Ether Game: Your Daily Dose of Musical Fun and Frustration (A Production of WFIU Public Radio)

Barbara Strozzi made for herself long and respected life as a musician in her native Venice. Strozzi was not only a skilled singer, but she was also a trained violinist and composer who studied under Francesco Cavalli. She is also lucky to have had many of her works published during her life, something that was indeed very rare for woman musicians in her lifetime. With her fame and public attention, however, came some pretty nasty rumors. Some of her critics accused her of being a courtesan, though we have to take that term into consideration. Courtesans were often valued and patronized for their intellectual abilities. In fact, many women during the Renaissance became “honest courtesans” in order to pursue their artistic endeavors. Whether or not this is true about Barbara Strozzi, we may never know. What we do know, though, is that Strozzi was one of a very small group of women who was able to enjoy a long and prosperous career as a musician during the late Renaissance and early Baroque era.

The story of Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann is an inspiring love story in the history of music. Clara had, however, been fortunate enough to establish a name for herself long before she met Robert for the first time. Even as a young woman, she was already giving recitals to sold-out audiences and composing her own works. Needless to say, her fame only grew in leaps in bounds after she married Robert. They were crazy about each other, and Clara soon became one of the prominent interpreters of her husband’s works. There are, however, questions about the role the young Johannes Brahms played in their relationship. Brahms was a lifelong friend of the Schumanns, though he often professed deeper feelings for Clara even after Robert died in 1856. Clara’s compositions seem to reflect a style that combines the innovative techniques of both her husband and their close musical friend.

The memory of the French composer Cécile Chaminade hasn’t fared as well as those of the other composers whose works we’ve listened to this evening. Chaminade was, as we’ve seen before on tonight’s game, a composer who exhibited extraordinary musical gifts at a very young age. She gave her first public concert as a pianist at the age of 18 and gradually gained a dual reputation as a composer and performer. Her character pieces for the piano, like the Valse Carnavalesque, and her songs were very popular for a time both in her native France as well as in the United States. The French composer Ambroise Thomas once said of Chaminade that she “wasn’t a woman who composes, but rather a composer who is a woman.” She was also the first woman composer to receive France’s highest civilian award, The Legion of Honor. Sadly, her international fame slowly diminished over the latter half of the 20th century, though there is still an interest in studying and performing her music.

Hildegard of Bingen is one of history’s earliest-known female composers. Hildegard began having sacred visions and giving prophecies at a very young age, leading her parents to send her off to a life as a nun. She eventually worked her way up to becoming an abbess and founded several abbeys in medieval Germany. In addition to her multi-faceted life as an abbess, herbalist, poet, visionary, and linguist, Hildegard is best known for her compositions of liturgical music. She is also credited as the inventor of her own alternative alphabet. The texts of her compositions and other writings show evidence of her use of a modified form of Latin, which she used probably to increase solidarity among her nuns. This particular work, Ave generosa, is a hymn devoted to the Virgin Mary.

Amy Marcy Beach was the first successful American female composer of large-scale musical works. A child prodigy who was originally trained as a concert pianist, she took up composition after her husband asked her to limit her performing activities to one public recital per year. Her first major success was her Mass in E-flat Major, which premiered in 1892 and was performed by Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society. The performance immediately put her at the forefront of American composers at the time. In addition to her career as composer and concert pianist, she was also a great advocate of music education. She is particularly well-known for her “Ten Commandments for Young Composers” and also served as the first president of the Society of American Women Composers. Needless to say, Amy Beach enjoyed a fantastic career as one of America’s first “leading ladies” in the field of composition.

It’s strange to think that Gounod’s opera Faust, one of the staples of the opera repertory, wasn’t that great of a success at its premiere in 1859. Thankfully, the work has stood the test of time and is a favorite of opera stages around the world. In fact, it was the work that was performed at the opening of the first Metropolitan Opera House in 1883 and was it’s season-opener for many years afterwards. Gounod’s opera is a faithful re-telling of Goethe’s epic play of a doctor who sells his soul to the Devil for youth and knowledge. Faust, once returned to his youthful appearance, falls in love with a girl named Marguerite. At the end of the opera, poor Marguerite is in prison for killing the love child she had with Faust. Despite Faust’s pleading and the Devil’s taunting, a chorus of angels proclaims that Marguerite’s soul has been saved as she ascends the scaffold for her execution.