Debbie Diamond, Poppy Walshaw, Becky Harris and Emma Alter, the Hanover Square Quartet, are all period instrument specialists playing with leading period instrument ensembles.
But during lockdown, like so many other musicians, they decided to go a step further and a create their own quartet not only to play period instruments but to promote the works of nineteen century women composers – rarely even acknowledged in their day. The musical activities of nineteenth century ladies of any breeding were not expected to extend beyond piano and song cycles performed in private drawing rooms. Any attempt at composition, especially of larger or ‘more serious’ works was heavily discouraged as being unladylike – and because women were not thought capable of such compositions.
On May 7th the quartet are focusing on the music of two women who broke that mould, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Emilie Mayer:
Quartet in Eb Major by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (her only string quartet)
and
Quartet in E Minor by Emilie Mayer
With a small gesture to male composers with
Quartet in F Minor Op. 80 by Felix Mendelssohn
Book here for 7th May
6.30 for drinks; 7pm for the concert; 8.15 buffet supper – all included in the ticket price of £28
Emilie Mayer 1812 – 1883
While Fanny Mendelssohn straddled the divide between a respectable married woman and a professional musician, Emilie Mayer was most emphatically a professional musician – only able to pursue this path thanks to her life’s circumstances.
Born in the north eastern corner of Germany into a well to do if not artistocratic family (her father was a successful pharmacist), she was the middle child of five but sadly lost her mother when she was only two. Aged five she was given a grand piano on which she not only played but started to compose. ‘After a few lessons,’ she recalled years later, ‘I composed variations, dances, little rondos, etc.’
Whether intentionally or accidentally, Mayer escaped marriage in her early 20s, remaining at home to run her father’s household until, when she was 28, he committed suicide. Traumatised (apparently she developed an eating disorder which remained with her for the rest of her life) but now financially independent she moved to Stettin, the regional capital of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Here she could study composition with famed composer Carl Loewe who was to become one of the most important supporters of her music. Inspired by his teaching, she composed two symphonies (‘the crown of male musical creation and inappropriate for a woman’s efforts’) which Loewe performed in 1847 with the Stettiner Instrumentalverein.
As Barbara Beuys says in her excellent article on Mayer on her Fembio site:
The only detailed contemporary source on Emilie Mayer’s personality is a two-part “Biographical Sketch” in the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung of March 15 and 22, 1877, written by Elisabeth Sangalli-Marr, a writer who advocated equal education for women. The author gets to the point quickly and with surprising frankness. Emilie Mayer had “renounced the binding bondage of marriage for the sake of art.” For the composer, there was an alternative to marriage: “She claimed music as her life’s calling, and considered it her life-companion, the ideal – of her loving, believing, hoping.”
But Mayer did not just compose – although she did that prolifically: eight symphonies, eight violin sonatas, a Notturno for violin & piano, 12 cello sonatas, six piano trios, seven string quartets, two string quintets, a piano concerto, 15 concert overtures, six lieder (including two settings of Erlkönig) and an opera, Die Fischerin. She was also her own manager, promoter and impresario organising concerts of her works (which were always well received) in Stettin and in Berlin. But although the public reception of her work was enthusiastic and discerning critics such as her teachers Carl Loewe and Adolph Marx and the critic Ludwig Rellstab praised the work, gender bias was against her and even active supporters were guarded and half hearted. Witness the review by Flodard Geyer quoted in the Art Music Lounge: ‘That which female powers – powers of a second order – are capable of attaining, Emilie Mayer has achieved and brought to expression.’
Mayer also struggled to get her worked published. Of her eight symphonies only the Fourth in B minor, premièred in Berlin in 1851, appeared in print but not until nine years after its first performance, and then only in an arrangement for piano duet. Of her at least 15 concert overtures only one appeared in print just three years before her death, issued by a tiny Stettin publisher in 1880.
By the end of her life her music was already falling from favour and after her death in 1880 it all but disappeared. It was only a century later in the 1980s her work started to be re-discovered and only in the last 20 years that any of it has been performed or recorded – although in 2021 she did make it onto BBC 3’s Composer of the week!
Apart from composing Mayer was also a sculptor and some of her pieces are preserved in collections today.
For more on her see the following sites:
Oxford Leider
Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra
Art Music Lounge
Fembio
Meanwhile, we look forward to listening to her music on May 7th! Book here.
Upcoming Salon Music concerts:
Sunday 11th June – Highgate Society Lunchtime concert
As part of the annual Highgate Festival, Highate’s very own jazz group – the Reliables.
£15 to include copious quantities of Bucks Fizz
Thursday 13th July – evening – Thomas Hardy poems set to song
A new song cycle by Arthur Keegan for guitar and voice setting five of Hardy’s poems about his first wife Emma.
£28 to include buffet supper and wine
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