Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn are enjoying increasing recognition today, and rightfully so. But in Germany, it is their generation's contemporary Emilie Mayer who is now regarded as the most important German female composer of the 19th century. This is due to her extensive oeuvre, which primarily comprises orchestral works. Her life path as a consciously unmarried woman also plays a role. Emilie Mayer was so aware of her capabilities that she dared to present herself as the first woman as a 'professional composer'. The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin will finally bring her out of oblivion at the end of October with a series of three concerts in Berlin. A city trip more than worth it.
Emilie Mayer (1812-1883) occupied an exceptional position in the 19th-century musical landscape. As a woman among her male colleagues, but also in relation to her female contemporaries. She remained consciously unmarried to avoid the risk of having to accept a subordinate role as a wife and mother. This allowed her to fully concentrate on her music career. And remarkable for a woman: her extensive oeuvre consisted mainly of orchestral works.
Unlike, for example, Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn, Emilie – pronounced: e-mí-lie-je – Mayer did not grow up in an artistic environment. Her father was a pharmacist, as was one of her brothers. Another brother and her brother-in-law were physicians. Yet she received all the support to develop her musical talent, which had been evident from an early age. Her career, however, only began late. In 1840, exactly 26 years after the death of Emilie's mother, her father took his own life. This was the moment when the then 28-year-old Emilie decided to make a drastic turn in her life.
Independent existence
She realized that in Friedland, her hometown in what is now the northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, she had little future. Her inheritance enabled her to build an independent existence. She moved to Stettin, the present-day Polish city of Szczecin. There she studied with Carl Loewe, a renowned composer, organist, pianist and singer. Although he had doubts about composing women, he was immediately willing to accept Emilie Mayer as his student. With him she immersed herself in the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn. Her first two symphonies were immediately performed in Stettin.
Subsequently, she studied fugue and counterpoint in Berlin with Adolphe Marx, a revolutionary who openly advocated for girls' access to music education. He was also publisher of the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung and music director at the university. Emilie Mayer finally learned orchestration and instrumentation in Berlin from Wilhelm Wieprecht, director of the Prussian military music band. He would premiere several of her works.
Her work was also performed in Munich, Leipzig, Vienna and even Brussels, among other places. Usually she had to organize those concerts herself and cover all costs, such as manually having her unpublished scores copied. In Berlin, however, she was given the Königliche Schauspielhaus free of charge.
Breadcrumbs
She owed this favor to her good connection with the court of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. This friendly relationship resulted from a special hobby: she kneaded Semmelkrumen – breadcrumbs or panko – and with the help of scissors and needles created little artworks. For example, she gave a bowl made this way to Queen Elisabeth of Prussia, who later gave her a gold medal in return. The Grüne Gewölbe collection in Dresden is said to still contain such a bread artwork by the composer.
Unique
Her concerts were consistently enthusiastically announced by Ludwig Rellstab, the renowned critic of the Vossische Zeitung, a newspaper widely read by the political and cultural elite. In 1850, for example, Rellstab wrote the following resounding words: 'Next Sunday morning, the musical world will have something special to offer. A lady, Dem.[oiselle] Emilie Mayer, will perform a number of her compositions in the concert hall of the royal theater (…) Such a concert program, entirely brought to life by a woman, is, at least according to our experience and knowledge, a unique event in world music history.'
The program was certainly impressive: an overture for orchestra, a string quartet, a song for tenor and one for alto, four-part choral works, a choral work, an aria and her third symphony, called Sinfonie militair, performed by the leading orchestra Euterpe conducted by Wieprecht.
The reviews were also praising. The Neue Berliner Musikzeitung was impressed: 'Until now, the hand of a woman has mastered at most the song (…), but a quartet, let alone a symphony with all the required skill for vocal writing and instrumentation – that is very exceptional. What female powers, powers of the second order, are capable of – that Emilie Mayer has achieved and demonstrated.'
Professional composer
She was also very aware of her own abilities. This is evident from the fact that she, perhaps as the first woman in history, presented herself as a 'professional composer'. Toward her publisher Bote & Bock Verlag, she dared to negotiate politely but resolutely about the printing costs she had to pay.
Furthermore, she did not shy away from approaching the greatest composers of her time. She asked Franz Liszt to make a piano arrangement of her string quartet in D minor, which she had dedicated to him. However, Liszt refused because he found it 'impossible' to 'reproduce her indispensable sound and colour on the dry keyboard'. He praised her enviable musical talent.
So many performances, so much praise, but when she was not appreciated at her true value, she experienced that as particularly painful. We learn this from a letter to composer and musicologist Wilhelm Tappert. Her teacher Carl Loewe had asked her for information about her curriculum when he was working on his autobiography. But when Loewe died and another author completed the work, she had to discover that she was not included in it at all. She complained about this to Tappert: 'As you may know, his biography was recently published. At his request, I had to send in some notes about myself while he was still alive, how long I studied with him, how many works I published and actually wrote. Incomprehensibly, Privy Councillor Bitter in Posen, who took over the editing, did not include the passage about me, for what reason I do not know, it has wounded me deeply.'
Or how women were even excluded from history books during their lifetime and consequently were forgotten very quickly.
140 years
It took about 140 years before Emilie Mayer received any attention again. Interest began to grow cautiously in 2012, on the occasion of her 200th birthday. The Neubrandenburger Philharmonie under Stefan Malzew performed her fourth symphony then. In 2019, that orchestra, based in Neubrandenburg, a city 30 km from Friedland, released that symphony on a double CD, together with other fine work such as her delightful piano concerto and a string quartet (in full on YouTube).
Furthermore, in Friedland, at the instigation of a local women's choir, a street was named Emilie-Mayer-Weg and a commemorative plaque was placed in the middle of what is now a large, paved Marktplatz but where Emilie's father's pharmacy was once located. To promote her legacy, an Emilie Mayer Gesellschaft was also established.
German pianist Kyra Steckeweh meanwhile became the first to record Mayer's piano sonata in D minor (CD ). Together with filmmaker Tim van Beveren, she delved into the archives, which resulted in the award-winning documentary Komponistinnen (2018, which also includes portraits of Fanny Mendelssohn, Mel Bonis and Lili Boulanger). Through Tim van Beveren's continued efforts, Emilie Mayer also received a commemorative stone in 2021 at the Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof in Berlin, at the location where according to the city archives she may have been buried – not far, incidentally, from the graves of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn.
Secret diary
Finally, there is also something to read about Emilie Mayer – albeit for the time being only in German. Based on an out-of-print academic study (Almut Runge-Woll, 2003), German journalist Barbara Beuys wrote the worthwhile biography Emilie Mayer: Europas größte Komponistin (2021). However, the source material is limited. It consists mainly of a whole series of announcements and reviews in newspapers and magazines, but little is to be found about Mayer's personal life. First-hand information is provided by only 21 original letters preserved in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. After her death, two more portraits were published, possibly more based on transmitted family anecdotes than on scientifically sound facts.
And yet Emilie Mayer's 'secret diary' recently appeared. A fictional one, of course, written by Gitta Martens, co-founder of the Emilie Mayer Gesellschaft. She deliberately calls the result of all her research a novel, not a biography or non-fiction. For it is impossible to determine how Emilie Mayer actually managed to hold her own in a male world that was not waiting for a composing woman and certainly not for an unmarried woman who made composing her profession. At the same time, that lack of preserved ego-documents gave Gitta Martens as ghostwriter plenty of room to fill in the gaps. Cleverly, she succeeds in Emilie Mayer, Componistin – Sinfonie eines Lebens in making vivid how it could have been. Through Emilie's eyes, you gain a comprehensive view of the living conditions of her time, the social and technological developments, the difficulties and prejudices women faced, how she as a self-aware woman dealt with them, and so on. In short, a novel that will captivate a wide readership and thus deserves a Dutch translation. (Read a review on the blog notities.vrouwaandepiano.be.)
Baroque orchestra
It is clear that with this book and the increasing number of cd recordings, often with Ersteinspielungen, of her chamber music and orchestral works, the attention in her birth country is increasing. On the occasion of the 140th anniversary of the death of Emilie Mayer, the Brandenburger Symphoniker organized an Emilie Mayer Retrospektive in 2023. And at the end of this month there is the Emilie Mayer Festival by the venerable Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin under the direction of Bernard Forck. A unique opportunity to become acquainted with all her orchestral works – at least what has been recovered, because she composed much more. The three concerts of the festival comprise five symphonies, four overtures and the piano concerto with Alexander Melnikov as soloist on the pianoforte.
That an orchestra with a focus on baroque and Viennese classicism would devote itself to a 19th-century composer may seem surprising, but the Akademie has good reasons for it, explained dramaturg and assistant director Linus Bickmann to me.
'Emilie Mayer's earliest work is rooted strongly in Viennese classicism. Furthermore, in recent years we have frequently made excursions into the 19th century, because we also like to look ahead. We use our experience to do justice to the sound image and style of Emilie Mayer. Finally, as a Berlin orchestra, we enjoy engaging with composers who were active here. Emilie Mayer lived in Berlin for a long time, precisely during the period when many of her symphonies and overtures were created.'
Historical performance practice
Characteristic of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin is historical performance practice: they want to approach the original intentions of the composer as much as possible, among other things by playing on historical instruments or copies of them. They also go back to the source material. Therefore, at the festival they only present works whose orchestral score by Emilie Mayer has been preserved. That is why precisely the fourth symphony is not on the program. 'Of it, a version for piano four-hands was printed in Mayer's time, but the transmitted orchestrated version is a reconstruction that is not by her.'
The piano concerto is on the program, although it presumably had no public performance in her time. 'After all, no reviews of it have been found. Moreover, the orchestral score contains no signs of use, while the piano part contains many annotations. In any case, we are preparing a new edition of her posthumous orchestral works.'
Bickmann suspects that this may be the first time the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin performs work by a woman, but the orchestra is determined to put Emilie Mayer on the program more often. The upcoming concerts will also be recorded for cd. Something to look forward to for those who won't make it to Berlin during the autumn holidays.
Faust Overture: the world turned upside down
From Mayer's orchestral work I would like to highlight one composition: the op. 46 (1879), composed when she was already 67. Two years earlier, Emilie Mayer had programmed Wagner's Faust Ouverture alongside the Adagio from her seventh symphony at a concert in Stettin. The Faust theme enjoyed great favor at that time; Schumann, Berlioz and Liszt also tackled it. That Emilie Mayer, as a woman, also did so seemed like a provocation. With none of her five previous overtures had she chosen a subject, and now she chose a decidedly 'masculine' theme. For the Übermensch that Goethe created with this character, with all his creative drive and titanic passions, is of course a man. Yet the composer received praise. The Musikalische Wochenblatt wrote: 'The world is turned upside down! Our young composers express themselves in lyrical outpourings, singing about spring and love, while the women (...) write their musical reflections on powerful and sublime subjects on sixteen-line score paper.'
The work quickly conquered concert halls as far as Prague and Vienna. The publishing house Bote & Bock published a version for piano four-hands, allowing the work to penetrate into living rooms and salons as well. Clever thinking. Furore Verlag, the German publishing house that publishes only works by women, brought out the score again. A tip for the pianists among us!
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• Emilie Mayer Festival by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin on October 24, October 28 and November 1 at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. Info and tickets: https://akamus.de/de/emilie.
• Gitta Martens: Emilie Mayer, Componistin – Sinfonie eines Lebens, Barton Verlag, 2025, 203 p.
• Barbara Beuys: Emilie Mayer: Europas größte Komponistin, Dittrich Verlag, 2021, 220 p.
• This article also appeared on the blog of Vrouw aan de piano.