Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head

music for the fair sex that worked toward the production of “an ideologically correct species of woman.”³³ The primacy of women’s duties in the family is kept in view by song texts that dwell upon courtship, marriage, and mothering, though that emphasis probably made singing not just acceptable but also meaningful in this historical moment, when music for music’s sake was no more an issue than was full female equality. The inclusion of songs and simple keyboard pieces in women’s journals such as Amaliens Erholungsstunden, Frauenzimmer-Almanach, and Leipziger Taschenbuch für Frauenzimmer is indicative of the contradictory role of musical accomplishment in relation to Enlightenment discourses of self- improvement and education as they were hesitantly applied to women. With a few exceptions, these periodicals represented only a superficial application of the rhetoric of personal improvement, since they discouraged education for women as a means of purely personal development. As Sabine Schumann has observed, the new literary genre of women’s journals responded to and propagated the notion of improvement and development for women, and “the literary housewife [became] a favorite image.” But female improvement was policed by the publications that fostered it. As Schumann wrote: “A hostile attitude to women and the Enlightenment is undoubtedly present. . . . ‘Female accomplishment’ (Bildung), an oft heard catch phrase of the period, permitted women only so much development as would transform them from simple housekeepers to cultivated housewives, without their transgressing the domestic sphere. The truly erudite woman, an equal of men, was an extremely odd idea at this time.”³⁴ At worst, the accomplishments were a means of erasing the perceived menace of female nature with a series of predictable and thus manageable behaviors. An essay in the Monatsschrift für Damen of 1787 described women as a menace, a danger, by nature unfathomable. Only through instruction could her God-given positive characteristics be developed, only then would she become “sanftmüthig, furchtsam, gefällig, mitleidig” (gentle, timid, pleasant, sympathetic).³⁵ Paradoxically, if predictably, self-improvement and education were the means to more effective control—a vivid illustration of Foucault’s thesis of education as a disciplinary technology.³⁶

      A conduct book by Andreas Meier from 1771 spelled out this highly qualified application of an Enlightenment rhetoric of improvement and related the accomplishments specifically to the class- and status-signifying practices that fell to woman in the home rather than to issues of purely personal development.³⁷ Meier rejected the extremes of a young woman’s either learning nothing but housework or straying into the realm of masculine learning: “If the first is her husband’s maid, the second is a fool who wants to rule him with her knowledge.”³⁸ The balance Meier sought to strike was one in which a wife possessed sufficient education to distinguish her from the lower order of maid but not so much that she would break the frame of female knowledge and start discussing “Wolf or Newton” with her husband.³⁹ Indeed, for those living in the country and small towns he deemed a knowledge of sewing, embroidery, and housekeeping sufficient.⁴⁰ But he saw the need for greater accomplishment for those living in larger towns. Here Meier recommended “Kentnisse der Geschichte und Geographie” (knowledge of history and geography), “Musik [und] Zeichnen” (music and drawing), and “eine zierliche und angenehme Schreibart” (a dainty and pleasant style of handwriting).⁴¹ That is, he recommended those accomplishments that enhance polite society (the writing of invitations, conversation, the entertainment of song).

      These broader issues of female cultivation and its limits bear directly upon the practice of music. Meier recommended music to the fair sex with particular warmth, on the grounds of woman’s innate affinity for its expressive and gently moving tones: “Among the galant arts that are expected of a young lady I figure music most of all.—‘Tones’, writes Mr. Batteux, ‘are the organ of the heart: they move, they please, they persuade us, and effortlessly touch the heart.’”⁴² Such views are reflected in the style and characteristic sentiments of music for the fair sex. “Gentle, timid, pleasant, sympathetic,” the qualities imputed to woman (in her civilized, disciplined state) by the Monatsschrift für Damen, furnished the expression and performance directions of this repertory. These “feminine” musical elements were always both aesthetic and social.

      The recommendation of music to women went hand in hand with attitudes (contradicted by the realities of eighteenth-century music making) that women could not achieve great things in it—that they lacked “genius.” An anonymous author in the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, edited by J.F. Reichardt, saw fit to cite Rousseau’s letter to d’Alembert to this end, despite the fact that both the editor’s wife and daughter were published composers. Rousseau’s description of creative inspiration as a violent ravishment of the heart and soul linked savagery, the irrational, and the uncivilized with masculine genius. Inspiration was off limits for woman, “whose writings or products are cold and pretty like their authors.” The “lightness of spirit, of taste, and of grace” exhibited by the “little works” produced by women connects these assertions about the limits and character of female creativity with the styles and genres of music for the fair sex.⁴³

      However patronizing they may be, these remarks also embody the idea that woman was the more intensely civilized of the sexes, a proposition that underwrote moral and spiritual investments in female musical practices in the home. The medical doctor Jacob Fidelis Ackermann pointed to the delicacy of woman’s physique and nervous fibers in demonstrating this point—though Rousseau would have not agreed with his conclusion that woman was better suited to intellectual and academic pursuits, man to physical labor.⁴⁴ This idea informed the spiritual-moral value placed upon women in the late eighteenth-century home, where she stood as a sort of totem warding off the evil she might, in other contexts, be seen to embody. In Goethe’s Elective Affinities, for example, this civilizing function of woman is evident in the effect of Ottilie’s arrival at the hall upon Eduard and the captain: “Both were altogether more sociable . . . they became gentler and generally more communicative.”⁴⁵ The sight of female beauty harmonizes the male viewer, pacifying him, returning him from his alienation to himself: “Whoever looks on beauty is immune against the advent of any evil; he feels in accord with himself and with the world.”⁴⁶ The moralizing piety of songs for the fair sex should be seen in this context; femininity was a form of secular religion, and its rituals, undertaken by women, were felt to safeguard the entire familial congregation.

      A COURTLY GENEALOGY

      If social status is a less conspicuous concern than education in discourse on female art practices in Germany, it is also clear from Andreas Meier’s remarks that education and status were ultimately inextricable. This intersection of agendas of class and gender helps to explain why the practice of music was so widespread. If music’s disciplinary function in relation to women had not been in some way tied to other social values in which the executants had a personal stake, the popularity of music might be difficult to explain. Indeed, the notion of an intersection of class and gender may fall short of the critical mark: for “femininity” was an ideal posited upon and signifying leisure, a withdrawal from physical work, an absence of labor. Music for the fair sex celebrated this remove from the physical and intellectual effort of professional musical production.

      In his preface to the Gesänge fürs schöne Geschlecht (1775), Johann Friedrich Reichardt underlined this absence of labor in a revealing fantasy of the performer’s physique, characterized by physical delicacy and tiny hands. Many of the smaller notes were optional, he assured the executant, and the essential notes were set in large type to help avoid unattractive squinting or a furrowed brow:

      With due consideration for the sensitive eyes and small hands of the fair sex, I have written the middle voice that is worked into the texture, in small notes, so that you may more easily distinguish the notes that are to be sung from those that are only for the clavier, and also so that you will be able to determine more readily which notes you can leave out, if the pretty little hand won’t stretch, and you would rather only play the vocal line [with the right hand]. This also applies to the small notes in the bass, so that you can find the real bass line more easily, because I was truly worried about jaundiced [neidische], red, and squinting eyes. Gentlemen, on the other hand, often have hands that can reach three or four notes beyond the octave.⁴⁷

      Much is at stake in these gallant concessions to female physical delicacy.