UK Edition
BBC revives works of 'lost' women composers to help redress 'historic imbalance'
One is best-known only as Stravinsky’s piano teacher. Others barely known at all.
From this year, the names of five female composers whose work has been all-but lost to history are set to become household names in Britain for the first time.
The BBC has announced the names of five “forgotten” women whose work they will now record and broadcast: Leokadiya Kashperova, Marianna Martines, Florence Price, Augusta Holmès, and Johanna Müller-Hermann.
In some cases, their pieces will be heard for the first time in a century; others will be played in public for the first time ever.
Alan Davey, controller of BBC Radio 3 and classical music, said it was “incredibly exciting” to “shine a light” on the composers, explaining: “It means that we are not only expanding the canon of classical music, but also actually helping to redress its historic imbalance when it comes to gender and diversity.”
The five women, who include a Viennese prodigy, the first woman to have an opera premiered in Paris, and an African-american composer who played with Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s, were identified as part of a project to seek out previously lost, forgotten or little known female composers, and make their work available to perform.
A selection of their pieces have been recorded by the BBC orchestras and choirs, to be played first on Radio 3 on March 8, International Women’s Day.
Davey said: “It’s incredibly exciting to think that, in many cases, this is the first time these works will have been heard in 100 years. Or even the first time they will ever have been performed.
“It means that we are not only expanding the canon of classical music, but also actually helping to redress its historic imbalance when it comes to gender and diversity.”
Davey announced the project at the Association of British Orchestra Conference in Cardiff on Friday, along with a host of other classical music programmes for the BBC.
One, the Young Musician Prom, will see around 20 of the winners and finalists from the last 40 years of the BBC’s Young Musician competition perform on stage in collaboration, in celebration of the competition’s anniversary.
The extraordinary prom could see a roll-call of talent who made their name in Young Musician, including Nicola Benedetti, Alison Balsom, Martin James-Bartlett, Stephen Hough and young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason.
Radio 3 also launched a year-long season of programmes across the station in partnership with BBC Four looking back at classical music across the past century.
Our Classical Century will feature four series on BBC Four focusing on a specific period and highlighting important classical moments while Radio 3 will identify 100 of the most significant events and music over the past century.
Davey also used his speech to urge the British classical music world to do more to boast of its successes.
“Too often it’s seen as something out of reach, something you need to be qualified to have an opinion on, that requires some kind of initiation above and beyond simple pleasure,” he said.
“The result, I believe, is that we are too diffident, too apologetic in this country about what a powerhouse we are.
“We’re comfortable celebrating our excellence in other areas of culture – even other genres of music – but less so with classical… We get self-conscious, wary of somehow sounding pompous or affected.
“We should never be afraid to shout about what we have to offer.
“But, in doing so, we must always send out a strong message that classical music is for everyone, and that there are no barriers to experiencing or enjoying it.”
THE WOMEN
Leokadiya Kashperova, who lived from 1872 to 1940, is described as a Russian pedagogue and pianist who wrote Romantic songs and instrumental music, performing twice at London’s Aeolian Hall in 1907 to “very good” reviews. The BBC said her role as a composer is “almost completely unknown today, and she is recognised primarily as Stravinsky’s piano teacher”.
Marianna Martines, born in 1744 into a noble Neapolitan family in Vienna, was a keyboard virtuoso, who enjoyed fame throughout Europe in her lifetime thanks to her musical salons reported to include performances from Mozart.
Florence Price, who lived from 1887 to 1953, was an award-winning symphonist from an affluent African-American family who had her first music published when she was 11. She defied the restrictions of her age to achieve a double first at the New England Conservatoire of Music, twice won the Holstein Prize, but was denied a place in the Music Teachers’ Association because of her skin colour.
Augusta Holmès, a mother-of-five who lived 1847 to 1903, composed large-scale orchestral and choral works, performing at the 1889 Universal Exhibition and in 1895 becoming the first woman to premiere an opera in Paris. The first recordings of Holmès’s music were made in 1994, but much of her catalogue remains undiscovered, the BBC said.
Johanna Müller-Hermann, an Austrian who lived 1868 to 1941, was known for orchestral music, chamber music and songs, and taught theory and composition at the New Vienna Conservatory. There are only a handful of recordings of her work, largely due to the closure of the New Vienna Conservatory by the Nazis after 1938.