Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music

This absorbing sheaf of feminist biographical sketches chronicles four centuries of female composers struggling to write music against the headwinds of sexist mores, straitened employment opportunities, and child-rearing duties. Cultural historian Beer (Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot) profiles seven women, including Renaissance Medici court composer Francesca Caccini; Fanny Helsen, whose brother, composer Felix Mendelssohn, discouraged her from publishing her music; Clara Schumann, who sacrificed her music writing to support the composing career of her husband, Robert; and 20th-century avant-garde composer Elizabeth Maconchy. In her telling, these women led decidedly interesting lives, weathering murderous court intrigues, plague, war, and histrionic romances. From their diverse stories, she draws recurring themes: the importance of mentors; the desperate search for stable (if sometimes tyrannical) aristocratic patrons or the rare paying gig that accepted women; chauvinist assumptions, from the 17th-century suspicion that women musicians were essentially courtesans to the later conviction that they were shallow dilettantes; and pregnancies and family-care burdens that made writing difficult (Schumann raised eight children while supporting her family as a touring concert pianist). Beer’s thesis that her subjects were geniuses excluded from the canon only by patriarchal prejudice isn’t entirely convincing, but she writes with rich detail and sympathetic insight about their ambitious, adventurous battle to overcome barriers to creativity. Photos. [em](May 10) [/em]