How Women Composers Were CUT from Music History

It's a matter of choice whether to include women composers or cut them.

Dear Clara fans,

I have been writing and writing, researching and writing—singing concerts with my Philadelphia Symphonic Choir, teaching voice lessons—then researching and writing some more. But I need a day off from writing so I thought I’d send you a little update, and a note on what is the hardest part of my job—deciding what to cut.

The amount of information on Clara Schumann—the extraordinary things she did and experienced—could fill many books. To write a book that’s read by an optimal number of people means to essentially write a book of Clara highlights.

There’s a phrase writers use when cutting things we love: “Kill your darlings.” I’m having to do lots of that. Though with Clara, some of the cuts feel more like cutting off a limb. The only way to survive it is knowing it will all go in newsletters and blog posts and YouTube videos eventually. I’m saving all of it for you later!

This is something every writer of history must do—decide who makes the cut. Choosing which people and events end up on the editing room floor and which ones make it onto the page is a hard job—and an enormous responsibility.

Not matter how much a writer may seek to deliver their information objectively, their point-of-view shows in the basic decision making of WHAT and WHO gets included.

And it’s becoming increasingly clear to me, as I research more music history, women composers were edited out.

Women composers in Clara Schumann’s world

I thought it would take some effort to include a woman composer in every chapter of the biography. But it is no extra work at all. None. It’s easy.

It just a matter of INCLUSION rather than EXCLUSION.

Women composers were everywhere, in every city that Clara toured to—her contemporaries and those of the previous generation still commanding respect. There were lots of them. Here’s a sampling:

Maria Szymanowska was MAJOR, a VERY big deal. Her influence on every pianist who came after her is immeasurable. Clara Wieck road her coattails—as did Franz Liszt. They all did. Sadly, Clara and Szmanowska never met, but Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father, heard Symanowska play and respected her a great deal. (The fact that he never gave young Clara any of Szmanowska’s compositions to play fills me with such rage.)

Ninette de Belleville, Leopoldine Blahetka, and Marie Pleyel were very famous composer pianists touring during the 1830s. They were all older than Clara but she was compared with them constantly as she began her early career. All very important and relevant.

Non-touring composers were also prevalent. Clara met Louise Farrenc in Paris in 1832. Bettina von Arnim in Berlin and Catharina Cibbini-Kozeluch (known as “Cibbini” but published under Kozeluch) in Vienna, both were of the previous generation, friends of Ludwig etc, but still influential. Clara met them, played for them, and spoke with each of them on numerous occasions.

Pauline Garcia-Viardot and Clara Wieck were of a similar age. They met and composed together as teenagers in 1838-1839—a very magical and important experience for young Clara. Fanny Hensel was around, of course, though she and Clara sadly did not meet until the year Fanny died.

There are more. That’s just a taste.

[Note: Please resist the temptation to blame Clara for not performing their works or promoting them. I’m not giving away my research but it wasn’t her fault, damn it. It was so many men around her and the climate they created. Clara was trapped in an oppressive system of misogyny, and it was a fight for her to even EXIST within that system.]

My main point is—finding women composers in 19th-centuy Europe was not difficult. It’s a matter of just simply including them and NOT cutting them.

The myth that there were NO women composers or very few or they were exceptions or even that they wrote no works of quality was CREATED.

HIStory writers just… cut them.

It was erasure.

It doesn’t have to be this way anymore.

We now have the CHOICE to stop erasing them—to include them.

Leah Broad wrote an amazing substack in response to some of the bizarre criticisms she received for her book QUARTET—about British composers Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Doreen Carwithen, and Dorothy Howell. Some critics complained: “Where is the smoking gun?” As in, there’s no smoking gun of suppression of women composers. As in, it must be the women’s fault, not the men.

The smoking gun is the SILENCE. The smoking gun is every time women just… aren’t there. That’s the smoking gun—erasure. Every time we read about music history and see concerts with only men composers—erasure. It’s a myth created by the choice to exclude. The narrative that they didn’t exist or were too repressed to write good music is false. It is a lie born of the choice to leave the women and their music on the cutting room floor.

We have the power to stop the narrative that it was somehow women’s fault. It’s terribly harmful to blame women for what was done TO them.

They worked hard and they were silenced. (A strategy still used on living women every day in our modern society.)

We can make the choice to play their music, listen to their voices, and write about their work. It requires intention and choice, but we can and will change the pattern.

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You can now find me posting most days on BlueSky. I’m enjoying posting it old school, A Clara Fact a Day, like I used to on Twitter. It’s very fun. I hope I’ll see more of you there. Please say hello: https://bsky.app/profile/sarahfritz.bsky.social

Wishing you a Happy New Year!