Emilie Mayer (1812 – 1883): Symphony no 7 in F Minor
Regarded by many as the greatest female composer of the nineteenth century, Emilie Mayer was also one of the most fortunate. Helped in no small part by a generous family inheritance, as well as a stoical aversion to marriage, she was able to carve out a life and career largely on her own terms. “She claimed music as her life’s calling,” according to one of her contemporaries, “and considered it her life-companion, the ideal – of her loving, believing, hoping.”
Doing things her own way always came naturally to Emilie. Growing up in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern town of Friedland, situated in northeast Germany, she was seven years old when she embarked on her first piano lessons. Her teacher, a local organist named Carl Driver, was so struck by the “free” approach she took to each piece he gave her that he eventually suggested she try writing her own compositions. “After a few lessons,” Emilie later recalled, “I composed variations, dances, little rondos, etc.” Driver also offered some simple, sound advice she never forgot: “if you make an effort,” he told her, “you can become something.”
Despite these auspicious beginnings, Emilie’s early life was far from plain sailing. When she was just two years old she lost her mother Henrietta to a sudden illness. Although her father Johann steadfastly raised Emilie and her three brothers, while continuing to make a profitable living as a pharmacist, he never truly got over his wife’s premature death. Twenty-six years later, and on the anniversary of Henrietta’s funeral, he tragically shot himself.
Johann’s suicide would mark a major turning point in Emilie’s life. While it would haunt her for years afterwards, it would also liberate her from her life as a domestic housekeeper. In addition, the sizeable inheritance left by her parents allowed her to pursue her dream of becoming a professional composer.
She moved soon after to Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland) to study under Carl Loewe, a celebrated conductor and song-composer (sometimes dubbed the “north German Schubert”). During their first meeting, Loewe subjected his new pupil to a few musical tests in order to assess her abilities. Quickly noting that her natural gifts were not quite matched by theoretical knowledge, he memorably told her, “you know nothing and everything at the same time, Emilie!”
But Loewe also promised to help smooth out her artistic rough edges: “I shall be the gardener who helps the talent that is still a bud resting within your chest to unfold and become the most beautiful flower!” In this he would prove true to his word. And when Mayer modestly asked whether she should share her lessons with other female pupils, he told her it would not be necessary: “Such a God-given talent as yours has not been bestowed upon any other person I know.”
Mayer would study with Loewe for the next six years, and in that time begin to turn out her first compositions, including her Singspiel opera Die Fischerin (The Fisherwoman), along with songs, a little chamber music and two symphonies. Loewe would duly organise performances of both the latter in Stettin, at a time when the idea of women writing symphonies was still seen as something of a challenge to decent society. The influential music critic, Ludwig Rellstab, was at least one of those partly won over by Mayer’s efforts, even as he struggled to contain his amazement that a lady, “Demoiselle Emilie Mayer … is writing larger musical works” and that her symphonies were being performed “to great applause.”
Delighted by her progress, Loewe eventually suggested that Mayer should relocate to Berlin and continue her education with two of his musical colleagues – counterpoint with musicologist Adolph Marx, and instrumentation with composer/conductor Wilhelm Wieprecht.
This she did, and both her new tutors would give her much the same, staunch support she had received in Stettin. While Wieprecht would help turn her into a skilled orchestrator and organize further performances of her music, Marx encouraged her to pursue a more expressive, romantic sensibility in her creative work. Marx was also on hand to offer some solidarity as Mayer gingerly negotiated the male-centric musical world. In 1856 he published an article in the Berlin Musikzeitung Echo fervently calling for better educational opportunities for female musicians.
An important event in Mayer’s career was a major concert of her own music at the Royal Theatre in Berlin in April 1850, directed by Wieprecht and including two symphonies, a concert overture and a string quartet. Ludwig Rellstab, reporting on the occasion, observed that “such a concert program, created entirely by female hand, is, according to our experience and knowledge at least, unique in the musical history of the world.”
In the event, her music not only went down very well with its audience, but also drew praise from several skeptical male critics. Rellstab, for one, commended the way Mayer could make her thematic material “flow smoothly through the securely defined realm of tonal colours, often with surprising elegance.” Putting his neck firmly on the line, he boldly stated that “we may place her work on an equal footing with most of what the young world of musical artists … has produced today, a wreath of honour that music criticism can rightfully present to female talent.”
Other commentators echoed Rellstab’s appreciation, noting Mayer’s “captivating phrases” and her “confident command of the material.” But there were some backhanded compliments too, with certain critics seemingly intent on reminding Mayer of her place in the wider scheme of things. Flodoard Geyer, of the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, wrote with gentle malice: “what female forces, forces of the second order, are capable of – that has been achieved and reproduced by Emilie Mayer.”
Over the next decade, Mayer would ride high as a serious symphonic force in Germany, with her music played all over the country and sometimes abroad too. Not only was her evident talent now flowering in exactly the way Carl Loewe had hoped, but she was flourishing in other ways. Blessed with the kind of personality that makes friends easily, she was able to take the occasional chauvinistic jibes thrown her way with good grace. She also proved excellent at networking and making influential contacts, often keeping open house as she alternated living in Berlin and Stettin.
Although she would write eight symphonies in all during her creative peak, completing her final effort in 1862, one of her finest examples in the form is surely her Symphony no 7 in F Minor, composed between 1855 and 1856, though not premiered until six years later. It’s a work of rare craftsmanship and skill, and bears repeated listening to absorb all of its rich content. Although Mayer was greatly influenced by the music of Beethoven in her youth (whose scores she would meticulously copy out and study), her Seventh Symphony perhaps stands closest comparison with a Mendelssohn or Schumann symphony, although with Mayer already showing herself to be a more inventive orchestrator.
The first movement, appropriately marked Allegro Agitato, crashes in with a stormy, rhythmical motif in 6/8, creating a genuine tension which then hardly lets up for the next twelve minutes. Such turbulent music was hardly untypical of Mayer: half of her symphonies, for example, are set in minor keys, while another employs a funeral march as its slow movement. As much as she could present a largely untroubled face to the outer world, Mayer was anything but artistically facile.
The second movement of the symphony is a heartfelt Adagio which both looks back to Beethoven while uncannily anticipating Brahms – even the beautiful solo ‘cello theme which opens the movement has a distinctly Brahmsian feel. The serenity does not however last, as on two occasions the music works itself up to a majestic climax, both times suggesting the first movement tension is far from spent.
Although the following movement is marked Scherzo: Allegro Vivace, it is not really a scherzo in the classical sense, with its pictorial inventiveness creating its own much freer structure. In a highly original turn, it takes the first movement’s stormy motif, but this time develops it in an entirely different direction. Nor is it all drama: there are also moments when the dark clouds lift and give way to calmer, more pastoral sounding passages.
The finale, also Allegro Vivace, may be the most impressive movement of the work. It has a touch of the corresponding movement to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, not least with its apparent delight in showing off its creator’s skill. It is at once dynamic, imaginative and immensely resourceful, not least with its masterly use of counterpoint and instrumental colour. Although it dares to close in F Minor (and thus avoid the “happy” major ending customary of the time), the final impression is not one of gloom but exhilaration. It makes it all the more poignant that this is the last surviving symphony we have by Emilie Mayer.
For all her great success, there were still opportunities denied to Mayer and still doors that would be forever closed to her. And while her symphonies could produce an initial wave of surprise and admiration (partly that a woman could write such things), a counter-wave of suspicion and jealousy would follow just as quickly, mainly from threatened-feeling naysayers who did not believe a female artist should be taken so seriously.
In 1851, at exactly the time Mayer was first making her name as a composer, the celebrated German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was publishing an essay entitled “Über die Weiber” (On Women). Among other things, Schopenhauer argued that “neither for music, nor poetry, nor fine arts do [women] really and truly have sense and sensitivity… The most eminent minds of the entire sex have never produced a single truly great, genuine and original achievement in the fine arts, and have never been able to bring any work of lasting value into the world.”
Such toxic words were only reiterating commonly held prejudices of the time, prejudices that other early Romantic thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“women, take as a whole, love no single art, are connoisseurs in none – have by no means the quality of genius”) or Friedrich Schlegel (“woman gives birth to man, man to the work of art”) had made respectable among the educated classes. It never seemed to occur to any of them what the fairer sex might be capable of if only given the same opportunities as men.
For all her best efforts, Mayer felt her career beginning to stall by the early 1860s. Increasingly she found herself funding orchestral performances out of her own pocket, until despondency began to set in. And although publishers were happy to accept her smaller, more “feminine” works, none would touch her symphonies, nor indeed her seven orchestral overtures. It seems inexplicable today that such fine music – Mayer was the symphonic equal of any composer, man or woman, in the 1850s and 1860s – could be treated so shabbily. Six of her symphonies remain in manuscript, while two others have been lost entirely.
Mayer generally took such setbacks stoically, only occasionally venting her frustrations to friends and colleagues. She once admitted that “I have experienced not only in male but also in female society not inconsiderable opposition and that it has not been easy for me to accept such opposition with the appropriate equanimity!” While in the last year of her life, she complained to a publisher: “I find the works of the male composers announced on the last page of the Musikzeitung [a contemporary music journal]. It would probably not be immodest if I also lay claim to this according to the principle: what is right for one is right for the other.”
Rather than keep beating her head against a brick wall, Mayer stepped sideways and turned to chamber music in her later years, contributing works in many forms (including sonatas, duos, piano trios, and string quartets) and with no loss of inspiration. And although largely discouraged from building on her fine orchestral achievements of the 1850s, the older Mayer still had one final masterpiece left in her as she turned out a concert overture based on Goethe’s Faust at the age of sixty-nine. It received a sprinkling of performances across Europe and was praised wherever it landed. Many now regard it as her best work.
Whether or not Faust might have heralded a late, great surge from Mayer we shall never know, as two years later she died of pneumonia at her Berlin apartment. She was buried in the city’s Dreifaltigkeits (Holy Trinity) churchyard, close to the graves of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn.
Although much of her music has since fallen into neglect and awaits rediscovery today, Emilie Mayer remains an important standard-bearer to the generations of female composers who have followed her. Perhaps her greatest legacy was to demonstrate to them exactly what was possible, not least when given the right opportunities.