiful voice and treats her with a respect so lacking in Jacques.Warmed by Bertie’s admiration and love, and believing in the ideal of marriage, Eve decides she must let him know of her prior love affair. Although Bertie had had a six-year relationship with a married woman, he is scandalized by her confession and calls her a “lost woman.”139 A letter marked “urgent” then arrives from Paris. Lunel’s opera is to be produced at the Opéra Comique and the director is desperate to find the right singer for the part of Hero—all the names on his roster are engaged or otherwise unavailable and Jacques has given Eve his highest recommendation.Will Eve come for an audition? She immediately goes to the telegraph office and sends her acceptance. The time of the Woman of the Past is not yet over. The time has not yet arrived for the Woman of the Future, but Eve’s work will prepare for her arrival. PART THREE: “A PERFECT VIBRATION”: THE SINGER AND HER PUBLIC The sense of exaltation and expansion that follows the establishment of a perfect vibration between an artist and his public, brings one nearer heaven than anything else on earth.The vibrations of a grande passion are the only ones that can be compared with it, but these, alas! are shared with another and dependent upon that other. . . . 140

So wrote the American soprano, Emma Eames, in 1927, as she looked back, a decade and a half after retiring from a career that had included tri-

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umphant performances at the Paris Grand Opera, Covent Garden, and New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Coming from a singer sometimes described as cold and aloof, Eames’s words highlight the intensely emotional, amorous relationship between the diva and her audience. In no other art form is the applause so frequent as in opera, coming not only at the performance’s conclusion but also in response to well-sung arias and at repeated curtain calls when the audience may be rewarded by kisses blown across the stage lights.141 Singers, wrote The Spectator in 1888—contrasting them with the presumably more hardworking instrumentalists—have an undeserved gift “almost magical in its power, which makes it rain gold, which brings worshippers, flatterers, lovers, in streams, . . . which lifts thousands of cultivated hearers on their feet panting with emotion, quivering with a rapture of enjoyment at once intellectual or sensual.”142 The great women singers, it is argued—the word “lovers” makes the gender reference clear—enjoy an extraordinary and unmerited level of power and riches and evoke a response that, in some hard-to-understand and disturbing way, is both intellectual and sensual.The grande passion of which Emma Eames spoke existed on both sides of the stage. In contrast with other musicians whose instruments form part of the visual ensemble that appears before an audience, the singer herself is the performing instrument. As a string-player-turned-singer recently explained in a New York Times interview, part of the “magic of singing . . . [is] getting onstage and having nothing between you and the audience,”143 nothing to modify the immediacy and directness of their relationship.A violinist’s fiancé might joke about her instrument as a rival in love,144 but the passion excited by the opera singer was something more than metaphorical. Mathilde Marchesi’s husband was no more accepting of her wish to sing in opera than her parents had been. Joseph Joachim, teacher of many women violinists, insisted that his future wife, the noted contralto Amalie Weiss, give up opera and sing only in concerts and oratorio.145 The actress Viola Tree, studying to be an opera singer in Italy in 1910, received this advice from friends: “Quand vous épousez votre mori [sic], il n’aimerait pas que vous jouiez à l’Opéra: il sera jaloux.”146 If the singer’s self-display within the opera house was the main cause of the intemperate response evoked among admirers and detractors alike— the normally soft-spoken Mrs. Rushmore, surrogate parent to the heroine of Crawford’s Fair Margaret, accuses her of wishing to go on the stage “just for the pleasure of showing yourself every night half-dressed to every commercial traveller in Europe”147—her eroticized image took on an extended life in the wide outreach of magazine advertising. While many of the ads promoted remedies for ills central to singing health, for example, cough lozenges and inhalants for respiratory problems, other advertisements

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called direct attention to the singers’ fleshly charms. A series of Pears’ soap advertisements that Adelina Patti shared with Lillie Langtry featured signed testimonials from both beneath the image of a lovely, pensive young woman, nude except for the towel she modestly holds against her upper torso, stretched out in an elegantly decorated bathtub.148 Advertised in general-interest as well as women’s magazines, corsets were sometimes named for famous opera stars and actresses—the Ellen Terry, the Patti, the Belle Cole, the last-named “a real boon for ladies of full figure”149—and occasionally bore their endorsements. The French diva Marie Roze, for example, attested to the excellence of “I. C.” French corsets: “I consider your Corsets very superior, and the principle upon which they are modelled most admirable.”150 The use of corsets was also discussed by voice teachers and by proponents of dress reform who criticized the confining, heavy garments worn by fashionable Victorian women. George Bernard Shaw, an advocate of dress reform, criticized Lilian Nordica’s performance in an 1889 production of Lohengrin not only for her singing but also for turning Wagner’s Elsa into “Elsa of Bond-street, by appearing in a corset.”151 The self-display of the opera singer, her body turned toward the audience to maximize sound even when she ostensibly addresses another singer,152 her sexuality emphasized by the passions she portrays, by her dramatically vibrant singing, by gossip about her in newspapers and magazines, even by speculation concerning her use or nonuse of corsets—all of these elements led to a blurring of private and public worlds,153 a blurring that allowed the singer’s instrument, her body, to become a focus for male viewing and commentary.“It must be disconcerting,” wrote the American music critic James Huneker,“for a woman singer to hear herself discussed as if she were a race-horse.”154 If the concert hall, with its restrained gestures and distilled emotion, provided a more genteel environment than that of the theatrical opera house, the element of sexual display was nevertheless present in the décolletage of the singer’s evening attire. Low-necked dresses were a feature of formal or “full” dress during the Victorian era, a facet of its culture indicative of the complex matrix of attitudes toward sexuality that can no longer be dismissed as monolithically puritanical and repressive. Décolletage was a requisite feature of dress at Her Majesty’s Drawing-Rooms, where highborn young women made their formal entry into Society. An 1880 article in The Girl’s Own Paper, few of whose readers would have qualified for that experience, shared the rules for this important rite of passage: “A young girl, on her presentation, wears white, and every lady attending the Court must have a train, lappets, Court plumes, and a really low dress. So strict are the laws with regard to this, that people are appointed to prevent ladies passing who fall short in any of these requirements.”155 An 1891 article in

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The Gentlewoman admits that while décolletage has in earlier years been excessive, this is no longer true: “Even at Court this has ceased to be the case, and in ordinary good society it is now quite the exception to see immoderately low dresses and sleeveless arms.”The magazine advised readers whose seamstresses asked for directives on bodice design that they respond: “‘Low enough for elegance, but high enough for dignity.’”156 The experience of the American contralto Antoinette Sterling shows how these customary upper-class practices were directly linked to the concert world. Invited to make her London debut at a Covent Garden Promenade concert in 1873, Sterling, who had studied with Marchesi,Viardot, and Viardot’s brother, Manuel Garcia, met with three men eminent in London’s music world to plan the program: the flamboyant conductor, Sir Julius Benedict, the pianist and scholar Edward Dannreuther, and the critic Joseph Bennett.They were probably aware of her Quaker background and used the meeting to instruct her on dress requirements. According to the account she gave her son, Sterling “flatly refused to wear a low-necked dress.”They insisted that she was obliged to do so “as it was quite impossible for any one to appear on the platform in morning dress at an evening concert. Such a thing had never been heard of.”As Sterling was clearly obdurate, her would-be advisers tried to effect a compromise, suggesting that a gown be fit out “with a square of pale pink satin at the neck to represent skin, so that it might at least assume a virtue if it had it not. They even commenced making working drawings. . . .”157 The plans of these amateur dressmakers were very likely inspired by the simulated nudity used by dancers and participants in “tableaux vivants,” in which amateur or professional actors assembled themselves in imitation of a scene depicted by a famous work of art.158 The compromise was adamantly refused and the singer triumphed. A gifted interpreter of German music, Antoinette Sterling had insisted on including a Bach aria in this London performance and received a stunning ovation for her first selection, the “Slumber Song” from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. The excitement intensified as she sang the ballads with which she later became most closely identified. An overnight celebrity, Sterling was plied with offers of engagements and in the following year, received an invitation to sing for the Queen. Again, Sterling took issue with the dress code. In response to the rule list sent by the royal Master of Ceremonies, she said she could not comply with a dress code that would be improper for a descendant of a Quaker family.Victoria was consulted, made a gracious exception to Court rules, and the engagement went on.159 The attention given to Sterling’s unwillingness to conform to the dress code expected of singers did not end with her death: Henry Davey, author of over 40 entries in the authoritative Dictionary of National Biography, saw fit

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to refer to it in his brief article on Sterling. “She had always leant to eccentricity, refusing to wear a low-necked dress, and getting permission to dispense with one at a command performance before Queen Victoria. She never wore a corset.”160 Femininity and Power When Erma Laninska is asked about the motivation of great “public” singers—what it is that they sing for—she responds,“[For] themselves.The power of it.”161 The many books and articles written about female singers during this period show a fascination with women who, in addition to their inspired musicianship, combined feminine beauty and charm with the defining male characteristics of assertiveness and power, in disavowal of the trait of modesty that even the modernist Havelock Ellis considered to be universal among women.162 The kinds of female singers’ power we will look at in the conclusion to this chapter include the power to influence and control the emotions of listeners; the power to elicit fervent and extreme forms of adulation; the power of control over mind and body; the power of physical endurance; and the power to command high remuneration. Thinking back to her earliest experiences of singing, the French soprano Emma Calvé remembered the pleasure she took in singing to children in her convent school. One of the sisters who asked about the source of a pupil’s tears received this response:“Oh, ma soeur! . . . what fun we are having! Emma Calvé is making us cry with her songs!” I think it was from that day that I began to be an artist, for it was then that I learned to express my own emotions, to externalize them, to convey them to my listeners. How thrilled, how intoxicated with delight I was, when I felt my little audience respond to my mood! Their applause gave me a hitherto untasted joy! Ever since that tender age, I have been dependent upon the exhilaration which comes with success.163

The precocious child-singer Adelina Patti expressed a similar pleasure in her ability to elicit audience admiration. In one of the earliest memories she related to the critic Edward Hanslick, Adelina at around age six would secretly get out of bed, dress in a costume of her opera-singer parents, and reenact opera scenes, after which she would impersonate her listeners, applauding and throwing “bouquets” at herself that she had made of old newpapers.164 Another anecdote from Patti’s childhood, recounted in an English paper in 1874, reveals the manipulative, controlling strain so prominent in her adult character. A man who had visited young Adelina backstage and found her playing with another child and a doll told her he

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would sit in the audience as soon as it was her turn to sing: “‘If you like,” [said Adelina] ‘I’ll make the people cry. . . .When I’m encored, . . . see if I don’t make them cry!’” After her first song, she sang an old English ballad as an encore with such pathos that many in the audience, including her backstage visitor, were moved to tears: On his return to the anteroom, he found the little singer, who so lately before had appeared to be overpowered with emotion, already re-possessed of her doll, and romping with her playmate; ceasing her play, for a moment only, to give him a merrily triumphant glance, as she said,“Well, the people did cry, didn’t they? I told you so! And you cried, too! I saw you!”165

As Calvé noted—and as the child Patti perhaps intuitively understood— the power to control and “externalize” one’s emotions is essential to the expressive singer. “Every true artist is emotional,” wrote the American soprano Lillian Nordica, but excessive emotion prevents one from doing one’s best. In singing a deeply moving piece, she would try to become “hardened, so that ultimately I might give an imitation of what I felt. If I did not, my emotions would get the better of me. . . .The outcome would be a breaking of the voice and a failure in interpretation, through excess of feeling.”166 The Scottish-American Mary Garden, in many ways the least sentimental of singers, remembered the similar effort of self-control she had to make in order to sing the role of Debussy’s Mélisande: “When I began to work on the role, . . . it took me a long time before I had my emotion under control, so as to be able to sing certain phrases without breaking down.”167 Blanche Marchesi revealed to an interviewer her inability to perform in public the song she regarded “as belonging most to my inner life, . . . Schubert’s ‘An die Musik.’ I have tried more than once to sing it, but always it has had to come off the programme at the last—always! I have never been able to overcome sufficiently the emotion it arouses in me, so that I may sing it.” She did manage, by dint of great effort, to sing Brahms’s “Von ewiger Liebe” at a St. James’s Hall “Pops” concert immediately after the composer’s death was announced.This was the only Brahms piece on the program and Marchesi had entered the hall to find Joachim and the members of his quartet openly weeping. Strengthened by her feeling of responsibility, she sang before an audience of two thousand mourners with the conviction that she was able to continue Brahms’s life with his beautiful song, but had to be assisted from the platform by the violinist, once the composer’s close friend.168 Another critically important ability for all soloists is the power to control nervousness. In her Hints to Singers, Nordica emphasized the importance of disguising this very natural emotion by a process of preparation

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and artifice: in a moment of trepidation in appearing before one’s audience “there is no such thing as being natural; to be so would mean to turn and flee.” She cites the singing teacher Delsarte’s method of preparing gestures that allow art to imitate nature:“If one rises from one’s seat to walk across the room, the idea is not simply to get there, but how to get there—the manner in which one is to rise properly, and move with dignity and ease.”169 The American violinist Albert Spalding, who sometimes performed with Nordica, attested to the success of Nordica’s method: “No majesty born to the purple . . . could have competed with her royal entrances and exits. The audience was spellbound before she sang a single note.”170 Strength in the form of physical endurance is essential to opera singers, especially to those who undertake the most demanding roles in Verdian and Wagnerian opera. Nordica identified the challenge of singing Wagner’s music in the demand that his “unusual intervals” make on vocal control: “In ordinary melody or smooth singing, it becomes almost second nature to produce a beautiful tone quality, but to sustain that quality when singing unusual intervals is a great study.” Great strength is also required by some of the poses and actions of Wagnerian characters, for example, in the carrying of Brünnhilde’s shield and other accoutrements up and down rocks in the Ring of the Niebelung. One of the most exhausting tasks for the Wagnerian singer is the ability to remain standing for as long as three to four hours. Nordica believed that opera singers’ tendency to put on weight was a kind of natural protection for the body, especially for singers who, having made progress in their career, encounter unending nervous strain in the challenge to sustain their reputation. She counseled singers against dieting, as she believed that vocal strength would also be diminished.171 No feature of the careers of famous women singers evoked greater awe and consternation than their impressive earning power. Reports of high fees were regularly supplied in the music press, sometimes with accompanying caveats on the possibility of “puffing”—deliberately inflated reports of high remuneration circulated in order to enhance a singer’s reputation. In an interview with the journal The Young Woman, the soprano Anna Williams urged the magazine’s readers against credulity: the big fees the newspapers say are paid, said Williams, are not always as big as they are said to be.172 But the power of the most extraordinary female voices was as great in the marketplace as in the opera house: a half-page drawing in an 1892 issue of The Illustrated London News, entitled “Engaging the Prima Donna,” shows an imperious and elegantly dressed woman, hands clasped in a determined pose, giving audience to an importunate agent or impresario who bends forward in a posture of almost servile pleading.173 Perhaps

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the drawing was inspired by the comments on Patti that James Mapleson, London’s first full-time concert agent,174 included in his memoirs, published two years earlier. Patti, Mapleson wrote, was as unrivalled in her mastery of exacting the highest possible fees as in the preeminence of her singing. Mapleson claimed that when Patti toured America with his company in her own elegantly appointed car accompanied by a retinue of servants, she brought along a parrot that cried “Cash! Cash?” each time he appeared. Critics enjoyed calculating the cost of each note Patti sang and some patrons bought tickets with performance choices that registered their preference for those operas with the highest Patti-note counts.175 It was appropriate that the response to the high fees of the most famous women singers focused most of all on Patti, the highest paid singer in operatic history. On her American tour of 1881 and 1882, she received an average of $4,646 for each performance; some of this went to supporting singers and her agent, but most went to Patti herself; she received comparable remuneration on subsequent tours.176 Patti’s career was also one of astonishing longevity: reappearing at Covent Garden in 1895 at the age of 52 after a ten-year absence, her engagement evoked such excitement that the price of seats rose to three or four times their normal value. As Theatre magazine wrote, “Such a triumphant return to the scene of a début that had taken place thirty-four years previously is utterly without precedent in operatic history.” And Patti lived up to her reputation: “The word disappointment was not even so much as whispered.”177 Patti’s market value—and that of other highly paid singers—was not the result of female guile and clever arm-twisting, but of the box-office drawing power generated by the recognition of rare talent. When asked by an impresario for the names of three singers best qualified to sing the role of Violetta (in La Traviata),Verdi replied,“First,Adelina; second,Adelina; third, Adelina.”178 The huge sums paid to Patti were justified, wrote Musical World in 1886, reviewing a recent concert:“A prima donna is worth exactly what she will draw, and that Mme. Patti will draw any amount of people was again proved by the crowded state of the Albert Hall.”179 Many years later, Francesco Berger, former Secretary of London’s Philharmonic Society, echoed that judgment. In a 1922 article, Berger criticized what he characterized as the current fashion of disdain for the prima donna. She is not to blame, Berger said, if people love “Home, Sweet Home,” a piece comparable to the equally successful potboilers of artists and writers. Planted stories of the theft of their diamonds while they are away on errands of charity should be seen as useful publicity and nothing more. Berger pointed out that great singers lead lives of hard work, studying new roles and dedicating themselves to regimens of practice designed above all to keep their voices in top condition.These women receive high pay because

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voices like theirs are extremely rare, especially when combined with acting talent.180 If in some ways the prima donna was perceived as exemplifying stereotypes about women—physically attractive and easily susceptible to vanity, most gratified when she was pleasing to men, her undeniably impressive talents largely the result, as Elizabeth Eastlake and others believed, of an “adventitious gift”—her prominence and earning power belied the perception that she was a musically unreflective and intellectually negligible artist, “an over-grown canary, a human flute,”181 whose musicianship was ideally subject, as was du Maurier’s wildly popular Trilby, to the control of a dominant male figure. Instead of a musically passive Trilby, instrument of the genius Svengali, or a guilt-ridden Evelyn Innes, we find Patti, still bewitching at age 51, sharing not only her beautiful sounds but also her deep musical understandings with her Albert Hall audience. No admirer of Patti’s coquettish demeanor, George Bernard Shaw paid unqualified tribute to her interpretation of Elizabeth’s prayer in Tannhäuser, an accomplishment he regarded as far beyond prevailing standards at Bayreuth: She goes straight to the right phrasing, the right vocal touch, and the right turn of every musical figure, thus making her German rivals not only appear in comparison clumsy as singers, but actually obtuse as to Wagner’s meaning. . . . If Patti were to return to the stage and play Isolde, though she might very possibly stop the drama half a dozen times in each act to acknowledge applause and work in an encore—though she might introduce “Home, Sweet Home,” in the ship scene, and the “Last Rose” in the garden scene—though nobody would be in the least surprised to see her jump up out of her trance in the last act to run to the footlights for a basket of flowers, yet the public might learn a good deal about Isolde from her which they will never learn from any of the illustrious band of German Wagner heroines who are queens at Bayreuth. . . . 182

Accompanying Patti’s great musicianship was the undisguised delight she took in preeminence and power: her business acumen, writes John Frederick Cone, was awe-inspiring.183 Travel to her opulent Welsh Castle of Craig-y-Nos (Rock of the Night) was in itself an exacting tribute to a reigning goddess: arriving at a railway station about six miles’ distance from their destination, visitors had then to endure an 80-minute ride through wild countryside in order to arrive at her shrine. After an elegant dinner with their sumptuously dressed and bejeweled hostess, guests were then treated to the “great event” of the evening, a game called Ladies’ Pool whose rules were devised so as to prevent men from ever becoming winners.184

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While the contralto, the lowest female voice, has evoked a comparison with the hermaphrodite, as in Théophile Gautier’s poem, “Contralto”— Que tu me plais, ô timbre étrange! Son double, homme et femme à la foix, Contralto, bizarre mélange, Hermaphrodite de la voix!185—

the voice of the high soprano has been perceived as both unambiguously feminine and powerful in its ability to soar above the sound of the orchestra. Often described as “piercing” or “penetrating,” the power of the soprano’s voice “contradicts the stereotype of feminine weakness,”186 even when the libretto conforms to traditional female characterizations. Perhaps elaborating on an experience of Nellie Melba’s, F. Marion Crawford gives his “Primadonna,” Margaret Dunne, now known as Cordova, the power to move an audience, put into a state of incipient panic by a large explosion, to orderly calm: The wretched manager yelled, stormed, stamped, entreated, and promised, but with no effect. . . . No one could be dead yet, even in that press, but there were few seconds to spare, fewer and fewer. Then another sound was heard, a very pure strong note, high above his own tones, . . . that filled the house instantly, like light, and reached every ear, even through the terror that was driving the crowd mad in the dark. A moment more, an instant’s pause, and Cordova had begun Lucia’s song again at the beginning, and her marvellous trills and staccato notes, and trills again, trills upon trills without end, filled the vast darkness and stopped those four thousand men and women, spellbound and silent, and ashamed too. It was not great music, surely; but it was sung by the greatest living singer, singing alone in the dark, as calmly and as perfectly as if all the orchestra had been with her, singing as no one can who feels the least tremor of fear; and the awful tension of the dark throng relaxed. . . . 187

Of all the Victorian-era singers prominent in London, perhaps it was Christine Nilsson who best embodied the mystique of the ancient sirens. A gifted actress, the “second Swedish nightingale” had a voice of “singularly pathetic timbre, a curious commingling of sweetness and power, to which she allied a charm of expression that was absolutely haunting.”188 One widely reported incident that occurred during a tour of her homeland attests to the mythic presence and extraordinary charisma of this remarkable singer. At the conclusion of a concert—a rare opportunity for her countrymen, as she returned to Sweden in her professional capacity only once189—Nilsson announced to her audience

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that she would later sing to all who wished to hear her from her hotel balcony. Although large numbers might have been expected to gather, the authorities took no precautions; such crowding ensued at the impromptu concert that 18 people were crushed to death. Nilsson was described as deeply affected.“No one will blame her in the matter,” wrote The Lute, “however much her extraordinary and sensational course may be regretted.”190 Remembering the incident many years later, the Musical Courier described Nilsson as having withdrawn calmly from this scene of tragedy, “the idol of all Sweden.”191 Robert Hichens relates an unforgettable memory of Nilsson, who came to London to sing at one of a series of farewell concerts that Sims Reeves planned for his retirement, in 1891 at the Albert Hall. Now married to a Spanish aristocrat and spending much of her time gambling at Monte Carlo, the legendary Nilsson quickly sold out the hall. Her appearance on the platform, “looking simply magnificent, like an Empress from the North,” elicited a roar of welcome. Her self-possession, writes Hichens, was so great as to amount to insolence: With a sort of inflexible and glittering coolness she surveyed the vast audience, and before she had opened her lips to sing she had completely dominated everyone in it. . . . Her voice was still very fine, though possibly a little rough at the edge from lack of usage. In the second part of the concert she sang again, and the audience refused to let her go. And then at last she did a wonderful thing. She went to the piano, sat down at it, and without removing her gloves, sang Swedish songs accompanying herself. That was the clou of the evening. Dear Sims Reeves was forgotten. A magical woman held us in thrall, a belle dame sans merci. But who wanted mercy from her? We were all at her feet and wanted to stay there.192

Like Emma Eames, moved to “choking tears, happy tears” at the sound of her own voice and the sensation of its vibrations in her throat,193 Melba wrote of the thrill she felt as, in the hush of the Brussels opera house, she heard her voice float out, alone, into the distance.194 The joy of holding thousands spellbound as she sang, writes Marion Crawford of his own prima donna, Margaret Dunne/Cordova, placed beyond all possibility of regret the “calmer, sweeter life she might have led.” The gender change partway through Crawford’s reflections show the close identification with his character of this author who would have preferred to be a singer: The breathless silence of the many while her voice rang out alone, and trilled and died away to a delicate musical echo, was more to her than the

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roar of applause that could be heard through the walls and closed doors in the street outside. To such a moment as that Faustus himself would have cried “Stay!” though the price of satisfied desire were his soul. . . .To listen to perfect music is a feast for gods, but to be the living instrument beyond compare is to be a god oneself.195

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Chapter Seven

h

Music as a Profession for Women

y the 1890s, the social landscape for young unmarried women of the middle classes had undergone considerable change from the times of their mothers’ youthful days. Chaperonage was disappearing, and along with it the conspicuous leisure that had been a requisite status-marker for girls and women. The new ethos placed high value on worthwhile pursuits, which might be philanthropic or educational, and on preparation for and engagement in remunerative activities that would not compromise status and would provide some measure of protection against a father’s financial failure or premature death and against the possibility of spinsterhood.The earlier onset of menarche and the later age of marriage during the Edwardian years considerably lengthened, and therefore magnified, the importance of this liminal period of a woman’s life.1 The music conservatories and art schools that proliferated during the 1880s and 1890s supported—and benefited from—this social trend.Yet while they offered women unprecedented opportunities for professional training, they also diminished, by their serious overproduction of aspiring entrants, the career prospects for many of those who sought to enter these already competitive and overcrowded professions.2 Most of the students at England’s conservatories in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were women of whom the great majority studied piano, violin, or voice. As solo performers, women had achieved stellar success in all three areas, but only a handful of the thousands of music students could entertain realistic hopes for fame on the scale of Wilma Neruda on violin,Teresa Carreño on piano, or Adelina Patti on the opera stage.3 What employment options did, then, exist for professional women musicians? Where were the opportunities and how could women prepare themselves for them? Would it be possible for women to forge new paths for themselves in the music world, at decent

B

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pay? And finally, how did all of these issues connect to efforts by contemporaries outside the field of music to gain recognition for women’s talents and end women’s infantilizing exclusion from political influence and power? These are the questions that will occupy us in this final chapter. The first and perhaps most unwelcome lesson for young female students of the 1890s and later was the existence of a serious and relentless glut of solo pianists and violinists. The situation was clearly described by Florence Fidler and Rosabel Watson in their article, “Music as a Profession,” published in the Englishwoman’s Year Book of 1899: Ten years or so ago gifted students on finishing their musical education would become professional singers or instrumentalists, and find a very lucrative and happy career awaiting them. But now that the various academies are sending out each year such vast numbers of highly qualified musicians the question of adopting music as a profession has become a serious one. It seems as if, in spite of the growth of suburban musical societies, which generally need professional help on occasion, there are more artistes than engagements. . . . There is certainly no opening whatever for either solo pianists or violinists; the supply already immensely outruns the demand.4

During the 1890s, critics often complained about the impossible demands placed on them by the high volume of London concerts.The situation continued in the next decade: according to the Telegraph, there were 1,500 concerts put on in that city in 1907, making an average of 29 each week.The concert-givers seldom cleared expenses; it was even hard to find people who would accept and use free tickets.5 The most outstanding musicians were able to create opportunities by forming small ensembles—the Englishwoman’s Year Book of 1912 lists four instrumental trios and seven string quartets, two of which featured the cellist May Mukle. Rebecca Clarke was at various times a member of three all-woman ensembles: the Norah Clench Quartet, the English Ensemble, and a group that included the D’Aranyi sisters and the Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia.6 Amina Goodwin, a pianist who had studied with Liszt and Clara Schumann, was the sole woman member of the London Trio that she founded in 1901; Achille Simonetti, Anglo-Italian violinist, and William Whitehouse, cellist and professor at the Royal Academy of Music, were the other noted players.7 Women of less stellar attainments performed in a variety of small ensembles that provided entertainment in restaurants, department stores, and (from the rise of silent films in the early 1900s until their demise in 1928) in cinemas that featured a wide range of musical accompaniments, from the solo pianist to full orchestra.8 Rosabel Watson was concerned about

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women players who accepted low payment for tea-shop and restaurant playing and never sought to improve their musicianship or their position: “The result is that they go on playing Two-steps and Cake-walks all the year round.” Some women were hired in seaside bands during the summers because of their willingness to accept a low rate of pay. Watson repeatedly urged women to improve their skills by playing under good conductors—“slipshod conductors soon have only slipshod players”—in amateur groups, if necessary; once they raised their level of proficiency, they should never settle for anything less than payment equal to a man’s.9 Watson’s emphatic tone was essential for her message, but ran counter to young women’s experience and expectations: as an example of the realities of the wider employment world, civil service pay for female typists in 1914 was £1 per week; male typists received £3.10 Established in England during the 1880s when it was most famously associated with Lady Radnor’s band, the trend of all-women’s orchestras burgeoned during the nineties. All-women orchestras were engaged by several London theaters during the first half of the decade;11 by 1899, the Englishwoman’s Year Book took note of the “steadily increasing number of professional orchestras composed of women only under a woman conductor,” paying experienced members a salary of about £2 to £4 per week.12 Women players were seen in increasing numbers in the huge orchestra of the triennial Crystal Palace Handel Festival, from eight in 1891 to 68 in 1900 to 110 in 1903, much to the dismay of critic Joseph Bennett, who charged that the women players’ lack of commitment to their task caused them to lose concentration and that even those not guilty of this fault lacked “the power and promptitude in attack which, as a rule, the men display.”13 In 1894, a writer in The Orchestral Association Gazette decried the movement of women into orchestras not only as unwelcome competition in a field already difficult for men, but also as an egregious manifestation of the excesses of the women’s movement: By claiming so-called “equal rights with man,” the females of the present era are gradually revolutionizing the old accepted theories of what is “womanly,” and we now find them practising and employed in arts and crafts that a few years ago would have been unhesitatingly termed “unwomanly.” In the words of a contemporary: “The banks are now taking on female clerks and female cashiers, women are being admitted to the police force, the lady detective is the bright particular star of the private inquiry office, some of the newly-established newspapers are almost entirely worked by a female staff, the lady guide and the lady courier are distinct features of our modern civilisation, lady orchestras are being organised in every direction, the lady commercial traveller has taken to the road, ladies have taken to pleading their own causes in the courts of law, the lady doctor is very much in evidence, and the cler-

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gywoman would doubtless be banging the pulpit cushion if only the opportunity were given her.” . . . The old idea that woman is fit for nothing more than housekeeping and dress-making has long been deservedly exploded; but lately, the ladies’ “flowers of progress” have been growing . . . rather too fast. At any rate, we know many orchestral musicians who are very sore at heart on the ladies’ orchestra question.14

If neither Lady Radnor’s orchestra nor the Reverend Moberly’s that succeeded it aroused the ire that greeted women in theater orchestras, the reasons are easy to find: these were amateur bands (although Moberly admitted to employing a few professional musicians and several more Royal College students);15 Moberly sometimes made use of male double-bass players,16 a move supportive of the view that women could not go it alone; and both groups performed only for charitable purposes. But by the time Sutcliffe wrote his diatribe—including in his critique of women violinists the finding of physiologists that one muscle was “entirely absent from the female arm”17—women were also playing wind instruments, in allwomen’s and mixed orchestras that performed on a regular fee basis. How had the movement of women into the playing of wind instruments come about in the face of a level of societal disapproval at least as great as that once faced by women violinists? WOMEN AS WIND PLAYERS It was inevitable that new challenges to restrictions on other “nontraditional” instruments would follow the demise of the male monopoly of the violin.With strings now a viable option for women, the male hold on the other major orchestral group, the wind instruments (comprising woodwinds and brass), was challenged by several sources: by the success of soloists whose training and talents were as authoritative as any male musician’s; by the widening of instrumental options—and the opening of orchestral participation on woodwind instruments—to female students at England’s major conservatories; and by the expansion of women’s ensembles into the full range of instruments that these new paths in conservatory training encouraged. The taboo of female performance on mouth instruments was commonly attributed to the dislike of distended and ruddy cheeks and other facial distortions.According to a writer in an 1887 issue of The Girl’s Own Paper, German girls were taught to play a variety of woodwind and even brass instruments, “but whether it would be decorous for our females to imitate such examples is rather doubtful.”18 In the same year, Frederick J.

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Crowest, in an article published in The Lady’s World, reflected that although women had played the flute in ancient Greece, “distended cheeks and swollen lips are not marks of beauty nowadays; and while this is so the flute and other wind-instruments are unlikely to come into fashion.”19 Women brass players were typically associated with lower-class street musicians and portrayed as comical figures: the composer and conductor Frederick Corder, in a Musical Review article of 1883, told his readers about a quartet of female brass players he had heard in a seaside town playing battered old instruments, all of them out of tune.20 Female street musicians were depicted, cheeks comically puffed out, in an 1892 illustration in the enormously popular The Strand Magazine; the drawing was entitled “Petticoat Quartette.”21 In the same year, The Magazine of Music published the letter of an outraged amateur who had attended a concert at the Royal Academy of Music and was horrified to see female orchestra members playing flute and clarinet. The Magazine pointed out that while female flute-playing could be traced to antiquity and there had always been “sporadic” attempts by women to win distinction on wind instruments, none had succeeded in doing so. Agreeing with the writer that the inclusion of women wind players was an unprecedented practice in English academies, The Magazine elaborated further: “Lovely woman inevitably ceases to be lovely when she tackles a wind instrument. One has indeed heard a female cornet-player, but only the possession of a singularly equable mind could enable one to sit out the performance.” On the other hand, The Magazine disagreed with the correspondent’s advocacy of legislation to outlaw female wind-instrument playing: public pressure would surely suffice to keep it from becoming a fashion. “Besides, in spite of her new-found zeal to rival man in every department of life, women may generally be trusted to avoid pursuits which cannot be successfully followed except at a sacrifice of personal attractiveness.”22 Literary education in classical sources strengthened the negative associations between women and the flute. Athena, known in mythology as its inventor, was said to have thrown her instrument into a lake or stream upon seeing the reflection of her distorted features as she played it; the satyr Marsyas retrieved it and subsequently suffered defeat in a musical contest with Apollo whose lyre was thereafter believed to represent the higher, more intellectual form of music.23 The female flute players of ancient Athens performed at banquets, dancing lasciviously as they played;24 hence Plato associated the flute with wild Bacchanals and said that “no modest woman could hear the Lydian flute with impunity.”25 Aristotle revised the myth about Athena’s flute; in his version, she threw it away not because it distorted her features but because playing the flute is orgiastic and prevents the use of language, characteristics that made it an inappro-

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priate choice for the goddess who represents scientific knowledge and artistry.26 The art historian Emanuel Winternitz has identified a characteristic use of the flute by Renaissance painters for whom the instrument represented abandonment to sense pleasure.27 The most famous flute player of antiquity was Lamia, whose name means vampire or bloodsucker.28 The Lamia myth was a familiar one to classically educated people and to readers of Keats’s poetry.The author of a review of a book on the flute published in the Quarterly Magazine and Review in 1826 playfully suggested that Lamia might not have resorted to the flute had harps and pianos been available in her day: “Indeed it can hardly be recommended or expected that the professors of fair faces and soft swelling lips should consent to puff out the one or conceal the other by the use of the flute, while such a display of all the charms of grace and beauty wait upon the use of the harp.”29 John Keats’s 1820 poem, “Lamia,” presented her as a sorceress transformed by Hermes from a snake into a beautiful woman. Deadly delusion was central to the character of Lamia; the deluded one was always a man who finds out, too late, that the seductive woman is half-snake. In Keats’s poem, when Lamia’s hidden reptilian identity is revealed, the man who has fallen in love with her dies of sorrow. Turn-of-the-century artists—most notably, J. W. Waterhouse and Herbert James Draper—illustrated the legend, connecting Lamia with wild women or viragoes, an association that Joseph Kestner and Bram Djikstra interpret as manifesting the hostile male response to the New Women who laid claim to male prerogatives, asserted their sexuality, and, in the minds of their opponents, rejected their sacred duties as wives and mothers.30 Despite the negative context derived from mythology and the public’s dislike of any performance practice believed to compromise female beauty, at least two European women achieved eminence as flutists during the 1880s.The first, the Venetian musician Maria Bianchini, was brought to the attention of English music lovers in 1880 when The Musical World reprinted a review of her recent performance in Vienna by the noted Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick. His reflections on Bianchini’s performance appeared under the heading “A Lady Flautist”: The unusual sight of a lady playing such an instrument did not strike people as so strange as we thought it would; Signora Bianchini, who has a tall figure and whose demeanour is characterized by sympathetic, unaffected simplicity, avoids the ugly contortions of the lips and short-breathed blowing which may so easily jeopardise the aesthetic effect of flute-playing. Managed as it was on the occasion in question, the flute is decidedly not an unfeminine instrument.31

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The flute, because of its small size, delicate tone, and soprano range, was the wind instrument best suited to challenge the taboo on wind instruments. In addition to these “feminine” characteristics, the nonvertical performance position of the transverse flute lessened the anxiety generated by other wind instruments whose shape and mode of presentation evoked stronger phallic associations. The response to these associations had been succinctly—and unambiguously—expressed almost two centuries earlier in terms that would have violated the character of polite Victorian discourse. John Essex, author of an eighteenth-century manual on the proper education and conduct of ladies, listed several musical instruments as appropriate for the Fair Sex—harpsichord, spinet, lute, and viol da gamba—32 and gave a stern warning against others—the flute, violin, and hautboy [oboe], singling out the last-named as especially dangerous, for the oboe “is too manlike, and would look indecent in a Woman’s Mouth.”33 Two centuries later Ethel Smyth, in a passage that welcomed the demise of gender restrictions on the choice of instruments, celebrated the time when “the mouthpiece of certain wind instruments was permitted to insert itself between feminine lips” and pointed out that some of the best woodwind players in England were now women.34 In view of the sexually charged response to female wind-instrument playing, it is not surprising that England’s first important woman flutist, Cora Cardigan, “Queen of Flute Players,”35 began her career, like other women wind players of the day, in the more sexually “knowing” venue of music hall.36 Born in London in 1840, Cardigan studied flute with her father and with Richard Shepherd Rockstro, professor of the flute at the Guildhall School of Music; she also played violin and piccolo.37 Cardigan first performed at the Royal Music Hall in Holborn, then at the Oxford and the Royal Aquarium, performance sites that reflect the marginality of the female wind player at that time to the more decorous world of art music. The Royal Aquarium, especially, would otherwise have seemed a choice scarcely appropriate for a brilliant, classically trained musician: built in 1876 as a palace of entertainment and opened by the Duke of Edinburgh, its main hall was decorated with palm trees, sculpture, and tanks intended for exotic fish that never arrived. Despite early attempts to set the institution’s “tone” by means of an orchestra conducted by Arthur Sullivan and an art exhibition organized by the artist Millais, the Aquarium quickly deteriorated into “a house of mixed entertainment and low reputation” featuring scantily dressed women acrobats, “genuine Zulu dancers,” and the like;38 its most popular attractions included a performer, Zazel, who was shot from a cannon, and a hair-covered lady billed as “Darwin’s Missing Link.”39 An advertisement for Cora Cardigan in The Era Almanack Advertiser of 1884, while it conveys not the slightest hint of

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indecency, presents her as a kind of amazing musical acrobat: “Miss Cora Cardigan: the only Lady Flute, Piccolo, and Violin Solo Artiste on the English Stage.”The notice is placed between ads for Jenny Hill,“The Vital Spark,” Principal Boy of Pantomime at the Alexandra Theatre in Liverpool, and Annie Dunbar, music hall star, Principal Boy in Grand Pantomime; the Principal Boy, part of the travesti fashion in burlesque, was established as a tradition during the eighties by impresario Augustus Harris, who insisted upon the player’s “opulent curves.”40 A later advertisement in the same journal, headed “Miss Cora Cardigan, Musical Genius,” suggests a transitional point in Cardigan’s career: it mentions her coming engagement at the Reichshallen Theatre in Berlin and quotes from a Daily Telegraph review of a recent concert performance that praises Cardigan’s “soft limpid tone, . . . executive powers that know not difficulty, . . . artistic phrasing and genuine expression.” This notice is followed by another for Annie Dunbar, Principal Boy, one for Miss Nellie Reid, “Première école équestienne [sic] of the world,” and another for Walter Stanton,“England and America’s greatest mimic.” Hanslick’s admiring review of Bianchini notwithstanding, Cardigan’s early–1880s announcements clearly present her as an astonishing variety-show attraction. It was in only in 1885—by this time she was 45—that Cardigan moved from music hall to the concert stage, performing in London at Princes’ and St. James’s Halls and at the Bow and Bromley recitals, then touring in the provinces and in the United States.41 Cardigan’s example was followed by other women who, as already noted, took their places as woodwind players in England’s conservatory orchestras, despite a continued undercurrent of public disapproval. Negative comments were made by such respected musicians as the Reverend E. H. Moberly, who perhaps saw this trend as a challenge to his highly regarded string band, and by Rosalind Ellicott who declared herself in favor of women string players but vehemently opposed their performance on wind instruments on grounds of unsuitability.42 In an article in The Girl’s Realm in the early 1900s, journalist and fiction writer Maud Stepney Rawson advised her readers that “the old prejudice against the momentary displacement of the features of a wind player [have] been at last cast aside!”43 By this time, a number of women were gaining notice as soloists on clarinet and oboe, Maude Melliar having won the first wind scholarship opened to women at the Royal Academy of Music in 1901.44 Unease about female performance on wind instruments did not disappear during the period under study and is reflected in the policy of the Royal College of Music, in effect as late as 1918, to limit eligibility for wind scholarships to male students.45 In interviews and articles, Rosabel Watson urged women to take up wind instruments, advising that they were easier to play than those of the

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string section and offered the best prospects for paid orchestral employment. Even though female professionals were not, except for harpists, hired in the most prominent orchestras, they were often paid to “stiffen” amateur groups (as a young woman just starting her musical career, Watson had herself earned money in this way46), and proficiency on a wind instrument could qualify a player for membership in the growing numbers of professional women’s orchestras. Unlike other musical fields, work could be found for female wind players whose numbers were “excessively small.” In the Englishwoman’s Year Book of 1899, Watson and Florence Fidler provided an informal survey of female wind instrumentalists: there were many flutists and clarinetists but only eight oboists, two bassoonists, three French horn players, a number of cornettists, and several drummers. No woman trombone player could be found,“for no apparent reason, for the instrument is neither difficult nor expensive, and no woman need be ungraceful in playing any instrument if a proper method be adopted from the first.”47 The reluctance of classically trained women to take up brass instruments probably had less to due with misapprehensions concerning the difficulty of learning them—although some Year Book readers might have thought the multiply gifted Miss Watson guilty of passing over the wellknown difficulties posed by the French horn—than with connotations of masculinity that continue to be evoked, especially by the trumpet and trombone whose appearance when played Anthony Kemp has characterized as a “phallic stance”; in recent research on the gender stereotyping of instruments, the only brass instrument sometimes perceived as feminine is the French horn.48 Genteel young women would also have been put off by contemporary associations with street entertainers (as in the abovementioned “Petticoat Quartette”) and with variety-act suggestiveness that was regularly exploited when provocatively dressed young women were paraded on stage while holding or playing cornets, trumpets, trombones, clarinets, and saxophones. For example, Greta Kent, in a fascinating memoir of her musical family, writes of the experience of three of her aunts, who did music hall turns and entertained in similar venues in France and Germany with a group called the Biseras. Photographs of the all-female troupe of about eight musicians show them in military costumes, holding various sorts of woodwind and (mostly) brass instruments. Kent recounts her daughters’ observation that the costumes made these young ladies “look more like principal boys.” One incident on a German tour in which the women were expected to “entertain” gentlemen in the audience following the performance required the management to take legal action. The group broke up when Mr. and Mrs. Biseras “tried to change the act and my aunts wouldn’t do what was being asked of them. I think they

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wanted the musicians to climb up a pole playing the trombone or some such silly idea and so my aunts left. . . .”49 Rosabel Watson was infuriated by the continued presentations (and selfpresentations) of women musicians in comical or novelty costumes. Her love of theater notwithstanding,Watson believed that the tradition of costumed female musical performance—a tradition in which she had participated early in her career as a member of Mrs. Hunt’s militarily dressed “Les Merveilleuses”—undermined the professional status of women musicians. In 1904, in response to an invitation by J. Cuthbert Hadden to contribute to an article he was writing on “Ladies and Orchestral Instruments” for The Young Woman magazine,Watson sent these words of advice: Please advise all women musicians to study hard, become properly qualified, and never accept less than a proper fee. I feel strongly on the subject, and want women to do better work than be dressed up like mountebanks and set to play comic opera selections and jigs. Fortunately many conductors are beginning to realise that some of us can do better work, and engage us to help their amateur choral and orchestral societies at the same fee as they would pay male players. The members of my orchestra earn a fair income with professional orchestral playing. The full band numbers twenty performers, comprising string players, wood-wind and trumpets (not cornets only, please note), horn and trombone.50

Watson’s fully professional ensemble, which she called the Aeolian Ladies Orchestra, was not the first to bring female woodwind and brass orchestral players before the public. It had been preceded by the English Ladies’ Orchestral Society, an amateur orchestra that had featured wind players as early as 1880, two years before Lady Radnor started her all-string band. By the mid-1890s, the Society’s founder, John Shepherd Liddle, an organist and music graduate of Cambridge University, had attracted a stellar list of patrons that included Her Royal Highness Princess Christian, Princess Mary of Teck, Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir John Stainer, Hubert Parry, Joseph Joachim, and Cécile Chaminade. In 1895, The Magazine of Music described the group as the first complete orchestra of women amateurs. Originally established in Newbury, the Society had by this time moved to London, a change that facilitated the recruitment of outstanding musicians working in the capital.A number of its members were graduates of the Royal Academy and Royal College and of the Guildhall School of Music; quite a few of the group were also music teachers.51 The Orchestral Society’s amateur status changed by the late 1890s: the Englishwoman’s Year Book of 1899 describes it as “formed of both amateur and professional players under a professional conductor.”According to the composer and conductor Marion Arkwright,

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who had studied composition with Liddle and served as honorary secretary of the English Ladies’ Orchestra, the difficulty of finding an adequate supply of amateur wind players (presumably the Society could not afford to pay professional fees on an ongoing basis) was the main contributing factor to the group’s dissolution, which took place in 1912 or 1913.52 A respected musician who, in 1896, succeeded August Manns as conductor of the Handel Society in London, Liddle was important as a male expert and strong advocate of the capacity of women to perform on the full range of orchestral instruments at a level of skill and musicianship in no way inferior to that of their male peers. While variety acts often made comic use of women brass players in mock-military uniforms, a remarkable religious and philanthropic organization placed those instruments into the hands of God’s soldiers, both male and female. Influenced by his wife, Catherine Mumford Booth, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, gave women officers a role equal to that of men: “My best men,” Booth said, “are women!”53 In 1880, Booth issued a directive stating “our desire that as many of our officers and soldiers generally, male and female, who have the ability for so doing shall learn to play on some suitable instrument.”54 Excluded from the all-male ensembles of the enormously popular brass-band movement, women appeared before the public playing brass-instruments in Salvation Army bands;55 as in the wider amateur and professional musical worlds, however, it was difficult to recruit them in sufficient numbers.56 In 1890,William Booth held the first Salvation Army music festival at the Crystal Palace, initiating a tradition that was to make the Palace the “home” of his movement; 20,000 people attended the Palace “meeting” of 1896, welcoming General Booth upon his return from a mission in South Africa. In 1904, the Third International Congress of the Salvation Army, which attracted 70,000 people, made use of all the Palace’s facilities and featured a variety of musical events, both choral and instrumental, throughout the meeting day.57 George Bernard Shaw wrote respectfully—sometimes, with admiration—about performances by several of the bands he heard at a Salvation Army music festival in 1905.58 Ray Strachey, feminist author and suffragist, paid tribute to the “most tremendous influence” that the Salvation Army’s policy of “absolute sex equality” exerted on the position of women.59 Given the significant component of religious dedication and temperance advocacy among some supporters of women’s suffrage, the Salvation Army’s aural and visual linkage of women whose lives were devoted to God and charity with male-defined brass instruments added respectability and strength to their use as martial symbols in the iconography of the movement for women’s suffrage.

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CAREERS FOR SINGERS The title of this chapter repeats that of an article written by the singer, pianist, music teacher, and critic Annie Glen and published in The Woman’s World in 1889,60 the journal then in its second year of Oscar Wilde’s editorship. Glen presents a moderately optimistic view of women’s roles and future prospects in the music profession, one whose recent progress “to a high position of honour and responsibility,” has been enhanced by the increasing value and importance of female participation. She cites three areas of performance in which women have achieved the highest recognition: voice, piano, and violin. Opportunities for singers abound—not, in Glen’s opinion, in “serious” opera, which, she believes, does not enjoy wide appeal in England, but in the ever-popular forms of cantata and oratorio and in ballad concerts.The London institutions that Glen identifies as the most important vehicles for women musicians and singers are the Monday and Saturday Popular Concerts, the weekly concerts at the Crystal Palace, oratorios at the Albert Hall, and solo roles with the Philharmonic Society and the orchestras led by Richter and Henschel. Glen reviews the programs of study open to future singers and instrumentalists and concludes that, while foreign study is no longer necessary, it does offer significant advantages: German conservatories are cheaper and German towns provide the student with access to a concert life far richer and more varied than what is available at home, while singers will want to enhance their education with a period of study in France or Italy. She criticizes English vocal training as “exceedingly severe,” especially for the more delicate voices, and believes the climate to be taxing to the young singer’s strength. Glen closes her article with a caveat to students, especially to singers: an audience of appreciative friends can encourage more self-confidence than is justified. A solid foundation and devotion to the highest standards are required for those who would go beyond giving momentary pleasure: “Music is socially so seductive that there is a lurking danger of forgetting how lofty is the ideal for which artists must strive.” A second article by Glen that appeared in the following year,“Dramatic Singing as a Career for Women,”61 displays her knowledge of opportunities in musical theater. Here she again warns singers who aspire to operatic careers to be realistic about their chances, noting that local employment in opera is very limited:“One short and uncertain season, undertaken by private speculation, represents the operatic year as far as England is concerned.” Ballad Opera (with music and spoken English dialogue, such as Balfe’s Bohemian Girl) and French Opéra Comique have runs only of a few weeks in London; a longer touring season exists in the provinces as a result of the praiseworthy efforts of the Carl Rosa company.

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In contrast to the weak demand for singers in “grand” opera, the most flourishing branches of musical drama—those that offer the best sources of employment for singers—are the popular forms of pantomime, burlesque, and English comic opera.62 Glen attributes the British delight in these musical forms to their immediate appeal and tunefulness, questioning the widely held view that attributes the low level of interest in serious opera to a national character of coldness and reserve; instead she believes that English audiences resist the complexity of opera, finding it “too great a strain upon the imagination.” Comic opera, most notably Gilbert and Sullivan’s plays, appeal both to “the people and the connoisseurs” and their plays have “raised the standard of taste in other works of the same class.” Excellent singers also find employment in burlesque and pantomime, genres that had recently improved their music, dancing, and scenery. Comic opera provides frequent employment as well as engagements of substantial length, a factor that reduces the strain faced by singers who constantly need to learn new roles. Training for the comic opera stage is similar to that for serious opera, but is narrower in scope and much shorter in duration. Success for the theatrical singer requires a combination of gifts: a phenomenal voice is less necessary than stage presence. A good figure and graceful bearing are all-important, along with a voice of “sympathetic charm.” The inclusion of theatrical singing in a genteel women’s magazine is indicative of the increased respectability of comic opera brought about by the popularity and propriety of the musical plays of Gilbert and Sullivan. As William Gilbert observed some years after his former partner’s death, comic opera as they found it had consisted largely of adaptations of operettas by the French composers Offenbach, Audran, and Lecoq, in which plots were either so bowdlerized as to be almost unintelligible or were “frankly improper”: Sullivan and I set out with the determination to prove that these elements were not essential to the success of humorous opera. We resolved that our plots, however ridiculous, should be coherent; that the dialogue should be void of offence; that on artistic principles no man should play a woman’s part, and no woman a man’s. Finally, we agreed that no lady of the company should be required to wear a dress that she could not wear with perfect propriety at a private fancy ball.63

The remarkable change in respectability that resulted from this policy is striking when we compare the acceptance of theatrical singing reflected in late-1880s The Woman’s World with the soul-searching engaged in slightly more than a decade earlier by Jessie Bond, as she considered

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D’Oyly Carte’s offer of the role in the 1878 Gilbert and Sullivan success, H.M.S. Pinafore, that initiated her celebrated career with his company. A contralto who studied with Manuel Garcia at the Royal Academy of Music, Bond had given serious thought to the social implications of her decision: I had been trained in the strict conditions of concert and oratorio singing. Would not such a change in my life mean social downfall, and would not my parents think I had gone to perdition? I dared not tell them of Carte’s offer. I knew too well beforehand how strong their objections would be. But in my eyes the prospect was too dazzling. I could not turn away from it. . . . At eleven o’clock on the appointed morning I was in Mr. D’Oyly Carte’s office. He offered me an engagement in his company, and without hesitation I signed a contract for three years, at the princely salary—for me—of three pounds a week.64

As we move further into the nineties, articles in women’s magazines and in the music press show a continued trend of greater respectability for singing careers in theatrical settings, and far more detailed and candidly realistic articles catering to aspiring singers. An 1885 article on singing careers in The Lady, entitled “Poor Cecilia” and included in a series on “Professions for Gentlewomen,” had spoken only of at-homes, benefits, and charity concerts as vehicles for the novice singer, and emphasized the discouraging messages implied by its title. Poor Cecilia will find that the Society ladies at whose houses she sings (without pay) are happier to provide invitations for charity engagements that do not reimburse the singer’s expenses than they are to purchase tickets to her debut concert, an effort that almost always gains little notice and incurs considerable costs. Soon, her onetime patronesses lose interest and Cecilia must turn to teaching where she may find a “stray pupil or two, . . . but private pupils are in these days exceedingly difficult birds to catch. The Musical Academies and schools of all sorts cropping up in every direction, offer so many facilities for lessons at a cheaper rate than can be given privately; while those who can afford to pay higher prices naturally look for the prestige of a master with a well-known name.”65 Articles during the nineties and early 1900s are far more expansive in scope and outlook. The caveats now include not only exploitive society hostesses but also inconsiderate charity officials, unscrupulous agents, and charlatan voice teachers, but these human obstacles are presented in the context of a wider and more promising range of performance opportunities. The authors write with a tone of measured optimism, conveying the belief that a person of real talent and a willingness to work hard will

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eventually succeed: “As in every vocation,” writes an anonymous authorsinger in Atalanta in the early nineties, “the competent are sure of ultimate recognition.” Atalanta’s article outlines several paths to a rewarding singing career. An especially advantageous way to start is with a “highclass concert” at a prestigious venue—the Crystal Palace or St. James’s Hall concerts are ideal for those who are able to gain access. Another way is to begin, as the writer herself did, with a provincial concert tour. The possibility of music hall employment is tentatively broached: the author notes in passing that one famous opera singer began her career at a music hall, but cautions that “as a rule such a beginning does not lead on to fame or fortune.”66 By the late nineties, advice to beginning singers becomes increasingly specific, naming audition sites, schedules, and salary range, and suggesting audition songs.The hard-headed Dictionary of Employments Open to Women, published in 1898 by the Women’s Institute, informs its readers of opportunities for chorus singers in light opera who can expect to receive two to three pounds per week, depending upon the theater or company that employs them.67 At about the same time, The Lady’s Realm published an article on singing careers by Wilhemina Wimble, clearly a well-informed insider.The pragmatic tone of her essay shows how far genteel attitudes toward singing careers had come since the days when the only proper sphere for well-trained upper-class female voices was one limited to domestic and philanthropic ends. Wimble advises young singers to welcome every opportunity to be heard by “musical people.” Auditions should be sought with managers of the large concert halls, who are always “on the lookout” for good voices; Robert Newman at Queen’s Hall is especially recommended. While helpful agents can be found, the singer must regard them with wariness and without false hopes: they will seldom audition novices and few even have a piano. Among those agents who agree to work with young singers, some will try to trap them into a kind of contractual servitude. Readers are warned not to contract with agents for more than one year: some novice performers foolishly “sign away their liberty for an indefinite time.” Although solo concerts are ruled out as too expensive, two singers who share an accompanist can avail themselves of a frugal way to plan a seemly public appearance: if the smaller Queen’s Hall is rented for four guineas, and another five set aside for advertisements and other expenses, ticket sales need only amount to three pounds in order to break even.Wimble also suggests a plan similar to that followed by Doreen, Edna Lyall’s heroine, advising her readers to procure an introduction to one of the singers who organize the annual dinners given by London’s City Livery Companies.68 These events pay fees ranging from two to five guineas and can be followed up by joining a touring company; established musi-

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cians engaged for the public dinners are often associated with such organizations.Touring companies are remunerative and offer a good way to become associated with an important name: “it is in the provinces that you will earn money, and begin to make a reputation.”69 During the new century’s first decade, singers who solicited career advice from The Lady were regularly directed to seek employment in London’s musical theaters, a reflection of the enormous expansion that had taken place in the number of theaters and music halls in greater London since 1890,70 and of the simultaneous blossoming of the genres of musical comedy and the more substantive musical play.71 “Scala,” who provided most of The Lady’s guidance, suggests that singers appear for auditions held every Tuesday at two London theaters, Daly’s and the Prince of Wales’, cautioning that the experience at either place was likely to be “something of an ordeal.” The song chosen for the audition should “strike a happy medium between the hackneyed and the purely classical” and should have an “effective ending. I know this may be considered partial trickery, but it is essential.” Scala is discouraging about opportunities in concert work, which is difficult to obtain “and to be quite candid, merit is not the only requisite.” If the singer is ambitious and aspires to grand opera, she is advised to audition for Charles Manners of the Moody-Manners Opera Company: chorus singers there receive a fair salary, valuable experience, and the possibility of promotion to a stage role.72 Scala identifies several honest agents such as William Boosey, whose address she provides to one correspondent to whom she offers to send other names, including that of an agent who specializes in “high-class sketches.” Circulars that give qualifications and quotations from performance reviews should be widely circulated, especially among local music-sellers:“You cannot be too widely advertised.”73 A few weeks later, Scala advises another correspondent to consider trying out for a place in a theater chorus: with luck, this may lead to a small stage role or understudy position.The wide appeal of musical comedy, a salary of £2 10 s. per week—hardly munificent, but better than the pay available to young women employed in less exciting jobs—and the glamour of the stage attracted increasing numbers of middleclass girls into theater choruses: “These daughters of doctors or lawyers or clergymen thought it was great fun to share a dressing-room with ‘Greasy Gracie,’ whose father was a gravedigger at Kensal Green.”74 In her 1911 novel, Daisy the Minx, Mary Pendered writes about two sisters born into high social circles who rebel against their mother’s efforts to control their lives and marital choices: “We can’t change our sex, and therefore we can’t be free so the wisest plan is to make the best of our petticoats.”The elder secretly marries an American writer while her younger sister Elaine persuades Daisy Clover, a music hall entertainer, to allow her to perform with Daisy in

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a “little girl” song-and-dance act. When Lady Lofthouse discovers her daughter’s deception, Elaine points out that many society ladies now pay for a chance to appear on the music hall stage,75 no doubt an exaggeration, but one that contained enough of a reflection of reality to evoke a knowing smile among this popular novelist’s readers. Scala does not hesitate to suggest performance in pantomime and music hall. A success on the music-hall stage, she counsels, is “unequivocal,” but no easier to achieve than on the concert stage.76 By the turn of the century, appearance in music hall no longer implied the sacrifice of a woman’s reputation. The eminently respectable Royal Welsh Ladies’ Choir performed in a six-week engagement at the Palace “theatre of varieties” in 1900, the choir director, Clara Novello Davies, having agreed to bring her young ladies there after satisfying herself that performances at the theater were “of a high character.” She told The Musical Herald’s critic of the kindness that Charles Morton, proprietor of the Palace Theatre, had shown her and her singers, and of her conviction that “by getting a footing in such a hall, we are helping the cause of pure and healthy entertainment.”77 Morton, who carried the unofficial title of “Father of the Halls,” had, after all, sponsored the first English performance of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust four decades earlier in his Canterbury music hall, and recently criticized what he considered to be the low standard of 1890s music-hall songs.78 Novello Davies, a teacher of piano and voice and head of a Music Institute at Cardiff, had developed the Welsh Ladies Choir into a prestigious organization; it had toured with Patti, won a Gold Medal at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and appeared (in 1894) in a command performance before the Queen.79 The author of an article in The Musical Herald on the choir’s music-hall appearance reported on the group’s excellent qualifications as he reflected on his own presence in this unfamiliar venue: The times are progressing, and musical environments are changing.To talk of “turns,” and “stage doors,” and “dressing-rooms” is something new to me; I am more used to interviewing in vestry and organ-loft, in drawing-room and rehearsal-room. My prejudices are removed as I sit for four hours in the “handsomest music-hall in Europe,” and hear no objectionable word, and see no questionable action. The people are all seated as at a theatre, and indeed the atmosphere is the same as at a theatre, except that it smells of tobacco smoke. If I had been in such a place some years ago, especially in the provinces, I fear that I should have lost my church appointments. But we are becoming more tolerant, and, at the same time, these places are being purified.80

Voice, piano, and violin—these, with the extension of the last into the closely related viola and violoncello—remained the favored musical vehi-

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cles for women throughout this period; indeed, no others were mentioned in the listed vocations of founding members of the forward-looking Society of Women Musicians in 1911. Harp continued to be approved for women and female harpists were often hired to play in all-male orchestras—a correspondent to The Orchestral Association Gazette in 1894 notes that female harpists had been permanently engaged in one or two London theater orchestras, while others of their sex performed in major orchestras such as Hans Richter’s and that of the Albert Hall.81 Nevertheless, the instrument’s eclipse as a domestic instrument had greatly reduced the number of female players, while scarce opportunities for regular employment decreased the harp’s attractiveness to aspiring professionals.When the parents of Marie and Sidonie Goossens chose instruments for their musical children around the year 1906, their decisions were based upon the scarcity of performers on French horn, oboe, and harp—their sons were assigned the winds and Sidonie the harp; Marie, not assigned an instrument because of a long illness, was immediately captivated by her sister’s harp and allowed to follow her example.82 MUSIC TEACHING FOR WOMEN Restricted opportunities for performing careers meant that most women who sought to make music their livelihood would inevitably look to teaching, whether privately or as visiting or resident instructors, preferably at girls’ secondary schools, most of whose students were socialized to the value of “accomplishments” and where many tuition-paying parents could afford the usual supplementary charge.83 Unfortunately, each young woman who chose the path of music-teaching was joining the ranks of a vast proletariat of underpaid and often poorly qualified, exploited workers whose numbers, alarming at the start of our period, continued to swell until its end. As early as 1875, the Year-Book of Women’s Work had done its best to dissuade its readers from following this path.“Musical instruction,” writes the Year-Book, “ . . . is given at so low a rate as practically to make the position of teacher in the profession of no avail in a remunerative view. I am told that music lessons can be had for a shilling! And my informant ‘sincerely regretted to say that the instruction was actually good.’”The reason was simply that “the lower branches of the musical profession are overstocked”; in order to gain a foothold, people are willing to work for a nominal rate.84 From the late 1870s, a multipurpose and bewilderingly complex system of examinations for a variety of certificates and diplomas was developed by several examining bodies, ostensibly to provide objective measurements of gradations of musical knowledge and performance ability; the examinations

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would allow students to show progress and demonstrate proficiency and would provide present and future teachers with proof of qualifications. An abortive plan to register qualified music teachers, thereby freezing out the incompetent, would also have been based on examinations.85 One result of this complex system was a proliferation of initials representing certificates and diplomas, some of them from diploma mills that were continually denounced in the press (ostensibly as the work of foreigners); parents taken in by their tantalizing offers of free education and paid engagements would find that they had been required to purchase “quantities of useless music.”86 The examination became a fixture of the lives of thousands of middle-class girls, most of them piano students,87 whether urged on by their parents who sought confirmation of well-spent funds, by their own pride in demonstrating progress on the instrument, or by thoughts that music teaching might have a place among their few adult options, should genteel employment prove necessary. In a musical advice column published in 1900 in The Girls’ Realm, Annie Patterson, the first British woman to hold a music doctorate—here signed on as “Doctor Annie”—offered her readers recommendations of textbooks and practice plans to aid them in their studies “if, as most girls are now anxious to do, you purpose entering for a musical examination.”88 Even proponents of examinations may have felt some twinges of uncertainty when they looked at a typical “Professional Card” section of a journal like The Musical Herald: L.R.A.M., A.R.C.M., Singing Teachers’ Exams. Correspondence Course in Vocal Physiology and the Art of Teaching Singing. A.R.C.M. Examiner writes: “I think your papers are excellent.” Successes for last three years. A.R.C.M., L.R.A.M., L.T.C.L. Special Coaching by Correspondence for Singing Diplomas. Over 350 Diplomas & Certificates won by Pupils. Miss Margaret Young., L.R.A.M., A.R.C.M. (Piano Teacher), A.T.C.L. (Piano and Vocal Teacher). Correspondence Lessons—Theory Harmony, Form, Art of Teaching. . . . Successes at R.A.M. & T.C.L. Metropolitan examinations.89

As suggested by these examples, the most valuable credentials were Associateships and Licentiates from the two Royal Colleges and from Trinity College, London, but so overcrowded was the profession that even a succession of letters after one’s name would not guarantee success. Nor was a fine record of examination passes by one’s students sufficient: the strongest candidates were those who could show that their students had passed with high grades. A knowledgeable article on “Prospects of the Resident Music Mistress” by a female L.R.A.M., R. Ethel Bassin, that appeared in 1913 in The Musical Herald, confirms the significance of examination successes by

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pupils, but since “good marks and distinction” count more than mere passes, she advises teachers to think carefully about the levels of examination they choose for their students:“Enter them for lower examinations in which you will be sure of good results.”This is perfectly sensible advice for those who must work within the system, but reflects the inevitability of “teaching to the test”; when such heavy emphasis is placed on “objective” evaluations, the love of music becomes increasingly marginalized. Evidence of the importance ascribed to diplomas by parents, and their irrelevance to professional musicians, is provided by Rebecca Clarke in an unpublished memoir. While she was still a student, her mother, a woman of “practical and loving nature,” foresaw a time when Rebecca would need to be selfsupporting and decided that a diploma was essential. It was not until much later that Clarke learned that her mother had sold a gold watch chain in order to pay the entry fee for the L.R.A.M. examination:“I got it, though not in a very distinguished class; but to Mama’s disappointment never made use of it, for by the time I became a professional I found that respectable musicians did not put such letters after their names.”90 Manuals and articles on careers in music typically emphasized the unprofitability of private music-teaching. Atalanta magazine in the early nineties tells readers to “think long and hard before you agree to be a visiting teacher at private homes.”Traveling from one place to the next wastes time and drains energy; novices seldom receive a rate of pay high enough to compensate for these disadvantages.91 Income was likely to be sacrificed if pupils or teacher fell ill. The proliferation of conservatories and the growth of girls’ secondary schools continued to increase competition among private teachers. Parents who could afford to pay well for lessons often preferred male teachers and those with prestigious connections. Margot Kostelitz, the gifted pianist in M. E. Francis’s 1898 novel, The Duenna of a Genius, is frustrated in her search for pupils among the socially prominent families to which she has been introduced: “Mademoiselle Kostelitz? Who is Mademoiselle Kostelitz? I have never heard of her. Julia and Mary are taught by a pupil of Hallé.Yes, I know Hallé’s playing was cold, but then his style was so finished. One can always tell a pupil of Hallé’s, &c., &c.”92 As is implied by this example, private teaching could pay very well indeed if the teacher had the sponsorship of a noted mentor or the prestige of an important appointment. Once she has become a protegée of Dr. Earle, Alma, Emma Marshall’s “little music mistress,” is able to command 10s. 6d. per hour for her lessons, an eight shilling increase over the hourly earnings of the days of her penury. And time spent trudging from one pupil’s home to the next is at an end now that Dr. Earle has provided her with a studio.93 Membership in a first-class orchestra also provided the imprimatur that resulted in high pay for private lessons, but

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during our period the possibility of such employment was precluded for all but a very few women.94 If the lot of the private teacher who lacked these special connections was an unenviable one, that of the school music mistress was seldom better.Typical salaries were pitifully low—a job manual of 1894 writes that £50 per year is exceptional; sometimes schools offer only £25 or less, or even nothing at all except for board and lodging and free lessons from other teachers. Several commentators write that male teachers are usually given the best pupils while ladies teach the beginners; in addition, schools often prefer to hire former pupils. Even at rates of pay that required an income subsidy from home, the oversupply of music teachers, including those with initials after their names, continued to drive their market value down. “Increasing numbers of professional students [i.e., graduates of music conservatories] threaten us, in years to come, with more teachers than learners.”95 While examinations and credentials do not appear to have reduced the number of music teachers (nor did they succeed in driving out the incompetent), they did have the effect of raising requirements even for lowpaying school-mistress positions. Although one would think her more to be pitied than censured, the all-round governess who shared her limited education in music (as in all other subjects) with her innocent charges for a pittance in salary was repeatedly blamed by serious music lovers for England’s musical shortcomings. In the early nineties, Atalanta magazine advised its readers that while women of “the cultured classes” were especially suited to music teaching, requirements were now far higher than used to be the case: it is no longer enough for the governess to have a smattering of French with an accomplishment or two.96 Jenifer Lyon in Cornish Diamonds (1895) decides to study music in Germany partly because she believes herself unqualified for teaching in England:“I am not clever enough to be a governess. One needs so many certificates and diplomas and things nowadays to get anything at all.”97 The diploma alone is no longer enough, writes the L.R.A.M. author of the 1913 The Musical Herald article cited above.“Educational agents” will tell you they have many more music mistresses signed on with them than they have positions to fill; most of those not placed have only the diploma. In addition to becoming multiply certificated by English institutions, credentials attesting to successful completion of a respected course of foreign study could help one stand out from the crowd of other applicants. In her 1908 novel, Maurice Guest, Henry Handel Richardson paints a vibrant portrait of a proudly independent woman musician single-minded in her determination to add to her musical qualifications so as to lead a selfsufficient life. She is the first acquaintance Maurice Guest makes in Leipzig and serves as a foil to his vacillations and morose self-absorption:

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Her name was Madeleine Wade; she came from a small town in Leicestershire, and, except for a step-brother, stood alone in the world. For several years, she had been a teacher in a large school near London, and the position was open for her to return to, when she had completed this, the final year of her course.Then, however, she would devote herself exclusively to the teaching of music, and, with this in view, she had here taken up as many branches of study as she had time for. Besides piano, which was her chief subject, she learned singing, organ, counterpoint, and the elements of the violin. “So much is demanded nowadays,” she said in her clear soprano.“And if you want to get on, it doesn’t do to be behindhand. Of course, it means hard work, but that is nothing to me—I am used to work and love it. Since I was seventeen—I am twenty-six now—I can fairly say I have never got up in the morning, without having my whole day mapped and planned before me.—So you see idlers can have no place on my list of saints.’”98

Madeleine understood that the market required a level of versatility that few pianists or violinists of either sex were likely to attain or even to contemplate. Knowing that she would be well advised to develop sources of supplementary income, Madeleine also studied Danish grammar, thereby qualifying herself as a tour guide for a group of English women going to Norway.99 The school music-mistress, as historical counterparts of Madeleine well knew—it seems likely that she was a portrait of a member of Leipzig’s English student colony—was most likely to obtain and keep her job if she could teach other subjects as the need arose, perhaps even needlework. If Richardson had been able to bring her almost defiantly pragmatic female musician to life, Madeleine would have smiled in approval as she read Ethel Bassin’s advice in The Musical Herald: “Prospects of the Resident Music Mistress” was published just a few years after Maurice Guest. “The music mistress,” writes Bassin,“occupies an anomalous position.”The school principal, who is usually either unmusical or has no understanding of the components of a good musical education, advertises for a school mistress, typically offering a salary of £30 - £40 per year plus board. Sometimes the advertisement specifies “lady by birth,” although no suggestion is given as to how she may live up to her ancestry on the proffered salary.Yet the oversupply of candidates results in many applicants; the successful candidate will be one who can teach as many subjects as possible for the lowest salary. Bassin points out that, while this description fits only second-rate schools, it is almost necessary to gain experience there in order to move on to better positions (such as the one Madeleine would occupy).To qualify for these, it is important to keep up with the latest teaching methods, such as Tobias Matthay’s piano pedagogy.100 It helps to say you have studied under a well-known teacher and to have developed a specialty in ear training and class singing. It is a

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good idea to take classes during vacations and important to maintain the standard of one’s own playing: “A principal naturally likes people to know that her music mistress is a brilliant performer.” It is important to keep informed of current musical trends, a problem for the mistress who works far from a town with good concerts. For this reason, a school near a large town is preferable to employment in more isolated places. At all costs, the schoolmistress must avoid stagnation, “but it is the hardest thing of all for the resident mistress in a private school to avoid.” WOMEN AS PIANO-TUNERS Piano tuning was part of the curriculum taught exclusively to girl students—then aged ten to 14—during the 1820s, the earliest years of the Royal Academy of Music; harp and dancing were the other subjects reserved to the girls.101 During the late Victorian era, piano tuning was occasionally suggested as an employment option for women, usually with the implication of its special suitability for girls of the working- and lowermiddle classes. The Year-Book of Women’s Work of 1875 opened its discussion of this vocation by disagreeing strongly with those who recommended it to women. Piano tuning, writes The Year-Book, requires long training that must be acquired in the factory where beginners are taught to “roughtune” a half-complete instrument. It is not likely that women will be admitted to factories, whose hot environment they are likely to find intolerable. Even if they were to be admitted, the mechanics of tuning require great strength and “a power of exact and immediate control hardly possessed by the hand of a woman.”102 Articles during the 1880s and 1890s disputed this judgement. Frederick Crowest, in his article, “Music as a Livelihood,” published in The Lady’s World in 1887, gave female piano tuning an enthusiastic recommendation, but not for his upper-class readers, some of whom would, he hoped, elevate the status of the music profession by entering it as performers. Crowest suggested that the profession be closed to the thousands of would-be musicians who had only a basic education, but “if they must perforce be musical, and apply themselves to making or improving the art, there is a direction which hitherto seems to have escaped even those who have busied themselves about suitable occupations for women, namely Pianoforte tuning.” He describes this as a “congenial and profitable employment” that would give work to hundreds of working-class girls.The sole prerequisite is a good ear and a keen perception of harmonics; the work has the advantage of being conducted indoors. With the cooperation of large manufacturers of pianos, poor girls could easily be trained as tuners after they leave school.The advantage of such a program would be considerable: the creation of another area of

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women’s work and a lowered cost of tuning.There might then, adds Crowest, be fewer aspirants of limited education to the higher branches of music and fewer out-of-tune pianos.103 In the same year that Crowest’s article appeared, The Girl’s Own Paper published its own recommendation of this occupation, presumably directed to the lower-middle class readers for whom the magazine was originally created.104 Women tuners! Why not? If a blind man can tune a piano (there are many such certificated by no less an authority than Mr. A. J. Hipkins105)—if men without the least education, musically speaking, earn their bread by tuning only, and there are thousands who do, it would be strange indeed if a girl with good sight and some knowledge of music should find the art of tuning impossible of acquirement.

Unfortunately, the upbeat tone of this introduction is undermined by advice that, while lacking the unabashed snobbery of Crowest’s article, seems blissfully unaware of who among his readers might wish to learn this craft and how they might realistically use the detailed advice the article provides.The reader (whose role model is depicted in a half-page illustration as an elegantly dressed young woman seated at the piano, depressing keys with her left hand as she wields her tuning-key with her right) is told that while just a few weeks of effort will train her to improve a badly out-of-tune instrument, years will pass before she can achieve perfect octaves, unisons, and equal temperament, a difficulty caused by the thoughtlessness and ignorance of mostly German—but sometimes also English—manufacturers. The reader is advised to spend four or five pounds on an old grand piano (“an old grand can be bought at any time”), as it is more easily tuned than cottage or square models; unfortunately, this instrument will not be available for any musical purpose while the student applies herself to the art of tuning. The requisite tools are described in detail, along with instructions for their proper use, but girls are cautioned that “a first-class tuner is nearly as rare a bird as a firstrate painter, a first-rate fiddler, or a first-rate pianist.” The address of the seller of tuning-keys is provided; the cost is 21 shillings, more than a working-class girl could expect to earn in a week. Prospective students are advised to study with a teacher “who clearly explains his subject,” but no advice is given as to how to locate such a person or the likely cost of instruction. If she remains undaunted through this remarkable introduction, the would-be tuner is referred the Regent Hall Association, “among whose members are many musicians of high position” who serve as examiners and award certificates to deserving candidates.

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A few years later, the journal of the People’s Palace included a more ambiguous recommendation of piano tuning in its columns, which began by observing, without explanation and somewhat ominously, that most women trained in England as piano tuners currently practice their craft in other countries: “That women are evidently fitted for this profession is self-evident, and that they are beginning to feel their way, is apparent by the proposed formation of an association for lady tuners.Whether the idea will float or not remains to be seen.”106 An employment manual of the mid-nineties, What Our Girls Can Do, is decidedly more negative. It confirms that women have begun to enter this occupation but cautions that it pays poorly. The standard rate for a tuning is four shillings, but travel expenses eat into that. Some tuners, presumably for security of employment, work on an annual fee of a guinea a year.107 Interested readers are advised to get in touch with piano manufacturers and teachers who are often asked for referrals.108 Florence Fidler and Rosabel Watson, in their 1899 overview of “Music as a Profession,” provide no encouragement to careers in piano tuning, only stating matter-of-factly that “[a] few women become piano-tuners.” ORGANISTS Performance on the organ, “King of Instruments,” has had a social profile very different from that of other instruments, largely because of its integral connection to the church. Unlike other instruments, the pipe organ could not be practiced at home; in order to develop her skills, the pupil required the assistance of a music school or instrument-builder, or access to a church organ,109 access that would have been difficult for girls unless they were relatives of church organists or of clergy. Musically gifted young choristers were the group most likely to receive training on the organ; not surprisingly, most of the eminent English organists of the nineteenth century, including organist, composer, and educator Sir John Stainer, started out as choristers. George Grove described Stainer as “a shining example of the excellent foundation of sound musical knowledge which may be got out of the various duties and shifts of the life of a clever chorister in one of our cathedrals.”110 The definition of “chorister” in the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary states that while “strictly speaking, the designation has no age limit or sex restriction, . . . it is now generally reserved for boy singers in cathedral or church choirs.” Girls who might have been drawn to organplaying were clearly disadvantaged by their ineligibility for this important source of musical education.111 Although the image of St. Cecilia at the organ seems to have conferred some degree of legitimacy on women’s playing of the instrument, the

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strong influence of the traditionalist Oxford Movement of the 1830s and ‘40s on later Anglican practice placed strict limits on women’s assumption of prominent roles in the religious service.The ritualistic practices adopted by many Anglican churches during the later nineteenth century gave greater prominence to both the organist and to the all-male, surpliced choir, emphasizing their centrality to the liturgy in a manner that traditionalists perceived as inappropriate for women.112 Earlier in the century, however, before ritualism became widespread, several women organists had acquired positions as church organists through open competition. One of the most noted was Elizabeth Stirling who, at the age of 18, astonished those who came to hear her perform “the most difficult pedal fugues and preludes of Bach, with a degree of precision and mastery, which may almost be said to be unrivalled.” The Musical Times continued its tribute with the guarded hope that “the prejudice against lady organists cannot remain, with such an example opposed to it.”113 Stirling submitted to Oxford University, under the name “E. Stirling, Esq.,” the “exercise” then required for the Bachelor of Music degree; her psalm for five voices and orchestra was accepted but not performed, as explained by George Grove in the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary, “owing to the want of power to grant a degree to a lady.”114 From 1839, Stirling held the position of church organist in several London churches. Grove also wrote the Dictionary entries on Ann Mounsey Bartholomew and Elizabeth Mounsey, both of whom held long-term appointments as organists in London churches. In 1843,Ann Mounsey began a series of six Crosby Hall concerts—sometimes spoken of as predecessors of the Popular Concerts—for which Mendelssohn composed a work for voices and organ. She taught, composed for piano and organ, and was elected an Associate of the Philharmonic Society in 1834. Her sister Elizabeth, a child prodigy, was appointed organist at St. Peter’s Church in Cornhill at the age of 15, a post she held until her retirement in 1882. Mendelssohn often played on its excellent organ during his visits to London. Elizabeth Mounsey also studied and performed publicly on the guitar; she was elected an Associate Member of the Philharmonic Society in 1842. Such success would have been hard for a female organist to achieve later in the century. According to Derek Hyde, the number of women organists in England’s largest parish churches began to decline after about 1870.115 In 1882, The Englishwoman’s Review expressed regret at the exclusion of women from professional participation in the services of the Established Church, pointing out that Elizabeth Mounsey, who had just resigned after 48 years of service at St. Peter’s, Cornhill, had been succeeded by a man.116 Women organists did, however, perform in a number of Irish (Anglican) cathedrals, in the chapels of women’s colleges, and at Nonconformist churches.117

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Many poor village churches accepted the services, at little or no pay, of the vicar’s wife or daughter who trained the choir and played the organ,118 a practice regarded in some circles as “noble work,”119 but one which aroused the ire of many underemployed and underpaid male organists. The organ was often said to be a difficult instrument for women because of the strength required for playing it. John Stainer makes no mention of this in his 1880 article for The Girl’s Own Paper, “How to Play the Organ,” in which he encourages girls to pursue the “natural ambition” and mysterious “temptation” to be able to “control some thousands of pipes, varying in length from about half an inch to thirty-two feet.”Although he makes no mention of her in his article, Stainer’s engaging introduction to the instrument for would-be girl organists would surely have been informed by the experience of his older sister, Ann Stainer, who in 1849 began a 50-year career as organist at the Magdalen Hospital Chapel in Streatham.120 Come with me if you please, kind reader, into an imaginary organ-loft.Take care of those steps, they are very awkward. Just here the passage gets very narrow, you must squeeze yourself through it. Mind your head!

Stainer answers the question,“How am I to play the organ?” with two encouraging words: “Do it,” an instruction more easily given than followed, but not one that suggests any essential disadvantage for female players. By the early twentieth century, improvements in design had lessened the physical demands of organ-playing; Annie Patterson, Irish organist (of French Huguenot ancestry), the recipient, in 1889, of a music doctorate, and a writer on music for The Girl’s Own Paper and other journals, points out in her 1907 book, Chats on Music, that “the physical exertion expended in organ-playing is no more hurtful to a woman than is walking, bicycling, or dancing. . . .”121 Writing a decade later and clearly rejoicing in these physical demands, Mary Layton who, in 1872, was the first woman candidate for the Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists (“the first English musical body to give its diplomas to women”) described modern organ-playing as similar to horsemanship and motor-driving: all three invite “the strong, healthy, dominant woman,” she who “hear[s] the boom of the big pipes with longing desire.”122 WOMEN AS CONDUCTORS As Annie Patterson points out, the church organist is usually also the choir director; like Mary Layton, she combined her career as an organist with positions in choir directing that included service as conductor of the

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Dublin Choral Union:123 Layton’s appointments included 27 years as organist and choir trainer at Chelsea Congregational Church, after which she became Musical Director of Westminster Chapel.124 From 1902 to 1904 she conducted oratorio services with full chorus and orchestra at Westminster Chapel; she later directed a women’s choir that won First Prize at the Paris Concours International in 1912.125 Annie Patterson took issue with the traditions that placed women on the margins of high-church practice: St. Paul’s objection to women speaking or “teaching” in an assembly, if taken literally, would dismiss the sex from class teaching of all kinds—an art at which women often shine. Patience, reverence and tact are all demanded from conductors of church choir practices, and these qualifications are eminently womanly ones.126

Patterson’s words on female choir-conducting applied equally well to orchestral conducting. There were already numerous examples of successful women conductors, some of whom, like Mary Layton, extended their work in sacred choral music to full performances with choir and orchestra.While most women conductors of the time, such as Lady Radnor, directed single-sex choirs and orchestras, Florence Marshall had demonstrated that a woman musician was equally capable of conducting a mixed group of amateurs and professionals; she trained the South Hampstead Orchestra, which she founded in 1886, to perform a demanding repertoire in annual concerts at Queen’s Hall,127 and by the early twentieth century, attracted noted soloists, including Kreisler and Casals, to perform under her baton.128 At the invitation of Henry Wood, Ethel Smyth directed the Queen’s Hall orchestra with her usual panache.129 There were no doubt many less prestigious examples of women conductors throughout the country, many of them conservatory graduates, conducting mixedsex orchestras of various degrees of proficiency and sophistication at this time of widespread, enthusiastic musical amateurism. But while choral and small-scale conducting by women was increasingly accepted, prejudice remained strong against the idea that women could master complex orchestral scores and merit the authority to command a full, professional—and largely male—orchestra. The strength and intensity of this prejudice, even on the part of a conductor known for his encouragement to women composers, is revealed in fascinating detail in an interview that the feminist writer Maud Stepney Rawson, later a founding member of the Society of Women Musicians, held with August Manns in 1895.130 Her account of their conversation was published in the journal Woman in 1895 and provocatively titled, “Mr. August

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Manns on Women as Conductors of Orchestra.”131 Rawson begins the piece with a statement of admiration for “the musician whose enthusiasm and genius in the furtherance of the best music in this country can scarcely be overrated.” She provides a few biographical details, and in an observation facilitated by her own background as a general’s daughter, shares the impression that Manns’s military training in Germany as band conductor for the hussars can be seen in his military air, erect head, incisive speech, and air of command. She then turns to her central question: “What do you think of the aptitude of women for a post of musical command?” “I do not advocate it.” “They have attempted it recently.” “To a certain extent. Remember, I spoke just now of the great orchestra—not of small bands. There are some of the latter, I know, managed by women entirely.” “As to grand orchestra, then, assure me on one point. Do you think women haven’t sufficient power to attain to such heights?” “My point of view is based on a question of temperament, and a question of existing conditions, family surroundings.The work of conducting requires absolute immunity from domestic and social demands and cares.” “And those women who never marry, have the talent, the opportunity, no private responsibilities?” “I do not deny that women having first-class musical talent, first-class opportunities, and first-class knowledge of the orchestra, are equally fitted, intellectually, for such a post as men. I am afraid that they would fail in coolness. Besides brains there is that indispensable quality of self-command—” I nearly rose from my seat. “I should have thought their whole education for centuries, their subjection to continual irritations and domestic cares, had secured the attainment of that,” I said, jostled by vivid memories. “The irritations of a conductor’s life are legion—one has to be prepared for any emergency, any accident; moreover, there is the soothing of ruffled feelings at rehearsals—” “Soothing is our peculiar province.”

Manns turns the conversation away from this heated encounter, moving to a non sequitor remark about rhythmic deficiencies among conductors. Rawson concludes with a conviction of the “vast gulf fixed between guiding and leading.After my talk with Mr. Manns I feel that only women themselves can best decide how to bridge it over.” The military image of the conductor—wielding his stick, commanding his men—is especially prominent in a series of articles,“How to Enjoy Orchestral Concerts,” that The Girl’s Own Paper published in 1904.132 The

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two authors present the orchestra to girl readers almost as an encampment of soldiers led by a powerful commanding general: The conductor, the important chief of the orchestra, stands in front of the forces which he is supposed to control, and . . . occupies a position of command from which he can communicate his directions as clearly as the orchestra can see and obey them. . . .The leader of the 1st violins is not only the chief violin-player, but he is also the conductor’s lieutenant in command.133

A subsequent article reemphasizes the conductor’s aggressively male identity, this time using terms that make it absolutely clear that this role can be aspired to only by men of the highest musical ability, who are at the same time the most fully masculine of their sex.The conductor must possess “the very same qualities that go to make a good military commander.” His conception of the music is held so strongly “that his own faith must impregnate the minds of his players with a magnetic reflection, a sympathy which carries all things before it. Here, then, is a man above men. . . .”134 WOMEN MUSICIANS AND THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT The Society of Women Musicians (SWM) was founded in 1911, a time when public sentiment was experiencing a strong backlash against the campaign for women’s suffrage, a response evoked by the violent tactics used by the [National] Women’s Social and Political Union [WSPU], the “suffragettes” of the movement’s militant wing.The officers of the Women Musicians took great care to present their Society in terms of womanly moderation. Maud Stepney Rawson used her journalistic connections to praise the Society’s “fine and temperate attitude on sex matters”; in an article published in the Evening Standard and St. James Gazette. she quoted the inaugural address of Honorary Secretary Katharine Eggar, who had deprecated “any motive of sex exclusiveness or any political intentions,” and dedicated the Society to the “purifying [of] musical life.”135 Eggar had, however, presented the SWM as exemplifying, in the world of music, the same idealism that informed the program and demeanor of the suffragists (the moderate branch of the movement): “Perhaps in the minds of some there is a lurking fear that we are a Suffragist Society in disguise; our only connection with the Suffragist Movement is a similarity of Ideals.” Both groups, as Eggar explains it, see much in, respectively, musical and political life, that needs reform, and both can “purify” public life by giving greater influence to women’s highest ideals. The Society of Women Musicians

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would emphasize one especially needed area of reform, the encouragement of women composers, who were finding it increasingly difficult to have their works published and performed; conferences would be held on subjects useful to composers, who would be given performance opportunities and the stimulus of interaction with colleagues. Marion Scott secured the assistance of Liza Lehmann and Ethel Smyth so as to associate the Society from the start with two of the most productive and successful women composers.136 Despite the founders’ use of reassuringly moderate language, “anything determinedly feminine,” as Katharine Eggar later wrote, “was suspect. . . .”137 It would in any case have been impossible for the Society to maintain a stance of apartness from the suffrage issue once it associated itself with Ethel Smyth—yet it could hardly refrain from requesting the assistance of the most versatile and widely accomplished woman composer of the day. Smyth was, however, already closely identified with radical feminism: in the previous year, she had interrupted her musical career to work for the WSPU, for which she had written the famous “March of the Women”; with words by feminist playwright Cicely Hamilton, the “March” was an enormously successful “propaganda song” of which the composer wrote numerous arrangements for every possible performance situation,“solo voice, choir, wind band or brass, a cappella or accompanied by orchestra, piano, percussion or chamber ensemble, with even a sol-fa guide for the musically illiterate.”138 In 1912, Smyth was sentenced to two months in prison (of which she served about half) for smashing the window of a cabinet minister.139 She was visited there by Thomas Beecham, who describes the scene he witnessed: suffragette prisoners, as they marched around the Holloway prison courtyard, sang “their war-chant while the composer, beaming approbation from an overlooking upper window, beat time in almost Bacchic frenzy with a toothbrush.”140 The establishment of the Society of Women Musicians was widely reported in the press, The Musical Times informing its readers of the Society’s dedication to assisting women composers and raising “the standard of musical politics.”141 The Musical News, however, worried over the suffrage connection; in several articles and letters, its writers and correspondents issued caveats against the mingling of music and feminist politics.The journal’s first article on the Society (July 29, 1911) praised Miss Eggar’s “admirable address,” reassuring its readership “that the Society of Women Musicians has no political object or bias whatever, and aims, indeed, at being a neutral ground where all may meet in the common service of Art.” Two months later, however (September 9), the News was no longer so certain. Ethel Smyth—now Dr. Smyth, recently awarded an honorary degree from Durham University—had become a member of the Society’s gov-

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erning Council, and a “word of caution” was deemed advisable:“Ladies are not always particular about the fitness of things, and the fact that the above list includes some advocates of Woman’s Suffrage might possibly lead to an attempt to introduce political matters into an Art Society. This would, of course, be wholly indefensible, and we trust that such a procedure will be strictly tabooed, otherwise, the future of the Society will be seriously imperilled.” In the course of the next few years, the journal shifted its attention from the Society to the connection between Smyth and the suffrage issue.The best music, writes the News in 1913, in a reworked version of an old argument, combines charm with masculinity. Women composers fail because they lack that essential manly strength. Smyth’s militant suffragism shows, however, that she is “imbued with a masculinity quite abnormal in the gentler sex.” Seemingly distressed by the turn of its own argument, the News ends its reflections on a note of uncertainty: if militant suffragism is combined with strength in a composer, one might deduce that “to be a strong composer a woman must be a suffragist, and we do not desire to hold out any extra inducement to the suffragist cause.We should prefer to think that there is nothing in common between votes and notes.”142 Whether or not they were (or later became) members of the new Society, many women musicians did perceive such commonality and gave their names and talents to the suffrage campaign. Musicians constituted a branch of the Actresses’ Franchise League [AFL], an organization of theater professionals dedicated to the support of all groups working for female suffrage, regardless of their tactical programs.143 Musician-members of the AFL marched in processions and planned and participated in programs both of the WSPU and the moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Antoinette Sterling and Mary Davies, best known as ballad singers, came to the suffrage cause through religious belief and temperance advocacy. Interviewed by The Young Woman in 1893 in an article, “Mary Davies at Home,” which was subtitled, “The Sweetest Lives are Those to Duty Wed,” Davies expressed strong support for women’s suffrage and even for the election of women to Parliament: “Things should be allowed to develop naturally, and then they will adjust themselves.”144 In 1906, the Aeolian Ladies Orchestra and Mascottes Ladies Band performed at a suffragist banquet chaired by Millicent Fawcett, president of the NUWSS;Watson and her group also performed for the WSPU, as did May Mukle (characterized by Anna Wickham as a “rabid feminist”145) and her sister Anne Mukle. May Mukle performed both as a soloist and with members of the chamber groups with which she was then or subsequently associated: Rebecca Clarke and the violinists Beatrice Langley and Marjorie Hayward. Mary Layton gave an organ recital at a WSPU mass meeting held at the Royal Albert Hall in 1908.146 The internationally renowned English

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Wagnerian singer Marie Brema, an officer of the Actresses’ Franchise League,147 sang “an international song” written for the Working Women’s Procession of the Suffragist International Congress at the Albert Hall in April, 1909. In January, 1911, contralto Edith Clegg, who later served (as did Marie Brema) as president of the Society of Women Musicians, gave the first solo concert performance of Smyth’s “March of the Women”;Violet Gordon Woodhouse accompanied her at the piano and the composer conducted the audience in the final verse.148 The event was reported in the suffrage journal, Votes for Women.149 Violet Gordon Woodhouse also played at the WSPU Christmas Fair and Fete in 1911, as did Her Royal Highness the Ranee of Sarawak.The Ranee also served as a member of the General Advisory Council of an exhibition, “Woman’s Kingdom,” held in April of 1914 with dramatic events directed by Edith Craig and Inez Bensusan of the Actresses’ Franchise League. The novelists John Galsworthy and Sarah Grand were fellow Council members, as was Dr. Annie Patterson. These names—and they are just a selection of those that appear in suffrage movement programs—cannot tell us how widely shared such intense pro-suffrage convictions were among the musicians not present at these or other similar events. They do reveal, however, that a significant group of prominent women musicians wanted their support of the suffrage cause to be public and wanted it directly identified with their commitment as artists. Clearly, the fervor that made the suffrage events so exhilarating and memorable expressed aspirations far wider than the right to cast a ballot. There was the glimpse of what Cicely Hamilton termed, in her words for Ethel Smyth’s stirring march, a “dawn breaking.”That vision was translated into musical imagery incorporated into the publications of both major suffrage societies.An image made famous by the NUWSS was that of the Bugler Girl; designed by the artist Caroline Watts as a poster to advertise the organization’s June, 1908, procession to the Albert Hall. Watts’s picture of an armored maiden (traditionally associated with depictions of Justice, Britannia, and Joan of Arc)—sword sheathed, banner held in her left hand, bugle pointing heavenward—was later used on the cover of Common Cause, the organization’s newspaper, accompanied by a line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Now press the clarion to thy women’s lip.”The adoption of this image was highly controversial, as some NUWSS leaders found it too assertively militant. But the militancy, as Common Cause explained, was similar to that of the Christian Church: “We are in arms against wrong, but we inflict none.” In keeping with this womanly militancy, the Bugler Girl shows no evidence of facial distortion due to indelicate blowing;150 in contrast, the WSPU’s “trumpeting angel,” borne aloft in a 1909 poster advertising its “Women’s Exhibition,” shows physical engagement with her elongated horn, which she plays in a profile view that emphasizes

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her unflattering, puffed-out cheeks.The NUWSS woman is shown essentially unchanged by her future as a fully enfranchised citizen, in an image reassuring to those who feared that enfranchisement implied the loss of traditional female attributes, while the WSPU created by the suffragette and artist Sylvia Pankhurst, is ready to sacrifice feminine grace and demeanor when her purpose requires it.151 By the second decade of the twentieth century, many women had experienced a social world far richer in possibilities than that of their mothers; if such change as had by then occurred seems limited, both in character and in quantity, from the viewpoint of later generations, many who knew it first hand could attest to truly significant difference. As Katharine Eggar observed in her 1915 presidential address to the SWM, Where should we be to-day if women were at the stage that they were in Florence Nightingale’s time? . . . Can you not see what it has meant for women themselves to have got used to travelling, to having clubs, to looking after themselves, to having big and serious interests of their own, to being a vital part of a world larger than their own sitting-rooms?152

These words were spoken during World War I, when the labor and talents of women were welcomed in settings formerly closed to them, including major orchestras. The situation was shrewdly characterized by Jessie Barratt Handley, an organist and trainer of boys’ voices employed during the war by one of London’s largest and “most fashionable” churches: “Now is woman’s opportunity—the best she is ever likely to get.”153 During the postwar years, women hired by orchestras were regularly let go, either to help men return to prewar positions or on a remarkable search for “unity of sound,” a characteristic that remained undisturbed by the traditional participation of the female harpist.154 SWM correspondence in the immediate postwar years is concerned with the continued exclusion of women from the governing bodies of musical institutions, an issue already raised in the 1918 Special Number of The Music Student. As Marion Scott pointed out in her contribution to that issue, the Philharmonic Society “only tolerates women as Associates or Fellows, denies them the privilege of membership, and so automatically excludes them from all share in the governance of the Society!”155 In a 1920 letter to musicologist and SWM president Kathleen Schlesinger, Gertrude Eaton, honorary secretary, urged the importance of addressing this problem but thought it best to keep herself in the background: “I think I am too much connected with the suffrage movement, so am better out of it.” Another issue dealt with in 1920 was seeing that Emily Daymond received the Oxford doctorate she had qualified for years before.“I agree with you,”

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Eaton wrote Katharine Eggar, “that this is quite a move to be associated with the S.W.M., and will give confidence to women who are still fighting their way, that we should back them. I think it is excellent, too, for Miss Schlesinger to start this, as she has in no way supported the feminist movement up to now.” Dr. Daymond did receive her degree (in 1921), and an abuse long denounced by the music press was at last terminated. In 1928, ten years after The Music Student’s Special Number on women’s work in music, Katharine Eggar wrote a decade-anniversary update for the Women’s Employment Publishing Company. In it she reports with pleasure that “the old barrier of the Royal Philharmonic Society has . . . been pierced since then: women are now eligible as members, and last season two places among the violas of the orchestra were filled by women.”156 There is additional good news in the advance of women to full professorships in the academies; however, the governing bodies of major musical institutions remained all male. Except for these brief reports of progress, most of Eggar’s article looks back to The Music Student issue of 1918 in a mood of nostalgia. Out of sympathy with the twentieth century’s new musical idioms, Eggar says little more about women composers than to quote Ethel Smyth’s dispirited statement that “until time enough has elapsed for a certain all-round emancipation of the female spirit to bear fruit, it will be impossible to decide what ‘contribution’ women are making—or are capable of making—to the spiritual riches of the Universe.” Born in 1874, Katharine Eggar grew up at a time when women’s works were often performed, not only by conservatory orchestras, but in the public concert world. Alice Mary Smith (Mrs. Meadows White), whose cantata, “Ode to the Passions,” was discussed in Stephen Stratton’s 1883 talk before the Royal Musical Association, had been honored years earlier by Female Professional Associate membership in the Philharmonic Society (1867) and awarded honorary membership in the Royal Academy of Music in 1884.157 Pianist and composer Dora Bright, the first woman to win the Charles Lucas medal for composition at the Royal Academy of Music in 1888, performed several of her compositions at Academy concerts during the eighties; the performance of her Piano Concerto at a Covent Garden Proms concert in 1888 was well reviewed, and still greater recognition came in 1892, when her Fantasia in G minor for piano and orchestra was played at a Philharmonic Society concert, its first performance of an orchestral work by a woman.158 But neither of these composers was able to find a publisher willing to bring out her orchestral works.Although her compositions included a string quartet, several symphonies, a clarinet concerto, and other cantatas, written between the 1860s and 1884, the year of her death, Alice Mary Smith found publishers willing to print only her songs and piano music, the sole genres seen as suitable for female talents;159

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none of Bright’s many works for orchestra was published.160 The same was true for Ethel Barns, composer of many chamber works, whose Concertstück for violin and orchestra was performed at the Promenade Concerts in 1907,161 and also for Katharine Eggar: well received performances, but no way to legitimize achievement by publication, so as to ensure repeated performance within and beyond the composer’s lifetime.162 Some women composers believed that their works were likely to be better received and more likely to be accepted for publication when they used male pseudonyms, a strategy Rebecca Clarke used for a different reason as late as 1918: planning a concert with a number of her own works caused her embarrassment at the prospect of seeing her name repeated on the program.163 Asked by Ellen Lerner, who interviewed her in New York in 1978, why she had chosen a male name, Clarke replied that “it seemed natural in those days.” She was surprised to find that reviewers paid far more attention to the pseudonymous “Anthony Trent” than they did to her; the writer for Vogue said that “among English composers, there was one who should be better known; his name was Anthony Trent.”164 Among the composers who made use of male pseudonyms were Jane Roeckel, guardian angel to Marie Hall, who published as Jules de Sivrai;165 Emma Maria Macfarren, as Jules Brissac;166 Augusta Holmès, who published a number of songs under the name “Hermann Zenta”;167 Lucie Johnstone, a singer and composer, who published as Lewis Carey;168 and Ethel Smyth, who used the initials E. M. when submitting work to publishers.169 The firm of Novello agreed to publish Smyth’s Mass in D only if the Queen attended its opening performance by the Royal Choral Society. Smyth replied that the Queen would not be there but that the Empress Eugénie would, and Novello offered instead to assume half of publication expenses.170 Born in 1862, Liza Lehmann began sustained work in composition only after her marriage, in 1894, ended her singing career; in later years she often wished she had given the same attention to the study of composition that she instead devoted to singing. She had not done so because “in those days women-composers were not thought of at all seriously.”171 If the situation improved during the eighties and nineties, when more of women’s music was heard, the improvement did not last. Henry Wood included the works of several women composers at his Queen’s Hall concerts during the first two decades of the century, but according to Arthur Jacobs, few besides Smyth won “more than a transitory interest from Wood’s audiences.”172 A notable exception was the 21-year-old Dorothy Howell, whose symphonic poem,“Lamia,” was premiered by Wood in September 1919; it met with such success that this work of the “girl composer” was repeated four more times during that season.173 Despite this

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unusual success, Howell’s work, like the work of other women composers, was soon forgotten. Even Ethel Smyth, her titles of “Doctor” and “Dame” notwithstanding, was remembered more for her colorful memoirs than for her musical achievements.174 Recent research on women musicians has been stimulated by the reexamination of the role of gender across scholarly disciplines that has taken place over the past several decades. A number of the contributors to this research are cited in the notes to this book: their titles—“unearthing,”“reclaiming,”“unsung,”“new-found”—convey their message.Their collective enterprise has shown how the creation, expression, and experience of music are linked to complex structures of practice and belief arising from assumptions concerning gender. As the highly gendered history of the violin clearly indicates, such practices and beliefs—still very much alive in attitudes toward women composers and conductors175—are no more immutable than other aspects of musical life and of the general culture whose values it both influences and reflects.

Notes

PREFACE 1. Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girl’s Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995): 29. Mitchell’s source is Florence B. Low,“The Reading of the Modern Girl,” Nineteenth Century 59 (1906): 278–87. 2. The Musical Times, December 1, 1881, contrasted the sophisticated music coverage in the Girl’s Own Paper with the situation of the “old days” when the “Musical Corner” featured in Eliza Cook’s Journal included “tea table talk” about songs of scant value; in contrast, the Times observed, articles in the Girl’s Own Paper are written by some of today’s best musicians (p. 264). The strikingly different presence of music in female and male education, both formal and informal, is illustrated by the infrequent coverage given music in the counterpart publication, The Boy’s Own Paper. In a review of thirty-eight issues (1884–1900) of the Boy’s Own Paper published between 1884 and 1900, I was able to find only a few articles on music: one each on how to play the guitar and xylophone, and one on the Westminster Choir School. The issue of June, 1893 featured a short story, “A Musical Degree,” in which a joke played on a musically inclined student shows him to be “the greenest fresher of the year.” 3. Christopher St. John was the name that the playwright and novelist Christabel Marshal chose for herself. In 1899, she worked as Secretary to Lady Randolph Churchill and her son Winston Churchill (Jessica DouglasHome, Violet:The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse; London: The Harvill Press, 1996: 76). By 1905, Chris (as she liked to be called) St. John was writing music criticism for the Lady and continued to do so at least into the First World War years; her 1915 review of a concert that featured the harpsichordist Violet Gordon Woodhouse is cited by Douglas-Home (Ibid., 135).

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4. “It is as undesirable for him [the popular novelist] to be in the vanguard of informed opinion as it is for him to be in the rearguard of public opinion.” P. J. Keating, “Fact and Fiction in the East End,” in The Victorian City, edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973): II, 585–586. CHAPTER ONE 1. On women and the piano, see Arthur Loesser, Men,Women and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Dover Publications, 1990; first published 1954); Mary Burgan,“Heroines at the Piano:Women and Music in NineteenthCentury Fiction,” in Nicholas Temperley, ed., The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Richard Leppert, “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano,” 19thCentury Music, XVI/2 (Fall 1992): 105–128. On professional pianists and composers of piano music, see Nancy B. Reich, “European Composers and Musicians, ca. 1800–1890,” in Karen Pendle, ed., Women and Music: A History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): 109–12, 116–17. 2. Burne-Jones’s comments on the piano were quoted in exhibition materials accompanying a display of his drawings and watercolors held at the Tate Gallery: summer, 1993. On his work on piano design for Broadwood, see Michael I. Wilson, “The Case of the Victorian Piano,” Victoria and Albert Museum Yearbook no. 3, 1972: 140–141. Roslyn Rensch, The Harp: Its History,Technique and Repertoire (New York: Praeger, 1969). 3. Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 102. 4. “A good harp costs as much as a grand piano, and a low-priced harp is always dears in the end.” Flora Klickman, “Musical Notes,” Sylvia’s Journal (October 1893): 564. 5. H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), 103–04. 6. Jim Samson, “Chopin Reception: Theory, History, Analysis,” in Jim Samson and John Rink, eds., Chopin Studies, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press: 1994), 10. Chopin’s preludes were typically described in such collections as “pearls” and the etudes as “tuneful gems.” Ibid. 7. Charles Hallé, The Autobiography of Charles Hallé with Correspondence and Diaries, ed. Michael Kennedy (London: Elek, 1972), 54. Selections of Chopin’s shorter works, especially the nocturnes and preludes, were available in anthologies for fairly advanced pianists, such as the three-booklet series described by Derek Carew, Well-Known Piano Solos, How to Play Them With Understanding, Expression And Effect. Carew writes that the “educational” text that introduced the music in this collection appeared to have as its purpose the imparting of a “veneer of ‘expression’ and technical proficiency but

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

without soul-searching. Blandness rules.” See Carew’s “Victorian Attitudes to Chopin” in Jim Samson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Chopin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 230. The Musical Gazette of December 4, 1900, commented that the granddaughters of women who, in girlhood, played the “accomplishment” piece, “The Battle of Prague,” now “trundle through Chopin.” Louise Mack [Mrs. Creed], The Music Makers: the Love Story of a Woman Composer. (London: Mills and Boon, 1914). An Australian author, Mack lived for much of her life in England and Europe. Ibid., 115. The G minor Ballade, opus 23, was one of the technically demanding works available in simplified and abridged editions. Samson, “Chopin Reception,” 10. Jeffrey Kallberg, “The Harmony of the Tea Table: Gender and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne,” Representations 39 (Summer 1992): 102–133. See pp. 111–113 on efforts to place Chopin’s music in the tradition of great works by emphasizing the “masculine” and minimizing the “feminine” characteristics of his music. The Polish-born, American pianist Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) is regarded as one of the greatest interpreters of Chopin. See Nicholas Slonimsky, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed. (New York: Schirmer, 1992). Huneker’s 1900 work, Chopin the Man and His Music, is quoted in Kallberg,“The Harmony of the Tea Table,” 111–112. On Richardson’s Leipzig experience, see “Some Notes on My Books,” Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer, 1940), reprinted in Southerly (Vol. 23, Number 1, 1963, ed. G.A. Wilkes (8–19). Henry Handel Richardson, Maurice Guest, 2 vols. (1908; London:William Heinemann Ltd., 1929), 1:157. George Grossmith, A Society Clown: Reminiscences of George Grossmith (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1888), 36. See Stephen Banfield,“The Artist and Society,” in Nicholas Temperley, ed., The Romantic Age 1800–1914, The Athlone History of Music in Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 12. Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) was an eminent Russian pianist, conductor, composer, and teacher (Slonimsky, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary). M. Pullan, Maternal Counsels to a Daughter (1855), 81. Quoted in Jehanne Wake, Princess Louise: Queen Victoria’s Unconventional Daughter (London: Collins, 1988), 90. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, 6th ed., 2 vols. (London: Metheun and Co., 1950), 1:119–20. Bettina Walker, My Musical Experiences, a new ed. (London: Richard Bentley and Son; New York: Novello, Ewer and Co., 1892), 33. A highly respected pianist and composer, Henselt (1814–1889) taught in Russia for 40 years, where he held important Court positions, trained “a generation of Russian pianists,” and developed a technique for piano study that Walker found pedagogically valuable and inspiring. (Slonimsky, Baker’s

Notes

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

231

Biographical Dictionary). In the preface to the “new edition” of her autobiography, Walker mentions the interest that the first edition of her book evoked in Henselt’s method (viii). See chapter 6 for a detailed discussion of the career of the woman singer. Edna Lyall [Ada Bayly], Doreen: The Story of a Singer (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1894), 127. Ibid., 287. Arthur Jacobs, Henry J.Wood: Maker of the Proms (London: Methuen, 1994), 142. See chapter Seven for exceptions to this generalization: the small number of female wind instrument players were well compensated and Rosabel Watson took pride in the competitive salaries she was able to pay the members of her all-women’s orchestra. Christopher Wood, Victorian Panorama (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), l32. Spectator, 22 May 1875, 660. I am grateful to Pamela Gerrish Nunn for sending me a copy of this picture and of the critical commentary on it. London Times, 24 May 1875. Illustrated London News, July 1875. Ehrlich, The Musical Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century, l08-l5. Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 269. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women:Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 27. Ibid., 26. “Women Who Work: no. xvi.—Their Numbers and Employments,” Pall Mall Gazette, 3 October 1884. Jane Crisp, Jessie Fothergill, 1851–1891: A Bibliography, Victorian Fiction Research Guides II (St. Lucia,Australia: Department of English, University of Queensland, 1980), 5. See Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English:Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), and the biography by Beatrice Marshall, Emma Marshall, A Biographical Sketch (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1901). “In alt” signified notes printed above the treble staff lines. Jessie Fothergill, The First Violin:A Novel (New York: R. F. Fenno and Co., 1904), 20. Crisp, Jessie Fothergill, 20. Fothergill, The First Violin, 311. Emma Marshall, Alma, Or The Story of a Little Music Mistress (New York: White and Allen, 1889). Ibid., 183. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 261.

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42. Ibid., 311. 43. The Marshalls lived in Gloucester between 1874 and 1880. 44. According to the novelist Robert Hichens who was acquainted with the bishop’s family, Mrs. Ellicott was “a born Bohemian” who preferred the society of musicians, opera singers, and even of actors and dancers, to that of the clergy: “The clergy in general, I think, were rather amazed at her.” Robert Hichens, Yesterday: The Autobiography of Robert Hichens (London: Cassell, 1947), 25–26. 45. Ibid., 26. 46. Sophie Fuller, The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States, 1629-Present (London and San Francisco: Pandora, 1994), 112–15. I am grateful to Sophie Fuller, who has generously shared her knowledge of the work of Ellicott and other composers with me. 47. See the section on composers in chapter 7. 48. Fuller, Pandora Guide, 114. 49. Magazine of Music (May 1892). 50. Fuller, Pandora Guide, 115. 51. Englishwoman’s Review, 14 September 1889, 414. Founded in 1866 as the successor to the English Woman’s Journal, the country’s first periodical dedicated to women’s advancement, the Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions was the “journal of record for the women’s movement” until the closing years of the century. Sheila R. Herstein, “English Woman’s Journal, Englishwoman’s Review,” in Sally Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988). 52. Men and Women of the Day (1890). 53. Fuller, Pandora Guide, 114. Ellicott was one of several women composers to enjoy the encouragement of August Manns, conductor of the Crystal Palace concerts. Michael Musgrave, The Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112. 54. Young Woman (1900–01). Other composers discussed in the article are Maude Valerie White,Alicia Needham, Frances Allitsen, and Cécile Chaminade. 55. According to Sophie Fuller, after the mid-1890s, Ellicott composed mostly chamber music. In the early years of the new century, she co-sponsored a series of chamber music concerts in Gloucester. Pandora Guide, 115. 56. George John Romanes, “Mental Differences Between Men and Women,” Nineteenth Century 21 (1887): 654–72. Romanes’s article was widely reprinted. Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: the Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 36. 57. Russett, Sexual Science, 35–38.The correlation of lower brain weight with the presumption of female intellectual inferiority enjoyed remarkable longevity, as attested by Ashley Montagu’s 1952 comment, “I have never met anyone outside, and few in, scientific circles who did not believe that women had smaller brains and therefore less intelligence than men.” (The Natural Superiority of Women, rev. ed, New York: Macmillan, 1968), 61.

Notes

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

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From the standpoint of today’s more complex neurological understandings, the ready acceptance by earlier scientists of a direct correlation between brain weight and intellectual capacity was clearly simplistic and typically tendentious. Recent research on male and female brains has found differences in size, structure, and in the effects of sex-linked hormones, but findings are often ambiguous and implications hotly contested. The average male brain weighs three pounds, its female counterpart 2.78 (Carol Turkington, The Brain Encyclopedia: New York: Facts on File, 1996); a recent popular synthesis of research by Daniel Drubach, Department of Neurology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, finds the brain/body ratio to be greater in females (The Brain Explained; Upper Saddle River, NJ: : Prentice Hall Health: 2000). Brain weight is subject to change due to aging and environmental influences (see the discussion of research on these factors in Dianne Hales, Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science Is Redefining What Makes Us Female; New York: Bantam Books, 1999: 245–46). Hales calls attention to the difficulties of distinguishing innate from environmental causes: “Because the brain is a work in progress, no one knows—nor may ever know—whether any sex differences are hard-wired at birth or a consequence of experience and education” (Ibid., 246). Similarly, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, in Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, warns against the tendency to oversimplification: “Bodies, minds, and cultures interact in such complex and profound ways that we cannot strip them down and compare them separately.” Mindful of the tenacious tradition of interpreting female difference as female insufficiency, she believes that “only as the separate cultures of men and women become more alike . . . will we be able to assess the possibility of unalterable sex differences.” (rev. ed; New York: BasicBooks, 1992, 270). The Mirror of Music, 1844–1944 (2 vols; London: Novello & Co. and Oxford University Press, 1947): I, 325. “Franz Schubert: A Study,” Monthly Musical Record, 1 February 1877. Ibid. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), Sect. 3. Quoted in Rosemary Agonito, History of Ideas on Woman: A Source Book (New York: Perigee Books, 1977), 131. Artiste, “Women as Composers,” Monthly Musical Record, 1 July 1877. “The Feminine in Music,” Musical Times, 1 October 1882. See the entry on Scudo by M. Gustave Choquet in J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (London: 1904–10). Later, the Royal Musical Association. Published in London in 1877 by William Reeves. NY: 1891 rev. ed: l2, 21. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 22.

234 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Ibid., 26–31. Stratton, Musical Association Proceedings; May 7, 1883: 116–17. Ibid., 131. Local exams for Cambridge and Oxford universities had been open to girls since 1870, and, in 1878, the University of London opened both examinations and degrees to women. Joyce Pedersen, The Reform of Girls’ Secondary and Higher Education in Victorian England (New York and London: Garland, 1987), 48–50. Stephen S. Stratton, “Women in Relation to Musical Art,” Musical Association Proceedings (1883): 131. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 133–36. In his essay, “Of Women,” Schopenhauer declared women’s reasoning power to be weak and held that “the most distinguished intellects among the whole sex have never . . . given to the world any work of permanent value in any sphere.” “Woman is not meant to undergo great labor, whether of the mind or of the body. . . . Women exist in the main solely for the propagation of the species. . . .” Arthur Schopenhauer, The Works of Schopenhauer, ed.Will Durant (abridged ed., New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1928): 446, 450, 452. Stratton, “Woman in Relation to Musical Art,” Musical Association Proceedings., 1883: 138. Ibid., 138. “Women as Composers,” Musical Times, 1 February 1887. Romanes, “Mental Differences Between Men and Women,” 657. “The ‘Eternal Feminine’ Question,” Magazine of Music (June 1894). Ibid. Anton Rubinstein, A Conversation on Music, trans. Mrs. John P. Morgan (New York: Chas. F.Tretbar, 1892), l18–19. “In the ancient history of textual and visual representation in the West, music is commonly personified as a beautiful young woman. . . .” Richard Leppert, “Sexual Identity, Death, and the Family Piano,” 124. Langley, “Victorian Periodicals and the Arts,” 1240. Stratton, “Women in Relation to Musical Art,” 131. “Women as Composers,” Musical Times, 1 February 1887. Magazine of Music; December, 1895. The Magazine of Music strongly disapproved of the latter development, although it disagreed with a correspondent who urged legislation to terminate the practice of female flute- and clarinet-playing.The Magazine believed that public pressure would prevent the practice from becoming a fashion because of the “sacrifice of personal attractiveness.” (September 1892): 180. Olga Samaroff-Stokowski, “Women in Music,” Music Clubs Magazine 19 (1937): 8. Fuller, Pandora Guide, 72–74. Bright lived from 1863 to 1951. Ethel Barns (1874–1948); see Fuller, Pandora Guide, 44–46.The house of Schott published many of Barns’s works for violin and piano. “From the

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1860s onwards increasing amounts of music written by women were published. But women were only expected to write easy songs and piano pieces that mirrored the prevalent view of woman as gentle, passive and pretty. . . . It was almost impossible for women composers to publish anything other than songs or piano works. Much chamber and orchestral music that was painstakingly copied out by hand for performance has simply not survived.” Sophie Fuller, “Unearthing a World of Music:Victorian and Edwardian Women Composers,” Women: A Cultural Review 3 (1992): 21. 93. “Women as Composers of Chamber Music,” Music Student Supplement (May 1914). 94. The Mass in D was performed in January 1893, with Joseph Barnby conducting. The Empress Eugénie had arranged for a visit by Smyth to Balmoral, during which she presented portions of the Mass to the Queen. This set into motion a chain of influence led by the Duke of Edinburgh, a strong advocate for music and an avid amateur musician. Smyth’s good friend Eugénie underwrote Novello’s publication of the work. For background on the performance, see Ethel Smyth, Streaks of Life (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1921), 98–111; and Ethel Smyth, As Time Went On (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1936), 166–69.The reviewer in the Magazine of Music (March 1893) pointed out as a near-certainty that Smyth’s Mass would not have been produced under the Royal Choral Society’s auspices except for the patronage of the Queen and Empress. The critic, almost certainly the acerbic John F. Runciman (1866–1916; the article is signed J. F. R.), praises the work as a notable achievement flawed by excessive ambition: “The qualities most to be looked for in a sacred work from a female pen—grace, sentiment, melodic charm, and deep religious feeling—are scarcely to be found in her score.” 95. Marcia J. Citron, “European Composers and Musicians, 1880–1918,” in Karen Pendle, ed., Women and Music: A History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 138. Tovey compared Smyth’s Mass to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, “noting that both are spiritual, not liturgical, works. He admired the vocal writing and declared the ‘the score should become a locus classicus for the whole duty and privileges and choral orchestration.’” Jane A. Bernstein, “Ethel Smyth,” in Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel, eds., Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995), 138. According to Smyth, the eminent German conductor Hermann Levi was deeply impressed by the dramatic power of her Mass and encouraged her to write opera. See Jane A. Bernstein, “‘Shout, Shout, Up with Your Song!’: Dame Ethel Smyth and the Changing Role of the British Woman Composer,” in Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, eds., Women Making Music:The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 309–10. See also Elizabeth Wood, “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts,” in Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender

236

96. 97.

98. 99.

100.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 182. Fuller, Pandora Guide, 295. Thomas Beecham, “The Position of Women in Music,” in Vogue’s First Reader, introduction by Frank Crowninshield (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1944), 416–20.The book was copyrighted in 1942 by Condé Nast Publications, Inc., New York. Ibid., 416. Beecham was aware that his opposition to mixed-sex orchestras would have been considered as “heretical or blasphemous.” He objected to his feeling of constraint in having to “behave like a little gentleman” while wanting to express himself freely during rehearsals. He also objected to the distracting presence of attractive women and quoted a member of his orchestra as saying,“‘If she is attractive I can’t play with her, and if she is not then I won’t.’” (420). The tie was broken in Bloch’s favor by music philanthropist and festival founder Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who became a close friend of Clarke and later told her of the shock the jury received when they learned that her anonymously submitted work had been written by a woman. On Clarke, see Nancy B. Reich, “Rebecca Clarke: An Uncommon Woman,” Sounds Australian (1993–94): 14–16, and two articles by Liane Curtis:“Rebecca Clarke and Sonata Form: Questions of Gender and Genre,” Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 393–429; and “A Case of Identity: Rebecca Clarke,” Musical Times 137 (May 1996): 15–21. Poldowski (1879–1932) was the pseudonym of Irene Regine Wieniawska later Lady Dean Paul. Her mother was English and her father, Henryk Wieniewski,was an eminent Polish violinist and composer. Poldowski was best known for her art songs, many of them to texts by French poets. Amy Beach (1879–1961) composed orchestral and chamber music as well as works for piano; a number of her important works were written during the interwar period. See Adrienne Fried Block: Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian:The Life and Works of the American Composer, 1867–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Gena Branscombe (1881–1977), a choral conductor, wrote songs, choral and chamber music, and an orchestral suite. Ruth Crawford (Seeger) wrote songs and chamber music early in her career, then turned to folk song arrangements. She is best known for a muchadmired string quartet, written in 1931, which Virgil Thomson characterized as a distinguished and noble work. See Judith Tick, “Ruth Crawford,” in Sadie and Samuel, eds., Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, and Tick’s recent biography, Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer’s Search for American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–83) was a composer of opera, orchestral and chamber works, and songs. See her autobiography, A Goldfish Bowl (London: Cassell, 1972), and Meirion Harries and Susan Harries, A Pilgrim Soul: the Life and Work of Elisabeth Lutyens (London: Joseph, 1989). Elizabeth Ma-

Notes

237

conchy (b. 1907) has written many works for orchestra, as well as chamber music, songs, choral music, and operas. All these composers are profiled in the Norton/ Grove Dictionary, in Fuller’s Pandora Guide, and in Baker’s Biographical Dictionary (8th ed.).

CHAPTER TWO 1. For an analysis of Spencer’s writings on women and the work of later social theorists, see Lorna Duffin,“Prisoners of Progress:Women and Evolution,” in Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin, eds., The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World (London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1978), 59–62. 2. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 3. Joyce Pedersen, The Reform of Girls’ Secondary and Higher Education in Victorian England (New York and London: Garland, 1987). 4. June Purvis, A History of Women’s Education in England (Milton Keynes/Philadelphia: Open University Press,1991): 90. 5. The phrase is taken from a review of Maria L. Grimaldi,“The Art of Piano Playing and Teaching” published in The Lady, 6 August 1885. 6. J. A. Banks and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), l22. 7. Angela Burdett-Coutts, ed., Women’s Mission; A Series of Congress Papers on the Philanthropic Work of Women (London: S. Low, Marston, and Co., Ltd, 1893), xix. 8. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women:Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 212. 9. H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877). 10. See, for example, J. A. Fuller Maitland, English Music in the XIXth Century (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1902); see also William Gatens “Music and Morals,” in Sally Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988). 11. Charles Segal,“The Female Voice and Its Contradictions: From Homer to Tragedy,” Grazer Beitrage, Supplementband 5 (Festschrift W Potscher) (1993): 61–62. 12. The term “songbird” often appears in interviews with concert singers that appeared in girls’ and women’s magazines. See chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion of the woman singer. 13. Quoted in Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 57. 14. Octavia Hill, “ A Few Words to Volunteer Visitors Among the Poor,” in Our Common Land (London: Macmillan, 1877), 59- 60. Quoted in Anne Summers,“A Home from Home:Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth

238

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Century,” in Sandra Burman, ed., Fit Work for Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 55. Vicinus, Independent Women, 219. See Dave Russell, Popular Music in England, 1840-1914: A Social History (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1987): 26-31 and Percy Scholes, The Mirror of Music:1844–1944, 2 vols. (London: Novello, 1947). Lillian Lewis Shiman,“The Band of Hope Movement: Respectable Recreation for Working-Class Children,” Victorian Studies 17 (1973): 49–74. By 1886, there were 15,000 members in three separate choirs. Reprinted in W. Stanley Jevons, Methods of Social Reform and Other Papers (London: Macmillan, 1883), 3. Recent scholarship has challenged the older view, represented by Jevons, on the disappearance of fairs. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 14. Gareth Stedman Jones, “Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class,” Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 477, 490–9l. E. F. Almaz, “The Music-Hall Singer,” The Lady, 24 December 1908, 1188–89. On the greater favor shown halls by the middle classes, see Dagmar Höher, “The Composition of Music Hall Audiences,” in Peter Bailey, ed., Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1986), 85–86.Also see Peter Bailey,“Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture,” Past and Present 144 (1994): 138–70. On the sisters’ relationship, see Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill (London: Constable, 1990), 33–34. Janice Robins Nadelhaft, Punch among the Aesthetes: a chapter in Victorian Criticism (Ph.D.Thesis, UCLA/English, 1970): 198. Florence Marshall, “Music and the People,” The Nineteenth Century 14 (1880): 923. The Diaries of Mary Countess of Meath, Edited by her Husband (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d.) l3-l4; diary entry dated 1880. The Musical Times, 1 December 1880. Octavia Hill, “Colour, Space, and Music for the People,” The Nineteenth Century 18 (1884): 745–46. See the entry on Hill by Susanne Graver in Sally Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain:An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988). Hill, “Colour, Space, and Music for the People,” 745–46. For further information on the Kyrle Society see Ian Fletcher, W. B.Yeats and His Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man (London: Allison and Bushby, 1980). Lady’s Pictorial, 16 January 1886. The Musical Herald, 1 May 1908. On the prominent participation of musicians, including Wilma Neruda, Charles Hallé, and Christine Nilsson in the Grosvenor’s inner circles, see

Notes

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

239

Paula Gillett, “Art Audiences at the Grosvenor Gallery,” in Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, eds., The Grosvenor Gallery:A Palace of Art in Victorian England (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996), 39–58. Lady Radnor’s orchestra and chorus first performed in 1881. Their last concert was given in 1896. Helen Radnor, From A Great-Grandmother’s Armchair (London: Marshall Press, 1928). Marshall, “Music and the People,” 923. Queen, 1 April 1881. Musical Opinion; April 1, 1881. Radnor, From A Great-Grandmother’s Armchair, 103. Ibid. The Court Circle, May 1882, 2. Radnor, From A Great-Grandmother’s Armchair, 103. The Musical Times, 1 April 1881. The historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee was Arnold Toynbee’s nephew. Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1918), 1: 142–43. On the finances of the Church, see Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1996). Elizabeth Langland cites examples of resistance to philanthropists’ condescension: Nobody’s Angels, 58–59. Mrs. Russell Barrington, “The Kyrle Society,” Good Words, 22 (188l). Anne Summers, “A Home from Home,” in Burman, Fit Work for Women, 44. Lady Violet Greville, Vignettes of Memory (London: Hutchinson, 1927), 153–54. Ibid., 158. Shaw grew up in a musical family, his mother a singer and music teacher; he began his career as music critic. Dan Laurence, ed. Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, 3 vols., 2nd rev. ed. (London: Max Reinhardt,The Bodley Head), 1: 13. The concertina, an accordion-like, hexagon-shaped instrument invented early in the nineteenth century, was a popular salon instrument. “Me and the Missis on Entertainments for the People,” Punch, 28 May 1881, 252. The mock-monologue deals with a visit to a Whitechapel art exhibition. Punch, Christmas Number, 1893. People’s Concert Society, 27th Report (1904–05). Marshall, “Music and the People,” 928. Florence Marshall, “Music and the People,” The Nineteenth Century (December 1880), 924. Marshall, “Music and the People,” 925. Music Review, 10 March 1883; reprinted in Laurence. Laurence, ed., Shaw’s Music, 1: 204. Marshall, “Music and the People,” 921. The Musical World, 27 February 1886. The Musical World, 4 December 1886.

240 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 “Music for the People,” The Musical Times, 1 September 1881. The Strad 1907, p. 224. Marshall, “Music and the People,” 924. Obituary, London Times, 7 March 1922. See the entry, “People’s Concert Society,” in J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1878–90) See also Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill (London: Constable, 1990); and E. Moberly Bell, Octavia Hill: A Biography (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1943). Music Review, 17 March 1883; Laurence, ed., Shaw’s Music, vol. 1, p. 200. Radnor, From a Great-Grandmother’s Armchair, l05. Parry (1848–1918) became Director of the Royal College of Music in 1895. He described Lady Radnor as a fine vocalist:“[She] sings better than any amateur I ever heard—French, Italian, English and Schubert all equally well.” Charles L. Graves, Hubert Parry: His Life and Works, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1926): I: 138. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971): 222, 284–5, 290–2. From The Musical Herald’s report on Ethel Robinson’s address to the International Congress of Women: “Music for the People,” August 1, 1899. People’s Concert Society, 27th Report, 4. I am grateful to Cyril Ehrlich for calling my attention to the work of Cons and Baylis, and for directing me to several sources drawn on in this chapter. See Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); and Cicely Hamilton and Lilian Baylis, The Old Vic (New York: George H. Doran and Co., 1926). Hollis, Ladies Elect, 310. Beatrice Potter Webb, My Apprenticeship (New York and London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1926), 258. Morley died in 1886; Cons served as honorary secretary and trustee of the college. It was formally organized in 1889, having begun as a program of evening classes in the theater dressing rooms four years earlier. See entry on Morley College in Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). These were arranged by Alice Hart, sister of Cons’s friend, Henrietta Barnett, and wife of the physician and social reformer Ernest Hart. Edward J. Dent, A Theatre for Everybody:The Story of the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells (London:T.V. Boardman and Co., Ltd., 1945), 29. Ibid., 29. The Musical World, 1 April 1882. The Music Review, 10 March 1883. The Illustrated London News, 22 June 1884. This account draws on Lillian Baylis, “Emma Cons: The Founder of the Vic,” in Hamilton and Baylis, The Old Vic.

Notes 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101.

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110.

241

Dent, A Theatre for Everybody, 36. Ibid., 32. From a speech by Baylis quoted in Hamilton, The Old Vic, 189. Dent, A Theatre for Everybody, 40. See Nicholas Comyn Gatty, “The Old Vic,” in H. C. Colles, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (London, 1927–28). Dent, A Theatre for Everybody, 36. Ibid., 68–69. Ethel Smyth, Female Pipings in Eden (London: P. Davies, Ltd., 1934), 176. See article on Besant by Clinton Machann in Walter B. Thesing, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 135: British Short Fiction Writers, 1880–1914:The Realist Tradition (Detroit: Gale Research, 1993). Walter Besant, The Autobiography of Sir Walter Besant (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1902), 243. Ibid., 348. Deborah E. Weiner, “The People’s Palace: An Image for East London,” in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., Metropolis London: Histories and Representations Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1989), 42. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 290–291. Handbook, p. 5; a copy is in the British Library. Palace Journal, 16 November 1887. I am most grateful to the library staff of Queen Mary and Westfield College for providing me with access to the Palace Journal. Queen Mary College absorbed the People’s Palace Technical Schools and the East London Technical College. See “Queen Mary College” in Weinreb and Hibbert, London Encyclopaedia. The People’s Palace for East London, British Library. Palace Journal, 12 December 1888.The note was signed “MUSICUS.” Walter Besant,“The Amusements of the People,” The Contemporary Review, March 1884, 344. Ibid., 353. “The Late Sir Walter Besant,” Times, June 16, 1901. Palace Journal, 16 November 1887. Palace Journal, 15 May 1889. Simon Joyce notes that the choral society was the only People’s Palace club to outlast the Palace’s metamorphosis from a place of “delight” or recreation to one of education, especially, technical education. Joyce attributes the sharp falling off in philanthropic support that led to the Draper’s Company takeover of the People’s Palace (and the shift to technical education) to fears of working class radicalism stimulated by the West End riots of 1886–87. Simon Joyce, “Castles in the Air: The People’s Palace, Cultural Reformism, and the East End Working Class,” Victorian Studies 39 (1996): 513–38. See the article on Black in Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (New Haven and London:Yale

242

111.

112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 University Press, 1990). Black’s sister, Constance (Black) Garnett, later famous as a translator of Russian novels, worked at the People’s Palace in the late 1880s. (See article on Garnett, Ibid.) Palace Journal, 14 November 1888.The Ranee Margaret of Sarawak, wife of Charles Brooke, the second Rajah, became a friend of the Elgars. In her 1934 memoir, she enjoyed recounting the experience of playing duets with W. H. Reed, leader of the London Symphony orchestra, whom she met through Edward Elgar’s introduction. Lady Margaret Brooke [The Ranee Margaret of Sarawak], Good Morning and Good Night (1934; reprint London: Century Publishers; New York: Hippocrene Books, 1984). Palace Journal, 12 December 1888. Palace Journal, various issues; Gertrude Gow, “On Chorus Singing for Girls,” Girl’s Realm (1900–01): 1038. I wish to thank archivists at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, where I spent one month in 1996 as Mellon Fellow, for providing me with access to letters written by Watson and to the typescript memoir (with handwritten addenda) that she wrote when in her nineties: “Some Memories of My Life in Music and the Theatre.” The date on the cover page appears to be August 1957, but the final two digits are unclear.Watson died on October 6, 1959. The account of her life given in this chapter draws on the memoir, unless otherwise noted. In her memoir,Watson’s chronology is often vague. Weinreb and Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia, 61. A brief description of the school was given in Strad 22 (1911): 190. CHAPTER THREE

1. Maude Stanley, Clubs for Working Girls (London: Macmillan, 1890), 14–15. 2. The tonic sol-fa is a method of teaching singing in which the notes of the major scale are sung to syllables (doh, ray, mee, etc.) in which doh always represents the keynote. 3. The Musical Herald, 1 October 1912, 303. 4. The Graphic, 25 June 1870. 5. Guy De Charnacé, A Star of Song! The Life of Christina Nilsson, trans. J. C. M. and E. C. (New York: Press of Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1870), 8. 6. Ibid., 38. 7. The Athenaeum, 22 June 1867. 8. On the use of the word “girl” during this period, see Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6–9. 9. Who Was Who (London: A. and C. Black, 1916); Stanley died on July 14, 1915. 10. In an 1895 Strand Musical Magazine article on the Royal Academy of Music, Alexander Mackenzie, R. A. M. Principle, gives the fee as 11

Notes

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

243

guineas per term; in 1884, an article on the Academy listed tuition as 10 guineas per term plus entrance fee. I wish to express thanks to Bridget Palmer of the Royal Academy of Music library for checking Hotten’s records for me. Unless otherwise noted, the source for biographical information on de Lara is her autobiography, Finale, in collaboration with Clare H-Abrahall (London: Burke, 1955). George de Lara became a comedian and later, a composer of “light songs” and a theatrical producer. De Lara, Finale, 21. Aunt Russell was the wife of the popular composer Henry Russell and the mother of the musician Landon Ronald. De Lara, Finale, 30. Jerrod Northrup Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 295–96. Johnstone became an important patron of Elgar. De Lara, Finale, 65. Lewis Foreman, Music in England, 1885–1920 (London: Thames Publishing, 1994), 69; held at St. James’s Hall, the concert was conducted by Henry Wood. New York Public Library, Lincoln Center Performing Arts Branch clipping file; no date on this clipping; a similar article in Musical America was dated December 9, 1905. The Strad (1910): 20–22.The interviewer was B. Henderson, the same man who interviewed Hall a month after her London debut. On the philanthropy of the poor, see F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Baker’s Biographical Dictionary describes him as an amateur and A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1904–10) as a member of the Carl Rosa Orchestra. Ainslee (May 1907), 149. In the account he gives of Hall’s early years, E. H. Fellowes denies that she ever played in the streets for handouts. I have chosen to follow the story as given in her own articles and interviews, recognizing that elaboration on the facts, by herself or by an interviewer or editor, are entirely possible, Edmund Fellowes. Memoirs of an Amateur Musician (London: Methuen, 1946): 80–81. Wilhelmj was appointed Professor of violin at the Guildhall School in 1894. His second wife was Mariella Mausch, a pianist. Ainslee (May 1907): 149. Ibid. Broadway (1906). Obituary, The Musical Herald, 1 October 1907. See the article on Miles by Colles in A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd ed. (London: 1927–28) Broadway (1906): 52. As described in the preface to the first (January) issue.

244

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 CHAPTER FOUR

1. The Fiddler (1886). 2. Freia Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper: die musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1991), 190. Hoffman has found the same arguments used in German sources. 3. F. G. Edwards, in his article, “Lady Violinists.” The Musical Times, Nov. 1, 1906, p. 739, attributes this comment to Henry Chorley (1808–72), a member of The Athenaeum staff from 1833–1871; F. G. Edwards, in his article,“Lady Violinists,” The Musical Times, attributes the comment to Chorley.The full quotation is of interest for the extramusical perception that the woman violinist was, by the fact of her performance on this instrument, calling attention to herself: “It is a strange coincidence that a lady violinist playing music of the highest class should be just now drawing attention to herself in Paris and in Boston. In the former capital Madame NormanNeruda performed Mendelssohn’s concerto at the last of M. Pasdeloup’s concerts, while Madame Camilla Urso has several times of late played Beethoven’s concerto in the American city. The fair sex are gradually encroaching on all man’s privileges.” The Athenaeum; Feb.20, 1869. 4. Bertha Thomas, The Violin-Player:A Novel, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1880). Other fictional works about female violinists will be discussed in this and the following chapter. 5. Mrs. Humphry [Mary Augusta] Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888; reprint Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 175.Ward characterizes the works of Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein as “those passionate voices of the subtlest moderns.” 6. See article on the violin in Stanley Sadie, ed., New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1984). 7. Percy A. Scholes, The Mirror of Music, 1844–1944;A Century of Musical Life in Britain, 2 vols. (London: Novello, 1947), 1:343. 8. The words are those of Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces, 2d ed., 2 vols. (London, 1775), II: 111, quoted in Howard Irving, “‘Music as a Pursuit for Men’: Accompanied Keyboard Music as Domestic Recreation in England.” College Music Symposium, vol. 30, no. 2 (Fall, 1990) 129. 9. From entry on Mara by Jeffery [sic] Mark; Grove, 3d. ed. 10. Henry Saxe Wyndham, The Annals of Covent Garden Theatre from 1732 to 1897, 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1906), 1:249. 11. “Lady Violinists,” The Musical Times, 1 October 1906. 12. The Musical Times, 1 November 1906, 738–39. 13. H. Heathcote Statham, What is Music? A Brief Analysis for the General Reader (London: Chatto and Windus, 1912), 106. Statham was the editor of the Builder, a Fellow of the Royal Philharmonic Society, and author of several books on music. 14. “How to Play the Violin,” The Girl’s Own Paper (1880).

Notes 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

245

Ibid. Sylvia’s Journal (December 1892): 14. “How to Play the Violin,” The Young Woman (1893). In medieval Europe, musical instruments were often classified by gender associations: “For example, in the folk theater of Luzern and in bridal processions in Frankfurt, the male partner was associated with drums, trumpets, and pipes, and the female with harps, viols, and lutes. . . . Class and sex distinctions . . . are also found in other cultures, such as India and Java.” Margaret J. Kartomi, On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 143. In his comprehensive work, The History of Musical Instruments (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), Curt Sachs discussed the gender associations of a number of instruments, among them, the flute, whose shape gave it a phallic identity (“Even in modern occidental slang the penis is designated by flute names”) and the trumpet, an instrument he described as played exclusively by men and one whose military character was enhanced by the use of the color red in woolen wrappings and military bands, “an astonishing example of the tenacity of early traditions” (44, 48). Reflecting on recent cross-cultural musical studies, Ellen Koskoff writes that “like many aspects of social, political and ritual life, musical roles in most societies still tend to be divided along gender lines. Certain activities, instruments, performing contexts, rituals, ceremonies, and so on, are seen as the primary responsibility of either men or women, rarely both. It seems clear that the division of musical roles based on gender arises from the intersection of culturally held notions of sexuality and power.” “Gender, Power, and Music,” in The Musical Woman: An International Perspective, ed. Judith Lang Zaimont (vol. III, 1986–90): 769–70. George Grossmith, A Society Clown: Reminiscences of George Grossmith (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1888), 36. Hoffmann, Instrument und Körper: 190. Frederick Dolman, “Lady Hallé at Home,” The Woman’s World (1890).The prejudice against women violinists appears to have been similarly longlasting in the United States. An 1893 article in the Sewanee Review commented that two decades earlier, it was “an odd sight, and one that rarely failed to elicit visible and audible comment, not always charitable, when a girl or young woman carried a violin case through the streets of a city.” T. L. Krebs,“Women as Musicians,” Sewanee Review 2 (1893): 81, quoted in Julianna Moore, “A Comprehensive Performance Project in Flute Literature with an Essay, A Study of Female Flutists Before 1900” (D. M. A. thesis, University of Iowa, 1990), 48–49. “Woman in Relation to Musical Art.”The talk was delivered at the meeting of May 7, 1883, and was published, with an account of the discussion that followed, in the Association’s Proceedings (1883): l23–46. See Lucy Green,“Gender, Musical Meaning, and Education,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 2 (Fall 1994): 99–102; and the same author’s Music, Gender, Education (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5–11.

246

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Peter Ostwald’s perception that psychological differences in the relation of performers to instruments depend, in part, on their mode of engagement with the player’s body, is similar to Green’s interpretive scheme, except that the latter is applied to the audience rather than the musicians. “The Psychodynamics of Musicians:The Relationship of Performers to Their Musical Instruments,” Medical Problems of Performing Artists 7 (1992): 110–113. R. J. Hawkins, “Pythagoreanism,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed.Ted Honderich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Admitting his error, Socrates’s young friend Simmias adds defensively that he was misled by a “plausible analogy” that most people find persuasive. “Phaedo,” in Classics of Western Philosophy, 4th ed., ed. Steven Cahn (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1995), 89–96. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a reference from 1483. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 26–27.“The view that women’s nerves were normatively distinct from men’s, normatively making them creatures of greater sensibility, became a central convention of eighteenth-century literature” (27). Ibid., 27–28. “The emotional force in women is usually stronger, and almost always more delicate than in men. Their constitutions are like those of fine violins which vibrate to the lightest touch. . . .” Quoted by Clara A. Macirone, “A Plea for Music,” second letter; The Girl’s Own Paper, 1884 (269) from an article Haweis published in the Contemporary Review. Ethel Smyth, As Time Went On (New York and London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1936), 139. See Elizabeth Wood’s discussion of this passage in “Lesbian Fugue: Ethel Smyth’s Contrapuntal Arts,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 173. Ward, Robert Elsmere, 175–76. Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies, ed. Alan Manford (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Ibid., 137. Mary Remnant, Musical Instruments: An Illustrated History from Antiquity to the Present (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1989), 68. S. Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Instruments, 3:263. “During the 18th century performances were directed from the keyboard and early in the 19th century by the first violinist waving his bow at his colleagues when he was not playing.” From the entry, “baton,” in Michael Kennedy, The Oxford Dictionary of Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). S. Sadie, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, 3:256–58; Remnant, Musical Instruments. Evoking this analogy,Yehudi Menuhin has suggested that the attachment the violinist feels to his bow is like the knight’s to his sword. Menuhin, The Vio-

Notes

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

247

lin, trans. Ed Emery (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1996), 39. Perhaps this analogy was familiar to some Victorians; the violinist Gabrielle Vaillant used it in response to the music educator John Hullah’s expression of “astonishment at the bow having been placed in the right hand of the performer, while the violin itself was reserved for the left hand. I suggested that thus of old were held the sword in the right hand and the shield in the left.” “How to Improve on the Violin,” The Girl’s Own Paper (1893): 637. Despite this military association,Vaillant considered the violin “eminently the ladies’ instrument, for if it require some strength in the performer, it assuredly needs at least as much delicacy of touch and of feeling, although we do not wish to drive men from the field; yet we rejoice to find that we are now a recognised, indispensable element in the musical performances at home and in public” (636).According to Baroque violinist Andrew Manze, Giuseppe Tartini was one of many violin virtuosos known for their fine swordsmanship: see Manze’s notes included with his CD of music by Tartini: “The Devil’s Sonata and Other Works,” Harmonia Mundi CD HMU 907213 (1997) Menuhin, The Violin, 16. Remnant, Musical Instruments, 47; note her quote of Bachmann and Curt Sachs’s skepticism; Sachs regarded the supposed development of the musical from the hunting bow as “plausible but wrong.” Sachs, History of Musical Instruments, 56. So fine was the sisters’ playing that the audience was said to have quickly overcome the initial sense of grotesqueness at seeing two girls performing on the instrument. The Athenaeum, 24 May 1845, 524. “The Violin Bow,” The Musical World, 12 August 1865. “Joachim & Sarasate,” The Theatre, 1 May 1883, 285. Joseph Wechsberg, The Glory of the Violin (New York: Viking, 1973), 256–57. Menuhin, “Part One:The Violin,” in Menuhin and William Primrose, Violin and Viola (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976), 7–9; I wish to thank Diana Cavalieri and Ralph Cavalieri for calling my attention to this passage. Highly respected as a dedicated teacher of female, as of male students, Menuhin, in his 1997 book The Violin, was far more appreciative of women players. Nevertheless, he placed only one, the French violinist Ginette Neveu, among musicians of the very highest rank, those who fuse deep passion with the utmost in musicality: “Ginette Neveu was the first among the great women violinists. . . .There were many other women violinists, including the graceful Cecilia Hansen, but their playing was transparent and delicate, whereas Ginette Neveu belonged to the race of passionate performers, burning with a volcanic fire” (142). Rita Steblin,“Death as a Fiddler:The Study of a Convention in European Art, Literature and Music,” Basler Jahrbuch fur Historische Musikpraxis 14 (1990): 276–77. Mary Anne Alburger, Scottish Fiddlers and Their Music (London:Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1983), 19.

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48. “The Fiddler and the Maids,” reprinted from Ruth L. Tongue, Somerset Folklore, in Katharine M. Briggs, A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language Incorporating the F. J. Norton Collection, Part B, Folk Legends, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971). 49. Henry IV, Part I (2.4). According to the Shakespeare scholar Hardin Craig, this expression was proverbial in 1597–98 when the play was written. Hardin Craig, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1951): 690, n534. 50. Marcia Herndon and Susanne Ziegler, eds., Music, Gender, and Culture (Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel Verlag; New York: C. F. Peters Corp., 1990). 51. The year of this performance was 1658. In 1661, after the restoration of the monarchy, Baltzar was appointed leader of the king’s band of 24 violins. Mrs.Walter Carr, author of the article on Baltzar in J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1904–10), credits him with advancing the position of the violin in England to “the head of all stringed instruments.” 52. Herbert Halpert, “The Devil, the Fiddle, and Dancing,” in Fields of Folklore: Essays in Honor of Kenneth S. Goldstein, ed. Roger Abrahams (Bloomington: Trickster Press, 1995), 44. For a modern adaptation of the devil/fiddle connection, see the short story by country and western musician Charlie Daniels, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” in The Devil Went Down to Georgia: Stories by Charlie Daniels (Atlanta: Peachtree Press, Ltd., 1985), and his recording of the song with the same title. 53. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Books, 1977): 65: 47b. For an overview of the music/evil theme in literature, see Suzanne June Leppe, “The Devil’s Music: A Literary Study of Evil and Music” (Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Riverside, 1978). In the Timaeus, Plato distinguishes between the immortal part of the soul, which includes the powers of reason and decision and is situated in the head, and the mortal parts that are located in the heart and belly and “comprise very roughly” the emotions and the physical appetites (16–17). See the introduction by Desmond Lee to this edition of Timaeus and Critias. 54. The Republic of Plato, trans. with notes and an interpretive essay by Allan Bloom (New York and London: Basic Books, 1968): 77–82: 398c - 403a. “Socrates ruthlessly subjects harmony and rhythm to the tales he wants told. Only those rhythms and harmonies which evoke the feelings appropriate to the new heroes are acceptable.” Quoted from Bloom’s interpretive essay in this volume, 360. 55. Leppe,“The Devil’s Music,” 24.According to Kathi Meyer-Baer, Orpheuslike images of Christ playing a lyre were present in early Christian art but disappeared after the third century when music took on an evil connotation.The image of Orpheus taming the animals was adapted in depictions of Christ as the good shepherd.“Thus, whereas Orpheus had liberated the soul from Hades through music, Satan came to lead the soul through music

Notes

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

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to hell.” Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 270–73. On the belief that the devil invented music, see Maximilan Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (1931; reprint New York: AMS Press, 1970), especially chapter XX,“The Devil, the World and the Flesh (II): Music, Dance and Drama of Infernal Origin.” Percy A. Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 91–92, 102–03, 331. Ibid., 183; 342; 352–53. Disapproval of fiddlers was especially intense in Norway during the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of severe social dislocation whose effects were especially strong in rural areas. Pietists, the “puritans” of Norway, castigated fiddlers for the sinful behavior encouraged by their music-making, and brought strong public pressure on them to destroy their instruments: “There are even a few documented instances of fiddlers who maimed their fingers or hands, lest they be tempted to play this ‘sinful’ instrument again.” It was the Hardanger or folk fiddle used to accompany dance that was the object of pietistic anger. Mary Elizabeth Neal, Devil’s Instrument, National Instrument: the Hardanger Fiddle as Metaphor of Experience in the Creation and Negotiation of Cultural Identity in Norway; Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Indiana University; 1991: 132, 134. Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 34. According to Curt Sachs, England and France lagged behind Italy in the craft of violinmaking because those countries “did not consider the violin the queen of instruments” and continued to regard it as a dance instrument, resisting its acceptance into chamber music. History of Musical Instruments, 359. “Music in Society,” in Ian Spink, ed., Music in Britain:The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 39. Even the rare professional performances of accompanied sonatas, by Giardini in 1760 and Boccherini in 1779 and 1783, featured women at the keyboard. Simon McVeigh, The Violinist in London’s Concert Life, 1750–1784: Felice Giardini and His Contemporaries (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1989), l34. Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), l20. This section draws on Leppert’s discussion of English ambivalence towards dance in the eighteenth century: Music and Image, 73–86. Several of the drawings (by Rowlandson and other artists) reproduced in this book show skeletal dancing master-fiddlers leading their pupils in an ambience strongly evocative of early depictions of the dance of death. Thomas Hardy, who, having learned the violin at the age of four or five, accompanied his father and uncle at country weddings and dances, emphasizes the psychological

250

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 and social differences between the seated and standing fiddler in his novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (first published in 1872). As the country party entertained by the fiddlers who make up the Mellstock Quire enters “a further phase of revelry,” the fiddlers “no longer sit down but kick back their chairs and saw madly at the strings with legs firmly spread and eyes closed— regardless of the visible world.” Hardy names the chapter that describes this scene of music and dance, “They Dance More Wildly.” Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, ed. Simon Gatrell (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), 54–55.This passage is discussed in W. Eugene Davis,“Phantasmal Orchestras: Incidental Music in Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd,” Ars Lyrica 8 (1994): l28–29. My thanks to the author for sending me a copy of this article as well as his unpublished essay, “‘Strange and Godlike . . . Power’: Music in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” where Hardy’s early mastery of the violin and country performances are discussed. Jan Susina,“Fairy Tales,” in Sally Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain:An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988). Jan Susina, “Folklore,” in Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain. Carole Silver, “Fairy Lore,” in Mitchell, ed., Victorian Britain. Lowry Charles Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 332–35. On the various European versions of the ballad, see Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1965): 1:493–95, 4:447–49; a version of “Binnorie” is included in Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed., The Oxford Book of Ballads (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), l04–106. See also the discussion in Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads, 68–71. Lowry Charles Wimberly points out that hair plays an important part in many ballads and in the magical practices of many cultures. Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads, 70–71. London Musical Courier, 6 July 1907. For Rosin le Beau; see issue of September 1902. Heron-Allen’s first wife, Marianne, was the daughter of the artist Rudolph Lehmann and sister of the composer Liza Lehmann.A solicitor, Heron-Allen published books and articles on mineralogy, marine biology, meteorology, and Persian literature. Who Was Who, vol. 4, 1941–1950 (London: Black, 1952). Liza Lehmann believed that he spent two to three years studying Persian so as to read the Rubaiyat in the original language. Liza Lehmann, Life of Liza Lehmann (1919; reprint New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 72. See the article on Gaspar da Salo in S. Sadie, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (London: 1980). See entry on Tartini, J.A. Fuller Maitland, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1904–10). Musical quotations appear occasionally in nineteenth-century novels. Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins includes repeated quotations from one section of Mendelssohn’s Elijah. I am grateful to Dell Hollingsworth, Music

Notes

75.

76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

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Curator at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, for making available to me her list of novels in this collection that include quotations of printed music. Rita [Eliza Humphreys], Countess Daphne: A Musical Romance (London: John and Robert Maxwell, 1884), 192–98. Rita (1850?–1938) was briefly married, in 1872, to a professor of music, Karl Otto Edmund Booth, and socialized in musical milieux. See the entry, “Rita,” in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English:Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1990); and Rita [Eliza Humphreys], Personal Opinions Publicly Expressed (London: E.Wash, 1907). John Meade Falkner, The Nebuly Coat and the Lost Stradivarius (1895; reprint New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 544. The German violinist and composer Louis Spohr discussed these and other rumors about Paganini in his autobiography; Spohr is quoted in John Sugden, Paganini (London: Omnibus Press, 1986), 59; See also the account by Fräulein Bauer who attended Paganini’s first Berlin performance; an excerpt from her posthumously published memoirs was reprinted in The Lute, January 1, 1885 (17). Leppe, “The Devil’s Music,” l22. The Musical World, 3 July 1886. The Violin Times (October 1896). Although the author’s name is not given, the translator’s is: Harold Fordyce Birch. “New Story of Paginini,” The Violin Times (January 1898). Reprinted in The Violin Times (October 1898). The Cinderella story had recently been brought to the public’s attention; ten years before Hall’s London debut, a collection of 345 variants of the folktale had been published, the first such comparative study. Susina,“Folklore.” Brooke Alder, “Miss Marie Hall, the Girl Violinist,” The Girl’s Realm (1902–03). “Episodes in the Career of a Violinist,” Ainslee (May 1907). Lancastrian, “Music in Blackpool,” The Strad (1907). “The Story of a Lost Strad,” The Violin Times (September 1894). Authorship of the story was ascribed to “The McAmati.” Cyril Erlich, The Music Profession in Britain since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), l02. Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 100. Punch, 12 June 1875. The Gentlewoman, 19 July 1890. Italics in the original. “Lady Violinists,” Strad (1894). The Musical Times, 1 November 1880. See illustration.Vernon Lushington, a judge active in positivist circles, was, like his wife Mary, a dedicated music lover; the Lushingtons were close friends of the family of Virginia Woolf, who later modeled her character,

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95. 96. 97.

98.

99.

100.

101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

Mrs. Dalloway, on that of Kitty Lushington Maxse, one of the young musicians in Hughes’s picture. Helen Mirald and Martha Vogeler,“A Life Devoted to Music: Susan Lushington in Kingsley,” Hampshire Studies (forthcoming); Anthony Curtis,“Kitty Maxse,The Real Mrs. Dalloway,” P. N. Review 7 (September-October 1997): 49–52; Anthony Curtis, “Margaret Lushington and the Stephens,” Charleston Magazine 17 (Spring-Summer 1998): 39–43. Tilden A. Russell,“The Development of the Cello Endpin,” Imago Musicae 4 (1985): 352–53. F. Joyce Barrett,“The Violin as an Instrument for Girls,” The Woman’s World 3 (1890): 652. Stephen Banfield, “Aesthetics and Criticism,” in The Romantic Age, 1800–1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley, Athlone History of Music in Britain (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 462;Thomas Gibbons,“Occultism,” in The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art, and Culture, ed. G. A. Cevasco (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1993), 442. My thanks to Jan Marsh for calling my attention to this photograph. Dodgson, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). See the article on Tua in The Girl’s Own Paper 5 (1883–84): 445; see also the entry on Tua by Alexis Chitty in J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1904–10). See J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1904–10) and Scholes, Mirror of Music, 1:343. Shinner died at the age of 39 in 1901. In addition to Neruda,Tua, and Shinner, an 1890 article mentions as “well-known soloists,” Nettie Carpenter, Marianne Eissler, Arma Harkness, Kate Chaplin,Anna Lang, and Adelina Dinelli. Barrett,“ The Violin as an Instrument for Girls,” 651. “How to Play the Violin,” The Young Woman (1893). “Musical People,” The Graphic, 17 July 1889, 111. T. L. Phipson, Famous Violinists and Fine Violins: Historical Quotes, Anecdotes, and Reminiscences (London: Chatto and Windus, 1896). Quoted in Sheila Nelson, The Violin and Viola (London: Ernest Benn, Ltd.; New York:W.W. Norton, 1972), 177. Quoted from Echo in Funny Folks, 5 December 1891. Thomas, The Violin Player, 1:185. Barnard is listed in Christopher Wood, The Dictionary of Victorian Painters, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, Suffolk:Antique Collectors Club, 1978). See also the entry on Barnard in John Sutherland, Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. CHAPTER FIVE

1. Punch, April 3, 1875; v. 68, 150. 2. In a fascinating article on the efforts of Alphonse Sax, Jr., to promote female brass-instrument playing in France, Katharine Ellis suggests that the brass player in the Punch cartoon returns the stare of the man in the box,

Notes

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

253

as if daring him to continue.“The Fair Sax:Women, Brass-Playing and the Instrument Trade in 1860s Paris,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 124 (1999): 221–254. I wish to thank Professor Theodore Lucas, director of the School of Music and Dance, San Jose State University, for informing me about the sarrusophone. Illustrations of the sarrusophone and serpent may be found in Musical Instruments of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia by the Diagram Group (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 1997); the former instrument is shown on p.51, the latter on p.72. During the nineteenth century, the serpent was used in church music and in military bands. Ibid. Stephen Kern, Eyes of Love: The Gaze in English and French Culture: 1840–1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 10. Craig Howes,“Periodicals: Comic and Satiric,” in Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell (New York and London: Garland, 1988). “The Fair Violinist,” The Lady, 26 February 1885. It appears likely that this story about a violinist named Blanche/Bianca was the work of Blanche Lindsay (her full name was Caroline Blanche Elizabeth), who frequently published poems and stories in magazines and had firsthand knowledge regarding the status of musicians in titled society.The suspicion is strengthened by Lindsay’s use of her “official” first given name for the eponymous heroine of her first published novel, Caroline (1888). “A New Profession for Ladies,” Strad 8 (1898). Ibid. Joseph Conrad, Victory: An Island Tale, ed. Cedric Watts (London: Everyman/ J. M. Dent, 1944), 59. Victory was written between 1912–14 and published in 1915. Ibid., 238. On the symbolic use of hair in literature and art, see Elisabeth G. Gitter, “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination,” PMLA 99 (1984): 936–54. My thanks to Pamela Blevins for generously sharing her knowledge of Scott’s career and life. My thanks to Christopher Bornet, librarian at the Royal College of Music, and to Pamela Blevins for their kindness in helping me locate and date this and the following poem and to the Royal College of Music for giving me permission to publish it. Haweis’s article is quoted in The Strad 8 (1898): 250. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin, 1990), 3. Freia Hoffmann discusses the continuous use of gendered language in describing the violin and its players that she has found in German sources of the first half of the nineteenth century. She interprets the comment (made in 1826) of Hans Georg Nägeli, Swiss music publisher and composer and a close friend of Beethoven, that holding and handling a violin “is unbecoming a virgin [Jungfrau],” as revealing a subconscious association with female

254

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 homosexuality. Hoffmann suggests that the source of this concern was the perception that female violin-playing required the inappropriate contact of two [female] bodies. Instrument und Körper: die musizierende Frau in der bürgerlichen Kultur (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1991), 190. On Nägeli, see the entry in Slonimsky, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed. “The Musical Girl,” The Young Woman 5 (1896–97). The Minstrel (September 1895). Mrs. Humphry [Mary Augusta] Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888; reprint, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 574. Elizabeth Godfrey [Jessie Bedford], Cornish Diamonds, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1895), 1:102. Ibid., 2:240. Ibid., 2:240. Ibid., 2:246. Walter Besant, Armorel of Lyonesse: A Romance of To-day, (1890; London: Chatto and Windus, 1934), 317. Ibid., 10.“Her history begins, like every history of woman worth relating, with the man cast by the sea upon the shores of her island. . . .To you, dear Dorothy or Violet, it will doubtless be by the sea of society. And the day that casts him before your feet will ever after begin a new period in your reckoning” (10). M. E. Francis was the pseudonym used by Mrs. Francis (Mary) Blundell. Laurence is referred to in much of the novel as “Laur.” The absence of a final e fits with the male disguise she uses as a young music student. Bertha Thomas, The Violin Player:A Novel, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1880), 1:148–49.Thomas and the musician Florence Marshall were sisters. Ibid., 1:151. Ibid., 1:266. Ibid., 1:267. Ibid., 1:76. On luxuriant tresses as a symbol of “vigorous sexuality,” see Gitter, “The Power of Women’s Hair in the Victorian Imagination.” Thomas, Violin Player, 2:289. Ibid., 3:260. Ibid., 3:320. The Young Woman 5 (1896–97). M. E. Francis [Mrs. Francis (Mary) Blundell], The Duenna of a Genius (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1898), 290. Ibid., 291. “Sarah Grand” is the adopted name of Frances Elizabeth Clarke (1854–1943), who married Surgeon-Major David McFall, a widower with two sons, when she was 16. Her husband’s work at an institution for prostitutes with venereal disease influenced her feminist beliefs and provided her with subject matter she later included in her fiction. After the success of her first book, Ideala (1888), Grand separated from her husband but con-

Notes

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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tinued to live with her two stepsons. Among the admirers of her fiction were Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw. Although controversial, The Heavenly Twins was a great success; 20,000 copies of the book were sold in its first year. See Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, eds., Feminist Companion to Literature in English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); and Joan Huddleston, Sarah Grand: A Bibliography (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1979), 11–13. Carol A. Senf dates the writing of the first part of Grand’s novel, Ideala, and The Tenor and the Boy, to 1880–81. Introduction to The Heavenly Twins, by Sarah Grand (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), xxx. The Tenor and the Boy was published separately in 1899 in the series of “Heinemann’s popular novels.” Huddleston, Sarah Grand, l6. Grand, The Heavenly Twins, 471. Ibid., 403–04. Ibid., 403. See Martha Vicinus’s interpretation of this incident in “Turn-of-the-Century Male Impersonation: Rewriting the Romance Plot,” in Sexualities in Victorian Britain, eds. Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). Before taking her home, the Tenor braided her “thick dark hair.” Grand, The Heavenly Twin, 462, 465. Ibid., 453–54. Ibid., 541. Expecting that the violin was ruined by water, Angelica is amazed to find it lying in its case on its velvet cushion without a scratch or broken string. “Perhaps it had been one of his last conscious acts to put it right for her.” Ibid., 516. Ibid., 403. Published between 1896 and 1914, The Lady’s Realm was one of the most successful upper-class women’s magazines. Joan Huddleston, introduction to Index to Fiction in The Lady’s Realm, Victorian Fiction Research Guides V (Queensland: Department of English, University of Queensland, 1981), 5. Cecily [Ullman] Sidgwick, A Splendid Cousin, Pseudonym Library Series (London:T. Fisher Unwin,1892), l0. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 71. George Gissing, The Whirlpool, ed. and introduction Patrick Parrinder (1897; reprint, Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977). Ibid., 332. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 117–18. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 309.

256 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

74.

75.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Ibid., 342. Ibid., 365. Ibid., 424. Ibid., 383. Ibid., 453. Ibid., 235. Ibid., 245. Ibid., 313. During the course of research for The Whirlpool, Gissing collected books and clippings, “even reading The Musical Times in the British Museum.” Patrick Parrinder, Notes to The Whirlpool, 460. The only musical figure Gissing treats respectfully in the novel,Alma’s violin teacher, never emerges from the background of the narrative. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 334. 1897, the year The Whirlpool was published, was also the year that Philip BurneJones, son of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, exhibited “The Vampire” at the New Gallery, an image of a lovely woman, dressed in a clinging nightgown, crouching menacingly over the body of her male victim. After visiting the exhibition, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled “The Vampire,” in which he bemoaned the useless expenditures of energy and talent that men make for the sake of women. (Quoted in Idols of Perversity, 35l) See entry, “Danse Macabre,” in Michael Kennedy, The Oxford Dictionary of Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). “Freund Hein (the devil) spielt auf.” Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Recollections of Gustav Mahler, trans. Dika Newlin, ed. and annotation Peter Franklin (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), l79, n25. Mahler told friends he had composed the scherzo movement as a “Dance of Death.” Constantin Floros, Mahler:The Symphonies, trans.Vernon Wicker (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1993), 122. Mahler used the word “Fiedel,” a medieval forerunner of the violin. H. F. Redlich, Bruckner and Mahler (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1963), 194. Mahler had the first violinist tune his instrument a tone higher than the normal tuning in order to accentuate the harsh character of this passage. Henry-Louis De La Grange, Mahler (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1973), 646. Keller, the author of the story on which Delius based his opera, regarded the Dark Fiddler as a representation of evil, but Delius saw him instead as a figure close to nature. Delius perhaps identified with him as a social outsider and symbol of freedom. Christopher Palmer, Delius: Portrait of a Cosmopolitan (London: Duckworth, 1976), 113–15; Christopher Redwood, “Delius as a Composer of Opera,” in A Delius Companion, ed. Christopher Redwood (London: John Calder, 1976), 228–29.The opera was completed in 1901 and had its British debut in 1910. The devil had given the soldier a magic book in exchange for his violin. According to Eric Walter White, Stravinsky’s librettist, Ramuz, adapted a

Notes

76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

90. 91.

257

traditional Russian tale, combining it with elements of the Faust legend. Stravinsky:The Composer and His Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 265. The story, about a fiddling contest between the devil and a young hillbilly, “the best damn fiddle player in Monroe County, possibly . . . in Georgia” is published in Charlie Daniels, The Devil Went Down to Georgia: Stories by Charlie Daniels (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers Ltd., 1985). The hillbilly proves his boast, saves his soul, and wins the devil’s gold fiddle.The musical version is found on CD; The Charlie Daniels Band:A Decade of Hits, Epic EK 38795. Laura Winters,“An Odyssey Tracks a Fictional Fiddle’s,” New York Times, 25 May 1997. Anne Rice, Violin: a Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Anna Wickham, The Writings of Anna Wickham: Free Woman and Poet, ed. R. D. Smith (London:Virago Press, 1984), l34. Ibid., 8–9, 54–66. Ethel Sidgwick (1877–1970) was educated in England. She studied music privately and lived for much of her life in Paris. In addition to children’s plays, she wrote 14 novels (of which Promise was the first published) and a biography of another aunt, Eleanor Sidgwick, the principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1892 to 19l0. See the entries on Ethel Sidgwick in Blain et al. eds., The Feminist Companion to Literature in English; and in Janet Todd, ed., British Women Writers:A Critical Reference Guide (New York: Continuum, 1989). Ethel Sidgwick, Promise (1910; reprint, Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1920), 4. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 11–12. Ibid., 342–43. Lady Campbell (wife of Sir Nigel Campbell, a British banker) wrote children’s fiction and mystery stories that were published in the United States and Britain. She died in London in 1950 at the age of 67. New York Times obituary article, 29 July 1950. Harriette Russell Campbell, Is It Enough? A Romance of Musical Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1913) Ibid., 190 See the essay on Cobbett by H. A. Scott in H. C. Colles, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (London: 1927–28). Cobbett encouraged the work of the Society of Women Musicians and, in 1924, made it a gift of his collection of British chamber music. Nicholas C. Gatty, “Society of Women Musicians,” in H. C. Colles, ed., A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1927–28). See the final chapter for a discussion of Henry Wood’s remarkable action in breaking that ban in 1913 hirings for his Queen’s Hall Orchestra. “Women Violinists of the Victorian Era,” The Lady’s Realm 5 (1899): 654.

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Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 CHAPTER SIX 1 George R. Sims, My Life: Sixty Years’ Recollections of Bohemian London (London: Everleigh Nash Co., 1917). My thanks to Julie Early for bringing Sims’s remembrance to my attention by her message on the Victoria Internet discussion group (February 12, 1998). 2. John Frederick Cone, Adelina Patti: Queen of Hearts (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1993), 143. 3. “Some Operatic Personages: I.—The Prima Donna,” The Lute, 15 March 1884, 52. 4. Cone, Adeline Patti, 172. Cone provides a chronology of Patti’s appearances (323–81). Examples of her performances outside London include Birmingham Town Hall, 1864; Brighton, 1870; a Summer and Autumn 1875 concert tour that included Bristol, Brighton, Birmingham, and Manchester; Liverpool, 1878; Swansea, 1882 and 1884; a concert tour in 1885 that included Manchester and another in 1886 that included Manchester, Liverpool, and Dublin; an 1887 tour that included Manchester, Edinburgh, Leeds, Nottingham, and Birmingham; an extensive British tour in 1890 added to these cities Preston, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds, Leicester, Cheltenham, Plymouth, Exeter, Southsea, and Cardiff. Patti’s final Autumn concert tour of Britain took place in 1907. 5. E. Van der Straeten wrote the brief article on the singer and musician Adriana Baroni and her musician-daughters, Catarina and Eleonora (Lenora), in H. C. Colles, A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (London: 1927–28). Milton, then age thirty-one, was introduced to Eleonora by Cardinal Barberini. 6. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957), 130–31. Hughes interprets Milton’s text, “Either God or certainly some third mind,” as referring to God or the Holy Spirit, as suggested in I John 7. Milton’s poem is titled “Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem,” “To Leonora Singing in Rome.” 7. “Divinized as the song of the Muses, daughters of Zeus, it [the female voice] opens the past to the present through memory and enables the male bard to evoke the brilliance of dead heroes or immortal gods. Bestialized in the form of the Sirens’ or Circe’s song, it dehumanizes or immobilizes (male) heroes, cutting them off from everything that defines their human identity.” Charles Segal, “The Female Voice and Its Contradictions: from Homer to Tragedy,” in Grazer Beitrage, Supplementband 5 (Festschrift W. Potscher) (1993): 67. A different view of the Sirens appears in Plato’s Republic, in which they sing the musical scale that underlies the harmony of the cosmos. See Kathi Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death: Studies in Musical Iconology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 242–52. Dante’s Christianized vision of the Siren imagines her beautiful voice (“She began to sing in such a voice that only with great pain could I have turned from her soliciting”) in the repulsive body of a

Notes

8. 9.

10.

11.

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witch whose evil nature evokes the indignation of the saintly Beatrice, whose reaction leads Virgil to seize the witch, “and with one rip laid bare / all of her front, her loins and her foul belly: I woke sick with the stench that rose from there.” Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. John Ciardi in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, ed. Maynard Mack, (New York:W.W. Norton, 1995), 1836–37. H. R. Haweis, Music and Morals (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), 62. Joseph Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny:The Social Discourse of NineteenthCentury British Classical-Subject Painting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1989), 43. In “Chastelard,” Swinburne presents a sea maiden “with sad singing lips” who, having been caught in a fisherman’s net, seduces her captor and brings about his death.The poem is discussed in Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siécle Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), 266. The Graphic’s publication, in 1882, of a clever satirical treatment of the legend by F. Anstey (pseudonym of the novelist Thomas Anstey Guthrie) is an indication of the widespread familiarity of the Greek myth.“The Siren,” The Graphic (Summer 1882): 20–21. See the entry on Anstey in John Sutherland, Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Essex: Longman, 1988). The part of Cherubino, the page in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, is a “pants role,” a male character impersonated by a soprano.The poem to Lucca was published in July 1882. I am grateful to Lidia Haberman for her comments on the poem and for her translation.The original poem follows: Paggio gentil, tu che trasporti i cori E d’estasi celeste li innamori Or che si tosto, ahime, tu dei lasciarci, Speme ci regge almen che a ribearci Di tua grazia e beltade il dolce raggio A noi ritorni ancor. Addio, bel Paggio!

12. David R. Williamson, “Sonnets to Madame Adelina Patti,” The St. James’s Magazine 34 (1878). 13. Patti’s affair with Nicolini, carried on while she sued De Caux for divorce, was known as the greatest stage romance of the nineteenth century. Patti received the divorce in 1885 and married Nicolini in 1886. Cone, Adelina Patti, 113. 14. See the entry,“The St. James’s Magazine,” in John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction. 15. William J. Gatens, “Ruskin and Music,” in The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music, ed. Nicholas Temperley, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 76. 16. On the social distance that even “stage struck” Londoners kept from members of the acting profession, see Paula Gillett, “Art Audiences at the

260

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Grosvenor Gallery,” in The Grosvenor Gallery:A Palace of Art in Victorian England, eds. Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996), 51–53. Elizabeth Eastlake, in a long and anonymously published essay on music, Quarterly Review 83 (1848): 511. The essay was reprinted in Music and the Art of Dress:Two Essays Reprinted from the “Quarterly Review,” new ed. (London: J. Murray, 1854). Eastlake characterizes England as a land of “quiet speech” in her explanation of why Italian recitative, “derived as it is from a people of so much violent passion,” will always be uncongenial to her countrymen. She does, however, understand passionate expression to be “the true source of all musical expression” when the subject is of great moment, and admires the acting of the great Rachel in such roles as Corinne and Phaedre (511). H. C. Deacon,“Tremolo” in J.A. Fuller Maitland, A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, (London: 1904–10). “To sing really well demands some power of dramatic expression—some play of feature, and our insular reserve of manner is in this particular a drawback.” [A Singer], “In the World of Song,” Atalanta (1893–94): 31–34. The magazine was founded in 1887 by the feminist and girls’ fiction writer L.T. Meade. Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 10–12. In Greek mythology, Atalanta was a swift-footed huntress who reluctantly acceded to her father’s wish that she marry with the stipulation that she would become the wife only of the man who defeated her in a race; those who tried but failed were put to death.The victor, instructed by Aphrodite, dropped three golden apples at intervals along the race path. Unable to resist, Atalanta stooped to pick them up, thus losing the race. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, New Ed. By M. C. Howatson (Oxford: 1989). The Musical Herald, 1 July 1899. Hellen (or Helen) Lemmens Sherrington, an English-born soprano who sang both in oratorio and opera, studied in Holland (where her parents had moved in 1838, when she was four years old) and in Brussels. Married to the Belgian organist and composer Nicolas Lemmens (who died in 1881), she first appeared in England in 1856 at a concert of the Amateur Musical Society. Lemmens Sherrington suggested in the course of her interview that the traditional, submissive model of English female education had begun to change. Blanche Marchesi’s comments appeared in A Singer’s Pilgrimage (New York; Da Capo, 1978), 213. Born in 1863, Blanche Marchesi first studied violin before beginning voice instruction with her mother, the famous Mathilde Marchesi. Blanche Marchesi sang in opera and on the concert stage, settling in England after a successful London debut in 1896. She, too, became a well known singing instructor. Nicholas Slonimsky, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed. (New York: Schirmer, 1992). The First Violin: A Novel (New York: R.F. Fenno, 1904), 64.The novel was first published in 1878.

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23. The Tory Quarterly Review, founded to counter the reformist Edinburgh Review, published many of the best writers of the day. Both journals featured politically engaged essays presented as reviews of recent books. Raymond W. MacKenzie,“Periodicals: Reviews and Quarterlies,” in Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell, (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988). Today Eastlake is best remembered for her vitriolic review of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which she accused of coarseness and moral laxity.The Bronte critique was published in December, 1848, a few months after Eastlake’s essay on music, which had appeared in the September issue. See the entry on Lady Eastlake in John Sutherland, Longman Companion. See also the brief but informative sketch of Lady Eastlake in Mary Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins (London: J. Murray 1967), 31–32. 24. President of the Royal Academy of Arts from 1850 and Director of the National Gallery from 1855, Charles Eastlake died in 1865; the Eastlakes were married in 1849. The papers of the Musical Association (now the Royal Musical Association), which include the names of those invited to membership, are housed in the British Library. 25. “Sex and Music,” The Lancet 70 (1892): 1097.The article is unsigned. 26. Eastlake adds that these songs had survived the reign of the Puritans by being preserved in country houses where “prayers for the Restoration and the practice of ‘profane music’ were kept up together.” 27. The quotations from the essay on music are taken from the Quarterly Review. The section on “happy hummings” appears on 490.The gender of the true music lover, here as in the “Sonnets to Madame Adelina Patti,” is assumed to be male. In her sketch of Eastlake (in Mitchell, ed., Victorian Encyclopedia), Zelda Austin contrasts her compassionate, liberal response to the difficult situation faced by Effie Ruskin in the course of her marriage, divorce, and remarriage to the painter Millais, with Eastlake’s conventionally pious response to Bronte’s novel. Austin’s characterization of this striking inconsistency as “a felicitous example of Victorian duality” is similarly appropriate to Eastlake’s simultaneous elevation of musical art and relegation even of the highly gifted female amateur singer to a narrowly constricted private sphere that she clearly rejected in her own life. 28. Ellen Clayton, Queens of Song: Being Memoirs of Some of the Most Celebrated Female Vocalists (1865; reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), ix-x. Clayton found it hardly surprising that the temptations of such careers “would sometimes prove too great for virtue or prudence to resist.” 29. Quoted in the entry, “Adelaide Kemble,” in Feminist Companion to Literature in English, eds.Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements, (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1990). 30. Fanny Kemble became famous for her recitations of Shakespeare during the 1850s and 60s. She had never wanted to become an actress. Bernard Grebanier, Then Came Each Actor (New York: David McKay Co., 1975), 157. 31. Her daily lessons with Pasta are described in Adelaide Kemble Sartoris, Past Hours, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1880).

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32. For the sake of propriety, several members of the Kemble family accompanied them. J. C. Furnas, Fanny Kemble: Leading Lady of the Nineteenth-Century Stage (New York: Dial Press, 1982), 247. 33. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, From Friend to Friend (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), 52. Ritchie describes Kemble’s speech upon her return from the continent as characterized by the “hint” of a foreign accent; the DNB article on her describes the accent as “marked.” 34. Henry Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, ed. Ernest Newman (New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 137. Founded in 1776 and run by a Board of Directors made up of aristocrats, the Ancient Concerts (so called because their programs were not to include music written within the previous 20 years) sponsored annual performances until 1849; efforts to revive the institution, in 1868 and 1870, were unsuccessful. Percy Scholes, The Mirror of Music 1844–1944: A Century of Musical Life in Britain, 2 vols. (London: Novello, 1947), 1:187. 35. Adelaide Kemble’s birth is variously reported as 1814 or 1816.The DNB entry follows 1814 with a question mark. She is described as six years younger than Fanny, whose birth date is reported as 1809. 36. Furnas refers to Sartoris as a “gentleman about town.” Fanny Kemble, 254. Adelaide’s Covent Garden performances of Norma always filled the house. Ibid., 255. 37. “Horribly” was underlined in the letter which is housed in the Huntington Library.The recipient was James Robinson Planché, playwright and librettist. JP 145. 38. Ritchie, From Friend to Friend, 56. 39. See DNB entry,“Adelaide Kemble,” by Lydia Miller Middleton. First serialized in Cornhill, the novella was published in 1867. See also the entry,“A Week in a French Country House,” in Sutherland, Longman Companion. Adelaide Kemble Sartoris died in 1879. 40. Adelaide Kemble Sartoris, A Week in a French Country House (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1862), 171. 41. Ibid., 56.Anne Thackeray Ritchie describes Dessauer as “the fanciful extra ordinary musician who was [Adelaide Sartoris’s] faithful knight and follower through so many difficult passes, and whom she partially portrayed as Monsieur Jacques in . . .‘A Week in a French Country House.’ Some of us can still remember her singing of ‘Ouvrez, Ouvrez,’ a song of his which she made to vibrate with feeling.” From Friend to Friend, 48. 42. Sartoris, A Week in a French Country House, 184–85. 43. Ibid., 157. 44. Ibid., 187. 45. Frances Anne Kemble “had no wish to become an actress, but agreed to do so to help her father, who was then managing Covent Garden, and whose lavish expenditures were bringing him close to bankruptcy.” Bernard Grebanier, Then Came Each, 157.Adelaide’s and Fanny’s ambivalence about the stage was not new to the Kembles. Despite his success on the stage, their

Notes

46.

47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

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grandfather Roger would not allow his own daughter to marry an actor (she defied him and did so). Roger apprenticed one of his sons to an apothecary, tried to make a priest of another, and found Charles, Fanny’s and Adelaide’s father, a position in the post office. Charles left the civil service and married the lovely young Terese de Camp, a fine actress respected for her strict personal morality. Furnas, Fanny Kemble, 10. Dorothy Marshall, in her biography of Fanny Kemble, writes of her parents’ determination to give their children an education that would fit them for the society of those in elevated social circles. Fanny Kemble (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 15. Singer and musicologist John Potter comments that only in opera do classical singers depart from the restraint that is characteristic of their art.The presence of gestures in the recording studio suggests to Potter that “the gestural constraint on classical singers is a function of the social context in which they find themselves.” Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 183. In their manual, The Art of the Song Recital (New York and London: Schirmer Books, 1979), Shirlee Emmons and Stanley Sonntag advise that the concert singer’s extramusical means of communication come from the eyes and face; body movements are used sparingly and only during the later and less formal part of the program (116). Mathilde Marchesi, Marchesi and Music (London and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1897) 3–12, 26–36, 68. Castrone-Marchesi’s adoption of his profession was the result of his involvement in the Sicilian revolutionary movement (46). Percy Young, “George Eliot and Music,” Music and Letters 24 (1943): 92–100. Eliot and Lewes lived together as man and wife from the mid-1850s until his death in 1878, “publicly proclaiming their unconsecrated ‘marriage.’” Lewes was already married (and a father) when he met Eliot, but could not obtain a divorce as he had condoned his wife’s adultery. John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction, entries on Eliot and Lewes. See entry, “The Mill on the Floss,” in John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction. Several musical figures have been suggested as models for Klesmer. Gordon Haight makes a persuasive argument for Anton Rubinstein; see “George Eliot’s Klesmer” in Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1968), 205–14. Franz Liszt and Joseph Joachim are among the other suggestions; see the discussion in Beryl Gray, George Eliot and Music (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 140, n6. Gray cites Marghanita Laski’s suggestion of Joachim in “The Music of Daniel Deronda,” The Listener 96 (1976): 317–34.An addition to these possibilities, Robert Schumann, was recently suggested by Ruth A. Solie, who points out that Klesmer, like Schumann in the mid-1860s, was regarded as a difficult, futuristic composer. Eliot’s novel opens in 1865, and Solie points to

264

52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Francis Hueffer’s memory of Clara Schumann’s performance in that year of a Monday Popular Concert program of her husband’s works “which, in those days, were thought to be the abstruse effusions of the modern spirit.” Hueffer’s comment in Half a Century of Music in England, 1837–87: Essays Toward a History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1889) is quoted in Solie’s essay,“‘Tadpole Pleasures’: Daniel Deronda as Music Historiography,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 45/46 (1997/1998): 87–104; the discussion of Klesmer’s “ancestry” is on p.93. Rosemarie Bodenheimer, “Ambition and Its Audiences: George Eliot’s Performing Figures,” Victorian Studies 34 (1990): 7–33.The reference to her “besetting sin” comes from a letter Eliot wrote in 1839 at the age of 20 (quoted in Bodenheimer, 17). “Armgart,” Poems by George Eliot (New York: R. F. Fenno and Co., 1900): 320–360. The end of the reign of the castrati, writes Patrick Barbier, occurred at the start of the nineteenth century, when the “gods” were replaced by the “divas.” The World of the Castrati:The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon, trans. by Margaret Crosland (London: Souvenir Press Ltd., 1989), 240. “Sex and Music,” Musical Times, 1 June 1892. The original version of Orpheus was sung by a castrato; 12 years later, in preparation for a Paris production of the opera, Gluck revised it, using a French translation, and rewriting the castrato part for tenor. Ernest Newman, Great Operas:The Definitive Treatment of Their History, Stories, and Music, 2 vols. (New York:Vintage Books, 1958): 5. Pauline Viardot (1821–1910) was a musical prodigy and the younger sister of the legendary mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran and the eminent voice teacher Manuel Garcia. On Malibran and Viardot, see Rupert Christiansen, Prima Donna: A History (New York:Viking, 1985), 70–83. The novel was published in English translation in 1846. A letter of April 26, 1871, describes a lunch party at Eliot’s and Lewes’s home, the Priory, at which Viardot sang “divinely,” moving some to tears. Eliot’s letter of April 29, 1871, records that she and Lewes regularly attended Madame Viardot’s Saturday musical soirées. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1955): 5:143–44, 9:14–15. Christiansen, Prima Donna, 81. On Viardot’s use of ornamentation in the Orpheus, Chorley writes: “The torrents of roulades, the chains of notes, unmeaning in themselves, were flung out with such exactness, limitless volubility, and majesty as to convert what is essentially a commonplace piece of parade into one of those displays of passionate enthusiasm to which nothing less florid could give scope.” Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 237. April Fitzlyon, The Price of Genius:A Life of Pauline Viardot (New York: Appleton-Century, 1964), 372. By 1870 the opera career of the real “Paulina,”

Notes

62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

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the name Eliot gave to Armgart’s successor, was long passed; she could still sing brilliantly in small settings and continued to do so after her return to Paris at the conclusion of the 1870–1871 war.Among those who attended Viardot’s musical soirées there during the mid-seventies was Henry James who, although generally bored by music, declared her singing to be “superb.” Robert Rushmore, The Singing Voice, 2nd ed. (New York: Dembner Books, 1984), 225. For an interpretation of Eliot’s choice of Gluck’s version of the Orpheus myth over Monteverdi’s and Haydn’s, see Rebecca A. Pope,“The Diva Doesn’t Die: George Eliot’s Armgart,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, eds. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 139–51. The 1860 production of Beethoven’s Fidelio, in which Viardot sang the heroic part of Leonore, was an artistic success but its box-office popularity fell far short of that reached by Orfée. Viardot commented that Beethoven’s music was “too symphonic” for Paris audiences. Fitzlyon, The Price of Genius, 356. Rupert Christiansen, “George Eliot, ‘Armgart’ and the Victorian Prima Donna,” About the House 7 (1986): 8–10. E. A. McCobb,“The Morality of Musical Genius: Schopenhauerian Views in Daniel Deronda,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 19 (1983) 321–30; the reference to Eliot’s musical preferences is on 321. “George Eliot apparently preferred either non-verbal public performance or forms of verbal music which might be confined to the salon or drawing room; . . . these preferences call into question her claim for art’s universality and so vitiate, if not contradict, the value she attaches to it” (321). “The theatre,” Eliot wrote in a letter in 1853, “is generally a very dreary amusement to me. The wit is generally threadbare as well as vulgar—the actors and actresses neither men and women nor gentlemen and ladies.” Letter to Charles Bray quoted in William Joseph Sullivant, “George Eliot and the Fine Arts” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1970), 340. Rosemarie Bodenheimer writes that Eliot “retained a conventional Victorian reservation about the effect of women on stage,” despite Lewes’s interest in the theatre and Eliot’s own friendship with the actress Helen Faucit.“Ambition and Its Audiences,” 9. “Music that stirs all one’s devout emotions blends everything into harmony,—makes one feel part of one whole, . . . losing the sense of a separate self.” Eliot is quoted here by Beryl Gray in George Eliot and Music, x. The two instrumentalists, Herr Klesmer and his pupil, Catherine Arrowpoint, spurn wealth and social convention to devote their lives to music and married love. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 207. On Deronda’s boyhood and talents, see 205–09. His rejection of a singing career is discussed on 208–09. Ibid., 231.

266 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 Ibid., 728. Ibid., 541. Ibid., 253. Ibid., 422. On Eliot’s early support of the women’s movement, see Nicholas McGuinn,“George Eliot and Mary Wollstonecraft,” in The Nineteenth-Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World, eds. Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1978), 193–94. The Magazine advocated the use of a form of tonic sol-fa notation. An 1890 bibliography described the journal as a publication “for the student and for the million.” In the 1892 and 1893 bibliographies, J. F. Runciman was listed as assistant to the Magazine’s founder and editor, J. W. Coates. Runciman began his career as critic for the Saturday Review in 1894. See the brief description of The Magazine of Music in relevant volumes of the Guide and Index to the Periodicals of the World and in Grove’s Dictionary. The Magazine ceased publication in 1897. Christiansen, Prima Donna, 221–223. The Lute, 1 August 1884. Cyril Ehrlich points to a rapid growth in the numbers of musicians in England beginning in the 1870s. The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 51. The Lady, 7 May 1885. The Lady’s World: A Magazine of Fashion and Society, 1887. F. Marion Crawford, Fair Margaret:A Portrait (New York:The Regent Press, 1905), 196. F. Marion Crawford, The Primadonna: A Sequel to “Fair Margaret” (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 73. Melba described Crawford as “one of the greatest friends whom I have ever had.” She enjoyed his “appealing” tenor voice and his musical artistry. Nellie Melba, Melodies and Memories (1926; reprint Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970): 130. Henry Irving in 1895 and Squire Bancroft in 1897. Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 233–44. Fuller Maitland saw this recruitment change as a statement of the increased importance of music in English culture and as a catalyst “in raising the general tone of the profession itself.” English Music in the XIXth Century (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1902), 135–36. Musical Society, 1 August 1886. Peter Gammond,“Home, Sweet Home,” in The Oxford Companion to Popular Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Michael Turner describes Bishop as a “noted reprobate, home-wrecker, and spendthrift.” Turner, ed., The Parlour Song Book: A Casquet of Vocal Gems (London: Michael Joseph, 1972), 144. For profiles of Bishop and Ana

Notes

90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100. 101. 102.

103.

104.

105.

267

Bishop, see James D. Brown and Stephen S. Stratton, British Musical Biography:A Dictionary of Musical Artists,Authors, and Composers Born in Britain and Its Colonies (Birmingham: S. S. Stratton, 1897). “Bishop died in straitened circumstances—in want—why should we mince the matter?” wrote Musical World, on May 5, 1885, in its appeal to raise funds for his penniless children. Turner, ed., Parlour Song Book, 144. Musical Society, 1 August 1886. Turner, ed., Parlour Song Book, 144. “Ballroom and Drawing-Room Music,” chapter 6 in Music in Britain:The Romantic Age, 1800–1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley,The Athlone History of Music in Britain (New York: Athlone Press, 1981), 125–26. Ibid., 123. Bruce Carr, “Theatre Music: 1800–1914,” in Temperley, ed., Music in Britain, 301. John Frederick Cone, Adelina Patti, 213. Ibid., 45. “In response to the usual encore in the lesson scene, . . . [Patti] sang ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ to the unbounded delight of her hearers,” wrote George Bernard Shaw, adding that the “wearisome” nature of the event led some in the audience to “display their appreciation of the sentiment of the ballad in the most practical way.”The comments, dated June 20, 1877, are included in Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 3 vols., 2nd rev. ed (London: Max Reinhardt, The Bodley Head, 1981), 1:137–38. Ibid., 1:226. Harry How,“Madame Albani,” The Strand Magazine, 189: 220.Also see the article on Albani in The Young Woman 2 (1893–94). The Illustrated London News, May 21, 1887. This section on Wagner is drawn from Anne Dzamba Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979), 27–34. Also see William Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, eds. David C. Large and William Weber in collaboration with Anne Dzamba Sessa (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 28–71; and Anne Dzamba Sessa “At Wagner’s Shrine: British and American Wagnerians,” in the same volume, 246–77. Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English, 103. Sessa adds that Tannhäuser “almost becomes a code word for experimentation with forbidden pleasures.” The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890. E. F. Benson, The Rubicon (New York: Appleton, 1894). On Benson’s novel and other works influenced by Wagner, see William Blissett, “Wagnerian Fiction in English,” Criticism 5 (1963): 239–60. Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English, 100–102. Several of the drawings, which illustrated the prose narrative, “Under the Hill,” were published in

268

106. 107.

108.

109.

110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 expurgated version in 1896 in The Savoy. The full series of drawings appeared in an unexpurgated private edition in 1907. See also the entry on Beardsley by Stanley Weintraub and the entry on “Under the Hill” by Sharon Ellis, both in The 1890s:An Encyclopedia of British Literature,Art, and Culture, ed. G. A. Cevasco, (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993). Quoted in Laurence, ed., Shaw’s Music, 3:479–80. First published in 1924, C has been described as a novel that approximates to the form of a memoir. The comment is quoted in Emma Letley, foreword to C, by Maurice Baring (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), vi. Dannreuther, in essays published in the Monthly Musical Record in 1872 and reprinted in book form the following year, as Richard Wagner: His Tendencies and Theories, wrote dismissively about the tendency for grand opera to serve as a vehicle for the singer. Sessa, Richard Wagner and the English, 29–30.The stricture on applause was known as the “Bayreuth hush”: Wagner’s audiences “were not supposed to stop the performance by applauding their favorite singers, as they might with Bellini or Donizetti.” Ibid., 41. Rupert Christiansen sees Eliot’s “Armgart” as a spiritual predecessor to a “whole spate of long and now somewhat fulsome-sounding novels, all of which contain a fusing element absent from ‘Armgart’: the music of Wagner.” His examples are George Moore’s Evelyn Innes, Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, Gertrude Atherton’s Tower of Ivory and Marcia Davenport’s Of Lena Geyer. “George Eliot, ‘Armgart’ and the Victorian Prima Donna,” 10. Trilby was also a great success in dramatic adaptation in New York and London. A paperback edition with an introduction by Elaine Showalter was published in 1995 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press); another reprint, introduced by Leonee Ormond, was published in 1992 (London/Rutland: J. M. Dent and Charles E Tuttle Co.) The editions I have used are: Mary E. [Mrs. Herbert] Martin, Her Debut, 3 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, Ltd., 1895), consulted at the Beinecke Library, Yale University; Elizabeth Godfrey, [Jessie Bedford], Poor Human Nature: A Musical Novel (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1898); George Moore, Evelyn Innes (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898) and Sister Teresa (New York: Brentano’s, 1920); Claire De Pratz, Eve Norris (London:Wm. Heinemann, 1907). Godfrey wrote three novels with musician-heroines over a five-year period. Martin, Her Debut, 1:148–49. Ibid., 1:175–80. Ibid., 1:227–30. Ibid., 1:166. Ibid., 3:291–92. On Moore’s debt to Dolmetsch see Sara Ruth Watson, “George Moore and the Dolmetsches,” English Literature in Transition: 1880–1920 6 (1963):

Notes

117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125.

126.

127.

128. 129. 130. 131.

132. 133. 134. 135.

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65–75. For a fascinating discussion of Moore’s consultations with Dolmetsch on musical passages of the book and Dolmetsch’s revisions, see Margaret Campbell, Dolmetsch: The Man and His Work (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 69–75. Moore, Evelyn Innes, 151. “She felt that if she were to take another lover she would not stop at twenty.” Ibid., 275. Campbell, Dolmetsch, 74. Moore, Evelyn Innes, 328–29. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 452. Moore, Sister Teresa, 20. Moore, Evelyn Innes, 451. The quotation is from Carl Seashore, a psychologist at the University of Iowa who studied vibrato with a group of colleagues during the late 1920s and early 1930s; Seashore is quoted in Meribeth Bunch, Dynamics of the Singing Voice, 3rd ed., (Wien and New York, Springer-Verlag, 1995),75. P. H. Dejonckere, Minoru Hirano, and J. Sundberg, eds., Vibrato (San Diego: Singular Publishing, 1995), vii; see also William Vennard, Singing:The Mechanism and the Technic, rev. ed. (New York: Carl Fisher, 1967), 195–208; and Cornelius L. Reid, The Free Voice: A Guide to Natural Singing (New York: Coleman-Ross Co., 1965). Reid, The Free Voice, 169. “There can be no doubt that a vibrato invokes an atmosphere of the sensual, the voluptuous, though why this should be so is difficult to say.” Rushmore, The Singing Voice, 189. As Reid describes it, the harmonic structure of a fully resonant tone is complex because of changing overtones:“It is more than coincidence that both the diamond and a well-sung tone sparkle with lustrous brilliance.” The Free Voice, 173. In a recent New York Times review of Monica Mancini’s cabaret concert of songs by her father, Henry Mancini, Stephen Holden writes of her “rapid vibrato that suggests the glamorous vocal equivalent of diamonds flashing.”“Cabaret Review:A New Mancini Starts Out with the Family Repertory,” New York Times, 25 July 1998. Greta Moens-Haenen,“Vibrato,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992). Vennard, Singing, 205. Moens-Haenen, “Vibrato.” Quoted in Susan Rutherford,“The Voice of Freedom: Images of the Prima Donna,” in The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre, 1850–1914, eds.Vivien Gardner and Susan Rutherford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 97. “Sesame and Lilies” was published in 1865 and 1871. Rushmore, The Singing Voice,143, 190. De Pratz, Eve Norris, 20. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 100.

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136. See entry, “Hero,” in Robert E. Bell, Women of Classical Mythology: A Biographical Dictionary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 237. 137. De Pratz, Eve Norris, 110–113. 138. Ibid., 184. 139. Ibid., 306–307. 140. Emma Eames, Some Memories and Reflections (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1927), 301. 141. Sam Abel, Opera in the Flesh: Sexuality in Operatic Performance (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 50. 142. “Singers and Instrumentalists,” The Spectator, 13 October 1888, 1385. 143. “Ruined Career Rebuilt, Now a Debut in Boston,” New York Times, 8 February 1997; an interview with Susan Davenny Wyner, formerly a violinist and violist. 144. Anthony Kemp writes about the “personalities” often attributed to musical instruments and the jokes about their players; the “amorous relationship” between string players and their instruments is part of this folklore. Anthony E. Kemp, The Musical Temperament: Psychology and Personality of Musicians (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 145. 145. Nancy B. Reich, “Women as Musicians: A Question of Class,” in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Musical Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993), 125–46.The reference to Joachim appears on 140. “Her voice was a contralto of singular richness, her technique left nothing to be desired, and her musical temperament made her one of the greatest artists of the world.” Entry on Amalie Weiss, in J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1904–10). 146. “When you marry your husband, he wouldn’t want you singing at the opera; he will be jealous.”Viola Tree, Castles in the Air:A Story of My Singing Days (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1926), 30.“Mori” for “mari” may be an typographical error or an example of the often confusing word usage of a polyglot community. Tree cites other amusing mistakes in her narrative. 147. Crawford, Fair Margaret, 196. 148. Black and White, 8 July 1893, 56. Patti also endorsed “beauty aids, pianos, and Flor de Adelina Patti cigars.” Cone, Adelina Patti, 231. 149. Woman, 16 January 1895. Belle Cole (1845–1905) was an American contralto. 150. The Gentlewoman, 12 July 1890, vii. In the late 1860s, Britain produced three million corsets each year and imported two million more from France and Germany. Patricia Anderson, When Passion Reigned: Sex and the Victorians (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 29. 151. “A Butchered Lohengrin,” The Star, 31 May, 1889; reprinted in Laurence, ed., Shaw’s Music, 3:647.This was Nordica’s first appearance as Elsa,“a role in which she was destined one day to set all musical Europe by the Ears.”

Notes

152.

153.

154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160.

161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168.

169.

170. 171. 172.

173. 174. 175.

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Ira Glackens, Yankee Diva: Lillian Nordica and the Golden Days of Opera (New York: Coleridge Press, 1963). Abel, Opera in the Flesh, 28: “If a singer does not aim directly toward the audience, then the voice may not carry over the orchestra. . . .The upshot of this technique is that the audience gets the singer’s full attention.” See Juliet Blair’s article, “Private Parts in Public Places: The Case of Actresses” in Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, ed. Shirley Ardener (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 205–28. James Huneker, Bedouins (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 15. “How Girls Are Presented at Court,” The Girl’s Own Paper (1880). “The Décolleté Case,” Gentlewoman, 24 January 1891. M. Sterling Mackinlay, Antoinette Sterling and Other Celebrities: Stories and Impressions of Artistic Circles (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1906), 36–37. Anderson, When Passion Reigned, 40. Mackinlay, Antoinette Sterling, 41. DNB, 1901–1912 vol., published in 1920. Davey mentions Sterling’s affiliation with various sects and later with Christian Science. She was a temperance advocate, vegetarian, and suffragist. Martin, Her Debut, 1:149. Paul A. Robinson,“Havelock Ellis and Modern Sexual Theory,” Salmagundi 21 (1973): 43. Emma Calvé, My Life, trans. Rosamond Gilder (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1922), 19–20. The Theatre, 1 October 1878, 226. Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 8 August 1874, 558; quoted in Cone, Adelina Patti, 27. Nordica’s comments are taken from her Hints to Singers, quoted in Glackens, Yankee Diva, 346–47, 330–31. Michael T. R. B. Turnbull, Mary Garden (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1997), 32. [E. J.], “One of Queen Victoria’s Favourite Singers. An Interview with Madame Blanche Marchesi,” The Young Woman, 13 (1904–05): 217–220; this reference appears on 218–19. Quoted in Glackens, Yankee Diva, 329.The theories of the French singing teacher François Delsarte (1811–1871) were adapted for use in acting and dance. Magnus Magnuson, ed., Cambridge Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Quoted in Glackens, Yankee Diva, 242. Nordica, Hints to Singers, quoted in Glackens, Yankee Diva, 341, 344, 340. Wellesley Pain, “A Great Singer in Retirement: An Interview with Miss Anna Williams, The Young Woman 6 (1897–98): 207–209.The comment appears on 209. The Illustrated London News, 16 January 1892. Christiansen, Prima Donna, 93. Ibid., 114–15.

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176. John Rosselli, Singers of Italian Opera:The History of a Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 116. Rosselli’s statement refers to payment in “real terms.” 177. The Theatre, 1 July 1895, 43. 178. The Lute, 1 January 1886, 17. 179. The Musical World, 30 October 1886. 180. “The Prima Donna,” Monthly Musical Record, 1 May 1922. On Berger, a musician who married a professional singer, see Cyril Ehrlich, First Philharmonic: the History of the Royal Philharmonic Society (Oxford: Clarendon; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 137–42. 181. F. Marion Crawford writes of the readiness of fashionable audiences, enthralled by the singing of a lyric soprano, to characterize her brilliance as that of “an over-grown canary, a human flute.” The Prima Donna, 3. 182. “German Opera at Drury Lane,” The World, 18 July 1894; reprinted in Laurence, ed., Shaw’s Music, 3:274–75. 183. Cone, Adelina Patti, 144. 184. William Beatty-Kingston, “Madame Patti at Home—II,” The Lute, 1 December 1885. 185. Théophile Gautier, Émaux et Camées (Paris: Librarie Droz, 1945), 30–33. (How you please me, strange timbre! / Double sound, at once female and male, / contralto, bizarre mélange, / hermaphrodite of the voice!) See the discussion of Gautier’s poem in Felicia Miller Frank, The Mechanical Song: Women,Voice, and the Artificial in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 105–08. I am grateful to Heather Hadlock for this reference. For definitions of the contralto voice and biographical profiles of English contraltos, see Phyllis Ann Brenner, “The Emergence of the English Contralto” (Ed.D. diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1989), 13–16. 186. Abel, Opera in the Flesh, 20. 187. Crawford, The Primadonna, 6.The incident related by Melba also occurred during her performance of the mad scene in Lucia, but her role in calming the audience on the outbreak of fire was spoken rather than sung and followed the exemplary actions of occupants of the boxes. Crawford appears to have created an imaginative melding of this event with one immediately preceding it in Melba’s Melodies and Memories. In San Francisco to sing the part of Rosina in The Barber of Seville in the heated atmosphere of anti-Spanish hysteria that preceded the Spanish-American War, Melba became increasingly concerned that the opera’s setting would serve as the excuse for a riot. Just before Rosina was to begin the song of her choice in Rossini’s lesson scene, Melba, who was convinced of audience hostility, thought of a saving strategy. She sat down at the piano, played the introduction to the “Star Spangled Banner,” and was soon drowned out by a sea of fervent voices, another catastrophe averted (168–71). 188. Hermann Klein, Thirty Years of Musical Life in London (New York:The Century Co., 1903), 154.

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189. Alexis Chitty, entry on Nilsson, in J. A. Fuller Maitland, A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1904–10). 190. The Lute, 1 October 1885, 223. 191. Musical Courier (July 1916). Nilsson was 73 at the time this article was written. 192. Robert Hichens, Yesterday:The Autobiography of Robert Hichens (London and Toronto: Cassell and Co., 1947), 37–38. 193. Eames, Some Memories and Reflections, 301. 194. Melba, Melodies and Memories, 50. 195. Crawford, The Prima Donna, 75. CHAPTER SEVEN 1. Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 8. 2. On the burgeoning of art schools that served a largely female clientele, see Paula Gillett, Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); published in the United Kingdom as The Victorian Painter’s World (Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1990), 167–72. 3. For an overview of noted soloists, see Nancy B. Reich, “European Composers and Musicians, ca.1800–1890,” and Marcia J. Citron, “European Composers and Musicians, 1880–1918,” in Women and Music:A History, ed. Karin Pendle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 4. Englishwoman’s Year Book (1899): 132–33. 5. Reported in Henry T. Finck, Success in Music and How It Is Won (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 9. 6. See Stephen Banfield’s article on Clarke in The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, eds. Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuels (New York and London:W.W. Norton, 1995). 7. See entry on the London Trio in H. C. Colles, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1927–28). 8. On the employment of musicians in cinemas, see Cyril Ehrlich, The Music Profession in Britain Since the Eighteenth Century: A Social History (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 194–97. 9. “The Aeolian Ladies’ Orchestra,” The Musical Herald; 1 May 1912, 136. 10. Jane Lewis, Women in England: 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 166. 11. Wallace Sutcliffe, “Ladies as Orchestral Players,” The Orchestral Association Gazette (February 1894): 48. 12. Florence Fidler and Rosabel Watson, “Music as a Profession,” Englishwoman’s Year Book (1899): 132. In 1912, a branch of the Amalgamated Musicians’ Union formed to protect the interests of choristers in theater sought a minimum salary of £2 per week with compensations for such expenses as costumes and pay for rehearsal time.“The Hard Case of the Chorus Girl,” Musical News, 7 September 1912, 186.

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13. Quoted in Percy Scholes, The Mirror of Music, 1844–1944 A Century of Musical Life in Britain, 2 vols. (London: Novello, 1947), 2:732. 14. Sutcliffe, “Ladies as Orchestral Players,” 48. 15. “Of professional players, in the ordinary sense, I have not more than three or four.” Moberly revealed that there were a number of Royal College students in his orchestra, and “fourteen or fifteen who give lessons.” Interview with Moberly in The Magazine of Music (June 1893). 16. As reported in The Magazine of Music (May 1892). Sutcliffe was pleased to report that Moberly had found it necessary to “fall back upon the sterner sex for five double basses” at a recent concert at St. James’s Hall.“Ladies as Orchestral Players,” 49. 17. Sutcliffe, “Ladies as Orchestral Players,” 49. Sutcliffe retracted the “missing muscle” charge after Ada Molteno, leader in several theater and opera company orchestras, challenged him to reveal the name of the muscle and of the scientists who had identified its absence in women. His statement, wrote Sutcliffe, had been “advanced in all seriousness and good faith, and was made on the strength of a similar assertion in a recently published book.” See Correspondence columns, March and April issues of The Orchestral Association Gazette. I learned of Sutcliffe’s article and the subsequent correspondence in Cyril Ehrlich’s The Music Profession in Britain, 156–58. 18. “How to Take Care of a Violin,” The Girl’s Own Paper (February 1887): 332–33.The author is identified only by the initials C. H. P. 19. “Music as a Livelihood,” The Lady’s World (1887): 174–75. 20. Musical Review, 2 June 1883, 347. 21. “Street Musicians,” The Strand Magazine 3 (1892): 72. 22. The Magazine of Music (September 1892): 180. 23. Charles Segal, “The Gorgon and the Nightingale: the Voice of Female Lament and Pindar’s Twelfth Pythian Ode,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, eds. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 30.The ancient aulos was a reed instrument and therefore closer to the oboe or clarinet, but the word is conventionally translated as “flute,” a usage followed by the editor of The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, who points out the misleading nature of the translation. See “Music, I,” in the M.C. Howatson, ed., 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 24. Emil Medicus,“Female Flutists of Ancient Greece,” The Flutist (1929).The classical sources are Athenaeus and the letters of Alciphon; H. Macaulay Fitzgibbon, The Story of the Flute, Being a History and Everything Connected with It, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), 270. 25. Charles Segal, “The Gorgon and the Nightingale,” 34; Suzanne June Leppe, “The Devil’s Music: A Literary Study of Evil and Music” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1988), 15. 26. Segal, “The Gorgon and the Nightingale.” 27. Emanuel Winternitz, Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism in Western Art (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1979), 49–53.

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28. The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300–1990s describes what was perhaps the original mythological Lamia: a conquest of Zeus who expressed her fury in the aftermath of her children’s murder by Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, by snatching and killing other children.The Guide also takes note of the Lamiae associated with her, “amorous fiends who lured young men to bed, then drank their blood and ate their flesh. Jane Davidson Reid with the assistance of Chris Rohmann, 2 vols.(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 2:623–24. 29. The book was W. N. James’s A Word or Two on the Flute; quoted in Julianna Moore, “A Comprehensive Performance Project in Flute Literature with an Essay, A Study of Female Flutists Before 1900” (D.M.A. thesis, University of Iowa, 1990). 30. “The link between Lamia and the late nineteenth-century feminists, the viragoes—the wild women—would have been clear to any intellectual reasonably well versed in classical mythology. . . .” Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 309. On Waterhouse, see Anthony Hobson, The Art and Life of J.W.Waterhouse R. A., 1849–1917 (New York: Rizzoli in association with Christie’s, 1980), 122–23; on Draper and the use of classical mythology in artistic expressions of misogyny, see Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny:The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-Century British Classical-Subject Painting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Kestner discusses Draper’s work, which abounds in frightening images of women, on pp.288–92. 31. The Musical World, 28 February 1880. 32. Essex refers to the viol da gamba as a “base [sic] violin.” According to Willi Apel, the term “viola” was used during the Renaissance and Baroque periods to signify the entire family of bowed strings. Later, the viola da gamba, held on or between the knees, became identified with the bass viol. See entry, “viola,” Harvard Dictionary of Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 797. 33. John Essex proscribed the violin and also warned against the flute, which he considered “very improper, as taking away too much of the Juices, which are otherwise more necessarily employ’d, to promote the Appetite, and assist Digestion.” Essex’s book, The Young Ladies Conduct, or Rules for Education, was published in 1722. The quotation is taken from the catalogue published by Stuart Bennett, rare book dealer in Mill Valley, California: Rare Books 1995, item 37. I am grateful to Mr. Bennett for several informative conversations and for calling my attention to this quotation. According to Curt Sachs, “Early civilizations where the masculine impulse predominates connect the ideas flute—phallos— fertility—life—rebirth, and they associate flute playing with innumerable phallic ceremonies and with fertility in general.” The History of Musical Instruments, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), 44. See also Sach’s remarks on the flute in chapter 4, note 18.

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34. Ethel Smyth, Female Pipings in Eden (London: P. Davies, 1934), 8. 35. Richard Shepherd Rockstro, A Treatise on The Construction, the History, and the Practice of the Flute, including a Sketch of the Elements of Acoustics and Critical Notices of Sixty Celebrated Flute-Players, rev. ed. (London: Ruadall, Carte and Co., 1928), 146. Cardigan’s unofficial title is also mentioned in H. Macaulay Fitzgibbon, The Story of the Flute, 223. 36. Music halls of the 1880s used “an unwritten language of vulgarity and obscenity . . . in which vile things can be said that appear perfectly inoffensive in King’s English.” Quoted in Peter Bailey,“Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture,” Past and Present 144 (1994): 157–58. Cyril Ehrlich notes the names of eight women flute players in the Music Directory of 1900: “Several of them had been playing in music halls since the 1880s, but their numbers were diminishing.” Music Profession, 161. 37. Cardigan’s birth date is given in Julianna Moore, “A Comprehensive Performance Project in Flute Literature,” 69. On Rockstro see listing immediately following the listing of his brother William Smyth Rockstro, in James D. Brown and Stephen S. Stratton, British Musical Biography: A Dictionary of Musical Artists, Authors and Composers Born in Britain and Its Colonies (Birmingham: S. S. Strattton, 1897). 38. My thanks to several members of the Victoria Internet Discussion Group who directed me to the entry on the Royal Aquarium in Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). Additional information is given in the entry on the Imperial Theatre, the name given to the theater of the Royal Aquarium by a new proprietor at the end of the 1870s. 39. According to Dickens’s Dictionary of London, 1879:An Unconventional Handbook, the Aquarium without fish became a standing joke. The author (Charles Dickens the younger, son of the novelist) described the Aquarium as one of London’s most successful exhibitions, thanks to its sensational acts. (London: Charles Dickens, “All the Year Round” Office, 1879). The failure of efforts to give “tone” to the Aquarium was noted by H. G. Hibbert in Fifty Years of a Londoner’s Life; Hibbert is also the source for information on the popularity of Zazel and the hair-covered lady (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co, 1916), 187–88. Again, my thanks to colleagues on the Victoria Internet Discussion Group for responding to my inquiry about the Royal Aquarium (also known as the Westminster Aquarium) with the recommendation of Dickens’s Dictionary and to Patrick Leary, director of the group, for introducing me to Hibbert’s book. 40. See entry,“Principal Boy,” in The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll, 3rd ed., (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967). 41. Brown and Stratton, British Musical Biography. In 1889, Cardigan married the composer and pianist Louis Honig. She died on March 17, 1931. 42. “Our Round Table:Are Ladies Successful as Orchestral Players?” The Magazine of Music (June 1896): 394–95.

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43. “Careers for Girls: Music,” The Girl’s Realm 5 (1902–03): 1092. 44. Marion M. Scott, “British Women as Instrumentalists,” The Music Student Special Number—Chiefly prepared by the Society of Women Musicians (1918). 45. “The Academy encourages, while the College prohibits, the playing of wind instruments by female pupils.” Florence Fidler and Rosabel Watson, “Music as a Profession,” 133.“Women could get as good a training as men in the student orchestras of the R.A.M. and R.C.M. (though at the latter place Wind scholarships are still closed to women). . . .”; Scott, “British Women as Instrumentalists,” The Music Student, 1918. 46. Watson was 18- or 19-years old and had recently learned the double-bass, after which she was often paid to play in amateur orchestras; she also became a French horn player. Watson’s typescript, “Some Memories of My Life in Music and the Theatre,” is held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. 47. “Music as a Profession,” Englishwoman’s Year Book (1899): 132. 48. Anthony E. Kemp, The Musical Temperament: Psychology and Personality of Musicians (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 152. Kemp provides an informative account of recent research that shows that trumpet and trombone continue to be perceived as instruments best suited to male players. (Ibid., 142–43). See also Katharine Ellis’s comment on the “voyeuristic potential of women brass-players”; “The Fair Sax: Women, Brass-Playing and the Instrument Trade in 1860s Paris,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 124 (1999): 235. 49. Greta Kent, A View from the Bandstand (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1983), 39–46. 50. J. Cuthbert Hadden,“Ladies and Orchestral Instruments,” The Young Woman (1903–04). 51. “The English Ladies’ Orchestral Society: Half an Hour with Mr. J. S. Liddle,” The Magazine of Music (May 1895). In 1896, Liddle succeeded August Manns as conductor of the Handel Society in London; he continued to direct the English Ladies’ Orchestral Society after that appointment. (Brown and Stratton, British Musical Biography.) 52. The English Ladies’ Orchestral Society is listed in the Englishwoman’s Year Book of 1912. An article on Marion Arkwright (“Miss Arkwright, Mus. Doc.”), marking her award of a Doctorate in Music from Durham University, makes it clear that the Society had disbanded:“This was a complete amateur orchestra of ladies, but it was difficult to keep up the supply of amateur wind players.” The Musical Herald, 1 December 1913, 370. 53. Gillian Hall,“Salvation Army,” in Victorian Britain:An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1988). 54. Trevor Herbert, “Nineteenth-Century Bands: The Making of a Movement,” in The Brass Band Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed.Trevor Herbert (Philadelphia: Open University Press), 49. 55. Ibid.

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56. Trevor Herbert, “God’s Perfect Minstrels: the Bands of the Salvation Army,” in The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History, ed. Trevor Herbert (Oxford, forthcoming). I am most grateful to the author for sending me a copy of this chapter. 57. Michael Musgrave, Musical Life of the Crystal Palace (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 210. 58. “The Bands of the Salvation Army: a Critical Report,” written for the Salvation Army on 31 March 1906; published under the caption “What the Critic Had to Say” in the Musician of the Salvation Army, 3 December, 1960; reprinted in David Laurence, ed., Shaw’s Music:The Complete Musical Criticism in Three Volumes, 2nd. Ed., 3 vols. (London: Max Reinhardt, the Bodley Head, 1981), 3:588–94. 59. Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (London:Virago Press, 1978), 212, 214. 60. Glen (née Broder, born in India to English parents in 1859) is listed in Donald L. Hixon and Don A. Hennesse, Women in Music: An Encyclopedic Bibliography, 2nd ed. (Metuchen, New Jersey and London: Scarecrow Press, 1993). Brown and Stratton, in British Musical Biography, note her authorship of two books: Music in Its Social Aspect and “an elaborate treatise,” How to Accompany. Glen’s article is in The Woman’s World 2 (1889): 82–85. 61. The Woman’s World 3 (1890): 491–93. 62. On the various genres included in the term “musical theatre” at this time, see Andrew Lamb, “Music of the Popular Theatre,” and Nigel Burton, “Opera: 1865–1914,” in Music in Britain:The Romantic Age 1800–1914, ed. Nicholas Temperley (New York: Athlone Press, 1981), 92–108, 330–357. 63. From a speech Gilbert gave in 1906; quoted in E. D. Mackerness, A Social History of English Music (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 190. 64. The year was 1878. Quoted in Arthur Jacobs, Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician, 2nd ed. (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1992), 119. 65. “Professions for Gentlewomen. Public Singing. II.—Poor Cecilia,” The Lady, 12 March 1885, 135–36. 66. “Some Experiences of a Débutante, By A Singer,” Atalanta 7 (1893–94): 249–53. 67. The full title is A Dictionary of Employments Open to Women with Details of Wages, Hours of Work, and Other Information, by Mrs. Philipps assisted by Miss Marian Edwardes, Miss Janet Tuckey, and Miss E. Dixon, published in 1898 by the Women’s Institute, London: 97–98.The recommendations for musical employment include the warning that “the profession of a public performer is very precarious.” Mrs. Philipps, founder of the Institute, described it as “an outward and visible representation or incorporation of the woman movement.”The Institute included a library and a lecture department that established a list of highly qualified women lecturers on a variety of subjects and helped them reach audiences. The Institute also had a Music Society consisting of professional and nonprofessional musicians.

Notes

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79.

80. 81.

82.

83.

279

Raymond Blathwayt, “The Woman’s Institute: A Talk with Mrs. Wynford Philipps,” Great Thoughts, III (February 1899), 320–22. [Note: other sources refer to the “Women’s” Institute.] See entry, “City Livery Companies,” in Weinreb and Hibbert, London Encyclopaedia. Wilhemina Wimble, “Incomes for Ladies: Singing as a Profession,” The Lady’s Realm 5 (1898–99). Ehrlich, Music Profession, 155–56. Lamb,“Music of the Popular Theatre,” 97–100. George Edwardes directed both the Prince of Wales’ and Daly’s Theatres; shows at the latter “boasted a more substantial and consistent plot and more ambitious and extended musical writing that was indeed nearer to comic opera.” Ibid., 99. The Lady, 25 June 1908. The Lady, 11 June 1908, 1150. Alan Hyman, The Gaiety Years (London: Cassell, 1975), 96. Mary L. Pendered, Daisy the Minx: A Diversion (London:W. J. Ham-smith, 1911), 219. A disadvantage of music hall performance, writes Scala, is the number of tips to be paid. The Lady, 9 January 1908, 76. “The Royal Welsh Ladies’ Choir,” by “An Occasional Theatre-Goer” The Musical Herald, 1 December 1900, 373–374. Dagmar Kift, The Victorian Music Hall: Culture, Class and Conflict, trans. Roy Kift (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 54.The performance was actually of selections from Faust; see the entry on Faust in J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1904–10). Before music hall entertainment began to feature standard character-roles (e.g., the soldier, milkman, and domestic servant), singers had appeared at Morton’s Canterbury in evening dress and presented their songs as if at a classical concert (Ibid., 45). Morton’s criticism was expressed in an interview with the Westminster Gazette that was quoted in The Musical Times (1894). See Scholes, Mirror of Music, 1:506. Brown and Stratton, British Musical Biography. Percy Scholes mentions Novello Davies as a highly respected choir trainer famous for conducting her ladies’ choir for almost 60 years. Mirror of Music, 2:731. “The Royal Welsh Ladies’ Choir,” 373. Letter to the Editor from Wallace Sutcliffe,“Correspondence. Ladies as Orchestral Players,” The Orchestral Association Gazette (April 1894): 83. Sutcliffe had initiated a discussion by Gazette correspondents with an article, “Ladies as Orchestral Players” in the issue of February 1894. Marie Goossens, Life on a Harp String: An Autobiography (London: Thorne Printing and Publishing, 1987), 18–19. Marie and Sidonie Goossens both attained eminence on the instrument. Pupils at publicly run elementary schools, where music was included in the curriculum (until 1902 these were known as Board schools), were drawn from the working classes; an 1883 manual on employment options for

280

84.

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97.

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914 women advised that while elementary school teachers received good salaries and had short working hours,“many ladies would find the class of children they would be required to teach a great trial to them”; Mercy Grogan, How Women May Earn a Living (London/Paris/New York: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1883), 40–41. In 1877, at a college that trained female Board school teachers, authorities opposed teaching piano to these young women because “such practice would not only interfere with their other work, but did not become persons of their station in life.” Gordon Cox, A History of Music Education in England, 1872–1928 (Aldershot Hants, England: Scolar Press; Brookfield,Vermont:Ashgate Publishing Co., 1993), 29. Efforts to attract “teachers of another class” by recognizing University examinations as another means of entry were unsuccessful: “It is doubtful whether more than a very few women of even moderate University attainments are at present engaged in elementary teaching. Such women can get work under easier conditions and with better pay elsewhere, the headmistresships of some London Board schools excepted.” A. Amy Bulley, “How to Become a Schoolmistress,” The Young Woman 1 (August 1893): 383–85. The Year-Book of Women’s Work, ed. L. M. H., author of “Work for Ladies in Elementary Schools,” etc. (London: 1875), 89.The depressing statistics are discussed in Ehrlich, Music Profession, 104–05. On the subject of examinations and efforts to establish a registration system, see Ehrlich, Music Profession, 116–20, 130–35. Mrs. H. Coleman Davidson, What Our Daughters Can Do: A Handbook of Women’s Employments (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1894), 197–98. Ehrlich, Music Profession, 118–19. “Quarterly Musical Letter,” The Girl’s Realm (1900): 258–59. The Musical Herald, “Professional Cards” section (1915): 5. From Clarke’s unpublished memoir,“I Had a Father Too,” 1969–1973. I am grateful to Liane Curtis for her generosity in sharing her knowledge of Clarke’s work, life, and career, and for informing me of this incident. “A Singer,” “Teaching as a Profession for Women” Atalanta 7 (1893–94). M. E. Francis [Mrs. Francis (Mary) Blundell], The Duenna of a Genius (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1898), 130. Emma Marshall, Alma, or the Story of A Little Music Mistress (New York: White and Allen, 1889), 14, 224, 307. Ethel Smyth has pointed out that membership in a first-class orchestra provides collateral benefits: the opportunity to play the best music and to learn about instruments and conducting, invitations to play in chamber concerts and on provincial tours, and good payment for private lessons. Female Pipings, 11. Davidson, What Our Daughters Can Do, 199. “Teaching as a Profession for Women,” Atalanta 7 (1893–94), 396–400. Elizabeth Godfrey, Cornish Diamonds, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1895), 1:29.

Notes

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98. Henry Handel Richardson (pseud. of Ethel Robertson, née Richardson), Maurice Guest, 2 vols. (1908; Reprint; London:William Heinemann, Ltd., 1929), 1:38. See reference to this author in chapter 1, p. 5. 99. Ibid., 1:148. 100. Piano educator and professor at the Royal Academy of Music. His analytical studies of piano technique were known as the “Matthay System.” See the entry on Matthay in H. C. Colles, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1927–28). 101. Bernarr Rainbow,“Music in Education,” in Temperley, ed., Music in Britain: The Romantic Age. 102. L. M. H., ed., The Year-Book of Women’s Work, 89. 103. “Music as a Livelihood,” The Lady’s World (1887). 104. GOP cost a penny per week; studies of its circulation show that it was read by a remarkably wide socioeconomic range, from servant girls to the daughters of professionals. Mitchell, The New Girl, 27. The article, which was published without attribution, was titled “Girls as Pianoforte Tuners:A New Remunerative Employment,” and was featured as the opening article of the issue of 23 April 1887, 465–66. 105. Alfred James Hipkins was a writer on music and musical instruments and an expert on the piano and earlier keyboard instruments. Brown and Stratton, British Musical Biography. 106. Palace Journal, 13 August 1890, 160. 107. There were twenty shillings to a pound. A guinea was 21 shillings and being paid in guineas rather than in pounds was one mark of a professional person. 108. Davidson, What Our Daughters Can Do, 202–03. 109. Annie Patterson, Chats with Music Lovers (London:T.Werner Laurie, 1907), 126. 110. See the article on Stainer in J. A. Fuller Maitland, ed. A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: 1904–10). 111. Writing in 1907, organist Annie Patterson considered this a significant handicap for women and a likely source of prejudice against women organists. Chats with Music Lovers, 126–27. 112. Derek Hyde, New-Found Voices, 3rd ed. (Aldershot, England and Brookfield,Vermont:Ashgate, 1998), 37.The surplice is a long, loose, white linen vestment. 113. Quoted in Scholes, Mirror of Music, 2:729. 114. Information on Stirling’s use of “E. Stirling, Esq.,” is included in the obituary article in The Musical Herald, 1 May 1895. 115. Hyde, New-Found Voices, 37.Writing in the mid-1940s, Percy Scholes commented that there had never been, within his own memory, a woman organist in any English cathedral. Mirror of Music, 2:731. 116. The Review pointed out that Mounsey was to retain the right to use the organ for teaching purposes. The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 August 1882, 378.

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117. Florence Fidler, “Music as a Profession for Women,” The Humanitarian (1901): 425. 118. Hyde, New-Found Voices, 38. In 1909, there were 13 women organists in Irish cathedrals. Mary Layton, “Women as Organists and Choir Trainers,” The Music Student, Special Number, Chiefly Prepared by the Society of Women Musicians (1918), 336. 119. Hon.Victoria Grosvenor,“The Amateur Church Organist,” The Girl’s Own Paper (October 1886). 120. “How to Play the Organ,” The Girl’s Own Paper 1 (1880): 328–30. Ann Stainer’s long career is noted in Scholes, Mirror of Music, II, 730. 121. Patterson received the degree from the Royal Irish University in 1889. She was also a composer, a popular lecturer, and later, a radio personality. See her entry in Sadie and Samuels, ed., Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. 122. Layton,“Women as Organists and Choir Trainers,” The Music Student, Special Number chiefly prepared by the Society for Women Musicians, 1918, p. 336. 123. Obituary article on Patterson, London Times, 18 January 1934, 17d. 124. Identified as Evangelical Independent in Weinreb and Hibbert, The London Encyclopaedia, 101. 125. Layton, “Women as Organists and Choir Trainers,” 336. Layton’s article is followed by a brief biographical note on the author. 126. Patterson, Chats with Music Lovers, 137. 127. Henry Holiday, well-known painter and dedicated music amateur, writes of the celebration, on July 4, 1911, of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the South Hampstead Orchestra. Reminiscences of My Life (London: Wm. Heinemann, 1914), 378. 128. The London Times, in its obituary article, also paid tribute to her “notable performances of the symphonies of Brahms [given] at a time when they were not considered to be the popular attractions they are to-day.” 7 March 1922. 129. Smyth conducted the overture to her opera, The Wreckers, at a promenade concert on August 21, 1913. Arthur Jacobs, Henry J. Wood: Maker of the Proms (London: Metheun, 1994), 143. 130. Rawson sometimes used the initials A. M. for Alice Mary. In the inaugural roster of the Society of Women Musicians, she listed herself as a vocalist and critic. (Papers of the Society of Women Musicians, 15 July 1911, Royal College of Music Library.) She was also the author of 18 novels, most of them historical romances. See her listing in Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter, Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 131. Maud Stepney Rawson, “Mr. August Manns on Women as Conductors of Musical Orchestras,” Woman, 6 March 1895. The interview was Number X in a series,“Talks on Topics.”Arnold Bennett was then assistant editor of this weekly magazine; he became editor in the following year. See Anita Miller, “Arnold Bennett,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 34:

Notes

132. 133. 134. 135.

136.

137.

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

145.

146.

147.

283

British Novelists, 1890–1929:Traditionalists, ed.Thomas Staley (Detroit: Gale Research, 1985). The coauthors were H. A. J. Campbell and Myles B. Foster; the latter was an organist, composer, and musical editor to the firm of Boosey. “Part X: Position of the Players,” The Girl’s Own Paper (1904): 660. “Part XI:The Conductor,” The Girl’s Own Paper (1904): 710. “Part I.—Entente for Women Musicians,” Evening Standard and St. James Gazette, 19 July 1911, in news clipping collection, Royal College of Music Library. Society of Women Musicians: Notes Taken at the Inaugural Meeting, annual reports of the Council, and news clipping file, Royal College of Music Library. Katharine Eggar,“Marion Scott as Founder of the Society of Women Musicians,” Friends’Tributes to Marion Scott at a special Composers’ Conference held in her memory, 24–25 June 1954, Papers of the Society of Women Musicians, Royal College of Music Library. Elizabeth Wood,“Performing Rights:A Sonography of Women’s Suffrage,” Musical Quarterly 79 (Winter 1995): 617–18. Scholes, Mirror of Music, 2:886. Jane A. Bernstein, “Ethel Smyth,” in Sadie and Samuels, ed., Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. Thomas Beecham, A Mingled Chime: Leaves from An Autobiography (London and New York: Hutchinson and Co., 1944), 85. Musical Times, 1 August 1911, 535–36. “The Status of Women Composers,” Musical News, 29 March 1913, 289. Julie Holledge, Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre (London: Virago Press, 1981), 53. Davies identified herself with the American suffrage leader Frances Willard and with Lady Henry Somerset, both of whom combined temperance beliefs with suffrage advocacy. The Young Woman (April 1893): 222. “She had had the devil of a time establishing herself against male prejudice, while making her way with an instrument considered unfeminine.” Anna Wickham, The Writings of Anna Wickham: Free Woman and Poet, ed. R. D. Smith (London:Virago Press, 1984), 119. The suffrage documents cited in this chapter, including the WSPU program of 29 October 1908, its Christmas Fair and Fete Program of 4–9 December 1911, and the NUWSS list of Council Members printed in connection with an event held in April 1914, and other materials mentioned, were read at the Fawcett Library in London. I am grateful to David Doughan, Reference Librarian, for helping me locate these materials and for many helpful suggestions. Officers of the Actresses’ Franchise League are listed in the section on societies of The Suffrage Annual and Women’s Who’s Who (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1913). I. I am grateful to Gail Cameron of The Museum of London for sending me this list and other informative materials.

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148. According to Jessica Douglas-Home,Violet Gordon Woodhouse’s willingness to support the suffragettes was largely due to loyalty to her friends Ethel Smyth and Christopher St. John (Christabel Marshall); Violet:The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (London: Harvill Press, 1996), 111–12. 149. Elizabeth Wood, “Performing Rights,” 639. 150. Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign: 1907–11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 211–13. The WSPU adopted the name National Women’s Social and Political Union, but the initials WSPU remained the familiar ones. Ibid., 277. A color reproduction of “The Bugler Girl” is printed opposite page 51 in Tickner’s book. 151. The program of the 1909 (N) WSPU, printed by the Woman’s Press, is in the Fawcett Library. Sylvia Pankhurst’s “trumpeting angel” design was widely used in other WSPU materials;Tickner, Spectacle, 28. 152. Address delivered at the Annual General Meeting on November 29, 1915, at the Women’s Institute. Papers of the SWM, Royal College of Music Library. 153. Layton, “Women as Organists and Choir Trainers,” 336.The characterization of Handley’s church as “most fashionable” is Layton’s. 154. See Nicholas C. Gatty’s discussion of Hamilton Harty’s dismissal of women players in the Hallé orchestra, “The Mixed Orchestra,” Musician (January 1921). 155. Scott, “British Women as Instrumentalists,” 337. 156. “British Women’s Contribution to the Art of Music,” Women’s Employment, 19 October 1928.According to the 1922 Annual Report of the Society of Women Musicians, Dame Ethel Smyth, honorary vice president of the SWM, and Mrs. Agnes Larkcom, SWM Council member, were the first women elected as (full) members of the Royal Philharmonic Society. SWM papers, Royal College of Music Library. 157. Derek Scott, The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1989), 62–63. 158. Sophie Fuller, Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States, 1629-Present (San Francisco and London: Pandora, 1994), 72–74. 159. Derek Scott, Singing Bourgeois, 62–63. 160. Fuller, Pandora Guide, 72–74. 161. Sophie Fuller, “Unearthing a World of Music: Victorian and Edwardian Women Composers,” Women: A Cultural Review 3 (1992): 21. 162. Many of Eggar’s chamber works, “although well received in concert performances, remained unpublished.” Sophie Fuller,“Katharine Emily Eggar,” in Sadie and Samuels, ed., Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. 163. Liane Curtis, “A Case of Identity: Rebecca Clarke,” Musical Times 137 (May 1996): 15–21—incident related on p. 17. Curtis observes that few male composers are likely to have responded as she did. Ibid., 17. See also Curtis’s “Rebecca Clarke and Sonata Form: Questions of Gender and Genre,” Musical Quarterly 81 (1997): 393–429.

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164. The typescript interview with Ellen Lerner was provided to me by Liane Curtis. My thanks to Ellen Lerner for permission to make use of this interview. 165. See the obituary article in The Musical Herald, 1 October 1907. 166. See entry on Macfarren by John R. Gardner in Sadie and Samuel, ed., Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. Married to John Macfarren, brother of the composer George Macfarren, she published piano pieces that Gardner describes as brilliant and original; some songs and piano works were published under her own name. 167. Landon Ronald,“Some Lady Song Writers,” The Lady’s Realm 9 (1901). A French composer of Irish parentage and an admirer of Wagner, Holmès wrote operas, symphonies, and choral works. See the entry by Hugh Macdonald in the Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. 168. Johnstone, a founding member of the Society of Women Musicians, was the first woman member on the Council of the London Section of the Incorporated Society of Musicians. Layton,“Women as Organists and Choir Trainers,” 335. 169. On Smyth’s use of initials in approaching publishers, see Marcia Citron, “Gender, Professionalism, and the Musical Canon,” Journal of Musicology 8 (1990): 108. 170. On the performance and publication of the Mass, see Ethel Smyth, As Time Went On (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1936), 61. 171. Liza Lehmann, The Life of Liza Lehmann by Herself (1919; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 22–23. 172. Jacobs, Henry J.Wood, 143. 173. Howell had studied at the Royal Academy of Music and was also a concert pianist. Wood gave first performances at the promenade concerts of several of her other works. The score of “Lamia,” in Arthur Jacobs’s judgment, “invites scrutiny today.” Jacobs, Henry J.Wood, 179–80. 174. Fuller, “Unearthing a World of Music,” 17. 175. On women composers, see Nicola LeFanu,“Master Musician:An Impregnable Taboo?” Contact: A Journal of Contemporary Music no.31 (Autumn, 1987), 4–8. On conductors, see Kay Lawson,“Women Conductors: Credibility in a Male-Dominated Profession,” in The Musical Woman: An International Perspective. Vol.3 (1986–90), ed. Judith Lang Zaimont, Jane Gottlieb, Joanne Polk, and Michael J. Rogan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 197–219 and Norman Lebrecht, The Maestro Myth: Great Conductors in Pursuit of Power (London: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster, 1997), 266–71.

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Index

Actresses’ Franchise League [AFL], 221 Aeolian Ladies’ Orchestra, 60, 199 Albani: Emma, 141, 142, 167 Arkwright, Marion, 199–200 Bach: Christmas Oratorio, 179 Bagby, Albert Morris: Miss Träumerei, 118 Balfour, A. J., 103 Baltzar,Thomas, 89 Baring, Maurice, 168 Barnard, Frederick, 107, 111 Barnett, Henrietta, 45–46, 61 Barnett, Samuel A., 45–46 Barns, Ethel: Concertstück, 29, 226 Baroni, Leonora, 142 Barrington, Mrs. Russell: Good Words, 46, 47 Bartholomew, Ann Mounsey, 215 Bassin, R. Ethel, 208 Baylis, Lilian, 52, 53, 54–55 Beach, Amy, 31 Beardsley, Aubrey, 168 Beecham,Thomas, 31, 220 Beethoven, 19, 151 Benedict, Julius, 53, 179 Bennett, Ellen A.: “The Result of a Song,” 73, 74–75 Bennett, Joseph, 162, 179, 192 Bennett,William Sterndale, 7 Benson, E. F.: The Rubicon, 168 Berger, Francesco, 183 Besant,Walter, 52, 56–59, 106, 107, 111, 120–21 Bianchini, Maria, 195 Bond, Jessie, 202–3 Boosey,William, 205 Bowles,Thomas Gibson, 164 Bradley, Orton, 60 Branscombe, Gena, 31 Brema, Marie, 221, 222 Bright, Dora: Fantasia, 29 Brooke, Lady, 59–60 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 35, 43 Burne-Jones, Edward, 3

Calvé, Emma, 151, 180–81 Campbell, Harriette R.: Is It Enough?, 139 Cardigan, Cora, 196–97 Carreño,Teresa, 189 Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson, Charles Carrodus, John Tiplady, 54 Casals, Pablo, 51, 217 Charity Organization Society, 40, 46, 48 Chopin, Frédéric, 5 Chorley, Henry, 149 Christiansen, Rupert, 155 Clarke, Rebecca, 31 190, 209, 221, 226 Clausen, Eleanor: Orchestra of Young Ladies, 60 Clegg, Edith, 222 Cobbett,Walter Wilson, 140 conductors, women as, 216–19 Conrad, Joseph: Victory, 114 Cons, Emma, 52–55 Corelli, Marie, 86 Crawford, F. Marion, 163, 177, 185, 186–87 Crowest, Frederick J., 163, 193–94, 212–13 Dannreuther, Edward, 167, 179 Darwin, Charles, 18, 101 Davies, Clara Novello, 206 Davies, Fanny, 66, 68 Davies, Mary, 221 Daymond, Emily, 224 De Lara, Adelina, 66–69 décolletage, 178–79 De Pratz, Claire: Eve Norris, 169, 174–76 Dent, Edward J., 53, 55, 56 Dickens, Charles, 18 Djikstra, Bram, 195 Dodgson, Charles, 103, 104 dress reform, 178 du Maurier, George, 109, 110, 111–13, 115, 169, 184 Dvorak, 69 Eames, Emma, 151, 176–77, 186 Eastlake, Elizabeth, 146–48, 184 Eaton, Gertrude, 224–25

308

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914

Edwards, H. Sutherland, 141 Eggar, Katherine, 30, 219, 220, 224–26 Elgar, Edward, 71 Eliot, George, 26, 152–58 Ellicott, Rosalind, 14–18, 197 Ellis, Havelock, 180 Ellis,William Ashton, 167 English Ladies’ Orchestra, 60, 199–200 Englishwoman’s Review, 16 Essex, John, 196 ”Fair Violinist,The” 113–15, 117, 119 Falkner, John Meade: The Lost Stradivarius, 95 Fawcett, Millicent, 3, 221 femininity and power, 180–87 feminist movement, 79, 101, 219–27 Fidler, Florence, 190, 198 Filipowicz, Elise Mayer, 80, 81, 82 Finlay, Mildred: The Stradivarius, 121, 123–24 flute, 194–96 Folkestone, Lady, 43–45, 51, 60 Fothergill, Jessie, 12–13, 145–46 Francillon, R. E., 92 Francis, M. E. (Mary Blundell): The Duenna of a Genius, 121, 124–25, 209–10 Fuller, Sophie, 31 Fun, 112–13, 131 Garcia, Manuel, 151, 179, 203 Garden, Mary, 181 Gautherot, Louise, 80, 81 Gautier,Théophile: “Contralto,” 185 gaze, male, 7, 106, 107–8, 110, 111, 111–15, 177, 185 gender and musical creativity, 19–28 gender-role ambiguity, 117 Gilbert,William, 202–3 Girl’s Own Paper, 6, 74, 75, 81, 115, 193, 213, 216 Gissing, George, 117, 130, 132–34 Glen, Annie, 201 God Save the Queen, 44 Godfrey, Elizabeth (Jessie Bedford), 120, 169, 170–71 Goodwin, Amina, 190 Grand, Sarah, 125–28, 222 Green, Lucy, 83 Greville,Violet, 46–47 Grossmith, George, 5, 82 Grove, George, 214–15 Guildhall School of Music, 60, 63, 164, 199 Gurney, Edmund: The Power of Sound, 103 Hadden, J. Cuthbert, 199 Hall, Marie, 66, 69, 70, 71–72, 97, 119, 128, 226 Hallé, Charles, 5, 119 Hallé, Lady. See Neruda,Wilma Norman Hamilton, Cicely, 220, 222

Hanslick, Eduard, 180, 195 Hardy,Thomas: “The Fiddler of the Reels,” 84–85 Haweis, H. R., 4–5, 36, 82, 84, 100, 103, 105, 116–17, 122, 142 Hayward, Marjorie, 221 Heine, Heinrich, 96 Heron-Allen, Edward, 92 Hichens, Robert, 15, 186 Hill, Miranda, 40 Hill, Octavia, 40–41, 53 “Home, Sweet Home,” 165–66 Hotten, Hannah, 65–66 Howard, Mabel: “Forgotten Chords,” 128–30 Howell, Dorothy, 226–27 Hughes, Arthur: The Home Quartet, 101, 102 Humphreys, Eliza Margaret Gollan: Countess Daphne, 94 Huneker, James, 5, 178 Hunt, Leigh, 96 Illustrated London News, 10, 12, 54, 100 James, Henry, 103, 148 Jevons,W. Stanley, 38–39, 42 Joachim, Joseph, 105, 177, 181, 199 Johnstone, Lucy, 226 Johnstone, Mr. and Mrs. George Hope, 68 Keats, John: “Lamia,” 195 Kemble (Sartoris), Adelaide, 148–51 Kemp, Anthony, 198 Kent, Greta, 198 Kern, Stephen, 111 Kestner, Joseph, 143, 195 Keynon, James B.: “Her Violin,” 118–19 Kitchin, Xie, 103, 104 Kreisler, Fritz, 50, 51, 217 Kyrle Society, 39, 40–43, 46, 48, 51 Lady,The, 30, 39, 164, 203, 205 Lang, Andrew, 103 Langtry, Lillie, 178 Laninska, Erma, 180 Layton, Mary, 216, 217, 221 Lehmann, Liza, 220, 226 Leighton, Frederick, 40 Lemmens Sherrington, Helen, 145 Lennox, Lady William, 60 Leppert, Richard, 90 Liddle, John Shepherd, 199, 200 Lind, Jenny, 64–65, 147, 166 Lindsay, Blanche, 43, 81, 98, 105, 115–16 Liszt, Franz, 6, 7, 135, 148, 190 Lucca, Pauline, 143 Lunn, Henry C., 100 Lyall, Edna: Doreen, 7–8, 169, 204 Mack, Louise: The Music Makers, 5 “Mademoiselle Lili,” 164–67

Index Magazine of Music, 8–9, 16, 26–27, 29, 92 Mahler, Gustav, 135 Maitland, J. A. Fuller, 164 “Maker of Violins,The” 93 Manns, August, 60, 200 Mapleson, James, 166, 183 Marchesi, Blanche, 145, 181 Marchesi, Mathilde (Graumann), 151, 177, 179 Marshall, Emma, 12–15 Marshall, Florence, 48–49, 50–51, 217 Martin, Mary E.: Her Debut, 169–70 Maternal Counsels to a Daughter, 6 Matthay,Tobias, 211 Meister,The, 28 Melba, Nellie, 151 Melliar, Maude, 197 Mendelssohn, 53, 83, 215 Mendelssohn Scholarship, 25 Milanollo, Maria, 86 Milanollo,Teresa, 23, 86 Miles, Philip Napier, 72 Millais, John Everett: “The Music Mistress,” 9 Milton, John, 142 Moberly, E. H., 115, 193, 197 Molesworth, Louise: White Turrets, 164 Monthly Musical Record, 19–21, 30 Moore, George, 169, 171–74, 174, 175 Mounsey, Elizabeth, 215 Mukle, Lillian, 61 Mukle, May, 61, 190, 191, 221 muse, 28, 36, 142 music halls, 39, 42, 50, 57–63, 196, 201, 204–7. See also Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall musical education and teachers, 9–10, 34–35, 48, 63, 145, 207–12 Musical Herald, 42, 61, 64, 208, 210, 211 Musical News, 220–21 Musical Times, 16, 19, 22–26, 28, 40, 42, 45, 50, 215 Musical World, 22, 50, 54, 220 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 221, 222, 224 Neruda,Wilma Norman, 1, 2, 22, 66, 71, 79, 81–82, 98–99, 103, 105, 119, 128, 189 New Woman, image of, 122–23, 168, 174, 195 Newman, Robert, 204 Newnes, George, 73 Niecks, Frederick, 19–21, 24 Nilsson, Christine, 1, 64–65, 71, 141, 185–86 Nordica, Lilian, 178, 181–82

309

Old Vic. See Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall opera singers, 36, 55–56. See also Calvé, Emma; Eames, Emma; Lucca, Pauline; Nilsson, Christine; Patti, Adelina organists, women as, 214–16 Paganini, Niccolo, 69, 94, 95–97 Parry, Charles Hubert, 51 Pasta, Giuditta, 148 patronage, personal, 68 Patterson, Annie, 208, 216, 217, 222 Patti, Adelina, 1, 141, 143–44, 166, 178, 180–81, 183, 184, 189 Pendered, Mary: Daisy the Minx, 205–6 People’s Concert Society, 39, 48–52, 57 People’s Entertainment Society, 39, 42–46, 48, 49, 50, 164 People’s Palace, 39, 57–62, 167, 214 “Petticoat Quartet,” 194, 198 philanthropy, music, 33–39. See also, Kyrle Society; People’s Concert Society; People’s Entertainment Society; People’s Palace; Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall piano tuners, women as, 212–14 piano, 3–4, 99–101 Polonaski, Eugene, 92 Powell, Maud, 67 Praeger, Ferdinand, 25–26 public performers, prejudice against, 6–8 Punch, 35, 47, 51, 99, 109, 110, 112 Radnor, Lady, 103, 192–93, 199, 217 rational recreation, 38–39 Rawson, Maud Stepney, 197, 217–19 Reeves, Sims, 186 Rensch, Rosyln, 3 Rice Anne: Violin: A Novel, 135 Richardson, Henry Handel (Ethel Robertson): Maurice Guest, 5, 210–11 Richardson, Samuel: Clarissa, 84 Richter, Hans, 207 Ritter, Fanny Raymond, 24 Rockstro, Richard Shepard, 196 Roeckel, Jane Jackson, 72 Romanes, George John, 18, 26 Rowbotham, Judith, 164 Royal Academy of Music, 61, 63, 79, 109, 164, 199, 212 Royal College of Music, 41, 63, 199 Royal Victoria Coffee Music Hall, 39, 52–56, 61 Roze, Marie, 178 Rubinstein, Anton, 6, 27, 31 Rubinstein, Arthur, 5

310

Musical Women in England, 1870–1914

Rushmore, Robert, 174 Ruskin, John, 36, 52, 174 ”St. Cecilia,” 158–62 Saint-Saens: Danse Macabre, 135 Sainton-Dolby, Charlotte, 53, 65 Salvation Army, 200 Samaroff-Stokowski, Olga, 29 Sand, George: Consuelo, 154 Sarasate, Pablo, 86 Schlesinger, Kathleen, 224 Schmeling, Gertrude, 80 Schopenhauer, 25 Schubert, 19–20, 23, 181 Schumann, Clara, 1, 22, 66, 68, 69, 190 Scott, Marion, 30, 115–17, 220, 224 Scudo, Pietro, 23, 24 Shaw, George Bernard, 47, 49, 54, 168, 178, 184, 200 Shinner, Emily, 67, 69, 103, 105, 128 Sidgwick, Cecily Ullmann (Mrs. Andrew Dean): A Splendid Cousin, 130–31, 134 Sidgwick, Ethel: Promise, 137–39 singer, perceptions of female, 141–53 singers, careers for female, 201–7 Smith, Adam, 6–7 Smyth, Ethel, 30–31, 56, 84, 196, 217, 220, 222, 227 Society of Women Musicians, 28, 30, 207, 217, 219 Soldat, Marie, 67 “Sonnets to Madame Adelina Patti,” 143–44 Spencer, Herbert, 34 Spohr, Louis, 82 Stainer, Ann, 216 Stainer, John, 214, 216 Stanley, Maude, 63–65 Starr, Louisa: “Hardly Earned,” 9–10 Statham, H. Heathcote, 80–81 Sterling, Antoinette, 53, 54, 179–80, 221 Stirling, Elizabeth, 215 Strachey, Ray, 200 Strad, 50, 69, 92, 100, 107, 114 Strand Musical Magazine, 73, 92, 123 Stratton, Stephen S., 23–26, 82–83 Stravinsky, Igor: The Soldier’s Tale, 135 suffrage movement, 30, 61, 219–22, 223, Suggia, Guilhermina, 190 Sullivan, Arthur, 53, 196, 202–3 Tartini, Giuseppe, 94 Temperley, Nicholas, 166, 167 Thomas, Bertha, 79, 107, 121–22 Thomas, John, 3 Thompson, Henry, 69 Thompson, Kate Loder, 69

Tourte, François, 86 Tovey, Donald, 31 Toynbee, Arnold, 46 Tree,Viola, 177 “True Music,” 112–13, 131 Tschaikowsky: Concerto, 69 Tua,Teresina, 67, 103 Urso, Camille, 67, 79 Viardot, Pauline, 154, 179 Vicinus, Martha, 11 Victoria, Queen, 57, 105, 179–80 violin, 4 demise of ban on women playing, 101–8 informal ban on women playing, 77–82 as the devil’s instrument, 78, 87–89, 134, 135, 137 gendered perception of, 78, 82–87 and piano, 99–101, 115 and the supernatural, 91–99 “Violin Bow,The” 86 violin/husband analogy, 118 violinist, allure of female, 113 von Bülow, Hans, 22 Wagner, Richard, 25, 28, 56, 167, 168, 170, 178, 182, 184 Wagner Society, 167 Wagner-mania, 167–71 Walker, Bettina, 7 Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 79, 84, 119 Waterhouse, J.W., 195 Watson, Rosabel, 60, 61, 62, 190, 192, 197–99 Webb, Beatrice, 53 Wechsberg, Joseph: The Glory of the Violin, 87 Weiss, Amalie, 177 White, Alice Meadows (Alice Mary Smith), 22, 25, 225 White, Maude Valérie, 25 Whitehouse,William, 190 Wickham, Anna: “Fragment of an Autobiography,” 135–36 Wieniawski: “Faust” Fantasie, 69 Wietrowetz, Gabriele, 67 Wilde, Oscar, 168, 201 Wilhelmj, August, 71 Williams, Anna, 182 Williams, Ralph Vaughan, 61 Wimble,Wilhemina, 204 wind players, women as, 93–101 Winternitz, Emanuel, 195 Women’s Social and Political Union, 219–22, 224 Wood, Henry, 9, 61, 64, 226 Woodhouse,Violet Gordon, 222