Old Man With Violin and Old Woman Victorian Art
Madame Norman-Neruda and a curt history of women violinists, Part I
The essay is in three parts. Hither'south the outset.
Click here for Part Ii
Click here for Office Iii
Anyone remotely acquainted with me knows that I have an obsessive nature. I have a bully love for the Victorian era, the history of women (especially women artists and writers and musicians), and of course the violin. I combined those 3 passions together when writing this essay nigh Wilma Norman-Neruda, one of the first great women violin virtuosos. I'd known about her for a long fourth dimension - ever since reading A Study in Scarlet ten years ago - just I had never dug around for biographical information on her before. Later on reading Laurie Niles's contempo inspiring interview with Rachel Barton Pine nigh Maud Powell, another early woman violinist, I decided the fourth dimension was right to do a niggling research on Madame Norman-Neruda, Maud's trailblazing forerunner. Shockingly, every bit all-time as I tin define, this is the longest biography of her on the Cyberspace, although she was the start great adult female violinist. As this is just an essay I wrote mainly for my own enjoyment and edification, and considering I've never had any training in writing scholarly works, information technology is not sourced, but I thought information technology was worth sharing all the same. If yous have any information on Wilma I would honey to hear information technology. Here'due south to hoping more people will go familiar with Wilma's name and work in the time to come.
Hither'south a lilliputian quiz for those of you who consider yourself somewhat knowledgeable about the history of violin-playing.
Have you ever heard of Ysaye? Joachim? Tartini? Sarasate? Kreisler? Of course.
But how about Sacchi? Norman-Neruda? Urso? Hall? Parlow? Jackson? Soldat? Tua? Saenger-Sethe? (Fortunately, thanks to Laurie Niles'south recent interview with Rachel Barton Pine, readers of this site are familiar with Powell.)
The first list contains the names of men; the second, of women. Due to a sorry twist of fate, the manifold accomplishments of female person violin virtuosos from the belatedly nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have largely slipped from our collective consciousness. In an era when an ever-increasing percentage of our great violinists are women, it is worth taking a footstep back and recognizing that only a few generations ago, violin-playing was considered to be non but unladylike, simply indecent. This review of a concert by violinist Elise Mayer Filipowicz, dating from 1834, is a typical i: although her playing "[gave] our ears smashing pleasance,…our eyes told us that the instrument is not 1 for ladies to endeavour." Louis Spohr, according to Paula Gillett in her book Musical Women in England, 1870-1914, believed that women were guilty "of mishandling the violin and lowering functioning standards." A woman named Blanche Lindsay wrote in 1880 that she had "known girls of whom information technology was darkly hinted that they played the violin, as information technology might be said that they smoked big cigars, or enjoyed the sport of rat-catching."
Why did women violinists excite such an acute antipathy? Historians are still scratching their heads over the question. As with then many other deeply entrenched societal attitudes, it seems that there was not 1 simple caption, simply rather a serial of interrelating ones. First and foremost, the violin did not have a particularly wholesome reputation in the early role of the nineteenth century. Although the violin has been associated with Satan for hundreds of years (a belief that offset gained traction when portable stringed instruments were played during dances, gatherings which the Cosmic Church looked down upon), the connexion was solidified in the popular imagination by the performances of Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840), a violinist who looked so macabre and played so brilliantly he was widely assumed to be in league with the devil. Paradoxically, women in the Victorian era were considered to exist both spiritually weaker and purer than men, and while information technology was believed that they needed to be protected from spiritually corrosive forces, they were as well expected to set a spiritual and moral example to society as a whole. Playing an instrument so long and then closely associated with the devil was deemed to exist incompatible with such a lofty goal.
Other more than insidious reasons came into play. In the gender-obsessed Victorian era, men and women akin were all too enlightened of the aesthetic similarities between a violin and a woman's torso. As if to underscore these similarities, violins and homo beings even share many of the names of their parts (the belly, the ribs, the cervix, etc.). Non to mention that the range of the violin is almost identical to that of a soprano - a uniquely womanly range. About people believed that such an apparently feminine instrument required a masculine player - a "master" - to play and dominate it, as they felt that women needed to be "played" and dominated by men. A woman playing the violin was faintly suggestive of lesbianism or self-love. Even Yehudi Menuhin, born in 1916, long after the Victorian era had come to a close, subscribed to a form of this view, writing:
I have ofttimes wondered whether psychologically there is a basic deviation between the woman's relationship to the violin and the man'southward… Does the woman violinist consider the violin more as her ain voice than the vocalism of one she loves? Is there an element of narcissism in the woman'southward relation to the violin, and is she, in fact, in a curious way, ameliorate matched for the cello? The handling and playing of a violin is a process of caress and evocation, of drawing out a sound which awaits the hands of the master.
Equally if these reasons were not vague or bizarre plenty, Victorian reviewers often even objected to the mode that women looked when playing the violin. For some reason the standing, the clamping down of the chin, and quick energetic bowing in presto passages were all deemed to be aesthetically unpleasing and inherently unfeminine acts. Ladies were encouraged to stick to instruments society felt were more passive and domestic, such as the pianoforte or the harp.
Whatever its precise causes, prejudice against female person violinists was rampant throughout Europe until the mid-Victorian era. Despite this, a few infrequent female players withal made their way into the music history books. Mozart wrote his b-flat minor violin sonata, Thousand. 454, at the request of a female violinist named Regina Sacchi, about whom he alleged, "No human can play with more than feeling." Viotti taught at least two women, i of whom tutored Empress Josephine'south son. Paganini is reputed to have given lessons to a talented youngster from his hometown of Genoa, Italy, named Caterina Calgano. The "sisters Milanollo" - two sisters named Teresa (1827-1904) and Maria (1832-1848) - were prodigies who played the violin together all over Europe in the 1840s. When Maria died at the age of sixteen, the grief-stricken Teresa continued her career every bit a solo violinist. Still, despite these and other contributions by female string players, it was generally considered foreign for a woman to play the violin, and there were no women virtuosos to speak of who could stand in comparison with the all-time of men.
Into this prejudiced musical climate, a little girl named Wilhelmine Maria Franziska Neruda was born in Brno, now in the Czech Republic, sometime between 1838 and 1840 (equally with many prodigies, there are conflicting reports over the year of her birth). Music surrounded little Wilma from the beginning; her father Josef was the organist at the Brno cathedral, and her ancestors had a local reputation of existence exceptionally musical. At least five of her siblings showed extraordinary musical promise from a very early on age: all were prodigies, and all went on to become professional person musicians - Olga and Amalie on the piano, Viktor and Franz on the cello, and Marie on the violin.
Shortly before her fourth birthday, Wilma began to show an interest in the violin. Her father, alarmed at her preference for such an unfeminine instrument, directed her to the piano instead. But, as i 1899 commodity in a Toronto newspaper delicately put it, "She had a most cordial dislike for the pianoforte, regarding it as an instrument of limitations." Josef had been teaching one of his sons to play the violin, and one day Wilma got a hold of it. She began playing in hole-and-corner, resolving that if nobody was going to teach her how to play, she would simply do it herself. When she was discovered, instead of disciplining her, Josef relented and began to give his persistent daughter lessons. Much to his astonishment, she defenseless on more speedily than her brother. Past the time she was six, Josef sent Wilma to Vienna, where she studied nether Leopold Jansa, a famous Maverick violinist. Wilma Neruda proved to be one of his two virtually famous pupils; the other was the violinist and composer Karl Goldmark.
In 1846 Wilma Neruda fabricated her public debut in Vienna, accompanied by her pianist sis Amalie. Shortly afterward their father took them on a concert tour across Europe, along with their cellist blood brother Viktor. Wilma quickly emerged as the star. In April of 1849 the family gave their London debut. Wilma playing Vieuxtemps'due south Arpeggio and Ernst'due south Carnival of Venice variations, with Amalie and Viktor accompanying. (Little did she know that when she grew upwards she would play Ernst's Stradivari.) Their two concerts were so successful that the family was re-engaged for sixteen more. At these after concerts she played a de Beriot concerto and Vieuxtemps's Yankee Doodle Variations, likewise as a limerick entitled "God Save the Queen" - every bit composed past herself! The critics raved over her intonation and bowing; her up and down bow staccato were said to be some of the cleanest the London critics had heard.
In June of that twelvemonth she gave even so another concert in England, playing some other de Beriot concerto. A Mr. Chorley, from the Archives mag, wrote in a lukewarm review:
Mdlle. Wilhlemine Neruda - whom we may name since in that location is modest adventure of our remarks reaching her painfully - has been capitally trained - and may, in time, emulate those more distinguished girl-violinists, the sisters Milanollo; but kittenish curiosity and indulgent applause - were they not destructive to their victim - are not the emotions to excite which the Philharmonic Concerts were founded.
Although Chorley ostensibly claimed to object to Wilma's appearance because she was a flashy prodigy equally opposed to than a full-fledged performing artist, he was really concealing the fact that he was ane of the many people who were hostile to the idea of women performers. A few decades after, after Wilma had established a commanding international career, and other women were following adjust, he famously complained in the press that "The fair sex are encroaching on all men'due south privileges." Thankfully, every bit Wilma grew upwards, such views slowly but surely became more and more unfashionable. Wilma Neruda - forth with the Milanollo sisters and another female violinist named Camilla Urso (1842-1902) - were gradually helping to reshape ideas about the ceremoniousness of the violin for ladies. Although audiences were skeptical at the idea at commencement, the more than they saw women violinists perform, the less threatening they became. It seemed to them that women who had devoted their lives to the violin were not whatever less feminine than those who hadn't. It was an uphill struggle, only the boxing against prejudice had begun.
In 1852 Wilma and her family arrived in Moscow to give a series of concerts. For one of them, she played in the same concert with the seventeen-year-one-time prodigy Henryk Wieniawski. After Wilma'due south performance, Henri Vieuxtemps came onstage to present her with a bouquet of flowers while the enthusiastic audience gave her a standing ovation. Wieniawski became jealous of Wilma'southward nifty triumph and elbowed his way back onstage, loudly insisting that he was the better violinist and offer to prove it. Outraged audience members clambered upwards onto the stage to quiet him, but this merely angered him more than. When a Russian general came to reason with him, Wieniawski prodded him with his bow and ordered him to be serenity. Harassing a member of the military machine in such a style was no pocket-sized criminal offence in Regal Russia, and Wieniawski was ordered to leave Moscow within twenty-iv hours. His punishment could easily take been much worse. It is foreign to think that Wieniawski may have been injured or killed, and his subsequent contributions to violin music lost, over such a piffling scuffle. Despite the insult Wieniawski had paid her, Wilma played his compositions throughout her life. One wonders if every fourth dimension she pulled out the canvass music she remembered the mayhem she had set off in Moscow.
Check out parts two of three, discussing Wilma's marriage and groundbreaking professional achievements from the 1870s and 1880s.
You might also like:
- Madame Norman-Neruda and a short history of women violinists, Part II
- Madame Norman-Neruda and a short history of women violinists, Role Three
- Rachel Barton Pino's Maud Powell Favorites
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Source: https://www.violinist.com/blog/Mle/20106/11325/
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