The story goes that Paganini was impressed by Schumann’s ability when he heard his fingers on the piano when he was only nine years old. At eleven, he gave his first full recital. At 18, he was achieving sellouts and critical acclaim in Vienna. He received praise from Franz Liszt and was awarded Austria’s highest musical honor. An anonymous critic of the time described his music thus: “In his creative hands, the most ordinary passage, the most routine motif acquires a felt meaning, a color, which only those of the most accomplished art can give.” Perhaps none of this surprises next to the Schumann surname. But who is hiding behind these biographical pieces? It’s not Robert, but Clara.
The story of Clara Shumann, composer and virtuoso pianist of the 19th century, is that of many others. To be but not to be seen. Of silences and oblivion. Her romances and her piano concertos have remained buried, despite her enormous artistic quality. She herself wrote in her diary: “Once I believed that she had creative talent, but I abandoned that idea; a woman should not want to compose, she is not skilled enough for it, why would I expect to be able to do it?
“Everything that has to do with thought is already known that it is not suitable for women, that we are not good for thinking,” he says, ironically, Marisa Manchadocomposer and General Deputy Director of Music and Dance at INAEM between 2007 and 2008. Although today no one would publicly support the idea that Schopenhauer defended, his influence to this day remains unquestionable in academic music.
Carmen Martinez-Pierret is a pianist and artistic director. She has been repeating the same experiment for some time now: she sends her fellow musicians a list of about 70 female composers and asks them how many of them they know. Most stay at seven or eight. “Not because there have been no women composers, in my archives I have works of more than 600. But we have lived in a patriarchal society under historical machismo,” she says.
Clara Schumann did not know her predecessors, just as the girls who study in conservatories today barely know her. The classical musical canon – the repertoire legitimized to go down in history – “has been controlled by men for centuries,” says Martínez-Pierret. “And when a woman has managed to compose, struggling a lot, once she died, the roller of the canon has passed through there and has disappeared.” removed from history.
Relegated in music education
The Paris Conservatoire, founded in 1795, vetoed women in composition and most instruments, being relegated to singing or the piano, more in line with the female stereotype. Women could hardly cultivate genius, immersed in the most mundane chores. Robert Schumann lamented that his companion Clara could not dedicate his time to the composition; she had given birth to eight children. “Clara herself has composed a series of small pieces that display a tender and musical wit like she has never achieved before. But having children and a husband who always lives in the realm of the imagination does not go hand in hand with composition. She can’t work regularly and it often bothers me to think how many deep ideas are lost because she can’t figure them out”.
Manchado insists that many years of study are needed. And women, who are more present than men in elementary and secondary music education, when they become adults they pass into the background. “Clara Schumann was an exceptional woman who raised the family and has been the best pianist of the 19th centurydespite the fact that history has brought us Liszt or Chopin ”, he maintains.
wives and sisters
When Queen Victoria of England invited Felix Mendelssohn to the palace, she wanted to sing him her favorite work, Italy, included in Opus 8. The composer confessed that it was not his, but his sister Fanny’s. Alma Schindler was already showing great talent in composition when she married Gustav Mahler, almost 20 years her senior, and the terms of the marriage included keeping her away from his creative genius: “The role of the composer belongs to me, yours is that of a caring and understanding companion.” the list is endless.
Martínez-Pierret has been embarking on a project for the recovery of women composers for some time, which she called ‘Ripping the Silence’. “We have to be very vigilant so that today’s female composers do not condemn us to silence again,” she repeats. The ‘Sérénade’ dossier, the first in the collection, begins with a declaration of intent, quoting the composer and director Nadia Boulanger: “Let’s forget I’m a woman and talk about music”.
Data showing glass ceilings
Louise Farrenc she became the second female professor of history at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842, but her salary was far below that of her male peers. She had to battle and prove her worth to get matched a decade later. Almost two centuries have passed and the situation is not so different.
For example, the New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra: in its 83 recitals it has always been a man who has led the baton, there is not a single woman among the 18 people who have directed it. Franz Welser-Möst, the director of this latest edition, maintained that “the exposure and the madness that accompany the concert are dangerous” and “it is necessary to have a lot of experience.” “Is paternalistic patriarchy, as if he wanted to protect us women. Who are you to say if there is a woman who is ready or not to direct that concert?” says Martínez-Pierret.
In 95 editions of the most important Hollywood film awards, the Oscars, this could have been the first time that two women nominated for the category of Best Original Score – with the permission of Anne Dudley and Lynn Ahrens, both nominated in the category already Missing from ‘Best Score for a Musical or Comedy’ in 1997-. Chanda Dancy and Hildur Guðnadóttir They were shortlisted by the Academy, but the conquest was short-lived: only Guðnadóttir managed to appear among the nominees. The Icelandic composer has already opened a gap in this glass ceiling by winning the Golden Globe, the Bafta and the Oscar for Best Soundtrack in 2020 for the movie Joker. “To the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters who hear the music bubbling within, please speak up. We need to hear your voices,” she said in her speech.
Neither prizes nor repertoires
Music is full of glass ceilings: they never run the show or are soloists. In the National Orchestra of Spain there are barely three women for every seven men. And none in the five management positions. The programming for this 2022-2023 season, presented by the four men in charge of the organizations involved, consists of twenty directors and only five directors. In the repertoire, 20 female composers in front of 111 men. And this despite the “special attention” to the presence of women creators and directors that INAEM highlighted. In the rest, the situation is not much better.
Pilar Rius, from the Women in Music Association, points out that “the classical sphere is still excessively conservative” and “big programming is still done by men”. but there is ways to avoid macho bias. “There are orchestras in the United States that, coincidentally, have a very high number of women and have done their tests with a screen,” she says.
In 2021, the Fundación Juan March held the cycle “The Spanish piano of the 19th century: a canonical proposal” which sought to recover the Spanish piano repertoire to create a new, less limited canon. In his painstaking selection there was not a single composer, something that especially outraged Martínez-Pierret: “Who is responsible for creating this list of 19th century composers and has had the great talent of not including a single woman? The best way to not find is not to search.
The National Music Award has two modalities, creation and interpretation, and has been awarded since 1980. In these more than forty years 60 men and only 14 women have been awarded. In composition, 38 men and only 5 women. “That they say that the balance is going the other way, as people with relevant positions say in the Ministry, is…”. Rius prefers not to complete a sentence that completes itself. “The challenge is to enter the canon and this is fought with democracy,” defends Manchado, “because there is nothing more democratic than not ignoring half of society.”
Spain empty… of women
The Observatory for Gender Equality in Culture has repeatedly requested that sanctions be included in the 2007 Equality Law, which is not complied with. “Private initiatives program with parity almost naturally, but the public ones are not even willing to sign letters of equality,” says Pilar Rius. In June, they reached an agreement 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 and Music Association gives the example of the programming of the Zarzuela ambigú or the Cádiz Festival, but the rest “is Spain empty… of women”. “Hopefully one day the quotas won’t be necessary, but the problem is that reality stubbornly shows us that once we remove the quotas, we’re back again,” says Martínez-Pierret, “talent is the one that has to win, but if the conditions are equal for all”.