|
"Beyond Beethoven" is an exhibit of seven biographical banners featuring women and people of color in Western music. This exhibit looks beyond Beethoven and other composers, to explore the lives and works of people who have been historically underrepresented in classical music. This intimate collection of artists includes a Prussian Princess, a medieval saint, a dashing swordsman-composer of revolutionary France, and others, whose fascinating stories are not known to the casual listener of classical music. Scroll down for a virtual tour of the exhibit.
|
Princess Anna Amalia, Abbess of Quedlingburg
(1723-1787)
Antoine Pesne, Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, before 1757. Oil on canvas.
Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin, Brandenburg
|
Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia was a musician, scholar, and composer born in Berlin in 1723. She was the youngest sister of the future king Frederick the Great. Under her brother’s encouragement, she studied music and became an accomplished harpsichordist and organist in addition to playing the lute, flute, and violin. In 1758, she began studying music composition under the tutelage of Johann Philip Kirnberger, a pupil of Johann Sebastian Bach. Among her musical compositions, are a number of military marches, a style of music that was rarely adopted by women composers in the 18th century. In 1755, Amalia became the abbess of the secularized convent of Quedlinburg. Her wealth and status as a member of the Prussian royal family allowed her the opportunity to curate and amass one of the most important collections of music in the world. Housed today in the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin, it includes scores by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, among others.
|
Hildegard von bingen
(1098-1179)
W. Marshall, Hildegard von Bingen. Engraving.
The Wellcome Collection
|
One of the most fascinating composers in the history of Western music, Hildegard von Bingen was a Benedictine Abbess of the Middle Ages. Also known as Saint Hildegard, she was born in Germany around the year 1098. A composer of sacred music, she was also a writer, philosopher, and Christian mystic who began having visions at the age of three. It is uncertain what year she entered the Benedictine order, but she would go on to become one of the most influential women of her era. In addition to 69 known musical compositions, she also authored what many musicologists consider the earliest form of European opera. The Ordo Virtutum is a morality play that includes 82 songs sung in Latin. It remains the oldest known musical drama not associated with liturgical texts. In recent decades, Hildegard’s life and work have seen much renewed interest. Her philosophies, medical theories, and musical works continue to inspire and intrigue 21st-century audiences.
|
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
(1875-1912)
Unknown artist, photo restored by Adam Cuerden, Portrait of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, ca. 1905. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
|
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer and conductor who was born in the London borough of Holborn in 1875. His mother was English and his father, who was born in Sierra Leone, was descended from African-Americans who had left America to escape slavery at the end of the Revolutionary War. Named after the famous poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge-Taylor learned to play the violin at a young age and, at 15, entered the Royal Academy of Music, where he would study music composition. A celebrated composer of his day, he frequently wove American and African themes into his works, ever aware of his ancestry and eager to explore it through his music. In 1904, on his first tour of the United States, Coleridge-Taylor was invited to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt, a singular and rare honor for a person of color at that time. The American educator Booker T. Washington described him as “the foremost musician of his race.”
|
Madame SissieRetta Jones
(1868-1933)
Sissieretta Jones, cabinet photo, date unknown. Encyclopaedia Britannica
|
Madame Matilda Sissieretta Jones is considered one of the greatest American sopranos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1868, just five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, she made her singing debut in New York City in 1888. Little is known of her early life, but she studied for a time at the Providence School of Music and likely at the New England Conservatory of Music. She performed around the world from America to the West Indies for presidents and royalty. The first Black woman to headline at Carnegie Hall, she would go on to sing at Madison Square Garden and for President Benjamin Harrison at the White House in 1892. Madame Jones sang for mostly white audiences in the segregated United States and yet conquered the concert hall circuit at a time when it was closed to Black patrons and performers. Despite being lauded by critics and receiving awards and honors around the world, Madame Jones was frequently the target of discrimination in the United States. It would not be until 2018 that the New York Times would publish an obituary for her.
|
Ignatius Sancho
(ca. 1729-1780)
Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Ignatius Sancho, 1768. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
|
Ignatius Sancho was a celebrated man of letters, an abolitionist, merchant, writer, and composer of the era known today as the Enlightenment. Born in Africa around 1729, he grew up an orphan. In the early 1730s, he was taken to London where he was forced to live as a slave to three sisters. It was there, however, that the young Sancho met the Duke of Montagu, who encouraged his education. Following the duke’s death in 1749, Sancho fled to the Duchess of Montagu, in whose household he would work as a butler for the next 20 years. While there, Sancho took full advantage of the family’s extensive library, becoming an avid reader and broadening his self-education. Through the wide array of well-connected and intellectual visitors to Montagu House, Sancho formed a network of notable friendships and correspondents. An active composer of music, he published four collections of compositions and a treatise entitled A Theory of Music.
|
Clara Schumann
(1819-1896)
Franz Hanfstaengl, Clara Schumann, 1857. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
|
Her career spanned six decades, and in a time when the world of classical music was dominated by men, Clara Schumann commanded the classical stage circuit in Europe. Born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1819, she was a child prodigy making her public debut at the age of 9. She began composing music at 11, and by 19, she was touring Europe to much acclaim. In 1840, Clara married the composer and pianist, Robert Schumann. In the fog of history, Clara’s career has been often overshadowed by her husband’s, despite having achieved much fame during her own lifetime. Not only was she one of the first pianists to play from memory, a practice which has now become standard in the repertoire, but she also reshaped the piano recital as an art form, emphasizing moving performances over virtuoso style. She was a friend and collaborator of the influential composer Johannes Brahms, and was one of the most influential pianists of the Romantic Era.
|
Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges
(1745-1799)
M Brown, Portrait of Monsieur de St. George, 1788. Engraving by W. Ward.
|
Born in Guadalupe, West Indies, in 1745, Joseph Bologne, le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was the son of a French plantation owner and an African slave. Bologne would go on to become a master swordsman and champion fencer, a virtuoso violinist, famed composer, and the conductor of Paris’s leading symphony orchestra. In 1779, after a visit to Paris, John Adams, who would later become the second president of the United States, called him “the most accomplished man in Europe.” Educated in France, he would eventually serve in the Legion de Saint-Georges, the first all-Black military regiment in Europe, fighting on the side of the Republic. Of the six operas composed by Bologne, only one survives, The Anonymous Lover. The complete manuscript of the work can be found today in the National Library in Paris.
|
