Clara Macirone isn’t exactly a household name these days, even in those well plugged into the classical music world. Even in her alma mater, the Royal Academy of Music, her name only appears four times in the library catalogue, in two different spellings (as it did in the original music publications), and mention of her draws blank stares. It’s a bit different from the first forty years of her career, when her name appeared often in newspapers, her music was performed around the UK, and commissions came her way with regularity. Of course, as was so often the case for nineteenth-century women composers, this activity and recognition petered out over the last decades of her life, and by the time of her death in 1914, she was already almost completely forgotten, her obituary in the local newspaper merely recording her as “the last surviving daughter of George Macirone esq. and niece of Colonel Francis and Mrs Macirone”.
Macirone’s mistake was to write music of her time, for people who really wanted to hear it. ETA Hoffmann’s well-known essay on Beethoven’s Instrumental Music is, I believe, in large part to blame for our beliefs about the relationship of music to the world. Not only is the canon predicated on the ideas underpinning his hierarchy, with the “sublime” Beethoven at the top and the “everyday” Haydn at the bottom, but it is also supported by his notions of what the sublime actually is. It’s worth thinking about this alongside the Academy’s founding assertion that they were training musicians “to provide for themselves the means of an honourable and comfortable livelihood.” Macirone lived at a time still on the cusp of earlier functional music, and later conceptualisations of music as aesthetic. There’s a reason why music criticism wasn’t really a thing before now.
It's also a reason why we have tended to see many of these musicians and their music as lower down the hierarchy. Never mind that women like Clara Macirone, Agnes Zimmermann and Dora Bright had successful careers and were much in demand for their portfolio of skills. Never mind that they transported their audiences, offered hours of musical delight and excitement, taught many through their musical ideals. They have been judged as lesser on our current aesthetic scale (which still holds much pop music in contempt for similar reasons). Macirone herself alludes to her motivations for music in the lengthy interview that appeared in the Hampstead and Highgate Express in 1889:
“I took it up because it is the most popular, the most far-reaching form of musical enjoyment. In my early days I wanted to make the lives of the many brighter to admit them to a share in the enjoyment of that art which had done so much for me, to take some share in the efforts dear friends were making to give brighter and better hours of rest and recreation to dark and dreary homes. […] In those days there were not many part-songs written, so I tried to supply the want.”
This newspaper article is interesting not just for its spotlight on Macirone, but in its really quite forward-thinking arguments in support of women composers. The writer, having read Upton’s now well-known arguments as to why women can’t compose, viz., that they are too emotional and thus cannot “project it outwardly”, punctures it neatly with one pin:
“All this is very interesting reading, but it strikes one as too ingenious. Surely Mr Upton’s reasons against the success of women as composers hold good equally against their success in painting, literature, and science. […] The whole matter, in our opinion, resolves itself into the question of environment and opportunity. […] one of the most important advantages that men composers have had is in being nearly all orchestral conductors. They have been able quickly and constantly to bring their works to a hearing, to attract public attention to themselves, and to make their works stepping-stones on which to rise to higher things.”
I find the mention of environment here fascinating – it is a surprisingly early acknowledgement of the need for a sympathetic lifestyle in order to create. How many women at this time could leave the laundry to work out the musical idea that has just come to them, or even simply to capture that idea (and how many still can)?
Clara Angela Macirone was the eldest of three. The fascinating story of the whole Macirone family and their fluctuating fortunes can be found in Patricia Neate’s book based on their prolific letters, To All My Darlings. We’ll take a closer look at this book next week; it’s very much the story of an epistolary relationship, as much as of the family itself. Clara is perhaps a less prolific letter writer than others in her family, so there is even more to be found of her in other writings, such as the many appearances in newspapers and journals that prove her musical place in the culture of the time.
It is hard to do justice to Macirone’s diverse career in a short space. Much of this diversity came from a need to earn enough to support parents and siblings; Macirone’s enterprise is astonishing. She studied at the Academy from 1839-42, with teachers such as Charles Lucas (prize) and Cipriani Potter. While not a scholarship holder, we are told that at the end of her studentship in October 1842
“[…] she received from the Academy a unique testimonial. In the presence of all the students she was presented by the committee with a copy of the score of Handel’s “Israel in Egypt” in token of their appreciation of her talent and worth. There is no other record of such a gift to a student.”
Macirone went on to become a professor at the Academy for a while, until the infamous dismissal of all women professors by William Sterndale Bennett in 1866, which had fairly devastating financial consequences for the whole family. Macirone, however, with her usual enterprise, found other teaching jobs. She went on to become head of the music department at Aske’s School for Girls, now Haberdashers’, and the Church of England High School for Girls in London, now Francis Holland. Her fame was such that her name was a draw for the schools.
Closely connected to her teaching was her writing. Macirone wrote regularly for newspapers and journals, mainly about the importance of the correct kind of engagement with music, especially in education for girls. While she could display a conservatism that was already becoming old-fashioned for its time, she was also well aware of the necessity for a much broader education than was often available to girls – she approved completely, for example, of the burgeoning number of female string players. Another strand to this foray into publication was her considerable assistance for father George’s translation for the German of Adolf Bernhard Marx’s Allgemeine Musiklehre, in English titled Marx’s Universal School of Music. Not only did Clara assist on the technical side, she also used her business acumen to garner subscription support and, eventually, a publisher.
Macirone’s broadest fame, however, of course came from her performing and composing. Early reviews from the 1840s, just after she left the Academy, tended to concentrate on her talent as a pianist. Many of these early concerts did centre around other composers. Macirone gave both solo and chamber concerts, often with fellow Academy alumni and teachers. At first advertised as “morning concerts”, these gradually gave way to a series of “soirèes musicales” that were extraordinary for the range of musicians that Macirone was able to engage – Anna Schroeder-Devrient, Clara Novello, Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, Josef Joachim, Johann Pischek, Prosper Sainton, all appeared on the platform with Macirone, along with many more well-known names. Gradually, too, the amount of Macirone’s own music increased, from sonatas for strings and piano to the part-songs for which she would become particularly celebrated. Reviews were invariably positive, such as this review of a quartet on a poem by the Italian poet Tasso:
“The composer of this Quartett has sufficiently earned her fame to allow of her writing simply without the danger of being accused of a want of power to write learnedly. It is difficult, we know, to produce a work which she equally please trained and untrained listener; but Miss Macirone has successfully achieved this task; and we are conferring a benefit upon vocalists by earnestly recommending “O Musa!” to their attention. Apart from the excessive melodiousness of the piece, the harmonies are so rich and yet so natural, and the part-writing so easy and yet so effective that, whilst giving but a small amount of trouble to well-trained vocalists, it will be certain to create a more favourable impression than many compositions we could name with infinitely greater pretension. ”
Macirone cast her net widely for poetry, setting texts that were lofty in their Christian sentiment, but also choosing texts with more than a hint of devilry in their humour. We are told at one point of a choral society who refused to sing a particular setting by her due to its scandalous nature. She was most prolific in her vocal music, though there are also chamber works and piano pieces. She would go on writing even after her retirement from teaching, and pieces by her do make an appearance in concert progammes and sheet music reviews into the twentieth century, before vanishing completely after her death.
Macirone lived with artist sister Emily until Emily’s death in 1888, thereafter living on her own in their London abode. She was the epitome of the portfolio musician, and like so many of her generation, deserves much more to be highlighted as a role model for music that stands at the intersection of both practical and aesthetic worth. Here’s a performance of one of Clara Macirone’s part-songs, To All You Ladies, on a poem by Charles Sackville, in which sailors address the women they have left on land.
