A Kiwi researcher is exploring the social landscape of Beethoven's Vienna, where women gained agency through chamber music during a period of social restrictions similar to our own covid lockdowns.
At that time women weren't really allowed to play music in public - and it was expensive to go to a symphony performance, so they recreated the music at home.
Beethoven Plaza in Vienna, Austria. Photo: CC00
Dr Nancy November has been awarded $623,000 by the Marsden Fund to take a closer look at the music-making of these innovative women.
November tells Jesse Mulligan she chanced upon the the subject matter when researching original chamber music during that period, music written for performances within the home.
“I discovered that there was a vast amount of music being performed within the home that wasn’t originally destined for home. I started to explore this music, and which music was translated for these take-home versions, who was playing it and why.”
The period is considered a time of the symphony, associated particularly Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Mozart and Ludwig Beethoven. She says what people of that era also wanted to see was opera, particularly Italian opera, with its engaging characters and star performers.
However, it was also considered a time of social upheaval, with the French Revolution of 1789 leading to the establishment of the first French Republic and a subsequent period of political violence. Monarchies across Europe feared the French revolution could aspire similar popular uprisings.
“There was a period in the late 1700s that was not dissimilar to our lockdown that we experienced, in that large-scale gatherings were prohibited and it was particularly problematic to have large-scale gatherings of men," she says.
"We just have to look back to the ‘reign of terror’ in Paris and what happened when large groups of middle-class and lower-class people got together and that’s what the authorities wanted to avoid.”
There was therefore a situation where large-scale works were being composed, as these were in demand, but it was not always possible to mount a performance in the original form, she says. So, chamber music flourished in this political and social environment, with a lot of private music making happening for a private setting. Much of it was a ‘take-home’ version of opera and popular culture.
The women performing these modified works got satisfaction in ‘owning’ their own version, achieving a degree of agency that wouldn’t have been otherwise afforded to them, she says.
“Women got to choose which repertoire they performed and they got to perform it at all. Women were not expected to perform in public, the exception to that was opera singers and the diva culture had been going on for centuries, by this stage.
“But, in terms of playing instrumental music in symphonies, they very, very largely didn’t… So this was an opportunity to play hands on, playing repertoires you wouldn’t have normally been able to.”
Popular instruments played by women included piano, harp and guitar.
“They played, oddly enough, some small-scale percussion instruments. So, things like tambourine, and little side-drums.”
November says one of the more fascinating arrangements she had been looking at was Wellington’s Victory by Beethoven, which involved Turkish instruments. “Women could have played those percussion parts,” she says.
One thing she noticed during the current period of covid lockdowns was that people had been making chamber music and playing works that had already been arranged. November says her research would resonate with those in lockdown and would even offer them works they could play too.
“I think people have recognised that this culture of small-scale home music making is very relevant to today.
"The research will also open up the repertoire of music available to people top perform. When I publish the edition of Wellington’s Victory by Beethoven, for example, it will be the first time that work will have been performed in an arrangement for five instruments and five performers since Beethoven’s time.
“So, we’ll get a rush of new chamber music that we can perform, both in the home and in the concert hall."
Her research will begin remotely, involving accessing songs available on digital archives, as covid continues to restrict travel to Europe.
“Thankfully a lot of my research is based on music and this is an innovative angle of the research," she says.
"Obviously historical researchers like to look at written document, where people will hopefully say some useful, pointed quite specific things. But quite a lot of my research will involve looking at the music, edited it and having it performed. Then asking questions of the music – how difficult is it, how difficult would it have been perceived on those days, which instruments are the most prominent and then to link that to gender, which instruments would have been played by women.”
