Reference News Network reported on June 15 that foreign media said that the success of musicians is inseparable from the silent efforts of women.
According to the Spanish "Le Monde" website reported on June 4, the wife of the famous German pianist and composer Schumann, Clara Schumann, was also an excellent pianist, but she sacrificed her career to support her husband.
There are many women in the music world who stand behind the scenes like her, and it was a book by Anna Bill that brought them to the foreground.
The world remembers masters such as Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner, but a closer look at the history of classical music reveals that many women in secondary positions were equally accomplished, such as Bach's wife helping composers revise their compositions; Mozart playing the music of his sister Nannell.
But despite their versatility, these women have never been recorded in history as talented composers, but they are also performers, singers, and composers, without whom Western classical music would not be so colorful.
There has been a lack of a book on female musicians in the rich historical literature, and Anna Bill has taken on the responsibility of finding historical materials and editing it. Her book Harmony and Light Music chronicles the forgotten but great contributions of women in classical music, obscure but made a great contribution from the Baroque era to modernism.
Among them, Francesca Caccini was the first woman in Florence to compose and sing operas in the seventeenth century; Barbara Strozzi was both composer and accompaniment, a female musician of the same era as the composer Cavalier; and Jacques De la Garele, who worked for Louis XIV at the Palace of Versailles.
Italian composer, singer and poet Francesca Caccini (infographic)
In Baroque music, outstanding women of great attainment include Marianne Martinez, a student of Haydn, Fanny Hensell, daughter of Mendelssohn, and Clara Schumann, Lily Bronge and Elizabeth Maconsha, among others, who were the great composers of the twentieth century.
As Bill points out, "there are no symphonies in the book."
Caccini wrote opera because it was fashionable at the time, and she was the daughter of the court composer Giulio Caccini; but Fanny Hensel was so weak from repeated abortions that she could only devote herself to the creation of art songs; Clara Schumann gave up her career in support of the composer's husband, Robert Schumann.
As the authors say, "These women have overcome their own weaknesses and difficulties and gone to great lengths to realize their worth, and they have done a good job".
Harmony and Light Music is an important book that gives us an idea of the names of little-documented and little-known classical female musicians.
Cover of Harmony and Light Music
With the publication of the book, the remaining works of these musicians were also sought out and interpreted, which was warmly welcomed by the audience.