Fanny lends Clara a helping hand

The discovery that the rather mediocre Easter Sonata, wrongly attributed to Felix Mendelssohn, is actually by his sister Fanny has poked the feminist hornet’s nest yet again.

Out flew the old insects ably led by the BBC, flapping their wings and buzzing the usual politicised inanities about the gross injustices suffered by women composers throughout the ages. The implication is that swarms of female geniuses have only been held back by flagrant discrimination.

Until now Clara Schumann has been the biggest inscription on the banners of musical feminism. It has been suggested, or sometimes actually said outright, that poor Clara had her composing genius suppressed by a regiment of Teutonic MCPs led by her husband Robert. But for such sharp practices, the world would realise she was at least her husband’s equal.

There was a brouhaha about this in 2015, when it was discovered that the A-level music syllabus covered 63 composers, all of them despicably male. Clara’s name was held up as the greatest omission.

Now Mrs Schumann herself, one of the best pianists of her time, didn’t consider her compositions to be significant. They were mostly little nothings she knocked off for her own recitals, as was a common practice then. Essentially Clara wasn’t even a minor composer – she wasn’t a composer at all.

And yes, perhaps in the nineteenth century there existed some prejudice against professional women, although that didn’t diminish Mrs Schumann’s success in something she really was good at, performance. Yet, at a wild guess, women’s rights were even a smaller priority in the twelfth century, when the sublime composer Hildegard von Bingen plied her art unimpeded.

Hildegard’s works survive to this day not because she was a woman composer, but because she was a great composer. Which Clara wasn’t, and neither was Fanny, as her hundreds of known works demonstrate vividly to anyone whose ears aren’t blocked by ideological plugs.

This category demonstrably doesn’t include the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who have embarked on a widely publicised search for ‘lost’ female composers.

They have their work cut out, for, according to the BBC, there are at least 6,000 of those lost sheep, waiting to be found for the delectation of music lovers who’ve had their fill of MCPs like Bach and Beethoven. The suggested number is nothing short of staggering. Let me spell it out for you: SIX THOUSAND.

Now, at the risk of sounding immodest, I know music rather well. My wife, a concert pianist, knows it much better. This morning we put the 6,000 number to the test by compiling our own list of male composers, ranging from sub-minor to minor to major to super-major.

Admittedly, we only spent half an hour on this exercise and, had we spent the whole day and used some reference literature, we could probably have done better. As it was, we barely got to a hundred, scraping the bottom of the barrel, where some 18th century Russian liturgical composers reside next to the lesser known Dutch and English polyphonists of the Elizabethan era (or whatever it was called in Holland).

Now it’s fair to assume that – due to discrimination only! – male composers must have outnumbered female ones at least 100 to one throughout history. Hence, accepting on faith the 6,000 figure put forth by the BBC, there must be more than 600,000 shamefully masculine composers languishing in the dark dungeons of history, waiting to come out and see the blinding light of fame.

I hope you realise that we’re no longer talking just about ignorance, stupidity and tastelessness. The toxic ideology of feminism has poisoned the brains of our culture vultures, rendering them certifiably mad.

Edwina Wolstencroft, BBC Radio 3’s editor, confirmed this clinical diagnosis when announcing plans to broadcast works by female composers, emphatically including Fanny Mendelssohn. I hope, said Miss Wolstencroft that “the live broadcast contributes towards Fanny’s recognition as a musical genius.”

Right. Fanny is ‘a musical genius’. So what term shall we use to describe those MCPs Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert? Since the verbal scale of human artistic attainment doesn’t really go higher than genius, we can only assume one of three things.

Either those gentlemen were demigods, sitting at the right hand of Apollo atop the musical Olympus, or Miss Wolstencroft et al. genuinely believe that Fanny is every bit their equal, or this lot care not about music but ideology expressed through music.

Dismissing the first assumption as sheer paganism, we have to accept some combination of the second and third ones as the likely cause.

Then we realise what a subversive role the BBC and likeminded institutions play in our culture, of which music is the salient representation. They are the enemy within, cancerous cells gradually eating away at everything that’s healthy and genuine.

As such, they cause even a greater harm than pop excretions. At least no one seriously considers those as the acme of the human spirit. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Miss Wolstencroft does.

5 thoughts on “Fanny lends Clara a helping hand”

  1. A similar uproar was heard at Art’s uni’s in the 1980’s. Misogynist’s had seemingly ousted women painters from previous era’s. I’m not sure that Mary Cassatt discussed such things with Berthe Morisot at the Impressionists exhibitions.

  2. From the folks who brought us the concept of ‘no platforming’ (a bit like waterboarding) we get unsubstantiated complaints about ‘no platforming’ in the past.

  3. Sorry to interrupt the flow of invective here, but I think all I said was that Fanny had a great talent and a great creative urge, which Felix, no doubt with the best intentions, went to some effort to suppress. I did not, nor would not, enter into a stupid argument about their relative merits. It’s not possible to know what a woman unhemmed in by either the conventions of the day, the demands of domestic life or her own learned insecurities might not have achieved.
    I would only add that both Hildegard of Bingen and the women of Ferrara, currently composers of the week, lived in convents where no such conventions about the ‘role of women’ prevailed. Have a lovely day, if you can.

    1. This from the Rev. Dr Peter Mullen:

      I love your reply. As if Bach was not restricted by all those children running between his legs while he was trying to compose his weekly cantata for St Thomas’. As if monasteries and nunneries were not places of work, and drudgery. As if there had not been countless deprived and harassed men down the ages who yet overcame their hardships and produced great works of art. That silly woman who rose to your bait is not in the business of criticism or rational argument or historical reality: she is in the service of an ideology and, of course, advertising. You can tell her that from me, if you like. And I’m having a lovely day, thanks!

  4. Thank you for informing me that Hildegard was a nun – learn something every day. There I was, thinking she taught composition at the Royal Academy, moonlighting occasionally at Radio 3. Hildegard must have taken the orders to escape male domination, an option that was also available to Fanny but one she chose to ignore, preferring instead to suffer stoically. Actually the article in contention unleashed my ‘flow of invective’ by quoting, uncritically, Edwina Wolstencroft’s hope that “the live broadcast contributes towards Fanny’s recognition as a musical genius.” That, to me, suggested parity between her and other geniuses, such as her brother. How silly of me, I do apologise. But do note that, in spite of ‘the conventions of the day’, Clara Schumann managed to compete as a pianist with the likes of Liszt. In the absence of such conventions, she would have doubtless outshone not only her brother but, well, Bach? Beethoven? One can only guess. I was also quite impressed by the the BBC’s lament that 6,000 female composers are languishing in oblivion. Had they said 6 or even 60, I wouldn’t have replied with such unprovoked venom. But 6,000 took us out of the domain of musicology and straight into one of psychiatry. And thank you for your wishes of a good day. I haven’t been having one until now, but your comments brought a broad smile on my face. I love to see certain people squirm.

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