This largely forgotten moment in the history of music and male identity was self-conscious and the subject of some contemporary theorization. Reichardt himself offered a formulation and reflection in two concluding essays of the Almanach for 1783.31 The first essay is on the education of taste, the second on the use of images of suffering heroes in the arts. Both essays directed German youth to female influences. In “Vom Geschmack und der Wichtigkeit einer frühzeitgen Bildung” (On the taste and importance of early cultivation) Reichardt recommended that the young should be spared harsh moralizing and allowed simply to spend time in the company of cultivated women.32 This, he argued, is the surest means to acquire taste, which is the ability to recognize and be moved by the morally good. A “Gefühl des Schönen” (feeling for the beautiful), which unites the domains of aesthetics and ethics, is nurtured through the elevating example of (the right kind of) women. At the opposite pole to exemplary womanhood stands “Der kalte lieblose Mann, oder noch mehr, der Bösewicht” (the cold, loveless man, or, still worse, the scoundrel), the army of rakes, libertines, villains, and unmovable fathers, indifferent to the torments they inflict.33 The reader is persuaded of this cause through felicitous semantic duplication, the use of schön to designate both women (“das schöne Geschlecht”) and the morally beautiful (“das Schöne”).
In the second essay, “Vom Interesse des leidenden Helden für die Kunst” (On the interest of suffering heroes for the arts), Reichardt provided an art-theoretical rationale for the idea of an exchange of souls. Suffering heroes are ideal material for artistic representation, he argued, because they arouse sympathetic identification: “As soon as we see someone suffering . . . our imagination places us with them in an identical situation; it seems as though we were in their place.”34 He then elaborated this principle in terms that both impose and dissolve sexual difference. Women, he asserted, are more readily and deeply moved than men, for which reason they make better “suffering heroes.”35 Indeed, elsewhere in this almanac Reichardt described the celebrity painter Angelica Kauffman in just these terms, as a sorrowing artist, burdened by a secret, suffering from love.36 What could be more moving than a virtuous woman in distress, Reichardt pondered at length. Where we might expect images of the male rescuer to enter the text Reichardt simply dwells, sympathetically, as if experiencing himself in the position of a suffering heroine.
The exchange of souls as an aesthetic and moral ideal, though more readily articulated through the visual arts and literature, also haunted Reichardt’s ideals of sound. The charms of Rosa Cannabich notwithstanding, Reichardt often attributed not narrowly gendered characteristics to performances but an androgynous mixture of forcefulness and delicacy that both entice and command. In the voice of Josepha Hellmuth, a court singer in Mainz, Reichardt discovered a mixture of tenderness and power that could be understood as encompassing extremes of manliness and femininity: “None can deny their astonishment at her richly toned, powerful, tender, touching, voice.”37 Not just expressive range but harmonious balance of contrasting elements is conveyed in this description. Far from representing a transgressive aspect, this androgynous balance of antithetical elements was a neoclassical ideal in art theory of the period, theory with which Reichardt seems to be working. Androgyny, as a golden mean and principle of balance, was influentially propounded by the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his reappraisal of classical statuary and epitomized by his celebration of the equilibrium of masculine and feminine, adult and youthful, characteristics of the Apollo Belvedere.38 Along these lines, Reichardt admired the antithesis between ingratiating “performance” and “manly” tone in the (male) violinist Schick: “Pleasingness, sweetness of performance perfects his glory; this performance is unsurpassable because it ‘speaks’ and is full of soul. . . . The tone that he produces from his violin is powerful, manly, profound.”39
However, there was an emphasis in Reichardt, alien to Winckelmann, on the female exemplification of aesthetic ideals that has implications for the political coloring of the realm of the arts. Reichardt began the Almanach for 1783 with a twenty-year-old violinist, one “Baier,” the daughter of a court trumpeter. The “Stärke und Werth” (power and integrity) of her playing, Reichardt affirmed, were recognized when Frederick the Great condescended to accompany her on his flute. This musical inversion of social hierarchy (the king as servant) hints at the notion of woman’s musical sovereignty. Reichardt also perceived aristocratic sprezzatura in Baier’s playing, even though she was not of aristocratic rank. Specifically, he praised her as the exception not only to her own sex but to male violinists in preserving in her playing a “decorum and artful negligence in execution.”40 Praise of female musical excellence is coupled here with some notion that the power of the sovereign is fleetingly usurped or checked. In this emphasis on an individual’s musical skill and, related to this, the unique character of her sound, Reichardt’s sense of music, and of writing about it, appears more modern, if impressionistic, than Forkel’s lists of institutional musicians, ordered according to the authority of clergy, aristocracy, and God.
SCOPE, ARGUMENTS, AND DRAMATIS PERSONAE
If Reichardt is so revealing a witness to this period, why is he so little known, or valued, in Anglophone musicology? One reason, already hinted at, is his colorful style, which seeks to capture (musical and individual) character rather than to proceed in a primarily documentary and positivist manner. His music, like his writing, also lost out to historical change. As the composer of around 1,500 mostly strophic songs, his musical output, though admired by contemporaries, was eclipsed by the Schubertian revolution. Specifically, Reichardt’s obedience to the form of the poetry he set revealed too little of that compositional rewriting, and subjectivity, admired in the romantic metaphysics of music that was emerging at the end of his life. As the preferred composer of major poets of the day, particularly Goethe, Reichardt appeared to modern eyes too devout (too Lutheran, perhaps) in his relationship to the word. Similarly, in instrumental music, Reichardt’s adherence to ideas of unity of style and affect, though typical of his Prussian context, was also a matter of regret within the discourse of Viennese classical style, as it developed in the twentieth century.
A pattern of Othering Reichardt as reportedly uncharacteristic of his period persists to this day. Symptomatic is the omission from the New Bach Reader of his important essay on J.S. Bach, first published in the Musikalisches Kunstmagazin (1782). The omission may reflect positivistic difficulty with Reichardt’s social and literary frameworks for musical meaning. His stigmatization began early, with his dismissal from the post of court kapellmeister in Berlin for his publication in 1794 of a relatively positive account of the French Revolution in the Vetraute Briefe über Frankreich. This disgrace, along with Schiller’s (presumably related) personal dislike of him, probably influenced Reichardt’s reputation in the canon-building and patriotic Prussian nineteenth century, and though the details of that scandal are not remembered now, it seems to have cast a long shadow.
In selecting Reichardt as a companion to this study I hope to highlight some of his novel modes of writing and thinking about music, and to place them within wider feminocentric aspects of the late eighteenth century. His life spans the entire period covered by this study. Born in the east Prussian city of Königsberg four years before the outbreak of