Charles Petzold

One of my favorite recreational activities is searching YouTube for music performances and posting them for others to enjoy. In 2020 I posted daily tweets for the Beethoven sestercentennial, and for Black History Month this past February, I used Facebook to post a 31-day Month of Black Composers.

All blog entries on women composers have now been consolidated in the new web site Women Composing.

Women’s History Month in March pretty much compelled me to begin posting the music of women composers on Facebook, and here they are. I obtained biographical details from the book Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music by Anna Beer, Women Composers of Classical Music: 369 Biographies from 1550 into the 20th Century by Mary F. McVicker, from Wikipedia, and from the internet in general.

These composers are arranged chronologically by date of birth. However, I only got up to Nadia Boulanger (born 1887), so another month might be necessary. (At least.)

Kassia (c. 810 – c. 865)

Kassia, also known as Cassia or Kassiani, was born in Constantinople to a wealthy family. Rather than marrying, she chose a monastic life. She founded a convent west of Constantinople and became its first abbess.

Kassia wrote spiritual poetry and hymns, and she is believed to be the earliest woman composer whose music still survives. Her most famous composition is known as the Hymn of Kassia (or the Hymn of Kassiani), which is still sung on Holy Wednesday within the Orthodox Church. The music is a form of solo Byzantine chant but is also sung by choirs in unison. The Greek text is based on Matthew 26:6-16, and for that reason the hymn is also known as the Hymn of the Fallen Woman.

This performance by the Portland-based Cappella Romana includes subtitles of the original Greek text and an English translation.

Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098 – 1179)

Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, mystic, visionary, author, and composer. Her written works include visionary theology, medicine, and natural history with an emphasis on botany and the medicinal qualities of plants.

In sheer quantity of surviving music, Hildegard is the best known of medieval composers regardless of sex. In recent decades her music has been extensively performed and recorded. Her liturgical songs are monophonic with vocal melodies set to her own Latin texts. Despite their harmonic simplicity, her vocal lines are highly expressive and closely connected to the words of the texts, many of which reflect devotion to the Virgin Mary.

Here is a selection of five of Hildegard’s hymns and songs sung by the Los Angeles-based Ensemble Vocatrix.

Texts of Hildegard’s music are available on the Hildegard Society website.

Francesca Caccini (1587 – 1641)

Francesca Caccini was born in Florence to a musical family. Her father, Giulio Caccini, was a well-known singer, composer, and writer on musical theory. Her mother was a singer, and after she died, her father’s second wife was also a singer.

Francesca Caccini grew up in the era when the tradition of opera was in its infant stages. The earliest opera that still exists is Jacopo Peri’s Euridice with additional music by Giulio Caccini, first performed in Florence in 1600. During this period, musical dramatic or comic works were often collaborative, and singers would even write their own arias. This is how Francesca Caccini got her start. Her career also benefited from the presence of strong women within the Medici court.

Francesca Caccini wrote or contributed to several operas, most of which are now lost. The only one to survive in its entirety is her 1625 comic work La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina (The Liberation of Roger from the Island of Alcina). Whether this is an opera or not is open to opinion, but if it is, it is the first known opera composed by a woman. Regardless, it is one of the earliest music theatre works by a single composer.

Earlier, in 1618, Francesca Caccini published a book entitled Il primo libro delle musiche (The First Book of Music) containing some 36 songs and arias that demonstrate various techniques specifically intended for women singers. As a one scholar has written, “one of the tricks that Caccini is teaching her female musician reader is how to sing about desire without acknowledging any knowledge of desire.” (Sounds and Sweet Airs, p. 29)

Here is a lively comic song from Francesca Caccini’s book, performed by Ars Lyrica Houston as part of a concert that included two other Caccini songs also available on their YouTube channel. They have graciously provided English subtitles.

Barbara Strozzi (1619 – 1677)

Barbara Strozzi was born out of wedlock in Venice. Her mother might have been a courtesan, and her father might have been Giulio Strozzi, a poet, opera librettist, and libertine. Regardless, Giulio Strozzi took both Barbara and her mother into his home, and eventually Barbara took his last name.

While still a teenager, Barbara Strozzi was heralded for her singing voice, and composers began dedicating music to her. While in her early 20s, Barbara Strozzi had four children by Count Giovanni Paolo Vidman, who did not marry her because he was already married. Strozzi’s biography is complicated by the uncertainty of her position as a concubine or a courtesan, but she seems to have been skilled at utilizing the best opportunities she could manage in the male-dominated society of 17th century Venice.

Barbara Strozzi never had the opportunity to compose an opera, but she did write and publish numerous madrigals and songs, first in 1644 and then seven collections between 1651 and 1664. These publications are said to be of exceptionally high quality, as if Barbara Strozzi knew that they would be her ultimate legacy.

This is one of four Strozzi compositions performed in concert by Ars Lyric Houston and available on YouTube with English subtitles. In this song, the singer implores Cupid to wake up and start shooting some arrows. The large string instrument is a theorbo, a lute-like instrument used throughout the Baroque era.

Isabella Leonarda (1620 – 1704)

Isabella Leonarda was born to a prominent family in Novara in northern Italy. At the age of 16 she entered an Ursuline convent where she remained for the rest of her life, composing in her spare time and teaching music to the other nuns.

Leonarda was a prolific composer of very many genres of religious vocal music, but she is also the first known woman to have published purely instrumental music. Her Opus 16 is a collection of twelve sonatas for one, two, or three string instruments with accompaniment by organ, which in performance is often provided by another instrument. These sonatas are divided into short movements and sometimes numerous short sections that are not quite long enough to be regarded as movements.

The 12th of her Opus 16 sonatas is for one violin. In this performance, the British violinist Rachel Podger is accompanied on theorbo by Sicilian guitarist Daniele Caminiti.

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665 – 1729)

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was born Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet to a family of musicians and instrument makers living on Île Saint-Louis in Paris. She grew up playing music. At the age of 5 she performed at Versailles before Louis XIV, and later became a court musician. In 1684 she married an organist, Marin de La Guerre, and continued performing in concerts in Paris, as well as composing and teaching. She was particularly renowned as a harpsichord virtuoso.

In the context of music history, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre is roughly contemporaneous with Alessandro Scarlatti and François Couperin, and about a generation ahead of those composers most associated with the Late Baroque: Bach, Handel, Domenico Scarlatti, Telemann, and Rameau.

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre composed in several genres: cantatas and other vocal music, suites for the harpsichord, sonatas for violin and viola da gamba, and a tragic opera based on the myth of Cephalus and Procris from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

One of Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s sonatas is performed here by the New York City-based Digital Camerata on historically accurate instruments: a baroque violin, a seven-string viola da gamba, a theorbo, and a harpsichord.

Princess Friederike Sophie Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709 – 1758)

Princess Friederike Sophie Wilhelmine of Prussia was born in Berlin to Frederick William I, who became King of Prussia in 1713. Wilhelmine was the older sister of Frederick II, who as King of Prussia from 1740 until his death in 1786 became known as Frederick the Great.

Princess Wilhelmine was coerced into marriage to Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. Together they extensively redesigned Bayreuth with much new architecture, including a new opera house and new theater, fashioning it into one of the cultural centers of Europe. She met and corresponded with several intellectuals of the era, including Voltaire.

Wilhelmine and her husband shared a love of music, and Wilhelmine is known to have composed several works including an opera. Most of her music has regrettably been lost, and her authorship of this delightful Harpsichord Concerto in G minor has recently been challenged. (See the comments on the video for more information.)

Julie Pinel (fl. 1710 – 1737)

Julie Pinel was born into a family of court musicians in France, but almost nothing more is known about her life. She published a collection of songs in 1737 that includes this lovely “Le Printems.” The video description includes an English translation of the lyrics, which begin “Nightgales you sing of the sweetness of the spring.”

Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia (1723 – 1787)

Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia was born in Berlin, the youngest sister of Frederick the Great and Princess Wilhelmine. She first learned music from her brother Frederick, who was taught by their mother. Their father, King Frederick William I, was abusive and reputedly hated music.

Much contradictory information exists about Anna Amalia — even whether she ever married or had children. Her own temperament was said to be mercurial. As one person wrote of her: “It is really true that the Princess’s conduct is unique. The waves of the sea are not more turbulent than her behavior. Good-natured and spiteful, philosopher, worldling, and pious woman, she is all of these by turns; ten times in the week she is satisfied and dissatisfied.”

Princess Anna Amalia became the influential abbess of Quedlinburg but continued to live in Berlin, where she studied music under Johann Philipp Kimberger, who was himself a student of J.S. Bach. She was a patron of musicians and composers, and also amassed an enormous collection of music of this period, which later became important when Baroque music was rediscovered during the 19th century, and which is still consulted by music scholars.

Besides playing harpsichord and violin, Anna Amalia also played the flute. It was very unusual for women of the era (and for some time thereafter) to play wind or brass instruments because it was considered improper to employ the feminine mouth in such a manner.

Many of Anna Amalia’s own compositions were either destroyed by herself or were lost. This performance of her Flute Sonata in F Major by the Montreal-based Infusion Baroque features period instruments, including the beautiful sound of a keyless wooden transverse flute.

Anna Bon (1738 – 1769)

Anna Bon was baptized in Bologna but she might have been born in St. Petersburg. Both her parents were involved in opera — her father was a librettist and set designer, and her mother was a singer — and they had at least recently been in St. Petersburg when Anna was born. Sometimes her last name is given as Boni.

At the age of 4 Anna Bon entered a music school in Venice, and later joined her parents at Bayreuth and became a court composer. She composed her Opus 1 flute sonatas at the age of 16. This is the 4th in that collection.

Marianna Martines (1744 – 1812)

Marianna Martines was born in Vienna. Her mother was German, but her father’s side of the family was from Spain by way of Naples. Sometimes her last name is spelled “Martinez.”

As was common in Vienna, disparate groups of people often lived in the same building, with the more affluent families on the lower floors and the poorer families on the upper floors. The Martines family had apartments on the 3rd floor of the Michaelerhaus, which also housed Pietro Trapassi (better known as the prolific librettist Metastasio), the opera composer Nicola Porpora, and at one time, Porpora’s assistant and student, the young Joseph Haydn.

Marianna learned singing from Porpora, the keyboard from Haydn, and composition from other teachers. A Mass that she composed was publicly performed when she was 16. She was befriended by Mozart, and the two of them played together at the harpsichord.

Marianna Martines never married and was able to devote her life to performing and composing music. Her best-known works are an Overture in C Major (sometimes incorrectly referred to as a symphonia or symphony) composed in 1770, incidently, the year that Beethoven was born:

This Dixit dominus from 1774 is based on the text of Psalm 109 from the Latin Vulgate, numbered as Psalm 110 in other translations, which begins “The Lord declared”:

Maddalena Sirmen (1745 – 1818)

Maddalena Sirmen was born as Maddalena Laura Lombardini in Venice. She began her music studies in a charitable orphanage for girls, and then continued with Venetian composer and violinist Giuseppe Tartini. She married a violinist named Ludovico Sirmen in 1767, and the two of them toured and performed together, including London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, where she also performed as a singer.

Most of Maddalena Sirmen’s known compositions feature the violin in some way. She wrote violin concertos, string quartets, string trios, and duets and sonatas for two violins that she probably played in concert with her husband. Here is one of those duets:

This Violin Concerto was published in London, probably in the early 1770s, under one of the variations of the spelling of her name: Madalena Laura Syrmen. The slow movement is quite luscious:

Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759 – 1824)

Maria Theresia von Paradis was born in Vienna. She was named after Empress Maria Theresa, for whom her father served as a royal court secretary.

At a very early age, Maria Theresia suddenly lost her eyesight. With the help of her father’s political connections, she was provided a good education and displayed an early aptitude for music. By the time she was a teenager, she was performing in public, and at the age of 20 she went on an extensive concert tour of Europe.

In 1784, Paradis performed as pianist in a Mozart piano concerto, but it’s not known if it was the Piano Concerto No. 19 in B♭ major (K. 456), which Mozart dedicated to her. Antonio Salieri and Joseph Haydn also wrote compositions for her.

During her European concert tour, Paradis began composing using a pegboard system designed by family friend and librettist Johann Riedinger. After Valentin Haüy opened the first school for blind youth in Paris in 1785, Paradis helped him develop the music curriculum.

Maria Theresia von Paradis is best known for the beguiling Sicilienne in E-flat major for violin and piano and adapted for many other instruments. Sicilienne is enormously popular. It’s been performed and recorded by many famous violinists and cellists, and it was recently played at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Sicilienne also overwhelmingly dominates YouTube performances of Paradis’s music, to the extent that other Paradis compositions are hard to find.

But, as should be obvious from its anachronistic romantic style, Sicilienne is not by Maria Theresia von Paradis. It is very likely a musical hoax by violinist Samuel Dushkin, who published the piece in 1924.

This Fantasie in G Major for piano is much more likely to have been composed by Maria Theresia von Paradis.

Sophia Dussek (1775 – 1847)

Sophia Dussek was born Sophia Giustina Corri in Edinburgh. Her father was Italian composer and impresario Domenico Corri, who had taken his family to Scotland to form an opera company. That didn’t work out, so the family later moved to London.

Sophia studied singing with her father, and sang in many public performances, including the first performance of Haydn’s The Storm and the London premiere of Mozart’s Requiem. In 1792 she married Czech composer and pianist Jan Ladislav Dussek, with whom she performed as a pianist and harpist. That marriage eventually floundered, and the couple separated a few years later. Following the death of Jan in France in 1812, she married a violist, John Alois Moral.

For some time, much of Sophia Dussek’s music was credited to her prolific first husband. But Sophia’s music for solo harp has been established as her own. This Sonata for Harp in C Minor was the third of three sonatas published under her name) by the Corri Dussek company around 1800. It is performed here by Turkish harpist Güneş Hızlılar.

Maria Szymanowska (1789 – 1831)

Maria Szymanowska was born Marianna Agata Wołowska in Warsaw into a prosperous family with interests in the arts. She apparently began learning piano at an early age. Her first public recitals were in Warsaw and Paris in 1810, which is also the year that she married Józef Szymanowski. Three children followed in the next couple years.

Maria Szymanowska toured all over Europe and was highly regarded as a piano virtuoso. She established a wide web of connections with composers and poets of that era, including Rossini, Cherubini, Hummel, John Field, and Goethe (who was said to be in love with her). She eventually settled in St. Petersburg as court pianist to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. She died there in 1831 during a cholera epidemic.

Most of Maria Szymanowska’s compositions are for piano and for voice with piano accompaniment. She wrote about hundred piano pieces and may have had an influence on Chopin.

This is Maria Szymanowska’s evocative Nocturne in B♭ performed by Macedonian pianist Natasha Stojanovska.

Louise Farrenc (1804 – 1875)

Louise Farrenc was born Jeanne Louise Dumont in Paris to an artistic and musical family. Even at an early age she demonstrated talent in both art and music but concentrated on music. By the age of 15 she was studying at the Paris Conservatoire and performing professionally. She married music publisher and scholar Aristide Farrenc in 1821.

In 1842, Louise Farrenc became a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, the first woman to achieve such a prominent position in a music academy. Most of Farrenc’s early compositions are for piano, but she is perhaps most highly regarded today for her chamber music, including two piano quintets and several trios and sonatas. She also composed three symphonies and other orchestral music. Several performances of her Symphony No. 3 in G Minor (Opus. 36) are available on YouTube. Here is one:

After the early death of her musically talented daughter Victorine in 1859, Louise Farrenc stopped actively composing and joined her husband in studies and publication of early harpsichord and piano music.

One of Louise Farrenc’s most famous compositions is her Trio in E Minor for Flute, Cello, and Piano (Opus 45), composed in 1857 and performed here by the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society of Wisconsin.

Fanny Mendelssohn (1805 – 1847)

Fanny Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg into a distinguished Jewish family. Her father was banker and philanthropist Abraham Mendelssohn and her grandfather (who died before she was born) was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Fanny had three younger siblings, including Felix.

Abraham Mendelssohn believed that Jews should participate fully in German public life and culture, even if this meant abandoning Judaism. He had his children baptized and changed their last name to Mendelssohn Bartholdy, under the assumption that the Mendelssohn part of the name would fade away with further assimilation. Although that compound last name is sometimes used even today, both Fanny and Felix hated it.

Both Fanny and Felix were encouraged by their father in their studies of music and composition, but their father had very different ideas for their futures: Felix would publish his compositions and perform in public, while Fanny’s music making would be confined to domestic settings. Some of Fanny’s early songs were published under Felix’s name.

In 1829, Fanny Mendelssohn married artist Wilhelm Hensel and is often known by her married name, Fanny Hensel, as in the title of a 2010 biography by R. Larry Todd: Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn. The Hensels had only one child, but he was given a very musical name: Sebastian Ludwig Felix.

At about the age of 40, Fanny decided it was time to begin having some of her songs and piano pieces published. Opus 1 through 7 were published during the last couple years of her life. Opus 8 through 11 (her Piano Trio of 1847) were published posthumously after her sudden death from a stroke. The remainder of Fanny’s music — totaling over 400 works — remained uncatalogued and unpublished until a recent focus on her life and compositions beginning in the 1980s. Here is her 1834 String Quartet:

Fanny Mendelssohn’s 1841 piano composition Das Jahr (The Year) has a movement for each of the 12 months. The autograph manuscript is embellished by drawings by Fanny’s husband and each month is preceded by a short verse. Despite its majestic scope and sumptuous piano writing, “Das Jahr” was not published until 1989. This performance is by Ukrainian pianist Anna Shelest.

Emilie Mayer (1812 –1883)

Emilie Mayer was born in Friedland, the town currently in the district Mecklenburgische Seenplatte of the state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Germany. Although she received an early education in music from an organist, she did not start composing until rather late in life. She was, however, quite prolific, composing an opera, eight symphonies, several overtures, a piano concerto, and a variety of chamber music.

This is her piano concerto dating from 1850.

Clara Schumann (1819 – 1896)

Clara Schumann was born Clara Josephine Wieck in Leipzig. Her mother was a famous singer, but her parents separated when she was about four, and she ended up in the household of her father, Friedrich Wieck, a very strict piano teacher. Under his tutelage (and certainly aided by her extraordinarily large hands), Clara Wieck became one of the century’s greatest and most famous concert pianists.

Clara began playing piano in public at the age of 9 and touring at the age of 11. Pianists of this era were expected to perform their own compositions in addition to those of others, and she obliged by composing piano pieces and songs. She began writing her Piano Concerto at the age of 13 and performed it shortly after her 16th birthday, with Felix Mendelssohn conducting.

One of Friedrich Wieck’s students was Robert Schumann, about 9 years older than Clara Wieck, who moved into the Wieck household when Clara was 8. The romance began developing several years later. They married against her father’s wishes in 1840 when Clara turned 21.

Despite some initial plans to forge an artistic collaboration of equals, Robert and Clara’s marriage became more lopsided. Clara was increasingly forced to give up her own compositional career in favor of Robert’s, to perform and promote his music in concert, to care for their children (which eventually numbered eight), and to deal with his worsening mental illness.

Soon after Robert died in an asylum in 1856, Clara stopped composing entirely. She continued her concert career until 1891, forging many friendships in the music world, and becoming a trusted mentor and consultant to Johannes Brahms. She would outlive her husband by 40 years.

These lovely Three Romances for Violin and Piano (Opus 22) are one of Clara Schumann’s last compositions, dating from 1853 and dedicated to violinist Joseph Joachim.

Pauline Viardot (1821 –1910)

Pauline Viardot was born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline García in Paris. Her parents were Spanish opera singers who had settled in France. She and some of her siblings became singers, and the family toured Europe and the United States. Pauline was also a gifted pianist, studying with Franz Liszt, and a composer studying with Anton Reicha. When she was 19, she married the writer and critic Louis Viardot.

Most of Pauline Viardot’s compositions are vocal music. She composed several operettas, including three based on librettos by Ivan Turgenev.

Pauline Viardot’s composed her 1904 operetta Cendrillon (the French version of Cinderella) to her own libretto. This video is an enchanting semi-virtual performance by the Grays Harbor Opera Workshop of Aberdeen Washington. It is sung in the original French with English subtitles, but the spoken parts are in English.

Teresa Carreño (1853 – 1917)

Teresa Carreño was born María Teresa Carreño García de Sena in Caracas, Venezuela. Her first music lessons came from her father, who was the son of Venezuelan composer Jose Cayetano Carreño.

In 1862, when she was 8 years old, Teresa Carreño’s family moved to New York City to further her career as a pianist. She met composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who became her mentor. In the following year she performed at the White House before President Lincoln. In 1866, the family moved to Paris, where she met Rossini, Gounod, and Liszt. Throughout her career, she frequently toured Europe, the United States, and also made appearances in Venezuela. She became known as “The Valkyrie of the Piano.”

Besides playing the piano, Teresa Carreño also sang, and she appeared as the Queen in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. She was married four times to four musicians (two of them brothers) and had six children.

The Teresa Carreño Cultural Complex in Caracas is named in her honor. It contains her archives and is home to the Venezuela Symphony Orchestra.

Teresa Carreño’s earliest piano compositions date from when she first began performing in public and use her own pieces as interludes between works by other composers. The impressionistic Un rêve en mer (A Dream at Sea), Opus 28, dates from about 1868, which means that she was probably about 14 when she wrote it. This is American pianist Sarah Cahill.

Cécile Chaminade (1857 – 1944)

Cécile Chaminade was born Cécile Louise Stéphanie Chaminade in Paris. Instruction by her mother introduced her to the piano. By the age of 10 she was invited to enter the Paris Conservatoire, but her father forbid it. She instead studied privately with several teachers.

Cécile Chaminade publicly performed on the piano at age 18 and played frequently in Paris and London. In her 50s she toured the United States.

Cécile Chaminade had also been composing since she was about 8 years old, and she played a few of her pieces for Georges Bizet. Her Opus 1 (Deux Mazurkas for piano) was published when she was 12, and she continued to compose over the next 60 years, reaching Opus 171 in 1928. Her compositions encompass songs, piano pieces, orchestral works, and a comic opera. In 1913 she because the first female composer to be made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

Chaminade’s one-movement Concertina for Flute and Orchestra in D Major (Opus 107) dates from 1902. This video with flutist Hayley Miller and the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra begins with the conductor’s amusing (though perhaps apocryphal) account of the origin of this composition. The music begins at 2:15.

Mélanie Bonis (1858 – 1937)

Mélanie Bonis was born in Paris. Her parents were not much interested in music, so she taught herself piano. She entered the Paris Conservatoire as a teenager at the time that Debussy was a student and she studied with César Frank.

Her early musical career was cut short by an 1883 marriage arranged by her parents to a man 22 years older, who already had five children, and who did not like music. In the 1890s she had an affair with a man she had met at the Paris Conservatoire, and who encouraged her to resume composing.

Melanie Bonis composed well into the 20th century, with a total of some 300 works including music for piano and organ, chamber music, and orchestral pieces. Most of her music was published under the name “M. Bonis” or “Mel Bonis” to disguise her sex. Even today people refer to her as Mel Bonis but in a more affectionate way.

Her 1906 composition Fantaisie en septour (Opus 72) is for 2 flutes, 2 violins, viola, cello, and piano, and is here performed by the Milan-based Le Cameriste Ambrosiane.

Ethel Smyth (1858 – 1944)

Ethel Smyth is one of the most famous and fascinating English women composers.

She was born in the Sidcup area of London to a proper Victorian family who gave her an early education in music but who would go no further. What she wanted was to study music at the Leipzig Conservatory, but this was adamantly opposed by her parents. Nevertheless, she persisted. She was eventually allowed to go there in 1877 but left about a year later. During her time in Leipzig, she met fellow students Grieg, Dvořák, and Tchaikovsky, as well as Brahms and Clara Schumann.

Ethel Smyth’s earliest compositions date from about 1877. Over the next half century she wrote music for orchestras, choruses, chamber ensembles (including six string quartets), piano, organ, and voice. She wrote six operas and about a dozen books, several of which are memoirs.

In the 1910s, Ethel Smyth became very active in the women’s suffrage movement in England. During an action involving throwing stones at the windows of politicians opposed to giving women the vote, she was arrested and served two months in prison. During that time, she led the other women in performances of her stirring choral work March of the Women.

In 1922, Ethel Smyth became the first female composer to be made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), and she is often known as Dame Ethel Smyth.

During her life, Ethel Smyth’s appearance and demeanor were often described as “mannish.” In modern terms, she presented butch, and there is no question that she was gay. Most of Ethel Smyth’s romantic relationships were with women, although some of them were unrequited. It is believed by some that one of her lovers was the famed suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst.

In February 1930, Ethel Smyth dropped by the home of Virginia Woolf, and despite the 24-year age difference and an even vaster difference in personalities, the two became close friends and correspondents. Over one-quarter of Virginia Woolf’s existing letters during the last 12 years of her life are to Ethel Smyth, and sometimes Woolf got two letters a day in return. “An old woman of seventy one … has fallen in love with me,” Woolf wrote her nephew. See this article for a full exploration of this extraordinary friendship.

Ethel Smyth’s most famous work is her 1906 opera The Wreckers, based on old stories of villages in Cornwall luring ships to crash on their shores, and then plundering them. The libretto was originally written in French because France was thought the best bet for a premiere. That didn’t work, so it was then translated into German for a premiere in Leipzig in 1906. In 1907 Gustav Mahler was considering a production at the Vienna State Opera, but he was driven out of his post there by antisemitic agitation that same year. In an English translation, The Wreckers was finally premiered in London in 1910.

In recent years, more productions of The Wreckers have been mounted, including this one at Bard College. Here is — in English and with subtitles — the complete opera The Wreckers.

Amy Beach (1867 – 1944)

Amy Beach was the first prominent American woman composer.

She was born Amy Marcy Cheney in Henniker, New Hampshire, and quickly showed an aptitude for music, singing on pitch when she was two, beginning piano at four, and composing at the same age. She was initially taught piano by her mother and gave her first recital at seven.

The Cheney family moved to Boston shortly thereafter, where Amy had private lessons in piano and a year of music theory and composition. In 1885 at the age of 17 she made her concert debut with the Boston Symphony playing the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2.

At the age of 19, Amy Cheney married Dr. Henry Harris Beach, a physician who was in his early 40s and who had long admired Amy’s piano performances. But as his wife, Amy was limited to two concert appearances per year. He encouraged her to compose, although not allowing her to study composition formally in a school or with a tutor. Aside from the year of instruction as a teenager, she was largely self-taught in music theory and composition. When she published or performed, she was known as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.

Most of Mrs. Beach’s early compositions were for piano, voice, and choruses, but from 1894 to 1896, she composed a four-movement 40-minute orchestral work that she called the Gaelic Symphony because it incorporated songs from the British Isles. It is the first symphony composed and published by an American woman, and it was widely performed in the decade after its premiere.

After her husband died in 1910, she legally changed her name to Amy Beach, but she continued to compose and perform under the name Mrs. H. H. A. Beach. However, there are indications that she wished to be known by posterity as Amy Beach, and that was the name that Adrienne Fried Block chose for the title of her groundbreaking 1998 biography Amy Beach: Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867 – 1944.

Amy Beach is now considered to be one of the Boston Six, or the Second New England School, which is a group of American composers recognized by music historians as having flourished around Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is the youngest and only woman of the group that also included John Knowles Paine, Arthur Foote, George Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, and Horatio Parker. Edward MacDowell is best remembered today for founding the MacDowell artist’s residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In her will Amy Beach created the Amy Beach Fund so that royalties from sales and performances of her music would help fund MacDowell.

Particularly in the 20th century, Amy Beach composed more chamber music. Two of her final works are an engaging Piano Trio (Opus 150) from 1938 and the short Pastorale for Woodwind Quintet (Opus 151) from 1942. Here is her very Brahmsian Piano Quintet in F♯ Minor (Opus 67) from 1907.

Margaret Ruthven Lang (1867 – 1972)

Margaret Ruthven Lang was born in Boston about 12 weeks after Amy Beach. Her father was a conductor and composer, and her mother was an amateur singer. As a result of her father’s activity in the Boston music community, Margaret was introduced to many of the composers and musicians who flourished there. In 1886, her mother took her to Munich where she studied violin and music theory. She also studied in Boston with George Whitefield Chadwick and John Knowles Paine.

Margaret Lang composed mostly piano pieces and songs, but also wrote some chamber music and orchestral music. While Amy Beach was the first American woman to have a symphony published and performed in 1896, Margaret Lang was the first American woman to have an orchestral work performed by a major symphony orchestra when the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered her “Dramatic Overture” in 1893.

Margaret Lang composed other orchestral music, but all of it seems to be lost, possibly destroyed by herself. She stopped composing in 1919, and although she continued to be actively interested in music — she was a subscriber to the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 91 consecutive seasons — she mostly devoted herself to religious work. She was honored by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of 100 and died at the age of 104.

Not much of Margaret Ruthven Lang’s music beyond songs and short piano pieces seems to have survived. Here is a performance of her companion piano pieces Twilight and Starlight published in an anthology of piano music in Boston in 1894.

Alma Mahler (1879–1964)

Alma Mahler had a social and romantic life that tends to overshadow her status as a composer. She was born Alma Schindler in Vienna, the daughter of a famous landscape painter. Her father encouraged her early interests in music, and she had several tutors. In 1900 she began studying piano and composition with composer Alexander Zemlinsky, which whom she had an affair.

In November 1901, Alma Schindler met Gustav Mahler, a 41-year-old conductor who was director of the Vienna Court Opera and had also composed four symphonies. They commenced an affair that overlapped with her relationship with Zemlinsky, and they were married the following year.

Alma had been composing music since she was a child, but Gustav Mahler’s attitude was similar to Robert Schumann’s 60 years earlier: He believed that a marriage could support only one composer, and she stopped composing for most of the duration of their marriage.

The marriage with Mahler was rocky, and Alma began an affair was architect Walter Gropius, who she married after Mahler’s death in 1911. After their divorce in 1920, she married author Franz Werfel, who later wrote The Song of Bernadette. From the 1940s she lived in Los Angeles, where she was a frequent hostess to the émigré community, including Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Thomas Mann, and then New York City, where she lived long enough to see Leonard Bernstein conduct her first husband’s music.

Most of Alma’s compositions seem to date from before her marriage to Mahler. Although she is believed to have composed piano music, chamber music, and a scene of an opera, her surviving compositions total only 17 songs, 14 of which were published during her lifetime.

Alma Mahler’s Five Songs for voice and piano were published in 1910 at the urging of Gustav Mahler, who was attempting a rapprochement with his wife after discovering her affair with Gropius. In English the titles are:

English translations are available on the Oxford Lieder website.

Dora Pejačević (1885 – 1923)

Dora Pejačević, also known as Countess Maria Theodora Paulina Pejačević, was born in Budapest to a Croatian count and Hungarian baroness. She received piano lessons from her mother and had private tutors for studying composition, instrumentation, and violin.

Dora Pejačević began composing at an early age, and with her Piano Concerto (Opus 33) in 1913, and her Symphony (Opus 41) in 1917, she became the first Croatian to compose such music. Her compositions have opus numbers up to 58, including songs (some with orchestral accompaniment), piano works and chamber music.

Her four-movement Piano Quartet in D Minor (Opus 25) dates from 1908. The second movement Adagio is particularly entrancing,

Rebecca Clarke (1886 – 1979)

Rebecca Clarke was born in Harrow, England to an American father and German mother. Her father was a tyrannical music lover, for he forced all his children to learn instruments so they could play chamber music for him. That’s how Rebecca learned violin.

In 1903, Rebecca Clarke continued her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, but then transferred to the Royal College of Music after a professor proposed to her. On the advice of another professor, she switched from the violin to the viola because being in the middle of the strings would give her a better sense of orchestral structure.

In 1910, she began supporting herself by playing the viola as a soloist, and with chamber ensembles and orchestras. She made her first visit to the United States in 1916, and played one of her first mature compositions, Morpheus for viola and piano, in several venues including Carnegie Hall:

In a famous incident in 1919, she entered her Viola Sonata in a contest, and came in second, but the name “Rebecca Clarke” was widely assumed to be a pseudonym, for it was believed that no woman could compose as well as that.

Rebecca Clarke was in the United States at the outset of World War II and couldn’t return to England, so she settled in the US, eventually living in New York City. She encountered an old college friend on the streets on Manhattan and married him in 1942. She stopped composing at about the same time and died in New York City at the age of 93.

Here is Rebecca Clarke’s impressionistic Debussyan Viola Sonata:

Florence Price (1887–1953)

Florence Price was born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, where her father was the only African American dentist in town. Her mother was a music teacher and gave Florence her early musical education. She was then able to enter the New England Conservatory of Music in 1902. After graduating, she taught music briefly in Little Rock and at an HBCU in Atlanta, but her career did not blossom until she and her husband escaped the South and moved to Chicago, where she continued to study music and began composing.

In 1932, Florence Price completed her first symphony, which was performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. This accomplishment made Florence Price the Black woman to have a composition played by a major American orchestra. The first movement is reminiscent of Dvořák’s Symphony for the New World (1893), which used Native American melodies and was influential in demonstrating to many early African American composers that it was possible to incorporate American music within the European symphonic tradition. The third movement of Price’s Symphony No. 1 is a Juba Dance and includes African drums and a slide whistle.

Florence Price created an impressive body of work, including four symphonies, violin and piano concertos, orchestral suites (several with Black themes), chamber music (including two string quartets), piano music, organ music, choral music, songs, and arrangements of spirituals, some of which were performed by Marian Anderson.

Florence Price’s four piano works entitled Fantasie Nègre date mostly from 1932, but the first was originally entitled Negro Fantasy in 1929, and the fourth was later revised several times. In this video, pianist Samantha Ege performs the fascinating original version of Fantasie Nègre No.4 in B Minor.

A video of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto in One Movement is included in her entry in my blog entry on A Month of Black Composers.

Nadia Boulanger (1887 – 1979)

Nadia Boulanger was one of the foremost composition teachers of the 20th century. Her students include Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach, and Philip Glass. But she was also a composer.

Nadia Boulanger was born in Paris in a family surrounded by French musicians and composers. Her father had attended the Conservatoire de Paris and won the prestigious Prix de Rome for composition in 1835, and later taught at the Conservatoire. Nadia also began attending the Conservatoire de Paris at age nine. One of her goals was to be the first woman to win the Prix de Rome for composition, and she tried and failed four times, in 1906, 1907, 1908, and 1909, but got further each time.

Nadia Boulanger’s father had died in 1900, and her younger sister Lili was often sick, so Nadia was burdened with support for the family. She turned away from composition following Lili’s death in 1918 and soon began teaching, and that dominated the rest of her life.

Nadia Boulanger didn’t think she was as good a composer as her sister, but you be the judge. This Fantaisie variée for piano and orchestra from 1912 is one of Nadia Boulanger’s few orchestral works.

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To continue chronologically, go to Another Month of Women Composers.