Conference Agenda

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, English square pianos appeared around the globe, from Britain and continental Europe to their colonies in Africa, the Americas, and Australia. These instruments were inexpensive and portable, yet they offered sonic flexibility through special effects such as damper-raising pedals and lute stops, meaning that they could accommodate a wide range of aesthetic preferences.

The ubiquity of English square pianos has been noted in the past, but their significance as sites of women’s cultural agency has not yet been fully explored. This purpose is clear from the fictionalized Letters from Eliza to Yorick (1775), which claim to record the correspondence between the novelist Laurence Sterne and his friend Elizabeth Draper. Preparing for a journey to India, Eliza describes her square piano as her “harmonious companion during the voyage.” With these words, she endows the instrument with a human quality and the capacity for friendship. Indeed, out of the public eye, the square piano became a “harmonious companion” to women of many social ranks, from farmers’ daughters to professional musicians, from the bourgeoisie to the aristocracy.

I argue for a new understanding of English square pianos as sites of women’s cultural agency, showing how these instruments reflected women’s personal tastes and priorities. I locate it in the salon of Madame Genlis, a writer, musician, and supporter of women’s education who highlighted the piano’s novelty and its sociable quality. Among Genlis’s habituées was the composer Marie-Emanuelle Bayon, who reportedly helped popularize the piano in France and who may have used it to teach Angélique Diderot, daughter of the philosophe. The artist Angelica Kauffman brought her English square piano when she moved to Rome; she used it in her studio to frame and normalize her activities in the male-dominated world of history painting. The English square also appeared in the home of Elizabeth Montagu, 3^rd Duchess of Buccleuch, who likely used it to play the music of Ignatius Sancho, a Black composer long associated with her family. In all these situations, the English square piano advanced the cultural agendas of the women who played them.

The proliferation of chamber concerts in Europe during the nineteenth century attests to the growing importance of chamber music culture in public musical life. However, the scholarly discourse of these public performances primarily focuses on male organizers, composers, and performers (Bashford, 1996 and 2007; Baron, 1998; Hefling, 2004; Lott, 2015), risking the silencing and trivializing of women’s agency in shaping this new musical orientation. Building on recent studies that explore the involvement of female performers in nineteenth-century chamber music performance (Hamilton & Loges, 2014; Stefaniak, 2021), this paper examines the entrepreneurial and programming strategies of German virtuoso pianist Anna Caroline de Belleville in developing a “classical” chamber music community in Brighton, UK, through works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Hummel. I argue that Belleville’s programming of “classical” chamber music in her invitation-based matinée musicale—a semi-public concert series mainly held at her Brighton residence—was crucial in forming a hub for chamber music enthusiasts in the community. With the ever-expanding chamber music community in Brighton, these musical gatherings paved the way for Belleville to establish the Brighton Musical Union with her husband, violinist Antonio James Oury. Despite the higher entrepreneurial risk and short lifespan (1847–1852), this public chamber concert series both distinguished Belleville as a “classical” music interpreter and broadened the musical taste of the public in Brighton, as evidenced by numerous positive newspaper reviews. The study of Belleville’s productive and generative concert endeavors sheds light on the professional agency of female pianists in shaping and fostering public chamber music culture in the mid-nineteenth century.

Viennese concert life around 1800, seen as a broad continuum from large Akademie concerts to intimate salons, featured a surprisingly high number of women in a variety of roles. Johann Ferdinand von Schönfeld’s Jahrbuch der Tonkunst in Wien und Prag (1796), for example, mentions over sixty notable women across a wide spectrum of activity (i.e., patron, performer, host). However, despite the pioneering work on women and salons by Rebecca Cypess, and Ruth Solie’s work on the agency of young women pianists, the extent of women’s agency in Vienna concert life is still poorly understood. In the ongoing WEAVE/FWF project “Concert Life in Vienna 1780-1830,” which is tasked with assembling a comprehensive database of events, persons, repertoire, and venues, it is becoming even clearer how women participated in numerous ways including as performers, organizers, hosts, patrons, and even poets. Looking at the entire spectrum of concert activity, new and interesting connections are appearing that have traditionally been overlooked by musicologists who have mainly been focused on male composers. For example, we have found Luise Brachmann’s poetry being declaimed by another woman, Betty Schröder (daughter of the actress Sophie Schröder and sister of the singer Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient), at the Kärntnertortheater in 1821; this was all before a musical program including Beethoven and Schubert. Women’s poetry and music was performed, women themselves performed, women organized and hosted in their own apartments, as well as financially supported a portion of concerts occurring in this period. In what ways did family contacts (or “das Ganze Haus”) enable and influence the success of professional and dilettante female musicians? What networks (supportive or competing) existed among the women musicians, and what institutional collective associations were formed? Using the database along with primary source material, this paper will investigate questions of women’s agency and networking among their many possible and overlapping roles at these multi-media concerts.