ABSTRACT
Pauline von Decker is a composer of song who is completely absent to us in terms of her own words. She was born Pauline von Schtzel in 1811. Her singing talents were noted early, and in 1824 she was sent to the renowned Berlin singing teacher, Heinrich Stmer. In 1832 she married the Court publisher Rudolf von Decker and, in accordance with court protocol, was not permitted to work as a married woman. The most obvious trend in cultural debate was the tendency to measure women against a system of what Carol Neuls-Bates calls sexual aesthetics whereby reviewers and audiences found both virtues and defects in a composition by a woman to be the inevitable result of her gender. In particular, the ways in which Decker's wordlessness allows a broad spectrum of performance choices certainly suggest that the idea of the explicitness of the words that the singer communicates is not as non-problematic as it may appear.
