ABSTRACT
This volume focuses on the circumstances of women’s music-making in the vibrant and diverse environment of the Czech lands during the nineteenth century. It sheds light on little-known women musicians, while also considering more well-known works and composers from new woman-centric perspectives. It shows how the unique environment of Habsburg Central Europe, especially Bohemia and Lower Austria, intersects with gender to reveal hitherto unexplored networks that challenge the methodological nationalism of music studies as well as the discipline’s continued emphasis on singular canonical figures. The main areas of enquiry address aspects of performance and identity both within the Czech lands and abroad; women’s impact on social life with a view to different private, semiprivate, and public contexts and networks; and compositional aesthetics in musical works by and about women, analysed through the lens of piano works, song, choir music, and opera, always with the reception of these works in mind.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|68 pages
Performance and Identity
chapter 2|13 pages
Sweet Street Music for Petty Alms
chapter 4|20 pages
Eliška Krásnohorská and Czech Operatic Historiography
part 2|70 pages
Institutional Structures and Networks
chapter 5|17 pages
Women in the Musical Culture of Viennese Czechs (Slavs) in the Nineteenth Century
chapter 7|7 pages
The "Disorder It Created"
chapter 8|13 pages
The Three Ebert Sisters
chapter 9|15 pages
Reminiscences of Past Sounds
part 3|94 pages
Reception and Analysis