The effects of German gender essentialism on the musical production of nineteenth-century women composers

This thesis confronts the inequity between the musical achievement of women composers and their male counterparts in an effort to expose the effects of German gender essentialism on the musical production of women active during the nineteenth century and the socio-cultural restrictions that hindered their aesthetic and musical development. The resulting psychological manifestations of gender-related oppression are chronicled through a discussion of the lives, writings and Lieder of the following exceptional women: Bettine von Arnim (1785--1859), Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805--1847), Johanna Kinkel (1810--1858), Josefine Lang (1815--1880) and Clara Wieck Schumann (1819--1896). The correspondence between the literary and musical realms is offered to substantiate the significance of the literarischer Salon in the aesthetic advancement of women and to demonstrate the propagation of the gender-biased perspectives of feminine identity through important literary works, including Johann von Goethe's (1749--1832) Faust: Der Tragodie erster Teil (Tubingen, 1808), Adelbert von Chamisso's (1781--1831) poetic cycle Frauenliebe und Leben (Berlin, 1830) and the encapsulation of the Rhine legend, the Loreleysage, in the poem "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten" (1824) by Heinrich Heine (1797--1856). The thesis concludes with a substantial comparative analysis of the characteristics of the hausmusikalische Lied and the Kunstlied and their relationship to "An Thyrsis" (Vienna, 1781) by Franz Joseph Haydn (1739--1809), to Frauenliebe und Leben , op. 42 (Leipzig, 1840) by Robert Schumann (1810--1856) and to the Loreleysage Lieder of Friedrich Silcher (1789--60), Franz Liszt (1811--1886), Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Johanna Kinkel and Clara Wieck Schumann.