Women hindered tracks
Historical and musicological term, « silenced voices » refers to musicians who were victims of 20th-century totalitarian regimes, foremost among them the Nazi regime. Over the course of the last century, thousands of composers and performers were repressed, sentenced to death or exile, and their works banned and destroyed for political, moral, or religious reasons.
Although many works will remain lost forever, research carried out over the last thirty years in Europe has brought several hundred masterpieces and as many authors back into the spotlight through concerts, publications, exhibitions... including today's exhibition dedicated to five female musicians of the 20th century: Sofia Gubaidulina, Alma Rosé, Elsa Barraine, Grażyna Bacewicz, and Henriëtte Bosmans.
This commitment by the Forum Voix Etouffées, copywriter and organizer of the exhibition, is part of a broader process of rehabilitating female composers in our musical history: Clara Wieck-Schumann (1819-1896), Augusta Holmès (1847-1903), Alma Mahler (1879-1964) and others fought early on for both women's rights and recognition. On the other side of the Atlantic, we also think of the first African-American musicians such as Florence Price (1887-1953), whose beautiful, militant work has only been rediscovered since the 2000s.
In the 1920s, the evolution of the artistic avant-garde in Europe took on the appearance of a generational struggle, with the rise of jazz, atonality, and movements such as New Objectivity challenging bourgeois concert culture. Fascist and conservative parties in Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and elsewhere saw this effusion as a sign of degeneration, a threat to the traditional values of their countries. “Entartete Musik,” “Kulturbolchevismus,” and “Musiques nègres” were among the pejorative terms applied to these compositions, which nevertheless met interest and success.
The rise to power of fascism in the 1930s precipitated the banning of this music. In addition, its composers quickly became undesirable for moral reasons (homosexuality, feminism), political reasons (communists, anti-fascists), religious reasons (Jewishness), or simply for their freedom of conscience. Some of these artists saved their lives by going into exile in the United States, such as the legendary harpsichordist Wanda Landowska (1879-1959) and the musicologist Anneliese Landau (1903-1991), while others met violent deaths or were detained in concentration and extermination camps.
Composers, instrumentalists, violin or piano virtuosos, singers—all were affected. A tragic fate befell the Czech writer and composer Ilse Weber (1903–1944), who died in Auschwitz with her son... The same was true of the very few female choir and orchestra conductors of the time, such as Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979). Although she was the first woman to conduct major American orchestras, she was not representative of the overall situation of women before World War II. Thus, access to higher professions was often closed to women in Franco's Spain and in Portugal, which was subject to the authoritarian directives of António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970). Their regimes repressed both fundamental public and individual freedoms. This situation led the Madrid composer Rosa García Ascot (1902-2002), a protegee of Manuel de Falla, to emigrate to Mexico before settling in France.
The recent death of Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, one of Dmitri Shostakovich's (1906-1975) few female disciples, has enabled the media in many countries to convey to their readers that the status of women in the Soviet Union (USSR) was still not as enviable as La Pravda once claimed. In the largely male-dominated profession of composing, the situation for women was anything but easy. Gubaidulina experienced this firsthand when she had the honor of becoming Shostakovich's assistant for his composition class at the Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) Conservatory, and faced numerous criticisms and jealousy from her peers.
The musician's uniqueness was also linked to her origins. She came from Tatarstan, a land of Muslim tradition where her grandfather was a mullah. Such origins did not prevent her from converting to the Russian Orthodox religion, at the instigation of pianist Maria Yudina (1899-1970). This very risky move in Soviet society caused her various problems. In addition, Gubaidulina's musical language was perceived as close to decadence by the leaders of the all-powerful Union of Soviet Composers and Musicologists.
The sprawling institution also targeted composer Jelena Firssova (*1950), banning the publication of her works in the West. However, she managed to emigrate to the United Kingdom in 1991. A year later, Gubaidulina settled in Germany. Her new surroundings became the setting from which she gained international recognition. The last three decades of her life were marked by triumphs, particularly in the English-speaking world. Today, Sofia Gubaidulina is regarded as one of the twenty most important figures in contemporary music worldwide since the 1950s.
She came from one of the most prominent families of the artistic elite of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her uncle was none other than the illustrious composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911); her father was the violinist Arnold Rosé (1863-1946), who held prestigious positions in Vienna as first violinist of the Philharmonic Orchestra and founder of the famous Rosé Quartet. Gifted with exceptional talent and trained in an extraordinary environment, Alma Rosé gradually became a first-rate violinist.
In 1932, she founded a women's orchestra called Wiener Walzermädl, whose numerous successes and tours made her something of a star throughout Europe. Unfortunately, the Anschluss in March 1938 and World War II put an end to her career. Born jewish, exiled to France and then denounced, Alma Rosé was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1942 in Dijon, interned in the camp of Drancy and then transferred to Auschwitz on convoy No. 57. She remained there from July 1943 until April 1944, when she died. In this hellish environment, she served as the conductor of one of the camp's prisoner orchestras. Alma Rosé was responsible for an all-female ensemble made up of musicians playing a variety of instruments. Most of these instruments had been looted by the Nazis, when they had not been made from scratch in the camp by the prisoners.
The orchestra, made up of around thirty musicians, played for hours every day during punishments and executions of prisoners, during the departure and return of work details, and more rarely for the entertainment of the SS, the Prominenten, and the prisoners. The testimonies of surviving members of his orchestra, such as violinist Violette Jacquet-Silberstein (1925-2014), emphasize her immense artistic integrity and the rigor with which the artist performed her duties.
At a time when French women did not yet have the right to vote and the vast majority remained confined to subordinate roles, several of them emerged as professional composers, including Claude Arrieu (1903-1990), Elsa Barraine (1910-1999), and Odette Gartenlaub (1922-2014). All three were victims of the coercive anti-Semitic measures taken by the Vichy Regime, in accordance with the racist directives of the German occupiers enacted in 1941.
Still worth rediscovering today, these three female composers received first-rate training at the Paris Conservatory, graduating with coveted awards. Elsa Barraine was the second woman—after Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)—to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for music in 1929. Odette Gartenlaub won the same award in 1948, after surviving as a social worker during the Occupation. Unfortunately, this period also marked a difficult break in her career as a virtuoso pianist. Deeply hostile to social inequality, Elsa Barraine became an activist in the 1930s, before officially joining the French Communist Party in 1938. Her progressive commitment was reflected in her music from those years onwards: in 1933, her orchestral work Pogromes already warned of the harmful events taking place in Germany, and in 1938, she composed an anti-war symphony, Voïna. The invasion of France by Wehrmacht troops cemented her commitment. She joined the Front National des Musiciens, and protected several Jewish musicians living in France, including Louis Saguer (1907-1991). Her commitment earned her a seat on the so-called purification chambers after the Liberation, where French citizens who had collaborated with Hitlerism appeared.
Elsa Barraine taught sight-reading and then musical analysis at the Paris Conservatory for nearly 25 years, showing immense curiosity for forgotten composers and the most diverse aesthetics. Continuing to compose until the 1980s, she suffered from the growing influence in France of Pierre Boulez's (1925-2016) aesthetic radicalism, which resulted in her works being forgotten, along with those of Odette Gartenlaub and Claude Arrieu.
The second Polish composer to gain international recognition after Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831), Grażyna Bacewicz came from a Lithuanian family, the Bacevičius. Their surname had been Polonized to Bacewicz. Grażyna quickly became an excellent violinist. She studied with the famous virtuoso Carl Flesch (1873-1944). In 1932, after graduating in composition from the Warsaw Conservatory, Bacewicz left for France, where she studied with Nadia Boulanger, among others. Returning to her native country, Bacewicz became first violinist of the Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1936 and 1938. When World War II broke out, the musician gave clandestine concerts.
With peace restored and Poland under Soviet control, Grażyna Bacewicz was appointed professor at the Łódź Conservatory. Her official biography, covering the early post-war years, would have us believe that she enjoyed nothing but success. But the reality in the USSR and then in Poland, in those times of heightened Stalinism and strict application of socialist realism in all forms of art, was much more nuanced. Indeed, although her music from the 1940s onwards featured folk elements “that could be whistled after the concert,” it nevertheless responded mainly to the “formalist deviations” that were formally prohibited at the time. Moreover, letters to his brother, who lived in the United States, show that as early as 1948 he was deeply suspicious of the political system that was being put in place. Nevertheless, his intelligence and his growing recognition (notably his first prize in the Liège composition competition in 1951) enabled him to avoid the main dangers. Three of her works were presented during the renowned Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1956, which musically reflected the thaw that was underway, as did those of his colleague Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994) – the latter's First Symphony, completed in 1947, had been banned by the Stalinist government officials. From those years until her death, her writing reincorporated more contemporary elements, making her, like Shostakovich, a symbol of adaptation to political dictates. Due to her dual role as performer and composer, many of her works are dedicated to the violin.
Due to her dual role as performer and composer, many of her works are dedicated to the violin. Grażyna Bacewicz left behind seven violin concertos, five violin sonatas, seven string quartets, and two piano quintets.
Born into a family of musicians, the Dutch artist has been attracting the attention of musicologists and the specialist press in recent years, following the gradual publication of her works by various publishers, including the Voix Etouffées - Missing Voices collection. Her powerful musical language, as evidenced by her Sonata for Violin and Piano, is a clear invitation to reconsider the landscape of female musical creation in the 20th century, as well as creation outside the main artistic centers of the 1920s (Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Prague, etc.).
Henriëtte Bosmans first performed as a solo pianist during the 1920s. She played with internationally renowned conductors such as Pierre Monteux. The young woman also took composition lessons with Willem Pijper (1894-1947), an important figure in Dutch musical life. Gradually, Bosmans' works began to be performed in the Netherlands and abroad, often with her herself at the piano, as well as with cellist Frieda Belinfante (1904-1995). Openly bisexual, the composer flouted social conventions. Belinfante's partner before the war, from 1947 onwards she appeared with the French soprano Noémie Perugia (1903-1992), with whom she gave various concerts and for whom she wrote 25 vocal works.
Bosmans' success came to an end with World War II and the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany. In 1942, she was banned from performing because of her Jewish origins and for refusing to join the Reichskulturkammer, while four members of her immediate family were murdered in the Auschwitz and Sobibor camps. These horrific events did not prevent Bosmans from returning to composing after a ten-year hiatus. But in April 1952, Henriëtte Bosmans collapsed suddenly on stage during a concert. She died shortly afterwards, at the age of 56.
