Composers and their works have traditionally been the focus of music historiography. This focus can be traced to the birth of music history as a discipline in the nineteenth century when the Romantic concept of genius played a decisive role in establishing not only which composers were deemed worthy of study but how their output should be approached and performed. The notion that the essential nature of music is captured in fixed and immutable texts to be reproduced in performance as faithfully as possible and exegetically analyzed to reveal the unique brilliance of their composers is a highly Romantic one. It informed much musicological scholarship until the late twentieth century when new paradigms emphasizing the social, cultural, ephemeral, and performative aspects of music as a practice emerged. Musicologists studying the late eighteenth century have embraced these new trends while often still positioning professional composers—the vast majority of whom were male—as music's main actors. In many studies, investigations of contexts of creation, performance, and reception ultimately serve to further the understanding of composers and their output, with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven still the most frequent subjects. Rebecca Cypess's brilliant exploration of “musical salons between roughly 1760 and 1800 as sites of female cultural agency” (26) is thus an extremely welcome and much needed examination of long neglected venues and participants fundamental to shaping Enlightenment musical culture.
As Cypess acknowledges, salonnières have been the subject of several scholarly studies, but her monograph is the first book length investigation of musical salons specifically, which she defines as ones “in which the hostess displayed a strong interest in music and in which music figured prominently in the proceedings” (5). “In most cases,” the salonnière was “highly involved in ‘musicking’ herself” (25). The concept of musicking—“encourag[ing] engagement with music not as object, but as act” (14; the emphasis is original)—first expounded by Christopher Small (Small, 1998) is central to Cypess's approach. For Cypess, this means “considering salon experiences as an entity—including both musical performance and the discussions and other activities that surrounded them—to understand their role in the formation of the musical cultures, practices, and aesthetics of the Enlightenment. This requires engagement not only with notated repertoire, but also with instruments, instrumental sounds and timbres, performance practices, systems of patronage, modes of listening, patterns of discourse, ideas of play, and the other sensual and intellectual experiences that surrounded music making in eighteenth-century salons” (14).
Throughout this passage and numerous others in the book, Cypess underscores collaboration and sociability as defining aspects of salon musicking. Salons enabled privileged women to exert cultural agency because they were liminal spaces, neither fully public nor fully private. As domestic spaces, salons preserved their hostess's modesty, but the networks of collaborators—friends, correspondents, performers, composers, writers; men and women; amateurs and professionals—that salonnières cultivated in these spaces allowed them to influence Enlightenment musical culture far beyond the domestic realm. As Cypess explores, musical salons both reflected and fostered important changes in the wider musical culture of the late eighteenth century: “the rise of new genres and styles of composition, the idea of musical education as an enlightening and educative force, the practice of music criticism and the cultivation of ‘taste,’ and the rise of music historicism” (6). Salon sociability and the networks of collaborators it engendered were integral to such developments, which “problematiz[e] the equation of musical authorship with musical composition” (38) and with the efforts of a single individual. As Cypess demonstrates, multiple authorship was far more common in the eighteenth century than has previously been recognized, not least because “the musical salon constituted a space in which the boundaries separating composer, performer, and listener easily blurred or broke down. The collaboration of professionals and amateurs enacted and enabled by the salonnières means that multiple people might be responsible for the creation of a composition. The collection of musical scores, undertaken by many salonnières, may also be understood as an act of authorship, in that it has the potential to endow music with new meaning. The same is true of performance” (38–9).
Cypess's case studies of specific musical salonnières throughout Europe and into North America—Anne-Louise Boyvin d'Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy in Paris, Marianna Martines in Vienna, Sara Levy in Berlin, Angelica Kauffman in Rome, and Elizabeth Graeme in Philadelphia—flesh out these points and form the heart of the book. Because of its attention to Vienna, chapter four may be of particular interest to readers of this journal. This chapter underscores how Cypess's approach differs from that of previous scholars who have written about some of the same figures. In reference to a study by musicologists Irving Godt and John A. Rice, Cypess comments that “when scholars of eighteenth-century musical practice and culture have discussed salons in any depth, such discussions have most often considered the role of salons in cultivating the careers of the professional composers who attended them, most of whom were men. . . . Thus Marianna Martines is referred to as a ‘woman composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn,’ rather than a salonnière at the center of an elite musical institution in (her own) Vienna” (10). Cypess posits that Marianna Martines's salon was central to her “deliberate strategies in cultivating a socially sanctioned musical persona” (170); her image, in turn, was critical to her upward social mobility and that of her family, who were not of aristocratic birth. Martines's salon functioned as a socially acceptable site in which she could showcase her abilities in performance and composition as well as her relationship with the celebrated Metastasio, the imperial court poet and famous librettist who resided with the Martines family. Through Metastasio, Martines gained access to an important network of professional musicians and aristocrats, but the relationship was hardly one-sided; as Cypess notes, “they each possessed talent and learning that complemented that of the other” (176). When Martines set Metastasio's naturalistic texts with great skill and performed them with equal virtuosity in her salon, the reciprocity of their collaboration was on full display without exceeding the bounds of female respectability.
Cypess's own virtuosity as a musician and scholar is itself amply displayed in this elegantly written and insightful study. Her interpretations are meticulous and rely on detailed study of a wealth of primary sources as well as her own experiences as a very accomplished keyboardist. The website accompanying the book includes supplementary music examples, as well as color reproductions of the images and recordings of the music discussed in the text. These are performed by the author together with several other musicians and wonderfully enact the culture of collaborative music making that is the subject of this outstanding monograph.
