This Is (Y)our Life: (Re)Writing Women's Autobiographies in Music in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This chapter explains the publication project of German writer and musician Marie Lipsius, better known as La Mara, who contacted female musicians between 1877 and 1902 with a request to contribute material for a collection of biographical sketches entitled Die Frauen im Tonleben der Gegenwart. Although La Mara's book is a landmark early source about women performers in Germany of the late nineteenth century, it remains by and large unknown to contemporary musicology. It may well be unique because La Mara relied upon the artists themselves for information, gathered through letters and questionnaires. Her detailed biographical questions to the women and her "objective" literary working out of their responses expose La Mara's ostensible purpose which – within the traditionally legitimating format of the collection of biographical sketches – was to present women as productive, qualitative contributors to German musical life, equally important as male musicians. La Mara had other mechanisms for controlling her women, beyond rewriting their autobiographies.