10 - Women, Song, and Subjectivity in the Nineteenth Century

Summary

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Lied provided women composers and performers with an important vehicle for self-expression, a means to assert their creativity and agency at a time when larger, more public forms of artistic expression were less accessible to them. Studying the Lied with reference to the contexts in which it was conceived, performed, and received provides crucial insights into the interpersonal relationships fostered by music-making during this period. Equally important, analysing Lieder with these contexts in mind shows how such relationships were refracted through the prism of song. Both lines of enquiry – one historical, the other analytical – unite in an effort to uncover what Aisling Kenny and Susan Wollenberg have described as the ‘personal stamp’ that female composers and performers placed on the nineteenth-century Lied.¹ It is this ‘personal stamp’ – this expression of female creativity and agency – which we understand in this chapter as female subjectivity.