The story goes that Paganini was impressed by Schumann’s talent when he heard his fingers on the piano when he was just nine years old. He gave his first full recital at the age of eleven. At the age of 18, he was full house and critically acclaimed in Vienna. He received praise from Franz Liszt and was awarded Austria’s highest music award. An anonymous critic of the period described his music as: “In their creative hands, the most ordinary passage, the most routine motif, acquires a felt meaning, a color that only the most perfect works of art can give.” Perhaps none of this is surprising next to the Schumann surname. But who is hiding behind these biographical pieces? Not Robert, but Clara.
Story Clara ShumanThe composer and virtuoso pianist of the 19th century is that of many others. To be but not to be seen. Silence and forgetfulness. His romances and piano concertos have remained embedded, despite their immense artistic quality. He wrote in his diary: “I once believed I had creative talent, but I gave up on the idea; A woman shouldn’t want to compose, she’s not talented enough for that, why should I expect to be able to?
“Everything about thought is already known, it doesn’t suit women, and we’re not inclined to think,” he says ironically. Marisa Mancadocomposer and Deputy General Manager for Music and Dance at INAEM from 2007 to 2008.
Carmen Martinez-Pierret He is a pianist and artistic director. He’s been repeating the same experiment for a while: The musician sends his friends a list of about 70 female composers and asks them how many they know, she says. Most stay at seven or eight, she. “It’s not because there are no female composers, I have more than 600 works in my archive. But we lived in historical machismo in a patriarchal society,” she says.
Clara Schumann did not know her predecessors, just as the girls studying in conservatories today hardly knew her. Martínez-Pierret says the classical music canon—the repertoire deemed legitimate to go down in history—has been “controlled by men for centuries.” “And when a woman succeeds in composing with great effort, when she dies, the wheel of the canon passes by and disappears.” removed from history.
Founded in 1795, the Paris Conservatory vetoed women in composing and most instruments, reducing it to singing or piano, more in keeping with the female stereotype. Women could hardly develop a genius immersed in the most mundane household chores. Robert Schumann, friend of Clara’s could not devote his time to composition; She had given birth to eight children. “Clara has composed a series of small pieces that show a musical and sensitive mind like never before. But having children and having a husband who always lives in a dream world do not go hand in hand with the composition. It often bothers me to think about it.”
Manchado insists it takes many years of study. Women, who are more involved in primary and secondary music education than men, fade into the background when they become adults. “Clara Schumann was an extraordinary woman raising the family and best pianist of the 19th centuryalthough history has brought us Liszt or Chopin,” he continues.
When Queen Victoria of England invited Felix Mendelssohn to the palace, she wanted to sing her favorite work. Italianwas included in Opus 8. The composer admitted that this did not belong to him, but to his sister Fanny. Alma Schindler was already showing a great talent for composing when she married Gustav Mahler, who was almost 20 years older than her, and the terms of the marriage included keeping her away from her creative genius: “My role as composer is my own, and yours is a caring and understanding friend.” the list is endless.
Martínez-Pierret has been embarking on a project he calls ‘Ripping the Silence’ for some time to recover female composers. “We must be very vigilant so that today’s female composers do not condemn us to silence again,” she repeats. The ‘Sérénade’ file, the first of the collection, begins with a statement of intent quoting composer and director Nadia Boulanger:Let’s forget I’m a woman and talk about music”.
louise farrenc She became the second female professor of history at the Paris Conservatory in 1842, but her salary was far below that of her male peers. Ten years later she had to fight and prove herself to get a match. Almost two centuries have passed and the situation is not much different.
For example, in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s New Year’s concert: 83 recital, there has always been a man conducting the baton, not a single woman among the 18 conductors. Franz Welser-Möst, the director of this latest edition, argued that “the exposure and frenzy that accompanies the concert is dangerous” and that “it takes a lot of experience”. “is-is patriarchal patriarchy, as if he wanted to protect us women. Who can tell if there is a woman who is ready to lead that concert or not?” says Martínez-Pierret.
At 95 of Hollywood’s most important film awards, at the Oscars, this could have been the first two women to be nominated for the Best Original Soundtrack category, courtesy of Anne Dudley and Lynn Ahrens. From ‘Best Music for a Musical or Comedy’ in 1997. Chanda Dancy and Hildur Guðnadottir They were shortlisted by the academy, but the conquest was short-lived: only Guðnadóttir managed to appear among the candidates. The Icelandic composer has already opened a gap in this glass ceiling by winning the Golden Globe, Bafta and Best Soundtrack Oscar in 2020 for his movie Joker. Girls, women, mothers, girls who hear the music bubbling inside, please make your voice heard. We need to hear your voice,” he said.
Music is filled with glass ceilings: they never direct the show or are the soloists. There are only three women for every seven men in the Spanish National Orchestra. And none in the five management positions. The schedule for this 2022-2023 season, presented by four people in charge of the respective organisations, consists of: twenty directors and only five directors. in the repertoire, 20 female composers in front of 111 men. And this is despite the “special attention” to the existence of female creators and directors, which INAEM underlines. The rest is not so good.
Pilar Rius of the Women in Music Association points out that “the classical space is still extremely conservative” and that “big programming is still done by men.” but there ways to get rid of macho prejudice. “There are orchestras in the United States that, incidentally, have a very high number of women who do their testing with the screen,” he says.
In 2021, the Fundación Juan March organized the cycle “Spanish piano of the 19th century: a canonical proposal”, which sought to save the Spanish piano repertoire to create a new, less limited canon. In careful selection there was not a single composersomething that particularly angered Martínez-Pierret: “Who is responsible for compiling this list of 19th-century composers and has the great gift of not including a single woman? The best way not to find it is to not search.
The National Music Award has two modalities, creation and interpretation, and has been awarded since 1980. For over forty years 60 men and only 14 women awarded. 38 men and only 5 women in the composition. “As people in the relevant positions in the ministry say that the balance has gone wrong…” Rius prefers not to complete a self-contained sentence. “The challenge is to get into the canon, and that’s fighting democracy, because there’s nothing more democratic than ignoring half of society,” Manchado argues.
Spain is empty… without women
The Observatory for Gender Equality in Culture has repeatedly requested that sanctions be included in the 2007 Equality Act for non-compliance. “Private initiatives almost naturally program with equality, but public initiatives are not even willing to sign equality letters,” says Pilar Rius. They reached an agreement in June to try to increase the presence of female composers by at least 40%, but in the end this is done through small “ghettos”. The president of the Women’s and Music Association gives the example of programming the Zarzuela ambigú or the Cádiz Festival, but the rest “in Spain … there are no women”. “I hope quotas won’t be needed one day, but the problem is that the truth stubbornly shows us that when we remove quotas, we’re back again,” Martínez-Pierret says, “is the talent that must win, but only if the conditions are equal for all”.