JEREMY NICHOLAS
Towards the end of the 19th century, the eminent Austrian pianist and pedagogue Ernst Pauer (1826-1905) made a list of the twelve pianists who, in his opinion, represented the technical execution of the highest perfection between the years 1830 and 1870. Of the twelve, nine were men: Liszt, Henselt, Hallé, Tausig, Thalberg, Dreyschock, Willmers (a now completely forgotten Danish pianist and composer), Anton Rubinstein and Bendel. Just three were women: Arabella Goddard, Wilhelmine Clauss-Szavardy and Clara Schumann.
Men have always outnumbered women on the concert platform – except, paradoxically, when the concept of a ‘professional pianist’ was in its infancy. Until the middle of the 18th century, there were very few professional pianists of either sex but of those who embarked on such a career, a surprising number were women. Playing the piano for domestic pleasure was a valued accomplishment for a woman, especially if she could accompany herself or others singing. The keyboard presented an elegant means of expression for a lady, much more so than the violin (which necessitated twisting the upper torso body into an ungainly position and would often leave an unsightly scar on the neck), let alone the trumpet or, God forbid, the ‘cello. The mental image we have of female keyboard players of the time, one never applied to their male counterparts, is of the earnest amateur trotting out her party pieces for the assembled company. Who can forget Mr Bennet’s injunction to his daughter Mary in Pride and Prejudice, ‘You have delighted us long enough’?
The names of the many lady clavier players of the period appear only fleetingly. What do we know of Therese Jansen, wife of the engraver Bartolozzi, for whom Haydn wrote his last three sonatas in 1794? What of Mademoiselle Lechantre, said to have introduced the piano, or ‘Clavecin forte-piano’, at a London concert in 1768? In Vienna, there were Franziska von Auenbrugger (said to be ‘masterly’), Karoline von Greiner (who later wrote novels under the name of Karoline Pichler) and Barbara Ployer, proficient enough to join Mozart for a public performance of his D major Sonata for two pianos. For Frau von Trattner, Mozart wrote his great Sonata in C minor. He thought Josephine Aurnhammer (‘very fat, given to perspiration, and somewhat aggressive’) ‘played delightfully’. Who was the French lady pianist ‘Jeunehomme’ for whom Mozart composed his Piano Concerto in E flat, K271? Recent scholarship suggests she was Victoire Jenamy (1749-1812), the daughter of one of Mozart’s best friends, Jean-Georges Noverre. What of (Baroness) Dorotea Ertmann (1781-1849) whose playing so delighted Beethoven and to whom he dedicated his great Op.101 Sonata?
The most celebrated female pianist of the era from Vienna was Maria Therese von Paradis (1759-1824), daughter of the Imperial Secretary of Commerce, Joseph Anton von Paradis, and Court Counsellor to the Empress Maria Theresa, for whom she was named. She became blind by the age of five, a disability that did not prevent her from touring all over Europe (with her mother), though this part of her career lasted only from 1784 to 1789, after which she settled in Vienna, opened her own music school and taught there until her death. Both Haydn and Mozart wrote concertos for her (she was reputed to have had sixty concertos in her repertoire).
Another player who was rated far above the level of delightful amateur was the Polish virtuoso Maria Szymanowska (née Marianna Agata Wołowska) born in Warsaw in 1789. Said to have been among the first to give recitals from memory, she composed a great deal (over 100 works). Scholars hail her as an important forerunner of Chopin who certainly knew her Polish dances, mazurkas and other music. She toured all over Europe, eventually settling in St Petersburg, where she became the court pianist of the Tsarina, dying there from cholera in 1831.
The first female British pianist to win public recognition was Lucy Anderson, almost invariably referred to in journals of the time as ‘Mrs Anderson’. She was born Lucy Philpot in 1797 in Bath and married a violinist named George Anderson in 1820. She became the first woman to appear at a Philharmonic Society concert (1822) though the event stirred little interest. ‘Probably,’ suggested the Musical Times of 1894, ‘the engagement of a female pianist was resented and almost certainly the artist suffered from having the misfortune to be an Englishwoman.’ Nevertheless, Mrs Anderson made a further 18 appearances with the Society, was the first to play Beethoven’s’ Emperor’ with them, and, eventually in 1869, was given the rare accolade of being made an honorary members of the RPS. She was clearly a fine pianist (Novello gave her the exclusive rights to play Mendelssohn’s Second Piano Concerto for six months) despite having had no important or regular teacher. But her husband was a decided factor in her success. He was, we read, ‘the governing power of the Philharmonic Society, and exercised much influence on every institution with which he had connection’, for her violinist husband, who had risen to become ‘master of the Queen’s private band’, in 1848 was made Master of the Queen’s Musick no less. They were a well-connected couple: Mrs Anderson was court pianist to both Queen Adelaide and Queen Victoria, and taught the latter’s children.
But Mrs Anderson’s most distinguished pupil was, for a quarter of a century from 1853, the most fêted of all English pianists: Arabella Goddard. She, too, might be said to have benefitted from her husband’s connections. Born in France of English parents in 1838, she was a child prodigy who played for the Queen and the Prince Consort at Buckingham Palace at the age of eight. In addition to Mrs Anderson, her teachers were Kalkbrenner and Thalberg, the latter recommending that she continue her studies with the influential British critic J. W. Davison. Arabella made her official debut in 1853 playing the ‘Hammerklavier’ from memory (not the first performance in Britain as some books have it – that was given in 1850 by Alexandre Billet – but an early one). From the late 1850s she began programming the last five of Beethoven’s sonatas, still almost unknown in England. In 1860 she married her mentor. She was 23, he was 46. From 1873 to 1876 she made a world tour playing in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Java. When she returned, George Bernard Shaw heard her, admiring her great dexterity but not entirely won over by her musicianship. ‘Madame Goddard played fantasias on English and Scottish airs, and fascinated her hearers with a strikingly unpleasant imitation of a bagpipes,’ he recorded of Goddard’s appearance at a Ballad Concert in 1877. Davison, whom she divorced after the birth of their two sons, would not have been happy: he disapproved of any music written after Mendelssohn. Arabella retired from performing in 1880 though she was not yet 45. Burnt out? Exhausted? ‘She was an extraordinary pianist,’ recalled Shaw in 1889. ‘Nothing seemed to give her any trouble. There was something almost heartless in the indifference with which she played whatever the occasion required: medleys, fantasias, and pot-pourris for “popular” audiences, sonatas for Monday Popular ones, concertos for classical ones; as if the execution of the most difficult of them were too easy and certain to greatly interest her…She was more like the Lady of Shalott working away at her loom than a musician at a pianoforte.’ Arabella died as recently as 1922 (in France), well into the era of recordings. Alas, she left none. What a tantalising prospect!
A near-contemporary of Mdme Goddard is the forgotten Madeline (or Madeleine) Schiller, London-born (1843), a pupil there of Benedict and Hallé, and later of Moscheles in Leipzig where she befriended Arthur Sullivan. She divided her career between the UK and the US (she married an American in 1872), giving the world premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto in New York in 1881 conducted by Theodore Thomas. She also gave the American premieres of concertos by Raff and Saint-Saëns. She must have been quite a pianist. Who now remembers her or Wilhelmine Clauss (also known by her married name of Clauss-Szarvady, and sometimes as Szarvady-Clauss), so highly rated by Ernst Pauer? She came from Prague (born there in 1834) and made a sensational tour at the age of fifteen, establishing her reputation in Vienna, Berlin and Leipzig. She eventually settled in Paris with her husband, the writer Friedrich Szarvady. Although she played some Schumann, Liszt and Chopin, her repertoire consisted mainly of Scarlatti, Bach and Beethoven, ‘and it is upon her execution of these,’ reported Grove’s Dictionary, ‘that her great reputation is founded.’ She was something of a scholar too, it seems, editing and performing a concerto by C.P.E. Bach ‘which had not previously been published, and which she arranged exclusively for the piano.’ Wilhelmine Clauss must have been a fine musician, for more than one contemporary writer compares her with the player routinely described as ‘the greatest living female pianist’: Clara Schumann.
The life story of Clara (née Wieck) is dominated by the relationship with (and sixteen year marriage to) Robert Schumann. Yet turbulent and passionate as this was – and important as the partnership was to the history of music – music-making was the motivating force of her existence. She was a child prodigy who first played in public in 1827 at the age of eight and only stopped in 1888 due to crippling arthritis. 1300 of her programmes have been preserved revealing a breadth of repertoire which, it is said, no pianist of the time, male or female, equalled. Clara’s domineering father, Friedrich Wieck, was determined that his daughter should be a major pianist and he proceeded to drill her, with a relentless regime of scales, studies and exercises, to become exactly that. By the time she was in her early teens, dazzling audiences with the music from the likes of Herz, Kalkbrenner, Hünten, Hummel and Henselt, she was a star. Small wonder, in the circumstances, that Wieck should be appalled at the prospect of his celebrated daughter marrying a penniless journalist and eccentric composer. And, indeed, though the marriage (in 1840) was a success, this period of Clara’s life was the most demanding. How do you give birth to eight children, raise them, be a devoted wife to a demanding husband – and find the quiet and the time to practice, to maintain the pianistic mechanism of a world-class virtuoso? Somehow she managed it – in 1844 she premiered Henselt’s ferociously difficult F minor Concerto – but even her husband realised the sacrifice that had been made, noting that though her playing had increased in intelligence and feeling ‘the development of her technique to the point of infallibility – for that she has no time. The fault is mine, yet there is nothing to be done about it. Clara realises that I must make full use of my powers, now that they are at their best.’
After reading this (with a sharp intake of breath), it’s a wonder that this extraordinary woman did it while being almost constantly pregnant, mothering her children, and ministering to her husband. And it was Clara who was by far the more famous of the two. During a concert tour that took the couple to Russia in 1844, Robert was routinely introduced as ‘the husband of Clara Schumann’. At one musicale in St Petersburg, a nobleman asked him: ‘Are you, too, musical?’
When Robert died, she was only 37 years old. She had a family to support and took up her career again with a determination and dedication that most of her male peers would have flinched at, sometimes playing as many as five concerts in four towns within a week. Doubtless influenced by her husband, Clara had long abandoned the showy composers of her teenage years and taken to playing recitals of Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann (of course), Chopin and, a little later, Brahms. (Not Liszt – beyond some Schubert transcriptions: she could not abide him or his music, even suppressing the dedication to him of the C major Fantasy in her edition of Schumann’s works.) The renowned critic Eduard Hanslick, reviewing a concert in Vienna in 1856, reported: ‘As a young girl, she already stood above the insipid trifle of virtuosity and was one of the first to preach the gospel of the austere German masters… Her penetrating understanding of every kind of music…is such that she can treat the whole range of technique as a matter completely dominated and utterly at her disposition.’ Dressed habitually in black from head to foot, the widow Schumann brought a new seriousness and musical integrity to the concert platform. In Arthur Loesser’s words (Men, Women and Pianos), ‘the virtuoso acrobat…was gradually replaced by a performer who considered himself an interpreter.’ And it was Clara Schumann (with, to some extent, Hans von Bülow) who pioneered the concept of an instrumental soloist who, for the first time, played nothing but the compositions of others. Here, largely thanks to a woman, was the blueprint for today’s piano recitals.
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Clara Schumann is one of the few women pianists of her generation whose name has survived on an equal footing, so to speak, with her male contemporaries. Why should this be? Yes, she was married to a famous composer; yes, she was a great pianist who enjoyed a long career; and, yes, her legacy lived on in a number of famous pupils. But how have the names of so many of her peers disappeared almost completely from view? Were they that much her inferior as pianists? I do not believe so.
Two women pianists born in 1811 (the same year as Liszt) just eight years earlier than Clara, illustrate the point. Both enjoyed long, high-profile careers alongside Madame Schumann. Indeed, Clara viewed Marie Pleyel (1811-75) as a very serious rival. Heine put her among the élite when he called ‘Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Mme Pleyel a sibyl, and Döhler a pianist.’ Born in Paris of Belgian-German parents, the flirtatious Marie-Félicité-Denise Moke caused a sensation wherever she appeared. Hiller and Mendelssohn adored her, Chopin dedicated his Op. 9 Nocturnes to her; Berlioz, famously, became engaged to her but on discovering she had transferred her affections to Camille Pleyel decided to shoot her. Pleyel married her in 1831 but divorced her after four years because of her repeated infidelities; Liszt (of course) had an affair with her (conducted in Chopin’s apartment, much to the latter’s displeasure). In 1848, the distinguished music critic François-Joseph Fétis invited Marie to become the first head of the piano department at the Brussels Conservatory and wrote of her in about 1870: “I have heard all the celebrated pianists from [Nicolas-Joseph] Hüllmandel and Clementi up to the famous ones of today but I say that none of them has given me, as has Mme. Pleyel, the feeling of perfection.”
Pleyel’s exact contemporary, the German Louise Dulcken (1811-50), was the sister of the violinist Ferdinand David, dedicatee of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. On her marriage at the age of nineteen, she went to London and made a brilliant career there. She taught Queen Victoria the piano, was the first woman to appear in a Philharmonic concert and was said to have given the first British performance of Chopin’s F minor Concerto. On 31 May 1841 we read of ‘Madame Dulcken’s – Pianiste to Her Majesty the Queen – Annual Grand Morning Concert in the Great Concert Room of Her Majesty’s Theatre’. The first part of the mixed programme concluded with Mdme Dulcken playing the world premiere of a two-piano arrangement of Liszt’s Hexameron… with the composer himself.
Agnes Zimmerman was another special favourite of London audiences. Born in Cologne in 1840, she studied from the age of nine at the Royal Academy in London where she made her debut at sixteen. She was still playing in public at well over 75. Zimmerman introduced Beethoven’s piano transcription of his Violin Concerto to a British audience (December 1872). Apart from composing (there’s a sonata, a piano trio, and a violin sonata among other works) she made editions of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas.
The Clara Schumanns, Marie Pleyels and Louise Dulckens of the world were trail-blazers. When we reach the generation born in the 1840s and ‘50s, we witness an exponential growth in the number of women pianists whose careers rivalled those of their male counterparts. Many of them studied with the two great teachers of the age, Franz Liszt and Theodor Leschetizky; significantly, many were also pianist-composers (still a novel concept for a woman). One such was Munich-born Sophie Menter (1846-1918) who studied with Liszt from 1869 and claimed a special place in his affections. ‘No woman can touch her,’ he said. Feisty, self-confident and beautiful, Menter, according to George Bernard Shaw in 1890, produced ‘an effect of magnificence which leaves Paderewski far behind…It is the distinctness of attack and intention given to each note that makes her execution so irresistibly impetuous’. Menter married the celebrated cellist David Popper in 1872 (they divorced in 1886) and taught at the St Petersburg Conservatory. Her exuberant ‘Concerto in the Hungarian Style’, recorded by Cyprien Katsaris and Leslie Howard inter alia, was probably written in collaboration with Liszt, but was certainly orchestrated by Tchaikovsky. This was in September 1892 when he was staying with Menter at Schloss Itter, her castle in the Tyrol which she had bought in 1884. That’s how successful Menter was.
Hardly less of a success – another German (from Hanover) and, as it happens, another friend of Tchaikovsky – was Adele aus der Ohe (1861-1937). Christened Adelheit Johanne Auguste Hermine on 11 February 1861 in Hanover, for a quarter of a century hailed as one of the greatest living pianists. A student of Liszt from the age of twelve from 1877 to 1884, she was the soloist in Carnegie Hall’s inaugural concert playing the Tchaikovsky B flat minor concerto under the composer’s baton, a performance repeated in Moscow when the ‘Pathetique’ Symphony was premiered. She was a formidable player with such demanding works in her repertoire as the Auber-Liszt Tarantella di bravura and Huss’s B major concerto. Devoted to her art and the memory of ‘The Master’, she seems to have had no love life, travelling everywhere with her older sister Mathilde, ‘friend, confidant, and probably much more’ confides her biographer with a nudge. Significantly, Adele all but stopped playing after Mathilde’s early death in 1906. Her life thereafter makes for unhappy reading: opting for residence in Berlin during the First World War, investing the fortune she had built up in worthless German government war bonds, crippled by arthritis and unable to play or even teach, and finally living on the charity of American friends and financial gifts from the likes of Rachmaninov. Her death in December 1937 must have been a blessed release.
Of the swarms of young ladies who flocked to Liszt, most were amateurs or went on to have undistinguished careers. Brief mention must be made of two exceptions: the Norwegian Agathe Backer-Grøndahl (1847-1907) made her debut in Oslo playing the ‘Emperor’ Concerto conducted by Grieg. An important figure in Scandinavian music, she became closely identified with Grieg’s music (especially his Concerto) before deafness put an end to her career. She composed over 400 works, mainly songs and piano solos. (In 1890, Shaw rated Backer- Grøndahl as ‘the foremost woman and [Bernard] Stavenhagen as the foremost man among the thoughtful players’, while ‘the pianists whose music is the expression of their strength and joy in life, the leaders are Sophie Menter and [Vasilly] Sapellnikoff.’) The first great American-born woman pianist was Julie Rivé-King, born in Cincinnati in 1857. Having studied in Europe with Reinecke and for a short time with Liszt, she returned to the United States in 1875. In the following fifteen years she gave over 4,000 solo recitals and made over 500 appearances with orchestra. As well as many salon pieces, she produced several highly effective transcriptions of works by Scarlatti, Chopin, Vieuxtemps and a paraphrase on Bizet’s Carmen. She died in 1937.
Sadly, none of these women left recordings of any kind, but several pupils of Leschetizky did. One such was Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler (1863-1927), born Fanny Blumenfeld in Bielitz (Austrian Silesia). A second cousin of Moriz Rosenthal, she was also related to Felix Blumenfeld, the teacher of Horowitz, and thus to his nephew Heinrich Neuhaus. Anglicizing her name to Bloomfield when she returned to America in 1885 to make her official debut there, she married another second cousin, Sigmund Zeisler and was henceforth known by her double name. She was described as a ‘small, slight, frail, delicate woman who appears more to need assistance for walking than playing’, yet her repertoire would indicate a pianist of considerable power, stamina and dexterity, including as it did Henselt’s F minor, Saint-Saëns’s C minor, Rubinstein’s D minor, the Moszkowski concerto, as well as solo works ranging from the Hammerklavier and Op. 111 to Howard Brockway’s Serenade, the latter two among the many piano rolls she made between 1908 and 1924 (Pieran 0003/4).
Annette Essipoff (or Annette or Anna Essipova) (1850-1914) may have been the first woman pianist to record. In 1898 Julius Block made just one cylinder of her playing a gavotte by Godard (she left no discs but later made a number of piano rolls for Welt Mignon, the same company that Bloomfield-Zeisler played for). As a fourteen year old at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Anton Rubinstein advised her to concentrate on singing; Leschetizky persuaded her to stick to the piano – which she did – and later, in 1880, married her teacher (they divorced amicably in 1893). Shaw was bowled over by ‘her terrible precision and unfailing nerve; her cold contempt for difficulties, her miraculous speed, free from any appearance of haste.’ This was in 1888. ‘Truly an astonishing – almost a fearful player,’ he wrote. Essipoff’s pupils in St Petersburg included Simon Barere, Sergei Prokofiev and Lev Pouishnov.
The most sensational female pianist of her day, however, arguably greater than even Menter or Essipoff, was neither a pupil of Liszt (she turned him down!) or Leschetizky. This was Teresa Carreño, ‘The Walküre of the Piano’. Ehrlich, in his Celebrated Pianists (1894), puts her ‘at the head of modern pianists. Her playing is unequalled, her technical knowledge is perfect, and she captivates even those who make it a rule to admire nothing.’ She and Sophie Menter, says Ehrlich, ‘are the only ones who, in spite of restrictions laid by nature upon their sex, have been able to overcome tremendous pianoforte difficulties’. This contentious disclosure was echoed many years later by Abram Chasins in his celebrated Speaking of Pianists (Alfred A. Knopf, 1957). Comparing Guiomar Novaës’s playing of Schumann with Rachmaninov’s, he concludes, ‘There is no getting away from it: physical power is a compelling power. I have never heard any woman – not even Teresa Carreño – who had it in sufficient degree to extract from the piano its fullest grandeur. I have therefore never yet heard the woman pianist able to command such works as the Beethoven E flat Concerto, the Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, or Prokofiev concertos.’
Chasins, though, could only have heard Carreño when he was a boy and she was nearing the end of her career. She had many of the big virtuoso concertos in her repertoire and I suspect had more than enough stamina and power to fire her way through the Rubinstein D minor, Liszt E flat, Tchaikovsky B flat minor and the MacDowell D minor (of which she gave the world premiere), all of which were staples of her immense repertoire.
Carreño was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1853. Her father was the Minister of Finance and gave her her first lessons. At the age of nine we find her in New York giving a benefit concert and playing for President Lincoln at the White House. Louis Moreau Gottschalk mentored her. Later she studied with Chopin’s pupil Georges Matthias in Paris. Rossini and Liszt were dazzled by her. Rossini wanted her to become a singer – she had a beautiful mezzo soprano voice and, indeed, sometimes appeared in opera (she was also known to conduct if one didn’t show up). She was a striking woman to behold – tall, beautiful with enormous charisma, physical strength and a fiery Latin temperament. Her first marriage at nineteen to violinist Émile Sauret ended acrimoniously after two years and left her with a daughter. Husband number two, a baritone named Giovanni Taglipietra, produced two surviving children. When that marriage ended, she married the recently divorced pianist Eugen d’Albert and had a further two daughters by him. A review, apparently genuine, appeared in a German paper: ‘Frau Carreño yesterday played for the first time the second concerto of her third husband at the fourth Philharmonic concert.’ When d’Albert and Carreño inevitably separated, in 1902 she married Arturo Tagliapietra, the brother of her second husband. It caused a scandal but was the one happy union of her tempestuous love life.
The waspish, hyper-critical Hans von Bülow called Carreño ‘A phenomenon. She sweeps the floor clean of all piano paraders who, after her arrival, must take themselves elsewhere.’ Not everyone was as convinced. Shaw, who knew his pianists as well as anyone, heard her in 1890 and compared her with Arabella Goddard – ‘She can play anything for you; but she has nothing of her own to tell you about it. Playing is her superb accomplishment, not her mission’ – later taking her to task for playing ‘arrant schoolgirl trash’ in the form of Gottschalk’s Tremolo. ‘Certainly she is a superb executant, and her bow is Junonian; but Gottschalk! – good gracious!’
Tragically, Carreño, who died in 1917, left no recordings, though she made a number of piano rolls including the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, Smetana’s Am Seegestade étude and her celebrated Little Waltz dedicated to her daughter Teresita.
Carreño‘s life and career remind one irresistibly of an equally temperamental present-day, much-married South American virtuoso: Martha Argerich. When considering women’s place in the history of the piano, it’s worth noting, not incidentally, that in the three most prestigious international piano competitions (the Tchaikovsky, the Chopin and the Leeds) held between 1960 and 2005, Argerich was the only female first prize winner.
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Of the hundreds of people who embark each year on careers as professional musicians only a tiny proportion of those achieve lasting fame during their lifetime. Of those happy few, how many will be remembered ten, fifty years, a century after their deaths? The male-dominated world of the solo pianist in the last half of the nineteenth century inevitably yields a longer list of still-remembered names than their female counterparts. And if Henry C. Lahee is to be believed, there was a reason: ‘Pianoforte technique of today [1902] is a matter making heavy demands upon the strength of the performer, and while pianoforte playing is an almost universal accomplishment for ladies, there are few who possess the physical endowments necessary to achieve the greatest results’ (Famous Pianists of Today and Yesterday).
But here to rebut Lahee’s chauvinism is the delightful Amy Fay writing from Weimar in June 1873 about a young lady who was a pupil of Henselt in St. Petersburg and who had recently turned up to study with Liszt, clearly possessed with those necessary ‘physical endowments’. ‘She is immensely talented, only seventeen years old, and her name is Laura Kahrer. It is a very rare thing to see a pupil of Henselt, for it is very difficult to get lessons from him. He stands next to Liszt. This Laura Kahrer plays everything that was ever heard of, and she played a fugue of her own composition the other day that was really vigorous and good. I was quite astonished to see how she had worked it up. She has made a grand concert tour in Russia. I never saw such a hand as she had. She could bend it backwards till it looked like the palm of her hand turned inside out. She was an interesting little creature, with dark eyes and hair, and one could see by her Turkish necklace and numerous bangles that she had been making money. She played with the greatest aplomb, though her touch had a certain roughness about it to my ear. She did not carry me away, but I have not heard many pieces from her.’
What more of Laura Kahrer? Did she make a career? Did she fulfil her promise? Alas, you won’t find her name in any reference book. She disappears from the scene. The only glimpse of her talent and potential is via Amy Fay. In fact Laura Kahrer Rappoldi (1853-1925), as she became the year after this encounter with the American, spent the rest of her career teaching and performing in and around Dresden, as the wife of the violinist Edouard Rappoldi, onetime member of the Joachim Quartet. As for Amy Fay herself (1844-1928), she returned home to the States and became well-known for her ‘piano conversations’ – recitals preceded by short lectures. Nobody seems to have taken her very seriously as a pianist.
Exactly how good Kahrer and Fay were as pianists, or what they sounded like, we shall never know, yet both of them lived well into the age of recordings – as did Sophie Menter (1846-1918), Adele aus der Ohe (1864-1937) and Agathe Backer-Grøndahl (1847-1907) to name but three of their most distinguished contemporaries (see Part 2 of this series). Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler (1863-1927), Annette Essipoff (1850-1914) and Teresa Carreño (1853-1917) left only piano rolls (though Essipoff recorded a cylinder in 1898).
One of Amy Fay’s six sisters married the eminent conductor Theodore Thomas, founder of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Julie Rivé-King has been described as being ‘to the piano in America what Theodore Thomas was to the orchestra’. Born in Cincinnati in 1857, she is rated as the first truly great American woman pianist. Having made her debut aged eight, she studied with William Mason and Sebastian Bach Mills before heading to Europe for lessons with Carl Reinecke and Liszt. Rivé-King made a profound contribution to American musical life when she returned in 1875. In the following eighteen years she gave over 4,000 solo recitals and made over 500 appearances with orchestra. Again, she left no recordings despite living until 1937.
Few will have encountered the name of Marie-Léontine Pène (Bordes-Pène after she married), yet this French pianist (born in Lorient in 1858) was the dedicatee of d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Song (she gave the first performance too) and Franck’s Prélude, Aria et Finale. She played the premiere of Franck’s Violin Sonata with its dedicatee Eugène Ysaÿe – the famous occasion when, due to the length of the programme that preceded it, the players were obliged to play most of the work in the dark from memory, there being no artificial lighting allowed in the gallery where the performance took place. Bordes-Pène also championed the works of Chabrier, Fauré, Duparc and Chausson. Tragically, she was paralysed after suffering a stroke in 1890 and retired to teach in Rouen, otherwise she would surely have recorded, as did her French male contemporaries Diémer, Pugno, Planté and Philipp. She died in January 1924.
Other names from this period who had significant performing careers but left neither piano rolls or discs include the Germans Marie Krebs (1851-1900) – who was also an opera singer – Anna Mehlig (1846-1928), a Liszt student (both of them toured with Theodore Thomas in America in the 1870s) and Martha Remmert (1854-1928), also a Liszt student from 1873 onwards who became part of his inner circle (Borodin described her as a ‘blonde, attractive German, whose lips were faintly shaded with down. She was tall and graceful, slightly affected, and with a touch of coquetry’). Remmert was one of the first pianists to play Totentanz in public. Another German, though Paris-born, was Clothilde Kleeburg (1866-1909). She made a tremendous impression after her debut in the French capital playing Beethoven’s C minor Concerto at the age of twelve, and was wildly popular in London, winning the hearts of her listeners ‘more by her tender grace and poetical refinement than by her brilliancy’ (Ehrlich). Saint-Saëns who considered her to be ‘a brilliant pianist’, dedicated the fourth of his Études Op. 111 to her.
Increasingly, however, women pianists born in the 1850s and the immediate decades thereafter left us with firm evidence of their abilities. The earliest of these (and among the first ladies to make a disc recording) was the redoubtable Natalia Janotha (1856-1932). After working with Ernst Rudorff and Woldemar Bargiel in Berlin she studied extensively with Clara Schumann before becoming the Imperial Court Pianist in Berlin. Chopin’s sister was a close friend of her mother and through one of Chopin’s most devoted admirers, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, was given the manuscript of Chopin’s student Fugue in A minor. This, the work’s only recording for the next half century, was one of four titles she made in London in December 1904. The others works were Mendelssohn’s ‘Bee’s Wedding’ (with her own additions), and two of her own compositions. One wonders if these are truly representative of Janotha at her best. George Bernard Shaw had been won over in 1889 by her playing of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and considered her the natural successor to Clara Schumann: ‘I know no pianist of her generation whose playing is more sustainedly and nobly beautiful than hers’; he had changed his mind by 1892, finding her ‘idly displaying her rare dexterity of hand and her capricious individuality of style without a ray of thought or feeling’.
Janotha was wonderfully eccentric. A noted mountaineer (she frequently climbed wearing men’s trousers), she refused to give a performance unless her cat White Heather was within her view on stage. A devout member of the Greek Church, her prayer book would always be placed ostentatiously on the piano. She lived in London for many years but suffered the indignity of being deported in 1916 because of the War. She played only infrequently after this and died in relative obscurity in The Hague.
Of the earliest female pianists to record, undoubtedly the best known is Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) even if she was principally a composer rather than an international touring virtuoso. Her salon-style compositions were hugely popular. Lightweight they may be but they demand a superior technique to bring them off. Chaminade, who had been a child prodigy, had this in spades as she demonstrates triumphantly in seven of her own compositions recorded in London in late 1901 for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company. And talking of composers recording their own works on the G&T label, we should mention the legendary Pablo de Sarasate and the nine sides he left us in 1904. Not credited on the disc labels was his long-term accompanist Berthe Marx (1857-1925), a pupil of Henri Herz at the Paris Conservatoire (and, allegedly, the illegitimate daughter of the violinist, conductor and concert impressario Charles Lamoureux). By 1894, when she married Sarasate’s manager Otto Goldschmidt, the two of them had appeared together over 600 times. After Sarasate’s death in 1908, she resumed her solo career and made a few rolls for Welte-Mignon (including her own Rhapsodie hongroise based on Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen). Bernard Shaw had heard her in recital back in 1890: ‘It was very brilliant, and brilliant in a sympathetic way; but O, Miss Bertha [sic], if you would only mix just a little thought with the feeling now and then!’
The previous year, Shaw encountered [Aimée] Marie Roger-Miclos (1860-1950) for the first time playing Beethoven’s C minor Concerto. ‘She is a swift, accurate, steely-fingered player, who can make a scale passage sound as if it were made by a dextrous whipcut along the keyboard. I admire Madame Roger-Miclos much as I admire the clever people who write a hundred and eighty words a minute with a typewriter.’ You can discern something of this in the ten titles she cut for the Fonotopia label in Paris in 1905 (a further disc of Godard’s ‘Le Cavalier fantastique’ was unissued), but her light touch and nonchalant execution seems ideally suited to her virtuosic choices of Godard (a superb Mazurka No. 4 in B flat) Liszt, Mendelssohn and Chopin recorded on ‘one of those wonderful steel dulcimers made by Pleyel’ (Shaw again) that she preferred.
Apart from this association, Davies’s career was punctuated with other notable events, from playing Beethoven’s G major Concerto at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in the same concert at which Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Fourth Symphony. She gave the London premieres of Brahms’s Klavierstücke Opp. 116, 117, the Clarinet Sonatas Op.120 and Clarinet Trio, Op.114, (the last two with their dedicatee Richard Mühlfield) and the Violin Sonata in D minor, Op.108 partnered by Joachim. What else? She was the first person to give a piano recital in Westminster Abbey.
The long-lived Hungarian Eibenschütz (1873-1967) was another prodigy who also made her debut at six (in Vienna). By ten she had appeared in Russia, Germany and Scandinavia. She also studied with Clara Schumann and it was at her home in Frankfurt that she met and subsequently befriended Brahms. Eibenschütz was the first person to hear his Opp.118 and 119 when he played them through to her, and she gave the English premieres of both. Like Davies, noted for her ‘inexhaustible energy’, Eibenschütz was a lively personality – as is apparent from the two Scarlatti sonatas she recorded for the G&T label in 1903. More importantly, she also left a recording of Brahms’s Ballade in G minor, Op.118 No.3 and two Waltzes from Op.39. Despite living another 64 years, that is all she recorded commercially (there are some private recordings made in the 1950s and ‘60s and a fascinating illustrated talk recorded for the BBC in which she reminiscences about Clara Schumann and Brahms). The year before she recorded the five G&T titles, she had married. Like so many of her sex, this heralded her retirement from the concert platform in order to raise a family.
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Despite many of those women pianists born in the second half of the twentieth century who lived well into the age of the gramophone, only a small proportion ever made a recording. In some cases, this is puzzling. Why, for instance, did Cécile Chaminade (born in 1857) make only a handful of discs in 1901 and then no more though she did not die until 1944? Equally puzzling is why so many of the most revered pianists of the day can – and this is particularly true of female pianists – go from the very top to near obscurity in only 100 years. What, for instance, of the thirteen-year old Leschetizky pupil Paula Szalit described by her fellow pupil Arthur Shattuck as ‘the sublimest recreative talent of her time’? Artur Schnabel believed Szalit to have been the greatest child wonder in history. She could transpose fugues at sight and played to great acclaim in Vienna, Germany and her native Poland – to where she returned never to be heard again. She died in 1920 aged just 31, leaving behind a dozen or so rather charming piano pieces like her Op.3 Drei klavierstücke. If the myriad Liszt and Leschetizky pupils dominated the market at the end of the nineteenth century, those nurtured by Clara Schumann also made their mark. The most prominent of these were Natalie Janotha, Fanny Davies and Ilona Eibenschütz (see Part 3 in IP July / August 2016), the last of whom died as recently as 1967. Among the most remarkable was Marie Wurm (1860-1938) who, after a period with Clara at the Hoch Conservatory, went on to have lessons with Humperdinck, Raff and, on a Mendelssohn scholarship, Stanford, Sullivan and Bridges in London, and then composition with Reinecke in Leipzig. She was, ran one review, ‘a pianist of great technical strength and spirited style of play’. A brisk round of concerts – including one in 1895 which consisted entirely of improvisations (the themes were handed to her on stage in a sealed envelope) – was interrupted by tuberculosis. On her return to musical life she founded an all-woman orchestra in Berlin with herself as conductor (it folded a few years later because of financial difficulties). She promoted her fellow women composers – she herself had over one hundred works to her credit including stage, orchestral and chamber pieces – and remained active until her death in Munich at the age of 77. Marie was the eldest of a family of ten children born to two German emigrant musicians who moved to Southampton in the 1850s. If her name is unfamiliar today, those of her three musical sisters are not: Alice, Mathilde and Adèle (or Adela), unlike Marie, remained in the UK all their lives and anglicised their name in 1893 to Verne. The least known is Alice (1864-1958) who was taught piano in London by Robert and Clara Schumanns’ daughter, Marie, and became a piano teacher and ‘an innovator of percussion bands for children in the United Kingdom’. She and her husband, William Brendt, contributed to the success of the piano school set up in 1909 in London by her sister, Mathilde (1865-1936).
Matthilde studied with Clara Schumann in Frankfurt and launched a successful dual career as concert pianist and teacher in 1887. She appeared with some of the greatest conductors of the day (Nikisch, Richter, Mannes) as well as in 13 Promenade concerts, but she is probably better known as the teacher of Moura Lympany, Harold Samuels, most importantly of Solomon, and, most prestigiously of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons, the future Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The real international star of the family, and considered by many to be the successor to Teresa Carreño, was their youngest sister Adèle (1877-1958). After making her debut at the Crystal Palace in the Tchaikovsky B flat minor aged 13, she was taken up by Paderewski with whom she studied at his home in Switzerland. Adèle’s career is a succession of premieres: the first British artist to give a solo recital in the Royal Albert Hall; the first Australian performances of Tchaikovsky’s First and Saint-Saëns’ Second concertos; the UK premiere of Franck’s Variations symphoniques; the first woman to play the Brahms B flat in the UK (she also gave the first Proms performance of the concerto). Her son was the pianist John Vallier. Adèle made just two disc recordings, both in 1917, for English Columbia, yet lived until February 1952 (she died while preparing for her Royal Festival Hall debut). Other names from this period whose art is preserved on shellac discs are Amina Goodwin (1867-1942), a pupil of Delaborde, Clara Schumann and Liszt, and founder of the London Trio who recorded Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms trios for the G&T label in 1904. Ethel Hobday (1872-1947) built up a more impressive discography as a chamber player in acoustic recordings of piano trios and quintets, and as accompanist to the great viola player Lionel Tertis in sonatas by Grieg, Franck and Brahms (with whom she was friends). Adelina de Lara (1872-1961), a distinguished Clara Schumann pupil, recorded nothing until she was in her eighties when she recorded a lengthy series of Schumann titles and when, sadly, she was past her best. Well worth hearing are the recordings of the eminent Danish pianist Johanne Amalie Stockmarr (1869-1944). She studied with Niels Gade (Denmark’s most important musician, born as long ago as 1817) and performed the Grieg concerto under the composer’s baton. Her recording of Dohnányi’s Rhapsody in C made in 1942 shows that her technique was still very much intact in her early seventies.
Most others left only minimal or insignificant examples of their art. Zofia Rabcewicz (1870-1947), for example, a Polish pupil of Anton Rubinstein who had a colossal repertoire and long career, recorded just three Chopin pieces for the Polish Syrena label in about 1930 (you can hear her compelling performance of the F major Ballade on YouTube). The sole disc of Cornelia Rider-Possart (1865-1963) was the first recording of Scriabin’s Etude in F# Op.42 /1 made in Berlin in 1926. Mary Hallock Greenwalt (1871-1950), a Leschetizky pupil, also made just one disc (a Chopin nocturne and prelude for American Columbia) in 1919. Sandra Droucker (1876-1944) – German Jewish on her father’s side, Russian nobility on her mother’s – was another Anton Rubinstein pupil, a great talent who made what is possibly the first piano recording by a female pianist – an Arensky étude and a Chopin Prelude captured on a cylinder in February 1898 (Essipoff made one later that year in November). More prolific was Aimé Lachaume (1871-1944) who made 12 Bettini cylinders in New York in 1898 (amongst other works she composed were two musical comedies she produced herself on Broadway). Those women pianists born after the 1870s fall outside the scope of this survey, being better represented on disc. Very often, their considerable and / or complete discographies are available on CD (Ethel Leginska, for instance, Irene Scharrer, Guiomar Novaes and Olga Samaroff). The complete recordings of many born in the decades after 1880, like the short-lived, brilliant Marie Novello and the prolific Australian Una Bourne, have yet to be issued (many of the latter’s myriad discs were reissued on CD in 2023). So too have those of our final pianist, another Australian and the longest-lived female pianist of all: Elsie Hall. She was born in 1876 in Toowoomba, Queensland, and died in her one hundredth year in 1976 – a mere forty years ago. Her patron, Marie Benecke, was Mendelssohn’s daughter, a direct link to the early nineteenth century. Elsie was a child prodigy who was appearing in concerts before 1884 and gave her first major recital two years later playing a movement from Beethoven’s C minor Concerto in Sydney. After studies in Stuttgart, London’s Royal College of Music and Berlin, she made her debut in 1896 with the Berlin Philharmonic in Chopin’s E minor concerto. One early critic described her as ‘the Antipodean phenomenon’ while Bernard Shaw, who heard her early in 1890 in a recital at Steinway Hall, wrote of the ‘twelve-year-old pianist’ [sic] that ‘She played…with all the vigour and enjoyment of her age, and as dexterously as you please, being a hardy, wiry girl, with great readiness and swiftness of execution, and unbounded alacrity of spirit. At the same time, there is not the slightest artistic excuse for exploiting her cleverness at concerts; I hope we may not hear of her again in public until she is of an age at which she may fairly be asked to earn her living for herself.’ Shaw heard a few more times after that, hoping at length that ‘the sooner Miss Elsie takes her undeniable talent and intelligence off to Leschetitzky to be seriously trained, the better.’ She didn’t take the advice but went home to Australia for a few years before returning to London in 1903. Here she resumed her concert career as well as doing a little teaching. Her most notable pupils were the 14-yearold Princess Mary and the future composer and conductor Constant Lambert. In 1913 she married a medical man, Frederick Stohr, whose career took him to South Africa – and that became Elsie Hall’s home for the rest of her life. During the Second World War, she played for the troops in North Africa and Italy. One flight north to Cairo was particularly memorable if only because the pilot’s invoice of cargo simply read: ‘8,000 gallons of brandy and Elsie Hall’. In 1968, Gramophone magazine noted the pianist ‘at 91, passing through London on her way to the United States for a tour’. She published her autobiography, The Good Die Young, in 1969, also the year she appeared on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs full of fun and vitality. An LP of her 90th birthday concert was issued and she continued appearing with the leading South African orchestras until the age of 93. Elsie Hall recorded for Pathé (1910), HMV (early 1920s) and Decca (1930s). A retrospect is overdue. It has been a slow but relentless process, but women, for so long side-lined in the male-dominated world of the concert pianist, are now on an equal footing. The greatest and most celebrated women pianists of today can command fees and audiences every bit the equal of their male counterparts. No longer do we read the kind of views published in the April 1906 issue of Musical America that said men were better able to ‘discipline their strength’, making their movements ‘more precise than women. Thus men make the best pianists’. No longer is the fair sex patronised by reviews such as this from the December 1898 edition of Musical Courier reporting on a performance by Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler: ‘The wonder of the little woman is that she can be both woman and man in the illustration of her art… The marvel of her playing is that she commands so much virtuoso strength with such an abundance of feminine delicacy and subtlety of expression.’ A world with Argerich, Buniatishvili, Yuja Wang and other keyboard lionesses shows by how much the world has moved on since then.
Readers are referred to the five volumes of Women at the Piano issued by Naxos (8.111120 / 121 / 217 / 218 & 219) which includes recordings by Johanne Stockmarr, Elsie Hall and Cornelia Rider-Possart.
