The Other Voice
Women's Musical Creativity in Alma Mahler's Vienna
Carola Darwin [+–]
Royal College of Music
Carola Darwin took her first degree in Natural Sciences (Chemistry) at Cambridge, before training as a singer at the Royal Northern College of Music, where she was awarded an MMus (Perf.). She gained her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2009 with a thesis and a one-woman show, both on the representation of women in opera in Vienna 1900-1918. Since then, she has combined her academic career with working as an opera and concert singer in Britain and abroad.
Carola currently works at the Royal College of Music in London, lecturing in the History of Music. In 2017 her research into the Viennese composer Johanna Müller-Hermann was chosen by BBC Radio Three for their project Five Women Composers. In 2019, Carola commissioned a song-cycle Endless Forms Most Beautiful for voice and string quartet by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, with funds from Arts Council England, and premièred it at the Oxford Lieder Festival. In 2022, Carola will be broadcast on Radio 3 when Johanna Müller-Hermann is Composer of the Week. Her article ‘Odaline de la Martinez – conductor, composer, entrepreneur, leader’ is due to be published in The Routledge Companion to Women in Music Leadership in 2023.
Alma Mahler was at the centre of musical life in Vienna for most of the first four decades of the 20th century. But in 1902, just before her marriage to Mahler, she gave up composition, at his request, and never returned to it. Her story is well known, but less familiar are those of the many other brilliant women who contributed to Vienna’s musical culture between 1900 and 1938, working as composers, performers, writers and teachers. This book tells their story.
The Other Voice shows how personal and professional artists’ networks, which were such an important part of Viennese culture at this time, included a number of significant female figures. While links between male figures are well-documented, this study shows how creative women were also supported and influenced by each other, as well as by the better-known men. Secondly, it considers the impact on both women and men of the contemporary gender discourse, as expressed in political and philosophical writing, in literature and in music.
The second part of the book looks in greater detail at a selection of women musicians, dividing them in to three categories: composers, performers, and writers and teachers, although several of the musicians discussed fall into more than one category. In each case a brief account of their life is followed by a discussion of their work, including some analysis of scores in the case of the composers and links to recordings to bring the musical examples to life. This includes considering how their personal and professional lives were influenced by the women and men that they knew, and how the gender discourse affected, and was reflected in, their work.
The book draws on new research into the musicians’ manuscripts and personal papers, which are held in archives such as the Austrian National Library and the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv. It also includes original musical and textual analysis. It is rigorous from a scholarly point of view but written in an accessible style suitable for the general reader. As audiences become increasingly open to hearing music by women, a real appetite is developing for understanding the stories behind the music, which this book caters for. At the same time, the book will appeal to those who are already interested in Vienna’s cultural life at this period, but who wish to know more about the women whose stories have been erased from existing accounts.
Series: Women in Music
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Introduction [+–]
A brief description of the social and culture milieu in Vienna 1900-1938 followed by a discussion of the existing scholarship on women in the arts.
Chapter 2
Vienna Circles [+–]
Links between creative women and with creative men. This introduces the reader to the creative world in Vienna and links the women that the book discusses to each other, to other important women, and to the already well-known male artists, writers and musicians.
Chapter 3
The Woman Question [+–]
The contemporary gender discourse in philosophy, literature and music. This further explains the context in which the women musicians were working: an intense discussion of women’s rights, roles and abilities, to which women both responded and contributed.
Chapter 4
Composers [+–]
Alma Mahler (gifted amateur), Johanna Müller-Hermann (professional); Mathilde Kralik von Meyerswalden (salonière) ; Lilli Scheidl- Hutterstrasser (and her opera Maria von Magdala)
Chapter 5
Performers [+–]
Maria Gutheil-Schoder (singer); Anna Bahr-Mildenburg (singer and director), Irma von Halacsy (violinist and composer)
Chapter 6
Writers and Teachers [+–]
Therese Rie (music critic); Elsa Bienenfeld (teacher); Johanna Müller-Hermann (teacher)
Chapter 7
