ABSTRACT
This chapter sheds light on opportunities sought by and granted to female applicants to the Prague Conservatory throughout the nineteenth century. When the Prague Conservatory was founded in 1810 (opening in 1811), it soon received applications to also accept girls: the director’s assistant wanted his daughter to take part in the daily vocal exercises for choirs, and a citizen from Leipzig claimed that his fifteen-year-old daughter, who had already made enormous progress in singing and playing the piano, was urging him to seek admission for her to enter the Conservatory in order to learn the French horn. Apart from the fact that the French horn was considered to be a wholly inappropriate instrument for girls and women, the Conservatory had been planned for training male students only. Therefore, the applications mentioned above were rejected, but did at least lead to the establishment of a department of singing education (“Bildungsschule”) which accepted female students. This was the first opportunity for women in Germanophone Europe to complete a degree in music. Co-education was a completely new phenomenon in the nineteenth century and therefore required a great deal of organisational effort. Special teaching rooms were needed together with the establishment of particular classes and the employment of teaching and supervisory staff. In addition to singing it was possible to study the harp as a subsidiary subject from 1830–1832 and from 1854 onwards; from 1879 it could be taken as a main subject, too. Piano classes had not been part of the curriculum until 1888, but could subsequently be attended by female students. From 1891 onwards, there is evidence of the existence of female violin students, which is relevant regarding the famous Prague violin school (Prager Geigerschule, Moritz Mildner, Anton Bennewitz and Otakar Ševčíc). Studying other string instruments (apart from the violin) was forbidden to women at the Prague Conservatory, as were the organ and various wind instruments. In this respect the institution lost its initial pioneering role in the course of the century.
