1The first wave of feminist achievements set the context for changes in the musical world. The Association for the Rights of Women, founded in 1870, called for an ambitious agenda. New journals such as Le Droit des femmes and La Femme advanced these ideas. The adoption of a new constitution in 1875, a new republican majority in 1876, and a new president in 1879 raised women’s hopes of finally attaining some of these rights. A few minor successes followed. In summer 1878, nine deputies and two senators attended the First International Congress for Women’s Rights in Paris and in 1879 the First Worker’s Congress in Marseille voted for sexual equality. The Union of Feminist Socialists was subsequently formed and under their name a number of women ran for public office, albeit as candidates mortes. These were largely symbolic advances. However, in 1880 the Chambre des députés voted for a law giving women secondary education. The young deputy for whom the bill was named, Camille Sée, convinced anti-clerical republicans that educating women in their own lycées would decrease the influence of the church. The first women’s lycée opened in 1882. By the following year there were 29 such schools. This gave just under 3000 young women the possibility of preparing for college, as opposed to somewhat more than 90000 young men in 352 male lycées1.

2Despite these advances, strict limitations on women’s development continued. For years, women could not study the same subjects as men – no “matières nobles” (Greek, Latin, and philosophy); neither could they study math and natural sciences to advanced levels2. Lycée graduates received only a diploma, not the baccalauréat. Throughout the 1880s, “feminine” education was distinguished from “virile” education since it was commonly agreed that men and women serve different social functions. Because most republicans thought women belonged in the home, the ultimate reason for educating them, as Camille Sée put it, was to be “les mères des hommes” or, as more recent scholars have concluded, agents “de propagande républicaine”3.

3In the musical world, women singers, instrumentalists, composers, and critics also began to be more active, but not without resistance. Female amateurs of all classes joined ensembles open to musical progress. Although training at the Conservatoire, as at the lycées, was largely in separate classes, in 1876, even before women’s lycées were created, women were admitted to study composition. In the 1890s, after the first international congresses on women’s rights and feminine institutions, concert programs became more receptive to music performed and composed by women. Marie Jaëll built a reputation as a composer-performer and Augusta Holmès had more orchestral performances than many of her male contemporaries. In 1902, female composers were finally allowed to compete for the Prix de Rome, making it easier for more of them to be taken seriously. For upper-class women, singing and patronage, associated with the private domain, moved into the public sphere. Through the music societies they created, Henriette Fuchs and Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe were responsible for many premieres in France, including works by Wagner. They also took pen to paper to express their opinions. For the most part, however, professional music critics and scholars who were women, such as Marie Bobillier and Mathilde Daubresse, were not yet ready to reveal their gender in their signatures. In many ways, then, and with great courage and determination, such women challenged the boundaries of gender, class, and even nation.

All classes of women go public: Singing in amateur choral societies

4In 1880 Camille Saint-Saëns complained that most choral societies were entirely male, and choral music the domain largely of working-class male orphéons4. This rendered difficult the performance of serious choral repertoire, such as Handel’s music. But Saint-Saëns was not entirely accurate. True, the sociétés académiques Les Enfants d’Apollon and the Union artistique had no female members; however in the 1860s and 1870s many female pianists, string players, and singers performed with them: M^me Bordese presented Chopin and Beethoven in August 1866, M^lle Tayau the Godard concerto in February 1877, the Vicomtesse de Grandval her own mélodies in November 1877, and M^lle Miramont an arrangement of Handel’s Sanctus in November 1878. In addition, in the 1870s some working-class and upper-class choral societies began to admit women members. The Bon marché department store included women in its employee choral society from its beginning in 1872 (Illustration 1). The ensemble grew in importance when the retired conductor of the Garde républicaine became its director in 1874. Whereas their first concerts were offered to friends and store colleagues, in the 1880s they performed for the general public, joined by famous opera and cabaret stars. Such performances were contexts for mediating gender, class and cultural differences among professionals and amateurs, rich and poor on stage and in their audiences5.

5The Société chorale d’amateurs Bourgault-Ducoudray (1869-1874), founded to perform choral music, both “ancienne et moderne”, also included both women and men. This distinguished ensemble, whose honorary committee included Gounod, Delibes, Massenet and Thomas, had 130 to 140 performing members: 52 women, 39 girls, and 39 men. Here aristocrats and bourgeois, mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, and married couples performed together. Bourgault-Ducoudray offered solfège classes, but, sensitive to the problem of young women mixing with men, had the men and women rehearse separately. Beginning with a benefit concert of the music of Vittoria, Handel, and Gluck in spring 1872, they sang in concert halls, such as the Salle Herz, and sometimes with orchestra. Occasionally this society also joined forces with other ensembles, opera singers, and such distinguished performers as Saint-Saëns in the presentation of major choral works6. As performing in public had been rare for members of the upper classes, especially women, this was significant.

6Two other important choral societies with female members also emerged: the Société chorale d’amateurs Guillot de Sainbris and Concordia. The former was created in 1865 by Antonin Guillot de Sainbris, a conductor and composer from the bourgeoisie of Versailles. Men and women, in approximately equal numbers, also rehearsed separately. Whereas in the 1870s, performing female members often listed their names with initials (such as M^me D. or M^me W.), Cécile Chaminade used her name when she accompanied them in 1881, as did other professional female pianists – M^me Roger Miclos, M^lle Marie Poitevin, M^me Montigny-Remaury, and M^me Emile Rousseau. Donating its proceeds to charity, from 1867 to 1887 the society presented 85 mixed programs of old and new music. Besides giving the Parisian premiere of the finale of act 2 of Lohengrin on 4 April 1867, beginning in 1877 the society annually invited renown composers to write for them: Massenet who composed Narcisse (1878), Franck his Rebecca (1881), and Fauré La Naissance de Vénus (1883). Its chorists also performed Gounod’s Gallia (1871) months before it was done at the Conservatoire. Of note, were their multiple performances of new works, rare in Paris. Audiences were impressed that “toutes ces dames”, with their “toilettes étincelantes de diamants et de pierres” “que l’on pourrait croire peu disposées à se livrer à un travail soutenu”, performed “d’une façon très satisfaisante des œuvres relativement difficiles.”7 Reviewers remarked on “toujours le timbre distingué de toutes ces voix bien disciplinées qui font l’honneur aux leçons de Sainbris.”8 Some of these works depended on female performance for their message. Franck’s Rebecca, for example, sings, “Mon père seule dispose de ma vie. Et son désir est un ordre sacré, sa volonté sera suivie, qu’il commande j’obéirai.” Female singers thus provided an important context for writing and hearing serious choral music, not limiting composers, as with that written for the orphéons, in their difficulty and symbolic content.

7In 1880 Henriette Fuchs, an accomplished soprano, and her husband Edmond, a respected engineer, created Concordia. Thanks to her contacts in the musical world, Gounod served as their honorary president, members of the Institut and Conservatoire professors their honorary committee, C.M. Widor their chef de chœur, and, for a time, Claude Debussy their accompanist9. Among active members were aristocrats and bourgeois, women, their daughters, and their husbands alongside professional painters, writers, and publishers. In 1882-83 there were 271 members; “Au profit des œuvres de bienfaisance ou d’utilité générale”, they performed little-known old masterpieces (J.S. Bach’s two Passions, Palestrina, and Rameau), and new works (including the French premiere of Gounod’s La Rédemption and the music of Thomas, Lenepveu, and Saint-Saëns).

8Madame Fuchs was unusual not only for her leadership of this ensemble and its promotion of contemporary music, but also for her music criticism, rare for women during this period. After hearing the Bach Saint-Matthew Passion in Basel and then organizing Concordia’s own Bach festival in May 1885, she wrote of the need for more amateur choral societies, as in Germany and England, “appartenant aux classes cultivées10”. She then created Concordia’s own bi-centennial Bach festival, performed at the Conservatoire (Illustration 2). When she saw Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1885, she published reviews in La Revue générale. Parsifal gave her “une joie ineffable, une paix mystique” and made her want to kneel and contemplate a divine “mystère11”. On 30 January 1887, Concordia gave the French premiere of Parsifal’s “Chœur des filles-fleurs”, “sans coupures”, proving that “malgré les grandes difficultés d’intonation”, amateur females could sing it12. This challenged expectations about women’s capacities. M^me Fuchs also published an extensive analytical monograph, L’Opéra et le drame musical d’après l’oeuvre de Richard Wagner (1887). Here she balances praise for Wagner’s musical innovations and beauty with an attack on his orchestra’s overpowering of singers’voices and a defense of the Bel Canto tradition. She also suggests that, because he expressed their sentiments better, Wagner succeeded more with female listeners than male ones.

Training and professionalism

9Most women who wished to pursue a career in music studied privately, including the most illustrious female composers of the time. For those who made it into the Conservatoire, music was a gendered discipline in terms of training and future career options. There, young men and women studied solfège, piano, piano accompaniment (until 1890), and harmony in separate classes. In 1878 there were two solfège classes for male singers and two for female singers; three for male instrumentalists, but five for female instrumentalists. This suggests that women and men were equally prepared to train for vocal careers – indeed there were often equal numbers of male and female singers in the advanced classes – but that more women than men would become instrumental performers, especially pianists.

10Many women graduates went on to teach solfège. By 1900, the Annuaire des artistes listed 75 female professeurs de solfège, including M^lle Jaeger who taught solfège at the Schola Cantorum after having taught it at the Conservatoire (1896-99); this was also a profession women practiced in the French colonies. Some also wrote teaching manuals. In 1880, to popularize the teaching of singing and musical analysis, M^lle Laure Collin, a composer and professor of singing at the École Normale des institutrices de la Seine, wrote an award-winning Méthode élémentaire chorale et rhythmique. Significantly, wishing to promote French contemporary music, she convinced Delibes to compose music for these lessons, which also included music by Massenet, Guiraud, Franck, Gounod, and others. The work ends with a short history of music – the first of the period written by a woman. Her subsequent Histoire abrégée de la musique (1882), published three years before that of Henri Lavoix fils, the first written from a republican perspective, reached its seventh edition by 1891 and included a supplement on “femmes compositeurs”.

11When it came to pianists at the Conservatoire, from the 1870s through the 1890s, girls outnumbered boys two to one in preparatory and piano classes13, again not surprisingly as many went on to become piano teachers throughout France and its colonies. But gender separation in piano classes had subtle effects, as one might imagine, on the relative value of their prizes. From 1818 to 1900, for example, women never had the opportunity to play Beethoven in the Conservatory’s year-end piano competitions, thereby limiting their musical experiences. Male pianists, meanwhile, were assigned Beethoven seven times in that period and every year from 1897 to 1900. Moreover, there were differences in what music female and male pianists had to sight-read in the entrance exams. Massenet’s exercise written for young men in the August 1886 competition consists of a series of chords, to be played très modéré, soutenu, repeated throughout the piece at various dynamic levels and interspersed by expressive descending passages. The tone is ponderous and the dynamic and registral changes frequent. At the work’s climax, the chords move to the outer registers of the piano and build from ppp to fff, demanding strength and assertiveness from the performer. In contrast, Delibes’s exercise written for female competitors, a quick allegretto, consists mostly of a single line that begins in the bass and rises in arpeggios divided between the two hands before making its descent and beginning again. This lilting quality calls for a delicate touch and use of the pedals to render the sound fluid. In the middle, the piece modulates briefly, as it does in the Massenet, but here the pianist must follow the changes at a much more rapid pace. Other than a brief crescendo at the climax, the work is to be played softly throughout. Publication of these exercises in Le Figaro gave readers a chance to compare the standards used to judge the two sexes: in male pianists strength and expressive flexibility, in female pianists gracefulness and dexterity (Illustration 3).

12Despite these differences in their training, female pianists began to enjoy extraordinary international careers, even if their playing brought stresses and strains to their gender identity. One of the most successful, Marie Jaëll, also a composer, performed the complete works of Schumann (1889) and Chopin (1890), and was the first in Paris to play the complete works of Liszt (1889-92) and the thirty-two sonatas of Beethoven (1893). Together with her husband, the virtuoso Alfred Jaëll (1832-1882), her elder by fourteen years whom she married in 1866, Marie concertized all over Europe. Saint-Saëns dedicated his two-piano Variations on a Theme from Beethoven, op. 35, to the couple, knowing that they could rise to the challenge of its extraordinary technical requirements, inspired by Liszt. They premiered the work at Colonne’s Concert National on 28 March 1874; Marie and Saint-Saëns also performed these Variations together in London in 1876. Soon she became known for her performances of Saint-Saëns’ concertos14.

13Critical review of Jaëll’s performances, often using gendered concepts, evolved over time from emphasizing its strength and virility to focusing on its feminine attributes, perhaps in reaction to the growth of feminist consciousness. In the 1870s, she was praised for her “jeu vigoureux, énergique et puissant”, “extrême habilité de mécanisme”, and “plutôt le caractère de la force virile que celui de la grâce féminine” – characteristics that allowed her to take on the most difficult of pieces15. Her “mécanisme foudroyant” enabled her to stand up to “rudes épreuves”16. However, in the mid-1880s her virtuosity and “fougue” appeared “un peu trop emportée” and, along with recognizing Jaëll as a “grand artiste”, some wanted her to show more “féminisme.”17 In 1889 reviewers instead described how her interpretation of her Concerto nr 2 had “pureté, aisance, style, et charme” as well as “tact exquis” and “un goût particulièrement délicat”18. When she presented the complete Beethoven sonatas in 1893, she was praised specifically for not drawing attention to her own considerable virtuosity or personal success, but rather for losing herself in elevating Beethoven – a valued aspect of the feminine19.

14Jaëll also distinguished herself by writing a series of original pedagogical books on piano performance. Undoubtedly informed by her own experiences, these address issues that have since become known as inherent advantages and disadvantages of the female physiology20. Le Toucher, in three volumes, was published by Heugel in 1893-1894, later expanded into Le Toucher, enseignement du piano basé sur la physiologie (Costallat, 1899) and translated into German by Albert Schweitzer. In La Musique et la psychophysiologie (Alcan, 1896), Jaëll examines the challenge of playing extended passages requiring great strength, the role of muscles in memory, and the need for imagination and intelligence to “combattre l’inconscience”. Five more books (1904-1912) followed on intelligence and rhythm; rhythmic fusion between visual, auditive and tactile actions; the coloration of tactile sensations; and the resonance of touch21.

15Besides the piano, string instruments were considered appropriate for women at the time. Among harp students at the Conservatoire through the 1880s and 1890s, females outnumbered males, four to one. Henriette Renié (b. 1875), who won first prize there at age 11, also composed virtuoso pieces for this instrument. After winning first prize in 1867, the violinist Marie Tayau formed an all-female quartet. Then from 1872 to 1900, 39 female violinists and eight female cellists won first prizes, though far fewer than males. No females won on the doublebass, woodwinds, or brass22. Yet, audiences could have seen and heard women play these instruments in the Vienna Women Orchestra during intermissions at the Folies Bergère in the early 1870s, or in the Budapest Women’s Orchestra there in 1898. However, until the 1890s, the principal Parisian orchestras did not accept women musicians as members. Their conductors explained that this was not a question of women’s talent, but rather that the work was too difficult, it demanded too many hours (especially accompanying theatrical productions), and aesthetically audiences preferred the look of an all-male ensemble23.

16The situation changed only gradually. With women increasingly in the labor force, public alarm mounted that they were taking over men’s jobs and not staying home to have children. In 1892 the government stepped in to pass a law limiting the daily hours of women’s work and forbidding their employment at night from 9 PM until 5 AM. The Chambre des députés on 28 December 1895 noted that women could get permission to work until 11 PM in special circumstances, but they could never work more than 12 hours. Although in some ways this was a protective measure, it also kept women from work that was often better paid. In music, it made performing in any ensemble that gave regular evening concerts highly problematic. Still, by 1903, the Concerts Colonne had eight women violinists or violists, and by 1914, at the Schola Cantorum, “les musiciens et musiciennes sont, à l’orchestre, en nombre à peu près égal”24.

Compositional Successes

17Entrance into composition classes at the Conservatoire required a first prize in another subject, normally harmony. With four classes in harmony offered to men, but only two to women, more men could prepare for a career in composition. However, this did not mean inferior training for women. Their harmony class was the entry-level position for Dubois (future Conservatoire director), Lenepveu, and Guiraud (Debussy’s teacher). Her first prizes in solfège (1870) and in harmony (1873) earned Marie Renaud acceptance into composition. M^lle Papot, with her first prize in harmony (1877), entered Massenet’s class in 1878. Nine such women received first prizes in harmony and six others first prizes in piano accompaniment25. Women in composition at the Conservatoire – 16 of them between 1873 and 1897 – also wrote many fugues because they qualified to compete for the first prize in this genre. Seven won this prize, one for a fugue for eight parts and two for double chorus.

18To circumvent these barriers, many women studied privately, although this did not prevent them from earning public recognition. On 7 May 1874 Maria Isambert petitioned the Minister of Public Instruction and the Director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts to compete for the Prix de Rome. She had the necessary diploma, albeit not from the Conservatoire. The request was denied26. The most successful female composers of the period all studied composition privately: Grandval and Jaëll with Saint-Saëns, Holmès with Franck, and Chaminade with Godard; two of them won other major prizes, Second Prize from the Ville de Paris for Holmès’s Lutèce (1878) and the Prix Rossini for Grandval’s La Fille de Jaire (1881).

19In the 1870s and 1880s, Marguerite Olagnier and Jaëll rented halls to get their works performed. Women composers also began to appear frequently on prestigious concert series. At the Société Nationale, where women composers were allowed to be full members, they appeared on 82 concerts during these decades, or 38 percent of the society’s 215 concerts27. It helped if they could play their own music, as did Jaëll and Chaminade. There Jaëll premiered her first composition, a Piano Quartet, on 29 April 1876 and her first piano Concerto on 13 May 1877. A reviewer wrote: “Son concerto en ré mineur est bien plus une symphonie qu’un morceau de piano avec orchestre. La virtuose s’y est effacée pour mettre la symphoniste en relief”. Édouard Colonne said that one day Jaëll could turn out to be the “Schumann français”28, (perhaps a reference to the pianist-composer Clara Schumann). When he conducted her music again in 1879, the effects of “ses combinaisons de timbres”, “aussi heureux qu’inattendus”, and her Wagnerian preference for “d’interminables modulations” proved that she was capable of “tout ce qu’il est possible d’imaginer en fait de difficultés”29.

20Other performing organizations and the press also helped women composers. The Concerts Colonne included Grandval on one of their first concerts in 1873; so too the Concerts Danbé in 1875. Grandval and Chaminade were among the honorary members of the Société chorale Guillot de Sainbris that performed the former’s music in 1880, 1881, 1883, and 1884 and the latter’s in 1887. In 1892 and 1897, this society also performed works by Augusta Holmès, a former pupil of Sainbris. Suggesting the degree of acceptance these women were beginning to have, in 1885 Le Gaulois published a huge album of scores for its subscribers that included music and short biographies of six female composers (Jaëll, Grandval, Chaminade, Holmès, la baronne Winnie de Rothschild, and M^me Tarbé des Sablons). Their musical careers grew even more vigorous in the 1890s. The Concerts Colonne featured women’s music on fifteen concerts in 1889-92. Holmès had sixteen performances there in the 1890s, with multiple performances of the same works, that is, more than Charpentier, d’Indy, Fauré, Widor, and Dubois. And the Paris Opéra produced her La Montagne noire, performed 14 times in 1895.

The Ironies of Gender: Virility and Politics in the Music of Augusta Holmès

21The case of Augusta Holmès (1846-1903) raises issues that come up whenever a woman takes chances, thinks big, or addresses topics of social relevance in her music30. Whereas in the late 1860s, critics thought that women could write only music that is “élégante et gracieuse”, by 1880 they began to use the word “virile” to describe her music, sometimes more viril than the music of Gounod and Massenet31. Yet, “virile” reflects a wide range of attitudes, some pejorative, others complimentary.

22Holmès was known for her “tempérament vigoureux” and her will. Exploiting both “feminine” and “masculine” values, she used her music both to engage and to escape the social and musical stereotypes of her day. In her youth, with her long blond hair, she had a series of love relationships, including reputedly with César Franck, whom she met at a performance of the Société chorale de Sainbris c. 1870. She had five children, but never married and, through her own gender-bending manipulation of ambiguities, encouraged a different identity. In the late 1860s, like many women composers of her time, she published her first songs under the male pseudonym, Hermann Zenta. Later, she convinced reviewers that, despite its excesses, her music’s “hardiesses choquantes” reflected “originalité” and “courage” – words rarely used to describe a woman’s music. Critics in the mid-1880s considered the adjective “féminine” “au-dessous de son talent” and referred to her as “un jeune Apollon descendu de l’Olympe”32. She knew then she could succeed, as a man might. Yet could she succeed as a woman and what would this mean?

23Like many of her peers, she made much of her living by giving private lessons and performing in private salons as a pianist and singer. However, unlike the Grandval and Chaminade who had significant performing careers, Holmès tended not to perform in public venues. She preferred to be known more as a composer than a performer, though in the 1890s she occasionally conducted. Holmès’s first composition, the “Marche des Zouaves” was followed by “Vengeance” (December 1870), exploring a theme that would preoccupy her and others for years. Its extreme registral juxtapositions set a tone of urgency. Fortissimo chords in the middle range alternate with rising and descending chromatic octaves in the low bass. The piano doubles the baritone as he sings “Français! Assez de honte! Soldats que rien ne dompte… Vengeance”. After this passionate opening, the song then ends resolutely, underlining its message – the French should go back to war.

24Also unlike many other women composers of her time, when it came to public performances, Holmès always thought big. At the Société Nationale, she premiered a psalm, In exitu (1872) for soloists, chorus, cello and organ, and orchestral excerpts from two operas. Lutèce, her first major work, composed in the hope of winning the City of Paris prize in 1878, was a “dramatic symphony” in three parts, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. She wrote text and music. After a four-measure call to arms by the trombones, bassoons, and piano, the narrator calls on listeners to remember “vos ancêtres”, to which the Gauloise responds, telling her fiancé, “Réjouis-toi, patrie! Tes fils donnent leur sang, je donne mon époux!”. Bold musical gestures mirror Holmes’s feelings of how women should understand war, the Gauloise happily giving up her sons and husband. Part 2 takes place on the battlefield, after the narrator tells mothers to be proud of their sons because they consent to die. Critics pointed to “la dissonance dure”, suggesting the brutal juxtapositions of battle. Also running throughout the work is Holmès’s comparison between French wine and the blood of French heroes – “fertilisateur des champs dévastés”. In part 1, the Gauloise sings, in large sweeping phrases, “Verse en riant tout le sang de tes veines. Pour que du sol fécond renaissent des héros!”. It is women’s fertility as mothers on which the country’s salvation depends.

25Critics concentrated on what made the music sound virile and how unusual this kind of music was for a woman. Victorin Joncières, a composer-critic with Wagnerian sympathies, wrote:

La plupart des femmes qui font de la musique ne produisent que des œuvres en général assez médiocres […]. C’est gracieux, élégant […] mais, au point de vue du grand art lyrique, cela manque absolument de portée […]. M^lle Augusta Holmés fait exception à la règle. Sa musique a une vigueur, une virilité, un enthousiasme, qui méritent mieux que ces éloges banals qu’on accorde d’ordinairement aux femmes-compositeurs. Lutèce [est] pleine d’élan, de force, de grandeur dans laquelle il y a parfois des hardiesses choquantes, mais où règnent un souffle, une ardeur, une passion qui entraînent… Cette exaltation, qui, dans ses premiers essais, entraînait parfois M^lle Holmès à des violences excessives […] ne nuit nullement aujourd’hui à la clarté de sa pensée et à l’intelligence de ses développements […]. Cette courageuse artiste […] doit prendre sa place parmi les compositeurs les plus distingués de l’École moderne33.

26Joncières argues for six sources of credibility in her work:

27First, unlike the stereotype of women artists thought to be unable to endure struggle to achieve success, Holmès as shown “ténacité” and “indomptable énergie”. She returned to work after losing her first major competition. She has the perseverance and will necessary to pursue a serious career.

28Second, one can hear this “caractère courageux” in her music. Like the Gauloise, “elle chante la guerre avec la farouche puissance d’une Velléda”. She is bold in both action and music. Her music seeks to infuse energy in its listeners.

29Third, though this “exaltation” may sometimes lead her music to “des violences excessives”, it never lacks “la clarté de sa pensée et l’intelligence de ses développements”.

30Fourth, Holmès knows how to balance peaceful charming scenes and phrases “pleines de tendresse” with those of “mouvement et action”.

31Fifth, she uses vocal and instrumental masses to create “des sonorités brilliantes” and effects that are « tres grandioses. » That is, she commands a rich array of musical resources and can manipulate them skillfully. In other words, Holmès is not afraid to write big pieces, set heroic tales of war and patriotism next to her “duos ravissants” about love, explore loud, full sonorities and energetic movements – all of which begin to define virility in music at the time.

32Sixth, Holmès was bold, “moderne” or “avancée”, other implicitly masculine values also used by others to praise her work. More than a decade before the Wagner craze hit France, her music was called Wagnerian, a code word not only for power, but also the new. Reviewers would return to these attributes throughout her career.

33Not surprisingly, some were distressed by such independence. Ironically, her friend Saint-Saëns wrote the most ambivalent review, as if he envied her courage:

Elle a une originalité puissante, trop puissante peut-être, car cette qualité poussée à l’extrême la pousse irrésistiblement en dehors des routes battues où elle doit marcher seule, sans guide et sans appui […]. Comme les enfants, les femmes ne connaissent pas les obstacles ; leur volonté brise tout et ne s’arrête pas aux misérables obstacles matériels […]. Les cuivres éclatent, dans sa musique, comme des boîtes d’artifice ; les tonalités se heurtent, les modulations s’entrechoquent avec un bruit de tempête ; les voix, affolées, perdent toute notion de leurs registres naturels et se précipitent des tons les plus aigus aux tons les plus graves, au risque de se briser […]. Elle le veut34 !

34In her subsequent large works, Irlande (1882), Pologne! (1883), Ludus pro patria (1888), and Ode triomphale (1889), Holmès returned to patriotic subjects. The Ode, inspired by the colossal festivals of ancient Greece and the French Revolution and conceived for the opening ceremonies of the 1889 Exhibition, concerns abstract characters who explicitly represent republican ideals. It reiterates the themes and style of her previous music, including the fertility of the land and its people. But the style is magisterial simplicity, “nue comme une des déesses de marbre”35.

35In the 1890s, a decade of flux, discussions of the femme nouvelle pervaded the Paris press. For some, she was a hommasse, a female-man, “rigid, austere, and riddled with the appetitive combativeness of professional mobility”36. For others, she represented the new technology, with its similar capacity for inverting roles and ignoring gender differences. Politically les femmes nouvelles spanned from militant suffragists of the far left (Égalité [fd. 1888] and Solidarité [fd. 1891]), moderates and conservatives (Conférence de Versailles [fd. 1892], Avant-Courrière [fd. 1893]) to provincials (Comité féministe républicain [fd. 1889]) – all mostly republicans, living in Paris, non-Catholic, and from the middle classes (the largest number were teachers). These groups convened in May 1892 at the Congrès général des sociétés féministes. Aristocratic and bourgeois women shared belief in women’s increasing access to higher education and professional careers. However, as the number of French women in feminist organizations rose from fewer than 1000 in 1896 to somewhere between 20000 to 25000 in 1901, women began to be associated with the demise of French society, and it became increasingly difficult to consider feminine strength as something positive, even as a metaphor. With the country in the grips of depopulation – France’s growth rate from 1872 to 1911 was a mere 10 percent – women were called upon to be fertile mothers.

36Despite promotion of this in her earlier music, after the Opéra’s production of La Montagne noire (1895), Holmès’s virile patriotism and musical boldness came under attack. Bauër said that the “conflit de la passion et du devoir, de la féminité et de la force brute, Mars et Vénus” was an allegory “que nous avons trop vue”37. Holmès was put down for wanting to act, write, and be respected like a man. By the end of the century, she was told to “renounce any more attempts to venture into such high places”. Gender panic underlies the critic’s tone:

Cette musique me donne l’impression d’être travestie. Elle est femme et veut porter le costume d’homme. […] Ah ! Mesdames soyez des mères, soyez des amantes, soyez des vierges, mais n’essayez donc pas d’être des hommes. […] Vous n’arriverez pas à nous remplacer tout à fait38.

37Other French women composers preferred to adapt rather than confront societal norms, writing music more for entertainment than for large public performances. Chaminade’s Les Amazones (1888), a dramatic symphony with battle music and warring male and female choruses, was ignored after one performance. Critics remarked about Chaminade’s music’s vigor, but it was its charm and grace that assured her reputation. In the increasingly misogynist 1890s, Chaminade, while concertizing as a pianist, retreated to writing almost exclusively small forms, including sixty-four melodies. Accompanying the publication of one her mélodies inédites in Le Figaro (23 October 1897), a critic observed that if growing feminism “nous effraye” Chaminade’s music “demeure toujours femme par la grâce et la finesse de son talent”. The first female winner of the Prix de Rome in composition (1913), Lili Boulanger, was known not as a warrior, rather as a sickly, but talented “femme fragile” who died a few years later39.

The Power of Money, Courage, and Cooperation, whether Monarchist, Republican, or Socialist

38The Duchesse d’Uzes is remembered for having sold her house on the Champs Elysées, (which later became Claridges) to support the political campaign of General Boulanger. Less known is the important role she played in using musical fashion to fan enthusiasm for a return to monarchy. In 1887, L’Illustration reproduced a two-page engraving of contemporary aristocrats in period costumes dancing the minuet. Accompanying it, the editors explained:

La duchesse d’Uzès, si Parisienne, avait senti le besoin de renouveler les éléments qui composent le plus ordinairement les soirées du monde aristocratique et de s’attacher plus que jamais à satisfaire cette soif de sensations artistiques qui nous dévorent en cette fin de siècle. […] Telle fut l’origine de ce mouvement de la mode : d’autres salons suivirent40.

39In 1895 she also subsidized the creation of the Société des instruments anciens, giving major impetus to the early music revival well before the activities of the Schola Cantorum or Wanda Landowska. This movement was also encouraged and supported by the extensive historical scholarship of Marie Bobillier (1858-1918), who wrote exclusively under the male pseudonym, Michel Brenet, even as one of the co-editors of L’Année musicale (1911-13). Perhaps as a patriotic gesture, in 1917 Brenet also published an important study of military music from the middle ages through the Empire, utterly defying the interests normally associated with her gender41.

40When it came to new music, the most important music patron of the period was Countess Elizabeth Greffulhe, Proust’s primary model for the Duchesse de Guermantes42. Like the Duchesse d’Uzès, she embraced the return to interest in old dances, but focused on new ones dans le style ancien, commissioning Gabriel Fauré to write a pavane for her garden party in the Bois de Boulogne in 1891. Her principal form of patronage, however, was not artistic commissions, but entrepreneurship. Although born the Belgian Princess de Caraman-Chimay, she emerged from the private domain to undertake, organize, and manage public concerts.

41Patronage had been a family tradition: her great-grandfather Chimay helped to found the Brussels Conservatory. But, during the first ten years of her marriage, like most women of her class, Elisabeth did not question the primacy of the family realm. She organized salon concerts in the home of her in-laws, sometimes performing with family and friends, sometimes inviting major opera stars and cabaret idols to whom she paid them considerable fees (one such salon concert cost 7,190 francs, half the annual salary of the Conservatoire director). Such contexts helped her to build the kinship bonds so important to her class. To raise money for her mother-in-law’s favorite charity, the Société Philanthropique, she rented the Trocadéro hall, the largest in Paris, hired two singers from the Paris Opéra and the Opéra’s conductor, and chose Handel’s Messiah, a work well known in England but less so in France. She provided the press with tickets and voluminous notes. Even amid the distractions of the 1889 Exhibition, the profit from the performance in June 1889 was 25000 francs, almost twice what the Opéra took in on a good night.

42In January 1890, aiming to put on other large projects, Elisabeth approached members of the executive committee of the composer-run Société Nationale, proposing to create a joint society with the Société Philanthropique. When this was turned down, she cast off on her own, conceiving an organization, the Société des Grandes Auditions Musicales de France, that seemed like a large-scale collaboration but, in effect, was run by one person. A Protestant banker and neighbor, Baron Francis Hottinguer, served as treasurer; major composers such as Gounod were members of the Honorary Committee; and even Debussy became an accompanist in 1890. Thanks to her aristocratic connections as well as her republican politics, money came in from a wide variety of supporters, and in only six weeks she raised 163000 francs, the equivalent of 20 percent of the state’s annual Opéra subsidy. Part of the Countess’s success came from the allure of elitism with which these productions were surrounded, necessary – as Fourcaud, an influential monarchist critic, noted – if the Société was to “intéresser les hautes classes à l’art sérieux, dont elles ont rarement souci”43. She was also able to identify both a body of works ignored in France, including Wagner’s operas, and a constituency for them. Her society presented Parisian premieres not only of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Götterdämmerung, and staged fragments of Parsifal (see Illustration 4) but also Edward Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, Richard Strauss’s Salomé, orchestral works by Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, and the Ballets Russes, supporting the notion of modernism as an international aesthetic. For the Countess, these concerts were a form of cultural diplomacy, perhaps an analogue to the work of her father, the Belgian ambassador to France. Her belief in “la fraternité par les relations internationales”44 and her desire to enhance mutual understanding and respect resulted in choosing composers her foreign peers thought were the most representative of their countries.

43What underlay this entrepreneurial talent and shaped it? First and foremost, Countesse Greffulhe believed in women, whom she called to come out (sortir) the shadows and soar like birds. She explored her broad vision of women’s potential in a seven-part book, La Femme: Étude de physiologie sociale, which she showed to Goncourt in June 1894, apparently never published45. In it, she analyzes women from birth and childhood through love and marriage. But this is not a typical text, as it includes a section on “l’adultère”, several on “risques et périls” ( “la femme dans la société”, “en danger” and “les menaces”), on “la femme en cage” ( “au gynécée”, “au sérail”, “au pensionnat”, “au couvent”), and on “les déclassées” ( “la vieille fille”, “la prostituée”, “la grisette”, “la femme entretenue”, “les femmes hors cadre”), each discussed with great empathy. The book ends with “vertige au sommet” which extends from “la femme reine” and “la femme en révolution” to “Plutus au jupon” and a short history of women in theater, literature, and politics.

44Countess Greffulhe was particularly committed to music. Like Anna Lampérière, she believed that “toute femme doit être une artiste” who, through beauty, “peut et doit… élever notre âme”46. In the early 1890s, the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs called on the country’s female elites to become leaders in luxury craft production, “reclaiming the aristocratic tradition of women’s central role in the decorative arts” and forming “a female aristocracy of the spirit rather than of lineage”47. Countess Greffulhe contributed decorative objects to the first Exhibition of the Arts of Women in 1892, as did other music patronesses, Madame de Saint-Marceaux and the pianist Princess Bibesco. When in 1894, the Union started a special Women’s Committee, both Countess Greffulhe and her mother-in-law were among its first members. According to the Committee’s charter, women were expected to “involve themselves in the progress of the arts and in expressing their love of country and of solidarity” through “embracing their role as patrons” and “instructors in refining taste”48. In 1896, the Union president and deputy from Paris, Georges Berger, recognized women’s efforts to “assurer la réalisation du Beau dans l’Utile”, along with “du beau moral attesté par leurs penchants charitables”. He called on women to be involved in the arts as a form of patriotism49. Many female music patrons responded to Berger’s challenge. Some hired professional orchestras to put on Wagnerian acts, or sang the principal roles themselves. For the most part, however, these performances took place in their homes. Princess Edmond de Polignac built a special salon for music, engaged “house musicians”, and invited friends to attend performances of new works before their public premieres.

45What distinguished Countess Greffulhe was that she formalized a music society to realize her aspirations and produce public concerts. A female, aristocrat, and amateur as president was highly unusual. Greffulhe’s Société was the only major music organization in Paris run by a woman and she was the only aristocrat who organized public concerts with professionals – most organizers of public concerts in Paris were conductors50.

46Such success was also fueled by the Countess’s wealth, beauty, and intelligence. Proust, on meeting her, declared, “Je n’ai jamais vu une femme aussi belle”51. A biographer in 1894 pointed to her strong will and supreme love of independence52. Coupled with these, she had an extraordinary ability to navigate the ambiguities inherent in aristocratic identity at the time – knowing whom to approach, how to elicit their support, and, as might any good politician, what to give in return. She built networks of cooperation and collaboration with not only nobles, bankers, and politicians, but also musicians, concert organizers, and the press. Calling on fashion, a liminal area between private desire and public display, she attracted a new public to art music concerts. Her society gave elites a sense of themselves as a group with shared tastes, not just a class divided by old rivalries, and created a cultural analogue for political coalition. By inviting foreign musicians into her home and sponsoring French premieres of foreign new music, Countess Greffulhe sought to enhance mutual understanding and respect among people from different nations. Her concerts were thus a form of not only entertainment, philanthropy, and patronage, but also national pride and international diplomacy.

47Contemporary musicians also had an advocate in another woman, Mathilde Daubresse, a socialist music critic, regular contributor to Courrier musical and Bulletin français de la S.I.M., and “collaborateur” du Guide musical and Mercure de France. If she appeared to readers as a man, signing and always referred to as M. Daubresse53, she was also the founder and first president of the Union des femmes professeurs et compositeurs de musique, created in 1904. This was most likely a reaction to the decision of the Ministre de l’Instruction Publique et des Beaux-Arts who had just signed a décret limiting to four the number of women in the violin, viola, cello, and doublebass classes at the Conservatoire54. In 1904, Daubresse published an essay on women orchestra players, in 1907 on women composers, in 1909 on “le prolétariat intellectuel féminin”, and in 1910 on the role of musicians at the Congrès des classes moyennes, noting the remarkable absence of women there. Then, in 1911, she wrote on “‘professeuses’ de musique” and the need for their “corporation” which led to a series of lectures on musical careers for L’Action Sociale de la Femme, published in Le Monde musical and later as a book. This was a major sociological study, over 200 pages long, the first to systematically examine the nature of musical “travail”55. Daubresse observed that artists’ lives are frought with “matérielles préoccupations”. She believed that the XXth century could be characterized as “de la recherche et de la production intensive des valeurs”. This, she argued, involves a “mécanisme complexe”, intimately related to the constraints on musicians’ lives56. From her book, we learn how long it takes to become a virtuoso, how much money it costs to put on concerts, what musicians earn from teaching, publishing, droits d’auteurs for various genres, and prizes, and how French musicians’ social conditions compare with those in other European capitals. Recognizing that some 4000 women in France made a living through their music, Daubresse devotes chapters to “les femmes musiciennes” and to her Union des femmes professeurs et compositeurs: their Bulletin mensuel, their société chorale, their Promenades artistiques avec conférences, and their project of creating a retirement home for women musicians. She also points to the Union des Femmes-Artistes Musiciennes which provided over 1,200 members a “caisse de secours” as well as a “maison de retraite”57.

Conclusion

48Such an array of multi-talented, independent, and entrepreneurial French women carved out new spaces for women, not only through their musical activities – be it teaching, performance, composition, or patronage – but also through their publications. The participation of women and their daughters in amateur music societies helped build enthusiasm for classical music among all classes and created knowledgeable audiences, crucial to the growth of orchestras in the 1880s and 1890s. Demonstrating that their skills and stamina equaled those of their male peers, that they could compose and perform virility as well as femininity in music and were willing to take on the most difficult challenges, women pushed open the doors of composer societies, major orchestras, even the Opéra. Banding together to share their energies and financial resources, they created extensive networks of cooperation to promote new music – from Gounod, Massenet, Franck and Fauré to Wagner, Elgar, and even Schoenberg. Joining the beautiful to the useful for the sake of progress, they became formidable contributors to their culture. Yet, as women increasingly permeated the public sphere as composers, orchestra musicians, and creators of their own ensembles and music societies, largely domains previously closed to them, they also continued to meet resistance. Joining unions helped to protect them, but perhaps more powerful was their use of the press. Writing their own singing manuals to make contemporary music accessible to the young; using their own performing experiences to inspire new approaches to piano performance, composition for the harp, or Wagner; and building on their own reflection and research into women’s lives to develop new, more sociological scholarship, these women turned their personal perspectives into those with far-reaching implications. Taking advantage of the press’s receptivity to women, their articles and books assured that their voices would be heard broadly and into the future.